'We can't make Buckley,' Vylander said. 'Without number-three engine, we're losing altitude at the rate of nearly a hundred feet a minute. We're going to have to set her down in the Rockies.'
His announcement, was greeted with stunned silence. He could see the fear grow in his crew members' eyes, could almost smell it.
'My God,' groaned Hoffman. 'It can't be done. We'll ram the side of a mountain for sure.'
'We've still got power and some measure of control,' Vylander said. 'And we're out of the overcast, so we can at least see where we're going.'
'Thank heaven for small favors,' grunted Burns.
'What's our heading?' asked Vylander.
'Two-two-seven southwest,' answered Hoffman. 'We've been thrown almost eighty degrees off our plotted course.'
Vylander merely nodded. There was nothing more to say. He turned all his concentration to keeping the Stratocruiser on a lateral level. But there was no stopping the rapid descent. Even with full-power settings on the remaining three engines, there was no way the heavily laden plane could maintain altitude. He and Gold could only sit by impotently as they began a long glide earthward through the valleys surrounded by the fourteen-thousand- foot peaks of the Colorado Rockies.
Soon they could make out the trees poking through the snow coating the mountains. At 11,500 feet the jagged summits began rising above their wing tips. Gold flicked on the landing lights and strained his eyes through the windshield, searching for an open piece of ground. Hoffman and Burns sat frozen, tensed for the inevitable crash.
The altimeter needle dipped below the ten-thousand-foot mark. Ten thousand feet. It was a miracle they had made it so low; a miracle a wall of rock had not risen suddenly and blocked their glide path. Then, almost directly ahead, the trees parted and the landing lights revealed a flat, snowcovered field.
'A meadow!' Gold shouted. 'A gorgeous, beautiful alpine meadow five degrees to starboard.'
'I see it,' acknowledged Vylander. He coaxed the slight course adjustment out of the Stratocruiser by jockeying the enginecowl flaps and throttle settings.
There was no time for the formality of a checklist run-through. It was to be a do-or-die approach, textbook wheels-up landing. The sea of trees disappeared beneath the nose of the cockpit, and Gold cut off the ignition and electrical circuits as Vylander stalled the Stratocruiser a scant ten feet above the ground. The three remaining engines died and the great dark shadow below quickly rose and converged upon the falling fuselage.
The impact was far less brutal than any of them had a right to expect. The belly kissed the snow and bumped lightly, once, twice, and then settled down like a giant ski. How long the harrowing, uncontrolled ride continued Vylander could not tell. The short seconds passed like minutes. And then the fallen aircraft slid clumsily to a stop and there was a deep silence, deathly still and ominous.
Burns was the first to react.
'By God… we did it!' he murmured through trembling lips.
Gold stared ashen-faced into the windshield. His eyes saw only white. An impenetrable blanket of snow had been piled high against the glass. Slowly he turned to Vylander and opened his mouth to say something, but the words never came. They died in his throat.
A rumbling vibration suddenly shook the Stratocruiser, followed by a sharp crackling noise and the tortured screech of metal being bent and twisted.
The white outside the windows dissolved into a dense wall of cold blackness and then there was nothing — nothing at all.
At his Naval Headquarters office in Washington, Admiral Bask vacantly studied a map indicating Vixen 03's scheduled flight path. It was all there in his tired eyes, the deeply etched lines on his pale sunken cheeks, the weary slump of his shoulders. In the past four months Bass had aged far beyond his years. The desk phone rang and he picked it up.
'Admiral Bass?' came a familiar voice.
'Yes, Mr. President.'
'Secretary Wilson tells me you wish to call off the search for Vixen 03.'
'That's true,' Bass said quietly. 'I see no sense in prolonging the agony. Navy surface craft, Air Force search planes, and Army ground units have combed every inch of land and sea for fifty miles along either aide of Vixen 03's plotted course.'
'What's your opinion?'
'My guess is her remains are resting on the seabed of the Pacific Ocean,' answered Bass.
'You feel she made it past the West Coast?'
'I do.'
'Let us pray you're right, Admiral. God help us if she crashed on land.'
'If she had, we'd have known by now,' Bass said.
'Yes' — the President hesitated — 'I guess we would at that.' Another pause. 'Close the file on Vixen 03. Bury it, and bury it deep.'
'I'll see to it, Mr. President.'
Bass set the receiver in its cradle and sank back in his chair, a defeated man at the end of a long and otherwise distinguished Navy career.
He stared at the map again. 'Where?' he said aloud to himself. 'Where are you? Where in hell did you go?'
The answer never came. No clue to the disappearance of the ill-fated Stratocruiser ever turned up. It was as though Major Vylander and his crew had flown into oblivion.
1
Dirk Pitt released his hold on sleep, yawned a deep, satisfying yawn, and absorbed his surroundings. It had been dark when he arrived at the mountain cabin and, the flames in the great moss-rock fireplace along with the light from the pungent-smelling kerosene lamps had not illuminated the knotty-pine interior to its best advantage.
His vision sharpened on an old Seth Thomas clock clinging to one wall. He had set and wound the clock the previous night; it had seemed the thing to do. Next he focused on the massive cobwebbed head of an elk that stared down at him through dusty glass eyes. Slightly beyond the elk was a picture window that offered a breathtaking vista of the craggy Sawatch mountain range, deep in the Colorado Rockies.
As the last strands of sleep receded, Pitt found himself faced with his first decision of the day: whether to allow his eyes to bask in the majesty of the scenery or to feast them on the smoothly contoured body of Colorado congresswoman Loren Smith, who sat naked on a quilted rug, engrossed in yoga exercise.
Pitt discerningly opted for Congresswoman Smith.
She was sitting cross-legged, in the lotus position, leaning back and resting her elbows and head on the rug. The exposed nest between her thighs and the small tautened mounds on her chest, Pitt decided, put the granite summits of the Sawatch to shame.
'What do you call that unladylike contortion?' he asked.
'The Fish,' she replied, without moving. 'It's for firming up the bosom.'
'Speaking as a man,' Pitt said with mock pompousness, 'I do not approve of rockhard boobs.'
'Would you prefer them limp and saggy?' Her violet eyes angled in his direction.
'Well… not exactly. But perhaps a little silicone here and a little silicone there…'
'That's the trouble with the masculine mind,' she snapped, sitting up and brushing back her long cinnamon hair. 'You think all women should have balloon-sized mammaries like those insipid drones on the centerfolds of chauvinist magazines.'
'Wishing will make it so.'
