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Dedication

TO MY ALWAYS.

YOU MAKE SAVING THE WORLD MAGICAL.

CHAPTER 1

NINETEEN THOUSAND FEET ABOVE YORK, Pennsylvania

At the very moment Flight 937 was targeted — the moment when the three-hundred-plus souls aboard were brought into a peril whose magnitude they did not understand — the man in seat 2B was thinking about a nap.

Seat 2B was partially reclined, and he was breathing deeply. A rakish sort, tall, dark, and broad-chested, he had his thick hair swept fashionably to the side. Beyond his apparent physical allure, there was also an ineffable quality to him — call it charm, charisma, or just natural magnetism — that made the flight attendants pay him more attention than was strictly necessary.

His face was tanned, albeit in something of a windburned way. He had just spent several weeks climbing in the Swiss Alps, finishing his trek by solo-climbing the sheer north face of the Eiger in a shade under four hours. Not record territory. But also not bad for a man who didn’t make his living as a climber.

He still wore his hiking books. Some of his gear was stowed above him in a weathered rucksack. The rest was packed below, in the belly of the Boeing 767-300 that had been plowing dutifully through the sky since Zurich.

They had been making a long, slow descent toward Dulles International Airport and the man in seat 2B was looking forward to the evening, when he planned to take his father to an Orioles game. It had been two months since they had seen each other, which was too long. They had bonding to catch up on.

The 767 banked slightly to the right, then straightened. It was a sturdy aircraft and the flight had been smooth, with only the barest hint of turbulence as the plane had passed under a high ceiling of clouds a few minutes earlier. The man in seat 2B had his eyes closed, though he was not quite asleep. He was in that transitional period, when the conscious part of his brain was slowly ceding control to the subconscious.

Then came the loud chunk.

His eyes opened. It was definitely not among the sounds one wants or expects to hear on an airplane. It was followed by voices, plaintive and panicked, coming from behind him on the left side of the aircraft. From above him, the seat-belt sign chimed. The plane was no longer flying smooth or straight. It had entered a shallow, wobbly dive to the left, pitched at roughly ten degrees.

Physiologists have identified the two possible reactions to a threatening stimulus as being fight or flight. But those are, in fact, merely the instinctive responses, the ones gifted to humans by their simian ancestors. Fancying themselves members of a more evolved species, H. sapiens have learned to overcome those base, brutish urges. They are polite, civilized, especially when surrounded by many other H. sapiens. They value decorum — even over survival, at times.

As a result, most people’s response to an emergency is to do nothing.

The man in seat 2B was not most people.

As the other first-class passengers exchanged nervous glances, the man in seat 2B unfastened his seat belt and walked back toward the midsection of the plane. His fight-or-flight juices were flowing — heart rate increased, pupils dilated, muscles bathed in red blood cells and ready for action — but he had long trained himself how to harness that chemistry in a productive manner.