“Okay, Steve. We’re coming up on you now. You’ve got plenty of room. The field is now about twelve miles dead ahead.”
“Uh, Roger.” He peered ahead, trying to see through the red film. He could barely make out the long, black line painted on the desert floor. “Uh, Chase, I think I’ve got it in sight. What’s the wind?”
Radar Control broke in at once. “Radar to Cobra. Wind is fifteen knots from two two zero, gusting to twenty knots.”
Not good. Where the hell were the smoke flares? He wished he could rub his eyes to clear them.
“Cobra from Chase One. Can you see the smoke?”
“Negative, Chase One. No sweat.”
“Roger, Cobra.”
A blessed moment of silence. He pegged the air speed at two hundred forty knots, holding it steady, maintaining his rate of descent, planning ahead for the moment when he must flare, when he would bring up the nose. Damn his eyes. He—
“Cobra from Chase Two. Please lower your gear, Steve.”
Christ, he’d forgotten. He mumbled acknowledgment, hit the lever. The ship rumbled as the tricycle gear banged down in the slipstream, quieted a bit as the doors closed. Three green lights came on before him. “Three in the green,” he called.
Chase Two was directly to his right. “Roger, confirm three green,” the pilot replied.
The mountains were higher on the horizon now, the world flattening out even more on all sides. A broad band of water shimmered to his right. He shook his head angrily. Mirage, but enough to screw up his depth perception. He forced his eyes back to the black line on the desert floor now swelling swiftly before him. Things were happening too fast, he was behind his procedures.
“Cobra from Radar, you are now four miles out, that is four miles from the edge of your landing strip.”
“Okay, Radar.”
“Do not reply, Cobra,” the radar controller intoned. “You are above your glide path.”
He nudged the stick forward a hair. “Returning to proper glide path, now three miles out, maintain your speed and rate of descent.”
They were talking him in like the old GCA. Right now Radar was a blessing.
Desert features rushed by. He glanced at the airspeed—down to two fifty, dropping again. Even as Radar told him he was slightly above his planned glide path he nudged the stick forward again. What the hell was wrong with the trim? He nudged the trim control on the stick. No response. Something was screwed up in the electrical system. It would be even nastier than usual.
“You are one mile from end of runway. Slightly above glide path, coming back to glide path nicely. You are coming up on runway. Prepare for full visual takeover. You are now over the edge of your landing run.”
The voice went silent. The black line stretched away to infinity as the ship trembled from thermals smacking up from the desert. Damn that crosswind; it was edging him to the side. He corrected with rudder but the ship felt sluggish, and he was holding hard forward pressure on the stick, and—
“Bring her to the right, Steve.” The voice of Chase One. His foot went down a bit harder on the rudder pedal and he compensated with the stick. Time to bring her around now, flatten out the glide, set her down on the main gear.
“Watch it, Steve!” The voice roared in his headset even as the side drift brought one gear to touch. Too fast! The silver machine bounced, wobbling through the air, the speed playing off rapidly, the precarious lift bleeding away. Without wings out there to—He felt the impact as she rocked on the left gear, bounced again, then the nose was coming up, and without that trim to compensate for—
He stopped thinking then because he knew he’d lost her—there wasn’t any more lift, and control sloughed away in his fingers, and what had been a beautiful aerodynamic machine became a lump of metal going its own way, and there was a sickening gut feeling as the horizon tilted crazily and the earth came up with terrifying speed to meet him.
He’d seen it happen before, maybe a dozen or more times through the years, and memory shaped its own patterns in his brain, and the warning motions were enough to trigger the sequence of events he knew must happen. Dr. Rudy Wells for a moment felt Jan’s nails digging into his arm and then he felt nothing because he was, gratefully, numb from head to foot, his mind separating from his body, throwing total concentration into the impossible scene taking place before them. Numb through his limbs, rooted to the desert floor, mouth open like a fish, he knew what would happen even as the ship went through its inevitable motions.
