Cloudburst

by Pearson, Ryne Douglas

  “Cap,” Quimpo began, “that crap’s gonna kill him, ain’t it?”

  Sean didn’t answer. There were already two good guys dead. That was too many. But Anderson...he had no control over it.

  Romeo Flight

  Major Cooper flashed off a final ‘good luck’ to the Clipper Atlantic Maiden before peeling off to the left, clearing the way for the 747 to come right in on the row of lights dead ahead. He wanted to stay overhead, acting as a chase plane of sorts, but knew better. His cargo was as dangerous as that on the big jet, and they would be anxious to get it into safe storage once again.

  He threw a salute as the jet passed him on the right. “God speed, folks.” A minute later he was heading south at speed, careful to stay over water all the way back to Louisiana.

  Flight 422

  “Everyone’s belted in,” Antonelli told the pilot.

  “You do the same,” Hendrickson instructed.

  Michael craned his neck, trying to compensate for the thinning clouds. “I see the lights. We’re low, just a little.”

  “Good. I want to bring her up right at the end. We’ve only got elevators.” Hendrickson put his right hand on the throttle levers.

  The pattern changed from red on the bottom to green. “On slope. It’s steady.”

  The captain cut the number two engine completely. The Maiden responded with a noticeable slowing and a falling sensation. He pulled back on the stick and throttled numbers one and four up. The speed stayed lower, but the falling sensation ceased, replaced by the familiar gentle gliding.

  Michael practically had to stand in his seat to see over the abnormally high nose. “Still good. On slope. We’re close.”

  The triple rows of referencing lights came at them fast, and the 747 came down toward them equally as fast.

  “On slope!” Michael’s voice rose with the excitement. He was operating now as a pilot, forgetting completely the fear. “Slope! Slope! Threshold!”

  The lights disappeared beneath the Maiden. She was now over concrete.

  Hendrickson kept his eyes forward. He pulled back on the throttles, reducing engine power. His aircraft responded accordingly, her body dropping hard onto the runway below. When the mains contacted, the remaining right-side tires and two left-side blew out with a forceful bang!

  The rear of the jet scraped the runway for the first hundred yards, sending a fountain of sparks behind her. Hendrickson smoothly pushed the stick forward until the nose wheel touched with a screech. They were forty knots over speed when he reversed the two engines.

  “Now!” Both men pushed the sticks forward, to the console. The Maiden’s nose drooped toward the runway.

  With no speed indicator, Captain Hendrickson had to go by dead reckoning when judging if he could weave the 747 to each side of the runway as he had before. He tapped the brakes, just to check, but they were nonexistent.

  “It looks like they’re waiting for us,” Michael said, seeing the rotating strobes at the far end of the runway.

  “Let’s oblige by not creaming them.”

  The sensation of speed was diminishing. A terrible screeching roar was coming from below the aircraft, signaling that the blown tires had disintegrated, leaving the metal wheels to drag along the pavement. The friction was welcome, as it slowed the Maiden, but it required compensation as it also pulled the jet to the right.

  They passed the halfway point at about a hundred knots. Hendrickson started weaving about then, when his ‘aviator’s stomach’ said it was okay. “Help with the rudder.” It was getting harder to weave and compensate for the right-pulling drag.

  Michael touched the pedal. It was down and stiff.

  “Now some right,” Hendrickson said. They worked it together, going left to the edge of the pavement, and back right, though not as close to that side. Back and forth, and back and forth. On the fourth weave the Maiden’s nose wheels blew.

  “Jesus!” Michael yelled. The violent contact of metal to pavement vibrated through the rudder pedals, jabbing an invisible spear into his heel. Instantly the aircraft slowed considerably.

  “Easy left. Easy left.” The captain wanted to bring the Maiden back onto the centerline, but her steering system, crippled by the last blowout, followed the right-leaning groove into the grass at the runway’s edge. Rain had soaked the earth. The nose gear dug in and sank a full two feet into the ground, and a second later the right mains did the same.

