Chapter 4 - The Voice of the AtlanticBack in the cockpit, the radio crackled to life again.
“Flight 782, Shannon Center. Do you read?”
Malachi pressed his headset transmit button. “Reading you loud and clear, Shannon. This is Malachi.”
“Good boy,” Liam O’Connor’s voice came back, steady and reassuring, like an anchor dropped into a raging sea. “Listen to me very carefully, Malachi. We’ve coordinated with Dublin and London Heathrow. We’ve cleared a direct emergency corridor across the Irish Sea. Weather at Shannon International is currently marginal—low cloud ceiling, moderate crosswinds coming off the coast at twenty knots, and intermittent rain showers. But your approach path is entirely clear of commercial traffic. You have the longest runway in the country waiting for you.”
Malachi’s eyes scanned the primary flight display. His altimeter read twenty-eight thousand feet; his airspeed was locked at a stable two hundred and eighty knots.
“What about the autopilot, Shannon?” Malachi asked, his voice cracking just slightly before he caught it. “The primary flight computer is throwing an advisory error on hydraulic system B. If I disengage the autopilot for a manual landing, the control column might feel heavier than normal.”
In the Dublin control center, Liam exchanged a rapid, anxious glance with his supervisor, a grizzled former RAF navigator named Arthur Vance who was standing directly behind his chair.
Arthur leaned down, pressing his lips to the secondary mic.
“Malachi, this is Arthur Vance here in Shannon command,” the old navigator said, his voice deep and gravelly. “Listen to me, son. Your father landed a crippled Tristar in a crosswind with half his hydraulic fluid leaking onto the tarmac. You’ve got more plane under your fingertips right now than he did. You’re going to keep the autothrottle engaged until you cross the outer marker. Then, at five hundred feet, you disconnect the autopilot, line up with the centerline, and fly the airplane. Do you understand?”
Malachi swallowed hard, tasting the metallic copper of the cabin air on his tongue. He looked over at Captain Pierce, who was still unconscious, his chest rising and falling in slow, heavy rhythms beneath the oxygen mask.
“I understand,” Malachi whispered. “But... what about the gas? The smell in here is getting stronger. My eyes are burning.”
Arthur Vance’s face hardened. He looked at the medical telemetry data relayed from the aircraft’s automated transponder. The cockpit air quality index was dropping into hazardous zones.
“Malachi, you’re suffering from mild hypoxia,” Arthur said urgently. “You need to put on your full-face oxygen mask right now. The quick-donning mask is stored in the compartment directly above your left shoulder. Pull it out, strap it on, and switch the regulator to ‘100%’ oxygen. Do it now, son.”
Malachi reached up with his left hand, his fingers fumbling slightly against the release levers of the heavy yellow mask box. He pulled it free, unspooling the rubber hose, and strapped it over his face, securing the harness tightly around the back of his head.
Instantly, a rush of cold, pressurized pure oxygen flooded his lungs. The dizziness that had been creeping behind his temples receded like a retreating tide.
His vision cleared. The green lines of the flight management computer sharpened into hyper-focus.
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“Mask on, Shannon,” Malachi reported, his voice now sounding crisp and mechanical through the heavy regulator. “Descending through flight level two-zero-zero. Heading one-two-zero toward the Irish coast.”
“Good boy,” Liam O’Connor said over the radio, exhaling a breath he felt like he’d been holding for an hour. “Bring her down, Captain Brooks. We’re right here with you.”
