The Fury and the Terror (7 page)

P
ortia Darkfeather had the usual blind faith in the physics of manned flight and the competence of military transport pilots. She parachuted from numerous C-130s. Day and night. The night drops were wicked. Miss the DZ, which was commonplace, anything could happen. Her worst mishap had been a cracked shinbone. You thought about it while you were up there droning through the dark, then put the thoughts of injury or death out of your mind. Plummeting through darkness suspended from a fragile parafoil was part of the job description.

O
ne thing she'd never thought about was the possibility that one of the old workhorse planes might crash. They shook constantly. They vibrated, groaned, yawed, bounced around in turbulence. But they stayed in the air.

The flight of TRANSPAC 1850 over northern California was, in contrast to some of the night training missions Darkfeather had been on, eerily peaceful. The weather was good, only a little clear-air turbulence from the Coast Range. Yet they continued to descend at a steady three hundred feet per minute, airspeed also dropping. Now at nine thousand feet, dollops of cloud hanging just below them, they were cruising over redwood country, immensely green. Medium-sized mountains. Nothing higher than forty-one hundred feet in their vicinity. Pocket lakes glinted in the sun. There had been two more course corrections at the whim of the autopilot, which, technically, should not have been operative at all. Captain van der Veek had the fuse in his shirt pocket.

Presently they were fifty-two miles west of the Innisfall municipal airport, which had an air traffic control tower and the airport on the edge of the Cal Shasta campus, eleven miles south of the municipal field. The autopilot, which the DC-10's crew had been unable to override, seemed to be favoring the uncontrolled airport. TRANSPAC 1850 was directly on course, at the proper altitude and airspeed, to land on the seven thousand-foot east-west runway. DC-10s, like other continent-hopping heavies, customarily took off and were landed by computer; the pilots touched nothing.

Captain "Dutch" van der Veek had finally declared an emergency, although he had no systems failures to report. Everything aboard was functioning perfectly. Nevertheless the two pilots were soaked in cold sweat. God, or something equally mysterious, had the controls.

Darkfeather was an atheist. She went back to the compartment where Kelane Cheng lay in near-state, breathing at extreme intervals, looking shrunken and post-operative. Darkfeather threw open her mind to probes or conversation, whatever was the Avatar's pleasure.

Utter blankness. She heard the roll-out of flaps on the DC-10's wings. The airplane banked left, gently.

"All right, Kelane. Would you care to let me in on just what the fuck it is you're trying to do?"

G
eoff McTyer, silver badge in hand, sprinted down the aisle steps toward the playing field, surrounded by an eight-lane rubberized running track. Riley Waring, considerably slower because of his bulk, followed.

Eden didn't see either of them. She was looking again at the sky west of the stadium, where the student pilot in the Piper Lance had turned base two miles out and was inbound to the airport at two thousand feet, approaching at a forty-five degree angle to downwind. The Lance's radio was silent.

Seven miles farther out, a speck in the bright blue sky, TRANSPAC 1850 was on straight-in approach to the uncontrolled runway.

South of the stadium a California Air National Guard C-130 on a routine training flight from Moffet Field had appeared on the horizon. Alerted to the emergency by the Los Angeles Air Traffic Control Center. The pilot had been asked to observe and, if necessary, direct rescuers in the event of a crash.

The controller in the municipal airport's tower was trying futilely to contact the student pilot, whose plane was equipped with two transponders. The number two transponder was on, reporting altitude, but the selector switch that would enable Innisfall tower or L.A. Center to contact him was turned to the number one transponder, which was off. Rookie mistake. A pilot practicing touch-and-go landings at an uncontrolled field should have been making his moves known to possible traffic in Class E airspace.

Now Eden visualized all of this in more perfect detail, where before there had been only a jumble of impressions: a fatal conjunction and a flare in the sky, followed by a hail of smoking death that riddled the stadium. She saw everything, and momentarily her throat locked as she fought against the two campus cops who were trying to get her off the stage.

