Lockout

CHAPTER SIXTY

Aboard Pangia 10 (0542 Zulu)

“I tried to tell the fighters, but they’re not responding,” Jerry said as Dan pulled on his headset and triggered the radio the Israeli had been using. “I’m starting a turn.”

“Patyish Lead, this is Pangia 10! We have regained control! Repeat, we have regained control and are reversing course back to Iraq.”

There was no response, yet another explosion in the distance off to the east announced the fact that the engagement wasn’t over.

“Where are we?” Dan asked.

“Just inside their airspace. Baghdad is right behind us. See if you can punch up the airport in case we need it.”

“Absolutely we’re going to…”

The rest of the answer was drowned out by a thunderous explosion on the right side of the Airbus and they could feel the big bird stagger and yaw to the right. Emergency warnings, beeps and horns and messages began flooding the ECAM computer screens.

“Jesus God!”

“What the hell was that?” Jerry demanded.

“Something exploded!”

“No shit, Sherlock! But what?”

“I don’t know… maybe a missile. We’ve lost number two engine, I think.”

Dan jerked his head back forward, quickly scanning the cascading readouts on the screen. “Yes, number two engine is down!”

“We have a fire light?” Jerry asked.

“What? Yes, dammit!”

“Run the ECAM procedure.”

“Roger. Engine fire number two, I have the fire switch for number two, confirm?”

The procedure intimately familiar from training scenarios, Jerry reached his right hand up and touched the same fire switch Dan was pointing to.

“Roger, number two confirmed.”

“Pulling two, continuing checklist. Shutting off number two start switch.”

The sudden feeling of deceleration superimposed itself over all their other senses as Jerry looked with feral intensity toward his copilot.

“No, No, Dan! Number TWO! Not number ONE!”

“I pulled two!”

“We just lost number one! Confirm the fire switch is in and try a restart…”

“Jerry!”

“…we can get her back! Quickly!”

“JERRY!”

“What?”

Dan was pointing to the forward panel and the depiction of the fuel tanks.

“We’re out of gas, Jere!”

“What?”

“We’ve run out of fuel. I’ve got all the pumps on.”

Dan leaned left to get closer to the fuel readouts, confirming it. No useable fuel in number one main tank, and essentially none in number two.

“We’re zeroed, Jerry.”

“Oh, fuck! But what happened to two?”

“They shot us.”

“Who? Who is they? Who shot us?”

“Man, I don’t know, but it had to be the Iranians.”

“But I’d just started the turn! We were nose on to them.”

“I don’t know…”

“Couldn’t be a surface-to-air, we’d be in pieces.”

“Okay, look, we need to maintain control here.”

“I know it!”

“Is she still responding?” Dan asked

“Yes. Sluggish but responding.”

“I’m deploying the RAT. And… we’re depressurizing, Jerry. Oxygen masks on, confirm 100 percent.”

Jerry let go of the sidestick long enough to sweep on his oxygen mask, checking the 100 percent position on the selector before resuming his death grip on the stick.

“Comm check, Dan. How copy?” Jerry asked, his voice sounding strange in the oxygen mask microphone.

“Loud and clear. How me?”

“Good. Run the depress checklist, but we cannot do an emergency descent.”

“Hell, no. I got that. We don’t want to anyway. We don’t know the damage.”

“Jump seat on,” Bill Breem reported, followed by a quick confirmation from Tom Wilson.

“Obviously it punched our fuselage,” Jerry added. “Do you suppose we’ve lost anyone back there?”

The question was in cadence with the rapid fire back and forth of the previous thirty seconds but the reality of it stopped both men cold. The memory of the gaping hole that had swallowed nine of United Airlines Flight 811 passengers in 1989 replayed in their heads as clearly as if there had been an HD screen on the glareshield.

“No,” Dan answered suddenly. “No, not possible. The pressure loss was slow and steady, not explosive.”

The electrical power flickered and stabilized with a reduced number of instruments, as Dan reached up to start the auxiliary power unit.

“The APU isn’t going to do us much good without fuel, Dan,” Jerry managed, trying his best to grin at him.

“I forgot,” Dan replied, shaking his head at the oversight.

“Is there an airport we can reach?”

“Yes. Baghdad International! Eighty-five miles, heading two-eight-zero. We’re at 37,000 feet… we have enough energy to glide 120 miles, Jerry. So we can do this.”

“You think it was a sidewinder or something?”

“Yeah, a missile, I’ll bet anything. But you’re the fighter jock.”

“We’ve got to get on the ground before someone comes back to finish us off!”

“Agreed.”

“That had to be a heat seeker or we’d be toast. Had to be Iranian.”

“Probably,” Dan said, another possibility nipping at the back of his mind.

“I imagine our Israeli friends are still holding them off.”

“Let’s just concentrate on getting down, Jerry,” Dan replied, trying to force his thoughts back to the myriad of tasks at hand. “Lemme dial up Baghdad tower. I have no idea if they’re clear or socked in down there.”

“Dan?” Jerry’s voice was suddenly tentative, puzzled, almost indignant, as if the scenario was going significantly off script and there had been no approval for such a deviation.

“Yes?”

“I’m… having control problems here, Dan.”

“What do you mean, control problems?”

“I mean… she’s sluggish on roll to the left, and the vibrations… feel that?”

“Yeah. No time to go back and look, but the right wing’s probably damaged.”

“Bet it ripped open our fuel tank.”

“Not that it matters!” Dan chuckled, in spite of the all-consuming tension.

