Skyjacked Read online

  Praise for Paul Griffin’s Adrift

  “A beautiful, haunting, horrific tale. Read this one when you won’t be disturbed—Paul Griffin deserves your undivided attention.”

  —Barry Lyga, author of the New York Times bestseller I Hunt Killers

  ★ “A terrifying survival story, visceral, intense, profound, will haunt readers.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “This fast-paced survival adventure makes an excellent crucible for Griffin’s examination of class.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Griffin keeps the pages turning; he has a gift for drawing out the suspense and immersing the reader in the story … complex, unpredictable, and entirely authentic.”

  —Booklist

  Contents

  Praise for Paul Griffin’s Adrift

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  Sneak Peek at Adrift

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE PASSENGERS

  Cassie Ando: the daredevil, her family owns the plane

  Brandon Singh: the serious one, Cassie’s best friend

  Tim Cuddy: the football hero, boyfriend of Emily

  Emily Alarcón: the big-hearted one, might have a crush on Jay

  Jay Rhee: the new guy, on scholarship to the private high school they all attend

  Reeva Powell: the chaperone, hard to read

  THE PILOTS

  Tony Blake: longtime pilot for Cassie’s family

  Nick Sokolov: Tony’s usual copilot, out sick the day of the hijacking

  Sofia Palma: Nick’s replacement, new to piloting

  THE INTERN

  Michelle Okolo: eager to prove herself to General Landry at the National Air Traffic Investigation Center (NATIC)

  MICHELLE

  July 28, 1:34 p.m. Eastern Time (ET)

  Coltsville, Virginia, NATIC

  Michelle Okolo always made sure she was at her desk, ready to work, twenty minutes before the start of her 2:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. shift. She didn’t need to be so early. The first six weeks of the internship had been uneventful. Technically her title was research assistant, but mostly she poured coffee.

  “Okolo, I’m looking into an empty mug,” a senior research analyst said before Michelle could take off her backpack.

  “Yes, sir,” Michelle replied. She hurried to the coffee station. How being a waitron was going to help her get into the United States Air Force Academy, she had no idea.

  Sixteen years old, she was a rising senior. She’d read about NATIC in the US Air Force Journal, the monthly magazine that kept coming to the apartment even though her father had been killed four years ago in a test flight. If the local air traffic control center had known about the sudden windstorm that day, the director would have recommended that USAF Captain Reginald Okolo divert course. But the storm was just outside the control center’s primary area of responsibility. The information about the wind came in a few seconds too late.

  NATIC was formed about a year after her dad died, with the purpose of obtaining and sharing critical weather information in real time. It also kept everybody up to speed about air-related terrorism threats. The chance to serve at NATIC—even if she was mostly serving coffee—thrilled Michelle.

  She eyed the Big Board, a screen fifty feet wide and thirty feet tall. It tracked every flight in US airspace. There were thousands of dots, most of them blue, which meant the planes were on course. A few dots were orange, the planes straying from their designated flight paths, usually due to wind. The orange dots always turned blue within a minute or so, after ATC—air traffic control—radioed the plane to correct its position. There was one now, over New Jersey: orange to blue, everything fine.

  Michelle delivered the coffee, settled in at her desk, and hoped her eyelid would stop twitching. She had been clicking around on Instagram way past bedtime. And then she sat up straight, her focus on the bottom of the Big Board.

  There was one other color a dot could be: red. That would be a plane off course and not responding to air traffic control. Michelle had never seen a red dot, until now.

  It was crossing into Texas from Mexico.

  Blant-blant-blant—an alarm went off in the auditorium.

  Michelle’s unit, the research team, scrambled to a long table in front of the Big Board with their laptops. One of the researchers wore a headset. He called across the auditorium to Major Serrano, Michelle’s boss, whose desk gave her a prime view of the Big Board. “It’s a mayday,” the researcher said. “Multiple bird strikes, starboard engine blown, port struggling to maintain power. ETC at present altitude is five minutes.”

  ETC? Michelle’s stomach constricted and turned cold as she remembered what it meant: estimated time to crash.

  “Michelle,” Major Serrano said. “This is an all-hands deal. Hit the keys.”

  “Me?”

  Major Serrano frowned. “Hey, you know what we do here, right? Get on your computer and find me a place where I can land that plane.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Michelle said. She’d memorized the emergency protocol manuals, but she’d never expected to have to use them—not in her lowly position as a research assistant, and definitely not the crash-landing protocol. What was the first step again?

  Water. Right. Step one: Find water. She had to find water within five minutes’ flying time of the plane’s current position. Four minutes now. How fast was the plane moving?

  She tapped up the flight information. “Six hundred and forty miles per hour,” she whispered to herself. She ran the numbers: At six hundred and forty miles per sixty minutes, the plane, with four minutes until impact—less than four minutes—would have to find water within forty-two miles. She launched her graphing app and plotted a semicircle with a forty-mile radius over her map of south Texas.