  Then, it was over. The Clipper Atlantic Maiden came to a full stop.

  Captain Hendrickson killed the remaining two engines. His body leaned forward, his head resting on the dark instrument panel. A few breaths came rapidly and deep, then he sat back up.

  Michael let go of the column and examined his hands. They trembled, but were dry as his mouth.

  “Come on.”

  The reluctant co-pilot looked up.

  “Michael, let’s get out of here.” Hendrickson reached for his arm. “You did good. We’re down. Now, we need to get out. You have a little lady back there, right?”

  That struck home. “Right. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The Delta troopers and the flight attendants opened only the forward doors, deploying the yellow evacuation slides with them.

  “Lewis. Makowski.” Sean looked to them both. “You go out first, one on each side, and direct everybody forward. Anderson says not to let anybody near the rear of the aircraft.” The two sergeants slid out before the rows of passengers lined up to follow, directed by the flight attendants.

  Sean ran aft one final time, rubbing the deathwatch under his cuff. “Anderson. Anderson!” It was quiet finally.

  “Who the hell landed this thing?” Joe cringed. His fingers were cramping badly. “Get somebody in a nuke suit to bring me locking pliers. Hurry.”

  “You got it.” The Delta captain went forward, just as the last of the passengers were evacuated.

  “Cap.” It was Antonelli.

  “Where’s Bux?”

  “Upstairs with ...”

  Sean nodded. He knew what was meant. “The crew off?”

  “Everybody,” Antonelli replied. A crash truck pulled up, its red and yellow lights sweeping across the field outside.

  “Tell Bux and Goldfarb to take Blackjack off. Then you, Jones, and Quimpo get the other bodies down—the co-pilot first.” There was a hierarchy even in death.

  “Got it.”

  Sean leaned out the open portside door. A lift-equipped fire truck pulled up. Two crewmen were in its basket, but they weren’t wearing the standard crash suits. Of course. A minute later they stepped off the lift and into the cabin.

  “There’s a guy back in the hold. He needs some help.”

  The bubble-helmeted crewman nodded, then pulled a heavy visor over the face mask, leaving only a slit for viewing. His partner signaled for Graber to get off the aircraft immediately.

  “Cap,” Antonelli called from the starboard door. “You and me are the last.”

  Sean looked aft, wondering if he would ever see Anderson again. It was a question that would have to wait to be answered. He walked to the starboard door and followed Antonelli down the inflatable slide.

  The White House

  Bud set the phone down. “They’re down. The passengers are safe.”

  “Whew!” the president said, slapping one knee.

  Herb Landau smiled and looked to the floor. “They did it.”

  The president left little time for glee. “We can celebrate more later, gentlemen. There’s a funeral in a few hours.”

  “I think some sleep is in order,” Gonzales suggested, directing it specifically at his boss.

  “Yes. Everybody.” The president gave a mock ‘out’ signal with his thumb. “Bud, I want to speak to you for a moment.”

  The door closed last behind the chief of staff.

  There were no words for a few seconds. “We stopped them, Bud. Probably for the first time we fought them on their own ground and won.”

  Bud agreed,
nodding. “Yes. We did that.”

  The president, in addition to being a bold young man, was keenly observant. “How many, Bud?”

  ‘Two. The commander of the assault force, and the copilot of the 747.”

  What words there were would not be sufficient, the president knew. “Two more funerals, then.”

  “The last from this affair, God willing,” Bud said. It might be a hope, but...

  “Maybe, though, we can prevent some,” the president said.

  “If your policy idea goes through, we might just be able to deal some preemptive justice.”

  “We can do that, but it’s going to have the same tainted feel to it.” Bud knew that killing, by any standards, was what its name said it was.

  The president thought about that for a moment. “That may be so, but I’ll suffer with that if it saves some innocents.”

  Epilogue

  BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE LIGHT

  Nellis AFB

  From the slight rise of the mesa three miles away, Joe Anderson was watching the burial of the would-be destroyer. His eyes strained without their glasses to see the scene through the binoculars, a task made more difficult by the late-morning heat shimmer rising from the desert sand.

