Adrift
Copyright© 2025 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 5
Harry awoke with a start, for a second not remembering where she was. Oh, yeah! Dad! That useless piss-ant, as Mom called him, was doing a movie on location in Samoa. He’s been on location a month, another month or so yet before the principal filming was due to complete. Mom wanted to spend some “quality time” with Denver Christian, a producer. Quality time! Harry sniffed in derision. Mom wants to fuck his socks off!
In the distance, a lightning bolt shot down from the sky, towards the surface of the sea. It stood alone, not obscured by clouds or buildings. It was easily the most magnificent sight that Harry had ever seen in her life! Awesome!
The speaker crackled to life. “This is Captain Parker. It looks like there are some thunderstorms ahead. I’m turning on the seat belt sign. Please return your seats. Flight attendants: prepare for rough air.”
The next lightning bolt sent the first one to the back of the line, in impressiveness. Then another cerulean bolt leaped from Harry’s side of the plane, heading in the other direction, mostly obscured by the rest of the aircraft. Even so, she could see the light from it, glaring from the windows on the other side of the plane.
This lightning bolt had branches leading up and down, right and left. Another bolt, slightly less impressive, flashed further away. Dimly seen, clouds pillared into the night ahead of them.
“Shit!” Roger cursed. “Where the hell did this stuff come from? It’s the middle of the g’damned night!”
“They have lightning storms here any time of day,” Tom said, hoping to calm his suddenly squirrelly captain. All evening, Rog had been acting odd. What was up? Another vertical bolt ahead of them showed towering ranges of cumulus mountains beyond, as far as the eye could see.
Tom spoke soothingly. “I don’t know about you, Rog, but I saw this movie, Six Days, Seven Nights. Harrison Ford got to boink what’s her name, Ann Heche. Course, he had to crash, fight off pirates, and all that shit. Frankly, I’d rather skip the crash, the pirates ... and all that shit. Just boink Ann Heche.”
“Ford was right,” Roger said with a laugh, “she doesn’t have any tits.”
“Rog, ol’ buddy, I know you like your ladies zaftig. Me? To me, more than a mouthful is a waste. That’s a lady who wastes not!”
Another bolt half-blinded them and was much closer. And in the afterimages, beyond mind-blowing pillars of cloud were visible. Fly into one of those, and they’d be dead, all of them, a minute later.
“Samoa, this is American Flight 1011. I’m turning to 270 for a bit, to see if we can avoid the weather,” Rog said into the radio.
There was an unintelligible burst of static in return. Another lightning flash lit the cabin. Tom glanced at his captain, who sat rigid, the tendons showing in his neck and hands.
“Who’s around us?” Rog asked, his voice thick.
Dominguez shrugged, “Nothing for a long ways. Up to the northwest is Tahiti. The next flight to Samoa is five hours behind us, boss!”
Rog picked up the microphone. “Crew, this is the Captain. We’re going to be making a turn here in a minute. Make sure everyone is snug and tight, then make sure you are too.”
Shortly, Roger put the wing down, and both pilots put their backs into it as they turned the big aircraft.
For a second, Tom wasn’t sure what had happened; the next flash was brighter than anything he’d ever imagined a lightning bolt could be.
Dominguez laughed nervously. “Oh yeah! Close, but no cigar! We still have electronics!”
“With our fuel load, Captain,” Tom said neutrally, “we could climb to 51.”
“That’s just a few thousand feet higher,” Rog replied, waving at a cloud column in front of them, lit by lightning flashes. “I make that a lot taller than that.”
Tom gulped. “A lot.”
“And at 51, the controls will be even more mushy than they are now, the pax will be getting more radiation. Bottom line: we’ll still be in this.” The next flash was not a cataclysm, but dull thunder shook the aircraft.
The next lightning flash more resembled a pinwheel ahead of the aircraft. A circle formed directly ahead of them, spitting sparks.
“Turning!” Rog said, his voice strained and pained.
