Silent Enemy (16 page)
Authors: Tom Young
The aeromeds were working on him when she returned to the cargo compartment. He looked pale, and the medics had attached some sort of clip to his finger. The clip glowed from the inside with a red light, and it was connected to a cord that led to an electronic monitor.
“What’s all this?” Gold asked.
“A pulse oximeter,” one of the medics said. “That LED shines through his fingernail and tells us the oxygen content in his blood.”
“What’s wrong with his oxygen content?”
“His system isn’t processing oxygen efficiently because of the damage to his lungs.”
Gold felt something turn cold inside her chest. If the medical people were this concerned about Mahsoud’s vital signs, then his hold on this world must have loosened some.
“How are you, my friend?” Gold asked.
He smiled, drew a long breath, and said, “Fine,” in English. Almost turned it into two syllables.
“The aircraft commander likes your idea,” Gold said in Pashto. “They are going to take and send a photograph. They have already found the equipment they need.”
“I am glad to be of assistance.”
“There is something else I should tell you,” Gold said. “We have a long way to go.” She explained where and why.
“I heard Major Parson’s announcement,” Mahsoud said. “I could not understand it all, but it seemed to make the Americans very unhappy. I knew it was not good.”
Gold tried to judge Mahsoud’s reaction, but he gave little by way of cues. He’s probably received worse news in his young life, Gold thought. She knew his mother and two brothers were dead, but she did not know when and how they’d died.
“Very few people from your village have seen a tropical island,” Gold said. She regretted the words immediately. Worried that they sounded patronizing.
“None that I know of,” Mahsoud said. “Few have seen even Kandahar.”
Gold admired his strong front, but she felt heartsick. Mahsoud needed a real hospital. Not some sandy strip of pavement on a dot in the Pacific. She hoped somebody was thinking far enough ahead to send doctors and medical gear to meet the C-5 at Johnston.
She decided to ask Parson about that. To his credit, he seemed to be in a mood to listen to people. Gold climbed the flight deck ladder, thinking how to frame the question.
In the cockpit, the crew looked busy again. She could hear what sounded like urgent crosstalk on the interphone, but without her headset, she could not make out the words. The trouble seemed to have something to do with a message on Dunne’s computer. She looked over his shoulder:
AIR EVAC EIGHT-FOUR—
TEXACO SIX-EIGHT CANNOT REFUEL YOU. IT ABORTED
WITH AN ENGINE FIRE ON TAKEOFF. CONTINGENCY
PLANS IN PROGRESS.
12
S
o this is how it will end, Parson thought. For all my efforts, I could change nothing but the coordinates of the crash site, the location of the last-known position. A burning oil slick for an epitaph.
o this is how it will end, Parson thought. For all my efforts, I could change nothing but the coordinates of the crash site, the location of the last-known position. A burning oil slick for an epitaph.
Of course the tanker aborted, he realized. It rolled out of the factory during the Eisenhower administration, and it belonged in the boneyard, not in the air. And now it probably sat on the hammerhead at Lajes, surrounded by fire trucks and wrapped up in foam.
Parson felt no panic. He found himself in an emotional netherworld he’d visited just once before, in the snows of the Hindu Kush. He remembered the cold of the Afghan mountains, so bitter it sapped away not just body heat but reason itself. The snow falling so heavily the air seemed fibrous with it, covering the tracks that were leading him to Gold. The prospect of finding her alive so remote and his own imminent demise almost certain. Each breath of that frigid air scorching his lungs. Darkness coming on, so that he could barely read his compass.
Like then, death was not a risk now but an apparent certainty, and it brought a strange calm, a clarity. He felt he’d already used up his quota of luck and now lived in some cosmic debt. But his passengers and crew—they were another matter. So many of them so young. And Parson could
not
lose another crew. The best friends he’d ever known had died in the shoot-down of his C-130 years ago or had been slaughtered by terrorists shortly after the crash. The thought of something like that happening again turned his stomach, brought bile to his throat. So he’d fight the inevitable, past all realistic hope, against logic itself. Somewhere outside hope and logic, he made a call on HF:
not
lose another crew. The best friends he’d ever known had died in the shoot-down of his C-130 years ago or had been slaughtered by terrorists shortly after the crash. The thought of something like that happening again turned his stomach, brought bile to his throat. So he’d fight the inevitable, past all realistic hope, against logic itself. Somewhere outside hope and logic, he made a call on HF:
“Hilda,” he said, “Air Evac Eight-Four received your L-band message. Tell me about these contingency plans.”
