Flight 19 Read online

  By the time her second grandson came into the world in early 2018, Joanne was beginning to put together what she thought would be at least a two-year plan—to slap her husband hard with the karma stick.

  Unbeknown to Mick, she even had the support of his second and third in charge at Darcon, his biggest and most successful company.

  And then he boarded Flight 19 on that fateful night in early 2019.

  Suffice to say, our resident billionaire would end up having a few less dollars in the bank, as just the beginning of his monumental fall from grace.

  Chapter Sixteen

  (PE10D) Tammy Hourigan, Economy, Row 10, seat D

  Age: 31 (2019)

  Married, two children, five and seven.

  Occupation: Housewife, Chesterfield, St. Louis, Missouri

  Tammy Hourigan was next on the way to her eventual release from Vandenberg, along with Michael E. Darcy and a retired couple.

  Mrs. Hourigan would be the first person to become a millionaire as a result of being a passenger on Flight 19. Within six months of her leaving the base, her fortune would go from around $864.22 to more than $1.25 million. Tammy was one of the American passengers to be offered seriously big coin to sell her story to CNN. Knowing exactly how many cents short of $865 she had in the bank at the time, and the size of her mortgage, to her it was a no-brainer.

  Other American passengers were offered enough money to change their fortunes. It seemed a fair trade-off for having their lives ruined by fate. But none were offered anywhere near Tammy’s haul.

  You see, Tammy Hourigan was a little different. She had been 28 weeks pregnant when the plane’s wheels lifted off the tarmac at Honolulu International Airport in 2019, and was still 28 weeks pregnant when the same wheels touched the dusty bitumen of runway two at Vandenberg 1,825 days later.

  She was one of the main reasons the AFOA knew that Flight 19 was genuinely the greatest mystery in the history of aviation. If no one on-board had been pregnant when the plane disappeared, they would always have wondered if the disappearance had been a very elaborate hoax, pulled off with the knowing participation of everyone on-board.

  One of the AFOAs had come up with an explanation of why Tammy was pregnant, just as she was when the plane disappeared. He asked if there was a chance she was pregnant—again.

  Tammy had a beautiful face, deep gray eyes, a smile on full, luscious lips that belonged in a toothpaste commercial, and black hair worn in a bob. At about five foot six, her slightly plump figure and pregnant tummy exuded an aura of happiness and contentment.

  Well, that was before the plane diverted to Vandenberg. As the first few days unfolded in Hangar 19, her happy facade quite understandably began to fall apart. Of the 210 passengers on Flight 19, the AFOAs focused most heavily on her. They tried as best as they could to treat her with respect and dignity. However, there was only a certain number of times you could poke and prod a pregnant woman, and it was all getting too much for her.

  In the end, she gave up trying to be stoic, and let her emotions run. Tammy took the news of their fate, the stress of her third pregnancy, and the knowledge that she had been away from her young family for five years, very hard.

  She formed a close bond with her group counselor, eventually opening up and telling her of her woes.

  Tammy told her about the issues she had been having with her husband, Brandon, and the strains of raising a young family in Chesterfield, St. Louis. Her husband, an editor for St. Louis Today, was growing concerned about his future at St. Louis’s only remaining printed newspaper. Times were hard in middle America, and not knowing at the time that Flight 19 would set her up in relative comfort for the better part of her life, she was worried about her young son and daughter, and her marriage. She alluded to the counselor, as the days dragged on at Vandenberg, that they had also been having issues in their relationship.

  When Flight 19 took off in Honolulu, Tammy was on her way home from visiting her one of her best friends, Maddy, in Sydney. Maddy had relocated there a couple of years earlier when she met the man of her dreams online. They’d spent a couple of weeks talking about how Tammy could make her marriage survive. Maddy was one of only three people Tammy counted as a best friend. Now, like many on Flight 19 who had been in established, monogamous relationships, her main concern was—had her partner moved on?

  And, if so, what the hell was she supposed to do? Knock on the door, look them in the eye and, in the words of Arnie in Terminator 3, say, “I’m back?”

  Tammy was insecure, and although sometimes she wondered if she even truly loved Brandon anymore, the thought of him having moved on was, put simply, a machete to her aorta.

  She admitted to the counselor she was prone to be a little jealous at the best of times, and that this had often fueled her fermenting insecurities as their marriage meandered rather boringly down the river of life.

  The third pregnancy had not helped her current mindset, either, injecting the early signs of another bout of mind-numbing postnatal depression into her body.

  When Tammy was finally cleared to leave Vandenberg, she told her counselor what was worrying her the most.

  Tammy had an identical twin sister, Annie. And even Tammy managed a smile when the counselor smirked at their names practically rhyming. She raised her hand and said, “I know. I know.”

  Tammy went on to tell her that she and her twin didn’t get on that well. Annie was childless, and had a dark side; she focused on her well-paid corporate job and on picking up as many suits as she could on Friday nights.

