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  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  The authors would like to thank

  Mel Parker

  for his careful editing

  and his unwavering

  enthusiasm for this novel.

  Introduction

  This book is not intended for in-flight reading. If you’re reading this on an aircraft, put it down, or turn off your eBook reader or your audiobook device. Find something else to read or listen to. Something less terrifying.

  Mayday was first published in 1979 under the name of Thomas Block, my childhood friend and a US Airways captain. I had helped Tom with the book, and in 1998, Tom and I rewrote Mayday, and it was published under both our names. If you read the editor’s note, “About the Authors and the Book,” you’ll see some other background about how this book came to be written, and about how the collaboration came about.

  Why the rewrite? Because a great deal of the technology that was depicted in the 1979 edition had changed by 1998, and we wanted to get the exciting new technology into this high-tech thriller. Also, the political and social landscape had changed, and that, too, needed some updating. As a for instance, a lot of characters in the 1979 edition smoked, and they smoked everywhere. Well, by 1998, they all quit. Also, the stewardesses became flight attendants, and we made other changes, some subtle and some not so subtle, regarding the characters’ job titles, gender relations, and other social and job-related issues.

  What amazed us as we rewrote and updated the book, however, was how much had not changed in the twenty years between the original and the update. Some things, like treachery, bravery, love, and the will to survive never change. And we see all of this in a smoke-free environment.

  Mayday was made into a CBS-TV Movie of the Week in 2005, starring Aiden Quinn and Kelly Hu. It aired on October 2 during primetime and received excellent reviews and a very high Nielsen rating. If you saw the movie, I’m sure you’ll agree that it was one of the better made-for-network-TV movies that has aired in recent times, and Quinn, Hu, and the entire cast did a great job of bringing this book to life. A movie never follows the book completely—there is just not enough running time to work in all the subplots—but Mayday the movie did capture the terror of a midair disaster with cinematic accuracy and a fine screenplay.

  The movie history of Mayday before it was a TV movie is interesting. When it was first published in 1979, it came to the attention of Stephen King, who read it and loved it. High praise indeed, from one of the best writers in America. Stephen happened to be working on a movie project called Creep Show with George Romero who had produced and directed the cult classic, Night of the Living Dead. As I heard the story afterward, Stephen said to George, “I just read a great book that could be a Night of the Living Dead at 50,000 feet.”

  George read Mayday and agreed. As it happened, George Romero was living and working in Pittsburgh at the time and so was Tom Block, who was based there with US Air. Tom and George got together to discuss the book and a possible movie, and a deal was struck. George made Mayday into a feature film, starring John Travolta, who loves flying, with a screenplay by Stephen King. The movie opened to huge box office and smash reviews.

  Well, no, that’s not exactly what happened. That’s a Hollywood ending, and Hollywood endings never happen in Hollywood or anywhere. Not even in Pittsburgh. But Tom and I really thought it would happen, with Tom as the technical advisor and me and Stephen collaborating on the screenplay. George, though he loved the book and wanted to make the movie, could not get it off the ground—pardon the pun. But there was a happy ending: Tom and I became friends with George and his wife Chris, and we were invited to the shooting and the screening of Creep Show where I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen King—and Tom had the additional pleasure of doing a walk-on bit in the movie itself ! Also, Stephen became a fan of my writing, as I am of his, and he’s mentioned my novels in some of his novels and also in his nonfiction book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. George and I have stayed in touch over the years, and someday we’ll make a movie together. Tom and I remain lifelong friends. Happy ending.

  After George Romero took a pass on Mayday, we had a lot of other Hollywood interest, but none of that interest turned into a deal for a feature film. Then, after the book was reissued in 1998, a TV producer made us an offer, and we decided we’d rather see Mayday made for television than not made at all. So we accepted the offer, and the result was the CBS-TV movie.

  Mayday has been translated into just about every language on the planet, and it remains in print all over the world. In fact, without overstating its success, I’d say it has become a classic in the genre. And what a genre it is—airline disaster, the modern equivalent of the proverbial train wreck that both repels and mesmerizes us.

  The New York Times wrote about Mayday: “A novel for the true connoisseur of disaster novels.” I agree, and I hope you do, too.

  So, without any further pre-flight announcements, welcome aboard Flight 52, departing San Francisco enroute to Tokyo, via Hell.

  Nelson DeMille

  New York, 2011

  SUCCESS/FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY

  MORNING/ALL AGAINST TWENTY-

  ONE-MILE WIND/STARTED FROM

  LEVEL WITH ENGINE POWER ALONE/

  AVERAGE SPEED THROUGH AIR

  THIRTY-ONE MILES/LONGEST

  FIFTY-NINE SECONDS/INFORM

  PRESS/HOME CHRISTMAS

  —Telegram to the Rev. Milton Wright,

  from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina,

  December 17, 1903

  1

  Silhouetted against the deep blue horizon of the stratosphere, Trans-United Flight 52 cruised westbound toward Japan.

  Below, Captain Alan Stuart could see pieces of the sunlit Pacific between the breaks in the cloud cover. Above was subspace—an airless void without sun or life. The continuous shock wave generated by the giant craft’s supersonic airspeed rose invisibly off its wings and fell unheard into the mid–Pacific Ocean.

