16 Souls

CHAPTER TEN

Seven Months before — January 21^st

Regal 12

For some reason, the right wing was feeling lighter, and for a few moments Marty hadn’t any idea why. He was still having to hold a huge amount of force to keep the yoke rolled to the left, but it definitely was becoming easier, and that meant something was changing, which was not necessarily good.

His eyes caught the fuel gauges on the center panel at the same moment the memory of the copilot’s voice replayed in his head: “We’re leaking fuel like a sonofabitch…”

Jesus! Of course! Marty thought, wondering if he had mere seconds or minutes to change the fuel distribution panel before the right engine started sucking air instead of kerosene. If the right engine flamed out, the prospects for restart would be nil, and the chances for staying airborne and under control with one engine and the wreck of another airplane on the right wing were zilch.

Somewhere deep inside a small prayer of thanks was playing like a mantra that the collision hadn’t physically destroyed the right engine. He wouldn’t be having this conversation with himself if it had.

I can’t believe this is happening!

Marty held the bird steady with his left hand while reaching to the overhead panel to make the adjustments — changing from the tank-to-engine takeoff configuration to have both of the hungry Pratt and Whitneys feeding off the unaffected center tank. That would preserve all the counterbalancing weight of the full number one tank in the left wing. He’d have to get Ryan to help with the calculations in a few minutes — how many pounds were left in the center tank and the left versus whatever their fuel flow was at low altitude in order to figure out how long they could stay airborne. Whatever the answer, it would be measured in hours, and surely they’d be on the ground long before that.

We’re supposed to be at nine thousand and we’re still at twelve, he reminded himself, his stomach contracting again at the near-certainty they’d created the whole disaster by blundering up to the wrong altitude. Maybe it was an old tendency to fatalism, but somehow — even without reviewing all the details in his memory — he knew. He just damn well knew! He’d promised himself to double check everything this copilot did, and he hadn’t.

Slowly Marty let the jet descend, pulling the power back slightly to keep the airspeed within ten knots of where it had been. If he changed anything about the angle of attack — slowed or sped up too much — there was no way to predict what would happen to the changed aerodynamics of the Boeing. But if 250 knots gave them some degree of stable flight, he wasn’t about to change the airspeed.

Marty glanced at the overhead pressurization panel. The cabin was essentially depressurized, but there was a very slight pressure differential a result of the air conditioning packs still shoving air into the cabin. Somewhere along the upper right side the fuselage had been punctured, not that it mattered much now.

The copilot had been shuttling back and forth to the cockpit as if manic action could help the situation. Suddenly he was back again, trying to close and lock the cockpit door behind him. The gesture struck Marty as ludicrous.

“Ryan! Stop fussing with the damn door and just prop it open!”

“Really? What about the security rules?”

“What? We’re worried about hijackers? Prop it open.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And then strap in and help me here.”

“I’m… sorry… I was trying to figure out…” his voice trailed off with the track of his thoughts as he scrambled to comply.

Marty let his mind ricochet around the cockpit again. He didn’t have a plan and he desperately needed one. There were no checklists for what had happened, but there were plenty of smaller checklists to help keep them disciplined. In range. Before landing. And there was probably something more in the emergency procedures to help, even though nothing covered hauling around a parasitic pile of aluminum on the right wing with people still inside.

First, last, and always, he reminded himself, there was order in the way you were supposed to fly even a crippled airliner, and he had to restore his thinking to that regimentation, even if his hands were shaking on the yoke.

“Where are we, Captain?” Ryan asked, the formality registering as a combination of fear and abdication. The subtext was agonizingly clear: I have no idea what to do now, so please tell me! Marty felt a flash of sympathy, wishing there was someone he could turn to with the same questions.

“Near Boulder, turning east.”

Yeah, what the hell DO we do now? Marty asked himself. He turned to the copilot — aware the senior flight attendant had once again entered the cockpit and was standing between them, unwilling to break in until acknowledged.

“Ryan, figure out the fuel and how long we can stay airborne at this fuel flow rate, and get on the controls with me. You need to feel this.”

The copilot nodded as his hand went to the yoke, his eyes scanning the fuel readouts. Marty slowly released his grip on the pilot’s yoke, letting the copilot feel the artificial feedback and realize how much pressure he was going to have to use to maintain control.

“Jeez! That much?”

“Almost everything. The rudder, too. Almost full left. Got your foot on it?”

“Not… yet. Hold on. Yeah.”

“You got it?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, you’ve got it. Remember, you’re flying hydraulic valves and artificial feel springs.”

They went through the same sequence with the rudders, Marty letting go and feeling the stricken 757 yaw sharply as the copilot first put too little pressure on his left pedal, then muscled it back under control.

“Good God, this is awful!” Ryan gasped.

“Can you hold it long enough to let me run back and look.?”

“I… yeah!”

“Hold your heading and slowly bring us down to nine thousand. Got it?”

“Yeah. Hurry!”

Tell me about it, Marty thought as he snapped open his seat belt and lunged out of his seat, aware the flight attendant was scrambling to get out of his way. The look in her eyes when he glanced at her was pure panic, and he stopped long enough to put a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Nancy.”

“Nancy, what were you going to tell me? You’ve been waiting.”

She pointed toward the cabin. “Just that… you need to see it, Captain!”

He let her lead the way into the forward entry alcove and past the galley, into a first class cabin full of the pasty faces of deeply shaken people. As the captain passed they could see the four stripe epaulets on his shoulder and read the determined look on his face — a contrast to the wide-eyed copilot who had already darted back and forth through their cabin twice. They were all on a ragged edge, he thought. A PA announcement from him would be needed as soon as possible.

