Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421 (A Novel) - Softcover

Newman, T. J.

 
9781668082546: Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421 (A Novel)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668082543 ISBN 13: 9781668082546
Verlag: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE * “Reads like Apollo 13 underwater.” —Don Winslow * “Electrifying.” —Los Angeles Times * “A stunningly vivid tour de force! Gripping. Shocking.” —Brad Thor

A “masterful” (Patricia Cornwell) adrenaline-fueled thriller about a commercial jetliner that crashes into the ocean and sinks to the bottom with passengers trapped inside—and the extraordinary rescue operation to save them.

Six minutes after takeoff, Flight 1421 crashes into the Pacific Ocean. During the evacuation, an engine explodes and the plane is flooded. Those still alive are forced to close the doors—but it’s too late. The plane sinks to the bottom with twelve passengers trapped inside.

More than two hundred feet below the surface, engineer Will Kent and his eleven-year-old daughter Shannon are waist-deep in water and fighting for their lives.

Their only chance at survival is an elite rescue team on the surface led by professional diver Chris Kent—Shannon’s mother and Will’s soon-to-be ex-wife—who must work together with Will to find a way to save their daughter and rescue the passengers from the sealed airplane, which is now teetering on the edge of an undersea cliff. There’s not much time. There’s even less air.

An unforgettable thriller about a family’s desperate fight to save themselves and the people trapped with them—against impossible odds—Drowning is “a thriller to the core, one that readers will want to finish in a single sitting” (The Washington Post).

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

T. J. Newman is a former bookseller and flight attendant whose first novel Falling became a publishing sensation and debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list. The book was named a best book of the year by USA TODAY and Esquire, among many others, and has been published in over thirty countries. The book will soon be a major motion picture from Universal Pictures. T. J. lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Drowning is her second novel. 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One CHAPTER ONE
WILL KENT OPENED HIS EYES just in time to see the engine explode.

His arm shot up to protect the passenger seated at the window, but his daughter Shannon didn’t seem to notice. The eleven-year-old girl just watched the flames spewing out of the back of the engine’s tail cone and uttered an uneasy whoa.

Will sat up straight and looked over the tops of the seats. The emergency exit was two rows up. A flight attendant sat there in a rear-facing jump seat staring at the passengers. He could just make out her name bar. Molly. Will caught her eye.

Molly didn’t say a thing. She didn’t have to.

The aircraft shook. Panic gripped the cabin as everyone craned for a look out the windows. Flames. Chunks of metal ripping off, flying by.

Will leaned over Shannon for a better view. The engine was on fire. Parts of the wing were shredded. Below the plane, crystal-clear turquoise water.

Shannon looked to her dad. “Why aren’t we turning back to Honolulu?”

Will had been wondering the same thing.

In the cockpit, every pilot’s worst nightmare was coming true.

“We lost thrust in engine one,” First Officer Kit Callahan radioed to ATC, her voice rising involuntarily as the plane dropped. “And all hydraulic fluid in all three systems.”

“Say again, fourteen twenty-one?”

The air traffic controller sounded skeptical. Even the captain glanced over to see for himself. Any other day, all this second-guessing would have pissed her off.

Not today.

Kit triple-checked the ECAM, barely believing the display herself. System failures were listed in order of severity. Level 3 failures, the most crucial, were first, in red. Red filled the screen. Every time she cleared one, another would pop up. All were Level 3. The digital screen looked like it was bleeding out.

They’d been airborne for less than two minutes. Engine one was dead. So were the hydraulics. This extended beyond their training. Pilots don’t run situations like this in the simulator.

There’d be no point.

“Fourteen twenty-one, ah, did you say all three? All three hydraulic—”

“Goddamn it, dead stick!” Captain Miller said.

No hydraulic fluid. No hydraulic power.

The plane was dead in the air.

