There were six passenger seats in the cabin, plus the attendant’s position, making a total of seven masks. One of them did not deploy at all. Two dropped, but supplied no oxygen. That left four masks among five people, and a life-and-death game of musical chairs began.
The attendant’s mask was functioning. So was McCabe’s. He’d inhaled a whole load of crap by the time he got it on, but finally he was breathing sweet, pure oxygen, and the heaving in his chest began to subside.
The other three men started scrambling through the ever-thickening smoke, shouting, screaming, and coughing in their desperate search for clean air. One managed to kick, punch, and elbow his way to a chair that had a working mask. Another was overcome by the smoke and sank to the floor, bent double on his knees, where he took his last few breaths. Then he collapsed, stone dead, in the aisle.
The fourth man, meanwhile, had finally found a working mask, but his brain seemed unable to give his hands the necessary instructions, his fingers fumbling helplessly as they tried to stretch the elastic strap over his head. He was coughing so hard now that he was bringing up blood, a scarlet spume that foamed from his mouth, bubbling and wheezing until he, too, was still.
And all the while, the plane kept dropping through the sky, the wind howled and buffeted around it, and the cables controlling the elevator flaps were eaten away by the flames.
The flight crew, meanwhile, were too busy to be afraid. There was barely any light in the sky now, and the mountains through which they were descending were just black silhouettes, outlined against a deep blue horizon. They were seven thousand feet up, less than five thousand feet above the lowest ground in the region, giving them maybe ten miles to play with at most, and no way to go but down. They’d dumped all their fuel to save weight and reduce the risk of any further fires. They’d deployed the undercarriage. All they were missing was their landing site. Then one last faint glint of light reflected off a sheet of flat white ice, and they saw a frozen lake up ahead.
It looked like a giant pair of spectacles. Two large, open areas at either end formed the lenses, linked by a curved channel. A small island stood right in the middle of the left-hand, westernmost lens. But it was too close and they were still too high. They were going to overshoot.
The pilot muttered a string of expletives into his oxygen mask and pushed the plane into an even steeper dive. He’d wanted to come in at a steady, shallow glide. Now he had to swoop down toward the lake like a dive-bomber, pull up at the final moment, and pray that the controls could take the strain.
Down the plane plunged, closing in on the lake, till the cockpit windshield seemed filled with nothing but ice.
They were over the first round lens of the lake now, still five hundred feet up, the pilot frantically pulling at the joystick to get the elevator flaps to lift, and pull the plane out of the dive.
In the rear equipment bay, the cables connecting the pilot to the elevators had been burned and frayed to little more than wire strands, and all the time, the demand for more lift was putting more pressure on the cables, stretching them tighter.
The nose wouldn’t come up. They were going to crash straight into the ice.
The cables were unraveling.
The ice was barely a hundred feet below them.
And then, at last, the plane pulled out of its dive, the descent flattened, and at that precise moment the final strands of cable snapped, the elevators lost all control and the plane fell the last fifty feet onto the frozen lake in a spectacular belly flop that buckled the undercarriage and sent the craft skittering across the ice like a giant hockey puck.
Somehow it found a straight-line path across the curved channel between one half of the lake and the other. But the impact had been enough to throw the attendant from her flimsy seat, ripping her mask away from its moorings, and throwing her in a flurry of arms and legs down the cabin, between the chairs, till she collided with the back wall and slumped motionless to the ground.
In the final instant before the plane had landed, an image flashed across Waylon McCabe’s mind, a memory from his childhood, Sunday morning in the church house, his mother singing a hymn in her harsh, reedy voice, his father’s voice a low, tuneless drone. He could smell their clothes, a bitter scent of sweat, dirt, poverty, and defeat. McCabe had not been back to that church in fifty years. He’d left it far behind the day he had watched his mother being buried and had quit his hometown for good.
The image vanished as he realized they’d got back down to earth in one piece. The impossible had happened. He’d made it.
Then the tip of the starboard wing caught against the rock face of the island, which jutted up out of the ice in the middle of the lake. The wing sheared right off and sent the rest of the plane spinning off at a new angle.
It came ashore in the center of a small cove, riding up the frozen beach till the port wing hit a massive boulder, crumpled, and left the fuselage arrowing into the rocks and trees, burrowing a deep trench through the thick winter snow and trampling the smaller saplings until the nose of the fuselage hit a much older, bigger pine.
The point of impact was slightly off center, to the pilot’s side, and he was squashed like a bug on a windshield as one half of the flight deck was obliterated and a huge gash was torn down the side of the plane. McCabe’s last surviving companion was flung out into space, still attached to his chair, till he came to rest, impaled by a tree branch, fifty feet away.
The final intact section of the plane caromed off a rock outcrop. The rest of the flight deck disintegrated, taking the copilot with it, and the main length of the cabin simply snapped in two, like a broken twig. The last of the smoke escaped into the subzero air. And Waylon McCabe slumped, eyes closed, in his chair.
There was an emergency locator beacon on the plane. A helicopter was heading out of the nearest settlement, Faro, within half an hour of the crash. The rescue team was winched down to the ground while the helicopter hovered overhead, illuminating the main crash site with its spotlights. One by one the corpses were discovered and then, when all hope seemed lost, there came a shout: “We got a live one!”
Waylon McCabe briefly regained consciousness as his stretcher was being winched up toward the helicopter. As he rose though the air, up into the heavens, his eyes were dazzled by shafts of light, his ears overwhelmed by what sounded like the fluttering of a million angels’ wings. The first words he was aware of hearing came from a paramedic: “It’s a miracle you survived.”
That’s what the doctors said, too, when he’d been airlifted to the nearest hospital. The news reporters who besieged the modest facility, his lawyer and financial director, who flew in from his corporate headquarters in San Antonio, the flight attendant who fussed over him as he was flown back home to Texas -they all used that same word: miracle.
FIVE YEARS LATER: January 1998
4
Samuel Carver’s room had a million-dollar view, clear across the water to the snowcapped peaks that rose in serried ranks beyond the southern shore. While the mountains stood solid and immutable, the skies above them displayed an infinite variety of light, color, and temper, concealing the glorious landscape one moment, illuminating it the next. On a clear day, a man could stand at that window and see all the way to Mont Blanc. He could practically reach out and touch the black runs.
But Carver wasn’t standing. Having visited death upon so many, he was now condemned to a half-life, trapped in a solitary purgatory. He was lying in bed, his body twisted in a fetal curl. The room was centrally heated, but his shoulders were hunched against the cold. It was silent, yet the palms of his hands were cupped over his ears, his fingers clawing at the back of his skull. The light was gentle, but his eyes were screwed tightly against a scorching glare.