An hour passed. He picked up the headset and tried again—it was, he knew, in the end all he had—but there was no answer. He felt like a prisoner, kept in a small cell that was hurtling through the sky at what he thought to be 160 miles an hour, headed—he didn’t know where—just headed somewhere until . . . There it was. Until what? Until he ran out of fuel. When the plane ran out of fuel it would go down. Period.
