closing fast.
Delbaugh thought of his wife and seventeen-year-old son at home in
Westlake Village, north of Los Angeles, and he thought of his other son,
Tom, who was already on his way to Willamette to get ready for his
junior year. He longed to touch their faces and hold them close.
He was not afraid for himself Well, not much. His relatively mild
concern for his own safety was not a result of the stranger’s prediction
that the flight crew would survive, because he didn’t know if the guy’s
premonitions were always correct. In part, it was just that he didn’t
have time to be concerned about himself Fifteen hundred meters.
Mainly, he was worried about his passengers and crew, who trusted him
with their lives. If any part of the crash was his fault, due to a lack
of resolve or nerve or quickness, all the good he had done and tried to
do in his life would not compensate for this one catastrophic failure.
Perhaps that attitude proved that he was, as some friends suggested, too
hard on himself, but he knew that many pilots worked under no less heavy
a sense of responsibility.
He remembered what the stranger had said:”. . you’ll lose a hundred
andforty-seven passengers. . .” His hands throbbed with pain as he kept
a tight grip on the yoke, which vibrated violently.
“. . plus four flight attendants. . .”
Twelve hundred meters.
“She wants to come right,” Delbaugh said.
“Hold her!” Anilov said, for at this low altitude and on an approach,
it was all in Delbaugh’s hands.
One hundred and fifty-one dead, all those families bereaved, countles
other lives altered by a single tragedy.
Eleven hundred meters.
But how the hell could that guy know how many would die? Not possible.
Was he trying to say he was clairvoyant or what? It was all a crock, as
Yankowski had said. Yeah, but he knew about the engine before it
exploded, he knew about the washboard turbulence, and only an idiot
would discount all of that.
A thousand meters.
“Here we go,” Delbaugh heard himself say.
Bent forward in his seat, head between his knees, gripping his ankles,
Jim Ironheart thought of the punchline to an old joke: kiss your ass
goodbye.
He prayed that by his own actions he had not disrupted the river of fate
to such an extent that he would wash away not only himself and the
Dubroveks but other people on Flight 246 who had never been meant to die
in the crash. Because of what he had told the pilot, he had potentially
altered the future, and now what happened might be worse, not better,
than what had been meant to happen.
The higher power working through him had seemed, ultimately, to approve
of his attempt to save more lives than just those of Christine and
Casey. On the other hand, the nature and identity of that power was so
enigmatic that only a fool would presume to understand its motives or
intentions.
The plane shivered and shook. The scream of the engines seemed to grow
ever more shrill.
He stared at the deck beneath his feet, expecting it to burst open.
More than anything, he was afraid for Holly Thorne. Her presence on the
flight was a profound deviation from the script that fate had originally
written. He was eaten by a fear that he might save the lives of more
people on the plane than he’d at first intended-but that Holly would be
broken in half by the impact.
As the DC-10 quaked and rattled its way toward the earth, Holly squeezed
herself into as tight a package as she could, and closed her eyes.
In her private darkness, faces swam through her mind: her mom and dad,
which was to be expected; Lenny Callaway, the first boy she had ever
loved, which was not expected, because she had not seen him since they
were both sixteen; Mrs. Rooney, a high-school teacher who had taken a
special interest in her; Lori Clugar, her best friend all through high
school and half of college, before life had carried them to different
corners of the country and out of touch; and more than a dozen others,