Silent Enemy

by Young, Tom

  “True enough,” he said in Pashto. “We have reached a point where we can only accept what comes.”

  “Such as a life of academics instead of a life of action?” Gold asked.

  “You chose both,” Mahsoud said, “but, yes, I understand your meaning—if life remains for us at all.”

  Mahsoud closed his eyes, and Gold decided to let him rest. He seemed, if not at peace, at least resigned. The words of the Falnama appeared to remind him he had a proper role in a plan too vast for comprehension.

  Around the cargo compartment, a few of the aeromeds and loadmasters tried to sleep. Gold noticed no one slept for long, but when they did, they slept anywhere: lying flat on the floor, sitting up with forehead on knees, in fetal position on a vacant litter.

  The crew members who remained awake began to secure equipment. They anchored Pelican cases to the floor with chains and tie-down devices. Loadmasters ratcheted straps tight across mounds of luggage. Aeromeds placed some of their more delicate tools, such as IV pumps and cardiac monitors, into foam-padded crates. Gold wondered how much of the effort was rote procedure and how much stemmed from an expectation that the equipment would ever be used again. At the very least, Gold realized, secured gear would not turn into missiles during a crash landing.

  Across the cargo bay from Mahsoud, Justin watched with listless eyes. Gold could not tell how much he understood. He seemed to have drawn blinds within himself, closed off light from outside. She hoped he would come to know what a gift he’d helped give everyone aboard, that pride and satisfaction in his deed might see him through the painful recovery that awaited him if he survived this flight.

  For now, anyway, he remained alive. Gold felt light-headed, just a bit tired and weak. She knew why; she realized where that part of her strength had gone. It lay before her, in someone else’s veins, her tithe of blood.

  28

  The pain in Parson’s leg twisted around itself, reached ever greater heights. He had to force his thoughts through it, across it, like concentrating with a high fever. The agony seemed to shape-shift: One moment, a thousand needles pricked the broken limb. Next, a single blade ran it through. Then the sharp points and edges went away only to be replaced by a coat of oil lit afire.

  His throat felt as if he’d swallowed sand. A strange buzzing annoyed him, barely audible. It didn’t seem like the normal whines of avionics. Parson realized it was probably in his head—the sound track of shock. Or maybe hearing damage from the blast.

  The number four engine still seemed to want to shake itself off its pylon. Though it no longer ran, the rotors turned with the air forced through the intake. That created drag and vibration more severe than anything Parson had ever experienced. He just hoped the shutoff valves would hold. When he’d pulled the fire handle for number four, it should have cut off fuel and hydraulic fluid to that engine. But given the way the TF-39 had shelled itself out and then begun rattling and spewing sparks, he could not know with certainty. The nacelle contained any number of components and fluids that could burn like hell’s own furnace. A generator cased in magnesium. A pylon, connecting the engine with the wing, laced with lines of flammables.

  Parson wished he could just jettison the damned thing—press a button and drop it into the ocean. No such system existed. Whatever was going on with that engine, he and his crew would have to live with it.

  Gold entered the flight deck and sat at the nav table. “Where do you want me for the landing?” she asked.

  “Right there,” Parson said. “Your seat has a four-point harness. If you cinch it down tight, that’s as safe a place as any.” All true, but Parson didn’t add that he wanted her there for his own reasons, too. Her voice cut the pain. Her presence helped him think.

  He checked the FMS: a little more than two hundred miles to go. “Listen up, guys,” he said. “We’re still a ways out, but I want to start configuring to land. We know we have to emergency extend some of the landing gear.”

  “The forward mains, at least,” Dunne said. “God only knows how the electric motors will work after the lightning strike.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking,” Parson said. “Whatever new problems we’re going to have, let’s go ahead and find out what they are.” He needed to make sure the plane was set up for landing well before arrival at Johnston. In its damaged condition, it did not have the power or controllability for a go-around.

  “So do you want me to put the gear down now?” Colman asked.

  “Gear down,” Parson ordered.

  “Airspeed,” Dunne said.