  Within the semicircle there was no body of water, at least not any big enough to accommodate a landing plane.

  Step two in the protocol: Find an out-of-use landing strip.

  No go.

  Step three: Locate a desolate area, one without infrastructure like train tracks or power lines.

  There was none. The landscape was suburban sprawl and industrial waste storage.

  The only option left was awful: Find the area with the lowest population density.

  “I need coordinates, gang,” Major Serrano called out.

  Michelle looked at the Big Board. The plane was on course to hit ground in Kappock, Texas, population 241,000 and evenly spread out within the plane’s landing range.

  Wherever the plane landed people were going to die.

  She zoomed in on her map but scanning the entire area for population density and flat terrain at the same time would take minutes she didn’t have, even with multiple statistics and topography apps running.

>   There was only one thing to do now: Log onto Facebook.

  She tapped up her page and ran a search with the words Kappock Texas highway expressway freeway.

  Several hundred feeds came up with matches. After scanning a few posts, mostly complaints about traffic, Michelle figured out that the area’s main expressway was due east of Kappock’s commercial district. She pulled it up on her map. It was seven lanes with a wide, grassy median.

  “Anybody?” Major Serrano called out to her team. She turned to Michelle. “Okolo?”

  Michelle hesitated.

  “Michelle, now or never, give me what you got.”

  “Route 46, Major. I mean 64. No, wait, yeah, 64.”

  Major Serrano called out to her assistant, “Get Kappock ATC to raise the alerts, radio, text, all of it. I need that highway cleared.”

  “Eastbound or westbound?” the assistant said.

  Major Serrano nodded at Michelle. “Which is it, Okolo?”

  How could this be possible, Michelle wondered, that the selection of the plane’s crash site had fallen to her, a low-level intern?

  She looked at her map screen, then the Big Board, which had zoomed in on the red dot, so much bigger now, brighter, blinking faster as the dying plane lost altitude. In two minutes it would be tearing up the highway, but in which direction?

  The eastbound highway was three lanes wide, the westbound four. The plane’s wingspan was 197 feet. If it landed toward the westbound’s outside emergency lane, the wing would barely overlap the eastbound lanes. Yes, wider had to be better.

  “Westbound?” Michelle said.

  “Is that an answer or a question?” Major Serrano said.

  “West—westbound, ma’am.”

  “The westbound lane is heading into the city, Okolo.”

  “Ma’am?” Why was the major smiling? Why wasn’t she calling in the order to clear the highway?

  “It’s morning rush hour, Michelle. The westbound lane where you put that 787? It’s a parking lot. You just killed eighteen hundred commuters.”

  The research team surrounded her cubicle.

  The blant-blant-blant stopped. Time stopped, or seemed to. One wrong decision—her decision—could kill eighteen hundred people? At least eighteen hundred. No way that 787 would hold together after it hit all those cars and trucks.

  The Big Board returned to normal status, most of the dots blue, maybe three orange dots, no red.

  “It … crashed?” Michelle gulped, but the knot high up in her throat wasn’t going anywhere.

  “It was a simulation,” Major Serrano said.

  “What do you mean? Like, a trick?”

  “We call it an emergency preparedness drill. You’re furious, I know.”

  “I’m not, ma’am,” Michelle said, but she was all right. Oh how she was. She’d barely been able to find the words. She couldn’t keep from shaking, from glaring at the major.

  “I’m sorry, kiddo, but you have to taste the fear before you can learn how to swallow it. The fear that whatever you do, whatever decision you make, people will die. It doesn’t happen a lot. Maybe once every five years. But toward the end of your thirty-plus year career, when you’re sitting in my chair, you will, at some point, more than likely have to make the call.”

  “Hey, at least you put the plane on the highway,” one of the senior research analysts said. She turned to Major Serrano. “Remember that kid who wanted to land it in the amusement park on a beautiful Saturday afternoon?”

  “Not a big roller coaster fan, that one,” Major Serrano said.

  “Chin up, Okolo,” another researcher said. “Everybody fails the Kappock nightmare.”

  Michelle forced herself to nod. And everybody doesn’t get into the US Air Force Academy, she thought.

  “I’m looking into an empty mug,” Major Serrano said. “You’ll be all right, Michelle. We live and learn, right? We live to fight another day.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Michelle said, taking the mug. She almost made it to the coffee station before she cursed herself. She’d just told a pilot to land a wide-body 787 head-on into rush hour traffic. Way to go, Michelle, she thought. Dad would be so proud.

  She looked up to the mezzanine of glass-walled offices that overlooked the Big Board.

  General Landry, the founder of NATIC and its highest-ranking official, was at her desk, on the phone. She was expressionless, as usual. She rarely came down to the floor, where the research team worked, and when she did, she was all business. She’d have a quiet word with Major Serrano, and then she was gone, no time for chitchat.

