Flight 19 Page 8

  The search-and-rescue operation five years ago to find Flight 19 had cost around a quarter of a billion dollars—coming straight from the purse of the American taxpayer. And now, the plane was back.

  Questions—needed answers.

  Tammy had been told that her parents would be coming to Vandenberg to see her, and that they knew she wouldn’t be coming home with them, given her need for medical attention. Tammy would learn, once she walked through the DONR, that her two other children would not be there to see her.

  The counselors knew all this but would only inform her once she was through the doors. They didn’t want to overload her with too much information too quickly. The children would remain at home in St. Louis with their grandparents until Tammy had been given the all-clear to return in LA.

  The AFOAs had devised a color-coding system for their overall level of concern linked what had changed in each passenger’s life in the five years they’d been gone. Each passenger’s “EPL” (external personal landscape) had been investigated in detail to make sure the AFOAs knew what these people were returning to. Then the AFOAs had come up with processes through which they would try, as best they could, to ease the transition back into the world for those in the “danger colors.”

  In the AFOAs’ scheme, the color that indicated the highest level of concern for the mental well-being of a passenger was black. From lowest to highest, the colors went green, yellow, orange, blue, red, and then finally—black.

  At one point during the night before the passengers were released, in the privacy of one of the meeting rooms away from Hangar 19, a breakaway group including Tammy’s counselors had debated whether there should, in fact, be a higher category than black—for Tammy Hourigan alone.

  The AFOA representative, a Colorado native and a keen skier, suggested they give Tammy the color and category of the most challenging ski run in North America—the triple black diamond.

  By the time the group decided to call it a night around half past midnight, they had, tired and overworked, started calling Tammy the “T-black diamond.”

  The last order of business before they finished for the night was the situation regarding Tammy’s husband. They decided it was too risky to tell her, and that they would just have to be ready to deal with the fallout when it all went down.

  Brandon would not be coming to Vandenberg to pick her up because he was no longer her husband.

  He was now Tammy’s brother-in-law.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Less than 5% of the total number of passengers and crew had been tagged as category black. From the AFOA perspective, Tammy was in a league of her own, mainly due to her pregnancy and the other issues she was about to confront in a matter of moments.

  Sandra and Tim Erwin, one of three senior couples unlucky enough to board Flight 19 in Honolulu back in 2019, had been the next closest to receiving the T-black diamond label. And in that late-night meeting between the leadership group of the AFOA and her group of counselors the night before, Sandra Erwin was the next-most-discussed person after the quite pregnant Tammy Hourigan.

  Sandra Erwin had been a devoted mother, and in the last decade before the disappearance of Flight 19, a devoted grandmother. Mrs. Erwin was the type of person whose life almost entirely revolved around her children and grandchildren. She couldn’t go one day without speaking to her daughter; she would feel something was missing. Her son talked to her every week at the worst, and the twice-monthly Sunday family roast at Tim and Sandra’s house had remained intact for the better part of the ten years leading up to 2019.

  She would soon learn, after leaving Vandenberg that her children had continued the Sunday-night roast for two years after Flight 19 disappeared.

  And she would learn the reason those dinners had abruptly ended after two years, which was the same reason the AFOAs and counselors had nearly given her the T-black diamond tag along with Tammy Hourigan.

  Medical personnel were on-hand for when she and Tim walked through the DONR, secreted in various positions around the room where they would not arouse the Erwins’ suspicions.

  During the previous night’s meetings, the AFOAs and counselors realized that the three passengers they were most concerned about—Tammy Hourigan and the Erwins—would be released into 2024 within a few minutes of each other.

  Most of them wished they’d noticed that earlier. But they couldn’t change arrangements this late in the process without raising concerns. All passengers knew precisely when they would be leaving, having been given the time three days ago. Changing the plans at the last minute could be the precursor to further tragedy, and what the Erwins would soon learn would be hard enough to cope with as it was.

  “This is it, honey.” Sandra squeezed the hand of her husband of over 40 years. As those four decades had gone on, her grip had grown weaker, but Tim loved that little display of affection all the same. He looked into her eyes and winked before his legendary grin, the expression she loved more than any other, crossed his lips.

  The Erwins, along with the other senior passengers on Flight 19, had drawn strength from each other as the reality of their predicament began to take shape. They had whispered to each other many times, “At least we are still alive, and still have each other.”

  They were both excited about returning to their retired lives and to what they held dearest in them: their beautiful children and grandchildren.

  “I can’t wait to get home,” Tim whispered, as they received the signal from one of their group counselors that they would be walking through the door within seconds.

  The AFOAs agreed that they would tell the Erwins that their children had kept their home in Alameda just as it was five years earlier. They hoped that this good news would counterbalance the rest.

  The Erwins walked through DONR number three, the middle one. Tim let Sandra go first, and then as he entered, the door closed behind him.

  He scanned the room. Most people weren’t looking in his direction, but he felt as though they were watching him from the corners of their eyes. It unnerved him.

  Tim turned to his wife, who was in another world altogether.