  He had been to this part of the Nevada desert many times during his career. Most of those times he had observed underground nuclear tests, and the other times things not far removed from those detonations. The DOE did all of its testing here, as it had for twenty years, for reasons of safety and security. Treaty restrictions on aboveground testing were the primary reasons, though.

  Joe pulled the binoculars away and rubbed the sweat away from his eyes, then put his glasses back on. With the naked eye the huge white jet, whiter than the desert around her, was visible almost fifteen thousand feet away, her nose pointed toward the dark area before her. Two solid months it had taken to dig the mammoth grave, and another three weeks to line it properly. Nothing could be allowed to leak or escape from the tomb once sealed. Joe had seen to the details and planning himself, a thought that he had chuckled at numerous times in the previous month. He was going to bury his killer, and he would soon join her, though his grave would be in a shady spot somewhere in the Minnesota backwaters. Only three months after his exposure he was already in stage-one leukemia. The president had offered a full military ceremony and burial at Arlington, but Joe had decided to leave that place for the real heroes.

  The radio on his escort’s hip announced that the crew was ready. Joe acknowledged the Air Force major’s repeat of the transmission and gave the final go-ahead.

  He let the binoculars hang from his neck as he watched the process begin. It had actually begun long before, when the Clipper Atlantic Maiden made her circuitous final flight from the Cape to the isolated Air Force runway at Nellis. From there she had been slowly wheeled across fifteen miles of desert, over a movable steel mesh whose designed use was as a temporary airstrip liner. By the time the 747 had reached the spot of her burial two weeks before, the tomb had almost been finished, and there she sat. At night she was bathed in the glow of bright floodlights, and at all times there were no fewer than two hundred security troops guarding her. The material aboard the jet was unstable, and priceless to some nutcakes.

  Word came that the Maiden was rolling. It was obvious when she reached the long, sloping ramp that had been graded to afford access to the hundred-foot-deep pit. The nose of the blue-and-white bird slowly dipped as she began her last descent. When the tail pitched forward Joe pushed the glasses back atop his head and raised the binoculars. All looked good. The Maiden was now almost completely within the tomb, and for the first time the huge mounds of the reddish clay-boron mixture that would fill the pit were visible close beyond the hole. If the unthinkable happened, and the U235 aboard the aircraft combined and melted down, the compound would help slow the reaction, but not stop it.

  Something else was said on the radio. “The aircraft is in position, Captain Anderson,” the major announced.

  Captain. They must’ve briefed everybody, Joe thought. It shouldn’t bother him. After all, they were just showing respect. His rank was long gone, though. He was just Joe Anderson. Mr. Anderson to some. And not even that for long.

  “Good.” Joe let the binoculars drop. The strap tugged at the back of his neck, reminding him that he was already sunburned. Some half-funny thought about skin cancer ran through his mind. “Tell the foam trucks to get in there, but have them wait for the dozers to move into position.”

  The officer relayed the instructions. As soon as the bulldozers were ready to start burial they would begin pumping liquid foam into the interior of the Maiden, both cargo hold and cabin. This would harden within the hour, giving added crush resistance to the big jet so that the weight of the earth soon to cover her would not deform the outer skin or structure. When that was complete the clay-boron mixture would be pushed in, filling from the bottom up. The entire process would take two days, but Joe would be done there in a few minutes.

  He watched for a long minute before realizing that he couldn’t see anything of interest or importance. Even the desert around the site, which would be eternally off-limits, was naked and unappealing. It was too dry here, Joe thought.

  The sun was too damn much, he decided. “Shall we, Major?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  Joe wanted to laugh at that, a major calling a captain ‘sir.’ Would wonders never cease?

  They walked toward the blue Air Force Humvee parked a few yards away. Blue, Joe thought, letting his mind picture a place where he would spend the time he had left.

  “So tell me, sir,” Joe began, “do you do much fishing around here?”

