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  “I...they didn’t say.”

  Paul turned to one of the supervisors who was wearing a decidedly pasty expression, his eyes wide.

  “Can you get Denver ATC on the phone and check this out?’

  “In progress,” he replied, pointing to three men huddled over a bank of phones. .

  “And someone get an ACARS message to the crew to tell us what’s going on,” he said, referring to the onboard digital datalink letting them send printed messages to the cockpit.

  He pressed the phone back to his ear. “Okay, we’ll take it from here. Alert your maintenance people to stand by and try to call the flight on company frequency. And go to your emergency checklist, okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied, her voice trembling. “I just boarded them all less than an hour ago! All those people!”

  A flash of sympathy nearly pulled him off target, but there were bigger problems to attend to, and he ended the call as gently as possible. Two tiers of consoles down, two of his people had been huddling over another phone. They turned around suddenly, both trying to talk at once, until one gave way.

  “What?” the director asked, aware of the irritation in his tone.

  “Paul, our flight apparently rammed a Mountaineer regional flight from behind. A Beech 1900. Our pilots are telling ATC the wreckage of the smaller airplane is stuck on their right wing.”

  “What? Is that even possible?”

  They both shrugged. “That’s what they told Denver Tracon, and no one can reach the Mountaineer flight, and there’s no reported wreckage on the ground.”

  The thought of one of their airliners being involved in a midair collision and still airborne but without formal contact with the company was unacceptable. Hell, the whole idea was unacceptable. Must be a hoax, or a gross misunderstanding.

  Take a breath, Paul thought. The number one checklist item he himself had written for the command post was to take a beat, take a breath, and slow your own heart rate. He let himself stare at the desk for thirty agonizing seconds before looking up and positioning his mouth in front of a small, gooseneck microphone connected to the PA speakers at each position. He pressed the transmit switch and adopted the calmest voice he could manage.

  “Okay, folks, this is Butterfield. We’re going to a Stage One Alert. Our Flight Twelve out of Denver is reportedly preparing for an emergency return to Denver and has reportedly suffered a midair with a regional airliner. There are blizzard conditions there, as most of you know. I need the roundtable manned in five minutes with open lines to all duty officers, especially maintenance. I need Boeing in the mix for aerodynamics, and run the normal contact checklist for a Stage One. We need to try to get our crew on the satellite phone, send them an ACARS message that we’re trying, get maintenance control on alert, and get a line to Denver Tracon. This has already hit local television in Denver, so we need to scramble our communications team, and corporate.”

  The quiet but intense scramble of control room personnel moving in their appointed trajectories began instantly, yet Paul Butterfield’s attention was on the phone number he had to dial next – the one that would presumably grab the full attention of Regal’s CEO. That Doug Nielsen was the very last human whose attention he wanted tonight was an understatement of epic proportions, and he girded himself for the experience while ticking off the one positive in all of this: The ‘Can’t Leave’ explanation to his wife was no longer a fib.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Seven Months before – January 21st

  Mountaineer 2612

  Michelle Whittier had come back to consciousness slowly, the scene around her as incomprehensible as the muddled dreams of a drunk. She was in the cockpit – a cockpit – but it was very cold, and there was a wild appearance to it with papers and debris strewn everywhere, including the glareshield. Worse, there was the noise of a slipstream, but no panel lights. And the cacophonous roar of their twin turboprop engines, where was that?

  She tried to raise her head and lean forward, but her right shoulder protested with a cascade of severe pain, and she gasped as she tried to relax back to her original position. Her head hurt, too. She turned her head to the right, trying to make out the face of the copilot who was leaning forward and draped over the controls.

  What the hell happened? She wondered, trying to make sense of being apparently airborne with no lights and no engines after...what?

  Am I dead? But there was pain, and maybe that meant no. Nothing made sense.

  No panel lights! Just a glow...emergency lights overhead.

  Yet, there was a glow outside somewhere to the left in her peripheral vision, and braving the new flash of searing pain in her shoulder Michelle forced her head part way to the left, her mind unable to comprehend why a row of lighted airliner windows seemed to be stationary there, where the left wing should be. Were they flying formation with someone? Why?

  The pain stabbed at her again and she felt herself drifting back to unconsciousness, relaxing to let it overwhelm her. Take her. Whatever nightmare this was, it wasn’t anywhere she wanted to be. Oblivion was clearly better.

  But it was so cold, and what sounded like voices from the cabin behind brought her back enough consciousness to spark her to try. She was captain after all, wasn’t she? Shouldn’t she deal with whatever this was?

  Once more she forced her body forward and upright, accepting the screaming pain and finding it not as unbearable as she’d first thought. Her right shoulder, she figured. Something had happened to hurt her right shoulder.

  Again she looked left, this time turning her body part way around to get her eyes squarely on what was out there.

