From the Publisher

The passengers of Meridian Flight 6 - delayed for hours and mistreated by rude and inept airline personnel - have been pushed to the edge. When Captain Phil Knight makes a forced emergency landing in war-torn Nigeria, abandoning his co-pilot to certain death, violence erupts inside the airplane as the enraged passengers attempt the first-ever commercial airline mutiny.

But what they don't know could kill them: The unscheduled loss of radio contact has led NATO and the CIA to believe they have been hijacked by terrorists and must be carrying a deadly chemical weapon into the heart of Western Europe. In the pressurized last moments as Flight 6 approaches, NATO scrambles to uncover the truth about the plane's cargo, while Navy pilots bring the 747 into their gun sights and the lives of innocent passengers hang in the balance.

Associated Press

Fast moving...Nance knows how to keep a plot zipping along.

Good Morning America

Nance...knows the airlines from the inside.

Publishers Weekly

It's unclear why anyone who's read a Nance novel is willing to board an airplane: Nance (Headwind, etc.), a veteran pilot, specializes in the scary side of flying, and his latest thriller delivers the suspense his fans want, even as its overcomplicated plot keeps it from reaching full altitude. Meridian Airlines is a major carrier plagued by greedy management and hostile employees; Brian Logan is a surgeon whose wife hemorrhaged to death aboard a Meridian flight, for which he blames the airline. As Logan prepares to fly to South Africa on Meridian, the only airline available U.S. government officials are growing concerned about the possibility of terrorists planning to use an airplane as a weapon escaping detection by flying under the guise of, say, an airplane diverted by mechanical troubles. Logan proceeds on Meridian toward South Africa, while the plane's sullen crew alienates passengers right and left; the pilot, fearing an engine fire, lands in a war zone in Nigeria, where the co-pilot is shot and left for dead. The plane takes off again, returning to Europe for lack of fuel, but a Nigerian warlord claims he has forced the passengers off the plane to hold them for ransom. To folks in D.C., it looks as if a passengerless plane is heading to a major European city, with evil intent; meanwhile, on the plane, the passengers actually are rioting. Nance's prose is serviceable, as are his characters; both lack subtlety, but do the job of spurring the plot to ever higher excitement. The novel's flurry of happy endings, however, will satisfy only the most Panglossian reader. (May) Forecast: The big question: post-September 11, will readers buy a thriller involving the threat of airplanes hijacked by terrorists? Probably, but don't be surprised if Nance sees a (perhaps one-time) dip in his sales. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Set in the near future with the specter of terrorism still looming, aviation thriller writer Nance's book explores the extreme possibilities of air rage and how a series of coincidences, circumstances, and apparent conspiratorial events can be perceived as a real terrorist plot. Both the passengers and crew of Meridian Flight Six are all pushed into their own whorls of anger by mistreatment and slights at all levels as the flight moves from Chicago to London and then toward Cape Town, South Africa. The worst villains in the piece are clear for the most part, but as emotions boil over, the culpability for mistakes by all the key players head the plane toward tragedy onboard and off. Nance makes the story engaging and believable, with two exceptions-an incomplete subplot with an infant and an obvious method of communication ignored when all else fails. Recommended, but it won't make you want to fly!-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Near-miss thriller about a commercial airliner threatened with hijacking-by all of its passengers. Meridian Airlines Flight 6-to London, then Capetown-has a crew remarkable for its special blend of ineptitude and mean-spiritedness. Its captain, Phil Knight, is a boob. Its chief flight attendant, Judy Jackson, is an authentic Messalina. Between them they succeed in so enraging 320 passengers that, collectively, they reach the edge of the first mutiny in commercial airlines history. Also on board this Bounty-like 747 is Dr. Brian Logan, the stuff of powder kegs. He blames Meridian Airlines for the death of his beloved wife and unborn child. Brian Logan, the powder keg, and Judy Jackson, the igniter, clash explosively almost at once. Punchable Judy, whose regard for her passengers is minuscule, and whose approach to maintaining order is Hitlerian, has already accomplished the inevitable: every last Flight 6 passenger wants her off the plane, with or without a chute. At this point, pilot Knight gets a reading that seems to indicate engine trouble. His much smarter copilot attempts to allay hysteria: the reading is at fault, not the engine, he insists. Panicked way beyond the reach of reason, Knight makes an emergency landing in Nigeria in the middle of a firefight. The copilot is wounded and left behind. By now NATO, the CIA, and other alphabet groups have become convinced that dread things are happening aboard Flight 6-and that it carries a weapon of some kind aimed at a European capitol. Meanwhile, of course, Flight 6's radio has gone dead. So, will the US Navy have to shoot down Flight 6, sacrificing hundreds of lives for the sake of thousands? A nail-biter if only. . . . If only aviationexpert Jance (Headwind, 2001, etc.) weren't quite so transparently manipulative. A less bizarre Judy, for instance, might have kick-started that old willing suspension of disbelief.