  Sandra focused on one thing only: Sarah, her daughter.

  “Mom!” Sarah nearly squealed as she ran to Sandra and threw her arms around her. They both broke into tears as Tim put his arms around both of them. The counselors agreed that if recording devices had been allowed in the exit room during the process, this would have been one of the most iconic photographs of the passengers rejoining the outside world.

  When Tim took his arms from around his wife and daughter, the first ripple passed through his mind that let him know something was seriously amiss. He saw that Sarah who seemed to be hanging on to his wife more than the other way around. When he noticed Sandra whispering into Sarah’s ear, he began to feel panicked.

  Sarah was inconsolable.

  The way her body shuddered as she cried was unusual; Sarah typically had a perfect handle on her emotions.

  “What is it, my darling?” Tim heard Sandra ask, a few seconds later.

  Sarah took her head from her mother’s shoulder and made eye contact with one of the counselors standing only a few feet away. Tim sensed something terrible was coming.

  “Tim, Sandra,” the lead counselor said, as pleasantly as she could. “Maybe we should talk in one of these private rooms over here.”

  Sandra must have realized something was wrong. The other passengers had walked out of the exit room straight away. None of them had gone into the meeting rooms.

  “Has something happened to Ben?” Sandra muttered through short breaths, which were rapidly becoming shallower and more frequent.

  Sarah turned to Tim, and the look on her face spoke volumes.

  Sandra seemed to understand her husband and daughter’s silent communication, and her legs grew dangerously weak.

  “Where’s Ben, Sarah? Tell me, tell me!” Her mother was now screaming.

  From all directions, people started to mov
e toward the Erwin family.

  Sarah burst into tears at the sight of her mother’s quick descent into hysteria. She hadn’t even told them the news yet.

  Then Sandra placed her hand on her chest, and as she collapsed to the floor, she had her third full-blown heart attack. It would not be her last.

  Tim, struggling to keep his emotions in order while all this unfolded before his very eyes, turned to Sarah, who rushed to his side to console him.

  As two paramedics put Sandra on a stretcher, Sarah said the words Tim hoped he’d never hear in his lifetime.

  “Ben’s dead, Daddy.”

  He hugged her tight before she looked up into his eyes, and added a new level of heartache to her father’s anguish.

  “They all are.”

  Tim realized that she meant Ben and his entire family.

  He’d lost his son, his daughter-in-law, and his three beautiful grandchildren.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Get your fucking hands off me!”

  Melanie’s strained words were a mere whisper.

  Thin, bony hands were fixed tight around her throat, squeezing the life right out of her.

  Her vision contracted into a tunnel that was getting darker by the second.

  Melanie could feel the heat of the sidewalk through her clothes, despite being barely conscious.

  Due to her professional prowess, she had a reputation on multiple continents for having a hard head—metaphorically speaking. By not passing out when her pretty face hit the sidewalk, she proved it literally true as well.

  It would be a painfully long 58 seconds before anyone came to her aid.

  As her life drew to an abrupt end, she found a few seconds to reflect on how she’d ended up there.

  Did she now regret fucking Kevin Brewster?

  Some believe that in your last moments, your life flashes before your eyes—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

  The night with Kevin hadn’t been exactly memorable, though it did the job all the same, and Melanie had long mostly forgotten about it.

  Her husband had apparently not.

  His eyes were bulging out of his angry, ugly face. It took quite the effort to squeeze another person’s neck this hard. He was not well known for his physical strength.

  But he was known for his fast-moving mouth, which right then was going at full speed. He screamed at her through labored breaths, saying it and spraying it for good measure. Spittle hit Melanie’s face every few seconds.

  Under different circumstances, she would have told Charles she wanted the news, not the weather.

  Charles Lewinson made three fatal mistakes that sunny LA day in early February 2024.

  The first was letting his temper snap in two in America, where most adults could readily buy a gun.

  The second was confronting his wife that morning, in that particular limo.

  The third was punching the limo driver in the nose. Once they had pulled up at LAX, the driver had watched in the rearview mirror as the altercation between his passengers went from verbal to physical. It had all happened so quickly; he barely had time to put on the handbrake before the punches in the back started flying.

  He was not one to stand aside and watch a man smack a woman around. He leaped out of the driver’s door and then lunged through the back door, intending to grab Charles and pull him off his wife. But he was the victim of his own timing. Charles landed a lucky punch out of nowhere and sent the guy flying back out the door, where he met the curb with a dull thud.

  “You fucking junkie whore!” Charles squealed through laborious breaths.

  The chauffeur would later tell the police his pitch and tone reminded him of a teenage girl. A bit embarrassing, Charles.

  Melanie’s pupils were now almost small pinpricks in balls of white.

  Charles continued his tirade.

  “He was a fucking intern, nearly eight years younger than you, you bloody slut!”

  His voice was so high pitched, like a car alarm, that it cleared the fog from the driver’s head.

  He looked up from the sidewalk and calmly surveyed the scene in front of him.

