Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (19 page)

“Yeah. It had a wasps’ nest in the static
sensors,” Dozier said.

“Bull! That’s the cover story. Ganter took a
look at the static ports after he got her back down. They were
covered with duct tape for Christ’s sake! The maintenance crew had
polished the plane and forgot to strip off the protective tape. I’m
telling you guys it’s only a matter of time before we kill a
shipload of people.”

It was a recurring nightmare, a plane falling
from the sky, the panicked cries from the passenger cabin, the
thunderous explosion and raging firestorm that would silence every
scream. He was not afraid for himself. Tony Kingston had confidence
he could handle any crisis, as long as the ship didn’t fail
him.

“Lighten up, Tony,” Dozier said. “Atlantica’s
never had a fatality. Not one.”

Jim Ryder took off his headset and turned
toward the captain. “Larry’s right. You’re crying wolf so often no
one pays attention. No one cares.”

“I care!” Kingston thundered.

* * *

Rita Zaslavskaya stood awkwardly to let the
man to her right get out of his window seat and open the overhead
compartment. He grabbed a weathered brown leather jacket and
slipped it on, then crunched her right foot under his wing tips as
he slid back into his seat. Rita had a fair complexion, dark, curly
hair, and a strong face that was more handsome than beautiful. She
was a large-boned woman in her midthirties who stood six feet one
and played volleyball with other Russian immigrants on Sundays at a
Jewish Community Center in Brooklyn. She’d asked for an aisle seat
in an exit row because her bum knee did not take kindly to cramped
quarters. One of these days, she’d have it scoped. It was on her
list of to-do’s, along with getting contact lenses, having her hair
straightened, and finding a husband. The last on the list was
inexorably linked to the first two, she thought and would be
considerably easier if she would refrain from spiking the ball off
the heads of every eligible bachelor in Bensonhurst, including a
handsome but frail cantor from Minsk who had flirted with her ten
minutes before she deviated his septum with a particularly vicious
kill.

Maybe it was for the best. He was such a
shmendrick.

“Excuse me,” her seatmate said, lifting his
foot from hers. He’d been in and out of the overhead ever since
they had left LaGuardia. When he wasn’t popping up and down, he was
staring out the window in grim silence.

“No problem,” Rita replied, glancing at the
old leather jacket, which the man had zipped all the way up to his
Adam’s apple. “Isn’t that a little warm for Miami?”

“I’ll take it off as soon as we’re inside.”
He was a small, paunchy man in his thirties with wispy pale hair
and wire-rimmed glasses. He wore a wedding band, she noticed out of
force of habit.

“Nice-looking jacket,” she allowed. “Good
material.”

“It’s an authentic re-creation of the Army
Air Force A-2 jacket from the Second World War, right down to the
seal brown horsehide, the wool cuffs, and brass zippers,” he said,
pointing to the sleeve patch with its winged logo boasting of the
9th Bomb Group. “Steve McQueen wore one in 
The Great
Escape.
”

Rita didn’t know Steve McQueen from Butterfly
McQueen, but her sense of logic was offended. “So why put it on now
if you’re just going to take it off when you get inside the
terminal?”

“The A-2 isn’t just for warmth. It’ll protect
you in case of a crash or enemy attack.”

That made her smile. “I live in Brooklyn.
Maybe I should get one.”

“I’m talking about fire. The danger is
greatest on takeoff and landing, which is why I always bring this
along, too.” He bent over and reached into his carry-on bag,
drawing out what looked like a SCUBA mask. “My personal smoke hood.
It’ll filter out the toxins.”

He pulled the mask down over his face, tested
his breathing, then slid it onto his forehead, as if he were about
to explore some exotic tropical reef. “Some people might regard my
safety consciousness as …”

Meshugeh, she thought. Crazy.

“Excessive,” he said, placing a pillow
between his bulging belly and the seat belt, then cinching the
buckle hard. “Do you know the correct bracing position in the event
of a crash landing?”

Before she could answer, the man bowed
forward, as if in prayer.

* * *

Tony Kingston guided the aircraft on the
downwind leg, occasionally looking out the windshield at the pitch
black Everglades, a prehistoric creeping river of sawgrass,
alligators, and marshy hammocks. Thethree men in the cockpit
reviewed the landing checklist and waited for instructions to turn
left and begin looping back to the airport.