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FAA AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL TOWER
CHICAGO O'HARE AIRPORT, ILLINOIS
11:30 A.M. CDT

"This is nuts!"

Shift Supervisor Jake Kostowitz shook his head in pure exasperation as he muttered vague epithets to himself. The day was going to hell already.

Again he felt the deep craving for a cigarette, the fallout of quitting after twenty years. The FAA's no-smoking policy inside control towers was unshakable, and he still felt a pang of resentment every time the urge became too strong to bat down without a surrogate stick of gum.

He hated gum. But he dug into his right pants pocket anyway now to find some.

All around him-spread out for three hundred sixty degrees and some two hundred feet below the new, glassed-in, air-conditioned O'Hare FAA control tower-the gridlock of overheated, delayed airliners inched forward along crowded taxiways past jammed intersections, baked by the relentless glare of the summer sun.

What was that figure he'd heard? Jake mused. Was it fifty, or sixty flights that were scheduled to depart O'Hare at precisely the same time every day? Whatever the figure, at least the system was fully recovered from the nationwide passenger panic following the loss of the World Trade Center. Jake shook his head slightly, a gesture no one else noticed. Never did he ever want to see his airport looking like a ghost town again, but the endless flow of airliners was now back to ridiculous, and the airlines refused to change it.

The aroma of hot cinnamon reached his nose, and Jake turned toward the stairwell to see one of his off-duty controllers munching on a huge roll and grinning. Jake shook his head in mock disapproval. The controller was at least eighty pounds overweight and a walking heart attack. He climbed the last few steps licking his fingers and stood beside Jake, surveying the intense action in the tower cab.

"Well, you think they'll do it, boss?"

Jake turned to glance at him, trying to read his meaning. "Sorry?"

"That's a good word for them. Sorry. I'm talking about America's most dysfunctional airline. Dear old Meridian Air, or as a pilot friend of mine who works there calls 'em: 'Comedian Air, where service is a joke.'"

Jake shook his head. "I sure hope they don't walk. They've got twenty-six percent of this market now. That's a lot of delayed passengers."

"How would they know the difference?" The overweight controller laughed. "Besides, that would also mean twenty-six percent fewer flights for us to sort out."

Jake chuckled and shook his head. "Yeah, right. As if United and American wouldn't pick up the slack. We'd be just as stressed." Jake pointed to the half-eaten sweet roll. "Any more of those in the break room?"

"Yeah. I bought a box. Have at 'em," the man said, watching Jake slip past him down the stairway.

A TV was droning away in the corner of the break room as Jake swung through the door and headed for the box of Cinnabons, the mention of air traffic control catching his attention.

The set had been tuned to C-Span, and a congressional hearing was in progress. Jake recalled reading something about it the day before. Some congressman had seized on the latest air rage incidents to justify a hearing.

Another useless exercise in political grandstanding, Jake thought, his curiosity piqued by the sight of an Air Force officer sitting alone at the witness table in a hearing about the civilian airline industry. The officer wore the silver eagle emblem of a colonel.

