General Bradley Elliott double-checked the autopilot and flight control annunciators while Ormack went over his fuel calculations. They had been flying for well over an hour at ten thousand feet, forced to that altitude by the damage to the pressurized crew compartment.
'Fuel flow?'
44 'Pretty steady,' Ormack said, 'but the fuel curve is getting orse.
Looks like a major leak from wing and body tanks. I've jumped all the fuel out of the body tanks but I can't do anything about the mains.
I've got the minimum in them to keep the engines going as it is.
We've had low-pressure lights on for a long time-' 'Can we make it to the ocean?' Elliott asked, scanning his engine instruments and checking them by moving the throttles.
'Put it down on an ice floe or punch out near the coastline?'
'Punch out?' Angelina Pereira asked. 'You mean eject?'
'We'd have to cross high mountain ridges to get to the coast,' Luger said, warming his hands on an overhead air vent. 'It would be real close.'
'Now's the time to decide,' Elliott asked. 'Patrick, give me a heading toward the ocean, away from any active Russian fighter bases. Crew, prepare for-' 'Hold on,' McLanahan broke in. 'General, what does WXO near an airfield mean?'
1 — WXO?Warm-weather operations only. They close the place during winter because it's too expensive and too difficult to maintain.
Why?'
'I found one,' McLanahan said, putting a finger on his high-altitude navigation chart and checking the satellite navigation system's present-position counters. 'Straight ahead, fifteen minutes.'
'Fifteen minutes?' Ormack asked. 'You're crazy. That's in Russia.
1. They got a long runway at the very least,' McLanahan asked. 'Maybe they'll have gas and oil for the number two engine. If it's abandoned or vacant we could-' 'They're not abandoned,' Elliott asked. 'At least our Alaskan warm-weather bases aren't. We usually have care takers, mostly locals, that look after the place. Maybe some minimal security, National Guard or Reserve deployment Ormack stared at Elliott.
'General, you're not seriously considering… You're both crazy Maybe you ought to go back on oxygen. 'He looked hard at Elliott, expecting him to turn and shrug off McLanahan's notion. Some last-minute humor…
'General 'We're armed 'We've got your automatic and two lousy thirty-eight revolvers in the survival kits,' Ormack asked. 'They're more a hazard to us than they'd be to anyone else. They could have been stowed on this plane for years.'
Elliott said, 'I've done that, lots of times,' McLanahan put in, excitement rising in his voice. Luger was staring at McLa han pretty much the way Ormack was looking at Elliottdisbelief. 'Global Shield missions. Remember, Dave?Sir lated post-strike recovery at an emergency airfield. Keep number two nacelle running, pump gas into the right outboa right external, or right drop tank, then transfer gas to the rest the plane. I once hand-pumped ten thousand pounds of' The Russians aren't going to just let us take their gas,' Luger said.
'It's crazy.'
'We'd end up captured,' Angelina asked. 'I'd rathertake chances in the mountains than be captured by them-especially after this mission.'
'No, you don't want to go down in the mountains,' Elliott asked. 'Even if you come out of the ejection unhurt the chances are at best fifty-fifty even with the global survival kit we've got. And we can't ditch the Old Dog. She wouldn't withstand the impact.'
'I still think those odds are better than landing at a Russian airfield-' 'Do you, John?' Elliott asked. 'How long do you think we could survive out there in those mountains?'
'If we made it to the coast we'd have a chance.
Elliott ignored that, asked his navigators for the distance to the oastline.
'One hundred miles is the closest,' Luger asked. 'But 'We could do the refueling to himself than anyone else.
cross two ranges, each about nine or ten thousand feet, and we're within radar range of Trebleski Airfield the whole way After we cross the mountains we can cut away from Trebleski to the northeast.'
'We can stay near the mountains,' Wendy offered. 'Get as much distance as possible from Trebleski and hide in the ground clutter.'
Can we go around Trebleski at MIT' 'Not on the coastal side of the mountains,' Luger told him, rubbing his one uncovered eye, 'unless we turn around.'
'So it's unlikely we'd make it to the coast,' Elliott said.
'And that means we get out over the mountains in the dead of winter, hundreds of miles from any kind of friendly forces. We could try to evade but I wouldn't give us much of a chance of making it to the coast, much less into Alaska.
'General, are you saying that landing at a Russian military airfield, abandoned or not, is a better option?' Ormack said.
'We'd be surrendering. We'd be handing ourselves and this lane over to them. And I sure as hell wouldn't give us a snowball's chance in hell of making it out of a Soviet prison alive.
Elliott kept silent for a long moment, then: 'Distance to that airfield, Patrick.
McLanahan already had the geographic coordinates of the field typed into his navigation computer. 'Anadyr is eighty miles, five degrees left.'
'Any radar circles around it?'
'Yes. 'McLanahan said, studying his civil-aviation chart.
'Can't tell what they are but they've got something there.'
'Wendy, any activity?'
Wendy Tork had been carefully studying her threat displays ever since McLanahan had first made his wild suggestion.
'Clear scope ever since Ossora Airfield.'
'I've got no terrain on my scope for a hundred miles,' McLanahan said, tuning his ten-inch radar scope in onehundred-nautical-mile range. 'If there were any threat signals they're not being blocked by terrain. I can't make out the base, though.'
'Okay,' Elliott said, 'you've all heard the arguments.
There's no guarantee that we'll get gas, oil or anything but our asses in a sling if we land at Anadyr. On the other hand it's possible that we could land this beast and walk away from it uninjured, steal a truck and have a better than even chance of evading toward the Bering Strait, where our chances of being rescued significantly increase. If you're a wild dreamer like Patrick you'll actually believe there's an outside chance of pumping this aircraft full of gas, restarting the number two engine and running it enough to lift off again, and, making it back to Alaska.'
'Crazy,' Ormack muttered. 'If the base is occupied, we won't have any chance of taking off again-we'd flame out long before liftoff. If we can't find gas we're stuck a couple hundred miles from friendly territory on a Russian base. The Russians would get the Old Dog and we'd be trying to evade all the way back to Alaska. Fat chanc 'Well, I can't have this crew bail out over the mountains,' Elliott said.
'Chances of surviving the ejection itself are slim If we did survive we'd be faced with a three-hundred-mile hike across Siberia with the Red Army chasing us. I say we take our chances on solid ground, At least we'll be all in one piece to fight or run.'
'I'm for it,' Luger asked. 'Hell, that base will be the last place on this earth they'd look for us, except down in Moscow.
'All right, General,' Wendy said, closing her eyes in silent prayer, 'let's try to land it.'
Angelina shrugged. 'Check. I don't know if I could get myself out of this damn thing anyway.'
'I'm giving a crash course, anyway,' McLanahan told her. 'You may still have to do it. General, I'm clearing off upstairs. Dave, watch my scope for me.'
Ormack agreed they really didn't have much choice, out the emergency landing checklists as McLanahan upstairs and knelt between Wendy and Angelina. He put his headset into the defense instructor's station and told the women to switch their interphones to the 'private' position which allowed them to talk without bothering the
