Cold Fire (22 page)

McDonnell Douglas’s DC-10 specialist at SAM sounded equally baffled: “What’s this guy’s name?”

“We’ll find out. All we know right now is his first name,” Sleighton Delbaugh said. “It’s Jim.”

As the captain announced to the passengers that they would be landing in Dubuque as a result of mechanical problems, Jim watched Evelyn approach him along the port aisle, weaving because the plane was no longer as steady as it had been. He wished she would not ask him what he knew she had to ask.

“... and it might be a little rough,” the captain concluded.

As the pilots reduced power to one engine and increased it to the other, the wings wobbled, and the plane wallowed like a boat in a swelling sea. Each time it happened, they recovered quickly, but between those desperate course corrections, when they were unlucky enough to hit air turbulence, the DC-10 did not ride through it as confidently as it had done all the way out from LAX.

“Captain Delbaugh would like you to come forward if you could,” Evelyn said when she reached him, soft-voiced and smiling as if delivering an invitation to a pleasant little luncheon of tea and finger sandwiches.

He wanted to refuse. He was not entirely sure that Christine and Casey—or Holly, for that matter—would live through the crash and its immediate aftermath without him at their side. He knew that on impact a ten-row chunk of the fuselage aft of first-class would crack loose from the rest of the plane, and that less damage would be done to it than to the forward and rear sections. Before he had intervened in the fate of Flight 246, all of the passengers in those favored seats had been destined to come out of the crash with comparatively minor injuries or no injuries at all. He was sure that all of those marked for life were still going to live, but he was not certain that merely moving the Dubroveks into the middle of the safety zone was sufficient to alter their fate and insure their survival. Perhaps, after impact, he would have to be there to get them through the fire and out of the wreckage—which he could not do if he was with the flight crew.

Besides, he had no idea whether the crew was going to survive. If he was with them in the cockpit on impact...

He went with Evelyn anyway. He had no choice—at least not since Holly Thorne had insisted that he might be able to do more than save one woman and one child, might thwart fate on a large scale instead of a small one. He remembered too clearly the dying man in the station wagon out on the Mojave Desert and the three murdered innocents in the Atlanta convenience store last May, people who could have been spared along with others if he had been allowed to arrive in time to save them.

As he went by row sixteen, he checked out the Dubroveks, who were huddled over a storybook, then he met Holly’s eyes. Her anxiety was palpable.

Following Evelyn forward, Jim was aware of the passengers looking at him speculatively. He was one of their own, elevated to special status by their predicament, which they were beginning to suspect was worse than they were being told. They were clearly wondering what special knowledge he possessed that made his presence in the cockpit desirable. If only they knew.

The plane was wallowing again.

Jim picked up a trick from Evelyn. She did not just weave where the tilting deck forced her to go, but attempted to anticipate its movement and lean in the opposite direction, shifting her point of gravity to maintain her balance.

A couple of the passengers were discreetly puking into air-sickness bags. Many others, though able to control their nausea, were gray-faced.

When Jim entered the cramped, instrument-packed cockpit, he was appalled by what he saw. The flight engineer was paging through a manual, a look of quiet desperation on his face. The two pilots—Delbaugh and First Officer Anilov, according to the flight attendant who had not entered with Jim—were struggling with the controls, trying to wrench the right-tending jumbo jet back onto course. To free them to concentrate on that task, a red-haired balding man was on his knees between the two pilots, operating the throttles at the captain’s direction, using the thrust of the remaining two engines to provide what steering they had.

Anilov said, “We’re losing altitude again.”

“Not serious,” Delbaugh said. Aware that someone had entered, Delbaugh glanced back at Jim. In the captain’s position, Jim would have been sweating like a race-lathered horse, but Delbaugh’s face glistened with only a fine sheen of perspiration, as if someone had spritzed him with a plant mister. His voice was steady: “You’re him?”

“Yeah,” Jim said.

