Slowly, and very carefully, he pulled back on the controls. At first he wasn’t sure that the flaps were responding. Was it possible for the wind to move so fast that they didn’t have the force to shift? Then he felt the nose rise. He compensated immediately, afraid that if he let the aircraft get too far off level the wind would catch under the nose and flip him like a pancake. There was a brief shudder, and the turbulence shook him through to the bone, but he felt the familiar lift in his stomach, and knew he was gaining altitude.
What followed was another long, excruciating period of emptiness. There was nothing to see, nothing, really, to judge his altitude by. The steady grind of his engines was solid and comforting, but the roar of the wind and the storm competed with it, and the balance was nerve-wracking. Then he noted that the clouds above and in front of him were a lighter shade of gray, and a moment later he broke through, soaring above the clouds. The late afternoon sunlight glittered and almost blinded him. Phil closed his eyes, blinked slowly, and leveled off.
He glanced at the instruments and noted that the altimeter read seventeen thousand feet, and seemed to be steady. It might not be totally accurate, but it was close, and it no longer fluctuated or slapped back and forth. This time the relief was immediate and all consuming. He checked his gauges and fuel and found that he was well prepared for his return flight. The turbulence and winds were much less difficult at seventeen thousand feet, and just to be sure he pulled up a little more before dipping his wing and turning toward home.
He still had a couple of hours’ flight, and he didn’t want to waste any time celebrating his escape from the storm. It was bad luck to celebrate before your wheels struck tarmac and, in fact, Phil wasn’t feeling very energetic.
He pulled the Thermos from where he’d stowed it behind his seat. After a few moments of careful maneuvering, he managed to pour himself a fresh cup—still hot—and took a long sip. He didn’t exactly feel sleepy, which was good, but he did feel weak. He knew it was probably just an aftershock of the stress of being caught down in that storm out of contact with the world, but it never paid to take chances.
He waited until his cup was empty before he grabbed the microphone. He hoped the other aircraft were on ahead of him, closer to home base and already thinking about a cold beer, or a good dinner. He knew they were all good men, and exceptional pilots, but this had not been any normal flight. It also worried him that he’d lost contact so soon with the cargo planes. Something hadn’t been right about the whole mission. The gauges whirling, his watch seeming to lag behind what his mind told him was the correct time, and the communications equipment fritzing out over such a short distance—all of those things were exceedingly strange.
Without communications, it was impossible for him to judge what effect, if any, they’d had. One thing was certain. As he turned and headed for the coast, he saw no indication that the storm had been stopped. In fact, starting just before he’d released his load and pulled up and away, the thing had strengthened. He knew this could just be “The Coil”—the effect that Andrea had explained might be caused by contact with the slick on the ocean’s surface. If that were the case, the storm should spin itself right out of existence somewhere behind him.
If not, however, then it was just possible he’d be flying in barely ahead of the damn thing, and that they’d be riding it out together and testing the storm proofing that had been accomplished on the complex itself over the years. That was fine with Phil.
In fact, he had to shake his head and reach for the coffee again. The thought of sitting with Andrea, curled up on a couch, or a bed, waiting out the storm of the century had made him drowsy. He was surprised when, as he started to unscrew the lid of the Thermos, his hand shook.
He set the coffee aside and reached for the microphone on his radio. There would be time enough to pour a fresh cup after he found out what the status was. If there was good news, even coffee would do for an impromptu toast, and he found that he very suddenly wanted it over with if the news was bad. Three other pilots had come up here under his direct supervision, and three others he had hired had risked their lives as well. As he keyed the microphone, he tried to comprehend why he’d just been flying along, his mind drifting, without trying to raise the others.
“This is Sierra Papa One, all units respond. I repeat, this is Sierra Papa One, over.”
The radio crackled a couple of times, as if there were signals too distant to be picked up, but there was no response. He tried again, repeating his call, but there was no answer. He thought briefly of the other men, Satalino, Richards, and Pooler, three good pilots, but he didn’t allow himself to dwell on the images their names brought to mind. He had no evidence that there was anything wrong. For all he knew his own radio, or the antenna it was attached to, was damaged and not working at all.
Phil flipped the channel and called out again. “Oscar Sierra One, this is Sierra Papa One, please respond, over.”
Again his call was met with dead silence. Phil shook his head. He felt weak, and it would be a while before he was in sight of shore, let alone ready to come in for a landing in North Carolina. He knew he had to get his mind focused and cleared, and do it quick.
He flipped the switch one last time, and called out to the other three seed plane pilots. No answer. The cargo planes should have been out of there well ahead of his own men, so he wasn’t as surprised not to hear from them, but how long must he have been in that storm? If he’d remained far enough behind the others, paying attention to his malfunctioning watch, had they gone on without him and put enough distance between themselves and the storm that he couldn’t reach them? It seemed unlikely, but the radio continued to spit reality at him in short bursts of incoherent static.
