The purser shielded his mouth with one hand. “Let me through. Fast. Mickey Mouse.” He disappeared into the forward lavatory.
She wrestled the cart into the galley. Four flight attendants huddled inside, finishing up their meals. Faith rammed the cart into its dock and locked it into position.
An Asian flight attendant looked up at her. Her name tag read “Mae.” “Help yourself to lunch. From the looks of Jeff, I wouldn’t recommend the stuffed tennis balls today.”
“I need a drink.” Faith rummaged through the drawers of the beverage cart, searching for a tiny airline bottle of booze. She was sure Ian had a dutyfree bottle in his briefcase on the flight deck, but she hoped to make it to Moscow before he realized she was a stowaway.
“This is a Moscow flight. They wiped us out.”
“Guess I’ll eat something after all.” Faith tugged at the small aluminum handle of the meal insert, but the door didn’t budge.
“It’s jammed. We haven’t been able to get it open. Good thing it’s a light load today.” Mae pointed at the bin.
“Forget it.” She wasn’t that hungry and she didn’t want to hang with the attendants and give them a chance to realize she wasn’t really one of them, so she decided to go back and chat with secret agent man. What difference would it make? Her cover was blown with him. His cover was blown with her. And she was very, very bored. She took two spoons and an extra dessert from the presidential-class service and then entered the coach cabin. She glanced at her watch-five twenty-nine, local time. Not much longer.
The operative took up his space in 19A. The armrests of the two empty seats beside him were pushed up and magazines were spread out. Faith decided industry protocol didn’t matter a hell of a lot at that point in her short-lived Pan Am career. She approached him with the chocolate mousse and leaned over the empty 19C. “Compliments of the house. It’s part of our new World Spook Class service. Thought you might share it with me while we get-”
A brilliant flash. A thunderous clap. The plane lurched to port and shook violently.
Lockerbie.
The first row of coach passengers vanished. Faith dived onto the seats beside the agent. Her hand landed on a seatbelt. She grabbed onto the strap. A tornado engulfed what was left of the cabin, whipping purses, swizzle sticks and insulation into anything in its path. Overhead luggage compartments sprang open, their contents flying toward the open sky. She fought to hold on, but the force tore at her, pulling her away. She was being sucked into the air. She strained to hold on, but the strap slipped through her hands.
Frosty was ready to be on the ground and stretch his legs. It’s going to be Georgian food tonight, he decided. Shashlik. With lots of fresh cilantro. He could taste the chunks of marinated lamb as he glanced at his engineering console and the picture of his pooch. Everything was running beautifully and ol’ Clipper was happy as ever. At least they’d managed to pick up some time; they’d be starting their initial descent in about twenty minutes. He decided to go to the galley and see if he could find a snack to tide him over.
He reached to unfasten his seatbelt. An earsplitting explosion went off like a shotgun blast beside his ear. Dirt, charts, loose insulation and Clipper’s picture were sucked backward toward the passenger cabin. The force jerked Frosty’s head toward the door.
Lockerbie.
He snatched up his oxygen mask and donned his headset. The air fogged, then quickly cleared.
“Frosty, Jackson, you with me? Initiating emergency descent,” Ian said, his voice steady but barely audible through the mask mike.
“Affirmative. Initiating rapid decompression checklist.” Frosty’s ears popped like firecrackers and hurt like hell. Within seconds he confirmed that the air-bleed switches were open and that the pack switch was on. He closed the cargo heat outflow and attempted to restore cabin pressure manually, even though he knew it was hopeless. His stomach sank along with the plane.
He visualized the blue and white shell of the Maid of the Seas on the Scottish Highlands.
Lockerbie.
Faith fought to hold on, but the belt slipped through her fingers. She felt her body fly into the air. Then someone grabbed on to her. The operative wrapped his arm around hers. And he squeezed. She struggled to hang on.
Suddenly the sucking force subsided. A mist filled the air and then settled on everything. The roar of the wind and the engines filled the cabin. She could almost feel the sound hitting her body. Her ears throbbed with sharp pain. She moved her jaw back and forth to try to equalize the pressure, but the ringing in her ears wouldn’t stop. She breathed hard, gasping for the thin air.
The yellow oxygen masks dangled above some of the seats, but the ones above her failed to open. She stood and pried at it with her fingernails, feeling dizzier by the second. The operative whisked out a pocketknife and popped the panel open. They both grabbed the masks and inhaled deeply. The front of the plane pitched downward and they began rapidly losing altitude. Someone ahead of her began shrieking. Others joined in. And she wanted to cry out, too.
An icy gale battered her, but she could now stand. The plane’s interior panels had been ripped off and sucked away. A chunk of the ceiling was gone and she stared at the bare green skin of the plane. Overhead bins were open and one bank of them was missing. She looked toward the galley where all the flight attendants had been eating.
Blue sky. Nothing but blue sky.
Frosty flipped on the no-smoking and fasten-seatbelt signs. He felt vibrations and scanned his panel. The EPR on the number-three engine went to hell and the exhaust temp was plummeting. “Ian, number three has low EPR and EGT and no N1 indication. Ate something it didn’t like.”
“Initiate emergency shut-”
The engine-fire warning bell went off, drowning everything out. I should’ve taken that early retirement. What was I thinking? The flight engineer’s console blinked like he’d won the jackpot in Vegas. But Frosty McGuire was never one to walk away with money in his pocket. Like water seeking its own level, he always stuck with something until his luck turned bad. Frosty silenced the bell, then began shutting down the number-three engine. He prayed the other two hadn’t also ingested more debris than they could handle.
Faith stared at the blue sky. An invisible force pulled her toward the hole. She grabbed the back of a seat. She knew she was going to slide out if she took a step and she also knew her fear was taking over. She was probably the only flight attendant on board-or at least the only one wearing the uniform. The galley was gone and the cabin crew with it. Already passengers were beginning to look toward her, their faces expectant. She had to pull herself together and do something. She sat down and took three deep breaths of oxygen. It was just like smuggling across a border, she told herself. Stay in character. You’re Sandy Reeves, Pan Am flight attendant, trained for emergencies. She fingered the wings on her uniform.
Sandy Reeves stood, blocking out Faith’s fears. She knew what she had to do. The first rule of triage: life support. She snatched the pocketknife from the operative and took a deep breath from her oxygen mask. She moved quickly to the next row of passengers, where masks hadn’t deployed. With a twist of the knife, the panel opened and the masks dropped down. Before the passengers could put them on, she tugged on one and took a couple of deep breaths. She worked her way from row to row, hanging on to the backs of seats as she went.