Phoenix Rising

by Nance, John J. ;

  “Wait a minute … we may be breaking out!” Tyson called out, his voice tense with hope and fear.

  The reflection of the powerful landing lights suddenly ended, the beams stabbing unimpeded into the Arctic night.

  “We’re at nine hundred, speed two-ninety,” Tyson called out.

  Brian had inadvertently pulled back on the yoke, losing ten knots. He decided to hold speed until four hundred feet.

  “You see anything?” Brian asked.

  “Not yet … not yet … I’m looking!” Tyson’s words were tense and almost breathless. They needed a target. They were losing altitude, and only from altitude could they really see far enough to plan, but without moonlight …

  “Brian! There to the left! There’s some sort of break in the overcast, and I can almost make out the surface. Turn left! Now!”

  “I’m gonna stay on instruments for now. You guide me.”

  “Roger. Come left forty degrees at least.”

  “Keep descending?”

  “Yeah. Bring us down to four hundred. You’re coming through six hundred now and slowing.”

  Brian leveled at four hundred, listening to their life-giving airspeed drain away as the sounds of the slipstream faded. He looked up from the instruments then, and out in front of the aircraft as Tyson’s voice cut through the tension.

  “There! Dead ahead, I can see the outline of what looks like a lake!”

  Brian couldn’t make it out yet. There was filtered moonlight playing around an area up ahead of them, but it could be far beyond gliding range.

  He checked the airspeed. They were under 240 knots now.

  “We’re close enough, Brian, we’re close enough. Hold your altitude and keep coming.”

  “I don’t see it!”

  “Just ahead there. See that angled shadow cutting across in front of us? And see the slight reflection on this side? That’s got to be a lake.”

  Two hundred twenty knots and decaying.

  “I got it now!”

  They were out of time, and Brian could see the shoreline—if that was what it was—moving toward them. It was at almost a forty-five-degree angle to them, the line moving away on the left into the darkness. He checked the altitude again and mentally triangulated.

  “We’ll have to try it,” Brian said.

  Dear God, let that be a lake!

  At two hundred knots he pushed the nose forward and called landing gear down.

  “Roger, landing gear down.” Tyson snapped the lever down, and the satisfying sounds of the gear extension process reached their ears.

  “Down and three green,” Tyson reported.

  “Flaps five,” Brian ordered.

  The gossamer shadow had become something more now. In the landing lights, it was becoming a real shadow of some sort. It could be a small ridge, or it could be a shoreline, but whatever it was, they were closing on it rapidly.

  “You’re four hundred feet, speed one-sixty.”

  “Flaps … hell, all the way.”

  “Roger,” Tyson replied. His left hand worked the flap lever as Brian pushed the nose over slightly, the landing lights now confirming that whatever was beyond that threshold was not a frozen lake.

  “Jesus Christ! We’re headed for a shoreline!”

  Brian banked the 767 to the left instantly. He had very little altitude but just enough airspeed. The shore angled away to his left in what seemed like a straight line. They were almost over the shore now, and coming left.

  “Brian, I don’t know, airspeed’s one-thirty-five. We’re two hundred feet.”

  “Come on, baby!” Brian spoke the words as his left foot mashed hard on the left rudder to skid the jetliner around. He was at forty degrees of bank now, letting the nose fall slightly to keep barely above a turning stall as the lights aligned themselves with the shoreline and then moved left onto the lake surface.

  “One hundred feet, Brian, speed one-twenty. We’re gonna have to land it.”

  He had a ten-degree angle away from the shoreline now, almost out of altitude and airspeed and praying the right wingtip would clear the embankment to their immediate right.

  The thought had been haunting him that they might find only a small lake. Now they would be skimming along next to the shoreline at over a hundred miles per hour on ice, and if it suddenly curved in ahead of them …

  “Seventy feet.”