If they were out there, they weren’t answering. If they weren’t out there, where the hell were they? He wouldn’t consider the possibility they were all lost. One, maybe; he knew it hadn’t been simple pulling down so close that monster, and maybe one of them might have lost concentration, or nerve, or even run into one of those waterspouts that had come so close to removing him from the game years before. It was not conceivable to him that the same fate might have met all of the others. They were top-notch pilots in state-of-the-art aircraft. They were trained for this, and they knew what to expect. It had to be his radio.
He reached for the coffee again and ignored the shaking in his fingers. What he could not ignore was the blue veins that crossed the back of that hand, or the deep wrinkles etching his skin.
“Holy mother of God,” he whispered.
He turned his attention back to the Thermos, and the cup. Without regard to the hot liquid splashing onto his skin, he filled the plastic cup. The controls were set on auto, and they would hold steady enough—steadier than his hands, or the trip-hammer beat of his heart. He set the cup down on the floor beside him and re-stoppered the Thermos carefully. Spilling the hot coffee on his hands was one thing, if he got it down into his flight suit, or onto some of the controls, he might find himself with even greater troubles.
But was it possible to have greater troubles than looking down at your hand and finding that it was shriveling before your eyes? Could it get worse than to take off in perfect health and find that you could no longer hold your fingers in front of your face without them shaking, and that—by the way—your hand no longer resembled your hand at all, and if it wasn’t wearing your Naval Academy ring and the wrist wasn’t encircled by the watch Andrea had given you for your last birthday, it would be difficult to credit it as your own hand at all, even though it moved every time you thought it should, and appeared to extend from the sleeve of your flight suit?
Phil didn’t think so. He knew he could glance into the window beside him and catch a glimpse of his face, but he wasn’t going to do that. Not now. Not with the ocean beneath him and the controls of this aircraft gripped in his increasingly weak hands, or with the skyline blurring at the edges in ways it had never done before. He didn’t want to see gray hair and busy
, out-of-control eyebrows. He didn’t want to see red veins or cataracts where his clear blue eyes had been. So he didn’t look. He stared straight ahead, sipped his coffee, and he flew.
Every five minutes he picked up the microphone and called out. “This is Sierra Papa One, any units in area please respond.”
No one answered. He considered going to the emergency frequency, but decided against it. If it turned out he was having some sort of delusion brought on by stress, he might endanger his license, and despite all the sudden physical discomforts, he could still fly. He’d get the plane on the ground, get to Andrea, and there would be time after that to sort out whatever was happening to him. He just needed to get home.
~ * ~
At Norfolk Naval Air Station, there was a flurry of activity. The storm had sent units scurrying in all directions, some trying to get ships underway and out of the possible path of the storm, others working to secure aircraft, or to get them fueled and out of the area before they could be caught on the open tarmac by the hurricane’s winds.
There had never been a storm like this one. Meetings were held in barracks, Squadrons, Detachments, and all of them concerned the same thing. Get out. The base would normally shut down to “essential personnel” but this time there was no staying behind. The hurricane headed their way was huge—beyond the scope of anything they had any experience with, and the immediate concern was to get as much equipment, and as many people out as quickly as possible.
In the tower, however, there was another problem.
Lieutenant Mariner stood, staring out over the crowded runways, wishing he were anywhere else. He had to get his home boarded up. He had sent his wife, Tabitha, and their two children ahead on the road. Getting out ahead of the rush had seemed the best bet, and he knew he’d have to be one of the last out of the base. He didn’t mind that, really, except that Tabby would worry.
The airfield was a madhouse, and he felt the tension crackling in the air of the tower more than at any other place—more than at any other time in his life. They were all worried about a thousand other things, personal things, loved ones, homes, and boats—but they had a job to do, and today, of all days, they could not slip. There was too much at stake, and far too much traffic, for distractions.
So fate, of course, had provided one.
“You still have that guy Scharf on the line?” he asked.
The young woman behind and to his left, Petty Officer First Class Hill, had a headset on—pulled back out of the way—and a phone receiver in her hand. She nodded. “Yes sir,” she said. “He says that unidentified aircraft will answer if we change frequency. He also says it will answer to the call sign Sierra Papa One, but he doesn’t say how he knows this.”
Lieutenant Mariner nodded absently. He was staring down at where a truck, one he’d just told to hold its position on the far side of a runway, pulled out and started forward. A P3 Orion, barreling down the runway on its takeoff run, pulled up early and soared just over the top of the truck, which suddenly lurched forward, spinning rubber.
“Get that idiot up here,” Mariner barked.
Then, turning to Petty Officer Hill, he said. “Get someone on one of the old VHF sets and tune in that frequency. Get that guy out there on the horn and direct him here. I don’t know how we’re going to fit him into the pattern, but he can’t land down where he’s headed. There’s a thunderstorm front there already, ahead of the storm. Visibility is next to nothing, and there are some pretty serious wind gusts.
“We may have to arrest him later, when the time comes, but for now we have to get him, and every other pilot out there, down, fueled, and out of here before this storm hits.”
“What about Mr. Scharf?” she asked him.