  The windows of an airliner were now unmistakable. A big airliner of some sort, with faces in the lighted cabin, some staring back at her. She let her eyes move forward and down, seeing the left engine nacelle of the Beech she’d been flying. But there was no buzzing noise of a turboprop, no indication of a propeller, and...no left wing.

  She could feel the 1900 moving, bouncing and twisting in whatever wind this was, as if they were sitting on a larger airliner’s wing – as if that were possible.

  Must still be a dream.

  There were more voices from behind her, and Michelle forced herself to accept the massive protest from her shoulder as she swiveled to the right to peer through the cockpit door to where the cabin should be.

  In the glow of the emergency lights she could see the cabin was a godawful mess as well, with belongings strewn everywhere, the floor covered in spilled briefcases and coats. There were passengers there, too – several of them awake and looking back at her in wide-eyed, stunned silence.

  How many... she wondered, not remembering the number they’d had aboard.

  Painfully she turned back forward, her eyes resting on the copilot’s limp form again. This time she tried to get her right arm to move, to touch him, to shake him – anything. But it refused to work.

  She tried to call his name but couldn’t remember it. Was this the same flight that had started in...where? Denver?

  What the hell is his name? she thought, struggling to reorder her mind. The fuselage suddenly lurched as if rolling left. Just a little, but a sharp, startling movement nonetheless. She looked past the copilot’s slumped form and through his side window, straining to see the 1900’s right wing. It was there, okay, but it was riding up and down on the river of air streaming by. How could that happen, she wondered?

  No engine power, no propeller, but our right wing is flying.

  Motion in the right seat caught her eye. Just a small movement, but something to indicate he was still alive. She heard him moan.

  Luke!

  “Luke?” she called out loud, startled at the raspy, guttural voice that had come from her. “Luke? Can you hear me?”

  An arm moved, then moved again, accompanied
by a low noise of some sort she couldn’t quite make out. And without warning the copilot sat bolt upright, his head snapping around to her, eyes wild with fright.

  “Luke!”

  He was staring at her uncomprehending, blinking in the shadowy light, his head jerking left and right as he tried like she had to force sense out of an insane situation.

  “Where are we?” he gasped.

  “I...I don’t know for sure. It...I think we’ve been hit by a bigger aircraft, and....and we’re on his wing.”

  “We were hit? Oh, God! What are....what....”

  He was struggling to look over her through the left pilot’s side at the airliner windows beyond.

  “Our left wing’s gone, Luke. The props, too.”

  “Our engines?” Shock, she figured, was fully engulfing him. She watched the younger man glance forward then, his hands moved ever so slightly toward the control yoke as a scream erupted from her. “NO!”

  He looked over, totally confused. “Maybe we can pull up!”

  “NO!” she said again, shooting her left hand out at him, the gesture falling short but getting his attention. In the space of a split second she had understood exactly what he wanted to do. The control cables would still be connected from the control yoke to the elevators in the rear, if the tail was still there. One hard pull on the yoke and the broken airplane would leap free of the bigger bird to certain death.

  ‘Why?” Luke managed.

  “Our left wing is gone. We have to stay here.”

  “Here?”

  “We’re...Luke, listen to me. My right shoulder is bad hurt. We can’t fly. If we get shaken loose, we’re dead. Don’t touch that yoke.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  He was shaking his head side to side.

  “Okay...unstrap and carefully go back and check on our people. If the fuselage starts to tip, get back up here.”

  It sounded stupid, she knew, but what else made sense? What was holding them on here anyway? Maybe their tail was hanging out over the back of whatever wing this was. She couldn’t tell.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked again, his voice a pleading shriek.

  “Check on the passengers. Now! That’s what you’re going to do.”

  He nodded for an inordinate number of seconds before responding, fear tightening around his throat, inwardly grateful for direction as he released his seat belt and scrambled through the cockpit door to the small cabin behind them.

  She was alone again, and the desire to verbally bind with someone outside was growing like an explosion, driving her to search the cockpit for options. The radios were obviously gone since the engines were no longer producing electrical power, but there had to be some battery power. And her phone...where was her phone? Hadn’t she been using her phone?

  A vague memory undulated in the back of her frightened mind, something about their landing gear being stuck down, and their radios gone. How long back?

  Yes!

  There had been a cell phone and she’d called...who? Maybe the controller, but the memory ended abruptly.

  She tried to look in the shadows by her feet, but if a phone was down there she couldn’t see it....or reach it. Maybe Luke had one. Maybe one of the passengers did. Maybe people were trying to reach them right now to tell them to keep calm! Somewhere out in the darkness there had to be a rational answer, if only they could hear the instructions: “Stay put and we’ll get you!” They would expect the captain to lead, to make sure no one opened an emergency door or did anything stupid to make it worse. Whoever the pilots of this bigger plane were, maybe they were ready to open emergency doors and come get them. Or...or maybe they’d keep the 1900 attached and just land together. Could they do that, she wondered?

