Silent Enemy

by Young, Tom

  Colman returned from the bunk room and plugged his headset into his comm cord. “Copilot’s back up,” he said.

  “You get any sleep?” Parson asked.

  “Not much. An hour or two.”

  Not surprising. Parson hadn’t rested much better. He’d have to ask an exhausted crew to do the impossible. All their skill, training, and ingenuity would need to push through a heavy muck of fatigue.

  As he watched over his instruments, he thought about the Delta pilot’s advice: Just never give up. He wouldn’t have, anyway, but he appreciated the thought. A voice of encouragement came as a gift in the midst of this broad Atlantic.

  It reminded him of a lecture he’d attended by a retired United captain. Parson thought maybe Colman could benefit from its lessons.

  “Ever hear of an airline pilot named Al Haynes?” Parson asked.

  “I don’t believe I have.”

  “He brought a DC-10 into Sioux City after his tail engine blew up and took out his hydraulics. He didn’t have any flight controls at all.”

  Parson explained that when the engine shelled out, it turned the aircraft into an unguided missile. No emergency procedure existed for that problem. On his own, Haynes figured out a way to steer the jet with thrust alone. More than half the passengers survived the landing, their death sentences commuted.

  “Depending on what happens to me and what happens to the airplane,” Parson said, “you might have to do some things you haven’t even thought of yet.”

  “I think I take your meaning,” Colman said.

  They flew in silence for the better part of an hour. Dunne looked intently at something on his panel. Not a good sign. Parson waited for the explanation until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “I got some oil pressure flux on number one,” Dunne said.

  “Bad?”

  “Not yet. Just a few psi.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not yet’?” Colman asked.

  “It’s not going to get any better, and it might get worse. Temperature’s coming up. That means the oil viscosity is breaking down.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows?” Dunne said. “That engine has a lot of hours on it, and it’s not used to running this long.”

  So now I have two sick engines, Parson thought. Oil trouble on number one and vibration on number four. If they’ll just hold out a little longer....

  In the moonlight, broken undercast shimmered several thousand feet below like floating clusters of ice floes. Above it, stars encrusted the horizon. Parson considered how far that vision of stars had traveled to reach him. To shine on him at this moment, that light had begun its journey before he’d ever joined the military, before he’d ever been born. Parson found comfort in that somehow, though he could not say why.

  A VAGUE WEAKNESS CAME OVER GOLD. She had no appetite at all, but when she thought back over how little she’d eaten since takeoff, she realized she had to be a little hypoglycemic. Most likely everyone else was, too.

  In a carton of MREs she found only one left. The box also contained a half-full water bottle and three empties.

  “May I take the MRE?” she asked the lieutenant colonel.

  “Might as well,” the MCD said. “It won’t do anyone any good sitting on the floor.”

  Gold picked it up and read the label. To her disappointment, the main item was pork slices. She took it to Mahsoud, who looked more pale than ever. His oxygen cannula hung from around his neck, unused.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked Justin.

  “We’re out of PT-LOX.” He gestured toward a green metal box strapped to the floor. A placard on the knee-high unit read: PORTABLE THERAPEUTIC LIQUID OXYGEN SYSTEM. “It had more than enough to get us to Ramstein, but it’s empty now.”

  We’re running out of everything, Gold thought. Maybe Mahsoud would feel better if he ate something.

  “This is for you,” she said in Pashto. “I know you do not eat pork, but it is permitted to preserve your life. You need your strength.”

  “My need is not great enough for that,” he said, “but I thank you.”

  “Then you can eat one of the side foods.” Gold hunted through the inner packets and found corn bread. “Perhaps this, then,” she said. “It is a traditional American bread.”

  “That, I will try.”

  Gold tore open the pouch and broke the corn bread in half. She handed the piece to Mahsoud. He took a bite and chewed cautiously.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “It is not bad,” he said in English, still chewing. Crumbs fell onto his bloodstained uniform.

  “You need something to drink with that.” Gold turned toward the box with the water bottle only to see a loadmaster had just taken it.

