Silent Enemy

by Young, Tom

  Dunne opened to a range chart, ran his pencil through the curving lines. Tapped at his calculator. Swore, started over, ran the numbers again.

  “Three hours and twenty minutes,” he said. “And at that speed, we cover less distance.”

  Parson looked out at an ocean surface bronzed by moonlight. Our final resting place, he thought, after the engines flame out from fuel exhaustion, we descend through the bomb’s trigger altitude and hit the water in pieces like scattershot. This is what it feels like to run out of time and luck. His palms grew slick, his mouth dry. It all came down to the numbers on Dunne’s calculator, the negative figure at the bottom of the fuel chart.

  To have an airplane full of people die for want of ten or fifteen minutes? Such a short sweep of a watch’s hand. If only you could stretch time, Parson thought. Conserve it somehow. But it flowed at a constant rate; always had since the Big Bang.

  Parson scanned his instruments, though there was hardly any point. He stopped at the fuel flow gauges. Thought for a moment. He could not control the flow of time, but he could sure as hell control the flow of fuel.

  “Engineer,” he said. “How much time do we have if we slow it down to max endurance speed? Not max range, max endurance.”

  Dunne recalculated. Then he said, “Four hours, but we won’t put enough miles behind us.”

  “No,” Parson said, “but the tanker might if they push it up to barber pole speed. They have a fuselage full of gas. They don’t care about their burn rate.”

  “So you’re saying if we slow way down and they speed way up, the numbers will work out?” Colman asked.

  “You got it.”

  “Maybe,” Dunne said.

  “Will the tanker pilots want to fly that close to critical Mach?” Colman asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Parson said. “They live for this shit.” He called the tanker crew and told them his plan.

  “We’ll give it a try,” the KC-135 pilot said. “Let us have some coordinates to aim for, and we’ll meet you there.”

  Parson checked his FMS, made some calculations, gave the tanker crew the lat/longs. Then he added, “Opec Five-Two, confirm you’re Pacer Crag modified.”

  “Indeed, we are.”

  “What does that mean?” Colman asked.

  “They have a pretty good avionics suite,” Parson said, “and that will help them find us.”

  “I hope it does,” Colman said.

  Dunne slewed the N1 marker to the power setting he’d calculated for max endurance. “There it is,” he said. “Either this will work or it won’t.”

  Parson knuckled back the throttles until the N1 rpm lined up with the marker. The airplane slowed to what felt almost like a hover. Noise from the slipstream fell off in a decrescendo like orchestral strings hushed by the hand of a conductor. Then Parson waited. There was simply nothing left to do but let the clock and the fuel gauges do what they would. The charts and formulas showed only minutes to spare. And that depended on the wind, the efficiency of the engines, the accuracy of the instruments.

  A strange thought came to him then, a memory from nav school. One day at Mather Air Force Base, years ago, he’d picked up his schedule of training flights. Training sorties, they were called.

  “That’s a funny word,” he said to an instructor. “Sortie?”

  “It comes from the French word sortir,” the instructor said. “It means to leave. It doesn’t say anything about coming back. Remember that.”

  And so he had. Right up until this moment, over these infinite tracts of water, dark and deep as oblivion.

  GOLD SAT AT THE NAV SEAT. She felt honored that Parson seemed to reserve that disused crew station for her. No one else ever sat there, at any rate.

  She didn’t understand everything she’d just heard on the interphone and radios. But she gathered that the crew needed another aerial refueling, and it would be close. Very close. And they sounded like they were doing things way out of standard ops, improvising. Soldiers in the field did that all the time. But these flyboys, in their world of checklists and rote procedure, normally planned and briefed every move they made.

  Gold recalled an excruciating briefing for a paratroop exercise involving Fort Bragg and the adjacent Pope Air Force Base. The aircrews described their flight path to the drop zone, and they seemed to have a slide for every turn and landmark. Death by PowerPoint. One of the pilots taking part in Purple Dragon ’99 told her the flying was the easy part. Gold wondered what he’d think if he were here now.

