by Mike Jenne
In his experience, Carson had learned that roughly ninety-nine percent of flying was excruciatingly routine, almost like driving a milquetoast family sedan down a painfully boring stretch of straight and level highway to Grandma’s house. That said, the vast majority of pilot’s training—approximately ninety percent of the ground work and practice flying—was focused on the remaining one percent of flight, when things go horribly wrong in the blink of an eye, when instruments fail on a complex night approach, or when a plane swerves into a blistering spin or when the weather turns in an instant, altering the world from blissful calm to liquid shit. And that one percent of flight is why Carson existed. That one percent was why Carson was Carson. He was born to become one with his machine, to complete the mission and return safely to Earth.
Besides having too much airspeed, they were also too high. In all of their paraglider training, they had never once contemplated a scenario where they would have too much altitude. Normally, their dilemma was not having sufficient altitude, which caused them to come up short of the desired landing site. And even tonight, returning from orbit, coming up short would not be a horrific problem, had they been coming down at White Sands or Edwards or any of the other normal landing sites where there was an abundance of flat unoccupied desert.
In his head, he pictured the situation. Although Three-Six’s weather information was obviously correct, it only provided a static snapshot of the conditions. Carson knew that weather could be incredibly dynamic, not static. Because it was three-dimensional, simple reports and meteorological charts could not effectively convey its invisible complexities. Weather front boundaries could not be accurately depicted with neatly drawn lines, because those lines were anything but neat as they projected off the surface of the Earth and into a churning atmosphere.
Carson surmised that a moisture-laden mass of turbulent warm air—bearing the powerful thunderstorm—was literally bearing down on and riding over the top of a mass of calmer, cooler air. The warm front was like a huge inverted wedge, like a wave on the verge of cresting, miles ahead of torrential rains and gusting winds.
“We are way too high,” he announced. He threw the hand controller to the left, and the paraglider responded in turn, spiraling the vehicle down in corkscrew turns to bleed off excess altitude. “Scott, we’re just going to have to make the best of it. Keep your eye on the TACAN DME. About every thirty seconds, I want you to call our direction and distance to the controller down there, so he has some idea of where we’re coming to roost. And cinch your harness good and tight. I’ll try my best to slide us in somewhere safe, but I doubt that this will be pretty.”
“Three-Six, this is Scepter Four. Three-Six, this is Scepter Four,” stated Ourecky. “My pilot advises that we have too much wind at altitude and will likely land well to your south. I will call TACAN DME until we land, so you’ll have a reference. How copy?”
“Scepter Four, good copy. Where are you now?”
“We are two miles out, twenty degrees from you. We should pass overhead shortly.”
“Scepter Four, this is Three-Six, I copy two miles out, twenty degrees from my location. Will continue to monitor and record. Good luck to you.”
“Thanks,” replied Ourecky. He turned to Carson and added, “I swear that I know that voice from somewhere, but I can’t pin it down.”
“Probably from a practice drop. Scott, go ahead and switch on the camera,” said Carson. “I know that we’re not going to make the field, but I want to know what’s below us. I’ll let you know when to switch on the landing light.”
“Got it,” said Ourecky. He threw a pair of switches on his panel, then turned on a small television screen in the center panel. A blob appeared in the screen; the monitor, connected to a fiber optics camera mounted alongside the forward strut skid strut, gradually warmed up, eventually displaying a dim image of the landscape below.
Carson surmised that spiraling down was counterproductive. When they came around the circle so that their back was into the wind, the paraglider was thrust sharply forward, so that they really weren’t flying a corkscrew, but a series of tight buttonhook turns, still drawing ever closer to the dark mountains. Pulling out of the spiral, he pointed the paraglider’s nose into the wind to hold a steady course. Now, even with the airspeed generated by the paraglider, they were effectively flying rearwards. Ourecky continued to talk to the controller over the UHF radio, maintaining a running commentary of their distance and direction to the now distant landing site.
