Part 4 — The Pilot Announced That We Were Dying, but When I Went Toward the Cockpit, the Flight Attendant’s Face Suddenly Turned Pale

Emily’s voice was breaking up, but I heard her fear clearly.

“Emily, listen to me. Where are you?”

“At the airport’s old terminal. Mom, they are everywhere.”

“Trust no one. Lock the doors and move away from the windows.”

“You are still trying to save me.”

Crying sounded in her voice.

“This time save me too,” I told her.

Captain Reed pressed both hands onto the levers.

“Sarah, military airspace begins in two and a half minutes.”

“Then we have to turn back in two minutes.”

Jennifer put the black device on the table.

“The remote channel is still working. If I disconnect it, the auxiliary system may shut down completely.”

“And if you do not disconnect it?”

“Someone from outside will control us.”

“Then disconnect it.”

“This will leave us fully in control of the airplane.”

“It is already in our hands. It just has not realized it yet.”

Jennifer cut the wire.

The lights in the cabin went out and immediately came back on. The airplane seemed to be freed by an invisible hand. The rightward tilt stopped.

But the altitude was still decreasing.

“The engines on my command,” I told the captain. “Left a little less. Right more. Now.”

Reed looked at me.

“What if we cannot land?”

“Then I will be the last person to tell you that you did everything.”

He nodded.

“The command is yours, Phoenix.”

For the first time in thirty-two years, this nickname no longer seemed painful to me.

The old military airfield appeared below. The concrete runway was barely visible among the grass. At its end stood a broken control tower.

“It is too narrow,” Jennifer said.

“It is enough for us.”

The ground was rapidly approaching us.

In the cabin people were clutching one another. Linda Carter was loudly repeating how they should hold their heads. The child who had earlier asked about the rightward tilt was now hugging his mother.

“Mom, will we really survive?”

“That woman in the cockpit is doing everything,” his mother answered.

I heard her words and something froze inside my heart.

I was no longer alone.

“Now!” I shouted.

Reed changed the engines. The airplane raised its nose slightly, then touched the concrete.

The first touch shook the entire body.

The second burst a tire.

On the third, the airplane ran to the left.

The jolt threw me against the console, but I remained standing.

“Do not brake completely!” I shouted. “Keep the direction with the engines!”

Reed followed my commands. Jennifer clung to the side panel. Fifty meters remained to the end of the concrete.

Forty.

Thirty.

Reed reduced the engines simultaneously.

The airplane stopped.

For several seconds nobody moved.

Then such shouting broke out in the cabin as if everyone had been born again at once.

But I found only the copper-colored badge on the floor. It had fallen from the seat and had cracked in half.

“Everyone is alive,” Jennifer Parker said.

“Emily?”

The captain switched on the radio.

There was no answer from Emily. Instead, an unfamiliar man murmured.

“Vale says this was only the first airplane.”

Jennifer’s face changed with concern.

“Sarah, there is another file in the recording.”

It opened on the screen. It said that similar devices had already been installed in thirty-nine passenger airplanes.

At that same moment the sound of sirens came from the airport.

The first vehicles came onto the runway. Behind them, black cars appeared.

“Is that the police?” Reed asked.

“Some of them,” Jennifer said.

From the cockpit window I saw a tall, white-haired man get out. I knew his face from television.

Richard Vale.

He looked directly toward us.

A few minutes later the cockpit door opened. Vale entered with two armed men. Police officers in uniform could also be seen outside, but they had stopped.

“Sarah Mitchell,” Vale said. “Thirty-two years have passed. You still have not learned when to surrender.”

“And you still have not learned that evidence never dies.”

He smiled.

“No one will believe you here.”

Jennifer raised the phone.

“The whole country already believes.”

It turned out that Linda had switched on the cockpit conversation through the airplane’s internal announcement system. The passengers were hearing everything. One woman raised her phone high. Another did too.

Vale’s smile disappeared.

“Turn this off,” he ordered the men.

“You yourself said that you killed my career,” I told him.

“I said nothing.”

Jennifer played Hales’s recording.

David’s voice rang throughout the cabin.

“The system error was deliberately concealed. The order came from Colonel Richard Vale.”

Vale took a step back.

Then we played the second recording. In it Vale himself said that if the airplane entered the military zone, the crash would be blamed on Sarah.

It was his own voice.

While hearing his own words, I saw on his face for the first time what had once appeared on mine: wordless fear.

“It is falsified,” he said.

“Then why do you know what was in my bag?” I asked.

He could not find an answer.

The real police moved outside. The armed men dropped their weapons. Vale tried to escape, but two officers were waiting for him by the stairs.

Emily was brought out of the terminal a few minutes later. She ran until she reached the cockpit.

Instead of my mother, for the first time I let my arms go toward her.

We embraced one another.

“I am sorry, Mom,” she told me.

“You owe me nothing.”

“We lost fifteen years.”

“We still have the remaining years.”

The tigerishly noisy day slowly quieted. Vale and his accomplices were arrested. The investigation confirmed that the “Ghost” crash had not been my fault. The old reports, Hales’s recording, and the device found in the airplane changed everything.

But I did not go to court to take revenge.

I sat before Vale only once, when he heard his own words one more time.

“You said that I was killing people,” he said.

“No. You wanted everyone to think that.”

“What do you want now?”

I looked at him for a long time.

“Nothing. For the first time in my life, your next decision is no longer mine to make.”

Four weeks later, in Emily’s apartment, my room was still half empty. There was only one suitcase in the corner. On the bed lay the cracked copper badge.

Emily picked it up.

“Will you repair this?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to remember where my old life cracked.”

“And the new one?”

“The new one does not need cracks to be real.”

In a few months I opened a small workshop in Seattle. I taught aviation mechanics how to see what the reports concealed. Every morning I brewed tea, sat by the window, and looked at the drawings of little Noah, Emily’s daughter.

In one drawing there was an airplane with two wings and a large yellow sun. Below it was written: “Grandma Sarah is flying home.”

At the first snow, Noah took my hand.

“Will you fly again now?”

“Only if the airplane is very stubborn.”

“People?”

“I always return to people.”

That same evening I received a letter from Vale’s lawyer. He wrote that Richard regretted it, that he wanted to speak with me, and was ready to explain everything.

Emily looked at the letter.

“Will you answer?”

I folded the paper.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“For years I waited for the day when he would admit the truth. Now I no longer need his confession in order to believe myself.”

I put the letter in the trash bin.

In the evening I placed the badge on the desk. Its serrated edge shone in the light of the lamp. Earlier this object had reminded me only of a lost life.

Now it reminded me that an airplane may go out of control, but a person is not always obliged to follow it into its fall.

Noah placed the drawing beside me.

“Grandma, you came home.”

I looked out the window. Snow was falling silently over the city.

For the first time, the copper-colored badge was no longer broken.

It was simply mine.