  Parson and his crew had been in deep discussion, but at the moment, the interphone was quiet. Parson twisted around and looked at her.

  “Hey, Gold,” he said. “I didn’t see you back there.”

  “Sorry, sir,” she said. “If I’m in the way, I’ll go back downstairs.”

  “No, you’re fine. I guess you heard what we’re up against.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, now there’s nothing to do but wait. You’re welcome to stay there. Just keep off the interphone once we start the AR.”

  “I will, sir.”

  Parson and his crew looked eerily calm for people under that kind of pressure. But she knew from experience that when Parson was quiet, he was thinking. And that surface calm could end with quick action, even violence.

  She watched him, Colman, and Dunne check gauges, tweak knobs now and then. They appeared not to accept the hopelessness of their predicament, and Gold admired that. Every thought, every flip of a switch, every reading of an instrument, seemed an act of faith, a belief in life beyond this flight.

  Dunne’s checklist lay open on the flight engineer’s table. Gold noticed a photo taped to the checklist binder. It showed Dunne wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, along with an INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER baseball cap. He and two boys, maybe twelve and fifteen, leaned on the tailgate of a pickup piled with hay. One boy held a banjo, the other a violin. Dunne held a guitarlike instrument Gold did not recognize.

  The cockpit lights dimmed, apparently by the switch Parson had just turned.

  “Look at the stars,” he said. “Best thing about flying over the ocean at night.”

  A crystalline canopy of silver dust stretched across the Atlantic. Gold had seen the night sky so beautifully unpolluted by urban light in just one other place, and that was Afghanistan.

  “That’s Ursa Major,” Parson said as he pointed. “And there’s Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, and Draco, the Dragon. You can see the Dragon’s tail looping around Ursa Minor.”

  At first it surprised Gold to find Parson so knowledgeable about constellations. He hardly seemed the type for stargazing. But then she remembered he’d spent most of his career as a navigator, not a pilot. For him, the stars probably represented a lot of things: Data points. The beginnings of his profession. Astronomy and mythology, man’s first relationship with the sky.

  “Have you ever used a sextant?” she asked. She was reaching, but if the crew really had little to do at the moment, maybe conversation would help.

  “I’ve used one in older-model C-130s,” Parson said. “But I don’t think they even teach celestial navigation anymore.”

  “Where was Draco again?” Gold asked.

  “There,” Parson said. “It coils around the northern pole, and it never sets.”

  “Like us,” Colman said, “never landing.”

  No one said anything for a moment until Gold broke the silence. “This is a little out of my field,” she said, “but I think the ancient Egyptians had another name for Draco. And because it never sets, they thought of it as an ever-vigilant goddess protector.”

  “I’ll take all the help we can get,” Dunne said.

  “That checks,” Colman said.

  Parson peered up at the heavens for what seemed like a long time. Without taking his eyes from the stars, he asked, “How’s your friend doing down there?”

  “The nurses are worried about his breathing,” Gold said. “I’ve been meaning to ask—can they send some medical help
ahead of us to Johnston Island?”

  “They should have already arranged that,” Parson said, “but we’ll check and make sure.”

  “Thank you.”

  Gold wondered what else she could do for Mahsoud and the others and she found it frustrating that the answer was, pretty much nothing. She wasn’t used to helplessness. On the ground, no matter what she faced, she could nearly always take action: Return fire. Find cover. Translate thoughts. Resist interrogation. To just sit and ride and wait ran counter to everything in her nature. Parson at least had things he could do, or try to do, right up until the end. And, apparently, he was still planning.

  “Guys,” he said, “after we refuel, let’s depressurize like we did last time. Then we’ll go take a picture of that damned bomb.”

  “All right,” Dunne said. “Once we get the checklists cleaned up, I’ll go do it.”

  “Negative,” Parson said. “I won’t ask you to go through that again. I’ll let Colman take the plane and I’ll go do it. I want to see that fucking thing for myself, anyway.”

  “Wrap up good,” Dunne said. “It’s cold as sin back there.”

  Gold saw her chance. “Sir,” she said, “let me go with you as a safety observer like I did before.”

