jumbo jets bearing the colorful logos of the major airlines look absurdly out of place here, as they disgorge hundreds of troops and thousands of tons of palleted cargo. Trucks, vans, cargo loaders (known to us as K-loaders), tugs, and behemoth fuel trucks bigger than any I've ever seen rush about the ramp, so that we have to be supercautious walking across the tarmac.
We walk toward the great hangar that serves as a staging area for incoming troops and, we would learn, is a favorite backdrop for TV correspondents taping their reports. The noise is incredible, with the scream of idling engines, the throbbing of power carts, the whop-whop of helicopter rotors, and the ground-shaking thunder of afterburners. It seems Dhahran is truly the Da Nang of the Persian Gulf.
As we walk nearer the hangar complex, I can hear, through the din, the intermittent wail of Arabic prayer songs on a distant loudspeaker. The air here seems thick with war.
Five.
Troubled Skies
Bones applies back pressure to the control yoke, and we rise as if perched on the muzzle of a great cannon being elevated for a shot. The 323,000-pound rip-snorting beast begins to run on its main wheels for a distance, allowing enormous cells of high pressure to form under our wings. Then we are flying and none too soon. The end of runway 6 flashes beneath us as I comply with Bones's request to raise the gear. Glancing out to the left, while listening to the familiar groan and plop of the retracting gear, I see that we're still low enough to pick out the white golf balls lying on McGuire Air Force Base's fifteenth green.
We breathe a little easier, now that the mother of all takeoff rolls is behind us, and Bones banks the Starlifter to the east. Torrejon lies eight and one-half hours ahead. As I switch the radio to departure control frequency, I abruptly freeze, motionless, my hand still on the radio knob.
When something goes amiss with your aircraft, you react instantly, if you're well trained. Your eyes go directly to whatever instrumentation can verify the problem. Your hands move immediately to the appropriate switches and levers. Your mind flashes the much rehearsed corrective action. But there is one matter that freezes you like a statue, that reduces you from a refined machine to a simple creature depending utterlyeven desperatelyon your animal senses. Nothing makes your skin crawl and your brain flicker with foreboding more than the pungent smell of burning electrical insulation.
My eyes shift to one side, then the other while I sniff the air. Yes, there seems to be a very faint odor. But I've been battling nasal congestion for weekswho am I to judge subtle smells? It's really barely noticeable. I try to ignore it. I'm busy with the radio and the departure procedure. Besides, there are five of us on the flight deck, if the odor is real, surely someone else will notice it.
But who am I trying to convince? It's time to fess up.
'Do you guys smell anything?' I ask.
Like me, they all are waiting for someone else to make the disquieting suggestion.
'Yeah. Just barely An electrical smell, maybe,' Walt replies.
That's not what I was hoping to hear.
Without waiting for guidance from me, Walt sensibly goes down to the cargo bay and into the tunnel underneath the flight deck to examine the tangled jungle of cables and dusty electronic boxes. He reports back that he couldn't smell it down there. That relieves us a bit but heightens our curiosity. We agree that the smell is getting stronger, though it is still elusive.
Trouble usually comes in subtle ways for the flier. It commonly starts out as a sneaky beast. Instead of rearing a big ugly head, it plays peek-a-boo with you. A feeling creeps over you that something is wrong. You rub your eyes, shake the cobwebs out of your head, look around to see if anyone else looks vexed. But trouble is a cunning psychologist. It plays with your mind, tries to convince you that all is rosy, that you're just tired, or that an indicator has gone bad.
And trouble plays havoc with your ego, which is quite hefty, or you wouldn't be here. You feel the need to discuss your suspicions with your crewmates but are afraid of what they might think of you if you're wrong. Then it gradually builds and enlists conspirators such as confusion, fatigue, unfamiliarity, and personality conflicts. External influences such as weather, fuel availability, and conditions on the ground can join in with the swelling, cascading snowball.
I know that every minute we are putting five more miles between us and the safety of the airfield, but the beast is having a field day in my mind. We'd be a laughingstock if we went back and the mechanics found nothing. They will write 'cannot duplicate' in the discrepancy forms when their search for a problem from a flight turns up nothing. I hate that. It suggests that I'm a jittery flier or that perhaps I'm someone who just wants to cause trouble for mechanics.
And then there's the fear of that old specter, fatigue. You know it'll catch up with you in the long hours ahead and you don't want to do anything to hasten it or intensify it. If we go back, they may throw us onto another mission, lengthening our crew duty day another three or four hours. But worse yet, they may dump us back into crew rest, which is something we dreaded at McGuire. Such are the mind games that insipid trouble plays on a flier, urging him to hold his inertia, to stick with the course.
But I know the crew is troubled, especially the conservative Brian back on the engineer's panel.
'Let's go back,' I finally say to Bones.
As New York Center clears us to turn 180 degrees for a direct course back to McGuire, the loadmaster, Mike Hall, announces that he has found the source. Many loadmasters stand back and watch when something like this happens or until an obvious calamity breaks out but not Mike. Maybe his survival instinct is driving him, but whatever, I'm delighted by his initiative. I turn and look, seeing him on hands and knees, sniffing, like a dog, at a circuit breaker panel just behind my seat. Then I notice the blue haze forming just above the deck, and I issue the order that I should have made minutes earlier.
'Crew, get your oxygen masks on. Check regulators 100 percent.'
The mask, with its attendant smoke goggles, hoses, and cables has an acute way of boosting your awareness when you wear it. It grabs your lapels and slaps your facepours a bucket of cold water on your thick, lethargic noggin. It gives you a vigorous shoulder shaking and makes you realize that your margin for error has narrowed and a high level of performance is now in demand. The hissing of your breathing and your muffled voice in the mask ram reality home and rivet your attention to the task at hand.
Now we are desperately busy. Bones transfers control of the jet to me and begins to copy new weather, while Brian calculates landing performance data and Wait continues to investigate the smoke. We barely have time to run the approach checklist. The weather has deteriorated since we took off, so rather than the quick visual approach that we hoped for, we have to set up for a lengthy ILS (instrument landing system) approach.
We follow the radar vectors from McGuire Approach Control and intercept the glide slope beam. As we lower the flaps and gear, the smoke thickens. The runway is wet and we're extremely heavy. It would be nice to get rid of some of this fuel, but there is no time. Even if there were, it would be questionable whether we should open the dump valves with a fire somewhere aboard. Brian says that we should be able to get stopped, but there won't be much room for error.
The tower reports stiff crosswinds. This we definitely don't need, because the crosswind requires extra speed that will gobble up precious runway. We break out of the clouds at about 400 feet into a heavy rain, and I begin to fight the gusting winds. I push the throttles up, then bring them back again and again to control the sink rates and airspeed transients. The yoke moves fore and aft, left and right under my hand in a struggle to maintain attitude. Bones switches on the rain removal system, and the tremendous howling of the pressurized air blowing across the windscreen claws at my concentration, but it clears the rain away.
With a clear view I can see that we are approaching in a big crab because of the crosswind. Our nose is pointed well to the left of the runway, though we are tracking the center line. We cannot land like this. Seconds before touchdown, I push the right rudder to the floor and roll the yoke hard left. The left wing goes down, and the nose swings to the righttoo much. Now we are angled a bit to the right of the runway centerline. I release a little right rudder pressure and apply a slight back pressure to the yoke. The landing is smooth, not because of my skill,
