In the Shadow of Falcon's Wings

CHAPTER 12 THE HIGH COST OF AIR TRAVEL

Dodge scanned the unfamiliar gauges, as if he might somehow in his ignorance, discover that she was mistaken.

“Can you glide her down?” asked Hurley.

“Sure… well, maybe. This is an awfully heavy bird. But it doesn’t really matter. Have you looked outside?”

Dodge did so, seeing once again the familiar golden brown of the veldt spreading in every direction toward the horizon. “We’ve left the jungle.”

“We’ve left the river,” she said slowly to underscore the clarification. “We’ve been on a northerly course for a while now — north, away from the river. I don’t know if there’s enough fuel to get us back over water.”

Hobbs placed a reassuring hand over hers. “What about a crash landing? Think you can pull it off?”

Molly was equivocal. “I don’t know if this bird will hold together through that.”

“What about the river? Shouldn’t we turn around?”

“If I have to set her down on land, I’d rather take my chances out in the open then over the forest.” She pulled back on the yoke and the nose of the plane came up. “I’m going to climb while we’ve still got some fuel in the lines. The purpose of the fuel dump is to get rid of excess fuel so that the plane doesn’t explode if you have to pull off a crash landing. There’s still a little bit left to play with. Once we lose the engines, we can use the speed of our descent to keep from stalling, but it won’t allow much room for maneuvering.”

Hurley wasn’t about to surrender to gravity. “Maybe there’s something else we can do; parachutes or…” His gaze settled on Dodge. “Hold on. There are three more of those flying packs below decks. We took ‘em off those mercenaries. Dodge, can you give us all a crash course in how to fly one?”

“Crash course? I’ll assume the pun was intended.” Dodge felt a glimmer of enthusiasm. “I think we can manage that.”

“That’s it then. We can bail out and we still won’t have to walk back to civilization.”

Hobbs stopped him before he could leave the cockpit. “And what about those poor souls we tied up down there?”

Frustration snatched Hurley’s elated smile away, but he made no retort. It was an old argument between the two — almost as old as their partnership. Dodge had written of it in fiction, but could not believe that, in the face of certain death, the Padre’s mores would thwart their one chance at salvation.

To everyone’s surprise, Molly stated the obvious. “What about them? Let them figure out how to land the plane. They’d do no less to us.”

A cloud of disappointment darkened Hobbs’ countenance. “Molly —”

“Don’t ‘Molly’ me, dad. They killed everyone at the settlement; defenseless old men and women, murdered. Don’t give me a sermon about respect for life or turning the other cheek.”

“That was Krieger’s doing.”

“It makes no difference.”

“The difference is me, Molly. I made a promise to God —”

Hurley interposed. “Dodge, couldn’t we could carry them along, piggyback style? The packs can lift that much weight, right?”

Dodge’s gaze flickered from face to face in the small control cabin. Although he shared Molly’s sentiment, something about Hobbs’ passionate plea for mercy reached him. Maybe it was the simple fact of bringing Hobbs to life with ink and paper for the better part of three years that made him understand how someone could value another’s life — even an enemy’s — more than his own.

He thought about Hurricane’s suggestion. It had merit, but was there really time to instruct the others in operation of the exoskeletons, compounded with the difficulty of carrying unwilling captives? There had to be a better way.

“Molly, if this bird had wheels, could you bring her down in one piece? Even if we ran out of gas?”

“Sure.” She stared at him quizzically. “But where are you going to get wheels?”

He turned to Hurley and Hobbs. “This is a nice airplane and we worked awfully hard to get her. It might come in handy later.”

The two old friends exchanged a glance then Hobbs spoke. “That sounds like something the Cap might say.”

“Darn right,” agreed Hurricane, shooting Dodge a wink. “What have you got in mind?”

“You asked if the flying rigs can bear the weight of two people; I think they can support a whole lot more than that. The force field itself acts like a cushion, and the more energy against it, the more it will push back. If we attach them to the hull —” he drew an imaginary outline of the plane on a table top, then indicated three points on the fuselage, two in the front by the wings and one further back near the tail — “I think we can land her just like she had wheels.”

“Attach them how?”

“I can weld them in place using this.” He raised one of the spherical gauntlets.

“You mean to do this from outside? Out there?” Hobbs looked about as enthusiastic as a kick in the shins, but Hurricane nodded slowly.

“It’s crazy, no doubt. But if you think you can do it, I’ve got your back.”

“It’s insane,” declared Molly from the pilot’s chair. “What if you fall?”