Green. Blue. Yellow. The aircraft’s three hydraulic lines. Two layers of redundancy in case of a system failure. It’s that important. The display should have shown three green lines at 3,000 PSI. Kit was looking at three amber lines with 0 PSI. Her best guess was that when the engine blew, fragments of metal sprayed like buckshot through the hydraulic lines and drained the fluid. Any moving component on the aircraft—ailerons, flaps, spoilers, rudder—everything that let them fly the plane, had frozen in place.

The pilots couldn’t command the Airbus A321 to do anything. They had no control.

“We can’t turn back,” Kit told the controller. “Requesting an alternate in front of us.”

Will ripped open one of the plastic pouches he’d just pulled from the compartments under their seats. He passed it to Shannon.

She turned the pouch over, looking at the folded yellow life vest tucked inside.

“Are we going to crash?”

Several passengers looked at her. She’d voiced their worst fears.

“Shannon,” Will said, shifting in his seat to face her. “We’ve lost an engine. I don’t know why we’re not turning back. It may be because we can’t.”

Will pulled the vest out and shook it open, slipping it over her head before cradling her face in both his hands.

“I know you’re scared. But whatever happens, I’m going to be right here with you.”

Will heard a seat belt unbuckle. He waited for the refastening click after the passenger realized there was nowhere to run. Instead came heavy footsteps. He looked up just as a red-faced, middle-aged white guy in a blue polo shirt blew past their row on his way to the back. Angry male voices began to rise in the rear of the plane as the guy in the blue polo shirt yelled at a male flight attendant who was seated in a swing-out jump seat in the center of the aisle.

“Sir!” the flight attendant bellowed. “Sit down! Sir!”

Suddenly, the plane dropped sharply. Everything went down—

—blue polo went up.

His head smashed into the ceiling. Will turned away as the man slammed back to the floor—just in time to see Molly the flight attendant unbuckle her harness and head for the back of the plane. Another jolt made the plane thrash violently. Molly flew forward. Her head smacked into an armrest, with her chin taking the brunt of it. Crawling on all fours back to her jump seat, Molly strapped herself in while blood trickled from a split lip.

Will refocused on Shannon. “Shannon. We stay together. You understand? No matter what. We stay together.”

Shannon wasn’t listening to her dad. Will followed her gaze. Blue polo was on his feet again, stumbling back to his seat amid the turbulence, moaning in pain. He held his head while blood poured down his face in thick streaks. As he passed their aisle, the plane dipped. He braced himself, then continued on, leaving behind a bright red handprint stamped on the white overhead bin.

Shannon stared unblinkingly at the blood.

“We stay together,” she repeated.

Molly Hernandez winced as she wiped the blood off her chin with the arm of her uniform sweater. She tried to look calm as she blinked at the passengers from under her straight-cut bangs, but her hands would not stop shaking.

Another seat belt unbuckled. Molly turned. A woman in a long floral dress got up to let the guy in the blue polo back into their row just as the plane lurched again. Floral dress lost her balance and fell into the man. Their heads smacked against one another and the woman grimaced in pain, a streak of his blood now covering her forehead. He sat clumsily, and with another jolt of the plane, she fell back into her own seat.

“Ma’am?”

I hate that guy, Molly thought, stewing. Three people are now hurt and bloodied for no reason.

“Excuse me—”

The only reason Molly had even gotten up was because she was worried about the unaccompanied minor. Flying all alone. Sitting in the last row of the plane. Poor kid had a front-row seat for all that screaming, all that blood—

A piece of the engine slammed violently against the plane. Everyone jerked away from the windows and Molly yelped. A few people screamed. Holy shit the passengers looked terrified. Holy fuck everything was happening so fast.

Molly closed her eyes. She was spinning out. Calm down, she thought, taking a breath. Just review your commands. Heads down, stay down. Heads down, stay down. Release seat belts. Leave—

“Excuse me! Ma’am!”

“What? What do you want?” Molly snapped at the woman sitting across from her. She immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry.”

“Where’s that vest?”

“Under your seat.”

The woman bent over and her waist-length braids pooled on the floor. She struggled with the compartment under her seat until...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668082543
ISBN 13 
9781668082546
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande