Breaking Point Read online

  To my editor, Keith Kahla, who made this book possible.

  To my agent, Janet Reid, who made Keith possible.

  To Katy King, who makes all the rest of the universe possible.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: The Crash

  Book 1: The Device

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Book 2: The Crashers

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Book 3: The Tempest

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Also by Dana Haynes

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE: THE CRASH

  DR. LEONARD TOMZAK WAS a modern American male. He knew it was considered inappropriate to stare openly at a pretty girl with long legs as she approached. Especially in public.

  He decided to throw caution to the wind. Tomzak—“Tommy” to his friends—gave a wolf whistle as Kiki Duvall stalked down the corridor toward the waiting area of gate A15 at Reagan National, two lidded coffee cups in her hands.

  “You’re too kind, sir,” she said, bending at the waist and kissing him on the lips.

  “I’m a pathologist. Nobody pays me to be kind. They pay me to be accurate. And I accurately find you to be hot.”

  She wound herself into the thermoformed chair like a shoestring being lowered into a tight pile. A tall, athletic woman with hair the color of pennies, it was her lithe grace that had first attracted Tommy to her. Her pianist’s hands were large enough to carry two creamer packets along with the coffee cups. She handed him one of the packets and a stir stick. As she sat, she glanced around the waiting area, which was all but empty.

  “Oooooh,” she purred. “Leg room!”

  “Leg room?”

  She waved the other coffee cup to encompass the gate. “It’s not a full flight.”

  “Cool. Wanna make out?” Tommy asked, the Texan in his voice ramping up a bit.

  “When do I not?”

  He opened his cup and blew on the surface. As he did, a curved hank of black hair fell across his left eyebrow. Kiki brushed it back.

  “D’you even know what kinda plane we’re flying in? Could be this is full up.”

  “Claremont VLE, twin turboprop.” She snapped a bubble with her gum. “Seats sixty-five with four crew. State-of-the-art avionics courtesy of Leveque Aéronautique Limited out of Quebec. Twin Bembenek engines. Came off the line fifteen months ago and is due for a checkup in five cycles.”

  A cycle is one trip: takeoff, flight, and landing.

  Before Tommy could razz her nerdiness, an appreciative, two-tone whistle sounded to their left. A man in the familiar brown-and-gold uniform of Polestar Airlines had been using a Nerf football to play catch with an eight-year-old passenger. He smiled at Kiki. “Even I didn’t know all that, and I’m the copilot. You an aircraft lover, ma’am?”

  Kiki smiled. “Something like that.”

  Neither Kiki nor Tommy felt a burning need to identify themselves as crash investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board. Pilots often were squeamish about flying with “crashers” on board. It felt like tempting fate.

  “Pilot’s flirting with you,” Tommy said for her ears only.

  “That’s because, as you pointed out, I’m so hot.”

  Tommy lifted his coffee cup and tapped it silently against hers in agreement. He checked his battered, digital Timex. It was going on 8:00 P.M.

  “So where the hell’s Grey?”

  “He’ll be here. Probably checking his luggage.”

  Tommy blinked at her. “We’re only staying over one night.”

  “Have you ever known Isaiah to pass up a golf course? In fact, if he even shows up for our panel discussion, I’ll be surprised.”

  Tommy laughed and pointed to the right. Isaiah Grey, a wiry, African American pilot, rounded the corner and waved to the couple. He was wearing flying clothes: comfortable chinos with loafers and a polo shirt under a denim jacket.

  Isaiah shook his head and peered out the terminal’s window at the Claremont aircraft, which was being readied by both a fuel truck and a food-services truck. “Somebody wanna remind me why we’re taking a freaking red-eye and a damned prop-job three-quarters of the way across the continent?”

  “I booked the flight,” Tommy said brightly. “You should see how much I saved.”

  Isaiah glanced at him. “It’s not your money!”

  Tommy said, “It’s the taxpayers’ money.”

  Isaiah sat and shook his head at Kiki. “He’s your man, you explain it to him.”

  Kiki said, “Love, we’re federal bureaucrats. We don’t actually like the taxpayers.”

  As they bantered, Tommy noted a dark-skinned man with wild hair and a Roman nose—perhaps Middle Eastern—sitting with two others, one Caucasian and the other from somewhere around the Indian Subcontinent. As Tommy watched, the three men leaned forward in their chairs and began whispering.

  It was completely wrong and indefensible to suspect fellow airplane passengers just because they look Middle Eastern. Tommy knew this. He would never mention his suspicions out loud. Not even to Kiki. He took extra pains to smile pleasantly at Middle Eastern passengers, if only to assuage his silent guilt. But, since September 11, 2001, Tommy had harbored those precise suspicions and he was secretly aghast at himself.

  Tommy looked up as a second man in the brown-and-gold Polestar uniform walked into the waiting area, wheeling luggage in his wake. The newcomer pretended to be shocked to find his copilot tossing around a ball with an eight-year-old. “What’s this?” The newcomer turned to the young boy. “Okay, that means you have to fly the plane.”

  “Nuh-huh!” the kid reeled back.

  “Just having a catch, boss.” The copilot grinned, then turned to the boy’s parents. “But your son can come look at the flight deck before we take off, if that’s all right with you.” His parents beamed.

  The pilot nodded to Tommy and his two cohorts, then headed toward the ramp.

  The copilot gathered the passengers’ attention. “Folks? If we could get you to stand on line and punch your tickets, we’ll get everybody seated on board. No need to wait for your row to be called. We’ve got a light load today.”

  With that, the pilot and copilot exited through the door onto the jetway leading to their plane. Tommy returned the lid to his coffee, stood, and gathered his battered leather portmanteau.

  * * *

  Flight attendants Andi Garner and Jolene Solomon studied the computer screen behind the counter as the last of the Flight 78 passengers trudged down the gangway toward the amidships door.

  “When was the last time you saw a half-empty plane?” Andi asked.

  “Pre-nine/eleven,” her partner Jolene replied. “Pre-Travelocity and the other sites. This is weird.”

  The petite blonde, Jolene—in her twentieth year as a flight attendant—picked up the phone behind the counter and hit three numbers
.

  “Central.” The voice came from Polestar Airlines’ headquarters in Cincinnati.

  “Hi. Jolene Solomon, FA-7, calling from Reagan. Hey, can someone check the computers for—”

  The Cincinnati voice said, “Flight Seven-Eight to Sea-Tac?”

  Jolene looked at her younger cohort, both eyebrows rising. “Yes.”

  “Yeah, we figured you might call. We got hit by some sort of computer virus. Nobody’s been able to book that flight for the past day and a half. They just get kicked out of the system. And some of your ticket-holders got rerouted to Dulles. We got ’em booked on the three ten to Sea-Tac.”

  Jolene winked at her friend. “We’re not complaining! This’ll be the easiest flight we’ve had all year.”

  She started to say her thanks and hang up, when another thought flickered. “Hey. How many other flights are affected?”

  “None,” Cincinnati said. “Just you guys.”

  * * *

  Tommy, Kiki, and Isaiah lined up with the others, boarding passes out.

  The flight from Reagan National to Sea-Tac takes eight hours, more or less. Less, if there’s a tailwind. This particular flight was scheduled to stop in Helena, Montana. And Kiki had guessed right: only twenty-two of the sixty-five seats were filled. After a boxed snack had been served—once free, Polestar charged nine bucks for it these days—several people shifted their seats to have rows to themselves.

  Halfway over southern Montana, Pilot-in-Charge Miguel Cervantes handed the stick over to Second Pilot Jed Holley. It was past ten o’clock mountain time. Cervantes had absolutely no qualms about giving up the stick: he would trust any aircraft to Holley. Both men had served in the navy, where they’d studied to be aviators. Both had gotten out with the rank of captain. They were a year apart, age-wise, and both enjoyed playing touch football. Even their wives knew each other. Cervantes had been named PIC—Pilot-in-Charge and Second Pilot being the terms used at Polestar Airlines for captain and copilot—a year earlier. Holley would take the test in five months.

  Cervantes used the lavatory and washed his hands. He flirted with both flight attendants, good-naturedly, and they flirted right back. He returned to the flight deck and struck the door with the knuckle of his middle finger: tap, tap … tap.

  Inside, Holley flipped the toggle on the center control panel, unlocking the steel-reinforced door. “I changed course for Vegas. Hope that’s okay.”

  Cervantes sat, adjusted his two-strap safety harness. “Fine by me. I lost five bucks on the Mariners last night. To heck with Seattle.”

  The Claremont VLE was in the mountain time zone, 105 degrees west of the prime meridian: 1330 hours Zulu time in the air, 10:30 P.M. on the ground.

  They were forty-three minutes out of Helena.

  Sitting in an aisle seat, Tommy studied his notes for the Helena lecture, using the next-to largest font size available on his e-reader. Public speaking was one of the highlights of his job as a pathologist. He always prepped rigorously to be able to rattle off a frightening array of statistics without glancing at his notes. “It’s how I pick up chicks,” he’d once explained to Kiki Duvall.

  “Yes.” She had patted his arm. “That’s usually what does it for us.”

  A few minutes earlier, the pilot had announced that they would be descending into Helena, Montana. Tommy glanced to his left. Kiki slept in the window seat, wearing the earbuds of her iPod, Vivaldi softly canceling out the susurrus of the twin Bembenek Company engines. She was two inches taller than Tommy but, by sitting at an angle, she could stretch her legs out under Tommy’s seat, ankles crossed, barefoot. Claremont aircraft were configured in a two-seats-on-the-left, two-on-the-right formation. Tommy studied her for a moment: the freckles across her nose, the swell of her breasts under her sweater. He smiled, feeling like the luckiest guy on earth.

  He turned to his right. Isaiah Grey slept across both seats on the starboard side, back against a window, knees up, feet on the aisle seat. He’d fallen asleep with reading glasses perched low on his nose, a novel open on his lap. That wouldn’t last long: attendants had just started making their way down the aisle, waking people up and urging them to push their seat backs to their upright position.

  Tommy checked his watch: 11:15 P.M. mountain.

  Pilot-in-Charge Miguel Cervantes adjusted the voice wand, keeping it clear of his mustache. In his ear, he could hear air traffic control in Helena describe the QNH, or the barometric settings on the ground that can cause an altimeter to read incorrectly.

  “Roger, QNH,” Cervantes replied. “We are on descent. Over.”

  “Confirm, Flight Seven-Eight.” It was a woman’s voice. Unusual. The great majority of air traffic controllers were guys. “You are thirteen miles from the outer marker, over.”

  “Thank you. We have the localizer. Over.” He nodded to Jed Holley. “Speed good. Flaps one selected.”

  Holley hit the switch. “Flaps to one. You want extra light in here?”

  Miguel said, “I think we’re good.” He toggled the internal PA system. “Ah, flight attendants, cross-check and prepare for landing, please.”

  To Holley he said, “Extend the slats.”

  “Slats are good.”

  “Okay. Slowing down a bit. Flaps eleven, please.”

  “You got flaps at eleven, boss.”

  Cervantes smiled at that boss.

  “Altimeter.”

  “Checked.”

  “Speed brakes.”

  “Armed green,” Holley chanted back. “Good to—”

  Thump.

  Jed Holley said, “What in hell…?”

  Both turboprop engines died, simultaneously. Every light on every monitor on the flight deck shut off as well. The sound of air whooshing around the airframe grew loud.

  Miguel Cervantes said, “Hey, hey, hey. What’s this … C’mon!”

  Glow-in-the-dark decals on many of the flight deck’s surfaces infused them with a sickish green glow.

  Cervantes began walking through the emergency ignition system.

  Nothing happened.

  He did it again.

