Three Times a Lady

Chapter 3

Dana awoke four hours later to the sound of the pilot’s deep voice coming over the intercom.

Letting out a soft yawn, she stretched her arms high overhead in an attempt to relieve some of the stiffness that had settled in during her long nap, at the same time trying her best to avoid elbowing the elderly scarf-knitter seated to her right square in the mouth. Not the sort of favour you wanted to pay forward, after all. Thankfully, mission accomplished.

Dana put her hands back down into her lap and yawned again, even more deeply this time. Blissfully, she’d managed to fall asleep somewhere over Nevada, which had made the long plane ride back home a bit more bearable – not that dreaming about the night your parents had been brutally murdered in cold blood right in front of your shocked and disbelieving four-year-old eyes could ever be considered restful.

Dana shook the remaining cobwebs from the attic of her brain and tried to concentrate on the pilot’s words as they crackled over the intercom. Even though the man was speaking in the same monotonous tone all pilots used, the words he was saying didn’t sound normal to her at all.

‘… and since we’re experiencing a minor technical problem with the landing gear at the moment we’ll be bypassing Hopkins International and touching down at Burke Lakefront Airport instead. As the holding pattern over Hopkins is already full anyway, this will give us just a little more time to iron out the kinks. Nothing to worry about, folks, I assure you, but I wanted to keep you in the loop. More in a bit.’

Dana sat up straighter in her seat and looked around the cabin at her fellow passengers. Like most Americans, anything out of the norm on a plane immediately slammed her mind back to the horrifying events of 11 September 2001, when Islamic extremists had slaughtered more than three thousand of her fellow citizens by plowing hijacked commercial airliners into well-known American landmarks stretching along the eastern seaboard of the United States from New York City all the way down to Washington, DC.

Dana tightened her grip on the armrests at her sides and glanced across the aisle. The rumpled businessman who’d elbowed her in the back of her head a few hours earlier was tilting back his head and finishing off the last of his latest drink, a glossy sheen sparkling in his badly bloodshot eyes. From the seat in front of Dana, little Bradley asked his mother, ‘Are we almost home yet, mama?’

The woman’s voice sounded almost as frightened as Dana felt on the inside. Still, to her credit, the woman tried to play it off. ‘We sure are, honey. Shouldn’t be too much longer now at all.’

‘But I can’t see my daddy when we get there because he got dead, right?’

Through the crack in the seats, Dana watched a sad look flash across the woman’s face, and she empathized with her at once. Because Dana had seen the exact same look on her own face in her bathroom mirror each and every morning for the past thirty-five years now, ever since the night she’d watched her parents viciously murdered by a deranged madman who still haunted her dreams to this day. ‘That’s right, baby doll,’ Bradley’s mother answered softly. ‘Your daddy died, but he’s always looking down on you from heaven, so you need to remember to always be a good boy, even when you don’t think anyone’s watching you.’

Bradley sighed audibly, further bruising Dana’s already-bruised heart. She bit down hard into her lower lip and felt her eyes well up; not knowing how much more bruising her heart could possibly take. As things stood now, her heart had already been lumped up worse than an overmatched prizefighter who’d just gone fifteen lopsided rounds with a Muhammad Ali in his prime. ‘What does my daddy do in heaven, anyway?’ the little boy asked. ‘Is he still a baseball player like when he was with us?’

The woman nodded and tousled her son’s hair. ‘Yep, he sure is, slugger. More than that, he’s the best baseball player in all of heaven. Even better than Babe Ruth, some say. Your daddy and Babe Ruth play on the same team, you know.’

‘What team do Babe Ruth and my daddy play for? Does my daddy still play for the Cleveland Indians?’

The woman smiled gently. ‘Nope. Not anymore, buddy. Your daddy was traded to the Angels, so that’s the team he’ll play on for the rest of for ever now.’

Heartbreaking as the conversation was for her to listen to, Dana felt infinitely thankful for the mental break it provided, however brief. Looking out her window, ten miles to the east she saw perhaps a dozen airliners circling the bright-blue skies above Hopkins, each taking its position in the mile-high queue and waiting its turn to land.

Dana checked her watch. Burke Lakefront was located fifteen miles west of Hopkins. The DC-10 in which they were flying had a maximum speed of six hundred and ten miles an hour, though Dana guessed they were only doing about five hundred miles an hour right now. That should give them approximately one minute until they made it to Burke Lakefront, a small commuter airport usually reserved for personal aircraft and corporate jets.