“I’ll just fly down,” he said quickly. He didn’t add that, while he might survive such a failure to complete his task, the prospects for those on the plane were a far sight grimmer.

“Then do it,” she said. “And hurry. Once the engine’s fail, we’ll start to plummet like a millstone.”

“I’ll be back in a flash.”

“Oh, wait! Dodge, I need to tell you something.” She leveled the column and switched on the autopilot, and then before he could even turn around, she slipped in between her adopted father and Hurley to embrace Dodge. Then she kissed him. “Good luck.”

In spite of the urgency of the situation, he blushed. “With a blessing like that, how can I fail?”

His confidence lasted about as far as the side door. Beyond that, only the urgency of the situation impelled him to action. He gathered the three exoskeletons and lashed them to his belt. Folded up, they seemed like nothing more than a bundle of steel rods. Hurricane and the Padre accompanied him to the side hatch, with the bigger man wrestling the door open against the fierce headwind. “Be careful!”

Dodge nodded, then activated his force field and stepped out onto the sloping top surface of the truncated wing-shaped sponson.

He kept a fierce grip on the doorframe, but immediately recognized that some of his assumptions, made from earlier empirical observations, were holding true. The energy bubble was deflecting the wind as effectively as if it were a solid object. More importantly, the field seemed to extend to anything already within its limits, creating a very tenuous bond with the exterior of the aircraft. The analogy of a bubble was apt; the closer he stayed to the plane, the more his energy shield sucked him against the smooth metal surface. However, despite the fact that Dodge was spared direct contact with the wind, he could feel its pressure against the force field, threatening to blast him loose. He might have been in a bubble stuck to skin of the plane, but that bubble was being blasted by a two hundred mile an hour wind.

The metal of the exoskeleton seemed to respond to his unspoken desire to cling to the aircraft, revealing a further property of the strange metal. Forcing back the instinctive impulse to hang on for dear life, he put his hands inside the spherical gauntlets and started moving along the side of the plane. The metal of the flying rig stuck to the aluminum skin like a magnet to steel. Heartened by the discovery, he commenced spider crawling down to the underbelly of the X-314.

This is actually going to work.

The catchall name for amphibious aircraft was “flying boat,” but the Boeing aircraft had been designed as a luxury cruise liner for the skies, and its dimensions were certainly on that scale. Dodge felt as though he had slipped beneath the Queen Mary; all he could see was silvery metal spread out in every direction. He sidled forward to a point where he could just see the wingtips, and went to work.

He released the right-hand grip and immediately slid a few inches along the remaining points of contact. To compensate, he flattened his body against the frigid aluminum, arresting his slide but constraining his freedom of movement.

I don’t have time for this.

He freed one of the exoskeletons from his belt and awkwardly brought it up to his working area where he braced it in place with a forearm then fumbled the clasp shut to activate its force field.

The insistent force of the wind relented as if a switch had been thrown. The second exoskeleton seemed to have added its power to his own, creating a refuge from the constant flow of air beneath the plane.

“That’s kind of nice,” he said, finally relaxing enough to breathe.

The bundle of metal rods remained exactly where he had placed it, affixed by some indescribable electric bond, but Dodge had already determined that a different, perhaps redundant, means of securing the exoskeleton was called for. He returned his hand to the basket-shaped gauntlet and directed a small but focused burst of electricity at the plane. When the sunspots faded from his eyes, he saw that the metal frame had been successfully fused into the aluminum surface.

“One down!”

He slid laterally to the opposite side of the fuselage and with a good degree more certainty repeated his efforts in half the time. He had just finished welding it in place when the engines began to backfire and die.

He felt the shift as the plane began to angle downward; Molly was putting the craft into a shallow dive, letting gravity make up for the loss of power. As long as wind continued to rush over the airfoil shape of the wings, creating an updraft above and pushing up from below, the plane would stay aloft. From their current altitude, he could see for miles. The green band of the Congo Basin was visible to the south, behind them, but below was the endless flat savannah that stretched all the way to the Sahara. There was only about five thousand feet of air between where they were and the ground, and the plane was losing altitude fast.

He scooted back out of the area protected by the two secured exoskeletons and immediately felt the push of wind rushing along the belly of the plane. His movements were hasty, but he was filled with a surety born of prior success. The fear that had slowed him before was gone. He crept like a fly to the predetermined apex of the triangle and reached back for the last remaining exoskeleton.

When his probing fingers did not immediately find it, he craned his head around, using his eyes to guide the search, but saw nothing. He stared in disbelief at the rope ties that hung impotently from his belt. It was gone.

