“ What? I don’t see-”

But in his agitation he had lashed out, and his arm hit her wrist, jerking the steering yoke to the left. The ailerons responded as they must: Up went the left one, down came the right one. The plane dipped precipitously to its left. The left wingtip touched the surface of the water. Like a stone skimmed over a lake, it touched, skipped, touched, skipped, touched… and finally broke the surface. The wing entered the water and caught.

The plane cart-wheeled, its forward momentum carrying it through the air for half a revolution, so that for one long, strange, dizzy second they were looking straight down into the floodlit water, tumbling tail-first. Claudia’s ear was warm and wet with blood. She had hit her head on something but had never felt it. Helplessly suspended upside down in her harness, seemingly suspended in time and space, she saw the tow bar and a pair of sunglasses on a lanyard float past the windshield, caught in the glare of the landing lights.

Like in The Wizard of Oz, she thought dazedly, when Dorothy was inside the tornado and things were whizzing all around her…

No, no, it’s only the baggage locker that’s popped open, she told herself. It was her last coherent thought. When the left wing hit the water the fourth time, there was a terrible rending of metal, and the plane bounced once more, hung heavily in the air for another endless moment, and flopped with a terrific, bursting impact onto its belly. Claudia never heard Torkelsson’s cut-off scream.

In silence, the mortally wounded airplane lay on the surface, its cabin filling with water, its occupants slumped forward in their harnesses, unmoving.