“We have another tanker coming to you from Mildenhall,” the flight manager said.
All the way from England, Parson thought. They’ll never make it in time. “I don’t think that’s going to work,” he said.
“Opec Five-Two is already airborne,” the flight manager said.
“What is their position?”
“Ah, I’m afraid I don’t have that information.”
“When did they take off?”
“Approximately two hours ago. We launched them as a backup for your primary tanker.”
Parson tried to do some rough mental math, made difficult because he was starting to get tired. If he stayed on his current course, he’d run out of fuel long before the Mildenhall KC-135 could reach him. The only way to rendezvous with that aircraft would be to turn and go find it. In the vastness of this black Atlantic. Parson switched to the other HF radio.
“Santa Maria,” he called. “We have another problem.” Parson explained his situation, how he needed a turn toward the northeast to go off track and look for the tanker. He knew that would play havoc with transatlantic flights. The trouble was that this far out over the ocean, there was no radar coverage. Controllers kept track of airplanes the old-fashioned way, with position reports. Pilots would call in their time, speed, and altitude at a given waypoint, and estimated arrival time at the next. They had to get there within three minutes of that estimate.
With an emergency aircraft cutting north, and no way for controllers to watch for potential collisions, airliners would have to change their courses and altitudes. That was not figured into their fuel planning. Some would probably divert into the Azores. Those that had not reached the midpoints of their routes might turn back to their departure airports. An international incident all by itself.
After perhaps twenty minutes, Santa Maria said, “Air Evac Eight-Four, that’s approved. Turn right, heading zero-six-zero. Cleared for course deviations as needed. Please keep us advised.”
“Zero-six-zero,” Parson said. “Thank you, ma’am.” Then he said over interphone, “We just fucked up a lot of vacations.”
“You’re breaking my heart,” Dunne said.
That encouraged Parson a little. If Dunne could crack a joke, then his head was still on straight. If Parson was going to pull off the impossible, he’d need the flight engineer’s input. At the pilot’s instrument panel, Parson had nothing to tell him fuel quantity, hydraulic pressures, or the status of the electrical systems. These things he’d get from Dunne or not at all.
The copilot, Colman, was also new, but at least he hadn’t done anything stupid. Parson felt he owed these guys his very best, no matter how hopeless it seemed. He remembered an instructor who once said, “Fly it until the last piece stops moving.” Well, this machine was still in the air.
Colman turned a knob to set an indicator bug on his HSI, pressed HEADING on his nav select panel. The aircraft banked to the right. Then Parson entered a frequency into his air-to-air TACAN, waited for a signal from the tanker’s transmitter. Nothing.
“Still out of TACAN range,” Parson said. “Let’s see if they’ll talk to us.” He dialed the HF tanker frequency and called, “Opec Five-Two, Air Evac Eight-Four.”
“Air Evac Eight-Four, Opec Five-Two. Go ahead.”
Well, at least the damned radios are working right, Parson thought. “Opec Five-Two,” he said, “We have turned onto an intercept course. What is your position?”
The tanker pilot read off his coordinates, and Parson began to do the math. With the KC-135 heading southwest at around pointseven-five Mach, the two planes’ closure rate had them meeting in about three and a half hours.
Parson told his crew what he had calculated, and he said, “Engineer, what’s our burn time now?”
“At cruise speed, about three hours,” Dunne said.
“What if we slow it down to max range speed?” Parson said. He knew that by flying more slowly, they could squeeze out more air miles per thousand pounds of fuel.
Dunne opened to a range chart, ran his pencil through the curving lines. Tapped at his calculator. Swore, started over, ran the numbers again.