  A man was trying to kill a defenseless woman.

  The driver quickly brought himself to his feet.

  His destination was not the two people only a few meters away, but the glove box of his limo.

  He had a gun license, and for security purposes, there was a pistol securely locked in the front compartment of each of the company’s cars.

  He’d never used the sleek piece of metal in a situation like this, only practiced with it at the range.

  The irony of this moment was indeed intriguing.

  In his hometown of Sydney, Charles Lewinson would later be labeled a manwhore. It came out eventually that while they were married, he had slept with far more women than his wife had men: about 17, not including prostitutes, which added another 12 to the count.

  Forget Chalew Holdings—he should have run Hypocrisy.com.

  In spite of Melanie’s having been gone for five years, presumed dead, Charles had never bothered to change his will, which Melanie Lewinson was still very much a part of.

  As the bullet from the chauffeur’s gun entered the right side of Charles’s skull, killing him instantly, the now dead millionaire never got to think about what his death—precipitated by his foolish, petty rage—had just given his widow.

  The ultimate homecoming present.

  Melanie Lewinson would walk away from that terrible day with a dizzying US$293.5 million in cold, hard cash.

  Three days after this windfall had been signed over to Melanie, the mortgage on the chauffeur’s house, in Fred Drive, Cypress, would mysteriously get wiped out.

  Who said destiny was a bitch?

  Not for Melanie Lewinson.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Thirty-one days later.

  It was 5.30am in Los Angeles. I was tossing and turning in my bed, on hotel sheets so full of starch I might as well have been sleeping under a hundred stapled-together pieces of copy paper. It had been a balmy evening in the City of Angels, and I was sweating like a pig.

  The two bottles of tequila I’d shared with a couple of the “survivors” of our flight several hours before may have contributed to my enormous hangover.

  Where the hell was the aspirin when I needed it? My throat was dry and hoarse. I don’t think I’d slept a full night since we were released from Vandenberg. I’d hoped the tequila would help me sleep better. It didn’t.

  Releasing everyone took four days all up, from when the first passenger, Emily Collins, left the desert air-force base, until the very last person—me, funnily enough. From one of the many AFOA debriefings I attended, I had known the crew would be the last to leave.

  Since I left the dusty roads of Vandenberg, I’d been holed up at the Beverley Wiltshire, though I wouldn’t be staying much longer. As part of the deal to sell my story to CNN, which I would sign in a couple of days, I would be moving to one of the private bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  Apparently, our billionaire passenger, Michael E. Darcy, had been staying in one of those same exclusive bungalows since leaving the glorious confines of Hangar 19. It’s a small world. I looked forward to bumping into him and sharing Flight 19 stories … not. Rumor had it he was an asshole, though I didn’t know this from personal experience. I tried not to believe the avalanche of stories to that effect; eventually, I’d find out for myself.

  Speaking of finances, I was, at that moment, flat broke. My accommodation for the past month was getting covered by one of my best friends. Being an internationally successful Australian music producer, Dirk was not short of a coin. I told him I’d accept his offer to pay my hotel bill until I worked out what I was going to do, but on the proviso that I’d pay him back.

  He’d huffed and waved his hand as if to say, “No worries, mate,” with not the slightest interest in taking my money.

  What I’d worn on the A380 when I boarded it in Sydney, way bac
k in 2019, was now all I owned. Apart from a small box of mementos my mother had taken from my apartment in the weeks after our plane had pulled the ultimate disappearing act, I had absolutely nothing else left.

  I’d had money: a superannuation fund and a large chunk of equity in the apartment I lived in. Damn it; I’d been about four years from owning it outright. It all eventually ended up in my mother’s bank account.

  And within 23 months of her getting the money, practically all of it ended up on the gaming tables of Sydney’s casinos. Mum had always had a gambling problem, but in the years before our plane’s disappearance, I thought we’d sorted it out.

  Over the phone some time ago, when I learned how Mum had squandered my life savings, my uncle Eddie argued, in her defense, that we all deal with loss and grief in a multitude of different ways.

  I couldn’t argue with that logic, and told him I agreed, but that I wished she’d done it on someone else’s dime, so to speak, not mine.

  And for God’s sake, Mum, pawning my record collection was the last straw. Some of the records were so rare I’d once considered putting them in a safe-deposit box. In the end, I built a killer hiding place for them in my apartment. Not even the forensic investigators from CSI would have found my secret hiding spot for my $50,000 record collection.

  But she had, and she’d sold them for far less than their actual worth.

  All for her addiction.

  Gambling ruins people’s lives, and it eventually destroyed hers. Then it flowed on to ruining mine.

  When the money from my estate was all but gone, Mum ran out of things to do. And without her only son helping her keep her life in some sort of order, she killed herself. Her matter-of-fact suicide note stated in a couple of sentences that she would join her beloved boy on the other side of the Pearly Gates in heaven. She thought she’d be better off. I wondered what her reaction had been (if you believe in all that afterlife stuff) when she walked through those gates to find I wasn’t there.