Gryphon (+ audio)

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December 13th.
Rolm Lindgren hung up the phone without quite slamming it down, though he wanted to drive it straight through the top of his desk.
He’d spent the last two hours on the phone while dictating press releases, checking in with key personnel, and trying to control the disaster. Every time he hung up, there’d been two more calls waiting. Finally, it had quieted for three whole minutes—before it gut-shot him again. He’d managed it all smoothly until now, but this had been one phone call too many.
In the echoing silence, without any more calls to make, he could finally start to think.
He glared at the calendar. He remained old-fashioned enough to keep a paper one by his desk for quick reference. Right now, it irritated him almost past reason.
With only eight days until its final retirement, the last Boeing 737-700 in Rolm’s fleet had gone down—hard.
He’d purposely planned his own retirement to follow the day after that of the 737’s. The way he felt, he might well be dead by tomorrow—from sorrow, if nothing else.
A hundred and thirty-seven passengers (only four empty seats), two flight crew, and four cabin crew had boarded the LuftSvenska flight under their own power. They would all be departing the flight, or at least the rolling hillside of the Fjällberget ski area, very differently. He’d been told that DNA testing would be required to straighten out who some of the parts belonged to. There was also the matter of eleven skiers still unaccounted for on the ground.
Rolm shifted his glare from the calendar to the cold sky outside his window and did his best not to read anything into today’s date. Easier said than done.
December 13th.
He considered himself to be no more superstitious than the next Swede, but it was the precise seventieth anniversary of the airline’s first disaster.
Not that he could do a damn thing about it from here, not until he knew what had happened. As if. President of the airline never did a damn thing anyway except PR—and suffer a thousand headaches.
His desk offered a sweeping view from the top floor of the headquarters building. Stories below, the waterfront of northern Stockholm inspired guests in his office to exclamations of pleasure. But all he’d ever really cared about was looking up. There, he caught glimpses of their LuftSvenska planes headed in and out of Arlanda Airport thirty kilometers to the north. As the country’s flagship airline, the King had granted permission to paint the planes flag blue with wide yellow stripes down the window line and diagonally up the tail. Distinctively Swedish from miles away.
Rolm’s service boss had been one of the many calls, assuring him that the bird had passed all safety checks and the maintenance was fully current. There’d been no slacking off as the aircraft approached end-of-service.
Then why had the 737 gone down?
Had it looked at a calendar? His wife, Gertrude, had suggested that when he’d called to let her know. Unlike him but like so many of his fellow countryman, she was deeply superstitious about the number thirteen.
The press was sure to make a heyday of that and the seventieth anniversary of that first disaster combined. LuftSvenska’s first crash, a midair collision over London that had killed all the crew and passengers, thirty-four in all, had almost killed the airline. Always remembered as the second-worst disaster in the airline’s history. Would it now be remembered as the third or finally relegated to the chronicles of the past? No, the newsies would make sure it was prominently remembered for a good while yet.

Initial Publication: January 23, 2024
Print Pages: 376
Audio length: 9:45
Narrator: Read by Author

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