  Parson checked his instruments. The plane was flying at two hundred and fifty knots. Gear operate speed was two hundred.

  “Good catch,” Parson said. “We’re all tired, and I feel like hell. Keep backing me up like that.”

  “You mean, like always?” Dunne said.

  Colman retarded the two good throttles by millimeters.

  “That’s it, sir,” Dunne said. “Don’t change speed too quick.”

  The airspeed crept down a few knots at a time. Parson scanned the panel, then looked outside. The scene before him presented no color except blue, in every possible shade. The sunlight illuminated the water as if to cleanse the whole planet. Aquamarine in the peaks of the waves, deep azure in the troughs. The horizon like a straight line of a fountain pen’s ink, and, above it, the lapis infinity of the sky.

  When the airspeed indicator reached two hundred, Parson repeated, “Gear down.” Colman put his hand on the gear handle and hesitated, as if moving it would lever open a door to realities too harsh to face. Then he placed it in the DOWN position.

  As expected, the indicators for the forward main gear continued to show their UP flags. But Parson felt and heard a thunk underneath him as the nose gear unlocked. And the indicators for the aft mains flipped from UP to the barber poles that meant IN TRANSIT, like the barest hint of a promise.

  “Pressure holding?” Parson asked.

  “So far, so good,” Dunne said.

  The aft gear extended and locked down. Their indicators displayed the green wheels of safe landing gear.

  “Well, that’s a little progress,” Colman said.

  The nose gear now showed red wheels. So at least the doors had opened, but the nosewheels had not fully extended and locked. Parson cursed himself for forgetting to glance at his watch’s second hand when Colman moved the gear handle. It shouldn’t have taken longer than twenty-five seconds to put down the wheels through normal means. He thought more time than that had passed, but in his pain and exhaustion he couldn’t be sure. Blazing nerve endings in his legs sent filaments of madness into his mind. By sheer will, he forced those filaments to retract.

  Finally, Parson felt a slight trundle, as if he’d driven over a speed bump. The nosewheels locked green.

  “You want me to go ahead with the emergency switches?” Colman asked. He opened the red guards over toggle switches for the forward main gear. They controlled electric motors to drive down the landing gear bogies when the hydraulics failed.

  “Yeah,” Parson said. “Remember, start counting seconds when you flip the switches. If the gear don’t go from UP to IN TRANSIT in five Mississippis, turn off the switches or you’ll burn out the motors.”

  “Yes, sir,” Colman said.

  Colman did not look surprised by that information. He knows what he’s doing, Parson realized. Just let him do it. The copilot clicked both switches, and Parson saw him mouth the words “Thousand one . . . thousand two.” The right forward gear began moving, but its symmetrical opposite remained at UP. After five seconds, Colman snapped off its switch.

  “Figures,” Dunne said. “I’ll check the breakers.” The flight engineer rose from his seat to scan a circuit breaker panel in the aft section of the flight deck. When he returned, he said, “All three are popped, and they won’t reset.”

  Those wheels would never come down, Parson realized. Lowering them required either hydraulics or electrics. Unlike smaller aircraf
t, the C-5 had no means of manually cranking down its landing gear. The hardware was just too heavy for that.

  Parson considered his newest predicament: two mains down on one side, only one on the other. Uneven wheels meant uneven braking. Uneven braking meant veering off the runway. Didn’t the book address that problem?

  “Let’s check that configuration chart in section three,” Parson said. “I believe we gotta raise the right forward now.” It hurt to move. It hurt not to move. It hurt to think.

  “We can’t, sir,” Dunne said. “We have no hydraulics to bring it up. The emergency system will only take it down.”

  Parson looked out at the ocean for a full minute. Then he said, “Can somebody bring me some more aspirin?”

  “I’ll be right back,” Gold said. She unbuckled and disappeared down the flight deck ladder. When she returned with two tablets, Parson had no more water within reach. He chewed them to a chalky powder, swallowed. Even moving his jaw muscles hurt his leg. He put his thumb and fingers around the manual trim handle and squeezed it without moving it, tried to get control of the pain. If he concentrated hard enough, gripped that handle and focused on a scratch across the windscreen, he could put the torment from his mind for about four seconds.

