Flight to Destiny (A Samantha Starr Thriller, Book 2)
Flight to Destiny
A Samantha Starr Thriller, Book 2
S. L. Menear
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Copyright © 2015 by S.L. Menear. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-64457-056-2
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Before You Go…
Triple Threat
Acknowledgments
Also by S.L. Menear
About the Author
For my beloved cousins,
Dick, Bob, Linda, Suzanne, and Debbie
“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you long to return.”
Leonardo Da Vinci, 1452 – 1519
“If you wish to understand the universe, you must think of energy, frequency, and vibration. Electricity is all around us.”
Nikola Tesla, 1856–1943
Prologue
It was the winter solstice in 8984 B.C., and time was running out for Atlantis.
The powerful nation clung to a small remnant of a huge continent. The sea had swallowed most of the land into deep trenches during cataclysmic earthquakes over the past ten millennia.
King Zoran strode off his longboat and gazed up at the glowing volcano looming behind the capital city as a strong tremor shook the island and rattled the docks.
He turned to General Xenos. “Take me to my airship.”
Panicked citizens stampeded the pier where soldiers held them off.
“My men will escort you, Your Majesty.” The general signaled the airship floating twenty feet above the shoreline.
Zoran followed his soldiers to where the royal airship touched down. As soon as he boarded, it lifted off toward the white marble palace on the plateau above the city.
The king entered the cockpit. “Captain, will we have enough oxygen? We’ll need a high altitude to escape the coming explosion.”
“Your Majesty, our chemical stores are sufficient for the oxygen generators during our long journey, and the battery bank is charged with enough solar energy to heat the cabin and power the motors if we encounter cloudy weather.”
The king furrowed his brows. “What about a massive ash cloud?”
“Ash will clog the motors and blanket the solar panels. As soon as the queen boards, we must depart.”
Zoran’s expression brightened when he spotted a long-haired blonde, her diaphanous gown billowing in the breeze.
“The queen is on the landing pad.” He hurried aft to the entry door.
Queen Aurora rushed up the ramp into her husband’s arms. “My love, thank Poseidon you arrived home in time!”
“The negotiations with Pharaoh were successful. He agreed to send ships to aid our evacuation.” He sighed. “I hope there’s still time.”
As his airship rose above the mountains, the king looked down on the volcano. Loud rumblings vibrated the rigid craft.
“At least we’re together.” He held his queen close as the flying armada fled his beloved island home.
Far below, the harbor area bristled like a beehive as terrified citizens rushed to board the longboats.
The airships climbed east from Atlantis above the mountains and caught favorable tailwinds.
The king’s craft took the lead at twenty-thousand feet as a volcano exploded on a small island near Atlantis.
“By our mighty god Poseidon, half that mountain just crumbled into the sea!” Aurora said.
“The wave is higher than our pyramids!” The king watched in horror as the monster wave shot across the fifty miles to Atlantis.
A towering wall of liquid doom unleashed its full fury on the helpless Atlanteans. Everything below the high plateaus was crushed and buried undersea.
Cool water forced its way into cracks in the mountain and triggered a powerful explosion in Atlantis’s pressurized volcano. The dome vaporized and formed a searing pyroclastic cloud that expanded with alarming velocity.
Deep in the bowels of the volcano, a chain reaction of explosions created earthquakes on the ocean floor beneath the island, shifting the tectonic plates and collapsing the once mighty nation into the gaping jaws of a new undersea trench. The entire fleet of longboats went down with the island.
A small section of Atlantis high atop the western plateau behind the mountain was sheltered from the crushing wave.
The Great Hall of Records and Royal Library, standing along columned streets flanked by ornate pyramids and huge sphinxes, sank into timeless perfection on the seafloor near the trench.
Aurora gasped and clutched her husband’s arm. “Atlantis is gone!”
He glanced back as an enormous ash cloud swallowed half the airship armada.
“Captain, maximum speed! The ash!” Zoran shouted.
The motors vibrated at full power as the royal airship struggled to outpace the dense cloud. One by one, the airships behind them vanished into hot swirling ash.
“The ash is slowing.” The king gripped a siderail. “We might escape it.”
“Any chance the other airships survived?” Aurora scanned the dark cloud.
He stared into the darkness. “We should have seen them by now.”
Two hours later, there was still no sign of the airships.
The king glanced around the main cabin where everyone waited in tense silence.