  A snow-covered surface as flat as a griddle stretched ahead of them into darkness. Brian let the 767 settle into ground effect and come down slowly to ten feet, letting the speed drain away as he flared, trying to touch down at around one hundred knots, still letting it turn slightly to the left, then, at the last second, leveling the wings for touchdown.

  The first indication that the wheels had kissed a solid surface was the realization that the radio altimeter was on zero. Neither of them had ever made a smoother landing.

  Brian let the nose down to the surface then, and stepped on the brakes. Amazingly, they responded, the anti-skid circuits cycling on and off as the speed of the jumbo slowly decreased to under a hundred miles per hour.

  The landing lights stabbed into the darkness ahead, but now there was a reflection of something linear and dark moving in from the right—the edge of the lake. Brian moved the nose-wheel steering tiller farther to the left—as far as he dared—but it was obvious they were running out of room. If the aircraft should rocket off the ice and into that embankment, the landing gear and possibly the engines could shear off, causing a fire.

  He pressed harder on the left brake, feeling the anti-skid cycling on that side, but still the onrushing side of the embankment that bordered the lake filled their windscreen.

  “Sixty-five knots!” Tyson called out.

  Brian cranked the steering even farther left and tromped hard on both brakes, checking the airspeed as it fell under fifty knots. They were slowing, but on a collision course with the black ground ahead.

  In what seemed like slow motion, the huge Boeing 767 skidded and lurched toward the end of the smooth lake surface in a high-stakes contest between remaining surface and remaining speed.

  Brian and Tyson both mentally braced for impact. The nose gear would undoubtedly go first.

  Over a hundred feet behind them, the chattering brakes and intermittently skidding tires had struggled in vain to find something to hold on to. Finally biting into a roughened surface closer to the embankment, the braking system of Clipper Forty began to do its job. The big Boeing shuddered and slowed, the specter of the embankment now moving under the nose, garish and menacing in the landing lights.

  Finally, in almost absolute silence, the last stored kinetic energy of the aircraft played itself out, the nose wheel coming to rest within eight feet of the potentially lethal eighteen-foot embankment surrounding the nameless, sixty-foot-deep lake whose impounded water was a solid block of ice all the way to the bottom.

  At first, both pilots sat in stunned silence. Tyson looked at Brian, Brian looked at Tyson. They both looked out the window at a wintry scene of light snow flurries blowing along the ice surface, and sparkling crystals of frozen water caught in the beams of the APU-powered landing lights, as they illuminated a snowy landscape of tundra beyond.

  Brian closed his eyes. Thank you, Lord.

  He took a deep breath and turned to Tyson, whose eyes were still the size of fried eggs.

  “I think we did it,” Tyson said.

  From the rear of the cockpit, through the cockpit door, the sound of applause, spotty at first, then energetic and heartfelt, filtered through.

  Brian picked up the PA microphone with a shaking hand.

  They were safe.

  At least for now.

  17

  Wednesday, March 15, 7:15 A.M.

  London, England

  Elizabeth was burning with impatience. The first-class sleeper seat had worked better than expected, carrying her to Heathrow Airport reasonably rested and ready to work—but she was blocked by the impenetrable wall of nor
mal business hours. She could do nothing before her nine-o’clock meeting with Alastair Wood at Lloyds.

  Instead, she decided to stay in her hotel room and work on the battle plan. Pan Am had five days left, and she was determined to work her heart out up to the deadline.

  A sudden swell of sleepiness rolled over her gently. She blinked and rubbed her eyes—trying to stay focused on the screen of her laptop computer—as the thought of a warm shower became a siren song.

  I guess I didn’t get as much sleep as I thought.

  She found herself undoing her earrings and unbuttoning her blouse, her legs propelling her toward the bath. Elizabeth left a trail of clothes and lingerie through the bedroom on her way toward the bath: She had just stepped into the luxuriance of cascading hot water when the phone rang, the bathroom extension startling her with its loud, traditional bell.

  Now what?