At that instant Steve Austin was condemned, for the ship was now slave to inertial forces over which he had no further control. Even with an engine behind him he would have been behind the power curve, the ship slewing along with its nose so high that only a huge rocket could have blasted him away. There was one chance left and because he had not seen it happen already, Wells knew that Steve Austin in his desperate attempts to save the machine had ignored completely the ejection seat. It could have punched him free. It could have hurled him up high enough for a rocket slug to boom open the parachute. It could have saved his life, but it didn’t have the opportunity to do that, because Austin was a conditioned test pilot first and last.
There was that sickening swerve of the nose, the yawing, nose-lifting motion that flashed reflected sun into the eyes and sounded the first mental shrieks of warning. A gear stabbed the ground, much too hard, and a stream of dust snapped into being, trailing the still-speeding, lurching coffin. The yawing motion and the dust trail froze Wells’s senses where he stood; there was the momentary sensation of nails digging into his arm. Maybe he heard the gasp from the girl clinging to him, maybe not, but certainly he heard the noise of tearing metal. First the one gear, then another wallowing motion; the ship rolled drunkenly, her lift gone, taken away from her pilot, and the other gear snapped down, hard enough this time to crack metal and send pieces of the gear screaming off at an angle.
There was a long, breath-sucking moment before the next impact, a moment filled with rustling wind, the last sighs of the machine about to destroy its pilot. Other sound filtered through to Wells’s mind; the banshee wail of the chase pilots overhead, and the reflex action of a man on the ground stabbing the disaster button. In that moment, mixing with the sound of the jets overhead, began the strident waver of the crash siren.
She came down hard, slightly to one side, taking most of the impact through the center line of the rounded belly. Wells heard a bone snapping, a bone of metal structure moving before his eyes. She caromed back into the air, a crack showing her innards, spewing debris and liquids from pressure bottles—a growing spray of destruction. This time the nose went higher; she twisted through her length and came back down partially inverted, stabbing a fin into hard desert. More dust, a bubbling torrent mixed with metal, and the new sounds, a gnashing and tearing roar as the ship began to disintegrate. When she hit again she broke into huge chunks, methodically chewing herself to pieces, and bright-orange flame licked through the tumbling mess as the liquid-oxygen tanks went. Wells knew what must happen next. Hydraulic lines rupturing, the sudden fiery lash feeding on the oily mixture, and a growing blossom of fire that seared through her innards. Pounding, breaking up, hurling forth a sputum of debris, mashing what was left of the nose section, now trailing metal, smoke, flame, dust, and other junk, the ship died. The noise changed, a staccato growing unreal, terrifying to hear, piercing through to his mind above the roar of the chase jets banking hard, returning to the scene, the pilots agonized over their helplessness. Other sound now—sirens, thin voices from all sides, and the roar of engines. Wells saw the crash helicopters moving in from the side, the meat wagon and fire trucks pounding to what had come finally to a stop nearly a mile away. The first choppers were on the scene, big ugly Kamans, working in a team. He saw the downwash pounding flame away from what was left of the silver machine, saw another Kaman pouring foam from its nozzles at the wreckage. Asbestos-clad men dropped to the ground, rushed in.
But he couldn’t move
. Startled, he realized Jan was standing by his side in shock. Wells tugged to free her grip from his arm. “Dammit, let go!” He finally pulled free, left her sagging to her knees as he signaled to a crash wagon moving by. They slowed enough for him to leap onto the running board, clinging to the door as the driver raced for the wreck.
He had a moment of lucid thought that all this was a waste, that no man could survive what he had just witnessed, that Steve must be dead. And if he’s not, thought Wells, then he was even more unfortunate.
He was off the truck and running before it screeched to a halt. The crash teams were swift and effective. Someone had cut open the canopy with an axe, even at that moment was in the midst of torn metal and rising steam, trying to get the straps free of the body. Wells didn’t waste time asking questions. No one could know any more than he could see with his own eyes. He moved as close as he could to the wreckage, checked for the medical teams standing a few feet away, and found himself wanting to do something.