Suddenly, an explosion reverberated behind
them, a booming rumble accompanied by the discordant shriek of
shearing metal.

“Jesus, what was that!” Ryder shouted,
instinctively looking back toward the cabin.

Kingston tightened his hands on the yoke as
the airframe shuddered. “Larry, what do you see?”

The flight engineer scanned his gauges.
“Pressure on engine two has gone to zero. Fuel flow is zero. Shit,
we must have blown the aft engine.”

“Perform engine shutdown checklist,” Kingston
ordered. As Ryder ran through the items, turning off the fuel to
the tail engine, idling the throttle, the aircraft rolled slightly
to the right. Kingston fought the yoke to level the plane.
“Ailerons not responding.”

Dozier checked the gauges. “Double shit!
Hydraulic pressure zero. Hydraulic quantity zero.”

“Can’t be,” Ryder said. “We’ve got three
redundant systems. You can’t lose them all just blowing one
engine.”

Kingston struggled with the yoke, which
trembled under his hands but wouldn’t turn. He locked his hands on
the wheel, took a breath, and threw his shoulders into it. Nothing.
The aircraft continued to tremble.

Ryder’s fingers danced over half-a-dozen
switches as he scanned his gauges. “Elevators, ailerons, and rudder
all inoperative,” he said, his voice strained.

“It can’t be,” Dozier repeated. “How the hell
are we gonna turn? How are we gonna control our descent?”

We’re not, Kingston thought, rapidly
analyzing the situation. Without flight controls, it’ll be
virtually impossible to land. He tried to activate the speed
brakes. “Spoilers not responding either,” he said after a futile
try. He increased thrust on the left engine and the wings leveled
off, but the aircraft continued vibrating, and a few seconds later,
the nose pitched up and the airframe shuddered.

“We’re gonna stall!” Ryder warned, his voice
breaking.

Kingston gave it more power, hitting the
right engine harder. The nose came down, but the aircraft rolled
slightly left.

“Miami Approach, this is Atlantica
six-four-zero,” Kingston said into his mike, while fighting the
roll. His voice was calm, but the words were clipped with urgency.
“We’ve lost the two engine and all three hydraulic systems. We
declare an emergency six-four-zero.”

The voice in his headset was equally
composed. “Roger six-four-zero. We’ll vector everyone else out of
there. Descend to fifteen hundred. Turn left to two-seven-zero and
prepare for final approach.”

“That’s a problem,” Kingston responded.
“Gonna have to use asymmetrical thrust from number one and three to
try and turn.”

His matter-of-fact tone masked the tension
building inside him. Inconceivable as it seemed, they simply had no
control over the aircraft.

How the hell are we going to land this big
fat bus?

“Copy that, six-four-zero. Advise when you’re
ready to turn into final.”

“When and if,” Ryder muttered.

There was a knock at the cabin door, and
Larry Dozier opened it. Senior Flight Attendant Marcia Snyder, a
divorcee who had just put her third child through college, rushed
in and slammed the door. Her face was pale, and her words came
rapidly. “I was in the aft galley. The explosion was right over my
head.”

“Did you see anything?” Kingston asked.

“No. At first, I thought we’d hit a small
plane. There was a puff of smoke, but no fire I could see. I think
part of the tail is gone.”

“Prepare the passengers for emergency
landing,” Kingston ordered. “Short briefing procedure. We don’t
have much time. And get me a souls-on-board count.”

“Already did,” she said. “Two hundred
seventy-five passengers, thirteen crew.”

Kingston nodded his thanks. Marcia was
already out the door, heading back into the first-class
compartment, when Kingston turned to his first officer. “Jim,
deploy the ADG. See if we can get some power out of it.”

The copilot yanked a lever, and a small
propellor-driven generator dropped a few feet out of the aircraft
into the jetstream. Dozier kept his eyes on his control panels.
After a moment, he said, “We’re getting power. But without the
hydraulics, it’s not going anywhere.”

“We have to do it manually,” Kingston
said.

“How?” his copilot asked.

