“You… you son-of-a-bitch. You murdering son-of-a-bitch… How in the name of God
…?” Hennings’s senses reeled, and he had to make an effort to stand steady. His eyes tried to focus on Sloan, but he saw sitting in front of him not Sloan himself, but Sloan’s true essence. “Who are you? What are you?”
“ We, Admiral. We.”
The illusion passed, and Hennings regained control of himself. “Matos was… he trusted you… he was one of your men…”
“I see you’re not giving as much thought to the hundreds of people we sent down on the Straton. Don’t civilians count?”
Hennings put his hands on the console and leaned over, close to Sloan. “You know the expression: three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.” He looked Sloan in the eye. “Me next?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
Hennings straightened up. “Call air-sea rescue right now.” He reached for the phone switches.
Sloan grabbed his arm and held it tight. “Don’t be a fool. We’ve already consigned a planeload of civilians to their deaths. If we start a search for one man who can hang us, we may as well do it for all of them.” He tightened his grip on the Admiral’s arm. “And it would be a useless exercise. No one can survive that sea.” He released Hennings’s arm and spoke in a calmer tone. “Admiral, it’s not even jail I mind very much. It’s the indignity of the proceedings. We’ll be treated as the most vile things that ever lived. Our names will be spit out in the officers’ clubs and ward rooms for generations. That’s no way to end a career. If you remain silent, no one will ever know. Nothing is gained by confessing. Nothing. The dead are dead. The Navy and the nation are intact.” He changed the tone of his voice and spoke as though he were giving an official report. “Flight Lieutenant Peter Matos was killed when the rocket engine of his Phoenix missile exploded while strapped to his aircraft. He will receive full military honors and his family will cherish his memory, and they will receive his insurance and all standard benefits due an officer’s family. His name will not be besmirched in any way.” Sloan paused for a long time. “Admiral?”
Hennings nodded.
Sloan looked up at the wall clock. Three-ten. “Isn’t your flight off the carrier scheduled for 1600 hours?”
“Yes,” Hennings answered absently.
“Then I suggest you gather your gear, Admiral. You’ve only got fifty minutes, and I expect you’ll first want to pay your respects to Captain Diehl.”
Hennings glared at Sloan.
“Also,” Sloan added, waving his hand at the report sheets that still lay on the radio console, “I expect your report to the Joint Chiefs will stress that this mishap was in no way my fault.”
Without answering, Randolf Hennings turned and walked out of Room E-334
John Berry felt the familiar pilot’s control pressures in his hands and realized that this was the first time he had attempted to hand-fly the giant Straton. The warning horn sounded weak and the lights became dimmer as the electrical energy was being drained away from the dying airliner. The cockpit became quieter as they dropped beneath the worst part of the storm. From the lounge, Berry could hear the moans of the injured. He released one hand from the wheel and turned on the windshield wipers. Through the rain and clouds, he thought he could see glimpses of the ocean. His heart pounded quickly. He forced himself to look down at the altimeter. “Four thousand feet,” he said aloud. They were dropping at the rate of about forty feet a second. “Less than two minutes to impact. Hold on. Sharon… the life vests…”
“Yes. In the orange pouch against the rear wall.”
Berry turned and looked at the orange pouch hanging on the wall, then saw the small emergency exit near the right rear of the cockpit. “When we hit, you get the vests. I’ll open the door. Linda, stay in your seat until we come for you.”
Crandall grabbed his arm. “John… John, I’m scared.”
“Stay calm. For God’s sake, stay calm.” Berry held the controls tightly. He knew he should be thinking about how to bring the aircraft in, and what to do if they survived the crash. But he couldn’t get his mind off the problem of the dead engines. The fuel was shut off. But the fuel is now on again. What else…?
A bolt of lightning flashed close outside his left window and the cockpit was illuminated with an orange glow, followed by the crackling sound of unharnessed electricity. Berry sat up quickly. Suddenly, all the complexities of the overhead instrument panel were swept away. “Oh, for God’s sake!” He saw in a moment of unbridled clarity his old Buick, rolling down a hill in Dayton, Ohio, engine off, and he saw his hand turn the ignition switch, and heard again the sound of the Buick’s engine firing into life. “Sharon! The ignitors! The ignitors! Listen. Listen to me. Get up. Get up!” He looked down at the altimeter. Two thousand feet.
