Alex Berenson
Twelve Days
For Max Cohodes,
the baddest dude around
PROLOGUE
TWELVE DAYS…
For as long as he could remember, Vikosh Jain had wanted to see India. His family’s homeland for a hundred generations. The world’s largest democracy. The birthplace of his religion.
While his friends moved out after college, he lived at home, paying off his loans and saving money for what he knew would be an epic adventure. The trip became an obsession. He mapped every train ride across the subcontinent, Mumbai to Delhi, Kashmir to Madras. Finally, when he’d saved the twelve thousand dollars he’d budgeted for a ten-week trip, he bought his ticket.
What a fool he’d been.
After a month, he couldn’t wait to get home. He was sick of India. Sick with India, too. He’d stayed away from street food and drank only bottled water. Even so, he found himself glued to a toilet a week after he arrived. The cheekier travel websites called what had happened to him “the Delhi diet.” It sounded like a joke, but by the time the doxycycline kicked in, he’d lost ten pounds. He could hardly walk a flight of stairs. His skin let him pass for local, but his gut was suburban New Jersey through and through.
Not just his gut. Coming here had taught him how American he really was. Every time he stepped into the streets, he was overwhelmed. By the dust coating his mouth. The shouting, honking, hawking crowds. The pushing and shoving and relentless begging. The way the men pawed women on buses and streetcars. He felt disconnected from all of them, even the ones who had money. Especially the ones who had money. He’d planned to spend a week with his father’s family in Delhi, but he left after two days. He couldn’t stand the way his aunt screeched at her maids and gardeners, like they weren’t people at all.
Before the trip, his parents had warned him his expectations were unrealistic. When he emailed home to complain, long paragraphs of frustration, his father had answered in one sentence: You need to accept it for what it is. And after another long screed: Don’t you see? This is why we left.
Even as Vik read those words, his stomach pulled a 720-degree spin, like a reckless snowboarder had taken up residence in his gut. He wondered what he’d eaten this time. He wasn’t scheduled to fly home for another six weeks. But enough. Enough was enough. He clicked over to united.com and found that for only two hundred dollars he could change his flight. He could leave this very night. He tried to convince himself to stay, that he would be quitting, betraying his heritage. But India wasn’t his country. Never had been. Never would be.
He reached for his credit card.
Now, after an endless taxi ride to Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, an hour-long wait to enter the terminal, three bag searches, two X-rays, and a barking immigration officer, Vik was almost free. He had maybe the worst seat on the plane, 45A, a window in the cabin’s last row. So be it. He’d be close to the toilets.
Nick Cuse had captained nonstops to Mumbai and Delhi for two years. After twenty-eight years at Continental — and he would always think of CAL as his employer, never mind the merger or the name on the side of the jet — he could choose his runs. Most captains with his seniority preferred Hong Kong or Tokyo, well-run airports that weren’t surrounded by slums like the one in Mumbai. But Cuse had started as a Navy pilot, landing F-14s on carrier decks. He was keenly aware that every year commercial aircraft became more automated. Every year, pilots had less to do. He wanted to end his career as something other than a glorified bus driver. Mumbai was a lot of things, but it was rarely boring. Twice he’d had to abort landings for slum kids running across the runway, airport cops chasing them like a scene from a bad movie.
His co-pilot, Henry Franklin, was also ex-Navy, just young enough to have flown sorties in the first Gulf War. They’d shared the cockpit three days earlier, and Cuse was happy to have Franklin with him for the ride back. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a civilian with a week of training could have done what they were about to do. But the hundredth time defined the job. A good pilot felt a crisis coming before his instruments did, and defused it before it became serious enough to be a threat. Cuse had that sixth sense, and he saw it in Franklin. Though the guy was a bit sharp to the crew.
Now they sat side by side in the cockpit making final preflight checks, their relief crew sitting at the back of the cockpit. A flight this long required another captain and first officer. Their Boeing 777 was just about full, making weight and balance calculations easy. Two hundred sixty-one passengers, seventeen crew members. Two-seven-eight human souls traveling eight thousand miles, over the Hindu Kush, the Alps, the Atlantic. They would fly in darkness from takeoff to landing, the sun chasing them west, never catching them.
Every time you leave the earth, it’s a miracle, Cuse’s first instructor at Pensacola had told him. You come back down, that’s another. A miracle of human invention, human ingenuity, human cunning. Never forget that, no matter how routine it may seem. Always respect it.
“Captain,” Franklin said. “We’re topped up.” An eight-thousand-mile flight into the jet stream required the 777 to leave Mumbai with full tanks, forty-five thousand gallons of aviation-grade kerosene. The fuel itself weighed three hundred thousand pounds, accounting for almost half the jet’s takeoff weight. They were carrying fuel to carry fuel, an inherent problem with long-range flights.
Cuse glanced at his watch, a platinum Rolex, his wife’s present to him on the day they signed their divorce papers. Nine years later, he still didn’t know why she’d given it to him. Or why he’d kept it. 11:36 p.m. Four minutes before scheduled departure. They’d leave on time. By Mumbai standards they had a good night to fly, seventy degrees, a breeze coming off the Indian Ocean to push away smog from trash fires and diesel-spewing minibuses. He looked over his displays one more time. Perfect.
Cuse liked to keep the cockpit door open as long as possible, a throwback to the days when pilots didn’t regard every passenger as a potential terrorist. Now the purser poked his head inside. “Cabin ready for pushback, sir.”
“Thank you, Carl. You can close the door.”
“Yes, sir.” The purser switched on the cockpit lock and pulled shut the door.
“Cockpit locked, Captain,” Franklin said. In aviation lingo, he was the “pilot monitoring,” with the job of talking to the tower and watching the instruments. Cuse was the “pilot flying,” responsible for handling the plane.
“Thank you, Henry.”
“Greetings, United Flight 49. I’m Carl Fisher, your purser. We’ve closed the cabin door and are making final preparations for our flight to Newark. At this point, United requires you to put your cell phone on airplane mode. To make the flight more relaxing for you and everyone around you, we don’t allow in-flight calls. But you are free to use approved electronic devices once we’ve taken off. The captain has informed me that he’s expecting our flight time to be sixteen hours. We do recommend that you keep your seat belt fastened for the duration of the flight in case we run into any rough air, as is common over the Himalayas…”
Vik thumbed in one last text to his mother—On the plane, see you tomorrow—and then turned off his phone. Even if his stomach settled down, he doubted he’d sleep. He was caught between the cabin wall and a chubby twenty-something woman wearing a Smith College sweatshirt and hemp pants. She smelled of onion chutney and positive thinking.