On Glorious Wings

by Stephen Coonts

  It was Sullivan’s choice. Apparently he had already made his final decision, and persuading him otherwise now could be both difficult and dangerous—particularly, Dan reminded himself, when the persuader occupied a subordinate position. Much would depend on how thoroughly Sullivan had been able to retake command of himself. For a while, he had been perilously near the breaking point. The signs were unmistakable; yet now he seemed again forceful and sure of his way.

  Dan tried to whistle but the tune that came to his lips was mournful and he soon stopped.

  Would Sullivan listen to an old man he had every right to classify as obsolete? How secret was his pity for Dan Roman—a beat-up has-been? It was the custom these days for the younger men, highly trained in prescribed schools, to politely tolerate the old timers. They respected them, not for what they could do, because often as not they were past the keen edge of top flying, but rather the respect came from an appreciation of what they had done. They had built a new world, and it had passed them by very swiftly, on the very speed which gave it life. Old timers, which included any pilot who had flown before 1935 or so, were like antique furniture—admired and even loved, perhaps, but often suspected of functional instability. And in recent years, the science of aerial flight was progressing so rapidly even the younger men were having difficulty keeping pace with it. Yet dammit . . . this situation was not science. It was luck.

  Dan forced himself to remember Garfield’s words. “You’ll find out you’ve had it, Dan. This is a kid’s game now . . . young, bright guys with a cap full of education and minds that work like high-pressure pumps. Hang up your helmet and goggles and forget it.” So?

  Sullivan, except for his temporary lapse, was exactly the kind of younger man Garfield was talking about. He was even more. He already had a great deal of over-ocean experience behind him, and he would have every reason to discount the opinions of a man he knew had principally confined himself to flying smaller airplanes over dry land. And he could be right, Dan—both in his refusal to accept your ideas and in the decision he had already made. You really haven’t admitted that.

  He held out his cigarette so that it was directly beneath the ventilator and let the dripping stream of rainwater extinguish it. Am I wrong in believing that Sullivan should carry on until the tanks are dry? Am I wrong in believing that, by pressing luck, we can make it? Am I committing another crime in trying to change his decision . . . and maybe succeeding?

  He rose and crossed the compartment to the bunk. Reaching over it, he pulled three life vests from their storage place. He removed the rubberized protective cover from one and placed the life vest over his head. He tied the straps around his legs and chest, then he set deliberately to the task of unfastening the life raft from the heavy straps which held it over the bunk.

  In its disinflated state the raft resembled an overlarge bedroll. It was very heavy and awkward to handle. Later, when the ship had come to rest on the sea, they would pull the emergency release on the astrodome and presumably have strength remaining to push the raft straight up through the small opening.

  He moved the raft to the ready position by the flight-deck passageway and, picking up the two remaining vests, walked forward. He handed one of the vests to Leonard.

  “The color may not become you, Lennie . . . but they’re in fashion.”

  “Thanks for nothing.” Leonard stared solemnly at the yellow vest. “I never thought I’d really have to put one of these things on.”

  “Better check the cartridges and make sure they’re okay.”

  “Yeah. . . .”

  As Leonard pulled the cover from his vest, Dan moved forward to Sullivan. He placed the last vest on his lap. Sullivan said thanks, but he kept his eyes on the instruments.

  Dan sat down in the right seat. Taking his time, moving with elaborate slowness, he loosened his tie, buckled his safety belt, and put on his headphones. Then he leaned across the control pedestal to Sullivan.

  “Our air speed looks a little better.”

  “A bit.”

  “Lennie says if we can pick up ten minutes we can make it.”

  “If you didn’t know . . . Lennie has always been an optimist.” Still Sullivan kept his eyes grimly on the instruments. The amber-red light from the panel cast deep shadows upward on his face as if a sculptor had worked at his features only from below; his strong chin and his mouth were unnaturally chiseled and his eyes appeared half-wild in their concentration.

  “Lennie might be right,” Dan said, without seeming to care.

  “If he’s wrong we’ve had it . . . maybe wipe out a few bridges or apartment houses. I can’t risk it.”