Tom put his back into it, hauled at the controls as hard as he could. “Turning!” he echoed. He saw the pinwheel move effortlessly to keep in front of them. “Shit!” Tom cursed in frustration.
Captain Rog looked up, said something under his breath, and continued the pressure on the controls. The left wing dropped further, and the aircraft lost speed, and almost at once, the stall warning went off.
“There must be a headwind,” Tom said, knowing that a minute ago, they’d been cruising at more than 500 miles an hour. To go from that fast to that slow, he’d have been likely knocked out by the drag. Still, they had to ease back on the yoke and level out.
Tom watched the pinwheel. It was turning at the same rate they were and was steadily moving closer. It wasn’t until they were almost through it that Tom recognized that the lighter color in the center of the firework display was something visible through the veil, not a function of the fireworks outside the aircraft.
For a second, Tom felt enormously odd and dizzy; worse, then the world brightened up. Then they were flying straight and level through calm air, only a few small puffy cumulus clouds, well distant, in view. And it was day, not night.
“What the hell?” Rog said loudly, feeling the change in the controls. “We went through it! Let’s turn around and go back!” Tom thought that was a really good idea, and helped Rog with the pressure on the yoke, to keep the aircraft turning.
“I don’t see it,” Tom said, knowing it was his job to say so. He blinked, looking down at what he did see. “Ahhhh! Jesus and Mary! Holy Mary, Sweet Mother of God!”
Ahead of them the sun stood well up on the horizon, over green and brown earth. There was no ocean to be seen, only an occasional flicker of light from a pond or stream. And damn all few of those. Mostly just solid green, stretching to the horizon in all directions.
Rog stole a glance, but didn’t curse. “Well, if we have to sit her down, at least we can do it on a runway! Mr. Dominguez?”
The flight engineer, in his cubbyhole, could only see that night was gone outside. “Rog, GPS is down, the radios are dead; we’re not getting a thing.” He flipped a switch. “Our LORAN is gone. We’re not getting anything from outside.” He frowned, running a diagnostic on the GPS, their best way of locating themselves.
“Negative on GPS restart, it can’t find any satellites.”
“Send an ‘any station,’ declare an emergency, get us down,” Rog commanded.
“Captain, I’m not getting anything on the radios; it looks like we’re transmitting, but I’m not hearing a thing. Running through the channels ... there’s nothing,” the flight engineer reported.
“Try AM and FM. See if short wave works,” Tom told him, while searching the view ahead for anything that looked like a road or signs of civilization. There was nothing, just like Juan had said the radios were picking up.
The intercom chimed and Tom picked it up. “We’re pretty busy here,” he told the purser.
“And I have a couple hundred pax scared to death. Not to mention I peed my pants,” the purser replied. “What the hell happened?”
“You got me,” Tom told him. He turned to Rog, “Could you say a few words to the passengers?”
Rog grunted, flipped his mike button. “This is the Captain. We’ve experienced an electrical malfunction, probably due to a lightning strike. The aircraft is intact; our flight systems are functioning perfectly. We are planning on making a precautionary landing here, as soon as possible, to check everything out.”
He flicked the button, and then looked ahead again. “Dominguez, you have anything, anything at all?”
“Well, the altimeter is bollixed up; the HOG laser says we’re 37,647 feet above grade. The altimeter is reading that we’re at 21,250 feet above sea level. One of them is wrong.”
There was a moment of silence in the cockpit. “Navigation’s out, then?” Rog asked in his Aircraft Commander’s voice.
“Yeah,” Dominguez said, looking at his instruments. “Actually, except for the flight systems, everything appears to be screwed. Compass heading shows we’re heading west, but the sun is in front of us. That’s gotta be east. The inertial navigation system says we’re moving almost due south. We took a pretty good lick back there; I suspect the gyros tumbled.”
Tom laughed. “Dominguez, unstrap and come up and get a good look.”
The flight engineer looked at his boards, decided nothing needed his immediate attention, and then did as he was told. When he saw the ground beneath him, he blinked.