They weren't listening anyway! They were all just sitting there, looking at her, shaking their heads and thinking breakdown, poor thing. Thinking drugs. Saying what a shame she has to ruin graduation for her fellow students.

Eden's pulses ticking like little bombs, red in the face, fighting ferociously. Hands offff me!!!! Get your—

Then Geoff was there, leaping up to the stage, badge in hand, telling the campus cops, "Innisfall PD! I know this girl! Let her go, I'll take care of this." And Eden, no longer restrained, collapsed into him, held him tightly. "You've gotta, gotta run, Geoff,
no time
! Those planes—"

"Where? What're you…."

"Up there!" She pointed. "See!"

He looked, saw the slow, mildly droning, single-engine plane turning right at fifteen hundred feet, and the landing lights of the DC-10, on a converging path about two miles behind the Piper Lance and traveling at a speed of 180 knots—almost twice the speed of the small plane—with its landing gear down. He was reminded of nature films, the sleek cats of the African plains in streamlined flight, overtaking plump fumbly prey.

C
olonel Max Shear, at the controls of the C-130, said, "Oh, my God," hearing back over his radio, "L.A. Center, I can't fly it. The bitch won't budge, son of a
bitch
!" The Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System aboard the DC-10 was ordering an immediate climb. The autopilot's mode control obviously not responsive. "
Climb, climb!
" And another voice, nearly obscured by the flight deck siren. Someone weeping, saying, "Mary Joseph and Jesus."

P
ortia Darkfeather worked the slide on her Sig Sauer .45, arming it. She held the muzzle against Kelane Cheng's forehead.

Only one way to put a stop to this.

"R
un!" Eden shouted to the crowd in the stadium. She didn't need a microphone. "Run! A plane is going to crash here! You'll be killed!" Some of the gowned graduates were standing, looking around, but no one was moving to clear the field. Until the sprinkler system came on with a jetting whoosh, sending arcs of spray over their heads.

That ended the commencement exercise. Graduates scattered in all directions to avoid a soaking as the landing lights of the DC-10 became too bright to be ignored.

A good many of those seated in the stands began to point and scream. They saw a very large airplane headed for the college airfield just to the north of the stadium. And a much smaller plane, turning, left wing high, into the heavy's path. Their combined screams became an aural tsunami. They scrambled, and for moments it was body against body, a seething directionless mass, until the quicker and more agile among them began to separate, piling into the exit tunnels.

Riley Waring looked down from the incoming planes and recognized his daughter, mortarboard askew. She was on one knee in the west end zone of the stadium. She had pulled the cover plate from the sprinkler controls to turn on the water. Seeing her there sent a jolt up his spine.

She saw Riley staring at her, and made a clear-out gesture with a sweep of her arm.

But—

Riley, glancing from the end zone to the stage in the center of the field, saw Eden there too, leaping down eight feet to the turf, just behind Geoff McTyer.

N
imbly shucking her wet robe and shoes, Eden ran through the rainbow arcs of the sprinklers with Geoff and a mob of still-gowned graduates, most of them headed for the east end zone and the gate there.

While at the same time—no mistake—Eden, yes,
his
Eden, was still standing in the west end zone as if she were in no rush, a prankish grin on her face.

Riley was run into by a teenage girl. Screaming, he presumed—her mouth was open in a snarl of braces, but everyone else was screaming too, he didn't hear and couldn't dodge the panicked girl. He fell on the now slippery running surface, putting too much torque on his sacroiliac, crying out in pain as he slid a dozen feet down the banked track.

Lying helplessly face up at the edge of the grass, he saw the DC-10 and the Piper Lance come together in the sky at twelve hundred feet, two and a half miles west of the Cal Shasta campus. At that distance it seemed as quiet and surreptitious as a stolen kiss.

