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Joseph Amiel
Joseph Amiel
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Lambent Publishing LLC
ISBN-10: 0985314486
Type: Fiction
Pages: 404
Copyright: 2013
ISBN-13: 9780985314484
Price: $4.95 (eBook)
America's leading airline is under attack by a mysterious saboteur destroying its 747s in flight. Dynamic lawyer Will Nye must track him down while fending off a ruthless corporate raider seeking to seize the airline. Powerful surprise ending!
Global Universal Airlines is fighting for survival. America's leading air carrier, it is locked in a bitter takeover fight with a powerful conglomerate run by a vicious recluse who threatens to seize everything Ben Buck, its aging CEO, has built. Then disaster strikes. A 747 plummets from the skies killing over three hundred people. And then another. The FBI suspects sabotage by terrorists.
Will Nye, the airline's brilliant lawyer, believes it's the ruthless corporate raider. Where and when will the killer strike next? Nye is obsessed with stopping the perpetrator before he brings down another airliner, killing more people and plunging the company itself into disaster. Behind the corporate drama is a private one in which Nye must choose between two beautiful women, each determined to make him her own: Belinda, a flamboyant celebrity-artist; and Donna, a lively flight attendant about to take off on a fateful flight.
Culminating in a heart-stopping confrontation with the killer on the very eve of the stockholder's vote, Stalking the Sky is both an inside look at the great airlines and a gripping, brilliantly-imagined adventure tale with a startling ending .
A story so gripping, so convincing, you'll be glad it's fiction.
Excerpt
[With the 747 down and a corporate raider seeking to seize the airline, the CEO, Ben Buck, has dispatched Will Nye, the airline's dynamic young general counsel to New York on an urgent mission to obtain additional funding for the airline. He is directed to fly there immediately in the company's Westwind, a private jet.]
The Westwind’s cabin contained two rows of seats and a sitting/sleeping divan along one side of the cabin. Will hung up his jacket and loosened his tie. He was just about to stretch out and catch some sleep when he noticed headlights racing toward the plane. A slim girl clutching a small saffron-colored valise charged out of a taxi and up the stairs. For a moment she seemed confused by the sight that greeted her. Then disbelieving anger widened her eyes to blue floodlights.
"One person? You hired this plane and got us all out here in the middle of the night in a snowstorm for just one person?" The question was an indictment.
He awoke to the sound of yawning. The girl was curled into a ball in one of the other seats. She had gone to sleep soon after him and was now waking up.
"You probably want breakfast, right?" Her tone had not acquired warmth in the intervening hours. A woman he barely knew was treating him like the husband in an unhappy marriage; it was a feeling he had once known only too well.
He removed the toiletry case and the fresh clothing from his valise and went to the lavatory, carefully reaching for a handhold before each step. His thoughts were hundreds of miles ahead of him in New York City, which for all its present fiscal misfortunes was still the financial center of the world.
When Will was beginning to rebuild a life shattered by the Vietnam War and divorce, he chose a law school in New York: Columbia. Only in a city of so many people could he be assured of the anonymity that would allow him to rehabilitate himself at his own pace. Later, he found the intensity, the diversity of New York so heady that he stayed on and became one of the bright young men climbing the greased rungs of a Wall Street law-firm ladder. He had an instinct for life as commerce—giving in consideration for getting. He understood that the ritual dances were a game and that the purpose was to win. He thrived. Ben Buck picked him for that instinct, that understanding, just in time—when he had begun to lose interest in solving clients' present problems and preventing future ones while having no personal stake in either.
Coming to the airline had reinvigorated Will, offering a prize so dazzling, however far away it might be and however remote his chances of winning it, that all other interests paled to invisibility. Now J. Stephen Girard was threatening to knock over all the pieces and seize the board—and presenting him with a world-class opponent in a truly high-stakes game. He loved the competition.
When Will returned to his seat, the aroma of coffee filled the cabin. He stopped for a moment to gaze at the woman preparing the breakfast tray. Her coloring was vivid: chestnut hair around pale, white skin; blue eyes. She was taller, her features sharper, more like a model’s, than the Miss America types Global Universal almost invariably hired.
When she brought him the breakfast tray, he smiled politely. Civility? She was having none of it.
"Instead of renting this plane, you could have waited a few hours and taken the eight-o’clock nonstop." She seemed to be continuing the earlier conversation as if the intervening hours had never passed.
"I also could have walked. Are you this pleasant to your regular passengers?"
"Sorry," she said curtly. "I’ll have to lay over in New York to pick up my flight to Europe and the Middle East on Tuesday. I won’t be back in Denver till the end of the week." She glanced at her watch. "The carpets will be delivered in two hours and the movers arrive four hours later with my new furniture."
"Have someone else let them in."
"The only one who might have been able to do it took over my flight duty the last two days. She’s probably in New York already."
Will felt a sudden vacuum in his stomach. "What flight?"
"Two Eleven," she replied. "L.A.–Chicago–New York."
His eyes flicked over to her nameplate.
"Donna," he began, feeling overwhelmed by the effort to meet her eyes, "you’d better sit down. Something has happened."
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