'Give it a moment…' she suggested. But the aircraft bucked beneath them and she almost retched as her stomach rose up inside her body. It felt as if the plane had dropped a thousand feet or more in a single second, hit something hard below, and was running along some solid, rough ledge cut into the air. The impact scattered every loose object in the cabin: notebook computers, writing pads, pens, papers, mobile phones. She clung to her seat, desperately trying to fasten the strap, and watched Levine and Barnside struggling to do the same. A hand gripped her shoulder. It was the co-pilot.
'Belts,' he said. 'I want you all strapped in right now.'
'We're talking,' she objected.
'No one's talking, lady. The comm systems just went stone dead and we don't even want to think about what might have gone with it. This is no big deal. We got plenty of altitude and we could just glide into Vegas from this height if we wanted. But there's something turbulent out there and that means we want you tied. Now!'
She wished she could see beneath the opaque Ray-Bans. This man looked scared, she thought, and that was rare in a pilot. 'I asked you to tell me if we had problems.'
'Please…'
She unhooked the strap, got up, holding tightly to the seat, tried to smile at him, and said, 'You have a jump seat. I'm taking it. And that is an order.'
'Go for it,' Barnside yelled, buckling himself into his seat, and gave her what she hoped was a look of encouragement. 'You heard the woman.'
'Shit,' the co-pilot muttered, then turned his back on them, worked his way to the front of the cabin, holding on tight to every seat as he passed it, and pushed open the cockpit door. A sea of light the colour of gold flooded through it, then he was dragging her with him, pushing her hard into the tiny jump seat, strapping himself in, and pulling down the military-style harness that sat above it.
'Make it tight,' he said. 'You can wear these too.' He pulled out a spare pair of sunglasses from a pocket in the cabin and thrust them at her. She put them on, took a deep breath, and looked ahead.
Still trying to believe her eyes, she gasped, 'What the hell is that?'
The captain turned round and smiled. 'We were rather hoping you'd be telling us that, ma'am.'
On the horizon, suspended over the south-western portion of the city, level with their own altitude, stood a vast, elliptical golden shape, like a miniature sun stretched and distorted by gravity. It ran almost the breadth of the valley, joining the mountain ranges on either side of the flat, strung-out urban area, and shimmered, motionless, in front of them.
'What do they say on the ground?' she asked, already knowing what the answer would be.
'All communications are down,' the co-pilot answered, tapping away at the buttons in front of him. 'We haven't a clue.'
'Can't you even listen?'
The co-pilot turned his sunglasses on her. He reached for the panel and upped the volume. The sound of static, screeching, meaningless, filled the speakers. 'I've been dialling through everything, from the McCarran tower through to local radio on the NDB frequency and they're all the same. Beats me. I never had interference that could run clear through from UHF to AM.'
The captain eased back some more on the throttle. The aircraft had slowed, she now realized. They didn't know enough to turn it round, but they wanted more information before heading straight toward the object. It sat several miles away from the commercial airfield, which she could see clearly now, directly in their flight path.
'Ordinarily,' the captain said, 'I would have suggested that was some kind of optical illusion. You get this thing called a parhelion, a sundog. Caused by crystal diffraction in the atmosphere. Harmless.'
'I know what a parhelion is,' she replied. 'And this isn't one.'
'No. I guess the interference ought to tell us that. You wouldn't expect that from an optical illusion.'
'So what is it?'
'Search me. But one thing I know is we're going nowhere near it. I'm keeping this altitude just so we're nice and safe and as close to the airfield as need be.'
She stared at the object in the sky. The colour was changing occasionally. At the perimeter of the ellipsis it turned blue and green in flickering waves of flame.
'If I didn't know better,' the co-pilot said, 'I'd reckon that was ball lightning.'
'Not that anyone knows what ball lightning is,' the captain muttered. 'Or has ever photographed it. Or proved it does exist. And, if my memory serves me right' — he stared at the golden shape ahead of them — 'it's generally supposed to be about the size of a soccer ball.'
'Yes,' she said, and found it impossible to take her eyes off the object. 'But it is some kind of lightning.' The aircraft rocked again. Not so bad this time. There was a sound close by, like escaping air.
'Shit,' the co-pilot said, and started to press gingerly at the bank of switches and buttons in front of him. Vegas lay in front of them like a giant lightning conductor, the metallic spine of the Strip running through its core. Silence invaded the cabin. On the panel the lights went dead. The two pilots stared at each other.
'It's moving,' Helen said. They looked ahead and saw that the rim of this miniature, elongated sun was now almost completely blue. What looked like flames or wild electrical discharges ran flickering along the skin.
The captain watched it for a second or two and came to a swift decision. 'To hell with McCarran. I'm taking this thing into Nellis whether they like it or not. And fast.'
She watched them run through the checks on the panel, push and pull the levers in front of them. Nothing much seemed to be working on the plane. The nose had slipped beneath the horizon, and the pilot was working the machine physically, with his hands, with his feet. The smell of ozone, of burning wiring, was starting to became noticeable in the cabin.
'We lost the flaps,' the co-pilot said quietly. 'No power, no flaps.'
The captain shrugged. 'Oh my. Well, I always did want to do this with someone else's ship.' And he turned the wheel full to the left, then kicked in hard with the right rudder, putting the plane into a sharp side slip. The aircraft jerked itself uncomfortably around in the air, the nose twitching to the right, no horizon visible, and it felt as if they would fall out of the sky any second. She watched the altimeter. It was unwinding at three thousand feet a minute. This crazy attitude made it difficult to see what was going on in the city. The wing obscured the view. All there was out to the left of the plane was a sheet of gold and flickering blue. She closed her eyes. The plane, the world, seemed out of joint. She tried to think of Michael Lieberman, and what he had said. He was probably right. They attacked this problem as if it were something that could be cured with conventional force, conventional procedures. Charley Pascal was smarter than that. Even more, she was only part of the problem, almost a symptom of it.
Her head hurt. Maybe a nosebleed was imminent. She screwed up her eyes, tried to will away the pain. Then felt the plane move again, swing forward, back into balance, return to something like normality. Against her instincts, Helen Wagner lifted her head and saw a long, empty runway approaching quickly in front of them, military planes parked either side of the extended finger of asphalt.
The co-pilot operated a lever on the floor and something shifted with a bang beneath them. 'Gear down,' he said.
'All right,' the captain muttered, and toyed gently with the wheel. The aircraft kissed the ground with scarcely a noise, and began to decelerate along the asphalt runway of Nellis. She didn't want to look but there was no avoiding it. To her left, the fiery ellipse was descending, streaking blue and green and red as it came to earth.
'Lightning,' the co-pilot said. 'Has to be.'