by Young, Tom
He entered the new route’s waypoints, pressed the INAV button on his navigation select panel. The GPS receivers and the central air data computers fed their inputs to the autopilot. The autopilot deflected the ailerons and flight spoilers, and more than six hundred thousand pounds of steel, fuel, and humanity began a slow roll to the west.
GOLD RETURNED TO HER SEAT AT THE NAV TABLE, buckled the harness, plugged in her headset. She heard the crew talking, but she could not bring herself to follow the discussion. So she only stared out the flight deck windows at clouds scudding below like ragged patches of cotton.
She tried to control the brimming in her eyes. Lost the battle, wiped a tear. Hoped she’d managed it without anyone noticing. Probably; the crew appeared busy. Across the flight deck from her, the engineer tapped on what looked like a laptop computer at his instrument panel. The copilot was poring over some kind of chart, just lines and circles, not like any terrain map. Gold could read nothing on it except the labeling: EN ROUTE HIGH ALTITUDE—EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND MIDDLE EAST. She supposed the crew was following highways that existed only as electrons, identified by patterns of dots and dashes, ones and zeros, pulses from satellites. Parson was talking on the radio, mainly a jumble of numbers she did not understand. Sounded ticked off.
Gold almost envied his annoyance. It focused him, gave him something to do. She wanted to take some kind of action, too, but she could not imagine what that might be. Ultimately, her job and most of her training came down to communicating. But there was nothing more for her to communicate, nothing except to wait and hope. And hope seemed so absurd right now. Perhaps, she thought, this is where hope trails off and faith picks up.
The old instruments on the nav panel in front of her still seemed to work. A needle twitched on a gauge marked TRUE AIRSPEED read something well over three hundred knots. The pointers on the altimeter were a little confusing, but Gold eventually deduced their meaning: thirty-four thousand feet.
Given the situation, she could imagine no way to come down from that altitude except a disintegrating plunge, a wild ride into the hereafter. She remembered an instructor at the jump school at Fort Benning, a veteran of the 1989 airborne assault in Panama. His favorite expression: “Gravity is a bitch.”
From that training, Gold knew terminal velocity with a failed parachute was about one hundred and twenty miles per hour. Judging by that old analog altimeter in front of her, if the airplane blew up now it would take more than three minutes for its parts and people to hit the ground.
Who would have thought her career choices would bring her to this? As a translator/interpreter in the airborne division, she knew she could meet her demise in any number of violent ways. Snipers, IEDs, airdrop accidents. But she had never imagined anything like this: to sit in an aircraft seat, perfectly healthy, yet with a terminal condition.
Her memories of jump school drifted to the long runs in the Georgia heat, the heavy packs. The jody calls—songs and chants to keep the pace and pass the time. Many of them infused with wry humor, irony, or fatalism:C-130 rolling down the strip,
Hauling paratroopers on a one-way trip.
Mission top secret, destination unknown.
Don’t know when we’ll be going home.
If a platoon ran for long enough, the songs became more than jody calls. Put the calls in the right order and they became a story of battle, an epic poem. Literature in its earliest form, a legend chanted by elders, now called NCOs, repeated back line by line by young warriors so they could learn its lessons. Near the end, the soldiers drenched in sweat, the call would change to the minor flats of a dirge: I hear the choppers hoverin’
They’re hoverin’ overhead.
They’re coming for the wounded.
They’re coming for the dead.
A tale of victory, but with an elegy for the lost. A reminder of the price paid.
And now we’re all just a price to be paid, Gold thought. Waiting for the bill to come due somewhere in this endless sky.
7
Parson watched the miles roll by on his CDU display, saw he was nearing the last waypoint on his route clearance. An airway intersection near Aviano, Italy. Beyond that, nothing on the flight plan page but a discontinuity.
Apparently, the copilot was thinking about the same thing. “What do we do when we get there?” Colman asked.
“We’re going to have to hold until they decide what to do with us,” Parson said.