  “I’ll just take it real easy on the brakes,” Colman said.

  The words broke Parson’s momentary trance and slammed him back into misery like striking a wall. He drew a long breath and said, “Yeah, but not too easy. I’d rather go off the side of the runway at forty knots than off the end at a hundred.” He tried to keep his voice even, but its strain betrayed him.

  “Yes, sir,” Colman said. “You okay?”

  Parson nodded. Then he gripped the trim handle again and ground his teeth. How could he have lived most of his life taking the absence of pain for granted? Just not to hurt would be paradise. He stared at the scratch on the glass, hoping to Zen himself just a couple seconds of relief.

  Out the corner of his eye, he saw Colman reach up and press the master caution RESET button. Parson found it hard to care why.

  “It’s the number four pylon,” Dunne said. Colman and Dunne began to move switches on their panels, recite checklist items.

  Wading through currents of pain, Parson brought his mind to bear on the new task at hand. He checked the light on his annunciator panel: FIRE WARNING.

  WHATEVER HAD JUST HAPPENED, Gold thought, it must have been bad. The crew seemed to perform their first actions from memory, as if they’d rehearsed for this moment. No one stopped to explain anything to her. She leaned forward, saw the FIRE light.

  She experienced not quite panic, but more a sense of urgent need—like that time she’d exited a C-141 over Fort Bragg. When she’d felt no opening shock, she looked up to see the streamer: a twisted, writhing parachute that would not inflate. She’d pulled her reserve, and its canopy flowed, billowed, and opened just a couple hundred feet above the North Carolina clay. Gold burned it in and turned her ankle, but the jumpmaster called it a textbook recovery from a malfunction.

  This time she had no rip cord to pull, no action she could take. She could only hope whatever the crew was doing, it would work.

  “I still got a FIRE light,” Dunne said. “How does it look out there?”

  Colman peered out his window. “In flames,” he said.

  Dunne pressed a button on a panel over his head. “I’ll keep shooting it with nitrogen,” he said.

  The crew began running some kind of emergency checklist. To Gold, the calls and responses sounded like an incantation or a catechism. She rose from her seat to see outside.

  Now, instead of sparks, the aircraft trailed ropes of black smoke. It boiled from the right wing’s outboard engine and the structure that attached the engine to the wing. The smoke plume expanded behind the aircraft, marked its progress over the ocean. Orange flames wrapped clawlike around the pylon. Sheet metal buckled and darkened as the fire spread. Gold knew little about aircraft design, but she did know the wing above that burning pylon contained fuel tanks.

  “Is it growing?” Parson asked.

  “A little,” Colman said.

  Dunne pressed that overhead button again. “I might be able to keep it off the wing as long as the nitrogen holds out,” he said.

  On that thread of hope, Gold searched Dunne’s panel for anything that looked like nitrogen quantity. She saw no such gauge. Apparently, it didn’t exist. So they had no idea how much nitrogen they had.

  “If I have to,” Parson said, “I’ll ditch the airplane. That’ll put out the damned fire.” And drown anyone not able-bodied enough to get out, Gold knew. Including Parson.

  “Let me try to keep it knocked down,” Dunne said. He pressed the button again. Gold saw that whenever he did so, the flames weaved as if dodging a blow. Their color shifted and lightened as the spray of liquid nitrogen stole oxygen from the fire. But when the spray stopped, the flames reddened and climbed. The blast of the slipstream did not blow out the fire, only fed it. And then Dunne would press his fire suppression button again.

  “Loadmasters,” Parson called on interphone, “make sure everybody has an LPU.”

  That, Gold understood. Life preserver units.

  “Yes, sir,” came the answer.

  “How far out are we?” Dunne asked.

  Parson looked down at the center console. Charts and other paperwork littered it like so many dead leaves. He examined a digital readout and said, “About a hundred miles.” Then he moved a switch and said, “Reach Two-Zero, Air Evac Eight-Four is on fire. Our position is ninety-eight miles southeast of Johnston. Be advised we may have to put it in the water.”