“We are the sole survivors of Atlantis, but don’t lose heart. We’ve known for years this day would come.”
King Zoran paused and looked into the eyes of his people.
“The secret enclave we built in the Himalayas will keep us safe until the appointed time. Remember the oracle’s prophecy. Triplet Goddesses of Sun
, Moon, and Fire will activate Poseidon’s Sword on the winter solstice eleven thousand years hence, and our mighty nation will rise to rule again.”
“Praise Poseidon!” the people said in unison.
Winter Solstice–10,976 Years Later
Flight attendant Suzanne Berglind enjoyed the panoramic view at thirty-seven thousand feet over the majestic Himalayas after she carried two cups of coffee into the private Boeing 767’s cockpit.
She handed the cups to the pilots. “Black with two sugars and one with cream and sugar.”
“What a view! Is that Mt. Everest ahead in the distance?” She pointed.
“Right, it’s just over twenty-nine thousand feet, easy to spot. I know you’ve only been working here a few weeks, but how do you like it, Suzanne?” Captain Phillips asked.
“I love it. They pay well, and I have lots of scheduled days off to work on my master’s degree.” She hesitated. “Uh, I don’t keep up with the jet set, so I’m curious, what’s the story with our bosses?”
“Ah, Richard and Sheila Conor, the billionaire power couple with engineering doctorates from MIT.” The captain sipped her coffee and smiled.
The copilot nodded. “Yeah, they hold hundreds of patents for military software and high-tech devices.”
“Well, they’ve been really nice to me,” Suzanne said. “They seem decent and down-to-earth.”
“They designed this airplane’s interior and the two survival pods in the tail section,” the captain said.
“They’re the sole owners of Gold Trident Industries. Nice, huh?” The copilot shook his head.
“I wonder how they came up with that name.” Suzanne glanced from one pilot to the other.
“Mr. Conor told me he named the company in honor of his late father, Robert Conor, a Navy SEAL,” the captain said.
Suzanne knitted her brows. “I don’t understand.”
“A gold trident is part of the symbol for Navy SEALs,” the copilot said.
“The SEALs began as underwater demolition teams,” the captain explained.
Suzanne gave her a blank look.
“The seas are Poseidon’s realm, and his weapon is a gold trident.”
“Oh, right, makes sense.” Suzanne left the cockpit and heard the galley intercom chime. She picked up the handset.
“Yes? Bottles for the triplets? Right away, Mrs. Conor.”
She prepared three bottles of baby formula, placed them on a silver tray, and hurried through the jumbo jet’s spacious lounge, dining area, office, and two bedrooms.
The main cabin compartments connected through wide sliding center doors secured open during the day. A padded crib bolted to the floor in the aft bedroom cradled the Conor’s daughters.
“I have their bottles ready.” Suzanne set the tray on a table between leather club chairs.
“Thank you.” Sheila unfastened the safety netting over the crib and handed one of the babies to Richard and another to Suzanne. She lifted the third baby into her arms and reached for a bottle.
Suzanne sat with the Conors and fed baby Blaze. “The triplets look identical except for their hair and eye colors.”
“As you can see, Solraya has Sheila’s golden hair and aqua eyes.” Richard turned the blond baby toward Suzanne and smiled.
“And Luna looks like Richard with her black hair and deep-blue eyes.” Sheila matched her husband’s smile.
“Blaze is a mystery with flame-red hair and emerald eyes. No one in our family looks like her—must come from far down the family tree.” Richard shrugged.
“Today is their first birthday.” Sheila kissed Luna as her baby sucked on the bottle.
“How did you come up with such unusual names?” Suzanne rocked the red-haired baby.
“Actually, that’s quite a story.” Sheila glanced at her husband. “Should we tell her?”
He nodded and looked at Suzanne. “Keep in mind we don’t believe in mythology or ancient legends.”
“A while back, I met a woman at a MENSA convention,” Sheila said. “We discovered we both had occasional visions, usually of the future.”
“Seriously? You can predict the future?”
“It’s not like I have control over what I see or when I see it, but my mother has the same ability. That MENSA woman believed we were descendants of powerful women from ancient Atlantis.”
“I’m working on a master’s in ancient history,” Suzanne said. “I read Plato’s account of Atlantis—fascinating story. Just enough clues are scattered around the world to make Atlantis a tantalizing possibility.”