The left wingtip of TRANSPAC 1850 sliced through the Piper like a machete, sending pieces of it through the DC-10's fuselage and tail assembly. The vertical stabilizer was heavily damaged and the rear engine, sucking in Piper shrapnel, blew apart in a ghastly explosion, dull orange and black with hurtling fragments of white-hot metal like new stars in a birthing galaxy. The big plane shuddered, then suddenly veered off course and headed down, toward the stadium. There was a second flash as a wing tank ignited; within seconds the entire plane appeared to be in flames as it screamed to earth.

Then Eden blocked Riley's view of incoming death. She pulled him up, an arm going around his waist. Riley yelped in pain.

"Come on!" she said. "Can you run?"

"No! Oh, God, my back—!"

"Then get down," she said. Her expression was calm, almost dreamy as she glanced at the sky. "Here it comes." She pushed Riley facedown beside a recessed sprinkler head next to the running track and covered him as best she could with her own body. Riley, unable to move, pleaded with her to leave him, save herself.

P
ortia Darkfeather was thrown to the other side of the cabin before she could pull the trigger on Cheng. The sky seemed to be on fire. The DC-10, riddled by the pieces of the disintegrating small plane, rolled sharply right on the undamaged wing and streaked down from a thousand feet. The collision with the Piper apparently had released the autopilot; "Dutch" van der Veek hauled the yoke back, and was able to keep the DC-10 from diving straight down. That was all he could do; he and the first officer and the flight engineer were smothering in lethal fumes filling the flight deck in the aftermath of the wing-tank explosion. In spite of Van der Veek's death-throe efforts, the plane's angle of descent was nearly thirty degrees.

The DC-10 reached the ground in just over six seconds, slammed down, lost the undercarriage, and broke in half forward of the remaining wing. The fireball front of the plane catapulted into the air again, skimmed over the terrace at the west end of the stadium bowl. It flew above the goalposts and smashed nose-down onto the playing field in a torrent of fire, scudding up mounds of turf where the college students had been milling less than a minute ago. Sprinkler lines were severed. Water continued to jet into the air, turning to clouds of steam as it poured down on the wreckage.

Meanwhile the crumpled rear half of the plane lay in boiling black smoke and flames a hundred yards west of the stadium.

Portia Darkfeather found herself on the ground a surprisingly long way from the blackened tail section. She had gone stone deaf, and there was a jagged piece of metal socketed in her right side, angled up beneath the ribs. Her face felt seared; the backs of her hands were burnt black. She wondered what had happened to her cat.

Deep in shock, she watched as Kelane Cheng walked out of the blazing hulk of fuselage and came toward her. Darkfeather's Sig Sauer was in her hand. Or was it Cheng? The figure before her seemed evanescent, flickering like a riot of daylight moths attracted by the flames. But the gun was real enough.

Darkfeather's mouth had filled with blood. She hung her head to let the blood drain out. Looked up defiantly. Spoke before more blood could rise to choke off her words.

"Fucking dpg. Go ahead, kill me. If Cheng's still in that wreck, she's dying too. When she goes, you go."

The doppelganger looked around. One moment three-dimensional, the next a hoodoo vixen, fighting otherworldly currents to stay on the earthly plane. Darkfeather began to cough. A gout of dark blood spilled out of her. Something messed up inside, really bad.

Darkfeather's Sig Sauer pistol was dropped into her bloody lap.

"Finish yourself off," the doppelganger said disinterestedly. "I have to find someone, and I'm in kind of a hurry."

Darkfeather wasn't listening. She had removed herself from pain and humiliation to a distant hilltop of shining grasses, where the cooling wind that poured over her carried only the sounds of a Crow Nation death song.

M
aking a wide turn overhead through a thinning pall of smoke, the California Air National Guard C-130 changed course to resume its training mission after its pilot reported the damages on the ground. Bodies were everywhere, but not as many as there might have been if Red Wolves Stadium hadn't emptied seconds before the crippled TRANSPAC DC-10 pancaked on the ground. Rescue equipment already was en route.