  When her counselor asked her about her sister’s dark side, Tammy told her that even as a toddler, her sister displayed behavior that made her parents cringe. Annie couldn’t play with other kids because she would pull on their hair so hard they screamed in pain. As they grew older, Annie’s public jealousy towards her twin sister got so bad that even at eight years of age their parents wondered if taking them out together was a good idea. They felt Annie embarrassed them; they couldn’t control her. Tammy told the counselor her sister’s jealousy only got worse as the two grew into adults. The counselor said it probably came down to one thing—as it does with jealousy most of the time—Annie just wanted to be Tammy.

  She had relationships, though they came and went with the seasons and rarely lasted more than one. Tammy shared Annie’s good looks and killer smile. The big difference was that Annie slept around—a lot—but Tammy never would.

  As Tammy’s marriage started heading south, so to speak, it was as if Annie was parachuting herself right into the middle of the impending conflict.

  She had on two occasions miraculously appeared at the local bar next door to Brandon’s newspaper on a Friday night, when he was trying to have a couple of quick pints of his favorite boutique beer before he headed home. Both times, Brandon arrived home hours later than he was supposed to, quite inebriated and smelling mildly of her sister’s favorite perfume.

  The last time this happened had been only three weeks before Tammy’s trip to visit Maddy in Australia.

  Brandon waved off her insecurity and told her it was all in her head. He said cheating on her was the last thing he would ever do, especially with her sister, of all people.

  When he fell asleep two minutes after his head hit the pillow, Tammy broke the golden rule of a trusting relationship. She picked up his cell phone and snuck off silently into the hallway to check his texts.

  There, she found a message from Annie, sent just ten minutes earlier:

  “Tx 4 the treat 2night. It was gr8 x.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  (PE25F) (PE25G) Tim and Sandra Erwin, economy class, row 25, seats F+G

  Ages: Tim, 67; Sandra, 65 (2019)

  Married, retired

  Occupations before retirement: Tim, scientist, NASA; Sandra, hospital administrator, Alameda, San Francisco.

  One of Tim and Sandra Erwin’s neighbors worked on the Crown Prince, a luxury cruise liner that made up part of the Princess Cruises extensive fl
eet of multi-million-dollar vessels. When the neighbor learned they were heading to Hawaii for a break, he suggested they catch a lift with him on the Crown Prince. They would dock in Honolulu just one night after they’d originally planned and, their neighbor added, they’d have more fun that way than they would squeezing into a pressurized cabin with hours of taxi rides, queues, and security screenings on either side.

  Considering their neighbor could get them the two nights on the liner for the price of one, Tim and Sandra decided to live a little and make an adventure of it.

  When they arrived in Hawaii, they settled into their holiday digs, a sun-filled house at Ewa Beach, which overlooked Mamala Bay, on the main island of Oahu. Then their brood came over from the mainland: their daughter Sarah and her husband, Sean, their son Benjamin and his wife Jenny, and a gaggle of beautiful grandchildren from both families, five of them in all.

  As the years dragged on after the A380 vanished over the Pacific Ocean, the Erwin children found comfort in the fact that their last Christmas with their beloved parents had been a particularly special one. Everyone behaved, there were no family squabbles, and everyone, including the in-laws, had what seemed to be a perfect time at the Ewa Beach pad. They had all agreed to return there for the following Christmas.

  At the time of the disappearance, Tim had what felt to him was the “seven-year itch,” not about his marriage—hell, no—but about retirement. As far as marriage was concerned, Tim had learned a long time ago how to optimize it and make it last. It was easy—he just kept out of his wife’s way for specific periods of the day.

  That had been no problem when Tim worked long hours for NASA (and other government outfits) but in retirement it was a little harder. Within his first year, though, he had worked it all out and drowned himself in numerous activities: golf, some volunteer work, sailing, and tending to his immaculately set-up workshop, where he would spend hours tinkering happily with various things until the sun went down and supper appeared on the dinner table.

  But as he had packed his bags at the holiday house in Hawaii on a bright, humid, and sunny Wednesday morning, getting ready to return to his life in Alameda, he couldn’t help but feel a stab of apprehension about returning to his now mundane life.

  Tim, like his father, grandfather, and even great-grandfather, had started his adult life flying airplanes. But in his early twenties, his career had taken a slight turn out of the cockpit when a routine training exercise over the Mojave Desert turned to disaster and the plane he was in crash-landed.

  No one could believe Tim had walked away from the crash with nothing but a broken nose and ruptured spleen. Sandra had said for years that he was too smart to be a pilot, and implored him to do something different. He had a natural flair for the sciences, and when the crash pushed him to hang up his pilot’s wings, he turned his focus, through his recuperation, to textbooks, and went back to university. A few years later, he completed his science degree, specializing in biochemistry.

  Being an ex-pilot with a bachelor of science, Tim easily found a natural home in the United States Air Force. With frequent secondments to NASA and other government agencies involving things that flew around in the air, Tim filled the decades between his early twenties and retirement at 60 in professional environments that he found both stimulating and challenging, and he saw through some of the most exciting times of America’s space program. He had found his niche.

  So when, on the morning of January 17th, 2024, Tim jerked on his wife’s arm to wake her as he saw Vandenberg Air Force Base coming into view, he felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. He had spent many years working there.

