Chapter 2 - Something Wrong in the Cockpit
When the cockpit door swung open, Dana understood immediately that this was worse than the captain's calm announcement had let on. Captain Marcus Reyes sat rigid in the left seat, both hands locked on the controls, fighting to keep the aircraft level, while the first officer slumped beside him, unconscious, an oxygen mask strapped over his slack face.
Reyes glanced at her — plain cardigan, travel clothes, a woman who looked nothing like what he'd pictured when someone said "fighter pilot" — and his uncertainty was written all over his face before he'd said a single word.
"You've got military flight experience?"
"Yes."
"What aircraft?"
"F-16 Falcons."
"When's the last time you flew?"
"About eighteen months ago."
Something in his expression flickered — he'd clearly been hoping for someone more current. But before either of them could say anything else, the aircraft began shuddering in a strange, repeating rhythm, and Dana's whole body went still, listening.
It wasn't turbulence. Turbulence was chaotic, random, unpredictable. This had a pattern to it — too regular, too mechanical, almost like the plane itself was generating the motion from somewhere deep inside its own systems.
She stepped closer to the instrument panel and studied the readouts. Years in fighter cockpits had taught her exactly how to tell the difference between bad weather and a system fighting itself, and within seconds she suspected Reyes might be making things worse — instinctively wrestling the controls in a fight the aircraft's computer was already winning.
"How long has the yoke been doing that?"
"About ten minutes."
"Walk me through exactly what happened. From the start."
Reyes explained it fast, his voice tight — the autopilot had disconnected without warning, and almost immediately the flight-control computer began throwing out contradictory alerts. Around the same time, his first officer had complained his arm felt numb, then simply gone limp in his seat, leaving Reyes alone up front while the aircraft grew harder and harder to hold steady.
"Did you two eat or drink anything from the same source before he got sick?"
"No — he brought his own coffee from the terminal. And nobody in the cabin's reporting anything like this."
The plane lurched right again, and Reyes threw his weight into correcting it. Dana watched the instruments for two full seconds before she understood something that made her stomach drop.
The system was answering back against him.
"Don't fight it."
"I have to stop the bank—"
"You're fighting corrupted computer input, not the airplane. The system's correcting against whatever you give it."
She told him, fast and precise, to isolate one of the secondary flight-control channels. He hesitated for exactly one second — one second too long, given what was happening — then did it anyway, out of options. The shuddering stopped almost instantly.
"You were right."
The relief was real, but it was small, and it didn't last. There was still a storm ahead, fuel dropping steadily, and an unconscious first officer with no clear explanation for what had put him there. Dana couldn't shake the timing of it either — his collapse and the aircraft's failures, arriving within minutes of each other, felt like too clean a coincidence to actually be one.
A passenger who'd identified himself as a doctor came through the cockpit door a few minutes later, having just finished examining the first officer in the back. Whatever he'd found had visibly rattled him.
"Captain, I don't think this is a normal medical event."
"What are you telling me?"
"His symptoms line up with chemical poisoning."
Dana's eyes swept the cockpit immediately, and she noticed what wasn't there. The first officer's coffee thermos — the one Reyes remembered seeing earlier that evening — was simply gone. The flight attendant confirmed it had been sitting right there before everything went wrong.
Every instinct Dana had went sharp at once. A pilot goes down after drinking from a container that then vanishes, at almost the exact moment the aircraft's systems start behaving like something's fighting them from the inside.
"Lock the cockpit door."
Reyes looked at her, understanding dawning slowly, unwillingly. "You think this was done on purpose?"
"I think somebody wanted your first officer out of this cockpit. And they got what they wanted."
As they set up for an emergency diversion into northern Portugal, another warning lit up — falling hydraulic pressure on the right main landing gear. It meant they now had to plan for the very real possibility that the gear might not lock into place on landing.
Then someone outside started punching the cockpit access code into the keypad.
Reyes checked the camera feed and recognized the man immediately — Victor Kessler, the airline's Director of Flight Operations, traveling up front in first class. Moments later the lead flight attendant called through, warning them not to open the door. Kessler was demanding access, insisting his title entitled him to be inside during an emergency of this scale.
Dana's suspicion deepened further when the doctor came back holding a small plastic cap he'd found wedged beneath the unconscious first officer's seat — the kind that belonged to a vial, not a coffee thermos. Between the missing container, the possible poisoning, the failing systems, and now Kessler hammering at the door, this had stopped looking like a string of unrelated bad luck.
There wasn't time to chase any of it down. The storm was already closing in around the diversion airport. When Reyes lowered the landing gear, only two of the three green confirmation lights came on. The right main gear gave them nothing — no confirmation it had locked at all.
"If that gear folds on touchdown, we could go off the runway."
Dana strapped herself into the first officer's seat and got ready to help however she could. She'd never landed this type of commercial aircraft in her life. But her training had spent years teaching her exactly what to do when a plane stopped behaving the way it was supposed to.
"I'll back you up on the controls."
"You've never flown this airliner."
"No. But I know how to keep a plane straight when its systems start lying to you."
Reyes brought the jet down through driving rain and a hard crosswind while Dana rode the secondary controls beside him. On touchdown, the aircraft leaned hard toward the uncertain right gear — for one terrible second it felt like it might go — and then a heavy, grinding jolt confirmed the gear had finally locked into place after all.
The plane rolled to a stop, and the whole cabin seemed to exhale at once. For nearly three hundred passengers, it was over.
For Dana, it wasn't. Not even close.
A first officer had almost certainly been poisoned. His thermos had vanished into thin air. The aircraft had suffered control failures and a hydraulic fault within minutes of each other. And a senior airline executive had spent the entire emergency trying to force his way into the one room he had no business being in.
May you like
Flight 738 had made it to the ground safely.
Now Dana needed to find out exactly who had tried to make sure it didn't.