  “It’s going to be a risk ditching. It will be rough down there.”

  “I know it.”

  “If we hit wrong, we’ve had it, too.”

  “I know that, dammit!” A new sharpness came to Sullivan’s voice.

  Dan waited for his mouth to relax. “Maybe now . . . we might try easing off a little on the power?”

  “A message came from Garfield while you were back there. He suggested a lower rpm.”

  “Why not try it?”

  “I thought about it a long time ago. It won’t work. She’s barely flying now.”

  “Any objection if I try?”

  For the first time Sullivan looked directly at Dan. It was only for the space of a second, yet Dan saw that there was neither hostility nor friendliness in his eyes. He was dead—frozen hard in his decision.

  When he looked away Dan reached for the three operating propeller controls. He gradually pulled them back until the engines were only turning over sixteen hundred revolutions per minute. The sound of the engines fell to a low murmur, almost as if they had ceased to work at all. Dan ignored the placard which boldly stated that the engines should not be operated at such a low rpm. At a time like this it was a law to be broken. He told himself that nothing would break; not for a while, anyway. He watched the air-speed. It, too, was falling off. One hundred and thirty . . . one hundred and twenty-five . . . one hundred and twenty . . . one hundred and fifteen. But the fuel flow meters also dropped. She was burning thirty pounds per hour less for each engine. Enough, maybe enough to make San Francisco!

  Sullivan squirmed uneasily in his seat. His hands gripped the control wheel so tightly it became a rigid part of his hands and his arms.

  “It won’t work! She’s going to stall on me!”

  Dan pushed forward on the throttles until they were wide open. The combination of very low rpm and full manifold pressure, he knew, was terrifically hard on the engines. The fuel flow increased only slightly, but the air-speed returned to one hundred and twenty.

  “This is no good,” Sullivan said. “We’ll blow a jug.”

  “What’s the difference? We’ll blow ’em all if we ditch. Hang on. We’ll make it.”

  “You’re crazy. We’ve tried it and it won’t do. Put those props back up where they belong!” The sweat was beginning to varnish Sullivan’s face again. It broke out very suddenly as if welling up from a thousand springs. Fighting for a hundred feet of altitude that he had lost, he pulled back angrily on the control column and suddenly a quiver passed through the ship—the first warning of a stall. Sullivan quickly pushed the nose down again.

  “Put those goddamned props back where they were!”

  “Nothing doin’, skipper.”

  “That’s an order!”

  Dan kept his hands on his knees. Sullivan looked at him in astonished anger and then reached for the controls himself. Dan caught his arm and held it firmly.

  “Hang on, chum! We’ll make it this way! You can do it, man! Just hang on. Fly, and let me pray!”

  “Are you tired of living? If we try an instrument approach at San Francisco we’ll run out of gas right in the middle of it!”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. Nothing is for sure yet. Try it this way for thirty minutes, will you? Don’t be so goddamned anxious to go for a swim!”

  “It’s crazy! She’s starting
to shake again!” The air-speed had indeed fallen off to one hundred and ten—and Sullivan had lost another valuable hundred feet of altitude.

  “Let her shake! The hell with it as long as she don’t fall off on a wing. Let her mush down a little if you have to. Look at our gas consumption . . . only one-fifty per hour! Hang on and fly, man!”

  Sullivan glanced at the fuel flow meters. His eyes that had been so empty of hope now brightened a little. He pulled his hand slowly away from the propeller controls.

  “If it doesn’t work,” Dan said, “you won’t have to get me fired. I’ll quit.”

  Sullivan took a deep breath and sighed heavily.

  “If it doesn’t work . . . it won’t make any difference what you do.”

  Then, like a man preparing to jump across an abyss he knew was impossibly wide, Sullivan set himself to the intricate, nerve-scraping struggle of flying an airplane that was not really flying.