Kingston didn’t know. There was no procedure
for this. He’d have to make it up as he went along. “Grab your
yoke. We’ll work them together. Larry, get up here and handle the
throttles. Let’s try to turn left. Ease off on number one and give
some power to number three. Jim and I will pull like hell on our
yokes. Let’s go!”

As the pilot and copilot tried turning their
two-hundred-ton aircraft with the power in their forearms and
wrists, the flight engineer crouched behind them, one hand on each
of the working throttles.

The aircraft yawed shakily to the left, and
the right wing tilted upward. “Too much!” Kingston warned, his
voice rising for the first time. Excessive roll and the plane could
flip over. One thing the DC-10 was not was an acrobatic
aircraft.

Dozier eased back on the right engine and
gave more power to the left. The aircraft rolled in the other
direction, leveling off, but the nose pitched upward.

“Miami Control, this is six-four-zero,”
Kingston said, forcing himself to calm down. “We can’t control the
aircraft. When we correct pitch, we start to roll and vice versa,
and we’re yawing like a son of a bitch. Don’t know how we’ll line
it up with the runway.”

“Copy that six-four-zero. Got you on radar,
forty miles west of the airport. We’ll have equipment waiting.”

Again, the big aircraft yawed to the right,
this time the left wing tilting upward.

Equipment.

The controller meant fire-rescue, paramedics,
and enough foam to float a battleship. But without the ability to
turn, without a way to control the pitching, rolling, and yawing,
they would not so much land as cartwheel across the runway. In that
case, the only equipment they would need would be hearses.

“We can’t turn your way and we don’t have any
brakes,” Kingston replied, “so I don’t know how we’d stop this
thing even if we get it there.” He pictured the crammed apartment
buildings and condos west of the Palmetto Expressway. “We don’t
want to drop it into a neighborhood.” He glanced at his two
crewmates and pointed down toward the ground. They both nodded.
“We’re going to have to ditch.” He sighed audibly and signed off,
“Six-four-zero.”

Below them, in the darkness, was the
primordial slough. Kingston hoped for a soft, level spot, not a
strand of mahogany or live oak trees. It wasn’t the ideal terrain
for ditching but better than the side of a mountain.

Dozier was hurriedly thumbing through the
flight manual. “Nothing here. Nothing for loss of all
hydraulics.”

“It’s not supposed to happen,” Kingston said
softly.

* * *

He said his name was Howard Laubach. Rita
Zaslavskaya said she was glad to meet him, but she wasn’t glad at
all. She had heard the explosion and felt the plane shudder. Now,
the right wing kept dipping and the nose of the plane was sliding
back and forth. She’d asked a flight attendant what happened, but
the woman hurried past her and headed toward the cockpit, the color
drained from her face.

“It could have been anything,” Howard Laubach
said, a hopeful note in his voice. “A flock of birds could have
been sucked into the engine. Heck, that’s brought down planes
before. But the captain seems like he has this one under
control.”

It didn’t seem under control to Rita. It
seemed as if the plane would veer to one side, then overcorrect and
swerve to the other side like a wobbly drunk attempting to walk a
straight line. Other passengers were chattering nervously or
praying or simply grasping their armrests with bloodless hands.
Rita felt queasy, as if she’d eaten piroshki made with spoiled
meat, and the look on the flight attendant’s face had frightened
her. Something was very wrong.

She turned to her seatmate. “You’re pretty
calm for someone who brings his own oxygen aboard.” She was annoyed
that the man could be so oblivious to the situation.

“It isn’t oxygen,” Laubach said, testily.
“I’m just prepared. If there’s a fire, you’d wish you were, too.”
He clutched his smoke hood, as if she might steal it.

“What’s that noise?” Rita asked, jerking
around in her seat.

“Landing gear,” Laubach said. “He’s setting
her down.”

“Where? Here?” She leaned past him and peered
out into the blackness. All she could see was the startled face of
an insane woman. It took her a moment to figure out that she was
staring into her own reflection.

Suddenly, a horn blared on the Ground
Proximity Warning System. The nose angled up again, and both pilot
and copilot pushed forward on the yoke. Tony Kingston already had
given the tower his count: 288 souls on board. It helped the
authorities when it was time to count bodies.

“Six-four-zero, please advise,” Miami Control
said through the headset.

“We’re about to put the world’s largest
tricycle down in the swamp,” Kingston said.