  “That’s mine,” a medic said to the loadmaster.

  The loadmaster uncapped it and took a drink. The medic charged at the other man and pushed him against a bulkhead. He drove a fist into the load’s solar plexus. The bottle fell to the floor and spilled.

  “Asshole!” the loadmaster yelled. He slammed the heel of his hand into the medic’s nose. Blood streamed from the man’s nostrils as the two wrestled. Droplets spattered on the floor in dime-sized starbursts.

  “That’s enough!” the MCD shouted. She pushed the two apart by the shoulders. Gold pulled the medic away by the arm. The loadmaster took one more swing but got only air.

  “You two idiots better unfuck yourselves right now,” the MCD said. “Does the phrase ‘dereliction of duty’ sound good to you?”

  “No, ma’am,” the medic said. He touched his sleeve to his face and the blood left a dark streak. Justin handed him a gauze pad.

  “Then get back to work. We’ll forget about this, but if it happens again you’ll need a proctologist to get my foot out of your ass.”

  Gold knew the fatigue and stress would only get worse. She thought of a painting she’d seen once while on leave in Paris. The Raft of the Medusa depicted a handful of half-dead castaways adrift in a roiling sea. The artist had taken inspiration from an actual event. Nearly one hundred and fifty survivors of the wrecked French frigate Medusa had set out on a makeshift raft in 1816. In thirst, starvation, and madness, the sailors and passengers began to kill one another. Others died of exposure or threw themselves overboard. Only fifteen were rescued.

  At least we won’t live long enough to reach that state, she thought.

  Baitullah wouldn’t eat the pork, either, so Gold took a few bites of it and gave the rest to Justin and the other medics. One of the medics offered an orange to Baitullah, which he seemed to relish. He wrapped the peelings in a paper towel and held them in his fist. Gold wondered if he planned to eat those, too, or if he just liked the scent. The citrus smell contrasted oddly with the odors of fuel, oil, sweat, and blood.

  Gold gathered up the empty water bottles and took them upstairs to the flight deck. Her hands were full so she didn’t bring her headset.

  “May I take some water?” she asked loudly enough to be heard without the interphone.

  Parson said nothing but turned and gave an OK sign with his thumb and forefinger. Dunne was finishing an apple, and he even ate the core. So they’re out of food up here, too, Gold thought.

  At the watercooler, across the aisleway from the galley, Gold filled three bottles. From the cooler’s slosh, she figured it was nearly empty. Maybe a gallon left.

  One pouch of instant coffee remained on the galley table, along with packets of sugar and dry creamer. Gold heated a cup of water and brewed the coffee. Then she stirred in five sugar packets and two creamers. Too sickly sweet, she guessed, but that way it had more food value, if she could get Baitullah to drink it. She stuffed the water bottles in her cargo pockets and carried the coffee in her hand.

  On the way back to the ladder, Gold passed the bunk rooms. On a hunch, she looked inside one of them. Yes, she’d remembered correctly. Each bunk had its own oxygen regulator, like the one at the nav ta
ble. If the nurses had no more medical oxygen for Mahsoud, could he come up here and breathe from the aircraft’s supply?

  When Gold returned to the cargo compartment, she offered Baitullah the coffee. He frowned when he took the first sip, but he drank it all while nibbling on the orange peels. His first experience in the care of Americans, Gold thought, and he’s hungry enough to eat trash. She gave the water bottles to the crewmen who’d fought, and she offered another one to Mahsoud. He looked even paler.

  “How’s he doing?” Gold asked the MCD.

  “He’ll need a respirator if he keeps declining.”

  “The bunk rooms upstairs have oxygen regulators. Would it help to move him up there?”

  The lieutenant colonel’s eyes widened. “They do?” she said. “Yeah, it would help. We should have thought of that, but we don’t normally use this airframe.”

  A loadmaster overheard the conversation. “Due respect, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Look what happened last time we let an Afghan patient upstairs.”

  Gold suppressed a surge of anger. She’d say something she’d regret. And she felt responsible for what Fawad had done. “What’s he going to do?” she asked. “He has one leg.”

