NO COFFEE
We are sinking, he thought. Slowly we will sink to a quick and grinding end. His calmness to this situation surprised and dismayed him. He should feel anxious, but no. Many things had happened quickly and he still was not aware of all of them. He was late, maybe too late.
The suddenness of the events, as he thought of them, had numbed him into an unexpected stupor. When he was in training he was expected to react frantically to sinking, but he had not done that today. He felt that he sat in thick, clear oil, watching himself and things around him move viscously. Calmly, almost sleepily, he adjusted the levers to settings that should halt the sinking. These settings reversed the sinking in all previous circumstances. He optimistically stared at the levers to confirm he had set them to the correct positions. Yes, the levers were set correctly, he said to himself. His instructors warned him that irreversible sinking might happen someday, but hopefully not. He could have been one of the lucky ones, but no.
He had time. Certainly five minutes, maybe even ten. He knew he was thinking very slowly, and wanted to think faster but it was impossible for him—too much had happened so fast.
He concentrated on the multiple dials in front of him, waiting for remission, but each jiggling needle forecasted an increasing descent. He knew individual dials would capriciously lie occasionally, and adjacent dials would reveal their perjury. Not now, the dials voted his demise unanimously. The levers that produced climbing were set correctly—he checked a second time. It even felt like they should be climbing, but no.
He continued to stare at the dials. We must climb. Climbing is life.
He felt he had just entered the little cabin and sat down to view what had happened, as an aerial voyeur. Maps and plastic coffee cups blew endlessly around the cabin. The man in the seat across the narrow aisle slumped against the farthest window, as if napping. He hardly knew this man. The man’s hand held a little spiral notebook, still clutched tightly as if his reading might resume. He could see blood beginning to run down the man’s blue shirt, turning dark purple before disappearing into his pants. This man cannot help me, thought.
Impossible, he thought. And yet there is blood on me, someone’s blood, perhaps my own, but he felt no pain. There are blood droplets all over my clothes and most of the cabin.
He thought back to when they were climbing, as they always did at the first part of a trip. How long ago was that? A minute? An hour? Probably less than five minutes ago, he guessed. The silver airliner had made the usual transition from rolling across the ground to takeoff speed and began climbing. He noticed the customary sounds of rushing air as they gained thousands of feet in altitude. Altitude was safety, speed was safety. He began to relax and enjoy the powerful machine. He knew that once they were high, they were probably safe.
He desperately wished things were still that way. He would let the other man have the controls and he would open his thermos for coffee. Not today. He could not take his hands off the controls for a moment, much less look for his thermos. He became more aware of the noise of the roaring wind and wondered how it was entering the cabin. There must be a large hole behind the dead man’s head but he wondered if a door or window had also been knocked open. The noise made him want to put his hands over his headphone-covered ears, but he continued to grip the control wheel.
He recalled the silent golden flash that had mysteriously appeared to his right side far behind his field of vision. The yellow and orange light blossomed into a bright, soundless flare, casting strange shadows in the cabin before abruptly extinguishing itself. He heard a series of loud staccato clicks as if someone was hanging on to their hull and banging on it with a hammer, or maybe, an axe.
Then the wind noise started. He could smell the hot African grass and earth far below him. These earthy odors replaced the usual cabin smell of air conditioning, old seat leather and toilet water. The howling air leaks sounded like a giant blowing over a soda bottle, resonating and vibrating the cabin.
Maybe something had come loose and hit the right engine. He could not see the engine, but it should not matter because the little panel dials conveyed the condition of the engine’s health. The dials showed the right engine was dying. Like little altar candles, indicator lamps winked on, announcing one unthinkable engine failure condition after another. He held onto the control wheel with both hands as if to support himself.
A tall woman in tan coveralls opened the door behind him, looked at him and then at the bloody man next to him. She mouthed words he could not hear and waved at something behind her that he could not see. She bent forward and looked out the front window as if searching for something familiar. He looked at her as if she may have an explanation or perhaps an idea. She soundlessly screamed a word and pointed to a place ahead, far away.
He had not thought to look out the window. She yelled in his ear and kept pointing ahead. She shook the man next to him by grabbing him on the shoulder. The man did not respond. She wiped her bloody hands on his shirt sleeve and then pointed to the lifeless engine behind them. She made a thumbs-down motion. He nodded that he knew that already.
The mountain peaks began to fill the windshield, he noticed. While he was looking at the woman the airliner pulled to the right, toward the dead engine. We must stay in the valley, he thought. The valley brought the sinking airliner time. He noticed that the control wheel had begun to vibrate, causing him to sit up and be more alert. He felt he could feel the airliner starting to fall apart.
Hesitantly, he moved the power levers to the maximum setting. The jet engines were almost never set to maximum power at takeoff so as to preserve their life. He had left the power set to the recommended maximum setting. The engine could produce more power at the expense of decreasing its life span. He decided it didn’t matter any more and pushed the good engine’s lever to the maximum forward position. He felt a small surge of speed as the engine increased its thrust. He knew that full power would consume much more fuel but dismissed the concern. Maybe less fuel would be a benefit when the time came.