  No response came for long seconds. Then: “Reach Two-Zero copies all. We’re inbound, about three-zero-zero miles out.”

  Gold watched Parson, strapped into his seat, prepared to ride it to the bottom of the Pacific. She thought of Mahsoud, Justin, and Baitullah, and her eyes brimmed. So much promise and so much pain. And now it came down to the spread of fire, the supply of nitrogen, the stretch of nautical miles.

  “Hey, loads,” Parson said on interphone.

  “Sir?”

  “Give everybody an EPOS, too. Open them up and show the pax how to use them.”

  “Roger that.”

  When a loadmaster climbed the steps, he handed Gold and the crew members their LPUs. Then he brought her a vinyl pouch labeled EMERGENCY PASSENGER OXYGEN SYSTEM. He tore off a red strip to open the pouch. Then he withdrew a plastic hood with a narrow oxygen cylinder. A lanyard connected the cylinder to a red knob.

  “If it gets smoky,” the loadmaster said, “pull the knob, stretch open the neck seal, and place this over your head.”

  “Got it,” Gold said.

  “It’ll give you just a few minutes of breathing to get out of the airplane.”

  Gold realized Parson was preparing his crew and passengers for two possibilities: a ditching in the ocean or a flaming landing.

  “Is anybody back in the courier compartment?” Parson asked.

  “Negative,” the loadmaster said. “Just the bodies.”

  “All right,” Parson said, “so it’ll just be the four of us up here when we land. If we make it to the island, open the aft ramp as soon as we touch down. Don’t waste any time because I don’t know how long you’ll have hydraulics.”

  “And if we ditch?”

  “Deploy a life raft if you can. But remember, fuel can burn on top of the water. If the fire doesn’t go out when we hit the drink, just use the LPUs and swim as far from the aircraft as possible.”

  The loadmaster looked at his commander, seemed to search for something to say, then only nodded.

  “A C-17’s on the way,” Parson said. “They’ll mark your position.”

  Your position, Gold thought. He didn’t say our position. Gold looked out at the fire. Flames danced along the length of the pylon and lapped at the underside of the wing. The smoke had thickened. But when Dunne hit the fire with more spray of nitrogen, the smoke dampened
enough for Gold to see the exposed ribs of the pylon. Most of the sheet metal had melted away. A dark stain spread into the wing’s leading edge.

  The smoke erupted once more. Dunne pressed his fire suppression button. Then he pressed it twice again.

  “I’m not getting a MANIFOLD light,” he said.

  “What’s that mean?” Colman asked.

  “Nitrogen’s gone.”

  Flames enveloped the pylon and flowed across the top of the wing. Gold thought she could smell the fire, a chemical smolder that seemed to have invaded the air-conditioning. The odor grew stronger as the smoke trail widened, like the foul tang of a bonfire.

  29

  The FMS showed fifty miles to Johnston Atoll. Parson squinted into the distance, tried to find a speck of sand or coral. Twice he thought he glimpsed something solid, only to recognize it as a wave’s shadow or a glint of light reflected off a swell. Oceanic mirages. Probably still too far out to see it, anyway. And what if lightning-damaged instruments had him a little off course?

  Sheets of flame shimmered farther across the right wing. Smoke spewed at odd angles from underneath the slats, between seams of aluminum.

  “I got a fire light for the inboard section,” Dunne said.

  Parson looked back at the flight engineer’s overhead panel. Two red lights now instead of one. Time for a decision. He turned his wafer switch to PA.

  “Prepare to ditch,” Parson said. On the panel above him, he opened a red guard for the alarm horn’s switch. He gave six short blasts of the horn, the signal to stand by to hit the water.

  “Sir, are you sure?” Dunne asked.

  “If we keep screwing around with this fire,” Parson said, “that wing will blow off, and nobody will get out.”

  Colman regarded Parson, let out a long breath, and placed his left hand on the throttles.

  “Try to put it parallel to the waves,” Parson said. “It’s going to bounce when it first strikes the water. Just hold it in the landing attitude until it comes down again.”