bang around, jerking up and down, jogging from side to side.
"I bet you think you're the only one."
"Yeah...no, feels like it, but I know I'm not."
"Would you like me to stay here?"
McChesney looked at her openly grateful. "Yes, but you've got a job to do. I know that...so if you have to go, it's okay." It had been very hard for him to say that.
Normally brash and arrogant, McChesney was completely cowed.
"No, it's okay. I've done all I can do."
The storm closed around the plane suddenly. Their small bowl in the night sky shrank in on itself and disappeared. Alvin tried to see what was going on outside the plane but blackness was total.
His eyes opened in surprise. The area around the plane was lit brighter than day. A fork of lightning with hundreds of branches, some bigger around than a house ripped through the clouds like a precursor to hell. After a short delay the booming of thunder rattled the skin of the aircraft.
Alvin was so excited he couldn't sit still. The plane seemed to be moving entirely at the whim of the storm.
In the cockpit, Duckhorn gritted his teeth and fought the yoke as the plane tried to go its own way. First Officer Neilsen had been calling in their position every few minutes and hoping ground weather could find a hole they could fly out through. It went on like that for an hour.
"What's our ground speed?" Neilsen asked.
Duckhorn shook his head. "Damn, Neil, I'm not sure. We're being pushed north west. It's like sailing. I'm going to have to go with this beast and hope it blows past us. One thing for sure. we're way off course.
"Captain, the computer's acting funny. I can't guarantee the locations I've been transmitting are accurate."
"I know, I know...don't worry about it. You just help me keep this thing in the air."
He slammed the steering column hard left and worked the flaps in both directions as the plane, trapped in a howling current of air tried to flip over on its back. For a moment the plane rolled up to ninety degrees shuddering like a killed thing before it slowly came back to level. The brief moment of level flight was replaced with a frightening ride upward, the altimeter needles winding up so fast they were a blur.
Duckhorn's ears popped and they roared through thirty thousand feet as if outer space were their final destination. In the passenger's cabin it was much worse. There was nothing they could do.
Tony Genoa had been through two wars, and before that he'd survived the streets of New York, but this took a different kind of courage.
The noise of thunder was continuous and deafening. He had to shout to get Alvin's attention.
"You okay, Mr. Eagle Scout?"
"Yes, sir." his eyes went wide as another lightning strike smashed the sky apart right next to the plane. "This is great. Do you have your pillow handy in case we crash?"
Alvin's question wasn't exactly what Tony wanted to think about, but the boy was incapable of not thinking about safety.
Tony laughed out loud. "Jesus, boy, what a thought, yeah, all right."
The plane seemed to bend as it was caught in a twisting knot of air and the metal skin popped with a series of gunshot-like cracks.
"I'm ready if you are, I'm no boy scout but I'll get by."
"Be Prepared, that's our motto."
"I know. What's your name?"
"Alvin Stanford Thomas."
"Good name. I'm Anthony Genoa. Call me Tony."
"Like the town in Italy," Alvin had to shout.
"Yeah, that's the one. You know a lot don't you, Alvin?"
Alvin laughed. "Not much. My father says no one's as smart as they think they are."
Tony's answer was cut off as the plane careened downward so fast the boy and the old man had to hold on. Even Alvin was frightened. It seemed like their downward plunge would go on forever.
Captain Duckhorn had the yoke pulled back to the stops and the engines at full power. He had to fly out of it. It was cool in the cabin but both he and Neilsen were sweating.
In the rear, McChesney was beyond thought, unable to communicate, unable to move. He was unaware that his whole body exuded an acrid stench of fear. His breath came in gasps separated by long moments when he didn't breathe at all. Sherry was fighting her own battle with fear and barely noticed McChesney's problems.
Again Captain Duckhorn brought the plane level, engines screaming with effort. It was another ten minutes before he gained back half the altitude lost during the last sickening dive.
What both men feared but did not express was the mountains to the west. The farther west and north they went the more danger there was from mountains. In the beginning they had turned north toward western Washington in the hope the storm would disperse over the flat farm lands of the Columbia River valley.
What neither man knew was that the navigation system had been off for the last hour. Their actual location was a hundred miles north and west of where they thought they were. Each man prayed for a break, any kind of break in the storm, but their prayers weren't answered. Instead the storm was increasing in intensity.
At fifteen thousand feet, near the edge of a boiling thunderhead, twenty miles across and forty thousand feet high, Flight 402 received it's first great lightning strike. Initially it hit the top of the aircraft at the wing root then snaked around the aft section of the plane. The intensity and size was such that the normal systems designed to bleed away excess electrostatic energy from the surface of the plane were overwhelmed and a tongue of intense static electricity found its way into the delicate electronic equipment bay burning and melting as it went. That it did not destroy the plane's electrical equipment utterly was a matter of chance.
However in one brief instant, both the primary and secondary navigation and communication systems were ruined. The barometric altitude indicator still functioned but that did nothing to tell them where they were.
In the cockpit Neilsen was pale with fear. He was not a man to curse but this was too much. The shear violence punched through his natural reticence.
"Damn...we're in trouble deep, Captain."
It was a measure of his fear that he did not call Duckhorn by his first name. Every instrument on the panel except those monitoring the engines was disabled. Needles, dials, digital readouts wandered about erratically, producing no usable information.
"Stay with me, First Officer. Take a walk aft, check the equipment bays. We've had three fire bottles go off in the aft electronics bay. The panel says there's no fire, but...do it, Neil. I want an eyes on. Move careful and get back as soon as you can, I'm going to need your help."
"Yes, Captain."
They had become formal, as though the rigid protocol of the flight deck could provide an added degree of safety and control in a environment that was rapidly descending into madness.
It took Neilsen five minutes to reach the rear of the plane. During the trip he fell to his knees twice, and once, near the rear of the plane was thrown upward to strike his shoulder on the overhead storage compartments.
The aft equipment bays were a charred ruin compounded by the effects of the fire bottle residue. Black boxes were scorched and wire cables melted into distorted lumps of melted metal. He examined everything quickly. He didn't need more time. There was nothing he could do. He closed the panels and headed forward.
Neilsen stopped at Sherry's seat and knelt at her side holding onto the arm of her seat. She didn't even notice him until he touched her arm. She jerked with fear.
"Easy, Sherry. Are you okay?"
"Yes, I'll be alright. Did the lightning..." she glanced toward McChesney. He was in another world. Sherry shook her