  Holley said, “Jesus…”

  * * *

  Tommy brought his head up sharply. He’d heard something go thump. He turned back to the notes on the e-reader, just as the device died.

  Zip. Nada. Totally blank screen.

  Tommy whacked it. “Piece a shit…” he whispered.

  And only then did it dawn on him: the engines had died, too.

  Both flight attendants turned and dashed for the flight deck. Tommy glanced out the window. Trees were close. Very close.

  “Fuck!” He grabbed Kiki by the shoulders, pulled her forward and down, and climbed on top of her.

  * * *

  Kiki woke with a shock. Someone was on top of her, pushing her down, her chest against her legs.

  Her first thought was: If this is an assault, the bastard is going to be more sorry than he could ever imagine.

  Her second thought: I’m still on the plane. Oh, dear God …

  Tommy shouted, “Isaiah! Get down get down get down!”

  * * *

  The former fighter pilot snapped awake. Isaiah blinked, taking the scene. In a second, he realized they were powerless. He craned his neck, sweeping away his reading glasses and looking out at the slowing propellers.

  He turned back and saw Tommy piling onto Kiki, pushing her down between their row and the seat backs ahead of them: rows 10 and 11.

  One of the flight attendants rushed down the aisle but lost her footing. Her head panged off one of the aisle-seat arms. Isaiah reacted quickly, grabbing her and rolling to the floor, he on the bottom, covering her head with his arms.

  * * *

  Flight attendant Jolene Solomon looked back and didn’t see Andi. At that moment, a dark-haired man with a hawk nose leaped from his seat, grabbed two cases from an overhead bin, and sprinted down the aisle toward the empennage, or tail cone. One of his friends stood, too.

  J
olene shouted, “Sir! Sit down! Now!”

  * * *

  Jed Holley shouted into the dead radio, “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Polestar Seven-Eight declaring an emergency! Repeat: emergency!”

  Miguel Cervantes tried the ignition sequence three times. It obviously wasn’t going to work. He switched to hauling on the yoke for all he was worth, fighting desperately to keep the nose of his powerless aircraft up.

  The Claremont VLE began slicing through the fir and pine trees, the tallest trees ripped savagely by the once-powerful Bembenek engines that hung beneath the eighty-five-foot wingspan of the plane. Cervantes and Holley both struggled with their yokes in the bizarrely quiet, green-tinted flight deck.

  Through gritted teeth, Miguel Cervantes said, “Jed?”

  Jed Holley said, “I know, man,” as a towering Douglas fir caught on the port wing and tore it loose from the airframe.

  As the port wing sheared free, the Claremont yawed madly, the starboard wing dipping, hitting more trees, thicker branches. Most snapped and splintered away. A massive pine caught the starboard turboprop, breaking the downward-facing propeller like a toothpick, before ripping away the entire wing.

  The Claremont rolled over, starboard windows facing the ground, port windows the moon. The great ship slid lower into the trees, momentum tanking, ablating bits of aluminum and glass and losing altitude but still not nosing over.

  A lone lodgepole pine shattered the flight deck windshield, tearing the copilot’s chair out of its floor restraints, sending the chair and Jed Holley into the back of the flight deck.

  * * *

  Tommy, his head near the floor, saw a man’s legs flash by, struggling to negotiate the off-axis aisle toward the empennage.

  Beneath him, Kiki hissed, “Oh God!” He felt her tense up.

  With her ear to the industrial carpet, she was the first to hear the snap! snap! snap! of treetops hitting the underside of the airliner.

  Most of the screaming passengers in the left-hand seats dangled to their right, hanging by their seat belts. Passengers in the right-hand seats pressed against the wall of the fuselage. Some sobbed. Some prayed. Others swore. Overhead bins opened; coats and laptops rained on passengers’ heads. The three crash investigators, wedged near the floor, stayed in place.

  * * *

  Still reeling over on its right side, Polestar Flight 78 hit the ground almost horizontally and slid, screaming, another hundred yards, snapping trees and sloughing off bits of both aircraft and bits of passengers.