Silent Enemy

by Young, Tom

  “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

  The 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.

  He wondered if a dying man might feel this way as he waited for judgment. The sum of his deeds, both good and evil, now closed out and tallied. And on the other side either paradise or damnation awaited, depending on the final calculus.

  Parson examined his radar altimeter. Its digital numbers flickered and danced as the radar beam swept the water: 9005, 8990, 9003, 9000. He realized his aircraft had descended below the bomb’s presumed trip point. If he hadn’t already gotten rid of the damned thing, the people under his command might be dead already.

  And he still had work to do. Could he let somebody know his status? He decided to try the HF radios again, just for good measure. Parson turned his wafer switch to HFI.

  “Mainsail,” he called. “Air Evac Eight-Four.”

  No answer. He repeated the call. Still nothing. Parson switched to HF2 and tried again. Nothing but static.

  All right, he asked himself, now what? The C-5 was no longer on any charted jet route. There might be no one anywhere near here monitoring the emergency channels. But it couldn’t hurt to try. Parson turned his wafer switch once more.

  “Any station,” he said, “Air Evac Eight-Four.”

  The answer came in grainy UHF: “Air Evac Eight-Four, Reach Two-Zero has you weak but readable. We are a C-17 off Hickam, en route your destination. Please advise.”

  A rescue bird. Was it possible? Or was this some auditory hallucination? Maybe not. Parson saw Colman, Dunne, and Gold were looking at him. So they’d heard it, too.

  “We’re about five hundred miles out from Johnston,” Parson transmitted. “The bomb’s gone now, but it went off when we jettisoned it. Two engines failed, heavy damage, marginal control.”

  “Reach Two-Zero copies,” the C-17 pilot called. “We have a medical team on board. Look, buddy, you just set that thing down on that chunk of coral, and we’ll take you home.”

  Parson leaned back against the headrest, looked out at the Pacific. Glints of sunlight sparkled on the water like drifting shards of silver. Just set that thing on that chunk of coral. Just lay your burdens down. If only it were that simple. But if he and his crew could pull it off, salvation awaited in the form of a C-17 Globemaster and the medics, food, water, and morphine inside it. God, for the morphine.

  GOLD BEGAN TO WORRY ABOUT the best-case scenario. What if the crew actually did land this thing? How would Parson—let alone Mahsoud, Justin, and the other patients—get out quickly if necessary?

  “Yeah, we need to think about that,” Parson said when Gold brought it up. “I hate to take away Mahsoud’s oxygen hose, but we better get him downstairs so the aeromeds can bring him out.”

  “Concur,” the MCD said on interphone. “If the loadmasters open the aft ramp as soon as we get slowed down, we’ll take everybody out the back.”

  “What about you?” Gold asked Parson.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Parson said. “I don’t want to block anybody on the ladder, so once everybody else gets out, I’ll climb down.”

  “With a broken leg?” Dunne asked. “What if the aircraft’s on fire?”

  “What if it is?” Parson said. “I still want everybody else out first.”

  “Screw that,” Dunne said.

  Not how Gold would address a major, but she agreed with the sentiment.

  “Just let me drop out the window with an escape reel,” Parson said.

  “That’s tricky even for someone who’s able-bodied,” Colman said. “We can get you down the ladder quicker than we can get you out a window.”

  “All right, but if it looks bad, just egress without me.”

  No one answered.

  “I’m serious,” Parson said. “If you guys get killed trying to rescue me, I’ll kick your asses up one side of hell and down the other.”

  “Once the airplane stops,” the MCD called, “I’m in command. And we will get you out.”

  That’s right, Gold thought. Pull rank on him.

  “All right,” Parson said. “The lieutenant colonel’s in charge on the ground.”

  “That’s better,” the MCD said. “Now let’s see about moving Mahsoud.”

  Gold didn’t like it when the aeromeds took away Mahsoud’s oxygen mask and snapped his regulator to OFF. But to have any hope of getting him out after a crash landing, they had to carry him to the cargo compartment. Mahsoud did not protest, but he groaned when they strapped him to a stretcher. And he cried out when it scraped against the flight deck door panel on the way down. The airplane had become
a pipe filled with pain, Gold thought. A vessel of hard edges and narrow passageways, reverberating with the moans of the wounded and the curses of the crew. And, surrounding it all, the slipstream’s rush like the sound of days slipping away.

  The medics latched Mahsoud’s stretcher into place at his old spot by the porthole window. Sunlight filtered through the delaminated glass and formed a penumbra around the window’s edges. Outside, the Pacific glowed like blue lava.

  “It will be over soon, Mahsoud,” Gold said. She took out a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his face, careful to avoid burns and contusions.

  “One way or another,” he said. He wheezed when he spoke.

  “A rescue plane is on the way,” Gold said. “I heard it on the radio.”

  Mahsoud showed little joy at that news. He seemed to feel it did not apply to him.

  Gold wondered about that herself. Would the aircraft from Hickam arrive only to find debris floating just offshore from Johnston? She could imagine the C-17 circling a rainbow smear of jet fuel, looking for life vests. Then perhaps it would overfly the atoll in a sad low pass before returning to Hawaii.

  “What does your Falnama tell us now?” Mahsoud asked.

  Gold didn’t feel like retrieving the book from her bags, but she decided it was worth it if it would distract Mahsoud. She just hoped he wouldn’t take any passage too seriously. To Gold, anything that smacked of fortune-telling ranked as nonsense. Though she respected all religions, she put no value on their stray tendrils of superstition. She read the Falnama as a cultural document, nothing more.

  “Open to a page at random,” Mahsoud said when she brought the book.

  Gold knew that was how people used the Falnama centuries ago. She hoped Mahsoud sought mere entertainment and not serious guidance. For that, he should read the Quran, as she read the Bible. But she opened her translated edition as he asked. At the top of the page, it read:

  Accept that you are an instrument of Allah’s will.

  A sentence filled with merit, to Gold’s mind. At least it wasn’t something that might raise hopes higher than warranted. She showed Mahsoud the English words.