She caught him looking at her and extended a hand, exposing a dirty Livestrong bracelet. “We’re going to be neighbors for sixteen hours, we should know each other’s names. Jessica.”
Vik awkwardly twisted his arm across the seat to shake. “Vik. Let me guess. Yoga retreat?”
“That obvious? How about you?”
“I came to visit family.”
“That’s so wonderful. Getting to see the place where you’re from.”
“Sure is.” Despite himself, Vik liked this woman. He wished he could have seen the country through her eyes instead of his own.
It was 11:50 p.m. by Cuse’s Rolex when he swung the jet onto 09/27. For years, the airport here had tried to operate a second, intersecting runway, a prescription for disaster. Complaints from pilots and its own controllers finally forced it to stop. Now 09/27 was the airport’s sole runway. At this moment, it was empty, two miles of concrete that ran west toward the Indian Ocean.
“United Airlines four-nine heavy, you are cleared for takeoff on runway nine. Wind one-two-zero, ten knots.” The air-traffic controllers here had call-center English, clear and precise.
“United forty-nine heavy, cleared for takeoff on nine.” Franklin clicked off.
Like all new-generation jets, the 777–200 was fly-by-wire. Computers controlled its engines, wings, and flaps. But Boeing had designed the cockpit to preserve the comforting illusion that pilots physically handled the plane. Instead of dialing a knob or pushing a joystick, Cuse pushed the twin white throttle handles about halfway forward. The response was immediate. The General Electric engines on the wings spooled up, sending a shiver through the airframe.
Cuse lifted his hand. “N1.” For routine takeoffs, the 777 had an auto-throttle system for routine takeoffs, though he could override it at any time.
“N1.” Franklin tapped instructions into a touch screen beside the throttle handles. “Done.”
Cuse dropped the brakes and the three-hundred-fifty-ton jet rolled forward, at first slowly, then with an accelerating surge. They reached eighty knots and Franklin made the usual announcement: “Eighty knots. Throttle hold. Thrust normal. V1 is one-five-five.”
At one hundred fifty-five knots, the 777 would reach what pilots called V1, the point at which safety rules dictated going ahead with takeoff even with a blown engine. Franklin spoke the figure as a formality. Both men knew it as well as their names.
“One-five-five,” Cuse repeated, a secular Amen.
Cuse’s gut and the instruments agreed: V1 would be no problem. The engines were running perfectly. Cuse felt as though he were wearing blinkers. The city, the terminal, even the traffic-control tower no longer existed. Only the runway before him and the metal skin that surrounded him.
The markers clipped by. They passed one hundred thirty knots, one forty, one fifty, nearly race-car speed, though the jet was so big and stable that Cuse wouldn’t have known without the gauges to tell him—
“V1,” Franklin said. And only a second later: “Rotate.” Now the Triple-7 had reached one hundred sixty-five knots, about one hundred ninety miles an hour. As soon as Cuse pulled up its nose, the lift under its wings would send it soaring. Cuse felt himself tense and relax simultaneously, as he always did at this moment. Boeing’s engineers and United’s mechanics and everyone else had done all they could. The responsibility was his. He pulled back the yoke. The jet’s nose rose and it leapt into the sky. A miracle of human invention.
“Positive rate,” Franklin said.
“Gear up.” Cuse pushed a button to retract the landing gear. They were gaining altitude smartly now, almost forty feet a second. In less than a minute, they would be higher than the world’s tallest building. In five, they would be able to clear a good-size mountain range.
“United four-nine heavy, you are clear. Continue heading two-seven-zero—”
“Continue two-seven-zero,” Franklin said.
“Good-bye,” Cuse said. That last word was not strictly necessary, but he liked to include it as long as takeoff was copasetic, a single touch of humanity in the middle of the engineering, good-bye, au revoir, adios amigos, but no worries, I’ll be back.
They topped four hundred feet and the city bloomed around them.
“Flaps,” Franklin said.
“Flaps up. Climb power.”
Vik pressed his nose against the window, looking down at the terminal’s bright lights. He felt an unexpected regret. Maybe he should have stayed longer, given the place another chance. He might see it again. Once he married, had children, a trip like this one would be impossible. Unless he married a wannabe yogi like Jessica and got stuck taking trips to India for all eternity.
“I miss it already,” she said, as if reading his mind.
“What’s not to love?” He wondered if she knew he was being sarcastic.
Second by second, the jumbled neighborhoods around the airport came into view. At ground level, Mumbai hid its massive slums behind concrete walls and elevated highways. But from above, they were obvious, dark blotches in the electrical grid, the city’s missing teeth. Some of the largest surrounded the airport. Vik had read a book about them. He imagined rows of rat-infested mud-brick huts, children and adults jumbled together on straw mattresses, trying to sleep, plotting their next dollar, their next meal. So much desperation, so much bad luck and trouble. They pushed on. But then, what else could they do?
Then, from the edge of the slum nearest the airport, Vik saw something he didn’t expect.
Twin red streaks cutting through the night. Fireworks. Maybe someone down there had something to celebrate, for a change. But they didn’t peter out like normal fireworks. They kept coming, arcing upward—
Not fireworks. Missiles.
Following a failed al-Qaeda effort to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet in Kenya in 2002, the Federal Aviation Administration had considered making American airlines retrofit their fleets with antimissile equipment. But installing thousands of jets with chaff and flare dispensers, along with radar systems to warn pilots of incoming missiles, would have been hugely expensive. Estimates ranged from five to fifty billion dollars. Worse, the engineers who designed the countermeasures couldn’t say if they would allow a passenger jet to escape. Passenger planes were far less maneuverable than fighter jets. Their engines gave off big, obvious heat signatures. And major airports were so congested that the systems might have caused jets to fire flares in each other’s paths.
The seriousness of the threat was also unclear. Despite their reputation for being easy to use, surface-to-air missiles required substantial training. After a few months of memos, the FAA shelved the idea of a retrofit. And so American jets remained unprotected from surface-to-air attack.
From the cockpit, Cuse felt the missiles before he saw them. Something far below that didn’t belong. He looked down, saw the streaks. They had just cleared the airport’s western boundary. Unlike Vik Jain, he knew immediately what they were.
“Max power.” He shoved the throttle forward and the turbines whined in response. “Nose down—” He dropped the yoke.
“Captain—”
Cuse ignored him, toggled Mumbai air-traffic control. “Mumbai tower, United four-nine heavy emergency. Two missiles—”
“Repeat, United—”
“SAMs.” The tower couldn’t help him now. He flicked off, snuck another look out the window. In the five seconds since he’d first spotted them, the missiles had closed half the gap with the jet. They had to be deep in the supersonic range, twelve hundred miles an hour or more. A mile every three seconds. Of course, the Boeing was moving, too, at three hundred miles an hour and accelerating. With a two-mile horizontal lead and a thousand feet of vertical. If the SAMs were Russian, they had a range of three to four miles. At three miles, the jet would probably escape.