Carl shoved the tickets toward the attendant behind the check-in desk.

“It’s a good thing you’re here early, folks,” she said. “All airline equipment has been ordered off the ground and out of L.A. in the next three hours, and we’re about to move this one within the next few minutes.”

“Because of the meteor?” Lori asked.

“Yes, that’s right. The front office is probably overreacting, but these airplanes don’t come cheap, so Mr. Continental isn’t taking any chances.”

“So, is this plane still headed for Colorado Springs?” Carl asked.

“Yes, I think so.” The gate attendant smiled. “The pilot will let us all know when we get to cruising altitude. But, wherever this flight goes, it will be better than L.A.”

“You can say that again,” Carl said. “Thanks for the information.”

Still hand in hand, Carl and Lori walked quickly down the ramp and onto the plane. They took their seats in the first-class cabin and breathed a sigh of relief, not realizing that they would probably never see their friends, their business associates, their home, their beautiful possessions, their car, or the city of Los Angeles again.

CHAPTER TWO

AT 8:45 A.M., PACIFIC TIME, Manuel Quintana pointed his Jeep Cherokee up the winding road that led to the top of Mount Wilson. Manuel, whose friends called him Manolo, was the chief engineer of KTTV. The station had its transmitter at the antenna farm located on Mount Wilson—the highest point in the Los Angeles area, and less than a half-mile from the observatory.

Manuel wasn’t accustomed to pulling transmitter duty, and if this hadn’t been a special situation, he would have sent one of the technicians to take care of it. When the station called him at home that morning to tell him about the transmitter problem, he had been told that something was causing electrical arcing in the power supplies. Since his house was just a few miles from the foot of Mount Wilson, he had decided to drive up there and take care of the problem himself.

Manuel was from a blue-collar family, and he had always been a hands-on guy. The son of illegal Mexican immigrants who had slipped past the INS border patrol, Manuel had been born in the U.S. His father and mother, who had worked at various menial jobs, often said that their proudest accomplishment of all was that their son had been born on U.S. soil—a real American citizen.

Manuel graduated from the public schools in East Los Angeles, then went on to get a broadcast engineering degree from DeVry Institute of Technology. After that, he breezed through the FCC broadcast license exams and was awarded a first-class Broadcast Engineer’s License.

His first job was taking transmitter meter readings on the late-night shift. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. To celebrate that first paying job, he married Cathy, his high-school sweetheart. Within a year came the first of three children—all boys, all like their father. Manuel adored them.

He was a hard worker and a quick study. Gradually, seniority came, raises came, and then one day the vice president of engineering suddenly quit and Manuel was given the job.