The woman came back to the front cabin and again looked out the front window. Her face was distorted from anxiety and she squinted against the morning sun. He wondered if she knew that he had let her down because of his ineptitude. He, too, looked out the window, searching for a landmark, but the terrain was foreign to him. He knew he was lost and it was too late to turn back to the airport they had departed from. He should have done that earlier, he thought.
She punched him on the shoulder and pointed to a valley miles ahead. He noticed the airliner was now below the tops of the small mountains on either side of them. They were sinking less probably because of the increased power. He was becoming more aware of controlling the airliner and was surprised at the amount of force that was needed to keep flying straight ahead.
The airliner’s engines hung under each wing. When both engines pushed equally, practically no effort was needed to steer; with one engine dead, steering became a sweaty, difficult, almost precarious task. The dead engine became an anchor to be dragged around and the controls had to be moved to unusual positions which, unfortunately, caused more anchors to be dragged around. And that assumed the dead engine was still encased in its streamlined silver housing, which looked like an old-fashioned canister vacuum cleaner. He wondered if the engine was still there or had it fallen off completely. It didn’t matter; the ride in the valley would soon be over.
She pointed to what looked like a four-lane, paved highway at least ten miles ahead. She made hand signals to him to go down to the freeway. She sat in the dead copilot’s lap, oblivious to the blood. He once had a dog so stupid that he had to put the dogs’ head in the food bowl to get him to eat. She was showing him a huge airport with no other airplanes in sight. She crouched down low to confirm he saw the airport, like putting his nose in the bowl. He deserved it, he thought. His fear had made him stupid. She had found them a safe haven in an empty landscape.
He had two minutes to get the airliner ready to land. The airport ahead looked immense, probably built by the Russians during the Cold War, he guessed. He had never seen it on the maps and he wondered how she had known about it. He quickly prepared the plane for an ill-prepared landing. He considered landing on the airplane’s belly but thought the chance for a fire would increase. He would cut the engine and hit the brakes.
The cool morning air would make their arrival smooth, he thought, not that it mattered. The passengers on his trips didn’t care if their drinks spilled because of turbulence. They were usually grateful to get a seat. To his amazement, the woman pulled the co-pilot from his seat, shoved him to the floor and belted herself into his chair. In seconds, he lowered the landing gear and reduced the power of the good engine. As they got closer, he could see small buildings and several trucks that started moving toward him.
As they crossed the end of the wide, concrete runway, he set the remaining engine to idle power and opened the wing drag brakes to full on. The airliner bounced several times and he pulled the emergency braking system on. They skidded for thousands of feet, finally sliding to a noisy stop off the runway and onto the baked dirt and brown grass of the valley. Several large rabbits watched, wide-eyed, as the airline rumbled off the concrete and onto the rough dirt.
He looked out the
windshield at the East African valley they had arrived in, surrounded by brown
hills. Nine months ago, in
If you could get
the engines running, the Africans would fly it. It could still roam in other
countries where the maintenance policies were not so strict. The tarnished
silver hull showed the faint names of airlines it had worked for. Now, on a
mysterious runway in equatorial
The woman pulled the main exit door open and inflated the emergency slide. She was probably worried now about fire, he thought. Always one step ahead of me, he thought. Two passengers slid down, and he followed them to the ground. He noticed there were multiple baseball-size holes in the passenger cabin and several people sitting still in their seats. Probably dead, he thought.
A small truck drove up and the driver spoke to the woman in a language he did not understand. The driver wore a military uniform but did not seem to be armed and appeared unconcerned about a airliner almost crash landing at his airport.
While the woman talked to the driver, he slowly walked around his airplane, now incongruously parked in knee-high grass. One side still retained its graceful, dolphin-like shape, but the other side was ruined. Whatever had struck the engine had also delivered a terrible blow to the entire side of the airliner. Torn sheets of metal, once part of the elegantly sculpted engine shells, were blackened and hanging from the wing. A half a dozen windows were shattered. Wires and hoses hung out of the ragged engine attachment, some still dripping fluids. The landing gear looked untouched, he noted with surprise. A large part of the wing behind the engine was missing. Something had caused the engine to explode and perforate the cabin hull.
He wondered if he would ever get in an airplane again. He knew the woman would.
©Gerry Cullen 2007
First chapter of Stinger Strike, a new novel by Gerry Cullen.
Chapter 2 BLOOD
TRAIL
They had been
driving all day in the little
Neither complained, they knew the drive would be like this. They had asked for an air-conditioned car at the airport and the clerk at said they had none. If you want an air-conditioned car, the clerk explained, you would have to rent a car with a driver. A driver was undesired, they both agreed. They had good maps of the area and a driver was something they didn’t want to deal with. The clerk suggested they check the oil every time they added gas. The car was tired.
Every five miles a small village of mud block buildings with metal or straw roofs would appear and the road would go through the center of the village. Each tiny village was almost identical: sleepy people watching them drive by and several emaciated cattle. The goats seemed well-fed and content, oddly. There was nothing for sale in these little villages, they noted. No gasoline, no lodging, no small stores selling soft drinks and cigarettes. They were both hungry but there was nothing offered.
The car rental
place had recommended they carry at least two cans of gas for the
The weather had gone from to numbing heat at late afternoon to lower, almot pleasant temperatures when they got to the airfield.
The arrived at the hotel.
©Gerry Cullen 2007
First chapter of Stinger Strike, a new novel by Gerry Cullen.