HL 04-The Final Hour (23 page)

I leveled the plane, hit the throttle, and gunned the engine back to full. The engine started its stuttering roar again. The plane seemed to hover in the air a second, as if deciding whether or not to fall.

Then the engine’s power took hold and pushed the plane forward. The Cessna steadied and began to climb away from the river. I started breathing again. I’d done it. I’d pulled us out of the dive.

My headset filled with the sound of Mike and Rose cheering and shouting my name. The nose of the plane lifted, pointing up toward the sky. I felt a thrill of achievement and relief.

Then the chopper—and the gunman—pulled up alongside us again.

I caught sight of the helicopter in the corner of my eye. I looked over, the wind through the broken window whipping my face. I saw the small two-seater whirlybird hovering beside us, the gunman sitting in the open door. I saw him lift his automatic rifle once again. This time, it was pointing directly at me.

In pure wild fear, I turned the yoke in my hand, hit the rudder with my foot. The Cessna gave a loud groaning buzz and swung to the right, away from the chopper. Over that noise and the shouts from Mike and Rose, I heard no gunshots. But I saw a spark fly off the plane’s nose cone and I knew we were under fire. My stomach rolled as I pushed the plane into a sharp circle.

“Here he comes again, Charlie!” Mike shouted.

I looked around, but for a long, long moment as the plane turned, I could not find the chopper. Then I saw it again as we came around. The whirling machine had lifted up above us. The shooter was trying to reposition himself in the doorway so he could fire down at us. I had to get away from him. Fast. Now.

There was no time to think—and that was a good thing. Because if I’d had time to think, I’d have realized we had no chance to survive. I had only the most basic flying skills. I could guide a plane in flight—which is pretty easy if you don’t have to do anything too fancy. And I could land—at least I had landed a few times when I had an instructor sitting in the seat beside me telling me what to do. But to take evasive action—to outmaneuver an expert pilot in a chopper—to stay away from a hail of automatic weapon bullets while keeping out of a stall—that was way beyond me. There was no chance I could pull it off.

That’s what I would have thought if I’d had time to think, so like I say, it was a good thing there was no time. I simply turned the plane again and pushed its nose down, diving right beneath the chopper before the gunman could get off another shot.

I heard Rose let out something between a curse and a prayer, his usually flat voice rising with fear as we continued diving across the river. But I couldn’t level out. I couldn’t see the helicopter behind me, but I knew it must be turning around, repositioning itself for an attack. I had to keep turning, twisting, diving, dodging.

Up ahead, I saw high-rise brick buildings—apartments in one of the towns or boroughs outside Manhattan—I didn’t know which one. I pointed the plane straight at the rising brick walls.

Once again, my headset filled up with shouts from Mike and Rose.

“Charlie, watch out!”

“Pull up, Charlie! We’re gonna hit!”

But I didn’t pull up. I forced the plane to sweep down out of the sky, knowing all the while that the chopper was right behind me.

I came off the river low, flying right over the street, right down the corridor formed by the brick towers on either side. We had lost so much altitude that when I glanced to the side, I saw the brownstone rooftops right next to me. I saw the upper windows in the buildings to my right and left. I could even see some shocked faces staring out at us through the glass.

I strained against my seat belt as I tried to look around, tried to spot the chopper, find out where it was. It was nowhere in sight.

I heard a scream—two screams.

Mike: “Watch out!”

Then Rose: “Charlie!”

I looked ahead—and let out a scream of my own.

A railway bridge was suddenly there, right in front of me. We were soaring right at it. I could already read the graffiti painted on its side.

I was about to pull up on the stick so we could rise above it. But just then, the chopper appeared, above and in front of me. It was blocking my escape route. If the plane lifted up now, we’d crash right into the chopper.

The Cessna barreled through the sky toward the side of the bridge. The chopper hovered above, turning so that the gunman could take his shot. To my left and right, the way was blocked by the brick towers.

My mind went blank. I couldn’t think of a way out. My head was filled with the sound of Mike and Rose shouting in my ear.

Then I saw the intersection, just before the bridge. I banked the plane and we went roaring around the corner and down the cross street.

The Cessna went over almost onto its side as we made the turn. The engine noise filled my ears, a howl like a baby’s. The sickening swirling scene in the windshield was like something out of a video game—one of those sequences where you have to dodge through obstacles—as the plane slipped through the gap between one brick tower and another. Of course, in video games, you have an endless number of lives. In reality, you only have one. It makes a big difference in how you play.

For an instant, I caught glimpses of people on the street below. We were actually so near the ground I could make out the horrified looks on their faces as they stood with their mouths open, gaping up at us.

Then, with a panicky jerk at the yoke, I leveled the Cessna out before it could come full around and smash into one of the buildings. The plane straightened and wobbled down the center of the street. I gave it gas and lifted the nose. We rose and rose until we were above the tower rooftops.

For a moment, I had a feeling of freedom, of escape, a sense that we were pulling away, speeding for the open sky.

Then the gunman struck again.

This time, I not only couldn’t hear the shots, I didn’t see the chopper or the shooter at all. But I felt this terrifying, stuttering jolt as the bullets ripped into the fuselage. For a second, I felt the plane was flying out of control. Then the yoke seemed to grip. I lowered the nose and dove toward the street again, turning at the same time to avoid another round of bullets.

