I do a last minute check. Flashing blue and red lights are starting to race down the taxiing lane.
I think everything is fine — on the inside. Out there, not so much.
It's time to go before some macho cop or kill-crazy Russian decides to play chicken with me.
I pull back the throttle and listen to the engines roar.
It's a good sound.
A reassuring sound.
I forget the world around me and pretend I'm sitting at our old computer hutch about to take to the sky.
34
The Captain
Taking off in a 777 by yourself is no easy feat. Had I stumbled into a 747, I would have probably died on takeoff trying to jump between the flight engineer station behind the co-pilot seat while handling the throttle with my toes.
This still takes all my attention because I don't get a do-over if I forget a flap or something.
Besides pancaking into the ground, my other concern is smashing my plane into one of the many other jets currently in holding patterns waiting for ground control to tell them when they can land.
Ideally, I'd like to maintain radio silence, but I kind of sort of morally need to tell them to clear a path.
I'm sure the pissed off French pilots have told them by now that some asshole American stole their plane. I need to convince them that I don't plan on slamming it into a building — hijacking used to be so much easier before they were afraid terrorists were going to use the planes as weapons.
After I gain altitude I put on the headset and key in the mic to talk to air traffic control's main channel.
"Rio, this is…" I look for a label above the radio with the airplane's registration number. "… N9987IF. Please clear a path between Rio and LAX. There are hostages onboard."
I shut the radio off. It wasn't exactly the most professional radio call of my life, but they can figure out the rest.
If I stay on the channel and let them talk to me, they'll try to convince me to land or tell me that I'm about to be shot down, blah blah blah.
I did enough flight training to know that the worst situation on the ground is when you have no idea what their intentions are.
Right now they're panicking because someone on this jet said there are hostages and then shut off the radio.
Sooner than later I'm going to have an escort of Brazilian, then Colombian and Mexican jets. Ultimately, at some point before I enter US airspace, I'm going to meet the most highly trained fighters in the world while somebody from the Pentagon makes a case to the President for or against shooting me down.
I really don't have much of a plan for that right now. Los Angeles is at the furthest limit of this plane's range. If I'd said New York City, I'd probably get shot down without a blink.
That may still happen. I can make up destinations all I want, but at some point I'm going to actually have to land. If they haven't killed me by then, I'm going to have one hell of a welcome reception on the ground that's going to be a little more focused than the fiasco I just left in Rio.
Strangely, I'm the calmest I've been since this whole thing began. Or maybe it's not so strange. Flying is the one thing I'm good at. Worrying about all the little details like cabin pressure, fuel lines and did I retract the — FUCK! — landing gear.
Focus, David.
If I make it back to America, they probably won't extradite me to Russia. Our two countries have never seen eye to eye about that. I'll just spend the rest of my life in a Federal penitentiary if Capricorn's boogeymen don't kill me first.
If child molesters are the lowest of the low in prison, where does a guy who stole a spaceship and a passenger jet in one day rank? That'll have to give me some street cred, right? If that can't keep me from being someone's bitch, what else can a guy do?
I reach a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. It'd be no problem to take this thing higher because there's nobody onboard, but that might signal the fact that there ain't no hostages.
I'm sure the airline already has their lawyers arguing with the insurance company over coverage in the event I get brought down.
Speaking of hostages…
I put the plane on autopilot and climb out of the cockpit — basically the dumbest thing you can do when you're flying an airplane like this by yourself — short of flying an airplane like this yourself.
I run down the aisle and start closing window shades in the front, then race to the back and close some at the rear. There are 100 windows on this thing. I'll be over San Diego by the time I close them all. I just shut enough to make it look like I'm hiding hostages.
All I need is one hotshot Brazilian pilot to fly next to the plane and notice there's nobody in the back and just one jerk in the front and the math problem of whether or not to shoot me down will get a lot easier.
Would that be an easier question if they knew who was flying? An hour ago there was a rumor that I was involved in the stadium shooting, but my actual whereabouts was unknown.
The fact that a jet just got stolen from the runway in the middle of a gun battle in the same city where David Dixon, astronaut-pirate, tried to land his spaceship, couldn't have gone unnoticed by the entire planet.
I can imagine some talking head on television news pointing out that, "Well, he is a pilot…"
Wonderful. I wish this bird had satellite television so they can explain to me why the Russian kill team and the Brazilian cops decided to shoot at each other.
Was it friendly fire? Or are there two kinds of Russians after me? The ones that just want to arrest me and kill me and ones that want to kill me before the ones who want to arrest me can kill me?
This is kind of stressful. Flying a 777 by myself I can cope with. Figuring international conspiracies is above my pay grade.
I poke my head into the cockpit to make sure that I'm not about to run right into a mountain then stick my nose in the galley because food is my drug of choice.
Holy cow! There he is, saluting me!
He may be called Capitaine on this French plane, but he was always an imposter wearing commander stripes anyway. It doesn't matter. He's an old friend whether you call him Capitaine Crounchie or Cap'n Crunch and I've got a dozen boxes of his sugary treasure.
Besides flying a 777 by yourself and leaving the cockpit, you should also never take a large bowl of milk and cereal and eat it over the controls — but hey, that's how I roll.
35
Co-Pilot
As I eat my fifth serving of Cap'n Crunch, a JAS 39 Gripen, a delta-wing attack and reconnaissance plane made by Saab, flies about a hundred feet to the port side of my cockpit and the navigator aims a huge camera lens right at me.
I'd been expecting this. It was only a matter of time before the Brazilians sent the air force to intercept me.
Right now the only way I can keep anything resembling an upper hand is by manipulating their uncertainty. I took a flight attendant's apron from the galley and made it into an improvised balaclava. It appears real enough, but smells like burnt coffee.
I just don't want them looking through the window and seeing dumb old David Dixon flying a plane all by his lonesome.
While I can ignore the radio, if the pilot of the Gripen decides to start flashing me Morse code, they would expect David Dixon to be able to figure out what they're saying.
Commercial airline pilots don't have to know it — they just use a manual — an astronaut pilot like myself is expected to understand a variety of low-bandwidth communications methods.
Once they know they can talk to me, they'll start getting into my head. If I had to bet on me or some terrorist negotiator who has dealt with dozens of high-stakes situations, my money is on him. I'm not cut out for this.
All they have to do is get my mom on the phone and have her yell at me that I'm grounded and I'm done for.