Silent Enemy Read online

  Some part of his mind told him to keep heading for the light. That’s where the cabin was.

  He kneeled at the pressure valves and crawled through the lower one. Someone had him by the arms, and he closed his eyes, drifted off into a warm sleep....

  Gold’s face appeared above him. The sight brought him a vague sense of well-being. This person was someone he loved. And she could help him fix the problem. She would know—know what? Parson tried to remember this thing, this trouble he had to deal with.

  He lay on his back and saw Gold’s hands around the refill port of his MA-1 cylinder. In one breath, all his responsibilities came flooding back. He felt embarrassed that he’d let himself pass out; he’d thought Dunne careless when it happened to him. We’ve been to the altitude chamber, he thought, and we should know better. But that was a controlled environment and this was a real emergency.

  “Thanks,” he shouted through his mask. “I guess you’re two for two now.”

  “Sir,” she said, “this isn’t working. Next time, we need to set up a firemen’s relay to hand fresh oxygen bottles back there to you.”

  Parson nodded as he got to his feet. She had a point. We have plenty of oxygen, he considered. And some of the crew and passengers are offering decent ideas. Those are about the only things in our favor, he thought. Might as well use them.

  GOLD ACCOMPANIED PARSON BACK TO THE COCKPIT. She wanted to keep an eye on him since he had just passed out, but he appeared sure-footed enough as he climbed the flight deck ladder.

  He lowered himself into the pilot’s seat, picked up his headset, and exchanged the portable oxygen mask for the one at his crew station. He and Colman seemed to confer about something, and Gold put on her own headset just in time to hear Parson say, “Oh, shit.”

  He was looking at his radar screen. Colorful blotches spread across it: greens, yellows, and reds. The green and yellow smears encircled red cores, except in a couple of places where the reds stood apart and took on an odd fishhook shape. To Gold, it seemed a hightech Rorschach test, and the crew interpreted every pattern as a threat.

  “What’s all that?” Gold asked.

  “Thunderstorms,” Parson said. “Strong motherfuckers.”

  “Oh.”

  “Let’s repressurize and start climbing,” Parson said, “so we can get our asses over and around these things.”

  “Cabin’s coming down,” Dunne said as he turned a knob.

  “Did you get the photo?” Colman asked.

  “Yeah,” Parson answered. “We’ll send it once we make sure these storms don’t tear us apart.”

  Colman advanced the throttles just as Gold felt the aircraft rock with the first jolt of turbulence.

  “Everybody strap in tight,” Parson said. “MCD—ma’am, you probably want to secure the patients.”

  “In progress,” came the answer over interphone.

  Parson moved a selector on his comm panel, keyed his mike, and said, “Santa Maria, Air Evac Eight-Four needs deviations left and right of course for weather.”

  “Air Evac Eight-Four,” the controller said, “approved as requested.”

  Gold looked outside at utter darkness—no moon, stars, or ships. Then a golden vein of lightning arced between two clouds. Daylight for an instant. And in that instant, Gold saw thunderheads like canyon walls. Mountains of cumulonimbus, roiling with energy. Weapons of angry gods.

  She didn’t know weather like an aviator, but she had heard of these oceanic clusters of storms. They raged in low-pressure areas, and if they lasted long enough, air would begin to swirl around the low’s center, gathering speed, moisture, and strength. The birth of a hurricane.

  An eerie blue glow began to dance on the windscreen. It spilled across the side windows, behaving more like liquid than light. Sheets of it pulsed and shimmered like a miniature aurora borealis.

  “What the hell is wrong with the windscreen?” Colman asked. “Should I turn off the heat to it?”

  “Nah,” Parson said. “It’s just Saint Elmo’s fire. Don’t worry about it.”

  The ride grew rougher, and the shoulder straps of the nav seat’s harness dug into Gold’s shoulders. The airplane seemed to hit unseen obstacles, rocks in the sky.

  “Are we going to make it over this stuff?” Dunne asked.

  “Not all of it,” Parson said.