He pressed a button to bring up the edit page on his FMS. Touched a LINE SELECT key to start building his holding pattern. Right turns. Ten-mile legs. Teardrop entry from this heading. ENTER.
When the autopilot turned the aircraft into the teardrop, Parson placed his hand on the throttles and nudged them back to slow the plane to holding speed. At this altitude, two hundred and sixty-five knots indicated. After five racetracks around the holding pattern, TACC called again.
“What you got for me, Hilda?” Parson asked.
“We’re sending you to Rota,” the flight manager said.
That worked for Parson. Rota Naval Air Station had a nice long runway. In southern Spain, near the Strait of Gibraltar. Small base hospital, but maybe the Spanish hospitals in Cádiz and Seville could help. That is, if the plane landed in one piece.
“What about some advice from EOD?” Parson asked. “Is there any way to defuse this thing?”
No answer for long seconds. Then the flight manager said, “Ah, Air Evac Eight-Four, there’s still no consensus on that. Sometimes these fancy bomb triggers fail. A few of the EOD techs think your best bet might be to leave it alone. If you screw around with it and don’t know what you’re doing, you could set it off. But sometimes these bombs don’t work.”
Just hope for a miracle? Didn’t sound like much of a solution to Parson. They’re writing us off, he thought. They’re giving up.
“I need something better than that,” Parson said. “Tell them to think harder. Or find somebody who knows more.”
“Air Evac Eight-Four, we’ll work on it,” the flight manager said. “Hilda Contingency Cell out.”
There were times to leave well enough alone, Parson realized. He recognized his own tendency to tackle trouble rather than avoid it, perhaps to a fault. While in high school he’d run into a diamondback rattler during a summer hike. The snake lay outstretched across a swatch of sunlight in the trail, but it coiled and rattled when Parson approached. He knew the smartest thing would be to go around it. But a group of hikers was coming behind him. He’d passed them on the way up and he didn’t want to leave the snake there for them to encounter. He threw a fistful of pebbles at the rattler, but instead of slithering away, it only coiled more tightly and buzzed with a higher note. He found a four-foot stick and jabbed at the reptile. When the snake struck at the stick, one of its fangs held fast in the wood for a moment, and Parson saw venom drip into the dust. He raised the stick to throw the whole thing, snake and all, away from the trail. But the rattler fell off, thudded at Parson’s feet, and struck his leg. The bite hurt but did not swell. The enraged rattler had injected all its poison into the stick. The ER doctor told Parson he’d not been envenomed. His father told him he’d been protected by the god who watches over fools and children.
Well, then, Parson thought, maybe I’ll need the same kind of protection now. He coordinated his new flight plan to Rota with Air Traffic Control. The controller cleared him direct, so he entered the airfield identifier, L-E-R-T, into the FMS. With the touch of a LINE SELECT button, he activated the new course. The jet exited the holding pattern and pointed its nose toward Spain.
Piloting duties complete for the moment, Parson looked outside. Beautiful day over Italy. Wisps of stratus like smears of sea-foam. On the ground, greenery in the ordered lines of cultivation. Orchards and vineyards. Food and drink. Life.
He could not believe his existence was so temporary and fragile, like that of the stone flies he’d seen in trout streams or the fuzzy seed heads of foxtail grass along field borde
rs where he’d hunted doves. And the younger people on this plane had their whole lives ahead of them.
The EOD guys will just have to come up with a plan, he thought. Tell us to look for a wire to cut, a battery to disconnect. Even guessing would be better than just praying the bomb turns out to be a dud.
Parson doubted an amateur could make this kind of bomb. If it really was triggered barometrically, and on descent rather than climb, it might require some kind of complicated circuit with a latching relay. Parson knew little of bomb making, but he knew aircraft systems, and they used electricity, too. No, whoever had designed this thing knew what the hell he was doing, and he probably didn’t make any mistakes.
A warning from the flight engineer broke into Parson’s thinking: “Gentlemen,” Dunne said, “don’t move the throttles.”
