Four Past Midnight (8 page)

The girl smiled at him uncertainly.

Nick turned back to Brian. “Ready, then?”

“Ready.”

“Right, then. One ... two ...
three
!”

They drove forward into the door, dipping down in perfect synchronicity just before they hit it, and the door popped open with absurd ease. There
was
a small tip—too short by at least three inches to be considered a step—between the service area and the cockpit. Brian struck this with the edge of his shoe and would have fallen sideways into the cockpit if Nick hadn't grabbed him by the shoulder. The man was as quick as a cat.

“Right, then,” he said, more to himself than to Brian. “Let's just see what we're dealing with here, shall we?”

The cockpit was empty. Looking into it made Brian's arms and neck prickle with gooseflesh. It was all well and good to know that a 767 could fly thousands of miles on autopilot, using information which had been programmed into its inertial navigation system—God knew he had flown enough miles that way himself—but it was another to see the two empty seats. That was what chilled him. He had never seen an empty in-flight cockpit during his entire career.

He was seeing one now. The pilot's controls moved by themselves, making the infinitesimal corrections necessary to keep the plane on its plotted course to Boston. The board was green. The two small wings on the plane's attitude indicator were steady above the artificial horizon. Beyond the two small, slanted-forward windows, a billion stars twinkled in an early-morning sky.

“Oh, wow,” the teenaged girl said softly.

“Coo-
eee
,” Nick said at the same moment. “Look there, matey.”

Nick was pointing at a half-empty cup of coffee on the service console beside the left arm of the pilot's seat. Next to the coffee was a Danish pastry with two bites gone. This brought Brian's dream back in a rush, and he shivered violently.

“It happened fast, whatever it was,” Brian said. “And look there. And there.”

He pointed first to the seat of the pilot's chair and then to the floor by the co-pilot's seat. Two wristwatches glimmered in the lights of the controls, one a pressure-proof Rolex, the other a digital Pulsar.

“If you want watches, you can take your pick,” a voice said from behind them. “There's tons of them back there.” Brian looked over his shoulder and saw Albert Kaussner, looking neat and very young in his small black skull-cap and his Hard Rock Cafe tee-shirt. Standing beside him was the elderly gent in the fraying sport-coat.

“Are there indeed?” Nick asked. For the first time he seemed to have lost his self-possession.

“Watches, jewelry, and glasses,” Albert said. “Also purses. But the weirdest thing is ... there's stuff I'm pretty sure came from
inside
people. Things like surgical pins and pacemakers.”

Nick looked at Brian Engle. The Englishman had paled noticeably. “I had been going on roughly the same assumption as our rude and loquacious friend,” he said. “That the plane set down someplace, for some reason, while I was asleep. That most of the passengers—and the crew—were somehow offloaded.”

“I would have woken the minute descent started,” Brian said. “It's habit.” He found he could not take his eyes off the empty seats, the half-drunk cup of coffee, the half-eaten Danish.

“Ordinarily, I'd say the same,” Nick agreed, “so I decided my drink had been doped.”

I
don't know what this guy does for a living,
Brian thought,
but he sure doesn't sell used cars.

“No one doped my drink,” Brian said, “because I didn't have one.”

“Neither did I,” Albert said.

“In any case, there
couldn't
have been a landing and take-off while we were sleeping,” Brian told them. “You can
fly
a plane on autopilot, and the Concorde can
land
on autopilot, but you need a human being to take one up.”

“We didn't land, then,” Nick said.

“Nope.”

“So where did they go, Brian?”

“I don't know,” Brian said. He moved to the pilot's chair and sat down.

Flight 29 was flying at 36,000 feet, just as Melanie Trevor had told him, on heading 090. An hour or two from now that would change as the plane doglegged further north. Brian took the navigator's chart book, looked at the airspeed indicator, and made a series of rapid calculations. Then he put on the headset.

“Denver Center, this is American Pride Flight 29, over?”

