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.