Nancy was all but running aft as he tried to keep up. She stopped adjacent to the emergency overwing exits where she motioned to a gaggle of standing passengers to move back and find other seats. It was against his normal manners to ignore passengers, but the need to see what was sitting on the right wing was all consuming, and he slipped into a row of seats and plopped his knee on the floor to put his face squarely in the window, marginally aware that Nancy was inches behind.

The flash of the red rotating beacon on top of the 757’s fuselage was the only light source, illuminating the bizarre image just 25 feet away in garish explosions of light. The shape of the smaller aircraft’s fuselage was too distinctive to miss: A Beech 1900, an overgrown King Air, with jagged and torn metal surrounding the stub where the left wing had connected with the left engine. The engine itself was still there, although the propeller was gone along with the left wing. And with the next flash he thought he could see the Beech’s right landing gear strut protruding down from the engine nacelle into the ugly gash on his right wing. How they had been lucky enough to avoid a major fire with the breached fuel tank?

Marty whirled around, almost smashing his face into the flight attendant’s.

“Nancy. Get back up to the cockpit and tell the copilot to turn on the overwing lights.

She started to move and he stopped her. “No! Wait! Instead, tell him to tell you where the switch is, and you do it. He can talk your hand onto it. I don’t want him to let go of the yoke. Understood?”

She nodded, terrified and silent, and disappeared up the aisle as he turned back to the window, pressing his nose against the plexiglass, aware that the 1900’s fuselage was vibrating visibly — not exactly rocking, but shaking and shuddering in the high-speed airflow.

And there was something else, and it chilled him as if the abstract had suddenly become reality. There were lights in the cabin of the ruined commuter — and in the cockpit a flashlight beam suddenly stabbed toward him. Marty could see whoever it was turn the beam on his own face, as if the underscore the fact that he wasn’t just dealing with a thing on his right wing.

He could see a cascade of long hair illuminated by the flashlight. The captain was apparently a woman, and somehow that made everything worse.

The white overwing lights on the side of the 757’s fuselage suddenly snapped on, flooding the nightmarish scene on the right wing like a single spotlight on an empty stage. He could see the remaining stream of kerosene leaking away into the night from the hopelessly gouged right main fuel tank, and with sinking heart he saw just how precarious the catastrophic mating of the two aircraft really was. The fuselage was just barely stuck on the Boeing’s wing. It wouldn’t take much abrupt maneuvering to get rid of it.

How the Beech had missed the 757’s right engine was a mystery in itself, but right on top of it — anchored tenuously by the wheel less right main landing gear at the end of a channel of ripped aluminum wing surface — was what? Ten thousand pounds of ruined airplane? Maybe more.

“Jesus Christ!” Marty said under his breath, aware every passenger within view was waiting to read his face when he stood and turned around. He had to look calm and in control, which would be a visceral lie.

Nancy was back, waiting quietly behind him, this time not as close.

How long has it been? Marty wondered. It felt like ten minutes since the collision.

“What do you think, Captain?” Nancy’s soft voice was holding up well, he thought. She had to be at least as terrified as he was, but neither of them could afford to show it.

He glanced at her, the words he had not wanted to verbalize escaping straight from his thoughts.

“I’ve got to find a way to get this bird down without changing the angle of attack.”

“I’m… sorry, I don’t understand that term.”

“The angle of the wing into the wind,” he said, turning back to the window again, no longer holding a tiny, irrational hope that the specter might have disappeared. How the hell can I do this, he thought, his synapses firing on a solution. Maybe if we milk the flaps down as we slow…

The way the ruined commuter was jumping and jerking around, if the airflow canted upwards anymore — hit it from a lower angle — the chances of it pulling loose were obvious. He could see the little Beech’s right wing occasionally flutter into view on the far side of the embedded 1900’s fuselage. That wing was producing lift, which was probably why they hadn’t just rolled over to the right and lost control immediately after impact.

But if it produced too much, it could fly them right off the wing. “Can we bring them in?”

The voice came from someone behind them standing in the aisle. Marty turned to find four ashen faces hovering above Nancy’s shoulder, one of them belonging to another of his flight attendants.

“What?”

“Captain, if we could open the emergency exit door two rows ahead, couldn’t we get those people across the wing and safely in here?”

“No,” he said, backing out of the seat row and preparing to dash forward.

“I think we can do it!” a male voice answered, two more chiming in for clueless support. The mere idea frightened him, and Marty turned to them. “I’ve got to get back to the cockpit, but don’t even think about opening that door. There’s no way.”

“Well, wait a minute!” One of the men said, glancing around as if confirming he had allies. “Suppose we could find a rope? Don’t you have a rope?”

The sight of the captain raising his hand for quiet had the desired effect.

“Hey! The wind over that wing? It’s two hundred and fifty knots… almost three hundred miles per hour. That’s worse than any hurricane! There’s no way to get a rope tied between them and us, and even if we could, there’s no way for anyone to hang on. They might as well be on the moon out there.”

“Well, then, slow us down, Captain,” one of the women said, as if only a moron wouldn’t be able to figure that one out.

“If I do,” Marty added, choosing his words carefully, “I’ll have to pull the nose up, meaning the wing will be at a greater up-angle to the oncoming wind in order to produce more lift, and if that nose-up attitude — what we call angle-of-attack — gets too great, the wind will raise their fuselage from our wing and fling it off. Their left wing is gone. They’ll die if they fall away from us.”

How could the import of his own words chill him so, Marty wondered, but there it was, in a nutshell. He turned and began moving back toward the cockpit as fast as he could without running, trying with only moderate success to suppress the thought of setting a 757 onto a short, slick, snow covered runway at just under three hundred miles per hour.