Silent Enemy (36 page)
Authors: Tom Young
“And time it all just right,” Parson said. Then he noticed Gold in the nav seat. “Welcome back,” he said.
Colman shook his head. “Sure sounds tricky,” he said.
“You bet it is,” Parson said, “but it’s all we got.”
Gold did not understand everything she heard, but she could tell they were talking about something they’d never done before. And they’d have to figure it out despite their pain and sleep deprivation.
“Have you ever done this in the sim?” Colman asked.
“No,” Parson said.
“I don’t think it’s been flight-tested, either,” Dunne added.
“Maybe we ought to flight-test it ourselves at altitude before we try to land with it,” Colman said.
“That’s a good idea,” Parson said.
Gold considered the task faced by the crew. Hundreds of miles of ocean lay ahead that they had to roll up, minute by minute, with a crippled aircraft. And that was the easy part. Then they had to aim this thing at a strip of asphalt probably narrower than the plane’s wingspan, using controls that didn’t work.
She felt frail as she looked out over the water spangled by slanting light. The sight gave her a chill. Her own life seemed brief and unimportant now that it might be nearing its end. Once at Nags Head, while on leave from Fort Bragg, she had watched a German shepherd puppy walk on the beach, apparently for the first time. The vastness of the sea frightened the animal, and it sat in the sand and yowled and cried. Now Gold understood how the pup felt. It had suddenly faced its own insignificance. The sweep of creation overwhelmed the animal’s mind, as it nearly had Gold’s.
The crew looked over stray pages from their manuals. Then Dunne gathered up the sheets, placed them back in his binder, and snapped the rings closed.
“So do we want to try this now?” Colman asked.
“No time like the present,” Parson said. He reached overhead and flipped a row of switches. At each click, a corresponding OFF light illuminated. Gold didn’t quite get this business of turning things off; more than enough parts seemed to have stopped working on their own. But Parson and his crew had clearly done some in-flight research.
“What do you want me to do?” Colman asked.
“Take the control column,” Parson said. “When you’re ready, punch off the autopilot. I’ll take the spoiler handle. You got the throttles.”
“All right,” Colman said. “Here goes nothing.” He placed his hands around the yoke.
“Remember,” Parson said, “if it all goes to hell, just put the airplane back in the configuration it’s in now. And if we can’t control it, we might as well know right here.”
“Yes, sir,” Colman said. “Disengaging.”
Colman pressed a button with his thumb. The nose climbed. Gold watched shadows in the flight deck crawl across the floor as the angle of sunlight changed. She felt a dip in her stomach.
“A little forward pressure,” Parson said. The nose continued rising, then reversed itself and fell. “All right, now, a little back pressure.”
Parson moved the handle on the center console, and the nose slowed its drop. He moved the handle farther, and the nose pitched up. Gold’s stomach lurched again. The sensations made no sense. The nose was climbing yet she felt she was falling.
“Altitude,” Dunne said.
“Shit, we lost two thousand feet,” Colman said. “I didn’t even notice.”
“Don’t forget,” Dunne said. “You gotta add power when you do that.”
“Sure as hell can’t do this and chew gum at the same time,” Colman said.
“Do you want to try it with flaps down?” Dunne asked.
“I don’t think so,” Parson said. “No telling what this damned thing will do if we lower flaps. I’d rather land fast even if we burn up the brakes.”
“Works for me,” Colman said.
“I do want to try it at a slower speed than this, though,” Parson said. “We can’t touch down at three hundred knots.”
Gold marveled at their clinical detachment, as if lives, including their own, didn’t depend on every decision. She felt herself a patient on an operating table, under the scalpel but completely aware, listening to the banter of surgeons.
“Now?” Colman asked.
“Yeah,” Parson said. “Slow us down to two hundred.”
Colman eased back on the throttles. He moved only three of them. The other remained out of place like a missing tooth, and Gold remembered the crew had already shut down one of the engines. The undertones of wind and turbines hushed as the aircraft decelerated. The nose fell, rose, fell again.
“Careful on trim,” Parson said.
“She’s handling different now that we’re slow,” Colman said. He moved one of his hands, and Gold saw his palm had left a sheen of sweat on the horn of the yoke.
“You got less lift now,” Parson said, “and what controls you still have are less effective.”
“Altitude,” Dunne warned. Gold noticed needles and tapes moving within the instruments, though she could not tell what it meant.
“Let’s catch that descent,” Parson said.
Colman pulled back on the yoke and advanced the throttles. Parson tugged at that handle on the center console again, and the nose snapped up sharply. The abrupt maneuver startled Gold so that she gripped the nav seat’s armrests. In the next moment, she thought she knew exactly how, when, and where she would die.
The aircraft shuddered. The warbling screech of a warning tone sounded in the cockpit. The C-5 stopped flying. It rolled off on its left wing, then dropped its nose toward the ocean. The windscreen showed nothing but blue water straight below.
“Stall,” Dunne said. Voice calm but eyes wide.
Pens and manuals clattered against the consoles. Screams erupted downstairs. Gold hugged herself into a tight ball and hoped the end would come quickly.
“Power off,” Parson said. “Get it back.” His words carried the resin of tension.
Colman slapped the throttles, pulled at the control column. The Pacific began to twist in the windscreen.
“Opposite rudder,” Parson said.
Colman kicked, and the sea stopped rotating. Then the ocean seemed to tilt away as the nose began to come up again. Gold’s cheeks sagged from some malign form of gravity, doubled and tripled, and coming from wrong directions.
“Airspeed,” Dunne said.
The crew seemed to have kicked into some cyborg state, become mere components of the aircraft. Not a wasted motion or word. Not even sparing the breath for profanity.
“Got it,” Colman said. Then he put his left hand on the throttle levers.