“Shit,” Parson said. There was only one reason an engineer told you to stay off the throttles. “Which one is it?”
“Stand by,” Dunne said. Tapped on his computer. “Abnormal vibration in number four.”
Parson thought he noticed a different sound from his aircraft, a chord change in the thrum of the engines.
“That one again?” he said. “How bad?”
More keystrokes. Dunne brought up a waveform display. “Fifteen mils,” he said.
“So we can keep it running,” Parson said.
“For now.”
“Son of a bitch.”
General Electric built a damned good engine, Parson knew, about as reliable as they came. But he had heard that in the rare cases when these big TF-39s failed, they failed in spectacular fashion. He knew an old-school engineer who called it the Jerry Lee Lewis phenomenon: Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On followed by Great Balls of Fire. Parson pulled off his right glove, touched the stem of the number four throttle with the end of his little finger. Sure enough, he felt vibration, transmitted through the control cables from all the way out there in the rightmost engine pylon.
“What’s our three-engine ceiling?” he asked.
Dunne flipped pages, looked at his outside temp gauge, consulted a chart. “Just over twenty thousand.”
“Good.” So if we lose that engine, Parson thought, we can stay high enough not to trigger the bomb. Well, at least high enough to stay above the altitude where that C-130 blew up.
Much of Parson’s simulator training had included compounding malfunctions. Difficulties that cascaded until he found himself wrestling with an airplane trying to go in every direction except the one he wanted. And forcing him to think hard at the same time: This landing gear problem means we’ve lost some brakes, which means we need more runway, which means Martinsburg is too short, so we’ll go to Andrews, where the weather just went below minimums, so we’ll go to Dover, if we have the fuel. And over his headset, a taunt from the instructor: “If you fuck this up, you’re buying the beer.”
But even the most sadistic sim instructor could not have come up with anything like this. And now there was no freezing the motion, no taking a break.
Parson remembered some advice his father had given him when he was still an ROTC cadet. “Some situations require you to think past the books,” the old man had said. “They can’t write a procedure for everything.”
He spoke from experience, two Vietnam tours in the backseat of an F-4. And while Parson was still in nav school, his father got activated for Desert Storm. One night during a Wild Weasel mission, the old man’s luck ran out.
Parson wondered what his dad would have said about this. In the old Air Force, they used to say the flight manuals were written in blood, results of lessons learned the hard way. But the books had no guidance whatsoever for something like this.
The F-15s still shadowed Parson’s Galaxy, piercing the sky with their honed edges. He doubted they had the range to accompany him all the way to Rota, even though they’d just topped off their tanks. He hoped not. They couldn’t do him any good, and they were getting on his nerves. He decided to give them a hint.
“Gunfighter, Air Evac Eight-Four,” he called.
“Go ahead, Air Evac.”
“We have things as under control as they ever will be,” Parson said. “If you’re low on gas, you can RTB.”
“Roger that, Air Evac. We’ll drop into Barcelona if we have to, but they want us to stay with you as long as we can.”
Wonderful, Parson thought. And if you keep flying that close to me, you’re gonna suck shards through your intakes when we get blown into scrap metal.
GOLD STARED OUT THE COCKPIT WINDOWS, tried to think of what to tell Mahsoud and the others. She could offer little hope now. About all she could say was that the flight engineer had found a bomb and that the aircraft commander was pushing for help. At the moment, Parson was still fiddling with radios. To what end, Gold wasn’t sure.
She watched Parson turn a knob, press a switch. He wasn’t much of an intellectual, she thought, but the force of life burned strong in that one. He could not seem to accept his situation, or at least he hadn’t yet. If someone told him he’d used up all his nine lives, he’d go to supply and put in for nine more. At the moment, he seemed to want information.
“Hey,” he said. “I found the BBC’s shortwave service.”
The crew seemed to be listening intently, so Gold pressed her interphone switch and asked, “How can I hear it?”
“Pull up HF2 on your comm box,” Parson said.
