A pilot’s emergency maneuver lands him in court in this thriller by a New York Times bestselling author who “knows how to keep his readers turning pages” (Booklist).
On takeoff from Denver during a winter blizzard, an airliner piloted by veteran Captain Marty Mitchell overruns a commuter plane from behind. Bizarrely, the fuselage of the smaller aircraft is tenuously wedged onto the wing of his Boeing 757, leading Mitchell to an impossible life-or-death choice.
Mitchell’s decision will land the former military pilot in the crosshairs of a viciously ambitious district attorney determined to send him to prison for doing his job. Despondent and deeply wounded by what he sees as betrayal by the system, Mitchell at first refuses to defend himself or even assist the corporate lawyer forced to represent him.
Pitted against the prosecutorial prowess of a DA using Mitchell’s case to audition for a political appointment is young defense attorney Judith Winston. Her lack of experience in criminal cases could mean the end of Mitchell’s freedom, if he doesn’t end his own life first. But like the pilot she represents, she will not give up in the face of devastating odds—and she’s growing ever more determined to expose the corruption behind his personal nightmare.
A passenger plane is electronically hijacked—and may be aimed at a target that could kill millions.
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 senses 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—not to mention armed fighters pulling 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.
An alphabet soup of federal agencies struggle for answers. Messages fly between Washington and Tel Aviv as suspicions grow about a plot to spark a nuclear war. The presence of a hated former head of state in first class fuels fearful speculation. As time and fuel run low, flying at full throttle toward a hostile border, Capt. 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 war room in Tel Aviv, the interim Prime Minister of Israel grapples with a horrifying choice between three hundred airborne lives and the probability of millions more casualties.
A pair of ferocious forest fires rages out of control, threatening to destroy two American national parks and incinerate thousands of homes and park buildings. As the desperate battle to squelch the global warming-induced fires before they "blow up" reaches a fever-pitch, a mysterious string of violent airborne accidents among the air tanker fleet produces a mounting body count. The air tankers - the old aircraft used by pilots to bomb the fires with fire retardant slurry - have been literally falling apart in midair. Clearly not designed for such punishing high-stakes flying, the flying museum pieces should have been grounded years ago.
Veteran pilot Clark Maxwell thought his fire bombing days were well behind him. But when Jerry Stein, Maxwell''s friend and air tanker fleet-owner, calls at the height of the fire season to beg him to reenter the war, he doesn''t hesitate. As the wildfires spread, whipped by massive winds and the federal forces arrayed against the fires reach their limits, hysteria and potential evacuation threatens the local population. In the middle of this crisis, Clark Maxwell becomes convinced that a sinister cover-up is behind the rash of horrific air disasters. As he races to unravel a very real mystery and prevent a natural disaster of massive proportions, Maxwell''s probe reaches the upper levels of government agencies charged with mounting the aerial fire fighting effort - a move that for wholly unexpected reasons just may cost him his life.
In Athens, a Boeing 737 noses into the gate, and its crew is suddenly confronted by Greek officials waiting to arrest one of its passengers, a beloved ex-President of the United States, John Harris. Captain Craig Dayton, believing Harris'' life is in danger, stages a daring escape by backing the jet away from the gate without clearance and taking off down a vacant runway.
The dilemma for Captain Dayton and his precious cargo is that Peru has signed an Interpol warrant for President Harris'' arrest, using the same treaty employed to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The Peruvian government alleges that Harris is personally responsible for a supposed CIA-led strike against a biological weapons factory during his term of office. But the nightmare for Harris - and the U.S. State Department - is this: There is no place to hide, because almost every nation in the world has signed the treaty and every one of them must honor the warrant and give Peru what it wants - a president to humiliate on the international stage.
Captain Dayton flies Harris and his crew on an against-the-clock mission around the world to find a safe haven, while Harris'' rumpled and out-gunned lawyer wrestles an international team of legal sharks snapping at their biggest prize yet.
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.
In the wake of Operation Desert Storm, a defecting Iraqi scientist has revealed Saddam Hussein's horrifying plans for a devastating counterstrike against his enemies...and the world.
With no time to spare, American forces must remobilize to locate and neutralize the underground laboratory where a lethal super-virus is ready to be unleashed. But an eleventh-hour disaster thrusts the entire mission into the hands of two Air Force comrades: Colonel Will Westerman and Reserve Colonel-turned-commercial pilot Doug Harris. Flying into the heart of Iraqi power, they must depend on both their skills and each other as never before in order to complete a mission that may be a suicide run.
"The ill wind that blew pilot-author Nance to the Persian Gulf sent him home with plenty of thoroughly realistic background detail and an entirely too plausible plot about biological warfare as it might have been waged by Saddam Hussein....Pleasantly terrifying military thriller." -Kirkus Reviews
Internationally acclaimed aviation insider and novelist John J. Nance moves with polished ease and compelling authenticity from the cockpit to the boardroom in a world where the "Big Three" U.S. airlines have achieved national dominance-with high prices and poor service. Challenging them comes a new, visionary airline, one that combines a great name from aviation's recent past with new standards of comfort and elegance. This billion-dollar start-up was engineered by Elizabeth Sterling, a bright young investment banker (and single parent). When she assumes the post of chief financial officer for this upstart carrier, she finds herself masterminding a frantic defense against a sinister campaign by powerful, unknown forces determined to destroy her proud creation.
