wheel.
“Son of a bitch, we’ve lost most of the aileron on the port side. Jerry, feather the number four prop. We’ve got to level her out. She’s pulling too hard on the starboard side.”
Winger did as ordered, and since the crew halved the thrust on her one side, the Stratofreighter slowly began to straighten, but still she was losing altitude. In the thirty seconds since the explosion, they had dropped to ten thousand feet and continued to plummet. The two pilots held on grimly, teasing the weakened controls so the plane stayed level. There was nothing they could do about holding her in the sky. It was just a matter of how gently they could put her on the ice.
“Start looking for a smooth area we can set this crate.” Delaney had recovered from his initial terror and his voice was crisp and commanding once again.
“I’m looking, but the ice is just too broken up.” Winger glanced at the altimeter. “Five thousand feet.”
In the denser atmosphere, there was a little more lift under the wings and her descent became easier. Delaney tried to raise her nose slightly, hoping to regain some altitude, but the C-97 dipped to port again. For a panicked second he fought to level her. “What do you see out there?”
Before Winger could respond, the cockpit was suddenly filled with smoke, a noxious mixture of burning oil and hydraulic fluid that cut visibility down to zero. The thick pall made all three men gag as petrochemicals scoured their throats and burned into their eyes like acid. Sanders screamed that he had a fire right behind him. Groping blindly, Delaney reached forward to shut off the cabin pressure and vent the cockpit’s air. In an instant the smoke cleared, leaving the men choking to draw in the fresh, yet frigid, air.
“Get that fire out,” Delaney rasped. In the moments between the time the fire ignited and the time he’d cleared the cockpit, the plane had lost another thousand feet. It was now dipping in a dangerous, lazy spiral. “Talk to me, Jerry. What’s out there?”
“Nothing.” Winger coughed, one hand on his chest as if the gesture would extinguish the pain from his scalded lungs. “Hold on a second!” He studied an area of clear ice. It was under the shadow of a black granite mountain.
“I got it,” Delaney said at the same instant Winger pointed it out to him.
“Fire’s out, Major, but I can’t promise for how long.” Sanders had been hardest hit by the smoke and his voice sounded like he was drawing his last breath.
Banking the lumbering cargo plane as gently as he could, Major Delaney brought them around, lining up the C-97’s bulbous nose with the patch of smooth ice with as much care as he’d ever shown in his life. They were at two thousand feet, and the airspeed was down to one hundred and ten knots. He judged that his landing site was about four miles away and began to reduce their altitude. This was a one-shot attempt and his knuckles were white on the control wheel. He barely noticed that the cockpit temperature was thirty degrees below zero and ice was forming on the inside of the windows.
“She’s feeling a little more responsive,” Winger said as he helped turn the C-97 into the prevailing northward wind for her final approach. “Must be the thicker air.”
“Yeah,” Delaney agreed, feeling just a touch of optimism for the first time since the explosion. Every second he had the plane under control meant their chances were that tiny bit better.
“Should we try flaps?”
“No. If they don’t deploy on the port side, the plane’ll flip.”
At two miles out, the pilots could see that the area they intended to use as a landing strip wasn’t nearly as smooth as they’d first thought. It was ravaged by the high winds, and the layer of new snow that would have cushioned the plane had been torn away, leaving grotesquely shaped daggers of ice that could tear through the Boeing’s thin skin and slice open her fuel tanks. Delaney ordered Winger to dump their remaining fuel, then prepared himself for the inevitable lift as the plane became lighter. He calculated that there would be just enough Avgas in the lines for him to maintain power until the plane was safely down. He feared fire more than he feared the upcoming landing. He’d seen too many comrades returning from bombing missions in crippled planes make a safe touchdown only to have their B-29s burst into flames on the runway.
“What about the landing gear?” Winger’s hand was poised over the switches.
“I’d rather flop her in on her belly. We can’t risk a landing strut hitting one of those ice ridges.”