Delbaugh looked forward again. “We’re coming around,” he said to Anilov, and the co-pilot nodded. Delbaugh ordered a throttle change, and the man on the floor complied. Then, speaking to Jim without looking at him, the captain said, “You knew it was going to happen.”

“Yeah.”

“So what else can you tell me?”

Bracing himself against a bulkhead as the plane shuddered and wallowed again, Jim said, “Total hydraulic failure.”

“I mean, something I don’t know,” Delbaugh replied with cool sarcasm. It justifiably could have been an angry snarl, but he was admirably in command of himself. Then he spoke to approach control, obtaining new instructions.

Listening, Jim realized that the Dubuque tower was going to bring in Flight 246 by way of a series of 360-degree turns, in an attempt to line it up with one of the runways. The pilots could not easily guide the plane into a straight approach, as usual, because they had no real control. The disabled craft’s maddening tendency to turn endlessly to the right was now to be incorporated into a breathtakingly conceived plan that would let it find its way into the barn like a stubborn bull determined to resist the herder and follow its own route home. If the radius of each turn was carefully calculated and matched to an equally precise rate of descent, they might eventually be able to bring 246 head-on to a runway and all the way in.

Jim twitched in shock and almost spoke those four words aloud when they came to him.

Instead, when the captain finished talking to the tower, Jim said, “Is your landing gear operable?”

“We got it down and locked,” Delbaugh confirmed.

“Then we might make it.”

“We
will
make it,” Delbaugh said. “Unless there’s another surprise waiting for us.”

“There is,” Jim said.

The captain glanced worriedly at him again. “What?”

“For one thing, there’ll be a sudden windshear as you’re going in, oblique to you, so it won’t drive you into the ground. But the reflected updraft from it will give you a couple bad moments. It’ll be like you’re flying over a washboard.”

“What’re you talking about?” Anilov demanded.

“When you’re making your final approach, a few hundred feet from the end of the runway, you’ll still be at an angle,” Jim said, once more allowing some omniscient higher power to speak through him, “but you’ll have to go for it anyway, no other choice.”

“How can you know that?” the flight engineer demanded.

Ignoring the question, Jim went on, and the words came in a rush: “The plane’ll suddenly drop to the right, the wing’ll hit the ground, and you’ll cartwheel down the runway, end over end, off it, into a field. The whole damn plane’ll come apart and burn.”

The red-haired man in civilian clothes, operating the throttles, looked back at Jim in disbelief. “What crock of shit is this, who the hell do you think you are?”

“He knew about engine number two before it blew up,” Delbaugh said coolly.

Aware that they were entering the second of the trio of planned 360-degree turns and that time was swiftly running out, Jim said, “None of you in the cockpit will die, but you’ll lose a hundred and forty-seven passengers, plus four flight attendants.”

“Oh my God,” Delbaugh said softly.

“He can’t
know
this,” Anilov objected.

Delbaugh gave additional instructions to the red-haired man, who manipulated the throttles. One engine grew louder, the other softer, and the big craft began its second turn, shedding some altitude as it went.

Jim said, “But there’s a warning, just before the plane tips to the right.”

“What?” Delbaugh said, still unable to look at him, straining to get what response he could from the wheel.

“You won’t recognize what it means, it’s a strange sound, like nothing you’ve heard before, because it’s a structural failure in the wing coupling, where it’s fixed to the fuselage. A sharp twang, like a giant steel-guitar string. When you hear it, if you increase power to the port engine immediately, compensating to the left, you’ll keep her from cartwheeling.”

Anilov had lost his patience. “This is nuts. Slay, I can’t think with this guy here.”

Jim knew Anilov was right. Both System Aircraft Maintenance in San Francisco and the dispatcher had been silent for a while, hesitant to interfere with the crew’s concentration. If he stayed there, even without saying another word, he might unintentionally distract them at a crucial moment. Besides, he sensed that there was nothing more of value that he would be given to tell them.