  Rain started to lash the windscreen, adding a deeper roar to the hiss of the slipstream. Then the sound changed to something like that of gravel thrown against the aircraft. Hail, Gold realized.

  Another lightning bolt stabbed into the sea, so bright it hurt her eyes. The flash revealed whitecaps on a heaving ocean, with skeins of foam stretching between the crests.

  Gold began to hear the electrical storm as well as see it. Blasts of static fried in her headset. The crackles erupted far more often than she actually saw lightning. She supposed she was hearing the strikes of bolts obscured by clouds.

  “Give me continuous ignition, please,” Dunne said.

  Parson moved an overhead switch and said, “On.”

  With the next rip of lightning, Gold saw a tremendous cloud mass ahead, its top shaped like an anvil from hell’s own forge. She wasn’t used to judging distances in the air, but it looked like the C-5 would never clear the top of it. But no turn in any direction looked like a better option. The radar showed a phalanx of similar monsters on all sides.

  Parson moved something on his console, and the plane banked a few degrees left. Perhaps he was trying to avoid the very worst of it. Gold wondered if the turbulence and electrical interference might set off the bomb. Everyone else had to wonder the same thing, she thought, but there was no point in discussing it because no one could do anything about it. As it was, the crew had their hands full in the tormented air with a plane trying to go anywhere but where they wanted it.

  The hail’s pounding grew worse, so loud that Gold turned up her interphone volume just to hear the crew talk. At that moment, something popped like a gunshot.

  “What was that?” Colman asked.

  “Hail just cracked the windscreen,” Parson said.

  “Did it get both layers?” Dunne asked.

  Parson scratched at the glass with his fingernail. He had to try it a couple of times because the turbulence made his arm flail.

  “No,” he said, “just the outer ply.”

  “It’ll hold, then,” Dunne said.

  Another fire stream of lightning. Closer this time. It exposed the building storms in ominous relief: gray walls closing in, hurling stones of ice and spears of fire. It occurred to Gold that in these remote reaches of the Atlantic, she was encountering air, vapor, and water in their most powerful forms. The elements could become an enemy for ground troops, to be sure. But she was learning that for fliers, the weather presented a constant threat, sometimes more dangerous than missiles or tracers.

  A laptop that Parson had placed on the nav table nearly slid off. Gold held on to it to keep it from crashing to the floor. Unlike the engineer’s computer, this one wasn’t bolted down. Gold had paid little attention to it before, but now, protecting it, she saw it was apparently some kind of navigational backup. On the screen, a miniature airplane inched along a green course line, steady and unmolested. The moving map display showed a serene sea marked by waypoints and jet routes. This computer program evidently knew exactly where they were, but had no idea what was happening to them.

  Saint Elmo’s fire enveloped the windscreen entirely, as if a translucent blue shroud had been draped over the plane. The starts and fits of static in Gold’s headset joined one another in a constant cacophony, a wall of white noise. The storms outside attacked all her senses at once, with neon in her eyes, overload in her ears, and nausea in her gut.

  The aircraft lurched to the right like a hammer blow had come down on the wing. A cracking sound came from overhead.

  “What was that?” Colman asked.

  “Probably hail taking one of our antennas,” Dunne said.

 
; “Which one?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  “All right, copilot,” Parson said to Colman, “give me two hundred and forty knots. Thunderstorm penetration speed.”

  Colman pulled back on the control column. Gold wondered why, until she realized the crew was slowing to a speed at which the plane could better withstand turbulence. So Parson had given up on powering over all the storms and accepted that he must go through part of them.

  Blazes of lightning came more frequently now. Diffused by the rain and mist, the streaks appeared more like explosions, as if the sky were filled with gunpowder.

  Another hard jolt came as if something had kicked the airplane. The blow slammed Gold against her harness, and her cracked ribs burned with pain. Then the plane dropped as if it had simply ceased to fly. The laptop levitated into the air as the nav table dropped away from it. It slammed back down onto Gold’s fingers, and she nearly cried out. Bile rose in her throat from airsickness. Helmet bags, pens, and manuals bounced against instrument consoles and clattered to the floor.