“Tell him we’ll do what we can.”
Petty Officer Hill nodded, repeated what she’d been told, and hung up the phone. Then she rose, exited the tower and headed down to the radio room below to find someone who could get the old, out-of-date frequency tuned in. Their sets in the tower were patched into radios that were kept in racks below. The radios each had assigned frequencies, and this was not one she was familiar with. It would take a few minutes she knew, but that was okay. The tower was insane, and any time spent away from it was a wonderful break.
The aircraft they were trying to reach had shown up on radar about an hour before. The first reports were from two ships. They reported it as having U.S. markings, very old, propeller driven, and not answering to calls on any frequency. The pilot was keeping it steady at about seventeen thousand feet, and it was coming from the direction of the storm.
They knew nothing of the flight. There was no flight plan filed anywhere, she had checked personally, and the airfield that the caller, Scharf, had told her the pilot was headed for had not been operational in over a decade. None of it made any sense, and Scharf had been just evasive enough on the phone to make her nervous. The last thing they needed in the middle of all the chaos the storm had brought was some lunatic terrorist in an antique plane thrown into the mix.
She didn’t like the way that was the first thing she thought of, but in the past few years there had just been too many bad incidents for her to shake the possibility free from her mind. What good would it do a terrorist to attack in the face of a hurricane? Even if they caused damage, the odds were it would all be erased in the coming disaster, and in any case it would take second fiddle to the storm in the news.
She stepped to the door of the radio room and buzzed. Access was controlled, and she had to wait until someone opened the window in the center of the door and peered out at her before she could be let in. She knew most of the techs, and they were usually happy to see her, but she saw immediately that things were no less tense here than they were at the top of the tower.
The guy who let her in, Petty Officer First Class Howe, smiled quickly, but was moving away almost as soon as his hand left the doorknob.
“We’ve had some systems go down,” he explained as he walked. “I have to finish this alignment or we’ll lose 121.5.”
She nodded. The frequency was one of the standard air-control frequencies, and she knew how critical it was. She watched as he stepped onto a short stool, stuck a long, very thin screwdriver into a hole on top of one of the receiver’s electronic modules, and turned it slowly. He watched a meter that was built into the rack carefully. The needle swung up, back down, and then, eventually evened out on the large zero in the center. With a grunt of satisfaction, he stepped down, released the catches on the rails that held the receiver and slid it back into the rack, fastening the screws on either sides with quick twists of his thumbs and forefingers.
“How can I help you, Katie?” he asked, turning back.
The two had known one another for a long time, and suddenly it felt good to be in the presence of someone she didn’t have to worry so much about upsetting. “Lieutenant Mariner wants this frequency dialed up on anything you’ve got available for it,” she said, handing over the sheet of paper. “He wants you to patch it through as soon as possible.”
He took the paper; glanced at it, then back up at her. “Now?” he asked dubiously.
She nodded. “We have a crazy guy out there in some kind of antique plane. He was supposed to be landing down in North Carolina—at least that’s what we’ve been told. The only thing is, there’s no active airport at the place he’s headed for—hasn’t been for nearly twenty years, and we can’t get this guy on the radio.”
“So why this frequency?” Howe asked. “This is old. I remember it from training, but we haven’t used this actively for years. They might still use it in Europe somewhere, or NATO, but . . .”
“That’s what’s weird about it,” she nodded agreement. “But the guy who called us with that frequency—Scharf was his name—was patched through from Washington. General Lynch himself authorized it and told Lieutenant Hill to do anything we can to help them, and to get this plane on the ground safely. It’s all weird, and this is the worst time in the world f
or it—you know?”
Howe nodded and smiled at her. “You holding up okay?”
“I’m fine,” she replied, “just nervous is all. You know me. Can you get that tuned for me?”
“It will take a few minutes. I’ll give you a call when it’s live.”
“Thanks, Jack,” she said. Then, seeing that he was already moving and already distracted by the banks of transceivers, receivers, and other equipment, she turned away and slipped out the door and up the stairs to her desk. It was going to be a long, long day.
~ * ~
Phil blinked at the clouds below and frowned. There was no way to deny it; his eyesight was not what it had been that morning. He could see the clouds, but they blurred at the edges. He had to squint at the gauges on his control panel to make them out in detail, and he was tired. He was, in fact, more tired than he could ever remember being, and the drone of the engines threatened to drive him over the edge into sleep.
He was tempted to drop down a few thousand feet. The coast would be in view shortly, and he very much wanted to see it, but he was afraid. It was almost a superstitious fear, like a few moments earlier when he hadn’t wanted to look at his own reflection.
What if he dropped down and couldn’t see land? What if he was within fifty miles of the shoreline, but his eyes could no longer make it out? He could still see the instruments, and if he had to, he knew he could land with those alone. He’d done so many times before, but never when he was so physically exhausted, and never with both of his hand shaking as if they’d contracted a sudden palsy.
Then, out of the blue, his radio crackled, and a female voice rose above the static.
Mote in Andrea's Eye Page 18
