No wonder the bad guys set these things to go off on descent instead of climb, Parson thought. Scatter that shit all over Germany and punish them for helping the U.S.
Down below, the edge of the Black Sea hove into view. Romania. The shoreline passed under the wings, the ground a patchwork quilt of green forests, brown fields, crops in corduroy furrows, hedgerows embroidering the borders.
The stamping of boots up the ladder announced the return of Dunne and Gold to the flight deck. Gold’s blond hair had tangled into her headset. Dunne’s cheeks, the part of them not covered by his oxygen mask, were red. He coughed into the mask as he strapped back into the engineer’s seat.
Parson didn’t know Dunne well, but he’d flown with him before and was beginning to learn how Dunne operated. When Parson was still a copilot on the C-5, he’d gotten stuck at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, with a blown starter. The crew, including Dunne, waited for several days for a new starter to come in. When it finally arrived, Parson found Dunne up on a stand with an engine cowl open. The flight engineer had a wooden chock in his hands and he was pounding it against the engine like a battering ram. Parson wasn’t a mechanic, but he knew nothing in the maintenance manuals called for beating a jet engine into submission.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” Parson said.
“Don’t ask, sir.”
Parson later learned the old starter had swelled its casing when it blew. As a result, Dunne couldn’t get a socket wrench on all the attachment bolts. He’d had to knock the thing around on its shaft to remove it. Unorthodox, and certainly not according to the tech order, but faster and cheaper than changing the whole engine.
What to do now? Parson knew he had several hours’ worth of fuel on board. There was no sense squandering it down here at twenty-five thousand now that he knew what he was dealing with. Better fuel economy up high. He waited for Dunne to settle in at his panel, watched him scan his instruments. Good, Parson noted. He’s still doing his job.
“Engineer,” Parson said, “repressurize us. Then I’m going to request a climb back up to three-four-oh.”
“Yes, sir,” Dunne said.
“Could it make the bomb go off if we repressurize?” Colman asked.
“No,” Parson said. “Remember, it’s in an unpressurized section.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Then Parson made a call to downstairs. “MCD,” he said. “Pilot.”
“Go ahead.”
“Ma’am, we’re about to repressurize, if the patients are ready.”
“There’s not really anything we can to do get them ready.”
Parson wasn’t sure how to react to that. It seemed simply a fact to which the MCD was resigned. He nodded to Dunne, who twisted the pressurization master switch to FLIGHT. Parson felt the swell begin against his eardrums. Pressing his fingers over the oxygen mask, he held his nose and exhaled against it to equalize the pressure, heard the faint pop. He had to swallow now and then to keep his ears comfortable with the change in cabin altitude. Thought again about what that must do to the inside of a wound cavity. But did any of that matter anymore?
“Tell me when the cabin pressure gets down below ten thousand feet,” Parson said.
“Roger that,” Dunne said.
Parson turned his wafer switch to VHF. “Control,” he said, “Air Evac Eight-Four requests climb to flight level three-four-zero.”
A voice responded with the exaggerated
l
’s of a Slavic accent: “Air Evac Eight-Four, climb and maintain flight level three-four-zero. Contact Bucharest on one-one-niner-point-five.”
Colman was flying the plane now. He set the altitude alerter, advanced the throttles. The nose pitched up slightly, and the aircraft began a gentle climb. Parson noticed Colman kept his hand on the throttles: a good technique to remind yourself to pull off some power after the aircraft leveled. This new copilot did everything methodically, like most new guys. He moved switches one at a time, not in a quick flow. He seemed to work from memory and procedure rather than instinct. That was okay with Parson. Better to do the right thing slowly than screw up fast. But this kid would have to learn that the flight manual’s index would not give him all the answers.
After several minutes, Dunne said, “Cabin’s below ten thousand.”
“All right, everybody,” Parson said. “You can come off oxygen now.”