  “Okay,” Parson said. “Won’t be the first time we’ve had our asses in a sling in a cold place, will it?”

  “No, sir.”

  Gold felt some of her tension release, and she almost smiled. Not so much at Parson’s comment but at the prospect of a mission. And the idea that Parson seemed to think of her as part of his team.

  She also liked his choice to go himself. If you’re in charge, Gold believed, you should never tell someone to do something you wouldn’t do.

  “So I guess it’ll just be Dunne and me up here, then,” Colman said.

  “You’ll manage,” Parson said. “If I fall and knock myself out or something, just repressurize, climb back up to cruise altitude, and press on to Johnston.”

  “Yes, sir,” Colman said. He took off one of his flight gloves and twisted it so tightly it looked like a short length of rope.

  “We’ll make a flinty-eyed airlifter out of you yet,” Parson said.

  Dunne seemed to be ignoring Parson’s pep talk to the copilot. He was working at his calculator again, and Gold saw that he’d brought up a page on his computer with columns of numbers. One of the numbers on the screen was red.

  “Fuel reading,” Dunne said as he passed a form up to Parson. When Parson took it, he shone his utility light on it, clicked off the light, and looked out again at the ocean and stars. He was quiet for a time. Then he said, “Loadmasters, break out the exposure suits.”

  “Yes, sir,” said a voice on interphone.

  Sounds of renewed activity came from the cargo compartment, the rattles of tie-down straps released and dropped.

  “You reckon anybody will need an exposure suit if we don’t make the refuel?” Dunne asked.

  “If the engines flame out from fuel exhaustion and we start descending,” Parson said, “we don’t know when or how that bomb will go off. I might have enough control left to keep the wings level when we hit the water.”

  That brought to mind another hazard, one Gold had not considered—the prospect of days or weeks adrift. She’d seen the yellow handle in the aft flight deck, the one marked LIFE RAFT—PULL TO DEPLOY. So many dangers, so many ways to die. Gold had spent little time on the water, but she’d read stories of survival at sea. Burning days and freezing nights. Sailors succumbing to thirst and madness. Survivors envying the dead.

  And in the event of a ditching, what would happen to the patients downstairs? Quick drowning, probably; most would never get out in time, even with help. Parson was likely thinking of all this, anticipating awful decisions.

  “Major,” called a voice on interphone, “we got ten exposure suits. Who do we give them to?”

  Silence for a moment. Then Parson said, “Anybody who’s able-bodied enough to benefit from it.”

  “Roger that, sir. I’ll bring some up to the flight deck.”

  “I don’t need one,” Parson said. “I’ll be sweating enough as it is when I plug with the tanker.”

  “What about when you go back in the tail?” Dunne asked.

  “I know it’s cold back there, but with that suit over my feet I’d probably fall on my ass.”

  “Then I don’t need one,” Gold said. “Same reason.”

  “Me, neither,” Dunne said.

  “Same here,” Colman said.

  “Are you guys sure?” the loadmaster asked.

  “Yeah,” Parson said. “All you loadmasters, put one on. I need you to be able to help with whatever patients make it out. Same with the aeromeds. I want all those suits worn by aeromeds and loads. If anybody argues, tell them I said it’s an order.”

  Gold looked out the cockpit windows again, not up at the stars but down at the water. She thought of derelict ships with tattered sails and crews dead from plague or typhoid, plying eternal courses set only by currents and trade winds.

  13

  The MAIN TANK LOW lights had been on for three and a half hours. The MAIN SUMP LOW lights had been on for forty-five minutes. Of the C-5’s dozen fuel tanks, eight were empty and four were nearly so.

  Parson’s FMS screen told him he was nearing the tanker rendezvous point. But he saw nothing on TCAS, received nothing on TACAN, heard nothing on UHF. He began to think about what he’d do at the end. Considered just to go ahead and ditch now while he still had easier control with all four engines providing thrust. But he decided not to give up quite yet. Besides, if the bomb blew the tail off, he’d have no control at all. Without the horizontal stabilizer, the jet would probably nose right over and go straight down. Hit the water in a vertical dive.