"Mr. Chairman," the senior officer was saying, "every day we have hundreds, if not thousands, of enraged passengers flying this airline system and just barely containing their fury. While excess liquor consumption often makes things worse, the underlying causes are a combination of massive overcrowding and poor passenger treatment, not enhanced security procedures."

A gallery of still photographers was sitting on the floor in front of the witness table, and the click-whirr of their constant shooting formed a strange audible backdrop to the televised image.

"So how do we fix it, Colonel? " the chairman was asking. "Is your task force ready with recommendations?"

Jake absently picked out an outrageously caloric Cinnabon and began munching it as he watched. There was a small sign on the witness table, and it identified the officer as U.S. Air Force Colonel David Byrd of the FAA.

Ah! An Air Force liaison officer, Jake thought. He had fond memories of working with a Navy liaison captain assigned to air traffic control several years back.

"No, sir," Colonel Byrd was saying. "We're not ready to issue the final report as yet, but I can tell you this from my own research: Tougher criminal laws won't do it, because people don't plan to get angry and out of control. In other words, we can't adequately change human nature by criminalizing it, and these incidents reflect the predictable responses of humans under great stress. You pack overheated people into overcrowded airports and airplanes and treat them like dirt, lie to them, manipulate them, and price-gouge them, and the numbers of rage incidents are, by definition, going to increase. Mr. Chairman, this is a ticking bomb."

The committee chairman raised his gavel to call for a recess and the next witness and Jake headed toward the stairway to climb back to the tower cab, the muffled roar from a departing 727 catching his attention as he stepped back on the top step. He tracked the departing jetliner for a few seconds, wondering how long that particular crew had had to wait at the end of the runway.

It was, indeed, a ticking bomb, Jake thought, because the delays and the crowding were worsening all the time, and it was already a typical day: there would be no on-time takeoffs the rest of the afternoon, yet the airlines would keep on shoving their jam-packed airplanes back from the gates to join the hour-long taxi delays while recording each push-back as an "on-time" departure. Only when the air traffic control system ordered them to stay at the gate would they do so, and even then, too often the airplanes were shoved out of the gate to make room for an inbound flight. The "penalty box"-as the ramp designated for waiting airliners was called-was usually full these days, and the airlines usually knew precisely which flights would be late. The passengers, of course, weren't supposed to know.

What a scam! And we get blamed. It's always the FAA's fault.

The same thing happened every day with depressing predictability, and today the rapid approach of a line of heavy thunderstorms now beating up Springfield, Illinois, to the west was poised to make the daily air traffic snarl even worse. When the storm finally moved over O'Hare, everything would come to a halt and stay that way until it passed.

Jake looked to the west, catching the glint of lightning a hundred miles out. Hanging in the western sky between the black thunderstorms and O'Hare was a seemingly endless procession of expensive aluminum moving steadily toward the airport with landing lights sparkling against the dark clouds beyond. Their pilots, Jake knew, were struggling to comply with the precise airspeeds ordered by the harried men and women of Chicago Approach Control, located several floors below the quiet tower cab in a windowless room. Airliners as big as office buildings traveling at two hundred miles per hour were reduced to electronic blips on radar screens monitored by air traffic controllers who snapped off continual speed changes as they tried to keep the minimum legal distance between them.

"American Seventy-five, slow to one forty. You're overrunning the Eagle flight ahead. United Three Twenty-six, I said maintain one eighty, sir."

Pilots who flew too fast, or slowed too late, ended up in pilot hell: vectored around for a half hour by unforgiving controllers who would eventually have to squeeze them back into the traffic flow for another try at landing-while the passengers checked their watches and fumed. On the ground, heat undulated in great waves from the blazing-hot metallic skin of the queues of idling Boeing and Airbus products interlaced with smaller regional jets and turboprops to form billion-dollar waiting lines stretching toward the horizon of O'Hare's real estate.