  “Damn, that hurt,” Dunne said. He began tapping at his computer, and Gold wondered what information he could possibly want from that thing at a time like this. “I got a g-limit fault code,” he said. “Two negative gs.”

  “Felt like about ten,” Parson said.

  Gold wasn’t sure what that meant, but she knew it was bad. She guessed the storm was slamming the airplane beyond its proven capabilities.

  The next lightning bolt did not appear as an arc. It lit up the whole sky. The noise made it seem it had ignited all the fuel in the airplane, all the fuel in the world. Sparks bounced from Dunne’s panel. The boom sounded to Gold like a mortar round; only her harness kept her from diving for cover. She smelled an odor like burned popcorn.

  The airplane went completely dark.

  15

  Parson heard screams downstairs from people who thought they were about to die. In the darkness, he felt for his flashlight. He switched it on, swept the beam across the dead instrument panel. The N2 tachometers came alive as backup systems activated. He groped for the INSTRUMENT POWER switch and placed it on EMERGENCY.

  “Did we flame out?” Colman asked, a catch in his voice.

  “Negative,” Parson said. “We still got all four engines.”

  “That lightning strike tripped the generators,” Dunne said. “I’ll see if any of them will come back on line.”

  Parson turned and shone his light back toward the flight engineer’s panel. Dunne had his own penlight in his mouth while he worked his switches with both hands. He moved a generator control to the TEST position, looked at its frequency and voltage. Apparently, he didn’t like what he saw, because he left it off. When he moved to the next switch, the same thing happened.

  This airplane has four main generators, Parson thought. Dear God, please give me just one back.

  A jolt of turbulence knocked Dunne’s hand off the number three generator switch. But when he moved the voltage selector, Parson heard him off mike as he said, Cool, to himself. Dunne moved the switch back to ON, and the airplane lit up. That brought a cheer from downstairs, something about Allah. Dunne checked number four, and that one showed good, too.

  Whines and buzzes rose as radios came back to life, gyros resumed spinning, computers rebooted, processors reset. The annunciator panel showed a few more warning lights than before, but at least the damned thing had power to show warning lights.

  “We’re going to have some damage,” Dunne said. “I smell fried wires.”

  “Me, too,” Parson said.

  Dunne pressed in circuit breakers that had popped, and OFF flags disappeared from the glass faces of gauges. Parson scanned the panel and took stock of his situation. The attitude indicators rocked with each bump of rough air. The airspeed indicators told him Colman was still holding thunderstorm speed. The flight augmentation computers all showed INOP lights. Parson pressed three buttons to reset them and give Colman an easier time handling the plane. Whatever damage the lightning had done, the aircraft remained flyable.

  Rain still whipped at the windscreen, but it sounded like the hail was gone. Flickers appeared in the sky like artillery flashes. Distant lightning, Parson supposed, obscured by clouds. The more distant, the better.

  “Go ahead and keep climbing,” Parson told Colman. “I think the worst is behind us. Just hand-fly it until we get into smooth air and then we’ll put the autopilot back on.”

  “Yes, sir,” Colman said.

  The copilot hadn’t done too badly. We just got our asses kicked, Parson thought, and Colman was obviously scared, but I never had to take the plane from him. Now we just need to get away from this tropical depression before it strengthens into a tropical storm.

  As the aircraft gained altitude, it emerged into clear air as if spat from the maw of some leviathan. Free of the storms’ updrafts and downdrafts, it settled into smooth flight. Rain and vapor vanished to reveal a silver panoply of stars. As an old navigator, Parson had always loved the night sky and the order it implied. For all time, mariners and airmen could know their position based on the angle of Rigel, Antares, or any of the fifty-seven navigational stars in the Air Almanac. To Parson, that meant that, from the beginning, somebody was keeping an eye on business.