They had one shot at landing with no power, limited instruments, only the force of the slipstream turning the ram air turbine and batteries providing instrument power, and a totally unknown situation on landing gear and flaps.

“We can do this, Dan!”

“That’s what I said. Damn right! You’re in direct law. What can I do to help?”

“Make the radio calls, call my altitude, keep calculating energy status, and make sure we don’t forget any emergency checklists.”

“We’re eighty miles out.” With the iPad on his lap and Baghdad’s main airport punched up, Dan located and dialed in the tower frequency and hit the transmit button for number one radio.

“Baghdad tower, Pangia Flight 10, declaring an emergency. All engines out. Eighty miles to the east, we’ll be making a no-engine approach and landing. Please acknowledge and say current winds and… ah… ah… ceiling.”

Seconds ticked by before the very American voice of a contract controller came back to them.

“Roger, Pangia 10. Runway Three-Three-Left is the active, 13,100 feet available, current winds three-two-zero at five knots, visibility unlimited. State fuel and souls on board.”

“Fuel is zero, and we have… I don’t know… several hundred souls on board. We will need the equipment and would recommend a few ambulances… we don’t know the situation in the back.”

“Please explain, Ten.”

“We’ve been hit by an Iranian air-to-air missile. We were attacked by the Iranians.”

“Dan… Dan she’s vibrating even more. Something’s coming loose out there!”

“Can you control her?”

“I’ve gotta slow down more… Jesus, it takes full left deflection to hold her level.”

“Want me to run back and look?”

“I… think we’d better! I need to know what we’ve got.”

An interphone call chime rang, and Dan punched up the channel. .

“Cockpit!”

“This is Lucy at Four-Right. We’re on fire!” The voice was as strained and frightened as he imagined he sounded.

“What are you seeing, Lucy?”

“Outside on the right wing, we’re trailing a sheet of flame!”

“Okay. One of us is coming back,” Dan said, pushing the receiver back in its cradle, as he quickly briefed Jerry and reached for the glareshield, his hand searching for the engine fire switch and the button for the fire extinguishing bottles.

“You already fired one, right?” Jerry asked.

“Yes. The ECAM’s saying to fire the second now. I’m shooting number two.”

“Go ahead!”

Tom Wilson had thrown off his seatbelt. “I’ll go back and take a look, guys.”

“Please!” Jerry affirmed.

Inside two minutes, Tom Wilson was on the interphone.

“Okay, guys, we ARE on fire. It’s not just whatever remains of number two engine, but it looks like we’re trailing flame off the middle of the right wing. How, I don’t know, since there’s no fuel left…”

“Could it be the metal of the wing burning?”

“God I hope not! But it’s pretty intense.”

“That’s probably hydraulic fluid, too, which means we could lose all the right side controls.”

“No wonder she’s sluggish!”

“I need to dive, Dan,” Jerry was saying. “I need to blow the flames out!”

“We have some extra altitude, but if you go down too fast, we won’t make the airport!”

“And if we don’t, it could burn through the wing.”

“She may not be able to structurally handle too much speed!”

“Gotta try! Increasing speed to barber pole,” Jerry said.

Patyish 21

The major flying the lead F-15 had seen the explosion on the right wing of the lumbering Airbus just before it turned back and headed out of Iranian airspace, but the air battle was still too engaged to give chase until they confirmed the Iranians were bugging out east and the Israeli force acknowledged his “knock it off” call.

Now he ordered the remainder of his flight to reform on Patyish 22 as he plugged in afterburner and dove to the west to join up on Pangia 10.

He had not monitored the special command channel Patyish 26 had been ordered to contact, and he’d restrained himself from asking about 26’s remaining ordinance when they were “safeing up” their weapons for the return. The possibility that the explosion he’d seen came from an Israeli missile was nauseating, but at least Pangia was still in the air.

The target of the huge Airbus flared clearly ahead of him as he pushed past Mach 1.8 in chase, closing the fifteen-mile gap easily before coming out of burner and timing his arrival alongside the stricken commercial liner.

Aboard Pangia 10

Carol had reached forward to grab the PA handset and both pilots registered the fact that she was making the announcement they wished they had time to give.

“Everyone check your seatbelts tightly fastened and keep your oxygen masks on! Stay down, lean as far forward as you can. We’re making an emergency descent and will be making a no engine emergency landing in Baghdad.”

“I’ll keep calculating the lowest altitude you can descend to and still make Baghdad, Jerry.”

“How far out are we?”

“Sixty-two miles on the GPS. That means no diving lower than 24,000.”

“And we’re still at 31,000.”

“She’s shaking pretty badly, Jerry!”

“I know it!”

“I didn’t see any obvious damage to the cabin, but somehow we’ve got a hole in us. You’re coming through 30,000 now.”

“That’s as fast as I dare.”

“Agreed. Twenty-nine, five… twenty-nine… twenty-eight, five…”

“Is someone watching back there?”

“Yes.”

“Wish we could talk to the passengers, too, but no time.”

“Twenty-eight, now Jerry, twenty-seven, five… this shaking is really worrying me!”

“Distance to Baghdad?”

“Fifty-four miles. We need 21,000, we’re descending through twenty-seven.”

“Call her, Dan!”

“Got it,” he replied, yanking the handset back out of its cradle and punching the button for 4R.

“Tom… status?”

He hunched over the phone, nodding and acknowledging before hanging up and turning back to the captain.

“He says the flames are less now, but it’s still burning, and every few seconds something else seems to fall off and blow away.”

“Like… parts of the wing?”

“Jerry, he said each piece is glowing hot or flaming when it falls away! We gotta get down man… we’re coming apart.”