Jake caught the eye of one of his controllers across the room and rolled his eyes in shared agony. The man smiled and nodded.

The background din of strained pilot voices always grated on Jake's nerves, especially when aircrews became testy in response to the staccato instructions of his ground controllers, who usually talked about as fast as human speech allowed.

"All right, United Two Thirteen, O'Hare Ground, I SEE you, and I told you to hold your position. Meridian One One Eight, stop it right there, give way to the Eagle ATR Seventy-two on your right. Lufthansa Twelve, speed it up, sir, I need you out of that alley NOW. Delta Two Seventeen, are you on the frequency?"

"Ah.......Delta Two Seventeen is with you."

"Roger, Delta, follow the Meridian Triple-Seven on your left. Air France Twelve, change to tower frequency and wait for him to call YOU."

Diane Jensen, Jake's favorite controller for mostly sexist reasons, appeared at his side from the break room below, adjusting her headset as she prepared to pick up the rhythm and take over for one of the male controllers. She ruffled her short-cropped, honey blond hair and smiled at him. "And now is the season of their discontent," she intoned with mock severity.

"Ours, too," he replied. "Herndon's slowing the inbounds already," he said, his eyes on the distant traffic as he invoked the name of the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center near D.C., "and we're running out of ramp space."

"And I've got a short-tempered brother in that mess down there trying to get to Dallas. I just dropped him off. You'd think he was preparing for battle."

"He was," Jake remarked.

"I suggested Amtrak," she said, moving forward to plug in next to the man she was preparing to relieve. "But he wouldn't listen."

The tie-line from Approach Control was ringing again, and as Jake reached for the receiver, his eyes caught a bright glint of sunlight from a distant car in the clogged traffic outside. He was glad he didn't have to be down there among all those flaring tempers.

Very glad.

RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Colonel David Byrd picked up the papers he'd spread out on the witness table and shoved them in his briefcase before turning to take the outstretched hand of Julian Best, chief of the Aviation Subcommittee staff.

"Nicely done, Colonel," Best said, a grin creasing his craggy features.

"Thanks," David Byrd replied as the insistent chirping of a cell phone began somewhere in the room.

Colonel Byrd tapped the surface of his briefcase. "By the way, Julian, I'm not exaggerating," he said, a dead-serious expression on his angular face. "While we've pretty much solved the terrorist threats, the air rage threat is becoming critical. The summer's just beginning, and this isn't FAA posturing."

Best was smiling. "I know you're not blowing smoke, Colonel. I know your record. Anyone who commanded a special ops squadron, has a row of ribbons that impressive, and handled the things you've handled is too tough to send to Capitol Hill on a B.S. mission."

The chirp of a cell phone interrupted them and Byrd shrugged as he gestured to the phone.

"Sorry."

"No problem, Colonel. I'll be in touch," Julian said as he turned to go.

Byrd opened the phone and turned toward the nearest wall to concentrate on the call, momentarily puzzled by angry words on the other end.

"This is Lieutenant General Overmeyer, Colonel. What in holy hell do you think you're doing testifying to Congress without my approval or a Pentagon handler? I just saw your ugly mug on television in uniform! Who gave you authority to go on C-Span in uniform and make policy statements?"

Colonel Byrd pulled up a mental image of General Overmeyer, the Air Force deputy chief of staff, a man known to most of his subordinates as "General Overreactor." The general was powerful and dangerous to the career of any officer who crossed him. Even a full colonel.

"General," the colonel began, "you put me directly under the command of the FAA administrator, and I was testifying at her direction."

"Byrd, you're not there to be a civilian lapdog to be trotted out at the administrator's discretion to chase pet issues up a tree anytime it pleases her."

"General, I take offense at that. I'm hardly a lapdog, I......"

"I want you in my office in thirty minutes, Byrd. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir. If you insist."

"Apparently I just did. That's a goddamned order. Oh. In case you've forgotten your roots, Colonel, do you need any help finding it? The Pentagon, I mean? It's a big structure near Reagan National."

