Before either Cricket or Robert could answer, Nick’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “We have been taken over by a militant group set on redirecting our flight to a foreign country. If we do as these men say, I have been assured that no one will get hurt. At this point, I do not know their politics or their purpose. Need I remind you that while on this ship you are under my command. It’s my intention to get everyone of you home safely to your loved ones. Follow their orders!”
The drone of the engines filled the void in the cabin when the PA system clicked off. The soldiers looked at each other in disbelief. Robert stared at the major, barely concealing his contempt and definitely not inviting any further conversation.
“The Indians in Oklahoma used to conduct sneak attacks on neighboring villages, but they had a purpose—horses generally, sometimes women. We don’t have either on board, so what’s this all about?” Even under extreme pressure Red had a knack for remaining cool.
“I’ve watched your American movies, and we are not a bunch of Indians stealing horses,” Vladimir said. “Just follow my orders.” He handed Red new flight plans from his position at the rear of the cockpit, just as two P-38s pulled up alongside the C-47.
Nick could see that the planes were Russian by their markings.
The fighter on his side threw a line of machine-gun fire across the nose of his ship as a warning to cooperate and that they were armed. Both P-38s dropped below and behind the C-47, but still in view out of Nick’s and Red’s peripheral vision.
“They will escort us for the remainder of our time together,” Vladimir said. “They will be useful in guiding us below radar making the planes disappear, once over the mountains.”
“Those are our goddamn planes from our base, I’ll bet,” Red said rhetorically in disgust.
Vladimir’s smile demonstrated a complex depth to his command experience never observed by Nick or Red in their day-to-day encounters in the past.
After a few minutes reviewing the plans, Red said, “This isn’t going to be easy. We’re not in a P-38, and, if you didn’t notice, the weather conditions aren’t the greatest. There is a high probability of icing with very limited visibility.” He handed the new flight plan to Nick with undeniable disdain.
“Jesus, Vladimir. We’ve got people on board. Flying below radar is very risky,” Nick said after a brief look. “Besides, these mountains will be treacherous. There’s a reason we fly around them.”
“Just do as the plan calls for. Cricket assures me you two are the best. He has mapped a route that minimizes this risk you talk about. Once you clear the uncharted mountain area to the northwest of McKinley, following the Yukon River will be a piece of cake, as you Americans like to say.”
Nick reflected on the words “making the planes disappear.” It was a phrase describing nap-of-the-earth, or NOE, low-level–type flight used to avoid detection. Geographical features, such as valleys and folds, would be exploited to stay below radar. The two P-38s would function like two field dogs flushing out the tricky spots, making up for the C-47’s lack of agility. This plan of theirs might just work, he thought. He looked at Red with a “tell me what to do and I’ll do it” expression on his face before saying, “Can we even do this?”
“The ship will handle the elevation okay if we avoid icing. The headwind and downdrafts will be a son of a bitch. Most of these mountains are uncharted—visibility will be key,” Red replied with a characteristically accurate assessment.
Vladimir added, “No radio communication. Understand? If you so much as break this silence I will shoot one of your passengers at random.”
“Understood.” Nick paused to light a cigarette. “Shit, Vladimir, I thought we were friends. Our countries, I mean.”
“This isn’t about friendship, Captain.”
“Then what is it about?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. Now start making your new headings.”
Cricket knew that the next forty minutes were critical. He looked at his watch. It was 1230. By 1310 the ship would be on the backside of the mountains headed northwest toward the valley and the Yukon River. They would follow it west, as best they could below radar, to the small outpost of Koyukuk. Once over the Norton Sound and the Bering Sea, their heading would be set directly toward Anadyr, Russia, for an airstrip specifically constructed on the Kamchatka Peninsula for this flight. The range of the C-47 was fifteen hundred miles, well within their target even with headwinds—maximum flight time of four hours. But just to compensate, Cricket made sure the tanks were full and the cargo was at a minimum. He had been over this plan a hundred times, first with his GRU handlers and Agent Sirak, and then with his “team.”
