WATCH THE BOOK TRAILER

ENJOY THIS SAMPLE CHAPTER OF OCEANUS:

Chapter One

January 10, 2042

“How long can the plane fly with both pilots dead?”

“We don’t know they’re dead.”

“You’re assuming they are. How long?”

Phillip Watanabe leaned against the desk and pushed back his suit jacket to slide his hands into his pants pockets. “It was bound from Guam to Tokyo with Osaka as an alternate. Say, four more hours, give or take, depending on wind conditions.”

Alex Rhys wasn’t fooled by Phillip’s casual stance. “So, it’ll ditch in the Sea of Japan. Probably won’t reach Russia.”

“I didn’t ask. You and I are going to make sure it doesn’t crash.”

Breath hissed through Alex’s teeth. “Still no communication? Nobody?”

“Nothing from pilots or crew. Air Marshall’s not answering. We’ve even been trying passengers’ phones. It’s a dead zone for cell signals, but Homeland’s database shows nine passengers with satellite phones—nothing from them, either.”

Dead zone. Alex’s shoulders twitched. “Well, the first thing we need to … Shit!” He stood on the brake pedal. His classic ’25 Charger screeched to a stop a couple of feet from the rear bumper of a white panel-van. The elderly woman pedestrian at the far corner of the intersection turned wide eyes toward him and waved the van hurriedly through the right turn in front of her. Alex waited until the van was well clear before continuing straight through the green light. He could feel the glare of the woman as he passed and swore again, then wiped his palms on his pant legs.

“What just happened?” Phillip’s voice held a concern Alex had never heard in it before.

“Nothing. I freakin’ hate handling calls like this while I’m driving!” He should have left the video off, at the very least.

“Suck it up. Listen, you’re about a half hour from here by chopper. Find a nice empty mall parking lot—we’ll come to you.”

Alex stopped at a red light and took his bottom lip in his teeth. On his left, a young couple was coming out of an Asian grocery store pushing a stroller. How many families just like that were on the doomed 787?

“Fine, but you can’t wait for me. What’s the biggest stratellite outfit in Japan?”

“Stratellites? Hang on … that’d be Nippon Stratellites, based out of Narita airport.”

“They’ll have maintenance flyers. Tell them to get their best crew in the air and on an intercept course, south, fully stocked with repair gear including plasma cutters.”

“Jesus! You’re not thinking they can get aboard a jetliner in mid-flight?”

“When you have a better plan, give me a call. I’ll be in the northwest corner of the Stonestown Galleria parking lot. Get me first, and apologize to the authorities, after.”

Phillip’s people would catch hell from San Francisco and Oakland air traffic control, the SFPD, the mall owners, and who knew how many others. That wasn’t Alex’s concern. As he pulled into a parking space, he commanded his console viewscreen to end the call and bring up specs on the Boeing Dreamliner. The screen blurred until he blinked away wetness as he pictured an aircraft interior filled with three hundred and forty-two souls—people with lives, people with families. In his imagination they were slumped over in unconsciousness, or even, in one flash he quickly pushed away, blackened and burned. It was one of the many nightmare scenarios that plagued his sleep since he’d accepted government work.

His last job for Phillip had ended only a week ago, barely enough time to take Andrea out to dinner. No way he’d make it to their theatre date tonight. He told the car to send a regret message and shook his head at how many times he’d had to send regrets in the past year. No wonder his love life was shit.

He’d been on a high after that last assignment, though. His biggest success yet: eight high-value diplomatic hostages rescued from the Kurdish Hezbollah in Gaziantep. A perfect extraction plan had been spoiled by bad luck. But that was why they needed Alex—his gift for creative troubleshooting when the dice came up snake-eyes. He’d improvised with the help of a passing city bus, an approaching thunderstorm, two pilfered umbrellas to flash a coded message to a rooftop observer, and a couple of well-paid hookers who’d playacted a thoroughly distracting fight in the open street. The story had been worth a lot of free drinks once the team was back home.

But one special-ops soldier hadn’t made it back.

Alex had gone to her funeral, standing on the very fringe of the cemetery gathering, but still too close to tear-stained faces with helpless expressions of grief. Thick raindrops sputtering on a dying fire. The cheerful flower arrangements on the casket depressed him: superstition painted to look like hope.

After that, he’d pretty much decided to get out of the business. His idea of “consulting” didn’t include decisions of life or death. He’d nearly cancelled Phillip’s call without answering—part of him wished he had. But another part thought of all those helpless airplane passengers returning home to Japan from a sunny vacation in Guam.

He had to help them. But he would get out of the business soon. His “retirement package” was almost ready.

# # #

As Alex jogged out from under the spinning helicopter rotors, Phillip met him on the rooftop. The Homeland Security agent’s hair didn’t budge. His suit seemed to repel the dirt blowing through the air. And maybe it did—there were nano-engineered fabrics designed for that. In contrast, Alex’s usual wardrobe would have embarrassed a department store dummy, though his recent government work had compelled him to upgrade a little.

He was as certain as he could be that Phillip didn’t really work for Homeland, and equally certain that the other man knew of his suspicions. But both played their parts and never spoke about such things. The bottom line was that Phillip did work for the American government: he had enormous clout when it came to accessing resources, and he accomplished very special tasks. Sometimes he hired Alex. So did a dozen other government agencies and five multinationals so far. Except Phillip’s missions were the toughest and dirtiest, and there was almost always a cost in blood.

Alex hoped this one would be an exception.