  ALONE

  FROM

  THE SHEPHERD

  by FREDERICK FORSYTH

  Frederick Forsyth is one of the premier thriller writers of all time. His masterpiece was Day of the Jackal, which receives my nomination as the best thriller ever written. Among his monster international bestsellers are The Odessa File, No Comebacks, The Dogs of War, and The Fourth Protocol. Yet before he was a writer Forsyth was a pilot; at the age of nineteen he was the youngest fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force.

  In the following excerpt from The Shepherd the narrator is flying a single-seat Vampire jet from a base in southern Germany home to England on Christmas Eve. One of the first jet fighters, the Vampire had fuel for just eighty minutes of flight and lacked an ejection seat. Alone, over the North Sea on a cold winter’s night . . . here is how Forsyth told it.

  The problem started ten minutes out over the North Sea, and it started so quietly that it was several minutes before I realized I had one at all. For some time I had been unaware that the low hum coming through my headphones into my ears had ceased, to be replaced by the strange nothingness of total silence. I must have been failing to concentrate, my thoughts being of home and my waiting family. The first time I knew was when I flicked a glance downward to check my course on the compass. Instead of being rock-steady on 265 degrees, the needle was drifting lazily round the clock, passing through east, west, south, and north with total impartiality.

  I swore a most unseasonal sentiment against the compass and the instrument fitter who should have checked it for 100-percent reliability. Compass failure at night, even a brilliant moonlit night such as the one beyond the cockpit Perspex, was no fun. Still, it was not too serious: there was a standby compass—the alcohol kind. But, when I glanced at it, that one seemed to be in trouble, too. The needle was swinging wildly. Apparently something had jarred the case—which isn’t uncommon. In any event, I could call up Lakenheath in a few minutes and they would give me a GCA—Ground Controlled Approach—the second-by-second instructions that a well-equipped airfield can give a pilot to bring him home in the worst of weathers, following his progress on ultraprecise radar screens, watching him descend all the way to the tarmac, tracing his position in the sky yard by yard and second by second. I glanced at my watch: thirty-four minutes airborne. I could try to raise Lakenheath now, at the outside limit of my radio range.

  Before trying Lakenheath, the correct procedure would be to inform Channel D, to which I was tuned, of my little problem, so they could advise Lakenheath that I was on my way without a compass. I pressed the TRANSMIT button and called:

  “Celle, Charlie Delta, Celle, Charlie Delta, calling North Beveland Control. . . .”

  I stopped. There was no point in going on. Instead of the lively crackle of static and the sharp sound of my own voice coming back into my own ears, there was a muffled murmur inside my oxygen mask. My own voice speaking . . . and going nowhere. I tried again. Same result. Far back across the wastes of the black and bitter North Sea, in the warm, cheery concrete complex of North Beveland Control, men sat back from their control panel, chatting and sipping their steaming coffee and cocoa. And they could not hear me. The radio was dead.

  Fighting down the rising sense of panic that can kill a pilot faster than anything else, I swallowed and slowly counted to ten. Then I switched to Channel F and tried to raise Lakenheath, ahead of me amid the Suffolk countryside, lying in its forest of pine trees south of Thetford, beautifully equipped with its GCA system for bringing home lost aircraft. On Channel F the radio was as dead as ever. My own muttering into the oxygen mask was smothered by the surrounding rubber. The steady whistle of my own jet engine behind me was my only answer.

  It’s a very lonely place, the sky, and even more so the sky on a winter’s night. And a single-seater jet fighter is a lonely home, a tiny steel box held aloft on stubby wings, hurled through the freezing emptiness by a blazing tube throwing out the strength of six thousand horses every second. But the loneliness is offset, canceled out, by the knowledge that at the touch of a button on the throttle, the pilot can talk to other human beings, people who care about him, men and women who staff a network of stations around the world; just one touch of that button, the TRANSMIT button, and scores of them in control towers across the land that are tuned to his channel can hear him call for help. When the pilot transmits, on every one of those screens a line of light streaks from the center of the screen to the outside rim, which is marked with figures, from one to three hundred and sixty. Where the streak of light hits the ring, that is where the aircraft lies in relation to the control tower listening to him. The control towers are linked, so with two cross bearings they can locate his position to within a few hundred yards. He is not lost any more. People begin working to bring him down.