  A letter of recommendation from General Landry was a guaranteed appointment to the USAFA, one of the most selective schools in the world. The government paid for everything: tuition, room, board, travel stipends. Upon graduation you were guaranteed lifelong employment in service to your country. Not to mention the opportunity to honor your dead father, Michelle thought, stirring sugar into the major’s coffee.

  Well, there was no chance for a letter from General Landry now, after Michelle had totally blown it with the Kappock sim. Even Major Serrano, who had taken Michelle under her wing, would probably think twice before she could recommend Michelle for a spot in the academy. The air force’s applicant wish list most definitely did not include a mediocre barista who made terrible decisions under pressure.

  JAY

  One month later, the last Friday of August, 9:55 a.m. Mountain Time (MT)

  Crabbe’s Fork, south-central Idaho

  Their sneakers were Nike custom jobs and New Balance. His were knockoffs from Payless. But here they were, all together, the five of them, in the middle of Crabbe’s Fork National Forest, standing at the edge of a cliff. Jay hung back a bit as Cassie squatted to check the slackline that spanned the canyon.

  It wasn’t that the Hartwell kids weren’t nice—they were. Okay, Tim had been a little cold to him once or twice, but Cassie, Brandon, and especially Emily were all right. Emily had pretty much adopted Jay at the welcome session for new transfer students last month. She’d invited him on this trip to Idaho with Cassie and her friends. “One last summer blast,” she’d said it would be, before the start of sophomore year.

  His mother forced him to go. Didn’t he want to make new friends? Not really. He just couldn’t see how he’d have much in common with these kids who’d been going to Hartwell since kindergarten. Their parents had gone there too.

  The Hartwell Academy English Department had put a bunch of F. Scott Fitzgerald stories on the summer reading list. All these dandies in tuxedos, mansions on the beach. Jay delivered store circulars and lived in city-owned housing. Did he really need to know about the so-called troubles of privileged white folks in the 1920s? But there was one thing good old F. Scott wrote that made a lot of sense. “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them.” Understanding these people was a constant challenge. Like, for instance, why was Cassie staring down into the valley floor with an unsettling grin?

  “How far a fall do you think that is, Timbo?” Cassie said.

  Timbo was six four, two fifty easy, already a starter on the varsity football team, noseguard, at fifteen years old. He dropped a rock over the edge of the cliff and counted, “One, two, three, four, five,” before the echo of the click-click-crack made it up the cliff. “I’ll tell you exactly how far down that is,” he said. “It’s exactly far.”

  “Well done, Tim,” Emily said, patting his very wide back.

  “It’s a half mile anyway,” Brandon said.

  “Then I better not fall,” Cassie said. She hopped onto the slackline and danced like a ballerina. She wore a safety cuff on her ankle, but still.

  “Casserole, it’s official: You’re insane,” Emily said. “Really, you have to pirouette? Cass, what are you doing? Don’t!”

  “Cassie, no!” Tim said.

  She unclipped her safety cuff and cartwheeled in slow motion along the slackline.
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  “Cass, I’m gonna kill you!” The words weren’t out of Emily’s mouth when Cassie slipped.

  She just barely grabbed the line with both hands. She looked down, seemingly more fascinated than terrified. “You guys, this is so beautiful. I’m floating.”

  Maybe that’s what she said. Jay couldn’t be sure with all the screaming Tim and Emily were doing. His pulse rate must have doubled, he was pretty sure, the blood whooshing against his eardrums, or was that the very strong wind?

  Brandon grabbed the line and made his way, hand over hand, toward Cassie. “No, Brand,” Cassie said. “Go back! I’m fine!”

  She wasn’t anywhere near fine. Her grip broke, and now she was hanging on with one hand. Just four fingers on the line now … three … and then she fell.

  Brandon snatched her wrist. He hung upside down from the slackline by his legs. He’d been smart enough to wear a safety cuff, but Jay didn’t think it would be able to bear his weight and Cassie’s if Brandon’s legs slipped from the line. And they did.

  Now they both hung by Brandon’s cuff string. It looked like a string anyway, practically fishing wire in Jay’s eyes, not that he’d ever been fishing. That would change soon, once he and the others hiked down into the river filled with jags of granite to retrieve Cassie’s body, or what would be left of it. Brandon wouldn’t be able to maintain his grip on her for much longer. His arm was starting to shake.

  “Brand, let go!” Cassie said. She tried to peel his hand from hers.

  It was definite now: Money made you stupid. Jay Rhee from Flushing, Queens, was not going down with these crazy rich kids from the Upper East Side. But then why was he moving toward the edge of the cliff, toward the slackline?

  Cassie’s sweaty hand slipped through Brandon’s, and she fell.

  BRANDON

  9:58 a.m. MT

  Crabbe’s Fork, Idaho

  The digital display morphed to 9:59. That would be the time of death.

  Brandon’s wristwatch glowed in the foreground as he hung upside down from the slackline and watched Cassie become small, smaller, shrinking in less than a second to a blue dot in her jeans and cobalt-colored shirt—and then a burst of red.

  The parachute exploded from the low-profile backpack she’d been wearing.