"General, sarcasm isn't necessary."

"GET YOUR ASS IN HERE!"

The general hung up, leaving David Byrd off-balance, as he calculated the fastest way across the Potomac.

from Turbulence by John J. Nance, Copyright © 2002, The Putnam Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

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TURBULENCE

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By John J. Nance

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

Copyright © 2002 John J. Nance.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0399148477

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Chapter One

FAA AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL TOWER
CHICAGO O'HARE AIRPORT, ILLINOIS
11:30 A.M. CDT

"This is nuts!"

    Shift Supervisor Jake Kostowitz shook his head in pure exasperation as he muttered vague epithets to himself. The day was going to hell already.

    Again he felt the deep craving for a cigarette, the fallout of quitting after twenty years. The FAA's no-smoking policy inside control towers was unshakable, and he still felt a pang of resentment every time the urge became too strong to bat down without a surrogate stick of gum.

    He hated gum. But he dug into his right pants pocket anyway now to find some.

    All around him—spread out for three hundred sixty degrees and some two hundred feet below the new, glassed-in, air-conditioned O'Hare FAA control tower—the gridlock of overheated, delayed airliners inched forward along crowded taxiways past jammed intersections, baked by the relentless glare of the summer sun.

    What was that figure he'd heard? Jake mused. Was it fifty, or sixty flights that were scheduled to depart O'Hare at precisely the same time every day? Whatever the figure, at least the system was fully recovered from the nationwide passenger panic following the loss of the World Trade Center. Jake shook his head slightly, a gesture no one else noticed. Never did he ever want to see his airport looking like a ghost town again, but the endless flow of airliners was now back to ridiculous, and the airlines refused to change it.

    The aroma of hot cinnamon reached his nose, and Jake turned toward the stairwell to see one of his off-duty controllers munching on a huge roll and grinning. Jake shook his head in mock disapproval. The controller was at least eighty pounds overweight and a walking heart attack. He climbed the last few steps licking his fingers and stood beside Jake, surveying the intense action in the tower cab.

    "Well, you think they'll do it, boss?"

    Jake turned to glance at him, trying to read his meaning. "Sorry?"

    "That's a good word for them. Sorry. I'm talking about America's most dysfunctional airline. Dear old Meridian Air, or as a pilot friend of mine who works there calls 'em: ‘Comedian Air, where service is a joke.’"

    Jake shook his head. "I sure hope they don't walk. They've got twenty-six percent of this market now. That's a lot of delayed passengers."

    "How would they know the difference?" The overweight controller laughed. "Besides, that would also mean twenty-six percent fewer flights for us to sort out."

    Jake chuckled and shook his head. "Yeah, right. As if United and American wouldn't pick up the slack. We'd be just as stressed." Jake pointed to the half-eaten sweet roll. "Any more of those in the break room?"

    "Yeah. I bought a box. Have at 'em" the man said, watching Jake slip past him down the stairway.

    A TV was droning away in the corner of the break room as Jake swung through the door and headed for the box of Cinnabons, the mention of air traffic control catching his attention.

    The set had been tuned to C-Span, and a congressional hearing was in progress. Jake recalled reading something about it the day before. Some congressman had seized on the latest air rage incidents to justify a hearing.

    Another useless exercise in political grandstanding, Jake thought, his curiosity piqued by the sight of an Air Force officer sitting alone at the witness table in a hearing about the civilian airline industry. The officer wore the silver eagle emblem of a colonel.

    "Mr. Chairman," the senior officer was saying, "every day we have hundreds, if not thousands, of enraged passengers flying this airline system and just barely containing their fury. While excess liquor consumption often makes things worse, the underlying causes are a combination of massive overcrowding and poor passenger treatment, not enhanced security procedures."

    A gallery of still photographers was sitting on the floor in front of the witness table, and the click-whirr of their constant shooting formed a strange audible backdrop to the televised image.