“No way!” the flight engineer said. “No fuckin’ way! Not on my worst fucking day as a navigator!”
“I have yet to see a road or a town,” Roger said softly. “We’ve moved about a hundred miles since whatever that was. Possible, but not very likely, we could be over the US. Maybe northern Canada or Siberia.” He waved to his left. “There are some mountains off that way. Not much; they look a little like the Appalachians, soft and rounded. But not as big. Not nearly as big.”
The flight engineer looked, and then shrugged. “They are parallel to our course; depending on the time of day, we’re going east or west. Anyone know of a mountain range that runs east and west and looks like the Appalachians?”
He looked at his fellow crew members, and the three communed silently for a few seconds.
Finally, Captain Parker spoke quietly. “Anyone have any ideas?”
“I’m going to try the radios again,” the engineer said. He went back and sat down, trying to shut out the view he’d seen.
Tom pulled a cell phone from his belt, flipped up the cover, and said, “Scotty! For God’s sake, beam us up!” All three of them laughed, then Tom turned to Roger. “My cell phone is toast too; I can’t get a signal.”
“The company phone is kaput, too,” the flight engineer reported. “I didn’t think to try my own.”
“Like I said, any ideas?” the captain said.
“Get the bird down safe,” Tom said, firmly and confidently. “That’s job one.”
“No shit.” Rog waved ahead of them. “Any recommendations?”
“A road, if we can find one. A long, straight stretch of beach. Dump her in the water close to land.” Tom laughed bitterly. “An airport would be nice.”
“Fuel, Dominguez?”
“We were near the end of the run. Another three hours at altitude. If we go much lower ... we’ll go through it pretty fast. An hour, maybe.”
The intercom chimed again. Rog signed for Tom to take it, while he looked forward, hoping to see anything, anything at all.
“What?” Tom asked.
“I have a Navy commander here who wants to know if she can use her satellite phone to call home,” the purser told him.
Tom thought for a second. “Have her come forward if she looks okay.”
The purser laughed. “She’s with Becky Thatcher, the girl who went adrift two weeks ago south of Samoa. She’s real.”
“I’ll check.”
Tom turned to Rog. “There’s a bona fide Navy commander back in coach with a satellite phone who wants to use it. That’s the Iridium system that Microsoft put up at the turn of the century; only the government could afford to use it. I’d like to let her into the cockpit and let her try it.”
“Right now, if you had three witches who said they could whip up an airfield in a cauldron -- double, double, toil and trouble -- I’d give it a whirl,” Rog said. “Yeah, go ahead.”
Tom told the purser to bring her up. A minute later there was a knock at the cockpit door, and Dominguez, per the post-911 SOP, opened it, his pistol ready for business.
Tom saw a woman in Navy OD’s, a commander’s rank tabs on her shoulders, and the girl, Becky Thatcher.
He blinked, startled. What do you say to someone who swam more than a hundred miles through shark-infested waters? At fifteen years of age? Only a little more than two weeks ago?
The naval officer was formal. “I am Commander Elizabeth Shumway, the assistant Intelligence Officer off the carrier Eisenhower, currently on TDY. I have a satellite phone.” She gestured at Becky Thatcher. “Miss Thatcher says that you might have need of it.”
Tom looked at the young girl who stared back at him, looking no different than any other teenaged girl ... except for her intent eyes.
“And why would you think our own radios aren’t working, Miss Thatcher?” Tom asked, curious.
“Are they?” she riposted.
Tom shrugged and shook his head.
“Commander, if you would then,” Becky Thatcher told her companion.
Tom was stunned when the officer did as ordered by someone not even half her age. Commander Shumway flipped the flap of her purse, pulled out a largish cell phone. Since when did Navy commanders take orders from a teenager? Yet, he was watching it!
After a moment of looking at the screen, the Commander shook her head. “Nothing -- it can’t find a satellite to link to.”
“We can’t pick up the GPS satellites and our own radios appear to be toast,” Tom said.
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