  The last thought morphed into an icy feeling in the pit of her stomach as she felt the fuselage rock again. They had to stay attached! But how could she ensure it? The urge to reach someone...tell them she knew what was necessary...was becoming manic. Radio, phone, something.

  Michelle looked back at those windows. The glow of the interior looked so warm, and it was so cold in here! There were eyes over there staring at her, too, and one had a face attached she could almost make out. A man with what looked like epaulets on his shoulders!

  She scrambled with her left hand to find her flashlight in the left sidewall pocket, yanked it up and snapped it on, playing the beam toward the face in the window and raking it back and forth frantically as if to scream “We’re in here! We’re here!” The face in the window was still there, but there was no wave, no indication that he understood.

  Michelle pulled the flashlight around and shone the beam in her face, relieved at last to see the man nod, then move away from the window.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind she understood the impotence of that pilot’s dilemma – whether he was the captain or the copilot or just another airman. There were emergency exits on both airplanes, but a no man’s land in between – a wind tunnel – and Michelle suppressed the reality of what that meant.

  Yet, there had to be a way. They were just a few feet apart!

  The airspeed indicator on the forward panel of the captive Beechcraft was in darkness, and she tried to ignore it. But it was no use. She had to know the airspeed, and with the flashlight beam flipped forward, the gauge was visible and reading 250 knots.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Seven Months before – January 21st

  Regal 12

  With the cabin full of anxious, frightened faces Marty had just seen – all pleading for deliverance – the act of selecting the PA position and preparing to speak to them brought its own level of terror. They would be listening to his words, and hearing reassurance, but was it enough? And how much of it would be true?

  Marty clicked the mic button, hearing the corresponding sound of the PA transmitter through the open cockpit door.

  Folks, this is the captain. I...there’s no way to sugarcoat anything. You know we’ve had a midair collision with another airplane, and you’re all aware by now the fuselage of that airplane has somehow become attached to our right wing, and as far as we know, everyone over there is alive. We are, of course, flyable, or I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. We can land back at Denver, and we’re making preparations right now to do that. Denver has closed all but the runway we used for takeoff because of the snowstorm, so...we’ll get on the ground as quickly as we can. We have a little under two hours of fuel on board, so it won’t take long. My plan right now is to try our best to land carefully and smoothly without letting those folks fall off our wing, but I’ve got to...we have to get some more technical help from our company on airspeeds and such.

  Marty felt his finger weaken on the transmit button and let it pop out. Was he lying to them? No, at least not yet, but how the hell could they keep the same angle of attack and slow down? Chances were not good for landing and getting stopped before running out of snow covered concrete .

  So far, no lies, he thought. He hated telling lies to passengers.

  Once more he pressed the transmit button.

  Okay, there are two things you need to know. First, as tempting as it seems, that we could just open a few emergency hatches and bring those people over here, that’s not possible. The wind is going over that wing at just under three hundred miles per hour, and there’s just no way. And I can’t slow us down enough. Worse, anybody exposed to even half that wind in below freezing temperatures would be hideously frostbitten within seconds, even if they weren’t swept off the wing. Now, we WILL need to slow down to land, but if we do it wrong and change the angle of attack...the angle of the airflow over the wing...we may lose them. I’ll try to keep you informed, but in the meantime, stay seated, stay calm, and a few prayers wouldn’t hurt...mainly for those folks on our wing.

&nbs
p; He replaced the microphone and glanced at the copilot, who was grimly hanging onto the controls and doing a surprisingly good job of holding their heading and altitude at 9-thousand.

  “You okay for a few more minutes, Ryan? I need to talk to the company.”

  He was nodding. “Yeah. I’m getting used to her now. We’re gonna slow for landing, right?”

  “We’ll do the best we can, Ryan.”

  “Okay. Captain, I don’t know if our trailing edge flaps will still work, but we can’t even try the leading edge devices,” Ryan said, his eyes riveted on the instruments. “They’ve got to be mangled on the right side, that leading edge.”

  Marty considered the incongruity of the F/O’s flaky, lackadaisical attitude as they left Denver and this sudden burst of cogent analysis. It was as if someone else had slipped into the right seat. Even the panic was gone, or markedly subdued.

  “Good point,” Marty replied.

  “When you’re ready to configure, we’ll need to deactivate the leading edge devices through the circuit breakers, and they’re right behind me, I think.”

  “Got it.”

  “And...one more thing, Captain. If the flaps are screwed up, the flap asymmetry protection may not work, so we’ll need to milk them down a few increments at a time and make sure they’re coming out exactly the same.”

  “Absolutely. Hang onto her...I’ll be on the sat phone. Then we’ll brief what we’re going to do.”

  Ryan nodded, his eyes glued on the instruments.

  Two flight attendants had moved into the back of the cockpit and Marty turned to face them.