Instinctively, her hand went for her cell phone, and she opened it, dialing a number by heart and listening to the ring.
Voice mail. Dar’s brow creased, then she shrugged. “Guess you forgot to turn this back on, huh?” she spoke into the phone. “Listen, something weird just happened to me. I...” Dar hesitated. “I’d like to talk to you about it. Give me a call as soon as you get this, okay?” A pause. “Okay. Talk to you later.” She closed the phone, then went over to the desk and sat down, activating her laptop and telling it to make a network connection.
A few clicks later, the light from the laptop’s active matrix screen lit her features with a ghostly glow, her face still as her eyes flicked back and forth, reading data. Another click, then she entered Kerry’s Red Sky At Morning 27
flight number and hit enter.
En route—delayed.
“Delayed.” A thousand thoughts sped through Dar’s mind. “Why?”
Suddenly, her guts clenched again and she doubled over, grabbing the edge of the table as a wave of fear almost swamped her. It forced a tiny cry from her throat, and she took a deep breath and held it, forcing the emotions down as she struggled to regain control.
It was tough, but she managed to do it. After wiping the sweat off her fingers, she refreshed the screen, watching the words refuse to change. She looked at the clock and calculated times. Then she picked up her cell phone and dialed a number.
It rang. A voice picked up, relatively cheerful given the time of night. “I need status on one of your flights. It’s listed as delayed.” Dar spoke slowly and clearly. “I need to know why it’s delayed, and you’re going to tell me specifically, or I’ll go up your chain of command until I wake up someone high enough to come down to that center you’re sitting in and use a fire hose to make you give me the information.”
Pause. “Is that clear?”
Dead silence. “Yes, ma’am,” the voice finally spluttered. “Can I have the flight number?”
Dar gave it, aware of a shiver working its way through her.
There was quiet, save for the distinctive clicking of a keyboard.
“Okay...um...Ms...”
“Roberts,” Dar provided softly.
“Right...Okay, well, from what I can see here, that flight hit some bad weather over Virginia...um...”
“Specifically,” Dar reminded her.
The clerk sighed. “Ma’am—”
“I am the chief information officer of ILS. I can, if I have to, break into your reservations system and get the information myself, but it’s going to take longer, and I’m not in the mood. So just tell me,” Dar bit the words out, “what...is...the...problem?”
“It’s not—well, they’ve got some damage to the aircraft, but the captain thinks he can land it okay. The problem is they’ve got to go through another storm first. They’re trying to land in DC.”
Dar clamped an arm across her stomach and bit the inside of her lip. She had to take several breaths before she could speak. “Okay.
Thanks.”
“Ma’am?”
Dar just closed the phone, and let her head drop forward to rest against the laptop’s cool edge.
KERRY WRAPPED HER arms around the pillow she had in her lap and just kept her eyes closed as the plane rocked and yawed its way through the clouds. She could feel little shudders running through the 28 Melissa Good frame of the aircraft, and she managed to compose a tiny prayer, which she sent outward, asking for nothing more than to hear Dar’s voice again.
That was all.
She felt a touch on her hand, and she jerked her head up to see Josh looking back at her, his face white as a sheet and looking very young.
She managed a smile for him. “We’re gonna be okay.”
“I know you’re an old, married lady, but can I hang onto your hand?” Josh asked. “I’m so scared, I think I just saw my left testicle float past my earlobe.”
That forced a breath of laughter from Kerry, and she reached over, clasping his hand with her own. “Sure.”
“Folks...” The pilot’s voice drew their attention. “Here’s the situation. We got hit by lightning and lost one of our engines, but don’t get excited. We have three.”
“Easy for him to say,” Josh muttered.
“We were trying to make it out to Chicago, but there’s a really big front ahead of us in that direction,” the pilot went on. “Washington is already closed, so we’re gonna swing out east and try to get into New York.”
New York. Kerry hung onto that one tiny sliver of very good news.
New York was where Dar was, and right now she very, very much wanted to be there.
“But we’ve got to get through this storm cell to do that. It’s going to be a little scary, but you all hang on, and we’ll get you down all right.”
“A little?” Kerry felt like throwing up. “I wonder how long it’ll take?”
One of the flight attendants, harried, coffee-stained, and exhausted, heard her. “Thirty minutes.”
“Thanks.” Kerry gave her a grateful smile. “Have you ever been through this before?”
The attendant, a slim, middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair and an interesting face, nodded briefly. “Twice. Every time, I swear I’m retiring.”
Kerry felt an uncomfortable pressure building in her ears, and she sighed, hugging her pillow with one arm and keeping a grip on Josh with the other. The plane began to rock violently again, and the murmur of voices, which had risen, fell again to silence. The cabin lights flickered off, leaving only the indirect lighting on, and the lightning outside brought lurid flashes of silver darting unexpectedly into the cabin.
“I hate this,” Josh whispered. “I’m quitting the minute I get on the ground, I swear. I’ll go into business with my Uncle Al back home.”
Glad of the distraction, Kerry licked her lips. “What does he do?”
“Pizza parlor,” Josh yelped, as a bang sounded and the plane tilted to one side. “Oh, my God.”
Red Sky At Morning 29
Kerry exhaled, keeping her eyes glued on the window. The clouds were so thick and dark outside, she could only see the edges when lightning flared within them, or when the faint lights from the plane’s leading wing edge broke free of the clinging mist.
It was like being inside a bag, rolling down a mountain. She couldn’t see anything, she had no sense of where the ground was...
Kerry felt like crying. The fear was so overwhelming, it made her want to scream, but she bit down on the inside of her lip and simply bore it—time running so slowly it was as if every minute was lasting an hour. Fifteen of them passed before something else changed.
The nose lifted, then plunged to one side, throwing the stewardesses. It hung at that angle for an eternity, then slowly straightened out and jerked downward. Kerry started shivering.
The plane kept rocking and bucking, so unstable it made her dizzy as her sense of balance fought to compensate for the movement.
Suddenly, she felt a difference in pressure, and she jumped, looking up and half expecting the panel to drop masks at her.
But it didn’t.
“Depressurized the cabin,” the flight attendant called to her seatmate. “We must be below 10,000 feet.”
“Is that good or bad?” Josh asked nervously.
No one answered him.
They all almost screamed when the engine sound changed and the plane slowed, its wallowing becoming far more apparent. Then another sound, a louder one, and Kerry just barely kept herself from total panic by realizing the sound was the landing gear extending. That meant—her frazzled mind clung to the rationale—that meant the noise before that was the air spoilers, slowing the plane for landing.