Silent Enemy (33 page)
Authors: Tom Young
“Losing hydraulics on two and three,” Dunne said.
“I can’t do anything with it,” Colman said.
“You’ve got only one rudder actuator left.”
Gold tore the headset away. The plane’s gyrations settled into an oscillating pattern: a steep climb, a moment of stability, then a stomach-knotting drop. At the top of a climb, Gold dragged herself to the pressure valves and opened the lower door.
The blast had torn open the aft end of the tail cone. Blue sky and blue water slid alternately into view, one pushing away the other, as the C-5 pitched up and down.
The wind took forms that Gold did not know existed: rushing high-altitude air nearly too strong to stand against yet too thin to breathe. The slipstream slashed at her with blades of ice. Gritty projectiles peppered her cheek. Red flecks appeared on her sleeves; they were droplets of blood launched with force enough to spatter on her uniform.
Two figures lay alongside the catwalk. Gold knew she couldn’t get them by herself. She fumbled for her headset, found the TALK switch, and shouted, “We need some help back here!” Then she dropped the headset, crawled through the pressure valve, and tried to get to her feet.
The aircraft pitched up. The g-forces doubled, then tripled her body weight. Gold’s muscles turned to lead and her joints to rubber. An invisible power bore her down to her knees. She knew she faced no danger of getting sucked out of the opening in the tail since the plane was depressurized. But
falling
out was another matter.
falling
out was another matter.
She timed her movements by the C-5’s flight pattern. At the top of the climb, the unseen magnets pulling her to the floor released her, and she stumbled down the catwalk. The maelstrom of wind assaulted her ears like some chorus of the damned.
Parson clung with both hands to a length of aluminum bracing marked NO STEP. Blood speckled the legs of his ripped and punctured flight suit. Shrapnel wounds, Gold supposed. She wondered if he was conscious until he raised his head and shouted, “Get Justin!”
The aeromed stared upward through sightless eyes rolled back into his head. As Gold tried to assess his injuries, the aircraft began another dive. With nothing to tether him, Justin slid nearer the open end of the tail cone, its jagged edges in a metallic shudder as the wind tore at them.
Gold lunged toward him and grabbed him by the collar of his flight suit, her oxygen cylinder clanging against the flooring as she fell. The fall turned her cracked ribs to razors, and the pain took her breath. Sprawled across the catwalk, she held Justin with one hand and gripped a length of steel tubing with the other. Gold timed the next lurch of the aircraft and let the plane’s motion help her pull him away from the opening. The Pacific loomed beyond, a fall through infinity to a sapphire obliteration. The sight brought a wrenching nothingness in her stomach.
Blood soaked the left leg of Justin’s uniform, and splinters of bone jutted through the fabric in three places. The points and edges looked like foreign objects, not of the human body, shards of a vessel that had held raw meat until something crushed it. Below the ankle, cords of sinew and torn ligaments were all that remained of his foot. Wind caught the blood as it poured from the mangled knots of tissue and turned it to spray.
The crew chief had simply vanished. The lanyard of his safety harness was still tied to the empennage ladder. The other end of it, frayed and charred, flailed in the slipstream. In a fleeting thought, Gold hoped the explosion had killed him instantly, that his body had plummeted those thousands of feet with no awareness left in it.
Justin and Parson had both lost their oxygen masks. Parson still seemed alert; perhaps in all the maneuvers the jet had descended into breathable air. The C-5 banked, a roll to the right. Where the sky met the ocean, the cerulean horizon tilted across the yawning gap in the tail cone. Gold feared the next lurch might throw all three of them from the aircraft. But then she saw Parson’s harness, still tied to the ladder. A measure of insurance perhaps, but someone would have to cut or untie the strap to move him.
Where was her help? Hadn’t they heard her call? Gold worried that the crew might assume everyone back here was dead. If they just repressurized the airplane and flew on, she could never get back inside through the pressure valves. Along with Parson and Justin, she’d soon die of exposure or hypoxia.