    "So how do we fix it, Colonel?" the chairman was asking. "Is your task force ready with recommendations?"

    Jake absently picked out an outrageously caloric Cinnabon and began munching it as he watched. There was a small sign on the witness table, and it identified the officer as U.S. Air Force Colonel David Byrd of the FAA.

    Ah! An Air Force liaison officer, Jake thought. He had fond memories of working with a Navy liaison captain assigned to air traffic control several years back.

    "No, sir," Colonel Byrd was saying. "We're not ready to issue the final report as yet, but I can tell you this from my own research: Tougher criminal laws won't do it, because people don't plan to get angry and out of control. In other words, we can't adequately change human nature by criminalizing it, and these incidents reflect the predictable responses of humans under great stress. You pack overheated people into overcrowded airports and airplanes and treat them like dirt, lie to them, manipulate them, and price-gouge them, and the numbers of rage incidents are, by definition, going to increase. Mr. Chairman, this is a ticking bomb."

    The committee chairman raised his gavel to call for a recess and the next witness and Jake headed toward the stairway to climb back to the tower cab, the muffled roar from a departing 727 catching his attention as he stepped back on the top step. He tracked the departing jetliner for a few seconds, wondering how long that particular crew had had to wait at the end of the runway.

    It was, indeed, a ticking bomb, Jake thought, because the delays and the crowding were worsening all the time, and it was already a typical day: there would be no on-time takeoffs the rest of the afternoon, yet the airlines would keep on shoving their jam-packed airplanes back from the gates to join the hour-long taxi delays while recording each push-back as an "on-time" departure. Only when the air traffic control system ordered them to stay at the gate would they do so, and even then, too often the airplanes were shoved out of the gate to make room for an inbound flight. The "penalty box"—as the ramp designated for waiting airliners was called—was usually full these days, and the airlines usually knew precisely which flights would be late. The passengers, of course, weren't supposed to know.

    What a scam! And we get blamed. It's always the FAA's fault.

    The same thing happened every day with depressing predictability, and today the rapid approach of a line of heavy thunderstorms now beating up Springfield, Illinois, to the west was poised to make the daily air traffic snarl even worse. When the storm finally moved over O'Hare, everything would come to a halt and stay that way until it passed.

    Jake looked to the west, catching the glint of lightning a hundred miles out. Hanging in the western sky between the black thunderstorms and O'Hare was a seemingly endless procession of expensive aluminum moving steadily toward the airport with landing lights sparkling against the dark clouds beyond. Their pilots, Jake knew, were struggling to comply with the precise airspeeds ordered by the harried men and women of Chicago Approach Control, located several floors below the quiet tower cab in a windowless room. Airliners as big as office buildings traveling at two hundred miles per hour were reduced to electronic blips on radar screens monitored by air traffic controllers who snapped off continual speed changes as they tried to keep the minimum legal distance between them.

    "American Seventy-five, slow to one forty. You're overrunning the Eagle flight ahead. United Three Twenty-six, I said maintain one eighty, sir."

    Pilots who flew too fast, or slowed too late, ended up in pilot hell: vectored around for a half hour by unforgiving controllers who would eventually have to squeeze them back into the traffic flow for another try at landing—while the passengers checked their watches and fumed. On the ground, heat undulated in great waves from the blazing-hot metallic skin of the queues of idling Boeing and Airbus products interlaced with smaller regional jets and turboprops to form billion-dollar waiting lines stretching toward the horizon of O'Hare's real estate.

    Jake caught the eye of one of his controllers across the room and rolled his eyes in shared agony. The man smiled and nodded.

    The background din of strained pilot voices always grated on Jake's nerves, especially when aircrews became testy in response to the staccato instructions of his ground controllers, who usually talked about as fast as human speech allowed.

    "All right, United Two Thirteen, O'Hare Ground, I SEE you, and I told you to hold your position. Meridian One One Eight, stop it right there, give way to the Eagle ATR Seventy-two on your right. Lufthansa Twelve, speed it up, sir, I need you out of that alley NOW. Delta Two Seventeen, are you on the frequency?"