Someone shouted a warning about the ejection seat; the crash teams were trying to keep the arriving technicians back from the smoldering wreckage. If the rocket tube in the seat went it would erupt with renewed violence, hurling the heavy metal seat through the men milling about the scene. To hell with that, Wells thought. He had to get in closer, and he motioned the medical team to move in with him. If by some miracle Steve was still alive then he would need whatever help they could give him immediately.
Heat washed over him. The wreckage crackled ominously, but there were qualified people to worry about that. Wells wanted to remove Steve from his shattered metal coffin. At long last one of the asbestos-clad figures began moving backward, the man’s legs clumsy in the foam-sprayed twisted metal. He motioned with one arm, and the medical team rushed forward with a lightweight stretcher. Wells pushed even closer, wanting to call out to the men to be careful, to take it easy, that whatever might be alive in there could only be a perilous moment away from death.
They lifted a smoking form from what had been a cockpit. The pressure suit was torn and seared from flames. Someone had had the sense to pull open the faceplate so that air could reach Steve, if he were still breathing. The body was limp, the arms and legs askew. Wells moved over sharp wreckage and felt as if he had been stabbed between the eyes.
Steve’s left arm was gone.
Wells rallied his shocked senses. He motioned to the medical team to move to his side, barked instructions. Moments later he secured a tourniquet outside the upper arm of the suit. It might not do any good but it must be done. He noticed, then, that both legs were twisted badly, one crushed almost completely. My God, my God . . . The words spun through his mind, but his hands moved of their own accord, felt the face, saw the bruises and lacerations, the unmistakable signs of a jaw broken in several places, the signs of severe shock.
He was alive.
The rest was a blur of instinct. They moved the basket stretcher away from the wreck. The team moved swiftly as they worked with Wells. Plasma, right there on the spot. Cortisone to keep the heart pumping. Oxygen through a lightweight mask held over his nose. Gently, gently . . . he’s bleeding there. Make sure he doesn’t choke on his own blood . . . All right, now, get him into that chopper at once. Careful, goddammit, careful . . . As if they needed to be told. They moved the broken form to the turbine helicopter, slid the stretcher inside. Wells and the team were in, waving for the pilot to move out at once. Wells clutched the side of the stretcher to keep it from sliding as the powerful machine boomed into the sky, already swinging toward the emergency room at the base hospital. Wells didn’t need to tell anyone to radio ahead; the word had been passed and a crack medical team would be ready and waiting to do whatever was possible for the man closer to death than to life. There were things to do in the meantime. Learn what he could, cut away the tough pressure suit now, plan ahead to those moments when their hands and instruments would decide whether or not this man would ever see another day.
The chopper banked away, turning steeply, reaching for all possible speed. Wells had time for a brief glance through the open door. The last he saw of the crash site was Jan Richards, her face a white mask.
CHAPTER 3
They were a hair-trigger medical team second to none in the world. They knew who was flying, of course. Every time a flight test went onto the schedule, the pilots were identified on the large notification board in the emergency medical building. Dr. Milton Ashburn, head of the emergency teams, insisted on this procedure. The pilots were identified and their medical records were copied and placed on immediate availability. Blood type, possible blood donors, and other vital information were thus right there, and not somewhere else, when needed.
Every member of the medical team understood that Colonel Steve Austin was up today in that little bastard of a flying abortion they called the M3F5. Hard not to know when a man who had walked the surface of the moon would be scheduled. You got just a bit tighter, then. Just a bit more shipshape, if that were possible. And when the alarm stabbed their ears and jangled their nerves and brought them bolt upright from beds, they thought of Steve Austin. Only for the moment. They thought also of the pilots and radar navigators in the SR-71 chase planes. Of the crew in the huge B-52 that would drop Austin at 45,000 feet. Of the helicopter crews, also. It could mean any of them, but it was important for them to know as quickly as possible just who it might be.
Dr. Ashburn hit the medical-request switch on his desk. In the control tower, in Radar Control, in Helicopter Control, in every control facility active that day, the request light flashed on and off, and would stay flashing until medical was advised. It didn’t take long. Radar Control was monitoring the chase pilots, of course, and they had listened to the agonized cry of Steve Austin’s friend as his voice told unbelievingly of the carnage splashing cross the dry desert floor.