The door from the rooftop had an old-fashioned key lock, nothing high-tech. Only temporary quarters for Phillip’s team. A couple of floors down, there was a suite of offices with windows blacked out and one wall a bluish screen with a half-dozen holographic displays floating in front of it. There were only six staffers on hand, but Alex had worked with four of them before and was awed by their skills. He was quickly introduced to the new members, both women in their late twenties so attractive that he promptly forgot their names. He would have forgotten his own, too, but Phillip supplied it first. Alex ran his fingers through his short blond hair and felt grit stuck to his scalp by sweat. He gave up any attempts to impress.

“The ocean views—are those from a chase plane?” he asked.

“From the maintenance flyer you wanted,” Phillip replied. “They’re at maximum airspeed, still a half-hour from the target.” He crossed his arms. “The company had to ask for volunteers.”

“Of course. Flyers don’t have the range for a round trip of that distance. These guys either succeed in hitching a ride on the 787 or they go down in the Pacific.” The stratellite service vehicle was a stubby wedge of flying wing with twin jet-engines at the rear and a main flight-crew hatch between the exhaust nozzles. There was another hatch on the underside, but that was for when the flyer was doing its intended job: ferrying two-man crews up to stratellites for maintenance work. Even solar-powered gas bags required repairs every once in a while, most often to electronic gear that relayed communication signals of every kind over a big chunk of geography. Alex knew that, basking in the stratosphere like gargantuan whales, Japan had at least one stratellite for each of the nation’s islands. Crewless, except during maintenance, their provision for in-flight visitors consisted of a special landing platform with a proprietary female hatch coupling to match the male counterpart on the underside of the flyers. No one relished the idea of walking over the top of a zeppelin in hurricane winds twelve miles above the ground. Once mated, crews could transfer directly from the flyer to the interior of the stratellite without oxygen masks. Since the flyers had vertical take-off and landing capability borrowed from jump-jets, and the platforms were always aimed into the prevailing wind, linkups were reasonably straightforward.

Landing on a jetliner at cruising speed would be a whole different story.

Phillip had returned his hands to his pockets, but Alex noticed them twitch every so often, as if they needed to be touching a control screen, pressing a button, or weaving a complex dance through a holo projection. Doing something. The man was a gifted organizer, but a restless supervisor.

“If you’re planning to have the strat team land on the plane’s roof and cut into her, it won’t work,” Phillip said.

“No. The ceiling’s all electrical cables and vents.” Alex gave a sweep of his hand and brought up a detailed cutaway of the Dreamliner. “This one is twenty years old, you said? But with upgraded engines?”

“Built in 2022.”

“Most of the 787’s flight functions are controlled electronically instead of hydraulically. Not a good idea to go cutting wires. Anyway, the carbon fiber composite materials of the fuselage and the insulation behind it are a bitch to cut through, even with plasma torches. They’ll have to go in here.” He tapped the air.

“The top of the cockpit? Isn’t that all control systems, too?”

Alex spread his fingers to expand a small section of the picture. “Escape hatches. One on each side, above the pilots. In the event of a survivable crash or a fire on the runway, the flightcrew is meant to climb out and rappel to the ground on retractable cables.”

The rectangles looked tiny. Phillip whistled through his teeth. “I hope these guys don’t live on pizza and beer.”

“The hatches will be big enough. Just. The problem is opening them. They’ve got safeguards to keep them from being opened in flight, of course, but the bigger obstacle is air pressure.”

“All airliner doors open inward, so the pressure differential between inside and outside at 30,000 feet keeps them locked shut.” The comment was from one of the new women—the redhead—leaning over a desktop console with her head cocked toward Alex. He became conscious of a cool touch at his armpit: sweat patches on his shirt as he painted the air with his fingers. Naturally.

“So, what’s the answer?” Phillip asked.

“The strat crews carry a new epoxy system in their kits. The catalyst, used on its own, is violently corrosive on synthetic sealing compounds like the ones around the escape hatches. But they’ll have to cut the locking mechanism with a plasma cutter.”

“In a five-hundred mile-per-hour wind?”

“But you’ll still have to push against the air pressure to open the hatch.” The redhead again. “My name is Jill,” she reminded him.

“Right. Two choices on that. One: quick and dirty—an explosive. They’ve got flares and mini oxygen packs that should combine for a big-enough bang. The downside …”

“A metal hatch bouncing around the pilots’ heads, followed by explosive decompression in the cockpit. Maybe the whole plane, if the flight crew left the door open.”

“Only first-class. Since 2024 this model has come equipped with instantly inflating pressure seals between the passenger sections. And the pilots are probably already dead.”

“Sure.” Phillip frowned. “But if a metal hatch slices into a control panel, that bird isn’t coming down any way but hard. What’s option number two?”

“The rear hatch on the strat flyer includes an extendable entranceway, basically a tent-like hood for the rare case that the coupling on the stratellite has been damaged. In our scenario, they extend the entranceway over an escape hatch and seal it to the fuselage with the quick-acting epoxy. Then they can equalize the pressure inside the hood with the plane’s interior pressure while they cut, and the hatch should just fall open. But they’ll have to set the flyer down on the nose of the jet—right over the windshield. They obviously can’t match speeds aimed the other way, and they could never extend the hood into the force of the airflow.”

“The downside?”

A nervous smile tried to rearrange Alex’s taut face but gave up. “For one thing, ‘quick-acting’ is relative. I’d guess that the cut-and-blast method will take ten minutes or so. Option 2? More like half-an-hour to forty-five minutes. Air temperature, the age of the hatch seals, the skill of the rescuers … a bunch of other variables could all make it take longer.”

“By then the plane will be into Japanese airspace, closing in on the coast.”

“Yeah. Not good. ’Cause there’s one more thing.”

“Which is?”

“Autopilots aren’t programmed to compensate for the weight of a truck suddenly planted on the nose cone. As soon as that flyer touches down, the Boeing is going to start to descend. Maybe in a hurry.”