  The radar operators pick up the little dot he makes on their screens from all the other dots; they call him up and give him instructions. “Begin your descent now, Charlie Delta. We have you now. . . .” Warm, experienced voices, voices which control an array of electronic devices that can reach out across the winter sky, through the ice and rain, above the snow and cloud, to pluck the lost one from his deadly infinity and bring him down to the flare-lit runway that means home and life itself.

  When the pilot transmits. But for that he must have a radio. Before I had finished testing Channel J, the international emergency channel, and obtained the same negative result, I knew my ten-channel radio set was as dead as the dodo.

  It had taken the RAF two years to train me to fly their fighters for them, and most of that time had been spent in training precisely for emergency procedures. The important thing, they used to say in flying school, is not to know how to fly in perfect conditions; it is to fly through an emergency and stay alive. Now the training was beginning to take effect.

  While I was vainly testing my radio channels, my eyes scanned the instrument panel in front of me. The instruments told their own message. It was no coincidence the compass and the radio had failed together; both worked off the aircraft’s electrical circuits. Somewhere beneath my feet, amid the miles of brightly colored wiring that make up the circuits, there had been a main fuse blowout. I reminded myself, idiotically, to forgive the instrument fitter and blame the electrician. Then I took stock of the nature of my disaster.

  The first thing to do in such a case, I remembered old Flight Sergeant Norris telling us, is to reduce throttle setting from cruise speed to a slower setting, to give maximum flight endurance.

  “We don’t want to waste valuable fuel, do we, gentlemen? We might need it later. So we reduce the power setting from 10,000 revolutions per minute to 7,200. That way we will fly a little slower, but we will stay in the air rather longer, won’t we, gentlemen?” He always referred to us all being in the same emergency at the same time, did Sergeant Norris. I eased the throttle back and watched the rev counter. It operates on its own generator and so I hadn’t lost that, at least. I waited until the Goblin was turning over at about 7,200 rpm, and felt the aircraft slow down. The nose rose fractionally, so I adjusted
the flight trim to keep her straight and level.

  The main instruments in front of a pilot’s eyes are six, including the compass. The five others are the air-speed indicator, the altimeter, the vertical-speed indicator, the bank indicator (which tells him if he’s banking, i.e., turning, to left or right), and the slip indicator (which tells him if he’s skidding crabwise across the sky). Two of these are electrically operated, and they had gone the same way as my compass. That left me with the three pressure-operated instruments—air-speed indicator, altimeter and vertical-speed indicator. In other words, I knew how fast I was going, how high I was and if I were diving or climbing.

  It is perfectly possible to land an aircraft with only these three instruments, judging the rest by those old navigational aids, the human eyes. Possible, that is, in conditions of brilliant weather, by daylight and with no cloud in the sky. It is possible, just possible, though not advisable, to try to navigate a fast-moving jet by dead reckoning, using the eyes, looking down and identifying the curve of the coast where it makes an easily recognizable pattern, spotting a strange-shaped reservoir, the glint of a river that the map strapped to the thigh says can only be the Ouse, or the Trent, or the Thames. From lower down it is possible to differentiate Norwich Cathedral tower from Lincoln Cathedral tower, if you know the countryside intimately. By night it is not possible.

  The only things that show up at night, even on a bright moonlit night, are the lights. These have patterns when seen from the sky. Manchester looks different from Birmingham; Southampton can be recognized from the shape of its massive harbor and Solent, cut out in black (the sea shows up black) against the carpet of the city’s lights. I knew Norwich very well, and if I could identify the great curving bulge of the Norfolk coast line from Lowestoft, round through Yarmouth to Cromer, I could find Norwich, the only major sprawl of lights set twenty miles inland from all points on the coast. Five miles north of Norwich, I knew, was the fighter airfield of Merriam St. George, whose red indicator beacon would be blipping out its Morse identification signal into the night. There, if they only had the sense to switch on the airfield lights when they heard me screaming at low level up and down the airfield, I could land safely.