He left the flight deck and moved as quickly as possible toward row sixteen.

Holly kept watching for Jim Ironheart, hoping he would rejoin them. She wanted him nearby when the worst happened. She had not forgotten the bizarre dream from last night, the monstrous creature that had seemed to come out of her nightmare and into her motel room; neither had she forgotten how many people he had killed in his quest to protect the lives of the innocent, nor how savagely he slaughtered Norman Rink in that Atlanta convenience store. But the dark side of him was outweighed by the light. Though an aura of danger surrounded him, she also felt curiously safe in his company, as if within the protective nimbus of a guardian angel.

Through the public-address system, one of the flight attendants was instructing them on emergency procedures. Other attendants were positioned throughout the plane, making sure everyone was following directions.

The DC-10 was wallowing and shimmying again. Worse, although without a wooden timber anywhere in its structure, it was creaking like a sailing ship on a storm-tossed sea. The sky was blue beyond the portholes, but evidently the air was more than blustery; it was raging, tumultuous.

None of the passengers had any illusions now. They knew they were going in for a landing under the worst conditions, and that it would be rough. Maybe fatal. Throughout the enormous plane, people were surprisingly quiet, as if they were in a cathedral during a solemn service. Perhaps, in their minds’ eyes, they were experiencing their own funerals.

Jim appeared out of the first-class section and approached along the port aisle. Holly was immensely relieved to see him. He paused only to smile encouragingly at the Dubroveks, and to put his hand on Holly’s shoulder and give her a gentle squeeze of reassurance. Then he settled into the seat behind her.

The plane hit a patch of turbulence worse than anything before. She was half convinced that they were no longer flying but sledding across corrugated steel.

Christine took Holly’s hand and held it briefly, as if they were old friends—which, in a curious way, they were, thanks to the imminence of death, which had a bonding effect on people.

“Good luck, Holly.”

“You, too,” Holly said.

Beyond her mother, little Casey looked so small.

Even the flight attendants were seated now, and in the position they had instructed the passengers to take. Finally Holly followed their example and assumed the posture that contributed to the best chance of survival in a crash: belted securely in the seat, bent forward, head tucked between her knees, gripping her ankles with her hands.

The plane came out of the shattered air, slipping down glass-smooth for a moment. But before Holly had time to feel any relief, the whole sky seemed to be shaking as though gremlins were standing at the four corners and snapping it like a blanket.

Overhead storage compartments popped open. Train-cases, valises, jackets, and personal items flew out and rained down on the seats. Something struck the center of Holly’s bowed back, bouncing off her. It was not heavy, hardly hurt at all, but she suddenly worried that a train-case, laden with some woman’s makeup and jars of face cream, would drop at precisely the right angle to crack her spine.

Captain Sleighton Delbaugh called out instructions to Yankowski, who continued to kneel between the pilots, operating the throttles while they were preoccupied with maintaining what little control they had left. He was braced, but a hard landing was not going to be kind to him.

They were coming out of the third and final 360-degree turn. The runway was ahead of them, but not straight-on, just as Jim—damn, he’d never gotten the guy’s last name—had predicted.

Also as the stranger had foreseen, they were descending through exceptional turbulence, bucking and shuddering as if they were in a big old bus with a couple of bent axles, thundering down a steep and rugged mountain road. Delbaugh had never seen anything like it; even if the plane had been intact, he’d have been concerned about landing in those treacherous crosswinds and powerful rising thermals.

But he could not pull up and go on, hoping for better conditions at another airport or on another pass at this one. They had kept the jumbo jet in the air for thirty-three minutes since the tail-engine explosion. That was a feat of which they could be proud, but skill and cleverness and intelligence and nerve were not enough to carry them much farther. Minute by minute, and now second by second, keeping the stricken DC-10 in the air was increasingly like trying to fly a massive rock.

They were about two thousand meters from the end of the runway and closing fast.