Parson pulled the sweep-on mask away from his mouth and nose, placed it back in its holder. He adjusted the boom mike on his headset, inhaled the cabin’s air. It always felt good to take off that mask. His face had gone numb.
He checked in with Bucharest, then switched to HF and called the Tanker Airlift Control Center. The flight manager put the DO on the line.
“Sir,” Parson said, “we have a bomb on board. We depressurized so the engineer could check the empennage and he found a device up in the vertical stabilizer.”
No response for a moment. Then the colonel said, “We copy your situation, Eight-Four. Maintain altitude while we get some answers from EOD. We’ll gas you up again if we need to.”
“Eight-Four wilco,” Parson said. “But there’s more.” Parson told him about the boxes and bags of unidentified material.
Another long pause. Then only: “Hilda Contingency Cell copies all.”
As the aircraft climbed, it passed through a thin cirrus layer like punching through a white shroud. After several minutes, the autopilot leveled the plane, the altimeters reading thirty-four thousand. Heavier now with fuel, the C-5 had reached the ceiling for its weight. It did not so much fly as wallow through the air. Parson felt the right wing dip a few degrees, a touch of Dutch roll. Then the flight augmentation computers corrected, and the ship settled into straight and level flight. At least that’s working, Parson thought. Hell, we don’t need any more problems.
“So what do we do now?” Colman asked. Voice steady, but his face very white. So were his hands, purple veins visible under the skin as he gripped the yoke.
Parson stared out into the blue. “I don’t know,” he said. Then he chided himself for saying that. The aircraft commander always knows. Or at least he knows who to ask. The crew members, the whole damned Air Force, expect you to suck it up and deal with it. No matter how much you might doubt yourself, he thought, you don’t have the right to show it.
The radio interrupted the flight deck conversation: “Air Evac Eight-Four, Hilda. You still on frequency?”
“Hilda, Eight-Four,” Parson called. “Go ahead.”
“Dip shop needs to talk to you. Stand by.”
What now? Parson wondered. Like I have time for their paperwork.
Then another voice on the radio: “Air Evac Eight-Four, Hilda. Be advised Germany has revoked your diplomatic clearance. We’re working on a reroute to Rota or Sigonella.”
Parson slammed his fist onto his armrest and swore. Pressed his TALK switch.
“Why the—Why would they do that?”
“Word has gotten out. They don’t want an at-risk plane over their territory.”
Well, word had to get out eventually, Parson thought. Hard to keep a secret about airplanes blowing up. “What about the patients?” Parson asked. “We have some critical cases on board.”
“We’re working that. The base hospital wherever you land will do what it can.”
Didn’t sound like much of a solution to Parson. Some base hospitals were little more than walk-in clinics. Maybe they don’t expect us to make it that far, he thought.
“Air Evac Eight-Four copies all,” Parson said. “We’ll maintain a listening watch on this freq until you come up with a new destination.”
Now it no longer made sense to follow the flight plan to Germany. Parson looked down at the screen on his FMS, set to a page listing familiar waypoints to Ramstein, a destination now denied him. Wherever the plane wound up, assuming it landed at all, no place could handle the patients as well as the Landstuhl hospital, just a few miles from Ramstein. No doubt more of them would die. If my dip clearance has been revoked, Parson thought, that means the bureaucrats and politicians know what’s going on and they’ve all come in to help. Fuck you very much.
But Parson could do nothing about that now. And there was no point going fast in the wrong direction.
“Control,” Parson called, “Air Evac Eight-Four needs to cancel flight plan to Ramstein. We’d like a partial route clearance anywhere more toward the west-southwest. Our destination will probably change to Rota or Sigonella.”
The Romanian controller asked Parson to stand by, then called him back:
“Air Evac Eight-Four, you are cleared Belgrade, Split, Aviano. Maintain flight level three-four-zero. We will give you further clearance when you confirm destination.”
“Air Evac Eight-Four copies,” Parson said.
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
P
arson 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.