  “You never know what a motivated terrorist is capable of,” the loadmaster said.

  “You do if their oxygenation is that poor,” the MCD said. “But it’s up to the aircraft commander.”

  Gold plugged in her headset and explained to Parson what she wanted to do. He said nothing for a while. Then he asked, “You want to bring another one up here?”

  A knife to her heart. One that she deserved, in her estimation. She looked at Mahsoud, and her eyes brimmed.

  “Hell, no,” Dunne said. “Sir.”

  Parson did not answer.

  He said he still trusted me, Gold thought, but he didn’t expect to have to prove it. He just wanted to make me feel better.

  “Major,” the MCD said, “this patient’s in bad shape. He couldn’t hurt you if he wanted to.”

  “The other one was wounded, too,” Dunne said.

  So the jury’s deciding Mahsoud’s punishment for my mistake, Gold thought. Dear God, everything I touch gets destroyed.

  “If he wanted to bring us down,” Parson said, “he wouldn’t have told us about that mercury switch.”

  “If that’s what it is,” Colman said.

  They’re going to sacrifice Mahsoud to paranoia, Gold realized. Why can’t they just take it out on me? The interphone fell silent.

  “Pilot,” the lieutenant colonel said. “MCD. We need a decision.”

  No sound but the tenor of the engines and the wind. Then the click of a microphone switch.

  “Bring him up here,” Parson said.

  20

  Alivid dawn materialized as the C-5 flew west. Parson could not see the sun rising behind him, but its rays lightened the sky ahead with a milky colorless glow. Broken stratus formations obscured the ocean surface, and their edges melded with surrounding air in a way that made it hard to identify any cloud’s boundaries. In a few places, darker blotches hung suspended like smoke rising through fog. The entire atmosphere seemed a pastel smear, as if viewed through cataracts.

  At least I’m not flying through black billows of ash, Parson thought. But as he looked down through a sky heavy with particulates, he realized that was the ash cloud, diffused and spreading, far from its source. Motes of silica from deep within the earth, hurled into the sky and drifting on the trades.

  Exhaustion dragged on him like a chronic disease. According to Dunne’s fuel log, the jet had been airborne for almost twenty hours. Parson had worked with augmented crews kept on duty for twenty-four hours at a stretch; the regs allowed that if you had an extra pilot. Because of screwed-up circadian rhythms, those augmented days could translate into thirty or more hours without real sleep. Flying tired was nothing new to Parson, but he’d never pushed it this far on any single flight. Once, twice, three times sleep overtook him, until his head sagged and he startled awake.

  Thuds, boot steps, and curses echoed from behind and below, and the flight deck door rattled open. Someone’s fingers wrapped around the doorframe, and then Gold pulled herself into the cockpit. She turned around, kneeled, and lifted, and she backed up holding the front handles of Mahsoud’s litter. Gold and her unseen assistants levered him onto the flight deck floor.

  “Sir,” Colman asked, “are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “Look at him,” Parson said.

  Mahsoud’s face wore the gray cast of the dying. His facial muscles hung slack except at the jaw, clenched in evident pain. Eyes open but unfocused, black pools of fear.

  Gold, Justin, and the MCD lifted him again and carried him into the forward bunk room. After they had him settled, Justin leaned the collapsed litter against an aisleway bulkhead.

  A faint scorched scent permeated the cockpit. Parson began to worry about another electrical fire—no telling what unseen damage had resulted from the lightning.

  “How’s your electrical panel looking?” he asked Dunne.

  “Yeah, I smell it, too,” Dunne said. “I got no warning lights or popped breakers. Load meters all look normal.”

  “It’s getting stronger,” Colman said.

  “I’ll look around,” Dunne offered. “Engineer’s going off headset.”

  Dunne got up and opened an avionics compartment door. He unzipped a flight suit pocket, removed a penlight, and shone it around. Then he leaned forward and sniffed. The effort put Parson in mind of a suspicious Brittany spaniel checking a hedgerow for pheasants. Dunne repeated the process at the aft avionics bay, shrugged his shoulders, and returned to his seat.