  The satellite phone call last night from the aircraft to Ron Lamb’s home came to mind immediately. The connection had been so clear that before she had told him, Ron had no inkling that she was airborne, let alone headed for London. She’d related the dark frustrations of the day, but omitted any mention of Irwin Fairchild or her suspicions about his involvement in the turndown by Bannister Partners. She had to get to the bottom of Irwin Fairchild’s contacts with Pan Am and Ron Lamb, but now was not the time.

  The fact that she was headed for London seemed to surprise Ron, but he had seemed truly shocked when she warned him in dire terms not to tell anyone else in the company—and especially not her secretary or assistant—where she really was.

  “Don’t even write this down, Ron. Just memorize the hotel name. And don’t call me from the office. I think there’s a good chance your phones and mine are bugged.”

  There had been a long, skeptical silence from the other end.

  The phone was on its fourth ring when she balanced herself in the shower stall and reached for it, almost losing her grip as her foot slipped momentarily on the slick tile.

  She had expected Ron Lamb’s voice, but there was no way to anticipate the news that Clipper Forty was down on a frozen lake in the Northern Territories of Canada. She reached back and turned off the water to hear better as he described what they knew.

  “My God, Ron. How cold is it up there? That’s … you say the airplane’s intact?”

  “Yeah. It’s minus forty degrees or more, but fortunately their auxiliary power unit is working fine and there’s plenty of fuel for now, so they can keep everyone safe and warm on board for at least a couple of days—provided the APU keeps running.”

  “Minus forty? How long until rescue planes arrive? They know where the airplane is, right?”

  “They know exactly. Our people still have good communication from the airplane, but less than thirty minutes after they landed, an Arctic storm front moved over them, and the Canadian Forces rescue center is not sure they’ll be able to reach them until it blows over.”

  “How long is that, Ron?”

  “Could be a day … could be three days or more. There’s a severe low over the area. The thing that’s got us all scared is that APU. If anything happens to it, or they run out of fuel before rescue can get in there … I don’t know. Two hundred forty people won’t make it long in those temperatures in a metal icebox, and there’s nothing in any direction for several hundred miles. They’ve got to get them out fast.”

  “How could the engines just quit?”

  “Our chief pilot—well, you know Brian Murphy, of course—Brian is dumbfounded, as is our chief of maintenance. Nothing like this has ever happened to a 767 before. Boeing says it can’t happen. The computer was going haywire just before it shut down their engines, and once it went off line, it wouldn’t let them restart.”

  The mention of Brian’s name caught her full attention. She could imagine him at that moment with a phone to each ear at the operations center, managing the crisis. Brian was wonderful in a crisis.

  “Ron, where is Brian Murphy right now? I may want to check with him.”

  Ron Lamb knew that Elizabeth and Brian were good friends, yet the question seemed to shake him.

  “Well … he’s talking to us on the satellite phone, and there’s a direct-dial number, but we need to keep that line clear.”

  That confused her.

  “He’s airborne, you mean? Or there in Seattle?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Elizabeth, Brian Murphy is the captain of Clipper Forty. He’s on that frozen lake right now.”

  Wednesday, March 15, 3:00 A.M. EST

  Clipper Forty

  The winds had come up as Brian sat on an armrest in the front of the first-class cabin and talked to the passengers on the PA. The wind was only a distant roar at first, barely audible above the sounds of the air-conditioning system, but it had grown rapidly to gusts that shoved the 767 sideways at times. He could see the eyes of his passengers growing more panicky with every episode. He knew it was up to him to reassure them.

  “I’m going to be completely honest and open with you,” he had begun, “and I must ask the same in return, along with your complete cooperation. Rescue forces are already on the way, but as you can hear and feel, there is a storm over us—an Arctic storm. It could be a while before they can find us or get aircraft in here to evacuate us. Rescue by land would take many days because of where we are, so what we can expect is the arrival of C-130 cargo planes on skis as soon as the storm lifts.”