  The first fatal symptom of fuel exhaustion, he supposed, would be erratic turbine temp and fuel flow. One by one, the engines would flame out, and he’d see the N1 and N2 tachometers creep down. When the third engine failed, the ram air turbine would deploy, a little propeller in the slipstream to drive an emergency hydraulic pump. Like a body dying of lethal wounds, backup systems would trigger to no avail. Warning lights would illuminate and then multiply: LOW PRESSURE. LOW VOLTAGE. LOW TEMPERATURE. LOW ALTITUDE.

  He kept glancing at the readout for distance from the tanker. It read nothing—no indication at all. But then it seemed to flicker, as if it caught a whiff of the KC-135’s TACAN signal. Numbers appeared: 161. Negative reading again. Then 160, steady. Parson tried a call on UHF.

  “Opec Five-Two. Air Evac Eight-Four,” he said. “I got a DME reading of one-six-zero miles. Would that be you?”

  “Air Evac Eight-Four,” called the tanker pilot, “we show you one-five-nine miles off our one o’clock.”

  Parson felt little relief. He needed to be receiving fuel by now. By half an hour ago.

  “Opec,” he said, “go ahead and give me a turn for an en route rendezvous. We are critical on fuel. Just a few minutes left.” If that.

  “Opec Five-Two’s in the turn.”

  Parson had stayed high to squeeze out all he could from every drop of gas, but now he cracked the throttles for a descent to the aerial refueling altitude of twenty-five thousand feet.

  “All right,” Parson said on interphone, “precontact checklist. We gotta get this right the first time.”

  “Air refueling door,” Dunne called.

  “Clear to open,” Parson said.

  Dunne unbuckled his harness and stood up. He opened an overhead panel, exposing the actuator for the air refueling door. Normally, he could open the door with the flip of a switch. But with the plane’s hydraulic loss, he had to crank it open manually. He put a dog bone wrench on the end of the actuator and began to turn it.

  “Tell me when you get a READY light,” Dunne said.

  The slipstream rose from a whisper to a growl as the wind swirled around the partially open AR door. But the green light Parson wanted to see remained out. Dunne strained
at the wrench.

  “What’s the matter?” Parson asked.

  “Actuator’s binding. It’s getting real hard to move.”

  “Well, you better turn it quick.”

  Dunne pushed hard. Still no READY light.

  “That’s as far as I can turn it with my hand,” he said.

  “If you don’t get it open, we’re fucked.”

  “I know, Major. Do you want me to hit it with something?”

  That would either open the door all the way or break the actuator, Parson realized. No time to debate the options.

  “Do it,” Parson said.

  “Sergeant Major,” Dunne said, “hold this in place for me.”

  Gold stood up and took the wrench from the flight engineer. She held it on the actuator with her thumb and forefinger. Dunne reached for a shelf next to his instrument panel and pulled out a technical manual in a hardcover binder. He swung the book like a maul and hammered the side of the wrench. Parson heard a sickening crack, but on his overhead panel the READY light illuminated.

  “That did it,” Parson said. “Good work.”

  Dunne picked up the checklist where he’d left off. “Continuous ignition,” he said.

  Parson moved an overhead switch and said, “On.”

  His instruments told him the tanker was now less than a hundred miles away, and the closure rate had slowed. Apparently, the other aircraft had turned one hundred and eighty degrees so he could approach it from behind.

  He just wished he could see it. Parson turned his radar gain control to AUTO, antenna stab switch to ON. Fiddled with the target clarity control.

  And there it was, a blip on the screen, dead ahead. Clear on the radar but hard to pick up visually because of shreds of cirrus clouds hanging at precisely Parson’s altitude. Inside the cloud vapor, the C-5’s strobes reflected back like heat lightning. The flashes distracted Parson, so he reached up and switched the strobes from white to red.

  He closed on the blip to within twenty miles, and the cirrus layer opened up to reveal clear sky ahead. Eventually, Parson recognized an artificial constellation, the vaguely cruciform pattern of the tanker’s lights as seen from the back.