Used to zooming straight ahead at supersonic speeds, flying backwards was entirely counterintuitive to Carson. He still wanted to lose altitude and stay as far north as possible, away from the mountains. As he watched the distant lights of Cap-Haïtien gradually climbing up in the window, he realized that they were going into the mountains regardless. A few moments later, he estimated that he was roughly five hundred feet up. “Switch on the landing light, Scott.”
Ourecky turned on the landing light, which projected a focused beam like a car’s headlight. While it was an essential to landing, it would consume their remaining battery power at an enormous rate. Even at this point, Carson wanted to conserve their batteries to have some residual juice to power the radios, so that they could summon the cavalry.
Scanning between the television monitor, the window, and his instruments, he identified a lighter shaded area below them and to the left, surrounded by darker terrain. He guessed that it was a cultivated field. Instead of gradually flaring the paraglider, which would be the normal procedure to lose speed and hold their position, Carson did the opposite: he dipped the paraglider’s nose so that the wing’s forward acceleration would cancel out their rearward flight.
It was a drastic and risky move, but it apparently was working. They were still moving backwards, but the craft seemed to be dropping—rather quickly—into the field that Carson had selected for their landing site. As they descended, he made slight adjustments to the sluggish paraglider, feverishly tweaking their trajectory to stay clear of the darker ground. It was tremendously awkward, because his steering inputs were backwards from normal flight.
Suddenly there was an unexpected and unwelcome change. Their rearward movement abruptly slowed, as if they were going into some sort of reverse stall, and then they surged forward. Carson realized that they must have descended through the “floor” of the storm front, and were now being overtaken by the surface winds that Three-Six had warned about earlier.
Instead of flying backwards, they were now accelerating forward. Trying to avoid any hasty corrections, Carson gradually tugged back on the hand controller, bringing the tail of the paraglider down. He glanced at the monitor, saw that they were still over the light-shaded area that he selected for touchdown, and then shifted his attention to the contact light that would blink on when a sensor, dangling fifteen feet below on a wire, touched the ground. That was his signal to “hard flare” the paraglider, just prior to the skids making contact, when Ourecky would fire the pyrotechnics to discard the fabric wing. Gripping the hand controller, he calmly stated, “Scott, call DME to Three-Six and stand by to jettison the paraglider.”
“Three-Six, preparing to land, we are at 8.8 miles, 20 degrees to your location!” blurted Ourecky. There was no reply from Three-Six.
“Watch that contact light, Scott. Eyes on that light.”
“Contact,” announced Ourecky, as the tiny light flickered green.
“Flaring,” stated Carson, tugging the hand controller fully back. What happened next was puzzling, but only momentarily. Instinctively waiting for the usual scraping noise as their skids bit into the ground, he heard nothing but an odd rustling sound. What he didn’t know was that they were landing in a field of sugarcane, and that the tall stalks had brushed the contact sensor, triggering the contact light. So immediately after Carson hard-flared, the craft plummeted approximately twelve feet to the ground, still moving forward at roughly ten miles an hour.
Not engineered for sharp falls, the l
eft skid strut snapped like a dry twig. The little craft lurched sharply to the left, plowing up earth as it slid to a stop. Despite their restraints, both men flailed forward. Ourecky smashed face-first into his instrument panel, shattering the clear visor of his flight helmet. With his instincts conditioned by years of boxing, Carson’s right forearm snapped out, blocking him from a similar fate. As a final insult, the television monitor broke free of its bracket, crunching into Ourecky’s midsection.
Carson took stock of the situation. The craft was laid over hard to the left, almost upside down, so that he was literally suspended by his shoulder straps. He couldn’t see anything through his windows and realized that his side of the vehicle was probably lying on the ground.
Looking to his right, he saw that Ourecky was obviously injured, bleeding, and apparently unconscious. He hoped that Ourecky’s hatch was clear of the ground, so that it could be opened. Then he glimpsed the flickering orange light through the right window, realized that the hatch was probably not impeded, and breathed a sigh of relief.
