in the snow. But it wasn't enough. I had no idea how long a runway an SST needed to take off, but it was certainly more than the hundred yards or so that the snow movers were operating in. And as soon as the plows moved farther out, snow blew and drifted back in behind them, accumulating at an alarming rate. Just in the few minutes I'd been standing in front of the hangar, huge flakes had collected on my hair, lashes, shoulders, and sneakers.
Less than six hours to Armageddon, and it was looking more and more like the second horseman out of Eden was going to be riding forth, killing untold millions in the initial explosion of his appearance and more untold millions in the radioactive wake of his passing. I clenched my fists in frustration, choked back a sob of grief and rage.
'We're not going to make it, Garth,' I murmured, and immediately hated myself for saying it.
'Let's get you out of the cold, brother,' Garth said, and started to haul me up the side of the snowbank.
I angrily shook off his grip-and promptly fell on my face in the snow. He grabbed me again, and half-pulled, half-carried me to the top of the mound of snow. We slid down the other side, found a door, went into the hangar. As soon as the steel door was shut, there was an almost eerie silence inside the cavernous space, which was filled with a ghostly, yellowish glow cast by spotlights powered by emergency generators.
In the center of the glow sat a magnificent, sleek airplane, its metal skin glistening in the light, its needle nose almost touching the closed hangar door. Even as I watched, two men in maintenance uniforms came around from the opposite side of the plane; they opened hatches under the rear of the fuselage, shone flashlights up into the compartments, checked hoses and dials.
Garth grabbed me as I started to sag, picked me up and carted me over to a corner, set me down on top of a pile of folded blue tarpaulins. I started to get up, but he put a hand on my chest and shoved me back down, covering me with a flap of the top tarpaulin.
'Rest, Mongo,' Garth said in a low, firm voice. 'You're going to need it. I've got a nose for other things besides evil, and it tells me that we're going to get up. I know it.'
'It would take a miracle, Garth.'
'We're going to make it.'
'Garth, don't leave me behind.'
'I won't, Mongo.'
'Promise me.'
'I promise.'
'You know I have to be there, the same as you.'
'I know.'
'Promise again that you won't leave me behind.'
'I promise again.'
My brother didn't lie-not usually. But I didn't trust him; not this time, since he was certainly capable of lying- and leaving me on the ground-if he thought it would save my life. Consequently, I struggled to stay awake. The result was a kind of surreal semiconsciousness in which blurred images moved about, accompanied by the muffled howl of wind and roar of machinery.
Segueing in and out of consciousness, I suddenly heard something begin to whine; the whine quickly grew in volume until it became a roar of sound cascading against my senses. I came fully awake, panicky, afraid that the plane was about to take off without me. I sat bolt upright-and saw Garth hurrying across the hangar toward me. He looked exhausted, his brown eyes glassy and sunken deep in their sockets. At the same time, there was an almost eerie serenity reflected in his features.
'Ready to roll, brother?' he said softly, smiling down at me as he brushed a thin, greasy strand of wheat- colored hair back from his eyes.
'Oh, yeah.' I struggled to get to my feet, fell off the pile of tarpaulins onto the concrete floor. I was feverish again, bone-deep exhausted, and still nauseated from the amphetamine overdose. 'I'm sorry, Garth. Help me, please.'
He did, pulling me to my feet and supporting me with one arm as we walked toward the ramp that was extended from the center of the SST's fuselage. I glanced at his watch; it was 9:00.
'The phones. .?'
'Still out.'
'Did they manage to plow. .?'
'No. But we're going anyway.'
With Garth supporting me by the back of my shirt, I managed to walk up the ramp and into the plane. Garth steered me left, through a thick steel door that Nigel Fickley was holding open for us, into a spacious cockpit that was in semidarkness except for the light cast by a glittering array of instrumentation that seemed to be all around me. Jack Holloway was strapped into the pilot's seat, and he gave a thumbs-up sign to me as we entered.
'Strap yourselves in, gentlemen,' Holloway said in his clipped tones. 'And please allow me to apologize in advance for what may be a slightly bumpy takeoff.''
Garth and I sat down in two seats at the rear of the cockpit, on either side of the steel door, and strapped ourselves in. Nigel Fickley eased his lanky frame down into the copilot's seat, buckled himself in.
Holloway tilted his head back. 'Ready, gentlemen?'
'Hit it, Captain,' Garth replied evenly.
Holloway signaled to someone below him, and a few moments later the huge hangar door opened-onto a nightmare. In the glare carved out of the darkness by the plane's lights I could see that the snow-removing equipment had been removed-but it was almost as if nothing had changed; snow was everywhere, and I knew that in the darkness beyond the light there were huge drifts. Also, undoubtedly, there were trucks, perhaps even stalled planes-dozens of snowbound, buried obstacles that could kill us.
Holloway pushed the wide handle of the throttle forward, and I could feel as well as hear the power surging through the plane. But we didn't move.
'Release the brakes on my mark, Lieutenant, and raise the landing gear on my second mark.'
'Yes, sir,' Fickley said easily. 'Luck.'
'Luck.'
Holloway eased the throttle even further forward, and the roar of the engines grew in volume; the plane began to vibrate as tens of thousands of horsepower howled in a kind of mechanical dismay and outrage, demanding that their awesome power be unleashed.
'Mark!'
'Aye!'
The screaming, gargantuan silver bullet that was the Concorde shot out of the mouth of the hangar into the maelstrom of night, wind, and snow.
'Mark!'
'Aye!'
For the first few seconds, before the landing gear came up into the belly of the plane, there was tremendous drag on the plane as the wheels ground through the snow. The muscles in Holloway's forearms bunched and stood out as he pulled back on a control. Then the wheels were up and the SST became an improbable ballistic sled catapulting us out across unknown territory.
Suddenly I suffered another dizzy spell; my vision blurred, and the cockpit began to spin. I screwed my eyes shut, opened them again just as the plane began to sideslip, its tail yawing over to the left. Holloway, his hands virtually flying from one control to another, struggled for control. I felt as if
I were hurtling down a roller coaster, and I was afraid I would vomit. The plane yawed sharply in the opposite direction, shuddered, then finally straightened out and shot forward with even greater speed; but now I was certain it was heading in a different direction, toward-whatever. Dark, terrifying black shapes that I was certain were planes or trucks or hangars flashed by, and great waves of snow splashed like water against the windows as we sliced through huge snow drifts. Again the plane yawed from side to side, again Holloway managed to correct.
Again, everything began to spin-but this time I was certain it was the plane itself, and not my head. We were out of control. The last thought in my head before everything exploded in brilliant flashes of red, black, and green was that this time Garth's nose had been wrong. We were about to die, only a couple of hours ahead of millions of other people.