From Sirak’s point of view the risks were minimal. When the world found out that the Americans were building a super-bomb site within striking range of Russia, they would think it prudent that Russia act preemptively. The United States didn’t run the world, and it was Sirak’s job to ensure that Stalin would have equal say with Roosevelt in post-war politics. As far as the immediate plan was concerned, he knew he had the best pilot team and a route that would be hard to track. These guys were skilled at flying, and the mountains would act as a radar shield if they stayed low. The riskiest part was crossing the mountains in front of them. The crosswinds were always unpredictable and a downdraft could force a plane to drop thousands of feet. That day, they had the added threat of icing conditions.
“Put your trust in God and Pratt & Whitney today, Red,” Nick said as they got one of the few clear glimpses of Mt. McKinley they would get. It was unbelievable in beauty and size. They were currently at ten thousand feet and in a gradual climb. The mountain rose to over twenty thousand feet, giving them a “King Kong and Empire State Building” experience. The wind raced over the highest bluffs, pushing trailers of snow a mile from its edge. The mountain and its own weather pattern were beginning to block the setting winter sun, which was scheduled to disappear at 1615. Nick flicked on the landing lights to assist in the transition from twilight to dark shadows, knowing it would happen soon.
As quickly as the mountain came, it was gone again with a heavy lenticular cloud cover separating it from the ship, leaving only a vague dark outline of the existing peaks. “Keep our heading due north while I try to get above this junk,” Nick said.
“Roger.”
“It’s likely that this ride is going to get rough. Tell our passengers that we want them in their seats with their seatbelts on. That includes Robert and Cricket. I don’t want someone getting shot by accident. That means you, too, Vladimir. Take the jump seat behind us.”
“Roger, Captain.” Red unbuckled so as to move back to the cabin to pass on the orders first-hand.
“Just do your job,” Vladimir said, cautioning Red.
Robert easily maintained command while buckled up, as his jump seat was designed to give him full view of the cabin and passengers. In the rear, Cricket buckled in while sitting on a duffle bag to allow him to keep his gun trained on the passengers. Red tried to pinpoint a weakness as he surveyed the cabin. He found none.
“Get settled in, Red,” Nick said upon Red’s return. “The next five minutes are going to be interesting. We’re icing a bit, but we should be okay. Can you see that ridge at ten o’clock, between those two peaks? I think we can use it as an alleyway through this maze.”
“Whatever you say, Captain.”
“Climb to 11,500 feet.” Nick vividly remembered his experience with Captain Smith in the Valley of the 10,000 Smokes on the Aleutian Chain. He knew instinctively that he needed a greater clearance margin as none of these lesser peaks in the McKinley Range had recorded elevations.
Each soldier offered his own prayer of safe passage as the crosswinds hammered the ship while it cleared the first ridgeline. The visibility was approximately one mile, perhaps a little more, as they entered a huge bowl-shaped valley between peaks. Complete desolation. Nick would only have about thirty seconds before the next hurdle of peaks. “What do you think,
Red?”
“About the same elevation, but I feel a little icing. Do you?”
“Roger that. Change altitude to twelve thousand.” At that exact moment, and before Nick could begin his climb to the higher level, the ship was pancaked by a downdraft that pushed it almost a thousand feet below where they needed to be. Visibility went to zero as the ship lost altitude uncontrollably in the darkness of the mountain’s shadows and clouds. Nick had never experienced such an extreme wind as it rolled easterly over the peak in front of them creating a crushing force and causing a virtual whiteout. Nick struggled to regain control of the ship. He fought the pressure of the downdraft, forcing the C-47 into an unintentional hard bank. He had to find an escape—the bowl had them trapped. They only had seconds—they had to get lift!
The torque from the twin Pratt & Whitney engines caused the C-47 to nearly explode with noise and vibration as he fought the effects of losing control. “It’s not enough … It’s not enough!” Nick heard himself say. Passengers on the plane were panicked, and the crew was helpless. Within seconds they cleared the cloud cover and gained visibility. The rock and snow-packed ridge leading to the unnamed peak in front of them went by like a View-Master on steroids. The final climb had to happen if any of them were going to survive. “C’mn baby! You can do it. A little bit more!”