  Brian felt the eyes of every passenger following his as he met the gaze of those closest to the front, one after another. Eye contact was important, but so was a calm façade. He struggled to look calm as he kept a smile on his face, hoping no one would think it too thin or insincere.

  The desire to flee back to the cockpit and lock the door was infantile and stupid, but it was gnawing at him. Equally compelling was the desire to get on the phone and find Elizabeth. Suppose she heard about the forced landing without the information that everyone was safe, including her mother and Kelly?

  He snapped back to reality, and to the fact that an entire aircraft full of people were watching him.

  He was the man with the four stripes of command on his shoulders, the repository of wisdom, and the single person to whom more than two hundred forty people were now looking for guidance and reassurance—and it was a terrifying position to be in.

  I can’t guarantee everything will be okay! Maybe that’s what’s scaring me.

  “Okay, here’s the bottom line, folks. We’ll hope to be here only for hours, but we’ll work and act as if we’ll be here for days. Though I fully expect things will turn out just fine, I have to tell you that we’re in a different phase now. This is no longer a passenger flight in which our principal cabin duty—after keeping you safe—is to keep you pampered and happy. This is now a survival situation in which our mutual duty is to keep ourselves alive and well. Mutual cooperation and dependency—and teamwork—will be essential.”

  There were nodding heads and smiles in return from the planeload of frightened people whom he had just empowered as a team. Brian marveled that he had found the right words, but, judging from the faces in front of him, he had.

  “Okay, let me take questions for a few minutes, then I’m going to pass out some paper. I’d appreciate it if each of you would write down your occupation, whether you’ve had any military training, survival experience, Arctic or cold-weather experience, whether you’re a physician, or anything else I might need to know. Don’t assume it’s not pertinent. I may even need entertainers, if we have any on board.”

  They laughed at that, and the response brought a smile to Brian’s face.

  The passengers’ confusion was apparent from their many questions. How could they be in a shirtsleeve-warm environment when they were stranded in the middle of the Arctic on a forlorn frozen lake with temperatures nearly fifty below zero?

  “The APU, or auxiliary power unit,” Brian explained. “It’s a small jet-turbine engine in the tail
of the aircraft, which runs on the same fuel the engines use. It wasn’t affected by the electronic problem that shut down our engines. It gives us electrical power and heat, and we have enough fuel to run it for many days.”

  An elderly man a few rows from Brian began to raise his hand, then decided against it. Brian saw the aborted attempt and looked him in the eye. His haunted look transmitted the question as clearly as if he’d spoken in Brian’s ear: What happens if the APU fails?

  That answer, Brian decided, was best left for later.

  After a few more minutes of questions, Brian excused himself and walked back forward through the Compartment Class section with its nine two-person compartments, all of which had the separating glass panels switched over to the transparent mode. Brian found himself marveling at glass that could be made opaque by the mere application of an electric current, though it seemed an inappropriate thing to be thinking about. He picked up the PA microphone and asked all flight attendants to come forward for a staff meeting.

  Kelly and Virginia Sterling had been assigned to Compartment 1, just behind the cockpit. He found them now and hugged them both.

  “You were terrific, Brian,” Kelly said, with tears glistening in her eyes. “I couldn’t even feel the landing.”

  “I got your message, honey. It helped.”

  “Were you scared?” She whispered the question, glancing around so as not to embarrass him. Brian could see she wasn’t teasing, and that it was important for her to know. There was no question that she had been scared to death.

  Brian hugged her again, feeling her shake slightly, and whispered loudly enough for Virginia Sterling to hear, “Yes. Worse than I’ve ever been. We’ll talk about it later.”

  “Brian, is rescue really on the way?” Virginia asked him.

  He meant to glance at her with a reassuring nod, but this was Elizabeth’s mother, and he found himself unable to varnish the truth. Instead he glanced at the gathering crew of flight attendants before turning back to Virginia with a worried look.

  “They are, Virginia, but I doubt they’ll be able to find us just yet, or land. We may be here awhile, and what’s worrying me …” he paused, and she prompted.