Had they lost their instruments, there would have been no way to tell their proximity to the ground. It was one of the bewildering aspects of flying in Arctic conditions: the absolute sameness wherever you looked. It was mostly the trees Delaney missed. He could determine altitude by gauging their height. His only visual reference here was the barren mountains looming out the starboard windows. Experience said they were about three thousand feet high, but they could easily be just three hundred. His hands tightened even further on the yoke. The cold was affecting him now. His eyes felt dried out though tears streamed down his cheeks. He could barely feel the rudder pedals. The altimeter spun through five hundred feet.
The Stratofreighter droned in, her two working engines maintaining a steady descent. Details of the ice field became crisper the closer they got and what Delaney and Winger saw was not good. This would be a rough landing even if the ice were smooth. But it wasn’t. The veil of snow blowing off the ice swirled and eddied against countless concrete-hard ridges.
Delaney bumped the throttles, feeling he needed a bit more altitude before flaring the crippled plane. She came in level despite the wind’s desire to slew her around. The closest mountain was only a quarter mile off the right wing, yet it offered little protection from deadly wind shears. He sensed a gust coming up and reacted accordingly, fighting the spongy controls to keep the wings of the artificial horizon indicator balanced. “Call the altitude.”
“One hundred feet,” Winger replied at once. “Tom, you strapped in tight?”
Sanders’s answer was a pained moan. Delaney had the plane, so Winger twisted around to check on the radioman. He gasped. Tom Sanders’s face was coated with blood that ran from his nose in twin jets and steamed in the flight deck’s freezing air. Most of the blood had solidified into a crusty sheet covering the lower half of his face. He cradled his head in his mittened hands, pressing against his skull with so much force his upper body trembled. His eyes bulged as though they were on stalks, and more blood leaked from around them.
“Tom, what happened?” Winger assumed their radioman had hit his face against the navigation table.
Sanders moaned again, louder, and began clawing at his chest, smearing blood on his leather jacket like paint strokes.
“Jerry, I need you,” Jack Delaney called. They were fifty feet above the ice.
Winger turned back to the controls. “Something’s wrong with Tom. He’s hurt.”
A gust took the C-97, pushing it to the left. Winger and Delaney responded in concert, easing the plane back on course. They brought the nose up ever so slightly. Air beneath the wings was forced against the ice, providing a cushion called ground effect that the plane gently sank through.
“Speed’s one hundred knots.”
Delaney’s concentration was total. This was nothing like the countless flights he’d done for the Berlin Air-lift, where planes were stacked up four and five high waiting for landing instructions. This was a one-time thing: land her safely or crash. There was no third option.
In the clear air, the ground came up deceptively fast. He held her aloft for a moment longer, then felt pressure against the yoke as though a weight had been forced against Winger’s column. He turned and saw his copilot slumped forward in his seat, his stiffened arms pushing on his wheel. Winger spasmed, throwing himself back again. Droplets of blood from his nose and eyes splattered the inside of the cockpit. A scream came out as a gurgling cry. More blood fountained from his lips. Delaney guessed that it was the effects of the smoke inhalation. Fortunately he hadn’t gotten it as strongly as his two crewmen.
There was no time to help. Delaney focused his vision on the landing just as the fully loaded plane hit the ice. With a rending scrape, her belly smashed into the ground. Delaney was instantly blinded by a fury of ice particles and snow. He felt the props on the two working engines tear into the surface and then shatter, the huge blades breaking off, one sounding like it had scythed through the aluminum skin of the payload area.
The engine drone was replaced by the sound of the plane being ripped apart by the ice. Every jarring crash into a ridge slammed Delaney against his seat restraints until his shoulders felt broken. It went on and on. The airspeed indicator had barely dipped below one hundred knots. It wasn’t possible, Delaney thought. They should have been slowing.
His view was completely whited out. He had no references, nothing to judge their position or progress. But it