Two force fields on opposite sides of the plane would probably suffice for an emergency landing, but the tail section would eventually settle onto the ground where it would be ripped apart by friction. They would probably survive, but the plane would never fly again. With one more force field near the tail, Molly might actually be able to save the plane, but now that wasn’t going to happen.

All for nothing, Dodge raged. Should have just bailed out in the first place.

But then another inner voice reminded him that he did have a third exoskeleton, the one he was wearing.

Dodge’s travails had not gone unnoticed. From the moment he had embarked on his desperate mission, Hurricane had begun searching for a way to back him up. He quickly discovered an abundance of rope in a storage area situated in the nose of the plane, under the flight deck. Because the aircraft was also a seagoing vessel, mooring ropes were a necessity, and sometimes needed to be replaced. Hurley cut off a short section and rigged a Swiss seat climbing harness, which he then secured to one of the mooring lines with a figure-eight knot.

“Go help her fly the plane,” he told Hobbs. “I’ve got this.”

The Padre nodded and went back to the cockpit while Hurricane crept out onto the sponson. He got into a good position to observe Dodge just as the latter finished securing the second exoskeleton, and gasped in horror when he saw the third one slip unnoticed from its restraint at Dodge’s waist and vanish in an instant.

“It’s enough! Come back.” His shouts were swept away in the wind. Dodge moved along the underbelly of the plane, unaware that anything was wrong.

He witnessed the moment where Dodge realized what had happened; saw the look of despair on the young man’s features. He continued to hurl his pleas into the atmosphere, but Dodge never heard him. And then to Hurricane’s utter amazement, Dodge began moving again.

He did not make his way to safety, as any sane man would have done, but instead scurried back to one of the fixed force fields and wedged his feet behind the assembly of rods. Then, as simply as if he were unbuttoning a coat, he deactivated his exoskeleton.

“No!” Again, Hurley’s cry went unheard. He understood now what Dodge intended, and saw just as clearly that the plan was beyond foolhardy; it was suicidal. But shouting about it wasn’t going to do a bit of good; he had to find a better answer.

Dodge left his force field off only long enough to squirm out of the restraints. As soon as he was clear, he folded it up and clasped the belt once more. The exoskeleton adhered to the plane just like the others, with Dodge holding onto it like the rung of a horizontal ladder. He pushed it along the hull as far as he could, but his effort was limited by his reach. The apex of the critical triangle was only five feet from its base; not nearly enough to keep the plane from sustaining damage upon landing. He worked his foot loose and placed the sole of his shoe against the exterior of the plane, bracing himself upside down. The energy bubble sheltered him from the rush of air, but it could not alter the inexorable attraction of gravity. His face turned purple from the exertion and the rush of blood pulled down from his extremities, but inch by inch, he pushed the charged exoskeleton toward the tail of the plane.

Hurley’s horror was grudgingly giving over to admiration, but there remained only one possible finale for Dodge’s heroics. He might have time to complete his task, but once the third force field was in place, he would be stranded where he was, clinging to his tentative handhold as the plane scraped across the veldt at more than a hundred miles an hour. If Dodge was going to survive, he was going to need some help from above; help, not from God, but from a Hurricane.

The plane was dropping about fifty feet a second. The landscape below still looked like something captured by an artist’s brush, but there could be no denying that it was getting closer. He was only going to get one chance to save Dodge, and it was going to take split second timing. With his legs gripping the edge of the sponson like the back of champion bucking bronco, Hurricane measured out thirty feet of the mooring line and tied off the excess. At that same moment, Dodge made his final adjustment, positioning the exoskeleton dead center on the hull, at the edge of the point where it began to taper up toward the tail.

Hurley threw himself into the wind, pushing off so that when his full weight hit the end of the line, he swung like a pendulum toward the place where Dodge hung on for dear life. As the rope snapped taut and he began arcing up toward Dodge, he threw his arms wide to catch his friend. His estimates were dead on; the line was exactly the right length, his trajectory had perfectly compensated for the rushing wind, his timing was right on the mark. He had only forgotten one thing.

When he tried to close his arms around Dodge’s inverted torso, something slapped him away. He bounced away from the force field as though he had hit a brick wall, and fell back into the wind.

His eyes met Dodge’s in that moment — a horrible instant of time, bloated to an eternity, where both men knew that a crucial opportunity had been lost. Hurricane could see the strain in his friend’s face, the quivering of muscles fatigued by the already inhuman expenditure of energy just to hold on. He made a final desperate attempt, knowing that it was futile, knowing that he was too far away….

But Dodge was already gone.