  “Find anything?” Parson asked.

  “You can hardly smell anything back there.”

  “Anybody cooking in the galley?”

  “There’s nothing left to cook.”

  Parson ran his eyes over his instruments and annunciator panel. No new warning lights there, either. Not that there isn’t enough wrong with the airplane already, he thought. His airspeed and altitude readings all made sense, and they all agreed with the instruments on Colman’s panel. So the air data computers weren’t fried.

  Yet the smell grew worse. The flight deck stank of sulfur. The odor of hell.

  Dunne leaned back, sniffed again. “It’s coming from the gasper outlets,” he said. “Do you see any engine damage?”

  Parson looked outside, back at the left wing. An engine with a blown duct or a fluid leak might explain the problem: The air-conditioning used purified air tapped off the engine compressors. Any smoke or fluid loosed in an engine could get sucked into the bleed air.

  “My side’s good,” Colman said.

  So was Parson’s. Two intact engines, humming away. But in the pallid light of dawn, Parson noticed an odd sight: a shimmering luster surrounded the nacelle inlets. Sharp-edged glints sparkled and danced like sunlight reflected off quartz. In all the strange meteorological phenomena Parson had witnessed in almost two decades of flying, he had never seen anything like this. But through the funk of sleep deprivation, he did manage to connect all the signs.

  “We need to get the hell out of here,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” Colman asked.

  “We aren’t over the ash cloud. We’re in it.”

  “I thought the advisory center said most of it would stay below us.”

  “They forgot to tell the damned volcano.”

  Parson hadn’t expected to need to climb so early. He felt doubly grateful to that airline crew, because the captain had requested a block altitude for him between twenty-five thousand and thirty-eight thousand feet. Now he wanted the top of it.

  “I got the plane for a while,” Parson said to Colman. “You take the radios.”

  “Yes, sir. But the radios aren’t working.”

  “Call in the blind on HF,” Parson said. “Say we’re climbing to three-eight-oh, but you’ll probably be talking to y
ourself.”

  “Rog,” Colman said. When he spoke on the air, no one answered.

  Parson set 38,000 in the altitude selector and advanced the throttles. With the tip of his middle finger, he nudged the autopilot pitch wheel to limit the nose’s rise to five degrees. He could get no better than a two-hundred-foot-per-minute climb. The jet was near the ceiling for its weight, and it seemed to claw for every inch.

  The aircraft finally leveled at the new altitude, and Parson eased the power back slightly to a cruise setting. As he did so, he noticed a buzz in the throttles. Weird. But he thought he knew where it came from. When he touched each throttle stem individually, he found the rattle came from number four. He’d noticed it earlier, but now it was more severe. Whatever was wrong with that engine, it shook hard enough to telegraph the problem along hundreds of feet of throttle cable.

  “The vibration on four’s getting worse,” he said. “I can feel it in the throttle.”

  “That ain’t good,” Dunne said. “Wish I could look at it, but my computer’s toast.”

  It really didn’t matter to Parson whether Dunne could look at that engine’s tormented waveform on a computer screen. Parson needed all four engines to stay out of the ash; he wasn’t about to shut one down and descend back into that shit. For all he knew, it was ash damage that had worsened the vibration. To see that engine’s problems quantified by mils and scope divisions would just be pointless aggravation.

  At least the sky seemed clearer here. The growing brightness forced Parson to dig into his helmet bag for his aviator’s sunglasses. He put them on and looked down. The air below bore the color of dishwater, unfit even for machines to breathe.

  The sulfur odor began to dissipate, but the ash left a scorched tang in the air almost as if someone had been smoking. From the bunk room, he heard Mahsoud cough. Parson made a mental note to check on him later.

  No horizon existed; the ash seemed to have scoured it away. Land remained out of sight, and Parson navigated by an integrated solution from GPS and inertial gyros. As long as those gyros knew where they started, they always knew where they were. Parson could determine his position within feet.