With a start, he suddenly realized the source of the orange glow. Since they landed in some sort of cultivated field, the still sizzling heat shield likely had ignited crops of some sort. Not good. Carson reached down and yanked a toggle that “safed” the ejection seats and assorted pyrotechnic charges intended to blow the hatches open. Outside the spacecraft, the world was quickly becoming a maelstrom of raging fire.
Carson reacted quickly. He undid a series of connectors and squeezed free of his harness. He reached over, swiftly unfastened Ourecky’s restraints, and wriggled until he was squeezed crossways in the cabin. Jamming his shoulder against the hatch, he unlatched it; pushing with all his strength, he swung it open as far as he could. The hatch opened barely enough to facilitate their escape. Aided by gravity, Carson extricated Ourecky from his seat, and both of them plopped headlong onto the hard ground below.
Apparently awakened by the abrupt fall, Ourecky came to life. With blood spurting from a gash in his forehead, he was obviously dazed and disoriented. “Drew?” he muttered. “Are we down? What’s burning? What’s that awful smell?”
Even with the billowing smoke of the burning sugarcane, the spent spacecraft’s collective fumes were almost overwhelming. The air was heavy with the scorched metal smell of the heat shield and the acrid fumes of residual propellant slowly venting from thrusters.
Without thinking, Carson raised into a crouch and placed his hand against the edge of the hatch to regain his balance; the insanely hot metal instantly seared through the thin leather palm of his Nomex flight glove and fused to the skin underneath. Howling from the intense pain, he quickly snatched his hand away, ripping away a layer of flesh.
Frantically assessing the situation, Carson considered grabbing the survival kits, but realized that their immediate survival hinged on escaping the rapidly growing flames. Hopefully, once the fire died down, they would be able to salvage some gear from the spacecraft.
“Let’s go!” yelled Carson, wrapping his arm under Ourecky’s. “Come with me!”
They barely escaped through burning sugarcane. In the flames, Carson saw a tree line, about two hundred yards away, and ran for its asylum, thinking that the fire would likely burn out when the dense cane was consumed.
They reached the safety of tree line. In the light of the flames, he tended to Ourecky’s wound, dislodging a thumb-sized shard of clear Plexiglas. The singed right sleeve of his flight suit was just barely hanging on by tattered remnants of fabric; he ripped it the rest of the way off and used it to fashion a makeshift bandage to stanch Ourecky’s bleeding.
He heard yelling, and saw two ominous figures wielding machetes, backlit by the pyre, about a hundred yards distant. They appeared extremely angry, probably seeking vengeance from whomever it was that dropped from the sky to set their crops ablaze.
Half-carrying Ourecky, he retreated further into the woods. Suddenly they were spattered with huge drops of rain. The cooling moisture was welcome for a moment, but the rain quickly worsened into a torrential downpour. The thunderstorm that had shoved them into the mountains was now here, and it was drenching the landscape. The ground sloped sharply; Carson realized that they were now descending down the west side of a steep ridgeline. There was so much rain that making any forward progress was almost like swimming through ink.
The next hour was a cat-and-mouse game; straining to keep his balance in the steep terrain, Carson fled deeper into the woods, maybe a hundred yards or so, and then looked back to see if they were still being pursued. Periodic flashes of lightning revealed that they were still being stalked by the two fearsome machete-armed men, so he went still further downhill, sometimes rolling head over heels when he lost his footing on the slick ground.
Finally, as the rain started to taper off, it appeared that the men had abandoned the chase. Carson leaned the barely conscious Ourecky against a tree and then plopped onto the ground next to him. Cupping his burned hand to his chest, he cringed at the horrific pain and the smell of scorched flesh. He had hoped that they could stay close to the spacecraft, but decided it was ill advised to linger in the area. It wasn’t the best of circumstances, and it would obviously be hours if not days before they were entirely safe, but at least they weren’t still trapped in orbit. He decided to wait here until dawn and then assess their situation in the light of day.
Milton, Florida
4:35 a.m., Friday, March 13, 1970
The phone jangled on the nightstand; Nestor Glades woke up, slipped out from Deirdre’s sleeping embrace and answered it. It was the duty officer at the Ranger Camp. He listened to the brief instructions, mumbled assent, hung up the receiver, and switched on the lamp.
