Chapter 3 - The Man Who Wanted Into the Cockpit
Once Flight 738 rolled to a stop, emergency vehicles swarmed the tarmac and medical crews boarded within minutes to get to the unconscious first officer. Dana expected the first wave of questions to focus on his condition and the mechanical failures. Instead, Victor Kessler seemed far more interested in what had happened behind the cockpit door.
He approached the moment he was allowed near them, introducing himself with the easy confidence of a man used to having his title do the talking for him. His first real question wasn't about the crew, or the passengers, or the emergency at all.
"You let an unqualified passenger sit in the first officer's seat?"
Reyes's jaw tightened. "She helped save this aircraft."
Kessler brushed past that and turned his attention to Dana instead, pressing her on her qualifications, pointing out — accurately, technically — that flying an F-16 years ago didn't authorize her to touch the controls of a commercial jet. What struck Dana wasn't the hostility. It was what he didn't ask. Not once did he ask how the first officer was doing. Not once did he seem even slightly surprised when Reyes mentioned poisoning.
That absence bothered her more than anything he actually said.
While investigators secured the cockpit, the doctor confirmed the first officer's condition was serious but stable, with early findings pointing toward exposure to some kind of chemical agent. The plastic cap found under his seat was bagged and sent for testing.
Kessler tried immediately to wave it off. "You're building a conspiracy theory out of a piece of plastic."
Dana looked at him steadily. "Nobody said conspiracy."
He paused, just a beat too long, and Reyes caught Dana's eye across the tarmac. Kessler had just defended himself against an accusation no one had actually made.
Investigators moved on to the aircraft's technical systems next. Early diagnostic pulls showed the same secondary flight-control channel Dana had isolated mid-flight had been throwing abnormal commands in the minutes before the autopilot disconnected — and the hydraulic fault on the landing gear didn't match the profile of ordinary wear either.
Dana listened as a technician explained that confirming sabotage would take a full inspection. She didn't claim it outright — there wasn't enough yet to say it with certainty — but the pattern was getting harder and harder to write off as bad luck.
Then a flight attendant found Reyes with another update.
The missing thermos had turned up.
Not in the cockpit. A ground crew member had found it stashed in a service compartment near the forward galley, buried behind stacked catering containers — a location the unconscious first officer couldn't possibly have reached on his own after he'd collapsed.
"Who has access to that compartment?"
"Cabin crew, catering staff, certain airline personnel."
Kessler cut in before the attendant could finish. "That proves nothing. Somebody probably moved it in the chaos."
Dana turned to look at him fully. "Then whoever moved it can explain why."
His jaw tightened visibly.
Airport police asked him to stay available for questioning, and that request seemed to genuinely offend him. He insisted he needed to contact airline headquarters immediately and warned, more than once, that detaining a senior executive on nothing but speculation would create serious legal exposure for everyone involved.
Reyes finally reached the end of his patience. "One of my pilots is unconscious. Someone hid his coffee. My aircraft had multiple failures in the space of ten minutes. Your title isn't the priority right now, Mr. Kessler."
Kessler didn't have a response to that.
While technicians kept working the aircraft, Dana walked a short distance away and tried to steady herself against the memories crowding back in. Eighteen months earlier, the accident that had ended her military career had also started with a malfunction — one investigators eventually blamed entirely on equipment failure.
At least, that's what the official report had said.
What was happening aboard Flight 738 felt disturbingly, uncomfortably familiar.
She asked one of the investigators if she could see the preliminary fault sequence from the flight-control computer. He turned her down at first — technically, she was just a passenger — until Reyes stepped in and pointed out that she'd been the one to recognize the corrupted control behavior before anyone else on board had a clue what was happening.
When Dana finally got the fault codes on screen, her stomach dropped straight through the floor.
She knew that sequence.
The exact same unusual combination of control errors had shown up during her final Air Force mission eighteen months ago, right before another pilot lost control of his aircraft entirely.
That accident had killed Major Ethan Cross — her closest friend, her wingman, the person she'd trusted more than anyone in the sky.
She'd spent eighteen months believing she'd failed him.
Standing on that tarmac with the diagnostic report shaking slightly in her hands, Dana let herself consider, for the first time, a possibility she had never once allowed herself to think.
Ethan's death might not have been an accident at all.
Before she could say a word, an airport officer walked up with another update. Investigators had pulled security footage from the departure gate in Boston and found someone entering the cockpit before passengers had even started boarding.
Dana turned and looked straight at Kessler.
The officer followed her gaze.
May you like
"It was him."
Victor Kessler had been inside the cockpit of Flight 738 before the plane ever left the ground.