  Captain Stuart scanned his instruments. It had been two hours and twenty minutes since the flight had departed San Francisco. The Straton 797 maintained a steady Mach-cruise component of 1.8—930 miles per hour. The triple inertial navigation sets with satellite updating all agreed that Flight 52 was progressing precisely according to plan. Stuart picked up a clipboard from the flight pedestal between himself and the copilot, looked at their computer flight plan, then glanced back at the electronic readout of position: 161 degrees, 14 minutes west, 43 degrees 27 minutes north—2100 miles west of California, 1500 miles north of Hawaii. “We’re on target,” he said.

  First Officer Daniel McVary, the copilot, glanced at him. “We should be landing at Chicago within the hour.”

  Stuart managed a smile. “Wrong map, Dan.” He didn’t care for cockpit humor. He unfolded the chart for today’s mid-Pacific high-altitude navigation routes and laid it on his lap, studying it slowly with the motions of a man who had more time than duties. The chart was blank except for lines of longitude and latitude and the current flight routes. Flight 52 had long left behind any features that mapmakers could put on a chart. Even from their aerie of over twelve miles altitude, there was no
land to be seen over this route. Captain Stuart turned to First Officer McVary. “Did you get the fourth and fifth sectors in?”

  “Yes. Updates, too.” He yawned and stretched.

  Stuart nodded. His mind drifted back to San Francisco. His hometown. He’d done a television talk show the previous morning. He’d been anxious about it and, like an instant replay, snatches of the conversation kept running through his brain.

  As usual, the interviewer had been more interested in the Straton than in him, but he’d become accustomed to that. He ran through the standard spiel in his mind. The Straton 797 was not like the old British/ French Concorde. It climbed to the same altitude the Concorde did, but it flew a little slower. Yet it was measurably more practical. Armed with some aerodynamic breakthroughs of the ’90s, the Straton engineers had aimed at less speed and more size. Luxury coupled with economy of operation.

  The aircraft held 40 first-class and 285 tourist-class passengers. For the interview, he remembered to mentioned the upper deck where the cockpit and first-class lounge were located. The lounge had a bar and piano. One day when he was feeling reckless he would tell an interviewer that it had a fireplace and pool.

  Stuart had spouted the advertising hype whenever he couldn’t think of anything else to say. The Straton 797 flew faster than the sun. Slightly faster than the rotational velocity of the earth.

  At a cruise speed of close to 1,000 miles per hour, Flight 52 should arrive in Tokyo at 7:15 A.M. local time, though it had departed San Francisco at 8:00 A.M. At least that was usually the case. Not today. They had departed San Francisco thirty-nine minutes late because of a minor leak in the number-three hydraulic system. While the mechanics changed the bad valve, Captain Stuart and his flight crew spent the delay time reviewing their computer flight profile. An updated winds aloft forecast had been sent to them, and Stuart had used the new wind information to revise his flight plan. They would fly south of the original planned routing to stay away from the worst of the newly predicted headwinds.

  Time en route would be only slightly greater than usual, at six hours and twenty-four minutes. It was still impressive; grist for the media’s mill. Across seven time zones and the International Date Line in less than a working man’s day. The marvel of the decade.

  But it was a little frightening. Stuart remembered the time he had been candid during a magazine interview. He had honestly explained the technical problems of supersonic flight at 62,000 feet, like the subtle effects of ozone poisoning and the periodic increases in radiation from sunspots. The interviewer had latched on to some of his points, exaggerated others, and had written an article that would have scared the hell out of a Shuttle astronaut. Stuart had been called in to speak to the Chief Pilot about his candor. Never again. “I did another one of those damned TV interviews. Yesterday morning.”

  McVary looked at him. “No kidding? Why didn’t you tell us? Not that I would have gotten up that early…”

  The junior pilot in the cockpit, Carl Fessler, who sat behind them at the relief copilot’s position, laughed. “Why do they always pick on you, Skipper?”

  Stuart shrugged. “Some idiot in public relations thinks I come across good. I’d rather fly through a line of thunderstorms than face a camera.”

  McVary nodded. Alan Stuart was every inch the image of the competent captain, from his gray hair to the crease in his pants. “I wouldn’t mind being on TV.”

  Stuart yawned. “I’ll suggest it to PR.” He looked around the flight deck. Behind McVary, Fessler was typing into a portable computer—an electronic equivalent of a ship’s log—with backup data from the instrument panel. McVary had returned to staring blankly ahead, his mind, no doubt, on personal matters.

  The usual mid-flight routines had laid their blue veil over the crew. The blue mid-Pacific blues. The doldrums, as they were called by seamen—but this ship was not becalmed as a ship caught in the doldrums. It was ripping along at close to the velocity of a bullet. Yet there was really nothing, at that moment, for the three pilots to do. At 62,000 feet, all the weather was beneath them. An hour before, they had flown over an area of bad weather. Some of the towering cumulus clouds had reached up high enough to at least give any of the crew and passengers who cared to look at them something to see. But there had not been even the slightest turbulence at those altitudes. Stuart would have welcomed a little bump, the way truck drivers did on a long haul across endless smooth blacktop. He glanced out the front window again. There was one thing to see that never ceased to fascinate him: the rounded horizon line that separated earth from subspace.