Deirdre awoke. “Trouble?” she asked, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
“Somewhere,” he replied, standing up and stepping towards the closet. He quickly pulled on blue jeans and a denim shirt. “I have to go.”
“Now?” she asked. “How long?”
“Don’t know,” he replied, stuffing his shaving kit, boots, and some folded field uniforms into a canvas kit bag. “Could be days, could be weeks. Deirdre, I’m really sorry about this.”
“Don’t be,” she answered, standing up and slipping into her nightgown. “It’s your job, Nestor. I understand that. Just try not to get shot. And try really hard not to come home with lice again. That was really quite a nuisance.”
“Yeah, it was, wasn’t it?”
“I’ll make coffee,” she whispered, padding towards the door.
“No time.” He picked up the kit bag and walked towards her. Holding the bag in one hand, he hugged her with the other. “I’ll think about you.”
“No,” she answered, hugging him back. “Don’t you dare think about me. I know that they’re not calling you in the middle of the night to go play in a tiddlywinks tournament. Focus on what you have to do, get it done, and then come back to me, Ness. There’ll be plenty of time to catch up later. We’ll have the rest of our lives. Someday, you’ll finally be done, and then we can be together always.”
Mission Control Facility, Aerospace Support Project
5:05 a.m., Friday, March 13, 1970
Wolcott had experienced some bad nights, but none quite so bad as this in recent memory. Seated in the glassed-in sanctuary at the rear of Mission Control, he hoped that they could resolve this sordid situation swiftly. He looked at an aeronautical chart of Haiti spread out over his desktop. He had never been there but had spent a week in the neighboring Dominican Republic a decade ago and couldn’t imagine that the countries could be that much different.
Since he could do virtually nothing in this trying situation, Mark Tew had gone off-base an hour ago, to see Bea and her new baby at the hospital. While Wolcott couldn’t comprehend how Tew could leave at such as critical moment, perhaps it was just as well. The night had been a horrible roller coaster for everyone in Mission Control, and probably no one had been more shaken by it than Tew. Besides, of the two, Wolcott wa
s much better suited for the sort of seat-of-the-pants decision-making that would surely ensue in the coming hours and possibly days.
As they grew up together in the service, even back during the War, Tew had always gravitated to the operations side of the business at hand, focusing his considerable intellect on forging precise and careful plans, while Wolcott was the one who executed those intricate plans with decisive aplomb, modifying them on the fly—literally—as required, doing what was necessary to execute the mission and bring the boys home when possible.
There was a furtive knock at the door. Wolcott gulped down the dregs of his coffee and bellowed, “Enter!” The Recovery Operations Liaison, a major assigned from Isaac Fels’s Wing at Eglin, entered the room and spread a detailed topographic map on the conference table.
“Update,” ordered Wolcott brusquely.
“We know they landed close to here,” said the major, obviously cowed to be in the presence of Wolcott, gesturing at the map with a mechanical pencil’s eraser. “That’s the last position they reported to our man on the ground. They’re in the mountains, near a town called Dondon.”
“So you’ve had radio contact with them?” asked Wolcott.
“No, sir. We put an aircraft overhead about an hour ago, but he’s heard nothing on the radio and hasn’t detected their rescue beacon, so we don’t know if they landed safely, or if …”
“We will assume they’re safe,” interjected Wolcott, snapping the filter from a cigarette before lighting it with his Zippo. “And until we know absolutely for sure, I will caution you to not ever imply otherwise, unless you want a size ten Tony Lama planted permanently up your ass.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the major, swallowing.
“Okay, so they haven’t phoned home yet, pardner. So where do we go from here?
“Our Rapid Response Flight has been on stand-by at Eglin. They’ll establish a staging site at Homestead, near Miami. The RRF has sophisticated search and communications gear, and they can execute a tactical rescue if the circumstances warrant. An RRF advance team will go into Haiti tonight and link up with our man on the ground.”