"Fasten your seat belt and prepare for a bumpy ride....Nonstop action circles the globe, and Brian Emerson achieves seamless transitions between American, Scottish, Canadian and Chinese accents....The action is so intense and the voices are so natural the listener is propelled through the story."-AudioFile
Minutes after a Boeing 747 rises majestically into a Hong Kong sunset, a flash splits the darkening sky. The pilot - suddenly blinded and doubled over in pain - fumbles in the dark in a frantic effort to gain control as the huge jet shudders through its descent. Kat Bronsky, FBI agent and terrorism specialist, is assigned the hunt for a Challenger-class business jet seen nearby just before the incident. The case poses countless questions: Was the flash a pilot error, a missile attack, or a malfunction? Or was it some new kind of weapon? And why are several government agencies interested in what Kat uncovers?
High above the Rocky Mountains, a routine airline flight becomes a midair standoff as 130 passengers listen to their captain relate the unprecedented demands of an unseen hijacker. Federal and state officials must hunt down, arrest, and indict the murderer of a young girl, and do it all in eight hours - or the airplane will be blown out of the sky. With the airline in confusion, the media pursuing, and the hijacker forcing the aircraft into wild maneuvers as they head toward Salt Lake City, the FBI reluctantly fields its closest hostage negotiator, a rookie female agent and psychologist named Katherine Bronsky. Immediately, Bronsky finds herself sucked into the vortex of an impossible war of wills between a volatile, unstable hijacker holding the trigger to a bomb and stonewalling Justice Department officials who have no real intention of meeting the lone gunman's demands. When the hijacker suddenly refuses to land at Salt Lake City, Kat commandeers a business jet and races after the low-flying 737. As the jetliner runs low on fuel, she's stunned to discover that the man with the gun is none other than the murdered girl's father, and that one of his hostages is a front-runner to become the new Attorney General of the United States. Successful at last in getting him to land in a remote Colorado airport, Bronsky's brave and desperate attempts to reason with the hijacker backfire, and she becomes a hostage herself. Now discounted and ignored by her superiors in Washington for losing control, Bronsky's only hope to save the passengers and crew of AirBridge Flight 90 is to solve the wrenching mystery of who killed an eleven-year-old girl in a dark Connecticut forest two years before. And for that, all she has is an airborne phone and precious few hours before the bomb detonates. Nance ratchets up the tension with expertly crafted twists and turns that converge into an unforgettably wrenching dilemma. But one thing finally becomes clear. The only person who can safely land AirBridge Flight 90 and save its 130 passengers is dangerously close to death. And if the clock runs out, The Last Hostage will never see the light of day.
For thirty-year-old captain Scott McKay, the transport run from Miami to Denver will give him the money he desperately needs to keep his fledgling air cargo company flying. When a mysterious crate is discovered on his plane, however, McKay is ordered to abandon his present course and fly the crate and its owner, Vivian Henry, to Washington, D.C., before going to Denver. McKay takes the forced detour in stride - until a strange noise comes from deep inside the crate. It is the voice of Vivian's husband, Dr. Rogers Henry, warning that the shipment they are carrying is actually a fully armed Medusa device, a thermonuclear bomb that can destroy every computer chip over an entire continent, and blast the Silicon Age back to the Stone Age. And it is set to go off within hours. As panic spreads from the small community of nuclear scientists who used to work for Dr. Rogers Henry to the White House and eventually to the general public, a group of rogue military officers conspires to disobey the President's orders and secure the technology of the Medusa device, whatever the cost. Will Captain McKay and his crew trust their own instincts to dispose of the bomb, or will they let a misguided government dictate their actions?
Captain James Holland is the pilot on a routine flight from Frankfurt to New York, packed with people eager to be home for Christmas. When a passenger collapses from what appears to be a heart attack, Holland is forced to request an emergency landing at London's Heathrow Airport. But to his great surprise, the air traffic controllers will not let him land in England - they tell Holland that his sick passenger has contracted a dangerous new form of influenza and that the plane must return to Germany. But when German officials also refuse the landing, and other European countries follow suit, Holland begins to suspect that he's in much more trouble than anyone's letting on. In fact, his sick passenger is carrying a deadly virus accidentally released from a Bavarian laboratory, and it is feared that everyone on board is now infected. At the same time, someone with access to the CIA's computers wants to shoot the plane out of the sky, and there is a United States ambassador on board with powerful terrorist enemies who want to see him dead. While the panic on the ground spreads from the White House Situation Room to a small airport in the Ukrainian Republic, Captain Holland has only one concern: Where and when can he land?
The year is 2009. For Kip Dawson, winning a passenger seat on American Space Adventure's first commercial spaceflight is a dream come true. One grand shot of insanity and he can return to earth fulfilled. It's a bittersweet moment of triumph, however, muted by his wife's terror over his accepting the prize. The day of the launch, Kip tries to reconcile his wife's and daughters' fears and even tries calling his estranged son, to no avail. He sets off, vowing to make amends upon his return. But a successful launch quickly morphs into chaos when a micrometeor punches through the wall of the spacecraft, leaving the radios as dead as the pilot. In the blink of an eye, Kip Dawson is truly alone and has no way of navigating the ship home. With nothing to do but wait for his fate, Kip writes his epitaph on the ship's laptop computer, unaware that an audience of millions has discovered it and is tracking his every word on the Internet. As a massive struggle gets under way to rescue him, Kip has no idea that the world can hear his cries - or that his heroism in the face of death may sabotage his best chance of survival.