  The autopilot made small and silent corrections to keep the flight on the preprogrammed course. Stuart listlessly laid two fingers of his right hand on the control wheel. He had not steered the 797 manually since right after takeoff. He would not use the control wheel again until the final moments of their landing approach at Tokyo.

  Carl Fessler looked up from his portable computer. He laid it down on the small table next to him. “What a lot of crap this backup data is. Most of the other airlines don’t do this crap anymore.”

  Stuart took his eyes off the horizon and glanced back at his relief copilot. “I bet we could find some eager young new-hire pilot to take your place. He’d probably type faster, too.” Stuart smiled, but he had been pointedly serious. He had little patience for the new breed. They had a job that was fifty times better than what had come before, yet they seemed to complain constantly. Did they realize that thirty years ago Alan Stuart had to hand-plot each and every route segment before climbing into the copilot’s seat? Spoiled, Stuart said to himself. Telling them about it was a waste of time. “If we land in the teeth of a monsoon at Tokyo, you’ll earn your day’s pay, Carl.”

  McVary closed his copy of Playboy and put it into his flight bag. Reading was not authorized, and Stuart was starting to get into one of his Captain moods. “That’s right, Carl. Or if one of these lights starts blinking, we’ll find something useful for you to do real quick.”

  Fessler could see which way the wind was blowing. “You’re right. It’s a good job.” He swiveled his seat slightly toward the front. “In the meantime, are you guys any good at trivia? What’s the capital of Rwanda?”

  McVary looked back over his shoulder. “Here’s a trivia question for you. Which one of the stews has the hots for you?”

  Fessler suddenly looked alert. “Which one?”

  “I’m asking you.” He laughed. “Look, I’ll press the stew call button, and if fate brings you your secret lover, I’ll nod. If not… well, you have ten left to wonder about.” He laughed again, then glanced at Captain Stuart to read his mood. The old man seemed to be taking it well enough. “Skipper, anything for you?”

  “Might as well. Coffee and a pastry.”

  “Coffee for me,” Fessler said.

  McVary picked up the ship’s interphone and pushed the call button.

  Flight attendants Sharon Crandall and Terri O’Neil were in the first-class galley in the main cabin below when the light blinked. Terri O’Neil picked up the phone. After a brief exchange with McVary, she hung up and turned to Sharon Crandall.

  “They want coffee again. It’s a wonder they don’t turn brown with all they drink.”

  “They’re just bored,” said Crandall.

  “Too bad. Walking all the way upstairs every time the cockpit crew needs a diversion is no fun.” O’Neil took out a dish of pastry and poured three coffees.

  Crandall smiled. Terri was always carrying on about something. Today, it was walking to the cockpit. “I’ll go, Terri. I need the exercise. I have to go down to the pit pretty soon to help Barbara Yoshiro.” She nodded toward the service elevator that led to the lower kitchen. “There’s no room to move down there.”

  “No. Take a break. If anyone needs the exercise, it’s me. Check these hips.”

  “Okay. You go.” They both laughed. “I’ll do the cleaning up,” Crandall said.

  Terri O’Neil picked up the tray, left the gall
ey, and walked the short distance to the circular staircase. She waited at the base of the stairs while an elderly, well-dressed woman worked her way down.

  “I’m sorry I’m so slow,” the woman said.

  “Take your time. No rush,” O’Neil answered. She wished the woman would move a little faster.

  “My name is Mrs. Thorndike.” She introduced herself with the automatic manners of the old, not recognizing or caring that modern travel didn’t require it. “I like your piano player. He’s quite good,” the woman said. She stopped on the bottom step to chat.

  O’Neil forced a smile and balanced the tray of coffees and pastry against the handrail. “Yes. He’s good. Some of them are even better than he is.”

  “Really? I hope I have one of the better ones on the flight home.”

  “I hope you do.”

  The old woman finally stepped aside and the flight attendant trudged up the stairway. Strands of “As Time Goes By” floated down to O’Neil over the normal inflight noises. With each step the singing of the more gregarious passengers got louder.

  When O’Neil reached the top of the staircase, she frowned. Three of the male passengers stood arm-in-arm around the piano. So far, they were content to sing softly. But she knew that whenever men acted openly chummy while they were still sober, they were certain to become especially loud after they began to drink. Alcohol released the Irish tenor in them. O’Neil knew they would soon get their chance, since she was supposed to open the bar in a few minutes. She wished the airline would go back to the old-fashioned lounge instead of the aerial nightclub.

  “Hello,” O’Neil called to the young piano player. She could not recall if his name was Hogan or Grogan. He was too young for her anyway. She edged her way around half-a-dozen passengers, across the heavily carpeted lounge, and toward the cockpit. With the tray balanced in her hands, she tapped against the fiberglass door with the toe of her shoe. She could see from the shadow that someone in the cockpit had leaned up against the door’s tiny section of one-way glass to see who had knocked.