Silent Enemy (20 page)
Authors: Tom Young
The aircraft lurched to the right like a hammer blow had come down on the wing. A cracking sound came from overhead.
“What was that?” Colman asked.
“Probably hail taking one of our antennas,” Dunne said.
“Which one?”
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
“All right, copilot,” Parson said to Colman, “give me two hundred and forty knots. Thunderstorm penetration speed.”
Colman pulled back on the control column. Gold wondered why, until she realized the crew was
slowing
to a speed at which the plane could better withstand turbulence. So Parson had given up on powering over all the storms and accepted that he must go through part of them.
slowing
to a speed at which the plane could better withstand turbulence. So Parson had given up on powering over all the storms and accepted that he must go through part of them.
Blazes of lightning came more frequently now. Diffused by the rain and mist, the streaks appeared more like explosions, as if the sky were filled with gunpowder.
Another hard jolt came as if something had kicked the airplane. The blow slammed Gold against her harness, and her cracked ribs burned with pain. Then the plane dropped as if it had simply ceased to fly. The laptop levitated into the air as the nav table dropped away from it. It slammed back down onto Gold’s fingers, and she nearly cried out. Bile rose in her throat from airsickness. Helmet bags, pens, and manuals bounced against instrument consoles and clattered to the floor.
“Damn, that hurt,” Dunne said. He began tapping at his computer, and Gold wondered what information he could possibly want from that thing at a time like this. “I got a g-limit fault code,” he said. “Two negative gs.”
“Felt like about ten,” Parson said.
Gold wasn’t sure what that meant, but she knew it was bad. She guessed the storm was slamming the airplane beyond its proven capabilities.
The next lightning bolt did not appear as an arc. It lit up the whole sky. The noise made it seem it had ignited all the fuel in the airplane, all the fuel in the world. Sparks bounced from Dunne’s panel. The boom sounded to Gold like a mortar round; only her harness kept her from diving for cover. She smelled an odor like burned popcorn.
The airplane went completely dark.
15
P
arson heard screams downstairs from people who thought they were about to die. In the darkness, he felt for his flashlight. He switched it on, swept the beam across the dead instrument panel. The N2 tachometers came alive as backup systems activated. He groped for the INSTRUMENT POWER switch and placed it on EMERGENCY.
arson heard screams downstairs from people who thought they were about to die. In the darkness, he felt for his flashlight. He switched it on, swept the beam across the dead instrument panel. The N2 tachometers came alive as backup systems activated. He groped for the INSTRUMENT POWER switch and placed it on EMERGENCY.
“Did we flame out?” Colman asked, a catch in his voice.
“Negative,” Parson said. “We still got all four engines.”
“That lightning strike tripped the generators,” Dunne said. “I’ll see if any of them will come back on line.”
Parson turned and shone his light back toward the flight engineer’s panel. Dunne had his own penlight in his mouth while he worked his switches with both hands. He moved a generator control to the TEST position, looked at its frequency and voltage. Apparently, he didn’t like what he saw, because he left it off. When he moved to the next switch, the same thing happened.
This airplane has four main generators, Parson thought. Dear God, please give me just one back.
A jolt of turbulence knocked Dunne’s hand off the number three generator switch. But when he moved the voltage selector, Parson heard him off mike as he said, Cool, to himself. Dunne moved the switch back to ON, and the airplane lit up. That brought a cheer from downstairs, something about Allah. Dunne checked number four, and that one showed good, too.
Whines and buzzes rose as radios came back to life, gyros resumed spinning, computers rebooted, processors reset. The annunciator panel showed a few more warning lights than before, but at least the damned thing had power to show warning lights.
“We’re going to have some damage,” Dunne said. “I smell fried wires.”
“Me, too,” Parson said.
Dunne pressed in circuit breakers that had popped, and OFF flags disappeared from the glass faces of gauges. Parson scanned the panel and took stock of his situation. The attitude indicators rocked with each bump of rough air. The airspeed indicators told him Colman was still holding thunderstorm speed. The flight augmentation computers all showed INOP lights. Parson pressed three buttons to reset them and give Colman an easier time handling the plane. Whatever damage the lightning had done, the aircraft remained flyable.