  Sandra was beside herself with grief when she found out their flight was five years overdue. At the briefing where they first heard the news, she was one of the first who had needed immediate medical attention. Sandra had fainted as the room deteriorated into mayhem, and Tim had told the paramedics, as they lifted her onto the trolley, that his wife had a history of heart problems. He’d thought she’d had a heart attack, and though he wasn’t religious, had thanked the man upstairs for not taking her from him.

  Mrs. Erwin eventually woke an hour or so later at the Vandenberg AFB hospital, hoping the last week had just been one hell of a nightmare. Tim was by her bedside to reiterate the news—it was 2024.

  Tim sat with his arm around his wife in the marquee that had been erected within the massive walls of Hangar 19—where all the passengers had first learned of what had happened to them—whispering to her that everything would be alright.

  The Erwins were next on the list to leave, along with Tammy Hourigan and Michael Darcy.

  Sandra trembled with fear. More than anything else, she felt a sense of dread at not knowing whether her two children, their partners, her five grandchildren, her two sisters, and her elderly mother were all still alive and well.

  At 67, Tim was visibly aging. His thick mat of jet-black hair was thinning high on his forehead, and the patch of baldness was expanding with unabashed speed. His toned skin was starting to get just a little bit puffy, though his large brown eyes had lost none of their sharpness. His snub nose nestled above his warm smile; his teeth were starting to move from white to eggshell in color.

  Even after the plane crash over four decades ago, he had always stood straight and with confidence. Nothing had changed there. His belly was starting to do what it liked, though only in the last two years had his belt size increased two holes.

  Sandra’s love of baking showed more on her small frame—she was only five foot two. Years of testing, and then enjoying, her homemade cakes and biscuits were yielding the results you might expect. But like many people of her vintage, she had come to worry less about her physical appearance than enjoying her twilight years. If she found she could no longer squeeze in and out of her favorite reading chair on the sun-deck, it would be time to do something about her weight then. More central to the way she and others saw her was her warm, rounded face, topped with a bristle of short, naturally blond hair, bright green eyes, and a genuine, almost ever-present smile that Tim had never stopped adoring.

  The senior counselor from the Erwins’ passenger group stared at the couple from the back of the large marquee. Her sense of anxiety rose as the minutes ticked down to their transfer to the building where the final debrief would take place.

  She would have to be the one to tell them.

  The counselor had already double-checked that morning that paramedics would be on high alert in the debriefing room when she arrived with the retired couple.

  She was extremely concerned about Mrs. Erwin—how she would take the news.

  Seventy percent of her family was dead.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dave stood absolutely still, as if he’d turned into a statue.

  He’d just shaken the AFOA counselor’s hand for the final time. The counselor had told him to stand where he was standing right now. In a moment, the door nearest to him would open.

  As we discussed earlier, Dave Collins was a strong and confident man.

  He had to be-to oversee his team of air traffic controllers in one of the world’s busiest airports, 84 meters above the bustling tarmac.

  Not one person at LAX, nobody, saw the man shed a tear after he lost his wife and only son on that fateful summer’s day eight years ago. He chose to mourn in private.

  Nevertheless, when Flight 19 disappeared in 2019, the close-knit community of tower air traffic controllers at LAX closed in around him.

  Dave’s heart reminded him every morning that there was always hope. But as three years from the disappearance became four, and then eventually an aching five, his head began to win out and form reasonable expectations—and explanations. He was now sure the plane was in some giant crack in the earth’s crust, thousands of meters below the waters of the Pacific, somewhere, somehow, in a place where the submarines had been unable to find it.

  Even James Cameron, one of Hollywood’s most successful producers and directors (and al
l-round top guy to the families of the missing passengers) offered to take his submersible the Deepsea Challenger, designed to reach the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, into the water. He, too, wanted to find the plane.

  And true to his word, Cameron ventured with his team into the waters of the Pacific.

  But when they returned to the shores of California, the news was not good.

  They had found no sign of the plane.

  Between his inner strength and the 24/7 support he received from all those around him, Dave Collins—somehow—survived those hollow years.

  But on January 17th, 2024, his Superman-like emotions changed forever.

  It was a typical Wednesday. Dave was working his tenth day in a row, and the skies over Westchester were hectic, even for a weekday. Dave was notorious for working up to 14 days straight. As his loyal band of ATCs had gotten to know over the last few years, it was his way of coping with losing his family.

  No one dared confront him about it. Most of the guys working the bird’s nest were prohibited from working 14 days in a row, but D.C. wrote his own rules. LAX moved more fluently with him in the nest, so senior management turned a blind eye when he worked crazy hours.

  D.C. glanced out through the window and spotted a couple of A380s reversing from their terminal gates at the same time. It was a mental habit that whenever he saw the 260-foot wingspan of the majestic aircraft, he thought of one plane only: Flight 19.

  As his mind drifted back to the activities of the tower and the two A380s made their way to one of the main runways to leave LAX, Dave took another large intake of lukewarm coffee from his oversized coffee mug.

  It was at that precise moment, as his lips parted from his cup, that his brother called him from the ARTCC and gave him the bizarre message that some smart-ass was telling his brother their plane was Pacific International Airlines PI019 and wanted clearance to fall into the LAX grid.