    "Ah ... Delta Two Seventeen is with you."

    "Roger, Delta, follow the Meridian Triple-Seven on your left. Air France Twelve, change to tower frequency and wait for him to call YOU."

    Diane Jensen, Jake's favorite controller for mostly sexist reasons, appeared at his side from the break room below, adjusting her headset as she prepared to pick up the rhythm and take over for one of the male controllers. She ruffled her short-cropped, honey blond hair and smiled at him. "And now is the season of their discontent," she intoned with mock severity.

    "Ours, too," he replied. "Herndon's slowing the inbounds already," he said, his eyes on the distant traffic as he invoked the name of the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center near D.C., "and we're running out of ramp space."

    "And I've got a short-tempered brother in that mess down there trying to get to Dallas. I just dropped him off. You'd think he was preparing for battle."

    "He was," Jake remarked.

    "I suggested Amtrak," she said, moving forward to plug in next to the man she was preparing to relieve. "But he wouldn't listen."

    The tie-line from Approach Control was ringing again, and as Jake reached for the receiver, his eyes caught a bright glint of sunlight from a distant car in the clogged traffic outside. He was glad he didn't have to be down there among all those flaring tempers.

    Very glad.

RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, D.C.

Colonel David Byrd picked up the papers he'd spread out on the witness table and shoved them in his briefcase before turning to take the outstretched hand of Julian Best, chief of the Aviation Subcommittee staff.

    "Nicely done, Colonel," Best said, a grin creasing his craggy features.

    "Thanks," David Byrd replied as the insistent chirping of a cell phone began somewhere in the room.

    Colonel Byrd tapped the surface of his briefcase. "By the way, Julian, I'm not exaggerating," he said, a dead-serious expression on his angular face. "While we've pretty much solved the terrorist threats, the air rage threat is becoming critical. The summer's just beginning, and this isn't FAA posturing."

    Best was smiling. "I know you're not blowing smoke, Colonel. I know your record. Anyone who commanded a special ops squadron, has a row of ribbons that impressive, and handled the things you've handled is too tough to send to Capitol Hill on a B.S. mission."

    The chirp of a cell phone interrupted them and Byrd shrugged as he gestured to the phone.

    "Sorry."

    "No problem, Colonel. I'll be in touch," Julian said as he turned to go.

    Byrd opened the phone and turned toward the nearest wall to concentrate on the call, momentarily puzzled by angry words on the other end.

    "This is Lieutenant General Overmeyer, Colonel. What in holy hell do you think you're doing testifying to Congress without my approval or a Pentagon handler? I just saw your ugly mug on television in uniform! Who gave you authority to go on C-Span in uniform and make policy statements?"

    Colonel Byrd pulled up a mental image of General Overmeyer, the Air Force deputy chief of staff, a man known to most of his subordinates as "General Overreactor." The general was powerful and dangerous to the career of any officer who crossed him. Even a full colonel.

    "General," the colonel began, "you put me directly under the command of the FAA administrator, and I was testifying at her direction."

    "Byrd, you're not there to be a civilian lapdog to be trotted out at the administrator's discretion to chase pet issues up a tree anytime it pleases her."

    "General, I take offense at that. I'm hardly a lapdog, I ..."

    "I want you in my office in thirty minutes, Byrd. Is that understood?"

    "Yes, sir. If you insist."

    "Apparently I just did. That's a goddamned order. Oh. In case you've forgotten your roots, Colonel, do you need any help finding it? The Pentagon, I mean? It's a big structure near Reagan National."

    "General, sarcasm isn't necessary."

    "GET YOUR ASS IN HERE!"

    The general hung up, leaving David Byrd off-balance, as he calculated the fastest way across the Potomac.

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Excerpted from TURBULENCE by John J. Nance. Copyright © 2002 by John J. Nance. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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