Finally, Parson felt a slight trundle, as if he’d driven over a speed bump. The nosewheels locked green.
“You want me to go ahead with the emergency switches?” Colman asked. He opened the red guards over toggle switches for the forward main gear. They controlled electric motors to drive down the landing gear bogies when the hydraulics failed.
“Yeah,” Parson said. “Remember, start counting seconds when you flip the switches. If the gear don’t go from UP to IN TRANSIT in five Mississippis, turn off the switches or you’ll burn out the motors.”
“Yes, sir,” Colman said.
Colman did not look surprised by that information. He knows what he’s doing, Parson realized. Just let him do it. The copilot clicked both switches, and Parson saw him mouth the words “Thousand one . . . thousand two.” The right forward gear began moving, but its symmetrical opposite remained at UP. After five seconds, Colman snapped off its switch.
“Figures,” Dunne said. “I’ll check the breakers.” The flight engineer rose from his seat to scan a circuit breaker panel in the aft section of the flight deck. When he returned, he said, “All three are popped, and they won’t reset.”
Those wheels would never come down, Parson realized. Lowering them required either hydraulics or electrics. Unlike smaller aircraft, the C-5 had no means of manually cranking down its landing gear. The hardware was just too heavy for that.
Parson considered his newest predicament: two mains down on one side, only one on the other. Uneven wheels meant uneven braking. Uneven braking meant veering off the runway. Didn’t the book address that problem?
“Let’s check that configuration chart in section three,” Parson said. “I believe we gotta raise the right forward now.” It hurt to move. It hurt not to move. It hurt to think.
“We can’t, sir,” Dunne said. “We have no hydraulics to bring it up. The emergency system will only take it down.”
Parson looked out at the ocean for a full minute. Then he said, “Can somebody bring me some more aspirin?”
“I’ll be right back,” Gold said. She unbuckled and disappeared down the flight deck ladder. When she returned with two tablets, Parson had no more water within reach. He chewed them to a chalky powder, swallowed. Even moving his jaw muscles hurt his leg. He put his thumb and fingers around the manual trim handle and squeezed it without moving it, tried to get control of the pain. If he concentrated hard enough, gripped that handle and focused on a scratch across the windscreen, he could put the torment from his mind for about four seconds.
“I’ll just take it real easy on the brakes,” Colman said.
The words broke Parson’s momentary trance and slammed him back into misery like striking a wall. He drew a long breath and said, “Yeah, but not
too
easy. I’d rather go off the side of the runway at forty knots than off the end at a hundred.” He tried to keep his voice even, but its strain betrayed him.
“Yes, sir,” Colman said. “You okay?”
Parson nodded. Then he gripped the trim handle again and ground his teeth. How could he have lived most of his life taking the absence of pain for granted? Just not to hurt would be paradise. He stared at the scratch on the glass, hoping to Zen himself just a couple seconds of relief.
Out the corner of his eye, he saw Colman reach up and press the master caution RESET button. Parson found it hard to care why.
“It’s the number four pylon,” Dunne said. Colman and Dunne began to move switches on their panels, recite checklist items.
Wading through currents of pain, Parson brought his mind to bear on the new task at hand. He checked the light on his annunciator panel: FIRE WARNING.
WHATEVER HAD JUST HAPPENED,
Gold thought, it must have been bad. The crew seemed to perform their first actions from memory, as if they’d rehearsed for this moment. No one stopped to explain anything to her. She leaned forward, saw the FIRE light.
She experienced not quite panic, but more a sense of urgent need—like that time she’d exited a C-141 over Fort Bragg. When she’d felt no opening shock, she looked up to see the streamer: a twisted, writhing parachute that would not inflate. She’d pulled her reserve, and its canopy flowed, billowed, and opened just a couple hundred feet above the North Carolina clay. Gold burned it in and turned her ankle, but the jumpmaster called it a textbook recovery from a malfunction.
This time she had no rip cord to pull, no action she could take. She could only hope whatever the crew was doing, it would work.
“I still got a FIRE light,” Dunne said. “How does it look out there?”
Colman peered out his window. “In flames,” he said.
Dunne pressed a button on a panel over his head. “I’ll keep shooting it with nitrogen,” he said.
The crew began running some kind of emergency checklist. To Gold, the calls and responses sounded like an incantation or a catechism. She rose from her seat to see outside.
Now, instead of sparks, the aircraft trailed ropes of black smoke. It boiled from the right wing’s outboard engine and the structure that attached the engine to the wing. The smoke plume expanded behind the aircraft, marked its progress over the ocean. Orange flames wrapped clawlike around the pylon. Sheet metal buckled and darkened as the fire spread. Gold knew little about aircraft design, but she did know the wing above that burning pylon contained fuel tanks.
“Is it growing?” Parson asked.
“A little,” Colman said.
Dunne pressed that overhead button again. “I might be able to keep it off the wing as long as the nitrogen holds out,” he said.
On that thread of hope, Gold searched Dunne’s panel for anything that looked like nitrogen quantity. She saw no such gauge. Apparently, it didn’t exist. So they had no idea how much nitrogen they had.
“If I have to,” Parson said, “I’ll ditch the airplane. That’ll put out the damned fire.” And drown anyone not able-bodied enough to get out, Gold knew. Including Parson.
“Let me try to keep it knocked down,” Dunne said. He pressed the button again. Gold saw that whenever he did so, the flames weaved as if dodging a blow. Their color shifted and lightened as the spray of liquid nitrogen stole oxygen from the fire. But when the spray stopped, the flames reddened and climbed. The blast of the slipstream did not blow out the fire, only fed it. And then Dunne would press his fire suppression button again.