“Medical from Radar.” The speaker box on the wall in the emergency building rasped the words.
Dr. Ashburn answered immediately. “Go ahead. Any identification?”
“Yes, sir. It’s Colonel Austin, sir. Crashed on touchdown. Pretty bad from what I understand.”
“Details?” Ashburn said.
“Only that the ship broke up, sir.” Radar Control hesitated. “I can patch you into the medical chopper. They’re starting to lift from—”
“Do it,” Ashburn snapped.
He waited impatiently while the radio line went into the central switchboard, patching him directly to the chopper.
“Colonel Ashburn here. Rescue One, do you read?”
“Rescue One. Go ahead.”
Ashburn recognized the voice of the copilot. He knew every member of the rescue teams personally. “Jackson, what’s the status on Colonel Austin? Keep it tight.”
“Yes, sir. It’s not good, colonel. From what I saw he’s lost an arm, and I understand his legs are pretty bad. Dr. Wells is with us. They’re giving Austin oxygen now. He’s unconscious.”
Ashburn cut away from the patch line, punched three digits for the control tower, told them the rescue chopper was coming straight to the medical building, to get everyone else the hell out of the way. He knew the Air Police were monitoring the line, that within seconds they would start out for the medical building to clear the immediate area for landing the helicopter. Ashburn glanced up, saw several of his staff standing by. He banged the telephone back to its cradle.
“Get ready in the hyperbaric chamber,” he ordered. “Everything we need in there at once.” The men disappeared with his words. He rose and walked quickly to the corridor. Seeing several medical technicians in the hall he ordered them to drop whatever they were doing. “Get every door between the emergency entrance and the hyperbaric chamber open,” he said. “Hold them open until they bring Colonel Austin through.” He didn’t wait for confirmation but went straight to the chamber where his assistants would be waiting for him. He had less than one minute to prepare himself.
Ashburn and the medical team waited inside by a su
rgical breakaway table in the hyperbaric chamber. “Put him on there,” Ashburn said quietly, his nerves stringy-cold now, the emotional response dismissed as the surgeon’s mind took over his thinking and actions. Wells was there to help, hands under the twisted, flopping legs of the unconscious pilot. They moved Steve Austin from the stretcher to the surgical table and Ashburn stepped forward, studying, seeking information before he moved. Wells paused by the table, his face contorted, hands trying to find something to do. Quickly he sketched in what had happened, his immediate findings. Ashburn nodded. “All right,” he told Wells, “I’d like you to stand by, please.” He glanced at the dust and soot caking the doctor. “Use the room to your left to clean up.” That was all; no time for anything else. Wells hurried to the scrub room, where a nurse waited to assist him.
The first step had already been taken in the opening moments of the struggle to retain what little life remained in Steve Austin. That was the decision to bring him into the hyperbaric chamber. As Austin was placed on the surgical table, technicians sealed a heavy steel door. Oxygen poured into the sealed chamber, and the technicians kept it at maximum flow until the air became much denser, several times the air pressure on the other side of the chamber. This eliminated the need to feed oxygen directly to Austin. He was now breathing the equivalent of full oxygen flow from a mask, but without the encumbrance to the medical team of such equipment. With the atmosphere so heavy, his tissues would also become saturated with life-giving oxygen, and would remain so as long as the hyperbaric chamber pressure was maintained. This would be, for that period of time required for his body to stabilize, the only environment Steve Austin would know. Dr. Ashburn was determined to keep Austin unconscious throughout this period when his life hung by a precarious thread. It would not do for Austin to emerge from shock into the horrors from which he might never escape.
The medical team cut with difficulty through the tough, multiple layers of the pressure suit. With the garments clear of the body there began the immediate steps to assure continued survival. They almost ended before they could begin. Rudy Wells was just returning from the clean room when he heard from Ashburn: “He’s dead. Heart shock, at once. Move!” They did. Two doctors responded instantly with an electrode against the upper axis of the heart. Seconds later the beat was resumed, stronger than before. The team kept the shock apparatus at hand.
Cyborg 01 - Cyborg Page 3