The pilot’s voice came over the intercom again just as what Dana assumed to be a military jet suddenly came roaring up along their left side, giving her heart a terrible start and flipping it over inside her chest like a gyroscope. High-pitched shrieks immediately sounded from all around the cabin. Pure pandemonium followed after that.

From the signage on the sleek gray fuselage, Dana identified the military aircraft as an F-16 fighter. Probably scrambled from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base out in Dayton. Nothing to worry about, her ass. There was plenty to worry about here, obviously. And that would have been putting things extremely mildly. A rounded bulletproof canopy couldn’t obscure the helmeted pilot inside the F-16, dark sunglasses and all. The DC-10 pilot’s voice didn’t sound quite so calm this time.

‘Flight attendants, please ensure that everyone onboard is buckled up, then take your own seats and prepare for an emergency landing. Passengers onboard Flight 942, this is not a drill. Please do everything your flight attendants instruct you to do. We are unable to operate the landing gear properly and an in-flight refueling can’t be performed at this late juncture. Therefore, we’ll be touching down in a water-landing on Lake Erie. When we hit the water, use your seat cushions as flotation devices. Slide the straps over your shoulders and activate the light beacon located on the left-hand side. Please secure your own flotation devices before attempting to help out children or fellow passengers. Exits are clearly marked and located at the front, middle and back of the plane. Please try to stay as calm as you possibly can. The Coast Guard is standing by. May God have mercy on our souls.’

The intercom clicked off and Dana’s breath hitched in her throat. She looked out her window again and felt her heartbeat notch up another fifty levels in her chest. In the distance, two Coast Guard cutters were steaming full-speed ahead toward an undetermined rendezvous point somewhere out on the menacing, gray-blue expanse of Lake Erie. Choppy waters threw around the massive cutters like toy boats bobbing up and down in the bathtub wake of a giggling, squirming child.

A massive adrenalin dump flooded into Dana’s veins and left her arms and legs tingling and feeling weak as a flight attendant in her mid-twenties charged down the aisle checking seatbelts; glancing first to her right and then to her left with a look of absolute terror etched into her pretty face. Thirty seconds later, the plane angled sharply downward and began its stomach-turning descent.

Dana’s heart did a quick series of quick somersaults in her chest as they went down, back-flipping across her ribcage like a highly trained Olympic gymnast springing handstands across cushioned mats. A moment later, an oxygen mask dropped down in front of her from a hidden compartment in the ceiling and dangled before her eyes. Reaching out with shaking hands, Dana fastened the plastic cup over her mouth and nose with the elastic drawstring while her mind flashed back to the story of Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, the former Air Force fighter pilot who’d been hailed as a hero for crash-landing his plane in the Hudson River in 2009 without incurring any fatalities or major injuries to the one hundred fifty-five souls aboard US Airways Flight 1549, Charlotte to New York City. Dana only prayed that the passengers onboard Continental Flight 942, nonstop LA to Cleveland, would prove every bit as fortunate.

They didn’t.

When the plane slammed down into the water fifty seconds later, it did so with enough force to rearrange Dana’s insides as though they’d been crammed into a gigantic blender turned up full-speed. A sickening rollercoaster feeling stabbed her deep in the gut. Unearthly sounds filled her ears: the screams of her fellow passengers; the rumble of an unimaginably powerful earthquake, as though some unseen giant had torn the Earth off its axis and was now shaking the world like an insignificant snow-globe he’d idly plucked off a big-city department store’s pristine shelf. The unbearable screech of twisting metal as the interior walls of the plane bowed and moaned and sagged. The whine and pop of rivets that suddenly transformed into deadly projectiles that whistled and shot through the confined space of the cabin like bullets fired from a gun.

Dana gripped her armrests with all her might, digging her fingernails into the plastic hard enough to draw blood. A sliding, disorienting sense of movement racked her body as the plane plowed even deeper into the murky water. The very last thing she remembered hearing was little Bradley’s terrified yelp of fear in front of her.

That’s when everything around Dana went pitch-black and dead silent. There were no more screams in her ears. No more rumbling in her belly. No more screeching of metal as the plane came apart at the seams. No more whimpering from little Bradley in the seat in front of her as Dana’s head slammed violently into the window out of which she’d been staring during various parts of the long flight. Just an unfamiliar sense of weightlessness in her limbs and head and torso as she floated away softly on a black cloud into a dark place she’d never before visited – and damn sure never wanted to visit again.