I caught sight of the chopper as it heeled to one side to come chasing down after me. Then I looked out ahead. We were diving down toward a street of smaller buildings: low, old brick-and-wood shops and houses.

Old wooden telephone poles lined the streets.

The pavement rushed up toward us. I leveled the plane out, close to the ground, and we shot ahead. A moment later, sparks flew from the plane’s left wing and I knew the helicopter had come down after us, that the gunman was firing at us from behind.

Desperate—terrified out of my skull, to put it plainly— I stared ahead, steering down the middle of the street. I saw people running for cover, cars screeching to the curb, drivers jumping out and dashing into stores and doorways. The road now lay clear in front of me. The dusk was settling over it, a blue-gray darkness overcoming the last light of day.

I had an idea. I guess you could call it an idea. Moving that fast, that low, that close to buildings and the street, with the chopper on my tail and the gunman taking shots at me, I wasn’t exactly thinking, not in a way you’d call thinking, anyway. But things flashed into my mind, half thoughts, half images, half-formed. There was no time to sort them out or make decisions about them. But there was also no choice but to act—and pray.

What came to me was the idea of telephone lines: the telephone wires that go from pole to pole. It came to me that telephone wires were deadly to low-flying planes. You couldn’t see them until the last minute—in this light you probably couldn’t see them at all—and if you ran into them they grabbed you, tangled you up, and tossed you to the ground.

As our plane shot down the street toward the corner, I realized there must be wires right in front of me, crossing the street from one set of poles to another. In seconds, we would hit them and go down.

So here was my idea—my crazy, sort of idea. I let the plane sink lower. Lower. So low that the windows of three-story houses flashed by me. We were seconds away from reaching the corner—and we were headed directly at the wires, the telephone wires invisible in the twilight.

I waited. Waited.

Then I started to lift the Cessna’s nose. Not fast at first, not hard, just enough to make the plane rise a bit. I sent up a prayer that I’d have time to get enough altitude to go over the phone lines. I prayed the wires wouldn’t snag the landing gear that hung down from the bottom of the fuselage. I prayed—and lifted the nose farther.

We rose and rose . . . And then there they were. I saw them: the phone wires crossing the street, parallel black lines like the lines on a sheet of music. I pulled back hard on the yoke and gave the plane full throttle. We lifted up and up suddenly. The wires passed underneath us. And then I banked the plane hard to the left.

The plane came around fast, low over the low rooftops. We made a quick semicircle and were just in time to see what happened next.

As I’d guessed, the chopper was right behind us. It had come down low to trail us, to try to get another shot. It had been right on our tail, the gunman taking aim.

But the pilot hadn’t thought about the wires.

As the Cessna turned, I looked out the window and saw the chopper start its rise to come after us. It never made it. Instead, it seemed to stop stark-still—just stop right there in the air above the street as if it had been caught in the hand of an invisible giant. It had flown right into the phone wires. The next second, the force of the impact flipped it upside down, just like that.

The gunman was hurled off his perch in the open doorway. With the Cessna still turning, still rising, I saw his black form tumbling through the air toward the empty street. His body smacked against the pavement so hard I could almost feel the thud.

Then the chopper came down right on top of him.

The whirlybird smacked into the asphalt and blew. The explosion sent a billowing dome of red flame up into the air. The thunder of the blast reached me even over my headset, even over the throb of the engine. The blast shook the Cessna as it climbed up out of its turn.

Mike and Rose stopped shouting in my headset. We were all silent. I faced forward. The flicker of flame played over the windshield as we climbed toward the darkening sky. I kept turning until I spotted the river, in the distance now. I headed for the water, the nose up, the plane gaining altitude, the city buildings sinking away below me.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then I smelled the smoke.

A second later, a black cloud lifted up from the fuselage. It was quickly blown apart by the wash of air from the propeller.

“Fire!” Mike shouted.

And then Rose shouted: “We’re on fire!”

I turned to look across Patel’s slack body, out through the window. I saw a lick of flame rising to the shattered pane.

My relief vanished in a nauseating swirl of fresh fear. Any second, I knew, the fire would reach the fuel lines. They would ignite, and the flames would rush to the gas tanks in the wings.

Then the plane would explode like a bomb.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Crash

Cut the engine!

At this point, I didn’t know whether Mike or Rose shouted the words into my headset, or the words just shouted themselves into my mind. But I knew that’s what I had to do: Cut the engine. Stop the fuel from running through the lines before the fire reached them.

I pulled the throttle all the way back. I pulled the red knob—the choke. The engine sputtered once and died. I killed the electrics. The plane went bizarrely quiet, just hanging in the air, no engine, no power. Another second and the nose pitched down toward the city below. The black smoke billowed up. The smell in the cockpit grew thicker.

We were going down. There was no way out of it. I couldn’t turn the engine back on, couldn’t start the gas flowing, not with the plane in flames. I could glide for a while, but we’d keep sinking. Eventually, we were going to crash-land.

That is, if we didn’t explode first.

I looked out through the windshield, scanning the scene in front of me, looking for a place where I could make a safe landing. The river was too far. We’d go smashing into the streets before we got there. I might try to land on the highway, but I could see in the gathering dark that it was thick with headlights, thick with cars, everyone heading toward Manhattan for the New Year’s Eve celebration.