Together, using the purser’s remaining strength and my own adrenaline-fueled grip, we hauled Covington up through the jagged opening in the lavatory wall. He kicked and swore, his heels banging uselessly against the plastic basin, until David shoved him facedown onto the galley floor, cinching his ankles together with a third set of heavy restraints. Mara was standing over him, her face white as bone, her hands trembling around the fire axe she had reclaimed from the deck. Beyond the curtain, the noise in the passenger cabin was rising. The sudden shudder of the aircraft as the descent steepened had awakened business class. Several passengers had unbuckled their belts, peering down the dark aisle toward the galley, their murmurs growing into a unified, panicked chorus.
"Mara," I said, ripping off my oxygen mask as I stepped into the galley. "Keep that axe in your hands. If he moves an inch, hit him with the flat of the blade. David, stay on his back." I grabbed the maintenance binder and ran past the curtain, bursting through the cockpit door. Inside, the silence was suffocating. Captain Thomas was slumped sideways, his forehead pinned against the left storm window, his oxygen mask hanging loose around his jaw. In the center pedestal, the trim wheel was spinning forward in short, aggressive bursts—click-click-click—pulling the aircraft’s nose down at nearly four thousand feet per minute.
The analog standby altimeter on the center panel was unwinding like a stopwatch: 14,200... 13,800... 13,400. The air in the cockpit was freezing, the smell of pesticide beginning to clear as fresh air from the reset galley valve slowly displaced the poison, but Thomas and Miller were entirely out. Neither man moved. Neither man breathed more than a shallow, rattling gasp. I dropped into the captain’s seat, slamming my right foot onto the left rudder pedal to counter a sudden yaw as the plane plowed through the turbulent boundary layer above the clouds. My eyes scanned the engineering schematic resting on my lap, cross-referencing it with the circuit breaker panel bolted behind the left headrest.
ROW 4, COLUMN BRAVO: CB-418. FLIGHT MANAGEMENT COMPUTER SECONDARY DATA REFERENCE. The breaker was marked with a red plastic collar that Covington had clipped over the shaft to prevent it from popping under load. I reached behind my left ear, found the red plastic collar with my fingernails, and snapped it off. With the flat of my thumb, I pulled the white breaker out three-quarters of an inch until the silver line showed on the shaft. Beneath the throttle quadrant, the emerald diode on the black box flared once—a brilliant, furious flash—and died. The automatic trim wheel stopped spinning. The cockpit went utterly silent, save for the screaming rush of outside air tearing over the windscreen.
"Manual control," I whispered, reaching out with both hands and seizing the heavy horn of the captain's control yoke. The yoke was dead weight, fighting back with eighty pounds of hydraulic resistance as the aerodynamic forces across the horizontal stabilizer tried to force the nose down into the Atlantic. I planted both boots against the rudder pedals, locked my elbows, and hauled backward with every ounce of strength remaining in my back and shoulders. The aircraft groaned, the aluminum skin vibrating with a deep, structural shudder that rattled through my teeth. On the pedestal, the mechanical trim wheel resisted. I took my right hand off the yoke, caught the wheel's rubber handle, and cranked it backward against the air load, rolling trim into the elevators three revolutions, four, five.
Through the darkness outside, the thick gray belly of the cloud deck swallowed the nose. 11,600... 11,200... 10,800. The G-forces hit us like a falling wall. My spine compressed into the sheepskin seat cover as the nose began to rise. The control surfaces bit into the dense, low-altitude air, clawing against the dive. Across the cockpit, Miller’s limp body was pressed hard into his seat harness, his head lolling back against the headrest. The descent needle slowed, hovered, and finally shuddered to a dead stop. 10,400 feet. The aircraft leveled out, screaming through the dense maritime fog at three hundred and forty knots, riding the knife-edge of safety above the frigid waters of the North Atlantic.
CHAPTER 9
I reached down and shoved both thrust levers forward, bringing the General Electric turbines out of idle. The deep, familiar roar of the engines surged through the floorboards, pushing us forward with a clean, level acceleration that steadied the deck. I reached up to the overhead communications panel, flipped the master avionics bus transfer switch to bypass the burned-out data link, and seized the handheld microphone. The static in my headset cleared instantly, replaced by the crisp, empty hiss of an unmonitored oceanic frequency. I punched four digits into the emergency transponder panel: 7700.