Gold hunted for the knob, then pulled it out and turned up the volume. Heard a woman broadcaster with a lilting Scottish accent:The U.S. military confirms two of its transport aircraft have been destroyed by what appear to be terrorist bombs. Officials say at least fifteen lives were lost. There are unconfirmed reports that other American aircraft may still be aloft with bombs on board.
The aircraft bombings follow this morning’s massive truck bombing at the Afghan National Police training center in Kabul. That attack left ninety people dead and more than twice that many injured. In a video released to Pakistani news agencies, a Taliban spokesman claims credit for both the police center bombing and the aircraft incidents. The Taliban says conspirators within the police helped get the truck bomb past checkpoints.
The last sentence of the news report sickened Gold. Corruption had long been rife within the ANP, but she had wanted to believe things were getting better. She wondered if the Taliban had enough hard-core supporters within the ANP to pull off something like this. It was possible, but more likely they just bribed people. The U.S. and UN had poured millions of dollars into building up Afghan security forces. Advisers, mentorship teams, equipment, training. And some Judas takes it all down for thirty pieces of silver.
Gold noticed Parson looking at her. When she met his eyes, he shook his head, glanced down at the flight deck floor as if he’d just learned of a death in her family. Except for Gold, this was worse.
“I wonder if anybody downstairs had a hand in any of this,” Colman said.
“Good question,” Parson said.
“Does it matter?” Gold said.
“How do you know which of these Afghani types to trust?” Colman asked.
Gold didn’t know whether it was a rhetorical question and she didn’t care. She didn’t answer, either. Just took off her headset and went down the ladder to the cargo compartment.
The aeromeds looked busy. Four of them tended to an Afghan patient, a newly qualified police officer. Gold remembered him from class, though she didn’t know him well. The man had one eye bandaged, and he was crying out in Pashto.
“What’s wrong?” Gold asked the MCD.
“We’re not sure. Did I hear that you speak his language?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll talk to him.”
Gold stood by the man’s stretcher, touched his shoulder, whispered in Pashto, “Officer Fawad, I am Sergeant Major Gold.”
Fawad exhaled, gave a weak smile. “Teacher, it is good to see you here. Are you injured?”
“Not badly. What is wrong, Fawad?”
“My eye hurt
s.”
“I am sorry, Fawad,” Gold said. “I will inform the nurses.”
Gold turned to the MCD and told her what Fawad had said.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” the nurse replied. “Pressure changes can worsen eye injuries the same way they aggravate head injuries. We’re trying to save his eye, but it’s doubtful.”
“How bad is it?”
“Lacerated cornea from grit and splinters. Hyphema. He was outside the building and got hit by flying debris. Just bad luck.”
“That sounds painful.”
“I’m sure it is, even without pressure issues. We’re giving him what we can, but the meds probably just keep the pain down to a dull roar.”
And it will probably get worse, Gold thought. She wasn’t sure what Parson was planning, but she assumed he would try to deactivate the bomb as soon as EOD could tell him how. To get to it again, the crew would have to depressurize once more.
Mahsoud was awake now. He looked at Gold with a questioning expression. When she went to his side, he asked, “What is wrong with Fawad?”
Gold told him, and he said in Pashto, “That is a shame. He would have made a good police officer. Now perhaps he and I shall sell kebabs on the street if Allah allows us to live.”
“You must stop this kind of talk,” Gold said. “Your body is injured, but your mind is strong. You will use it to serve your country.”
Mahsoud adjusted the oxygen cannula in his nose, raised himself on one elbow. He seemed unable to find a comfortable position, and he winced when he breathed. He looked outside.
“What is the pilot doing about our situation?” he asked.
Gold hesitated, then decided not to mislead him. There was no way to sugarcoat this set of facts. “The crew has located the bomb. The pilot is trying to get information on how to deal with it.”
“Where is this bomb?” Mahsoud asked, switching to English. His courtesy touched Gold. Whenever he spoke to her, he seemed to use his own language only when he could not express the thought in English.