“Keep the hammer down, pard. I can see the top.” Red gripped the sides of his seat as if he were Pecos Bill manhandling a West Texas tornado.
Instantly, all control was lost as a crosswind skid the ship one hundred yards toward the unforgiving rocks, ice, and snow. They were helpless as the port wingtip clipped a mountain wall and folded the wing up and back, shearing the bolts holding it to the fuselage. The snow mushroomed from the ship’s impact. The back of the fuselage broke at the loading door, tearing the landing gear assemblies loose and separating the ship into two parts. The forward velocity launched the cockpit portion forward over five hundred yards up and over the crest of the ridge with its bottom acting as a skid. The remainder of the ship rebounded from the precipitous side of the ridge, breaking the right wing loose, and plummeted fifteen hundred feet into a steep snow field high in the glacier. The soldiers were tossed upside down like surfers being pushed twenty feet deep in a wipeout without any sense of up. Nick held a brief vision of his port engine buried in an ice-encrusted vertical wall high above the glacier floor.
The force of the impact sucked the wind out of his body. As he was gasping for breath, choking, reaching for anything that would help, everyone found their expression in his uncontrollable cry for something to hang on to. “Agh, agh, agh!” Then blackness.
CHAPTER 39
Nick was unconscious from the collision of the C-47 nose section with the large boulder outcropping two hundred yards below the eleven-thousand-foot crest on the windward side of the ridge. The scraping metal sounds of the forward fuselage against the exposed rock surface of the ridge screamed for only a few moments as it was rocketed forward by the force of the crash. The sound of the metal was immediately swallowed by the buffeting winds as they continued their own assault on this raw, lesser peak in the McKinley Range. If the three men in this forward section of the crash heard the squeal and screech of metal against rock, it was lost immediately in their anguish and unconsciousness, and death. There were no trees or vegetation at that elevation, just the occasional exposure of crags and rocks showing through, where the ice and crusted snow had not taken hold. Only the raging winds driving a weather front up the mountain’s face seemed to have life—a harsh existence with windchills at ten below zero.
Nick heard himself moan as he gained consciousness. He had no idea how long it had been since the crash. His pain was intense as he struggled to remember what had happened. His seat had broken loose during impact, slamming the left side of his body forward and twisting it to the left. He had multiple fractures, broken ribs, deep lacerations to his face and scalp, and, undoubtedly, internal injuries. But it was the femur penetrating through the left leg of his flight uniform that was the source of pure torture.
The cabin was filled with blood. He looked to his friend in the co-pilot seat. “Aw, no!” he cried out, seeing Red’s body still strapped in and his skull crushed against the instrument panel. The loss of a good friend and the best airman he had ever flown with flooded him with emotions as he reached over and touched Red to confirm the obvious. “God dammit!” He tried to take a deep breath to get control of his emotions, but the pain was excruciating. “Nobody was like you, Red. I’m real sorry.” Nick’s immediate remorse for the circumstances and the outcome shrouded his thinking with guilt. How did I allow this to happen?
Nick tried to shift in his seat to see Vladimir. He’d rip his head off, if he could, for what he’d done to Red. The pain from the movement screamed throughout Nick’s body. He was pinned down by the crushed instrument panel and flight control column; it was impossible to move other than to make a slight turn of his head. What he saw in his peripheral vision so shocked him that his initial reaction was utter disbelief. Vladimir was still strapped in his seat behind the pilot’s seat. He was alive but had been impaled by a three-foot metal shaft that had once been part of the ship’s structure. It was as if he had been lanced completely through the upper torso by some mysterious medieval knight. Vladimir’s eyes stared in disbelief, communicating the terror of his situation. Beyond Vladimir, what was once the cabin door to the nose section, there was nothing but a gaping hole, which is where the rest of the ship used to be. The smell of burning oil and stressed metal from the crash filled the air. Shredded wiring, smashed components, and the paper from flight manuals and logs completed the collage of disaster.
“Can you speak?” Nick had heard Vladimir murmuring in Russian. It sounded like ramblings to Nick, but since he did not speak Russian, he didn’t really know.