“Loadmasters,” Parson called on interphone, “make sure everybody has an LPU.”
That, Gold understood. Life preserver units.
“Yes, sir,” came the answer.
“How far out are we?” Dunne asked.
Parson looked down at the center console. Charts and other paperwork littered it like so many dead leaves. He examined a digital readout and said, “About a hundred miles.” Then he moved a switch and said, “Reach Two-Zero, Air Evac Eight-Four is on fire. Our position is ninety-eight miles southeast of Johnston. Be advised we may have to put it in the water.”
No response came for long seconds. Then: “Reach Two-Zero copies all. We’re inbound, about three-zero-zero miles out.”
Gold watched Parson, strapped into his seat, prepared to ride it to the bottom of the Pacific. She thought of Mahsoud, Justin, and Baitullah, and her eyes brimmed. So much promise and so much pain. And now it came down to the spread of fire, the supply of nitrogen, the stretch of nautical miles.
“Hey, loads,” Parson said on interphone.
“Sir?”
“Give everybody an EPOS, too. Open them up and show the pax how to use them.”
“Roger that.”
When a loadmaster climbed the steps, he handed Gold and the crew members their LPUs. Then he brought her a vinyl pouch labeled EMERGENCY PASSENGER OXYGEN SYSTEM. He tore off a red strip to open the pouch. Then he withdrew a plastic hood with a narrow oxygen cylinder. A lanyard connected the cylinder to a red knob.
“If it gets smoky,” the loadmaster said, “pull the knob, stretch open the neck seal, and place this over your head.”
“Got it,” Gold said.
“It’ll give you just a few minutes of breathing to get out of the airplane.”
Gold realized Parson was preparing his crew and passengers for two possibilities: a ditching in the ocean or a flaming landing.
“Is anybody back in the courier compartment?” Parson asked.
“Negative,” the loadmaster said. “Just the bodies.”
“All right,” Parson said, “so it’ll just be the four of us up here when we land. If we make it to the island, open the aft ramp as soon as we touch down. Don’t waste any time because I don’t know how long you’ll have hydraulics.”
“And if we ditch?”
“Deploy a life raft if you can. But remember, fuel can burn on top of the water. If the fire doesn’t go out when we hit the drink, just use the LPUs and swim as far from the aircraft as possible.”
The loadmaster looked at his commander, seemed to search for something to say, then only nodded.
“A C-17’s on the way,” Parson said. “They’ll mark your position.”
Your
position, Gold thought. He didn’t say
our
position. Gold looked out at the fire. Flames danced along the length of the pylon and lapped at the underside of the wing. The smoke had thickened. But when Dunne hit the fire with more spray of nitrogen, the smoke dampened enough for Gold to see the exposed ribs of the pylon. Most of the sheet metal had melted away. A dark stain spread into the wing’s leading edge.
The smoke erupted once more. Dunne pressed his fire suppression button. Then he pressed it twice again.
“I’m not getting a MANIFOLD light,” he said.
“What’s that mean?” Colman asked.
“Nitrogen’s gone.”
Flames enveloped the pylon and flowed across the top of the wing. Gold thought she could smell the fire, a chemical smolder that seemed to have invaded the air-conditioning. The odor grew stronger as the smoke trail widened, like the foul tang of a bonfire.
29
T
he FMS showed fifty miles to Johnston Atoll. Parson squinted into the distance, tried to find a speck of sand or coral. Twice he thought he glimpsed something solid, only to recognize it as a wave’s shadow or a glint of light reflected off a swell. Oceanic mirages. Probably still too far out to see it, anyway. And what if lightning-damaged instruments had him a little off course?
Sheets of flame shimmered farther across the right wing. Smoke spewed at odd angles from underneath the slats, between seams of aluminum.
“I got a fire light for the inboard section,” Dunne said.
Parson looked back at the flight engineer’s overhead panel. Two red lights now instead of one. Time for a decision. He turned his wafer switch to PA.
“Prepare to ditch,” Parson said. On the panel above him, he opened a red guard for the alarm horn’s switch. He gave six short blasts of the horn, the signal to stand by to hit the water.
“Sir, are you sure?” Dunne asked.
“If we keep screwing around with this fire,” Parson said, “that wing will blow off, and nobody will get out.”
Colman regarded Parson, let out a long breath, and placed his left hand on the throttles.
“Try to put it parallel to the waves,” Parson said. “It’s going to bounce when it first strikes the water. Just hold it in the landing attitude until it comes down again.”
Colman closed his fingers around the throttle knobs.
“You’re a hell of a pilot,” Parson said. “You guys are a hell of a crew. Now ditch this aircraft.”
At that moment, Parson became aware of a presence behind him. Gold stood with her hands on the back of his seat. She pointed and said, “Birds.”
Four white petrels glided above the water at about two o’clock low. One veered away, and the others held themselves in a broken V pattern, a perfect missing man formation.
“The island has to be close,” she said.
“I see it,” Colman said.
Parson saw nothing. He removed his sunglasses and still saw nothing. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Colman said. “I have the island.”
Perhaps Colman’s younger eyes were right. Those birds had to come from somewhere.
“Let me try to make it, sir,” Colman said. “Please.”
A commander has to trust his crew, Parson thought. If you lead them well, they’ll do the right thing. You can’t do it all yourself.
Ahead, a shadow on the ocean lingered, became motionless. As the aircraft grew nearer, the shadow turned to a white lozenge in the distance.
“I got it,” Parson said. “Eleven o’clock.”
“Yes, sir,” Colman said.
“You’re only going to get one chance at this,” Parson said. Then he switched to PA and said, “Disregard the ditching order. Stand by for landing.”
The waves flashing by below seemed smaller now. Perhaps the surface winds were calming.