He flicked the toggle ... and heard nothing. Nothing at all. No static; no chatter; no ground control; no other planes. He checked the transponder setting: 7700, just as it should be. Then he flicked the toggle back to transmit again. “Denver Center, come in please, this is American Pride Flight 29, repeat, American Pride Heavy, and I have a problem, Denver, I have a problem.”

Flicked back the toggle to receive. Listened.

Then Brian did something which made Albert “Ace” Kaussner's heart begin to bump faster with fear: he hit the control panel just below the radio equipment with the heel of his hand. The Boeing 767 was a high-tech, state-of-the-art passenger plane. One did not try to make the equipment on such a plane operate in such a fashion. What the pilot had just done was what you did when the old Philco radio you bought for a buck at the Kiwanis Auction wouldn't play after you got it home.

Brian tried Denver Center again. And got no response. No response at all.

To this moment, Brian had been dazed and terribly perplexed. Now he began to feel frightened—really frightened—as well. Up until now there had been no time to be scared. He wished that were still so ... but it wasn't. He flicked the radio to the emergency band and tried again. There was no response. This was the equivalent of dialing 911 in Manhattan and getting a recording which said everyone had left for the weekend. When you called for help on the emergency band, you always got a prompt response.

Until now, at least,
Brian thought.

He switched to UNICOM, where private pilots obtained landing advisories at small airports. No response. He listened ... and heard nothing at all. Which just couldn't be. Private pilots chattered like grackles on a telephone line. The gal in the Piper wanted to know the weather. The guy in the Cessna would just flop back dead in his seat if he couldn't get someone to call his wife and tell her he was bringing home three extra for dinner. The guys in the Lear wanted the girl on the desk at the Arvada Airport to tell their charter passengers that they were going to be fifteen minutes late and to hold their water, they would still make the baseball game in Chicago on time.

But none of that was there. All the grackles had flown, it seemed, and the telephone lines were bare.

He flicked back to the FAA emergency band. “Denver come in! Come in right now!
This is AP Flight 29, you answer me, goddammit!
”

Nick touched his shoulder. “Easy, mate.”

“The dog won't bark!” Brian said frantically. “That's impossible, but that's what's happening! Christ, what did they do, have a fucking nuclear war?”

“
Easy
,” Nick repeated. “Steady down, Brian, and tell me what you mean, the dog won't bark.”

“I mean Denver Control!” Brian cried.
“That dog!
I mean FAA Emergency!
That
dog! UNICOM, that dog, too! I've never—”

He flicked another switch. “Here,” he said, “this is the medium-shortwave band. They should be jumping all over each other like frogs on a hot sidewalk, but I can't pick up jack shit.”

He flicked another switch, then looked up at Nick and Albert Kaussner, who had crowded in close. “There's no VOR beacon out of Denver,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I have no radio, I have no Denver navigation beacon, and my board says everything is just peachy keen. Which is crap. Got to be.”

A terrible idea began to surface in his mind, coming up like a bloated corpse rising to the top of a river.

“Hey, kid—look out the window. Left side of the plane. Tell me what you see.”

Albert Kaussner looked out. He looked out for a long time. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. Just the last of the Rockies and the beginning of the plains.”

“No lights?”

“No.”

Brian got up on legs which felt weak and watery. He stood looking down for a long time.

At last Nick Hopewell said quietly, “Denver's gone, isn't it?”

Brian knew from the navigator's charts and his on-board navigational equipment that they should now be flying less than fifty miles south of Denver ... but below them he saw only the dark, featureless landscape that marked the beginning of the Great Plains.

“Yes,” he said. “Denver's gone.”

There was a moment of utter silence in the cockpit, and then Nick Hopewell turned to the peanut gallery, currently consisting of Albert, the man in the ratty sport-coat, and the young girl. Nick clapped his hands together briskly, like a kindergarten teacher. He sounded like one, too, when he spoke. “All right, people! Back to your seats. I think we need a little quiet here.”

