Rating: Not rated
Tags: Fiction
Summary
Over the Atlantic in the dark of night, the electronic
brain of Pangia Airlines Flight 10 quietly and without
warning disconnects all the cockpit controls and reverses
course on its own. The crew of the huge Airbus 330 at first sense nothing,
the flight displays still showing them on course to New York.
But with puzzled passengers reporting stars on the wrong side
and growing alarm over the sudden failure of all their radios
- and when armed fighters pull alongside to force them to
land - the confused pilots discover that Flight 10 is
streaking back toward the hyper-volatile Middle East and
there is nothing they can do about it. With an alphabet soup of federal agencies struggling for
answers and messages flying between Washington, and Tel Aviv
where the flight began, the growing supposition that Flight
10 may be hijacked is fueled by the presence of a feared and
hated former head of state sitting in first class, a man with
an extreme Mid East agenda who may somehow be responsible for
the Airbus A-330's loss of control. As frantic speculation
spreads, the possibility that the unresponsive airliner could
be the leading edge of a sophisticated attack on Iran
designed to provoke a nuclear response drives increasingly
desperate decisions. As time and fuel runs low, flying at full throttle toward
a hostile border ahead, Captain Jerry Tollefson and First
Officer Dan Horneman have to put their personal animosities
aside and risk everything to wrest control from the
electronic ghost holding them – and perhaps the world -
on a course to certain disaster.And in the "Hole" - as the
war room in Tel Aviv is called - the interim Prime Minister
of Israel grapples with a horrifying choice in the balance
between 300 airborne lives and the probability of nuclear
war.