Rain still whipped at the windscreen, but it sounded like the hail was gone. Flickers appeared in the sky like artillery flashes. Distant lightning, Parson supposed, obscured by clouds. The more distant, the better.
“Go ahead and keep climbing,” Parson told Colman. “I think the worst is behind us. Just hand-fly it until we get into smooth air and then we’ll put the autopilot back on.”
“Yes, sir,” Colman said.
The copilot hadn’t done too badly. We just got our asses kicked, Parson thought, and Colman was obviously scared, but I never had to take the plane from him. Now we just need to get away from this tropical depression before it strengthens into a tropical storm.
As the aircraft gained altitude, it emerged into clear air as if spat from the maw of some leviathan. Free of the storms’ updrafts and downdrafts, it settled into smooth flight. Rain and vapor vanished to reveal a silver panoply of stars. As an old navigator, Parson had always loved the night sky and the order it implied. For all time, mariners and airmen could know their position based on the angle of Rigel, Antares, or any of the fifty-seven navigational stars in the Air Almanac. To Parson, that meant that, from the beginning, somebody was keeping an eye on business.
During better times he had taken pleasure in ocean crossings. He felt he had his own small place in a history that included Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Lindbergh. In those peaceful missions he’d taken his Kollsman Periscopic Sextant from its case and attached it to the sextant port in the cockpit ceiling of the C-130E. He’d find the star, place it in the crosshair, and keep the bubble centered. Then he’d measure the angle and figure a line of position. Usually, when the aircraft began receiving navigational beacons on land, his spherical trigonometry turned out to be dead-on.
A shooting star cut across the horizon like a topaz dropped from the heavens. It burned out and continued its plunge invisibly, followed by another, then another.
“Look at that,” Colman said.
Parson thought for a minute, considered the time of year. “It’s the Perseid meteor shower,” he said. “You’ll never get a better view of it than this.”
Meteors fell in streaks like electrified needles. Briefly, Parson wondered if they dwindled to ash after they burned out or if something solid remained to make an unseen splash.
Sights like this were part of why he loved his job. In normal circumstances, he might enjoy the scene for hours, sipping coffee and monitoring his instruments and radios with little to worry him. While flying, especially in untroubled night air at high altitude, he could feel he had escaped the ugliness on the ground. To Parson’s mind, gravity kept the worst of man’s inclinations held down to the surface of the earth. But now, with this bomb on board, hatefulness had reached up and found him in the stratosphere.
“So how bad off are we?” Parson asked.
“I got a couple of fuel pump breakers still out,” Dunne said.
“Leave those alone.”
“Oh, yeah.”
The last thing Parson wanted was to reenergize a torched fuel pump in a tank full of fumes. We already have enough reasons to blow up, he thought.
“Can you work around the bad pumps?” Parson asked.
“Affirmative,” Dunne said. “I can still transfer fuel. But I got other issues.”
“Like what?”
The flight engineer pressed keys on his computer, scratched at the cursor pad. “We have another controller failure. This computer won’t talk to
anything
.”
anything
.”
“Reboot it.”
“I will,” Dunne said. He pressed POWER switches next to the screen. “This makes the third time.”
Parson looked aft, watched the screen go through its restart sequence. He needed that thing to work because it was the only way to send a satcom message. The only way to send the photos of the bomb. The problem wasn’t the laptop itself; the problem was its link to everything else. Without it, he had no satcom and no text data from the Tanker Airlift Control Center. Nothing left but radios, with antennas torn up by hail. He’d also have no monitoring of engine vibration, no way to know if number four went bad again until it was too late.
Gold still sat at the nav table, eyes alert, watching everything with what looked like professional interest. She had not spoken since the lightning strike. When she finally pressed her TALK switch, she said, “I still smell something.”
“I think I do, too,” Parson said. “I thought it went away, but now it’s back.”
“I don’t—” Dunne said. Parson looked back to see why the engineer had paused. A red light glowed on Dunne’s panel. It said SMOKE.