“We
are
being quiet,” the girl objected, and reasonably enough.

“I believe that what the gentleman actually means isn't quiet but a little privacy,” the man in the ratty sport-coat said. He spoke in cultured tones, but his soft, worried eyes were fixed on Brian.

“That's
exactly
what I mean,” Nick agreed. “Please?”

“Is he going to be all right?” the man in the ratty sport-coat asked in a low voice. “He looks rather upset.”

Nick answered in the same confidential tone. “Yes,” he said. “He'll be fine. I'll see to it.”

“Come on, children,” the man in the ratty sport-coat said. He put one arm around the girl's shoulders, the other around Albert's. “Let's go back and sit down. Our pilot has work to do.”

They need not have lowered their voices even temporarily as far as Brian Engle was concerned. He might have been a fish feeding in a stream while a small flock of birds passes overhead. The sound may reach the fish, but he certainly attaches no significance to it. Brian was busy working his way through the radio bands and switching from one navigational touchpoint to another. It was useless. No Denver; no Colorado Springs; no Omaha. All gone.

He could feel sweat trickling down his cheeks like tears, could feel his shirt sticking to his back.

I must smell like a pig,
he thought,
or a
—

Then inspiration struck. He switched to the military-aircraft band, although regulations expressly forbade his doing so. The Strategic Air Command practically owned Omaha.
They
would not be off the air. They might tell him to get the fuck off their frequency, would probably threaten to report him to the FAA, but Brian would accept all this cheerfully. Perhaps he would be the first to tell them that the city of Denver had apparently gone on vacation.

“Air Force Control, Air Force Control, this is American Pride Flight 29 and we have a problem here, a big problem here, do you read me? Over.”

No dog barked there, either.

That was when Brian felt something—something like a bolt—starting to give way deep inside his mind. That was when he felt his entire structure of organized thought begin to slide slowly toward some dark abyss.

Nick Hopewell clamped a hand on him then, high up on his shoulder, near the neck. Brian jumped in his seat and almost cried out aloud. He turned his head and found Nick's face less than three inches from his own.

Now he'll grab my nose and start to twist it,
Brian thought.

Nick did not grab his nose. He spoke with quiet intensity, his eyes fixed unflinchingly on Brian's. “I see a look in your eyes, my friend ... but I didn't need to see your eyes to know it was there. I can hear it in your voice and see it in the way you're sitting in your seat. Now listen to me, and listen well:
panic is not allowed.”

Brian stared at him, frozen by that blue gaze.

“Do you understand me?”

He spoke with great effort. “They don't let guys do what I do for a living if they panic, Nick.”

“I know that,” Nick said, “but this is a unique situation. You need to remember, however, that there are a dozen or more people on this plane, and your job is the same as it ever was: to bring them down in one piece.”

“You don't need to tell me what my job is!” Brian snapped.

“I'm afraid I did,” Nick said, “but you're looking a hundred per cent better now, I'm relieved to say.”

Brian was doing more than looking better; he was starting to feel better again. Nick had stuck a pin into the most sensitive place—his sense of responsibility.
Just where he meant to stick me,
he thought.

“What do you do for a living, Nick?” he asked a trifle shakily.

Nick threw back his head and laughed. “Junior attaché, British embassy, old man.”

“My aunt's hat.”

Nick shrugged. “Well ... that's what it says on my papers, and I reckon that's good enough. If they said anything else, I suppose it would be Her Majesty's Mechanic. I fix things that need fixing. Right now that means you.”

“Thank you,” Brian said touchily, “but I'm fixed.”

“All right, then—what do you mean to do? Can you navigate without those ground-beam thingies? Can you avoid other planes?”

“I can navigate just fine with on-board equipment,” Brian said. “As for other planes—” He pointed at the radar screen. “This bastard says there
aren't
any other planes.”