“Wait,” Parson said. “Wait—now gimme some power back.”
Colman advanced the throttles. He wasn’t wearing gloves, and as he adjusted the power he glanced down at his hand as if something had bitten it. He took his hand off the levers and shook his fingers. Gold saw that one of the throttles—the one to the far right—was shaking so hard it buzzed in its mountings. The aircraft leveled and flew. Gold closed her eyes, exhaled a long breath.
“What’s with number four?” Colman asked.
Out on the right wing, something exploded.
27
T
he aircraft shook so violently Parson could hardly read instruments. But he could see and feel enough to know the number four engine had disintegrated.
he aircraft shook so violently Parson could hardly read instruments. But he could see and feel enough to know the number four engine had disintegrated.
“Somebody scan that wing,” he said.
Colman turned in his seat and looked out the window. “It’s shelled out pretty bad,” he said. “And it’s on fire.”
“Emergency shutdown checklist,” Parson ordered. He wasn’t surprised the damned engine finally blew. It had been running for about thirty hours.
Parson pulled the number four fire handle, then pressed a button to shoot extinguishing agent into the engine. Colman pushed up the power on the two remaining engines. Dunne’s hands played across the engineer’s panel; Parson heard the clicks and snaps of switches being turned off. With an engine fire added to their problems, Parson wondered if he and his crew were just going through the motions. But they’d come too far to give up now.
“Two-engine ceiling’s nine thousand feet,” Dunne said.
Parson tried to interpret the blurred and bouncing needles and indicators in front of him. The C-5 seemed to be descending at around a thousand feet per minute.
“Just hold this attitude,” he told Colman. “She’ll level off by herself when we get to nine thousand.”
No fire warning lights were on, but Parson realized he’d never seen any to begin with. That really meant nothing. An engine coming apart might rip out the sensors and circuitry for fire detection.
“Is it still burning?” Parson asked.
“You bet it is,” Colman said.
Parson flipped a switch to direct another bottle of extinguishing agent into the bad engine and he pressed the FIRE button again.
“How about now?” he asked.
Colman peered outside, shook his head. “Still burning,” he said.
Dunne unharnessed himself and stood to look out the window. Parson could tell from his expression he was puzzled. The flight engineer looked back at his own panel, then out at the engine again.
“Those aren’t flames,” he said. “They’re sparks.”
“What the hell?” Parson asked.
“The fan’s still windmilling,” Dunne said, “and those titanium blades are scraping against the inside of that fucked-up cowling.”
Parson leaned in his seat to see for himself. The effort brought waves of pain from his broken leg, and he cursed under his breath. He cursed again when he saw number four. Sure enough, a fountain of sparks spewed from the engine like those from a knife blade held against a spinning grindstone. The plume shimmered and danced for several yards behind the tailpipe.
“Is there anything we can do to stop it from turning like that?” Parson asked.
“No,” Dunne said, “but I imagine it’ll quit by itself soon enough.”
No telling what that implied. If that TF-39 finally seized up, what further damage could it do? The pylon and wing structure might already be compromised, depending on whatever stresses the engine caused when it let go. The aft end of the cowling looked like someone had fired buckshot through it from the inside. The force of the disintegration had thrown parts, probably turbine blades, through the sheet metal. The technical term was “uncontained failure.” Parson wondered that the compressor still turned at all.
He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. Tried to think. He drowsed, faded, entered a dark wood infested with copperheads. The only route away from them led through them. When Parson jolted awake, he wondered how long he’d slept. He checked his watch. Only seconds.
Whatever adrenaline had kept him alert was gone now. Just a little longer, he told himself. Hold on just a little longer. He knew that could make all the difference in a combat situation: the guts to hold course, hold position, stay on the target, just a few seconds more. This wasn’t exactly combat, but it would sure as hell do until the real thing came along.
Gold had remained silent through the engine failure. Now he felt her hand on his upper left arm. Those thin fingers, with their hints of scars, pressed down ever so slightly, and his anxiety broke like a vacuum, if only just for a moment.
Parson took her gesture as a reassurance, an expression of confidence in him. He looked back at her over his aviator’s glasses. She met his eyes, nodded, looked away.
The jet leveled at nine thousand feet, and now Parson needed information. What was the temperature deviation down here? It would affect fuel burn. His finger hovered over the control pad for his FMS on the center console. In his exhaustion, he struggled to remember the keystrokes to give him the data he wanted. He was so tired he had to think about things that should have been second nature. It was as if his brain’s automatic functions had shut down and switched to manual.
He recalled, pressed buttons, read numbers. “Temp deviation is plus fifteen,” he told Dunne. “What do your charts tell you?”
Dunne ran his pencil through a graph, tapped at his calculator. “We’re still okay on fuel,” he said.
Parson let out a long breath. Then he said, “All right, the box says we have five hundred seventy-five miles to go.”
“What about our pitch problem?” Colman asked.
Parson wasn’t sure how to answer that. Given what had happened earlier, it seemed the spoilers would, indeed, help bring up the nose a bit. But beyond some unknown threshold, they’d dump the lift and bring on a stall. Parson and Colman had not practiced with it enough to perfect the technique and they couldn’t screw around with it anymore after two engines had failed.
“When we make our approach,” Parson said, “just keep it in a level attitude as best you can. You’re not looking for a smooth landing, just a survivable one. I’m not touching that fucking spoiler handle again unless I have to.”
A disagreeable fact lodged in his mind: He had done all he could. The thought gave him no satisfaction. Rather, it made him realize his limits. He and his crew and passengers remained trapped within this enclosed tube of metal, a certain mass traveling at a certain speed, with a given mix of flammable materials and a set number of system malfunctions. Soon now Parson must allow his decisions to run their course, let physics and gravity do what they would.
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