Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [20]
'Oh. wow,' the teenaged girl said softly.
'Coo-eee,' Nick said at the same moment. 'Look there, matey.'
Nick was pointing at a half-empty cup of coffee on the service console beside the left arm of the pilot's seat. Next to the coffee was a Danish pastry with two bites gone. This brought Brian's dream back in a rush, and he shivered violently.
'It happened fast, whatever it was,' Brian said. 'And look there. And there.'
He pointed first to the seat of the pilot's chair and then to the floor by the co-pilot's scat. Two wristwatches glimmered in the lights of the controls, one a pressure-proof Rolex, the other a digital Pulsar.
'If you want watches, you can take your pick,' a voice said from behind them. 'There's tons of them back there.' Brian looked over his shoulder and saw Albert Kaussner, looking neat and very young in his small black skull-cap and his Hard Rock Cafe tee-shirt. Standing beside him was the elderly gent in the fraying sport-coat.
'Are there indeed?' Nick asked. For the first time he seemed to have lost his self-possession.
'Watches, jewelry, and glasses,' Albert said. 'Also purses. But the weirdest thing is ... there's stuff I'm pretty sure came from inside people. Things like surgical pins and pacemakers.'
Nick looked at Brian Engle. The Englishman had paled noticeably. 'I had been going on roughly the same assumption as our rude and loquacious friend,' he said. 'That the plane set down someplace, for some reason, while I was asleep. That most of the passengers - and the crew - were somehow offloaded.'
'I would have woken the minute descent started,' Brian said. 'It's habit.' He found he could not take his eyes off the empty seats, the half-drunk cup of coffee, the half-eaten Danish.
'Ordinarily, I'd say the same,' Nick agreed, 'so I decided my drink had been doped.'
I don't know what this guy does for a living, Brian thought, but he sure doesn't sell used cars.
'No one doped my drink,' Brian said, 'because I didn't have one.'
'Neither did I,' Albert said.
'In any case, there couldn't have been a landing and take-off while we were sleeping,' Brian told them. 'You can fly a plane on autopilot, and the Concorde can land on autopilot, but you need a human being to take one up.'
'We didn't land, then,' Nick said.
'Nope.'
'So where did they go, Brian?'
'I don't know,' Brian said. He moved to the pilot's chair and sat down.
6
Flight 29 was flying at 36,000 feet, just as Melanie Trevor had told him, on heading 090. An hour or two from now that would change as the plane doglegged further north. Brian took the navigator's chart book, looked at the airspeed indicator, and made a series of rapid calculations. Then he put on the headset.
'Denver Center, this is American Pride Flight 29, over?'
He flicked the toggle ... and heard nothing. Nothing at all. No static; no chatter; no ground control, no other planes. He checked the transponder setting: 7700, just as it should be. Then he flicked the toggle back to transmit again. 'Denver Center, come in please, this is American Pride Flight 29, repeat, American Pride Heavy, and I have a problem, Denver, I have a problem.'
Flicked back the toggle to receive. Listened.
Then Brian did something which made Albert 'Ace' Kaussner's heart begin to bump faster with fear: he hit the control panel just below the radio equipment with the heel of his hand. The Boeing 767 was a high-tech, state-of-the-art passenger plane. One did not try to make the equipment on such a plane operate in such a fashion. What the pilot had just done was what you did when the old Philco radio you bought for a buck at the Kiwanis Auction wouldn't play after you got it home.
Brian tried Denver Center again. And got no response. No response at all.
7
To this moment, Brian had been dazed and terribly perplexed. Now he began to feel frightened - really frightened - as well. Up until now there had been