Sheila nodded. “The woman took my hand and informed me I was pregnant with triplet girls. She said they would grow up to be as powerful as the Atlantean Goddesses of Sun, Moon, and Fire—Solraya, Luna, and Blaze. And she predicted their hair and eye colors.”
Richard broke in. “When Sheila got home, she took a pregnancy test that showed positive. We didn’t buy into the goddess BS, but we liked the unusual names.”
“So when my doctor told me I was carrying triplet girls, we decided to name them Solraya, Luna, and Blaze.”
“Have you noticed anything unusual about them?”
Sheila exchanged a glance with her husband. “Every now and then, it sounds like they say real words, but we don’t recognize the language.”
Richard laughed. “Don’t worry. Those words might be baby language. The important thing is they’re healthy.”
An explosion shook the airplane. The big jet yawed as a violent vibration shot through it.
Suzanne squeezed Blaze as she clutched an armrest and looked out a cabin window. “Oh, God!”
Fire, smoke, and debris trailed from the failed right engine.
Richard thrust baby Solraya into his wife’s arms. “Quick, dress them in warm clothes and strap them into their survival pod! We might not clear the mountains on one engine. I’ll check with the cockpit.” He rushed forward as the women sprang into action.
Suzanne glanced out the window again as she pulled on Blaze’s insulated one-piece. “We’re losing altitude, hurry!”
Turbulent air buffeted the aircraft as it skimmed the high peaks of the Himalayas. The women stumbled as they carried the babies to the little pod behind the aft bedroom.
When Suzanne leaned over to secure Blaze, the airplane banked sharply to the left and straightened. As she fumbled with the baby’s harness, the interior lights extinguished.
Silence.
Sheila’s eyes filled with panic. “Sounds like we lost the other engine!”
Suzanne glanced at the control panel above the nearby aft jumpseat as she remembered her emergency training. “My panel is dark. That could mean we lost battery power too!”
Richard burst in. “The pilot said we flew into a dead zone. We’re crashing! Suzanne, strap into your crew seat. We’ll take care of our children.”
“Richard, save our babies!” Sheila screamed.
Suzanne donned her uniform jacket and yanked down the crew jumpseat, which was on the aft bulkhead a few feet behind the two pods. She buckled the harness straps over her and pulled them tight.
Richard and Sheila rushed to secure their daughters in the pod designed to hold three infants and provide fifteen minutes of life support before the canopy opened automatically.
Sheila zipped her parka. “Hurry!” She handed Richard a parka as he closed the canopy on the babies’ pod and rushed across the aisle to their pod.
Harnessed to her jumpseat behind the Conors, Suzanne watched Richard open their pod’s canopy as the high-pitched sound of screeching metal pierced the cabin. She looked up the aisle all the way to the cockpit door. The big jet’s mid-section slammed nose high into a razor-sharp peak that skewered its belly and broke the airplane in two.
An invisible force sucked out the warm air and replaced it with frigid low-oxygen air and swirling snow. Richard and Sheila vanished in a split second.
“Noooo!” Suzanne screamed as the front section holding the pilots plummeted straight down
the steep slope. The back half carrying Suzanne and the babies, which had broken away from the front section ahead of the wings, catapulted over the peak and flipped end over end through the turbulent air—a nightmare carnival ride from Hell.
As the forward momentum shifted to a downward spiral, a wing caught the edge of a steep slope, and the aft cabin cart-wheeled from wingtip to wingtip down the murderous mountainside.
Suzanne lost consciousness in the thin air, and woke at a lower altitude as the aft cabin continued tumbling downward. She gasped when the babies’ pod broke loose and flew out toward a distant green patch shrouded in mist. The tail cone carrying her hit a boulder, broke away from the aft cabin, and plummeted in the opposite direction.
Her heart hammered against her chest as the cold fist of fear squeezed the air from her lungs. She clamped her eyes shut and prayed the end wouldn’t be painful as her wild slide down the mountain gained momentum.
The scraping of metal on ice gradually changed to muffled sounds of deceleration in dense snow. After several terrifying seconds, she no longer felt any motion.
Suzanne struggled to open her eyes, but they were frozen shut. She cupped her hands over her face and exhaled warm air until the ice melted. It took her a moment to focus when she opened her eyes. A shadowy figure loomed. Was it man or beast?
Feeling woozy in the thin atmosphere, she wiped water from her eyes and stared into the incredulous face of a man in his twenties. She glanced around and realized the tail cone had slammed against a snow drift near what looked like a base camp for mountain climbers.