5

The cockpit was empty. Looking into it made Brian’s arms and neck prickle with gooseflesh. It was all well and good to know that a 767 could fly thousands of miles on autopilot, using information which had been programmed into its inertial navigation system — God knew he had flown enough miles that way himself — but it was another to see two empty seats. That was what chilled him. He had never seen an empty in-flight cockpit during his entire career.

He was seeing one now. The pilot’s controls moved by themselves, making the infinitesimal corrections necessary to keep the plane on its plotted course to Boston. The board was green. The two small wings on the plane’s attitude indicator were steady above the artificial horizon. Beyond the two small, slanted-forward windows, a billion stars twinkled in an early-morning sky.

“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 no time to be scared. He wished that were still so... but it wasn’t. He flicked the radio to the emergency band and tried again. There was no response. This was the equivalent of dialing 911 in Manhattan and getting a recording which said everyone had left for the weekend. When you called for help on the emergency band, you always got a prompt response.

Until now, at least, Brian thought.

He switched to UNICOM, where private pilots obtained landing advisories at small airports. No response. He listened... and heard nothing at all. Which just couldn’t be. Private pilots chattered like grackles on a telephone line. The gal in the Piper wanted to know the weather. The guy in the Cessna would just flop back dead in his seat if he couldn’t get someone to call his wife and tell her he was bringing home three extra for dinner. The guys in the Lear wanted the girl on the desk at the Arvada Airport to tell their charter passengers that they were going to be fifteen minutes late and to hold their water, they would still make the baseball game in Chicago on time.

But none of that was there. All the grackles had flown, it seemed, and the telephone lines were bare.

He flicked back to the FAA emergency band. “Denver, come in! Come in right now! This is AP Flight 29, you answer me, goddammit!”

Nick touched his shoulder. “Easy, mate.”

“The dog won’t bark!” Brian said frantically. “That’s impossible, but that’s what’s happening! Christ, what did they do, have a fucking nuclear war?”

“Easy,” Nick repeated. “Steady down, Brian, and tell me what you mean, the dog won’t bark.”

“I mean Denver Control!” Brian said. “That dog! I mean FAA Emergency! That dog! UNICOM, that dog, too! I’ve never—”

He flicked another switch. “Here,” he said, “this is the medium shortwave band. They should be jumping all over each other like frogs on a hot sidewalk, but I can’t pick up jack shit.”

He flicked another switch, then looked up at Nick and Albert Kaussner, who had crowded in close. “There’s no VOR beacon out of Denver,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I have no radio, I have no Denver navigation beacon, and my board says everything is just peachy keen. Which is crap. Got to be.”

A terrible idea began to surface in his mind, coming up like a bloated corpse rising to the top of a river.

“Hey, kid — look out the window. Left side of the plane. Tell me what you see.”

Albert Kaussner looked out. He looked out for a long time. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. Just the last of the Rockies and the beginning of the plains.”

“No lights?”

“No.”

Brian got up on legs which felt weak and watery. He stood looking down for a long time.

At last Nick Hopewell said quietly, “Denver’s gone, isn’t it?”

Brian knew from the navigator’s charts and his on-board navigational equipment that they should now be flying less than fifty miles south of Denver... but below them he saw only the dark, featureless landscape that marked the beginning of the Great Plains.