She looked around the tail section. Its torn interior appeared skeletal to her, a cadaver long dead of a grievous wound. But the airplane remained very much alive, if badly hurt. The climbs and dives continued, though not with the same sickening amplitude. Maybe Colman and Dunne were regaining control. The C-5 seemed to ride gentle swells. She didn’t know if they could land it in this condition, but at least the aircraft no longer threatened to plunge straight for the bottom of the ocean.
One of the pressure doors opened, and a gloved hand reached through it. At first, Gold did not recognize the flight-suited figure, face covered by an oxygen mask, as it emerged into the empennage. Loose strands of graying hair tangled around the straps of the face mask. It was the MCD.
She balanced her way down the catwalk. A loadmaster came through the pressure doors and followed behind her. When they reached Gold and Justin, they lifted the wounded aeromed by the arms and pulled him farther from the hole in the tail cone.
“Grab his legs,” the MCD shouted. “I’ll take his arms.”
Gold got up on her hands and knees. She took Justin’s right leg. The loadmaster held him by the calf of his shattered left leg. Arterial spurts from the stump of Justin’s foot reddened the loadmaster’s flight suit. Justin gave no sign of consciousness. He was dead weight. Gold could find little reason to hope for his life except that the dead didn’t bleed.
They carried him forward, dripping spatters of blood onto the catwalk. When they put him down by the pressure valves, the MCD opened the lower door. From inside the aircraft, two medics pulled him through. Exposed veins and tendons dangled from his stump like tentacles. They left red trails as they dragged across the valve seal.
“Stop that bleeding,” the MCD yelled to her troops.
“Parson’s hurt, too,” Gold said.
The MCD nodded, and the three of them took half steps down the catwalk toward Parson. A rumble of turbulence put Gold on her knees again. The MCD and loadmaster pulled her to her feet. It felt a little warmer now. Maybe the aircraft really had descended quite a way, but as Gold looked out through the rip in the tail the water seemed no closer.
Parson stared up at them. So he was still conscious. The dark stains on his flight suit had all widened, but Gold saw no sign of severe blood loss anywhere.
The MCD reached into one of her leg pockets and withdrew a pair of medical shears. She cut through the strap of Parson’s safety harness. Wind caught the loose end and sucked it through the opening. Whipping in the slipstream, it beat against the outside skin of the airplane until it frayed into silence.
“Can you stand?” the MCD shouted.
Parson shifted his torso and bent his left knee. He raised his upper body by his arms, and Gold held out hope his injuries were minor. But when he put weight on his right leg, he collapsed and growled through gritted teeth.
“Broken tibia,” the MCD said. “He’s a big guy. This won’t be easy.”
The loadmaster grabbed Parson by his armpits. Gold moved to take his left leg, but she hesitated. Could they lift him without hurting him?
“Let’s pick him up by the thighs,” the MCD yelled. “Don’t put any pressure on his lower leg.”
The MCD took Parson’s right leg. Gold put her hands around his upper left leg. Parson made that growling sound again, and she felt something sharp through her left glove. In horror, she thought she’d found—and worsened—a compound fracture. But then she realized it was a sliver of metal embedded in his flesh. She moved her hand to avoid driving it in deeper.
“You got him?” the MCD asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Gold shouted.
“On the count of three,” the MCD said. “One . . . two . . . three!”
They lifted and Parson groaned, but they got him onto the catwalk. The three struggled with him, by inches, until they moved him to the pressure valves.
The MCD opened the lower portal. She shouted a quick diagnosis to the medics waiting on the other side: “Shrapnel lacerations all over. Fracture of the lower right leg.”
The aeromeds dragged Parson inside the troop compartment, and Gold, the loadmaster, and the MCD crawled through after him. When Gold put her hand down on the troop compartment floor, it came up sticky with blood. Justin lay beside a baggage closet, two medics working on him. They had scissored the legs of his flight suit, and what Gold saw brought bitter fluid up her throat. She forced it back down.