Parson held his breath. Please, not an electrical fire, he thought. Better to have a burning engine than that. He knew of planes that had filled with smoke and plunged to the ground while choking crews struggled to find and control electrical fires. The damned things had a way of hiding, like a forest fire spreading underground through a peat bog. You could stop it, maybe, if you knew what was burning and you killed its power source. But the fire could lurk behind access panels, underneath soundproofing, inside insulation.
Dunne moved a selector marked LOCATE, turned it through several clicks. He stopped when a second red light came on, and he said, “It’s in the avionics compartment. Engineer’s going off headset.”
Without waiting for Parson’s acknowledgment, Dunne dropped his headset onto the engineer’s table and unbuckled his harness. He stood, moved aft to the avionics bay door, and pulled it open. Smoke rolled through the doorway and mushroomed against the ceiling. It filled Parson’s sinuses with a chemical tang, and his eyes watered. Dunne ducked inside the compartment despite the smoke.
“Everybody on oxygen,” Parson ordered as he donned his sweep-on mask yet again. He checked to make sure Gold had hers on and she did. But he worried about Dunne, who would not have heard the order over interphone.
A shout came from inside the avionics bay. Dunne was either calling for help or cursing in pain. Parson rose from his seat.
Dunne emerged from the avionics compartment coughing, holding some sort of electrical box in his hand. The smoke seemed to be dissipating.
Parson removed his mask and said, “You all right?”
“Yeah,” Dunne said, “but it shocked the piss out of me.”
“What is that?”
“I just yanked it out of the rack. It’s the MADAR power supply.”
The electrical junction for the flight engineer’s computer. For the satcom, and so many other things. Parson glanced at the screen. It no longer said COMMUNICATIONS CONTROLLER FAILURE. It said nothing at all.
WITH THE STORMS BEHIND IT NOW,
the airplane flew smoothly enough that Gold put down the airsickness bag she had clenched in her fist. The bag remained empty, though several times she had nearly retched into it. People downstairs must have thrown up, though. She noticed the odor of vomit all the way from her seat at the nav table.
the airplane flew smoothly enough that Gold put down the airsickness bag she had clenched in her fist. The bag remained empty, though several times she had nearly retched into it. People downstairs must have thrown up, though. She noticed the odor of vomit all the way from her seat at the nav table.
The welcome end to the jet’s tossing and rolling made her think of a line from both Scripture and song: . . .
the rough places plain
. If she ever lived to hear Handel’s masterwork once more, that phrase would have special meaning. But then she tried to put the idea from her mind; she knew she might never again experience the pleasures of music, reading, culture. Concert halls and libraries, some of her favorite places, seemed worlds away from this ill-fated ship of war and its cargo of wounded, maimed in both body and spirit.
the rough places plain
. If she ever lived to hear Handel’s masterwork once more, that phrase would have special meaning. But then she tried to put the idea from her mind; she knew she might never again experience the pleasures of music, reading, culture. Concert halls and libraries, some of her favorite places, seemed worlds away from this ill-fated ship of war and its cargo of wounded, maimed in both body and spirit.
Perhaps she could help clean up whatever mess there was downstairs. She checked off headset and opened the flight deck door. A wave of foul smell hit her, and her stomach heaved. When her gut settled again, she descended the ladder.
Aeromeds and loadmasters were already on their hands and knees, wiping up vomit with thick paper towels. Gold nearly slipped on the slickened floor. She took a pair of latex gloves from a dispenser, then unrolled a wad of the towels. One of the flight medics began to spray disinfectant, and a medicine smell mingled with the stink of bodily fluids. Gold got down on the floor and helped clean up what was left.
Some of the liquids soaked into the knees of her ACU trousers, and the odor made her mouth flood with saliva in a final warning from her stomach. She tried to force it down, gave up, vomited onto the floor. She had not eaten much, though, and she lost little but clear phlegm. An aeromed gave her another paper towel, and she wiped her mouth, then cleaned up the rest.
None of the patients slept now. Mahsoud gazed out his window. Fawad sat up, watching her with his unbandaged eye. She got to her feet and steadied herself against a litter stanchion.
“How do you feel, Officer Fawad?” Gold asked in Pashto, voice still gravelly.
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