  During better times he had taken pleasure in ocean crossings. He felt he had his own small place in a history that included Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Lindbergh. In those peaceful missions he’d taken his Kollsman Periscopic Sextant from its case and attached it to the sextant port in the cockpit ceiling of the C-130E. He’d find the star, place it in the crosshair, and keep the bubble centered. Then he’d measure the angle and figure a line of position. Usually, when the aircraft began receiving navigational beacons on land, his spherical trigonometry turned out to be dead-on.

  A shooting star cut across the horizon like a topaz dropped from the heavens. It burned out and continued its plunge invisibly, followed by another, then another.

  “Look at that,” Colman said.

  Parson thought for a minute, considered the time of year. “It’s the Perseid meteor shower,” he said. “You’ll never get a better view of it than this.”

  Meteors fell in streaks like electrified needles. Briefly, Parson wondered if they dwindled to ash after they burned out or if something solid remained to make an unseen splash.

  Sights like this were part of why he loved his job. In normal circumstances, he might enjoy the scene for hours, sipping coffee and monitoring his instruments and radios with little to worry him. While flying, especially in untroubled night air at high altitude, he could feel he had escaped the ugliness on the ground. To Parson’s mind, gravity kept the worst of man’s inclinations held down to the surface of the earth. But now, with this bomb on board, hatefulness had reached up and found him in the stratosphere.

  “So how bad off are we?” Parson asked.

  “I got a couple of fuel pump breakers still out,” Dunne said.

  “Leave those alone.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  The last thing Parson wanted was to reenergize a torched fuel pump in a tank full of fumes. We already have enough reasons to blow up, he thought.

  “Can you work around the bad pumps?” Parson asked.

  “Affirmative,” Dunne said. “I can still transfer fuel. But I got other issues.”

  “Like what?”

  The flight engineer pressed keys on his computer, scratched at the cursor pad. “We have another controller failure. This computer won’t talk to anything.”

  “Reboot it.”

  “I will,” Dunne said. He pressed POWER switches next to the screen. “This makes the third time.”

  Parson looked aft, watched the screen go through its restart sequence. He needed that thing to work because it was the only way to send a satcom message. The only way to send the photos of the bomb. The problem wasn’t the laptop itself; the problem was its link to everything else. Without it, he had no satcom and no te
xt data from the Tanker Airlift Control Center. Nothing left but radios, with antennas torn up by hail. He’d also have no monitoring of engine vibration, no way to know if number four went bad again until it was too late.

  Gold still sat at the nav table, eyes alert, watching everything with what looked like professional interest. She had not spoken since the lightning strike. When she finally pressed her TALK switch, she said, “I still smell something.”

  “I think I do, too,” Parson said. “I thought it went away, but now it’s back.”

  “I don’t—” Dunne said. Parson looked back to see why the engineer had paused. A red light glowed on Dunne’s panel. It said SMOKE.

  Parson held his breath. Please, not an electrical fire, he thought. Better to have a burning engine than that. He knew of planes that had filled with smoke and plunged to the ground while choking crews struggled to find and control electrical fires. The damned things had a way of hiding, like a forest fire spreading underground through a peat bog. You could stop it, maybe, if you knew what was burning and you killed its power source. But the fire could lurk behind access panels, underneath soundproofing, inside insulation.

  Dunne moved a selector marked LOCATE, turned it through several clicks. He stopped when a second red light came on, and he said, “It’s in the avionics compartment. Engineer’s going off headset.”

  Without waiting for Parson’s acknowledgment, Dunne dropped his headset onto the engineer’s table and unbuckled his harness. He stood, moved aft to the avionics bay door, and pulled it open. Smoke rolled through the doorway and mushroomed against the ceiling. It filled Parson’s sinuses with a chemical tang, and his eyes watered. Dunne ducked inside the compartment despite the smoke.

  “Everybody on oxygen,” Parson ordered as he donned his sweep-on mask yet again. He checked to make sure Gold had hers on and she did. But he worried about Dunne, who would not have heard the order over interphone.

  A shout came from inside the avionics bay. Dunne was either calling for help or cursing in pain. Parson rose from his seat.