“Three hours and twenty minutes,” he said. “And at that speed, we cover less distance.”
Parson looked out at an ocean surface bronzed by moonlight. Our final resting place, he thought, after the engines flame out from fuel exhaustion, we descend through the bomb’s trigger altitude and hit the water in pieces like scattershot. This is what it feels like to run out of time and luck. His palms grew slick, his mouth dry. It all came down to the numbers on Dunne’s calculator, the negative figure at the bottom of the fuel chart.
To have an airplane full of people die for want of ten or fifteen minutes? Such a short sweep of a watch’s hand. If only you could stretch time, Parson thought. Conserve it somehow. But it flowed at a constant rate; always had since the Big Bang.
Parson scanned his instruments, though there was hardly any point. He stopped at the fuel flow gauges. Thought for a moment. He could not control the flow of time, but he could sure as hell control the flow of fuel.
“Engineer,” he said. “How much time do we have if we slow it down to max endurance speed? Not max
range
, max endurance.”
range
, max endurance.”
Dunne recalculated. Then he said, “Four hours, but we won’t put enough miles behind us.”
“No,” Parson said, “but the tanker might if they push it up to barber pole speed. They have a fuselage full of gas. They don’t care about their burn rate.”
“So you’re saying if we slow way down and they speed way up, the numbers will work out?” Colman asked.
“You got it.”
“Maybe,” Dunne said.
“Will the tanker pilots want to fly that close to critical Mach?” Colman asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Parson said. “They live for this shit.” He called the tanker crew and told them his plan.
“We’ll give it a try,” the KC-135 pilot said. “Let us have some coordinates to aim for, and we’ll meet you there.”
Parson checked his FMS, made some calculations, gave the tanker crew the lat/longs. Then he added, “Opec Five-Two, confirm you’re Pacer Crag modified.”
“Indeed, we are.”
“What does that mean?” Colman asked.
“They have a pretty good avionics suite,” Parson said, “and that will help them find us.”
“I hope it does,” Colman said.
Dunne slewed the N1 marker to the power setting he’d calculated for max endurance. “There it is,” he said. “Either this will work or it won’t.”
Parson knuckled back the throttles until the N1 rpm lined up with the marker. The airplane slowed to what felt almost like a hover. Noise from the slipstream fell off in a decrescendo like orchestral strings hushed by the hand of a conductor. Then Parson waited. There was simply nothing left to do but let the clock and the fuel gauges do what they would. The charts and formulas showed only minutes to spare. And that depended on the wind, the efficiency of the engines, the accuracy of the instruments.
A strange thought came to him then, a memory from nav school. One day at Mather Air Force Base, years ago, he’d picked up his schedule of training flights. Training sorties, they were called.
“That’s a funny word,” he said to an instructor. “Sortie?”
“It comes from the French word
sortir
,” the instructor said. “It means
to leave.
It doesn’t say anything about coming back. Remember that.”
sortir
,” the instructor said. “It means
to leave.
It doesn’t say anything about coming back. Remember that.”
And so he had. Right up until this moment, over these infinite tracts of water, dark and deep as oblivion.
GOLD SAT AT THE NAV SEAT
. She felt honored that Parson seemed to reserve that disused crew station for her. No one else ever sat there, at any rate.
. She felt honored that Parson seemed to reserve that disused crew station for her. No one else ever sat there, at any rate.
She didn’t understand everything she’d just heard on the interphone and radios. But she gathered that the crew needed another aerial refueling, and it would be close. Very close. And they sounded like they were doing things way out of standard ops, improvising. Soldiers in the field did that all the time. But these flyboys, in their world of checklists and rote procedure, normally planned and briefed every move they made.
Gold recalled an excruciating briefing for a paratroop exercise involving Fort Bragg and the adjacent Pope Air Force Base. The aircrews described their flight path to the drop zone, and they seemed to have a slide for every turn and landmark. Death by PowerPoint. One of the pilots taking part in Purple Dragon ’99 told her the flying was the easy part. Gold wondered what he’d think if he were here now.
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