As she unbuckled her belt and slid from her chair, the Straton broke through the bottom of the thunderstorm, and Berry could see the surface of the ocean clearly now. The sky was relatively calm, and the aircraft flew without much turbulence. But even from this altitude he could see the towering white foam of the swelling waves. He knew that even if they could get out of the aircraft, they wouldn’t survive that sea.
Sharon Crandall was holding his arm and looking at him. Berry realized in an instant that she had perfect trust and confidence in him; as a flight attendant, she must have known that to ditch without a restraining belt meant almost certain death.
Berry spoke clearly and firmly. “I can’t look away from the flight instruments… On the overhead panel there are four switches marked ‘engine ignitors.’ Hurry.”
She knelt down behind the pedestal between the pilot’s chairs and looked up. Her eyes swept the instruments and switches above her. “Where? Where? John…”
Berry tried to reconstruct the panel in his mind while he kept his eyes glued to the flight instruments. He finally glanced up for a brief instant, for as long as he could dare. “Lower left! Lower left! Four switches. Yellow lights above them. Yellow! Yellow! Turn them on. On!”
Crandall spotted them and passed her hand over all four switches at once, pushing them into the on position. “On! On!”
Berry looked down at the altimeter. Nine hundred feet. The rate of descent had slowed slightly, but they had lost some airspeed. They had less than half a minute before the Straton would hit the water. He called out to Sharon, “Back in the seat. Strap in.” He stared at the center panel and watched to see if the Straton’s engine instruments would come to life. He tried to think if there was anything else he had to do to fire up the engines, but couldn’t think of anything. He focused intently on the four temperature gauges. Slowly, the needles began to rise. “Ignition! Ignition! We have power!” But he knew that the process of accelerating the jet engines and producing enough thrust for lift would take time, perhaps more time than they had left.
He glanced at the altimeter. Two hundred and fifty feet. The airliner’s speed had bled off to 210 knots and the descent was slower, but he sensed he was very close to a stall. As soon as that thought entered his mind, the stall warning alarm began to sound-a synthetic voice repeating the word AIRSPEED, AIRSPEED, AIRSPEED. Berry knew that he should push forward on the wheel, lower the nose, and pick up airspeed to avert the stall, but he had no altitude left for that. Reluctantly, he pulled slightly back on the wheel and felt the nose rise. The Straton began to vibrate, the tremors shaking the air-frame so violently that it became nearly impossible to read the instruments. The Straton was engaged in a test of strength between gravity and the thrust of its accelerating engines. As he glanced at his altimeter, he saw that gravity was winning. One hundred feet.
He looked down out of the side window. The hundred feet that was showing on the altimeter seemed less than that in reality. The swelling sea that sped by beneath him seemed to rise up to the wings of the airliner. He glanced out the front windshield. Huge, towering waves rose and broke only a short distance below him. If even one of those waves reached up and touched the Straton, the aircraft would lose enough speed to make a crash a certainty.
Berry scanned his instruments. Engine power was up, airspeed was good, but altitude was still dropping. Berry nudged the control column, trying to keep the nose up. He was walking a shaky tightrope, and one slip would put them into the violent sea at nearly 200 knots.
The synthetic voice announcing AIRSPEED continued, and so did the prestall vibrations. Berry worked the flight controls judiciously, trying to trade their few ounces of available energy for a few inches of extra altitude.
The altimeter read zero, though he guessed the airplane was still about twenty feet above the water. It was becoming obvious that the Straton was not going to make it, given the rate of increasing thrust against the rate of descent. Involuntarily, the muscles of his buttocks tightened and he rose imperceptibly from his seat. “Come on, you pig-climb! Climb, you bastard!” He turned to Crandall and shouted above the noise. “Locate the afterburners!