“You almost made it,” Vladimir replied, regaining his English and suppressing the obvious pain. His body only allowed him very shallow breaths. He struggled to reconcile his disbelief in his wound with the reality of the crash. Cricket was so confident that this route would work that the takeover team never questioned this scenario.
“Is that all you can say? This is crazy. If any of us survive this mess there will be fuckin’ hell to pay.” Nick was beyond angry, but he was helpless to do anything.
“Is Robert back there? I can’t see,” Nick asked, instinctively checking on his traitor crew member.
“No. He moved to the main cabin before the crash. What do we do now, Captain?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. I’m completely pinned in with lots of broken body parts. Not sure I can get out. Your situation looks pretty grim, too?”
“I’m afraid to move with this metal sticking through me. There’s blood everywhere.”
“Anything else?” Nick’s reflection on his question was hell yes—there’s a whole lot wrong! People are dead, we’re all probably going to die and for what—a Russian militant plot! But, instead, Nick knew he needed to get control of himself and focus on the situation at hand. Rescue efforts were probably being organized for when the weather broke. They needed to figure out a way to stay alive and not freeze to death.
“It’s cold … real cold … feel dizzy. Not good,” Vladimir replied, fading back into unconsciousness.
“Stay with me. You hear!” Nick commanded. “Can you get free of your seat belt?” Nick knew that Vladimir’s chances would decline rapidly if the bleeding couldn’t be stopped. “If you can help me out of the cockpit, I might be able to help you stop the bleeding, but I’m stuck.”
No answer.
The added smells generated by the friction of metal on metal, the torn wiring, and leaking cockpit fluid lines filled Nick’s senses. He thought about the emergency equipment that was stored in the rear of the craft—smoke bombs, a flare pistol, and the Gibson Girl, so named because of its hourglass shape. It included a radio transmitter and hand-crank generator that would be invaluable. They were all lost because of w
here they were stored.
The P-38 escort on the underbelly side of the C-47 lost altitude in the same downdraft that affected Nick and Red. It ran headlong into a block of ice on the mountainside’s sheer wall, exploding and killing the pilot instantly. The collapsed ball of wreckage fell into the valley below and was completely buried by a trailing avalanche caused by the explosion. The second P-38 escort found a hole in the clouds and climbed to safety. After circling the crash area twice it continued back on course to Russia, careful not to attract any attention from radar.
Immediately after impact and the loss of the port wing and engine, the right wing and tail broke off and fell into the snowfield below. The starboard motor broke off separately and rolled down the steep slope, causing an additional avalanche further down the snowfield, which completely buried the motor. Because of their large airfoil surfaces, the wing and tail landed flat and virtually intact with the aileron still in place. When the remaining portion of the crash finally came to rest at nine thousand feet, two thousand feet below the cockpit, the main fuselage and the wing lay parallel to each other half buried in avalanche snow at the confluence of two large and uncharted glaciers fifteen hundred feet below the ridge where they struck. Passengers who weren’t wearing their seat belts, carry-on equipment, personal items, and all the emergency communication equipment were spread over hundreds of acres of snowfield, yawning crevasses, and ice caves with deep, treacherous drop-offs. Terrific downdrafts continued to blow over the crest and mountain cornice and sweep throughout the freezing valley below. Death was everywhere.
The impact of the fifteen-hundred-foot freefall of the fuselage on the valley floor killed almost everyone on board. Those who escaped death on impact were suffocated by a small avalanche triggered by the crash. The aft end of the fuselage was packed by the snow. Major Gordon survived, the courier bag still attached to his broken body. He clutched it from instinct in his semi-unconscious state. A negro sergeant from Harlem who had an early start on his leave and was drunk with his buddies also survived. He hadn’t bothered to buckle up and continued his relationship with a bottle of Jack Daniels during the flight. As luck would have it, he was thrown from the fuselage just prior to impact on the snow field floor. Ronald Reisdorf and Lt. Max O’Reilly died on impact. Cricket was thrown from the plane at the point of initial impact and fell a thousand feet into a deep mountain crevasse.
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