  Los Angeles

  “Two bags only, huh?” Art commented awkwardly. He didn’t know what to say. Things were changing too fast in his world.

  But hell, Eddie looked good, and things were going to go good for him.

  “Hey, boss, you know the routine.” The smiling agent pulled both of the small bags from the trunk and set them curbside in front of the terminal. “Check it, and you lose it. Carry-on’s the only way to fly.”

  Art forced a smile. He closed the trunk lid, leaving his hand on its warm surface. The two men stood still among the diesel exhaust and noise that pervaded the upper level at Los Angeles International Airport. Buses and vans, along with private autos, darted along the white cement roadway searching for the choicest spots for unloading.

  “So, it’s the academy for you?”

  Eddie nodded, tight-lipped. “Can you imagine that?”

  Art could. Eduardo Giuliano Toronassi was a damn good agent, a true Bureau man. Maybe not the exact type old J. Edgar would have imagined, but so what. The FBI Academy was getting a fine addition. It was just a shame that his street career had to be at an end, thanks to that one bullet. The only visible remnant was a simple Band-Aid just below and to the left of his Adam’s apple, but less obvious results were very real. The effects were slight, but enough to disqualify him from street duty. Now he would teach other young agents, using his unique insight and talents.

  “You’ll do good, Ed,” Art said sincerely.

  Eddie’s mouth dropped slightly. “C’mon, boss. You want me to cry or something?”

  Art didn’t, and let a laugh out. At least it wasn’t forced.

  Eddie saw his old boss look slightly away. “And what about you? What’s next?”

  Good question. “Hmm. If only I knew.” His eyes went back to his friend. “There’s no place in the academy for an old dog like me, you can bet on that.”

  Eddie smiled, knowing that Art was right, but for the wrong reasons. He wasn’t too old, but in many people’s eyes, many of the people in power, that was, Art Jefferson was too close to the edge. His personal life was a mess, and the Bureau doctors said his health wasn’t far behind. A ticker could only take so much in the form of physical and emotional abuse, as the heart attack had proven.

  “I don’t know,” Art said, his words comin
g from distant thoughts. “It’s all so damn much right now. Lois and all the other crap. Man, I’ve been doing every damn thing that shrink says, even the weird stuff. Lying down and visualizing all sorts of things. It’s supposed to relax you, you know, but all it seems to do is clear my mind so all the bullshit can fit. All sorts of negative shit, Ed.”

  “Art, listen. You gotta go easy. Take a load off. Get rid of some of the stuff that’s bothering you.”

  Easier done than accepted, Art knew. “That was done for me.”

  “What do you mean?” Eddie asked, perplexed.

  “Jerry talked to me a couple days ago.” Art paused. “They want me to resign from command. Go back to field stuff. Be a street agent again.”

  Eddie didn’t have to think long about it. “It sounds good. Do it.”

  The smile was almost automatic. “I thought the same thing after the initial shock of it.”

  “Why not? You’ll be out of the bureaucratic end of it and back where the action is...where you know the score.”

  “Where the action is?” Art commented. “Like where you were when that slug found you? Unh-unh.”

  “So I duck worth shit, what about it?”

  Art slapped the shorter agent’s face gently. “It’s good they’re sticking you behind a desk. Even I can nail you.”

  Eddie mocked pain and rubbed it off his cheek. “So where are you gonna be, boss?”

  “Working for Cam.”

  “Kidnappings and homicide? Dead bodies and all?”

  Art nodded. “The whole deal.”

  The Italian’s puffy cheeks jiggled as he shook his head.

  The time had gone quickly, and too much so. They would see each other again. Art was certain of that.

  “You want me to walk you in?”

  Again Eddie’s cheeks shook. “I can get it.” He stuck out a hand, and Art took it firmly. “We’ll be seein’ you, boss.”

  “You, too, Ed.” Art watched him take the bags and head for the terminal door. He stopped just short of entering and turned.

  “And get yourself a lady, you big black love god!”