The medics had placed a combat tourniquet above Justin’s knee. One of them tightened it down with the windlass rod and clipped the rod into place. The burned and torn flesh below the tourniquet looked like something a week dead. The bones were so shattered they gave no form to the muscles and left them a bleeding, shapeless mass. Justin would be lucky to live, let alone keep enough leg to walk easily on a prosthesis.
Parson sat up against the galley refrigerator. He clenched his jaw as the aeromeds cut open his flight suit and examined his legs.
“Give me a headset,” he said.
“Let us treat you, sir,” a medic said.
“Do what you gotta do, but give me a damned headset,” Parson ordered.
Gold closed her eyes and offered a silent prayer of thanks. That was the Parson she knew: pissed off and in pain, but still in command.
25
P
arson took the medic’s headset and plugged it into an interphone cord coiled beside him. His legs felt as if they were bound with barbed wire. Tinnitus rang in his ears continually, like a warning tone for which there was no MUTE button, and he had to turn the headset volume all the way up to hear anything. He adjusted the mike and pressed the TALK switch.
arson took the medic’s headset and plugged it into an interphone cord coiled beside him. His legs felt as if they were bound with barbed wire. Tinnitus rang in his ears continually, like a warning tone for which there was no MUTE button, and he had to turn the headset volume all the way up to hear anything. He adjusted the mike and pressed the TALK switch.
“Flight deck, troop compartment,” he said. “This is Parson. Tell me what you got.”
A pause of several seconds. Then Dunne said, “Great to hear you, sir. We lost all the fluid out of systems two and three. We have the shutoff valves closed to a bunch of actuators and we’re going to try to refill the reservoirs. Maybe we can get those systems back.”
“Good work,” Parson said. “It feels like you have partial control now. What did you do?”
“I added power whenever we climbed and I wiped it off when we dived,” Colman said. “That seemed to civilize those oscillations, exactly like the book says.”
“We uprigged the ailerons, too,” Dunne said. “I just told him to turn on the LDCS.”
“All right,” Parson said. “You boys have been studying.” Parson had never felt prouder of crewmates than now. They
deserved
to live. He just didn’t know if they had a landable plane.
deserved
to live. He just didn’t know if they had a landable plane.
“How’s everybody back there?” Dunne asked.
Parson hesitated. Then he said, “Spencer’s gone. Justin’s fucked up real bad. Gold is okay. I got a broken leg.”
“I’m sorry,” Colman said.
“Yeah.” Parson didn’t know what else to say. Could he have prevented the crew chief’s death? He’d have to think about it later. “Repressurize the aircraft,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Dunne said.
When the medic adjusted Parson’s broken leg, pain shot through his body as if his nerves had turned to acid. He cried out, then closed his eyes hard and muttered curses. It was the worst he’d suffered since an insurgent twisted his cracked wrist four years ago when he and Gold were captured. He felt light-headed. So this is what it’s like to pass out from pain, he thought. But he remained alert. No such luck as a few minutes of unconsciousness.
Sweat beaded cold on the end of his nose and dropped onto the front of his flight suit. He felt a flutter of panic. For a moment, the agony put him on the ground in the snow in Afghanistan. He forced the memory back down, pushed it into that mental oubliette where he kept all the emotions he could not afford.
The MCD helped remove his boots and secure the plastic splints, and she managed not to hurt him again.
“I want to give you morphine,” she said, “but Justin’s going to need what little we have left.”
“That’s okay,” Parson said. “We still got problems, and I don’t need anything that’ll screw up my judgment.”
“We have plenty of aspirin.”
“It’ll do.”
The MCD went down the steps and came back with two white tablets and a foam cup filled with water. Parson downed the aspirin and gulped all the water. He hadn’t realized he was so thirsty. The aeromeds brought him another cup, and he drank it in three swallows. Part of it ran down the sides of his mouth.
“Once the aspirin kicks in,” the MCD said, “we’ll get some of that metal out of your skin. What’s in deeper might have to stay there.”
“Just get me so you can put me back in the cockpit.”
“You’re crazy, Major,” the MCD said. “You’re in no condition to fly. Your copilot and engineer have the airplane.”
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