her seat belt cut deep into her as the plane suddenly rolled hard, the right wing tipping toward the ground as if the jet was flipping over.
Bodies bumped over seats as people not belted were tossed to the right wall, along with laptops, backpacks and purses amid shrieks and loud bangs as items thudded and hammered in the overhead bins. The service trolley crashed into passengers in the right rows, spilling hot coffee and raining down cans of soda and juice.
The jet froze with its wings in a twelve-and-six-o’clock position.
Kayla clawed at Logan, locking her arms around him as people screamed, cursed and prayed.
Then the plane lurched hard to the left with the left wing pointing directly to the earth. Again, bodies flew through the cabin, slamming against other passengers, the wall and the overhead luggage bins. The bin doors opened and luggage tumbled like boulders along the left row. Logan reached out to grab an older woman who’d fallen into them but she slipped from his grip as the jet suddenly rolled right until it was almost level.
Now it began dropping, banking downward, as if it would spiral out of control. Passengers yelled and screamed, some calling out to God before the crew regained control and finally leveled the plane.
“Please, please, let this be over,” Kayla whispered through her tears.
In the aftermath, the attendants, despite being hurt and bleeding, took charge. Even as the sounds of crying and moaning passengers filled the plane, people began helping each other. Kayla thrust her face into Logan’s chest, slid her arms around him and sobbed, feeling his heart beating rapidly against her face.
Logan held her tight as the jet resumed a smooth flight.
Kayla prayed for the plane to land.
Get us back on the ground! Please, God, get us back on the ground!
Her cheek twitched as something wet and warm splashed on her skin; one drop then another. As she pulled back, she saw blood dripping down on them from the little boy who’d been contorted into the open luggage bin above them.
Two
Manhattan, New York
“New York, EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety...declar—an emer—”
“EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety, transmission garbled, say again...”
Kate Page, a reporter with Newslead, detected something in the chatter crackling from the news agency’s emergency scanners. More than a dozen of them issued a constant stream of coded bursts across from where she sat in the newsroom. Kate stopped her current work, jotted down the name of the airline, the flight number and listened.
“...EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety...injur—request—medic—”
Sounds like “injuries” and a call for medical services.
She listened as the dispatches continued echoing in the news department.
It was Saturday and the newsroom was nearly empty.
Kate had a bad feeling about what she’d heard. She went online. EastCloud 4990 was a commercial flight that had originated in Buffalo and was bound for LaGuardia. It was a new Richlon-TitanRT-86 with a capacity for eighty-six passengers. She quickly checked social media feeds. No one was tweeting about the flight.
Not so far, anyway.
She glanced at the corner and the glass-walled cubicle known as the scanner room. Reporters called it “the torture chamber,” because if you were assigned to sit in it you had to endure and decipher the chaotic, simultaneous cross-talk flowing from metropolitan New York City’s police, fire department, paramedics and other responders.
But no one was there.
The cubicle door was open, which is how Kate had been able to hear the chatter from the scanner.
What’s going on? Why isn’t someone listening?
This broke Newslead’s cardinal rule: never, ever leave the scanners unattended. Emergency scanners were the lifeblood of any news operation, alerting the reporters to the first cries for help, pulling them into stories that would stop the heart of the city.
Or break it.
Kate’s years of listening to police radios while working on crime desks in newsrooms across the country had given her the ability to pluck a key piece of data from dozens of staccato exchanges all happening at the same time. She knew the alphanumeric code systems. She could pick out a trace of emotion in a dispatcher’s voice, the underlying tension in a transmission. This was a skill Newslead, the global wire service, demanded from every member of its reporting staff, especially here at its world headquarters in Manhattan, where the competition was fierce. But the incessant noise, the confusion and pressure not to miss anything was torturous for some reporters, making a shift on the scanners the most dreaded job in the newsroom.
Another transmission from air traffic control crackled.
“EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety, we can give you Teterboro or Newark.”
The jet’s response was overtaken by static.
Damn. There’s a jetliner in trouble with injuries aboard and we don’t know where it’s headed.
Kate glared at the empty scanner room.
This is how we miss stories. This is how we get beat.
She made a quick check of the bank of flat-screen TV monitors tilted down from the ceiling over rows of empty desks. The sets were tuned to news channels with the volume turned low. Most newsrooms in New York subscribed to professional scanner-listening services that sent out alerts. Newslead had cut its subscription years ago to save money.
Nothing was breaking on TV, either. Kate picked up more dispatches.
“EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety, repeat—we can give you Teterboro or Newark.”
“Thank you, New York. We’ve got a visual on the Verrazano Bridge. We’ll keep LaGuardia.”
“Forty-nine Ninety, stand by.”
Kate did another online check. No one was tweeting anything.
This is all happening now.
Resentment bubbled in the pit of her stomach. She’d come in today on her own time to finish a feature about crime on the subways of the world’s largest cities. She was pulling together files from Newslead’s bureaus in Mexico City, Seoul and São Paulo. But she had to stop. The situation on the radios gnawed at her.
No way am I taking the blame for us missing a major breaking story because someone else failed to do their job.
Kate went to the scanner room, looking for the incident log, or at least a note from whoever was on duty. She found nothing. Again, she looked around the newsroom. One person was working in graphics. Other than that, no one was around. A portrait of an industry withering before the internet, she thought. When she’d started, one hundred and forty newspeople had worked here at headquarters.
That number was now seventy-one.
