Pandora's Curse

GREENLAND AUGUST 1953

The entire length of the Air Force C-97 Stratofreighter shuddered as the port-side outboard engine began misfiring again. This time was much worse than before and rather than risk his plane becoming too unstable, Major Jack Delaney shut down the twenty-eight-cylinder Pratt and Whitney Wasp. He reduced the drag by feathering the prop so the blades cut the slipstream edgewise, but the plane still felt sluggish in his hands.

“We’re in a world of hurt, aren’t we, Major?” asked his copilot, Lieutenant Jerry Winger.

Delaney didn’t respond as he studied the gauges for the three working engines. Every instinct told him that they hadn’t seen the last of whatever had affected the power plant. The remaining engines were running hot, making him think that the problem wasn’t with the plane, but with the fuel they’d taken on in England. Most likely poorly maintained tanker trucks had contaminated the fuel. He looked out the windshield, known as the “greenhouse” throughout the Air Force because it was made up of nineteen individual panes of Plexiglas. It resembled the cockpit of the venerable B-29, on which the Stratofreighter was based.

Eighteen thousand feet below the Military Air Transport Service cargo plane, the desolate north Atlantic was as dark as the slag heaps in Delaney’s native West Virginia. The sky was thankfully clear. Only a few stringers of high cirrus clouds smeared the air high above the plane, but Delaney didn’t know how much longer his aircraft would remain aloft.

“Yeah, Jer, we might just be,” Delaney finally replied. Glancing at Winger, he saw his own concern reflected in the younger man’s eyes. Despite the heat blasting into the pressurized cabin, the major felt a chill race across his skin like sheet lightning. “Tom, where the hell are we?”

Tom Sanders, the navigator, was seated at his tiny desk behind the cockpit, a chart spread before him and a worried frown on his face. “Closer to Greenland than Iceland if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” the pilot grunted.

“I’d say we’re about forty miles from the Greenland coast.”

Delaney’s experience was that it took a series of small mishaps to lead to the catastrophe of a crash. Except, he thought darkly, during the war when flak or a Japanese Zero came out of nowhere. He’d had a few close scrapes during his command of a B-29, but Delaney had never lost a man. Now, however, his luck might have finally run out. This time fate was dealing him one problem after another, and there wasn’t much the major could do.

It had started an hour out of England when they were rocked by a sudden wind gust that shifted an improperly secured cargo pallet in the hold of the giant aircraft. It was not a mortal problem; it merely caused the C-97 to fly out of trim. Delaney was forced to keep firm pressure on the wheel so the plane maintained an even keel. He had reported the incident back to the controllers and had them inform the isolated Air Force base at Thule, Greenland, that their supply plane would be coming in late. He also said he wanted the head of whoever was responsible for tying down cargo when he returned. The crew then had several trouble-free hours until an electrical fault had sparked in the radios, shorting out the entire system. They were one hundred miles past Iceland, flying northwest, and suddenly the plane was without communications. Tom Sanders had tried to fix the set but got nothing for his troubles except some singed fingertips. Delaney had considered turning back, except problems at Dover Air Force Base, where normal cargo flights to Thule originated, had hampered three recent attempts to resupply the base above the Arctic Circle. He also knew the narrow weather window they were enjoying would close before another mission could take off. He now considered his decision to press on as another of the small mishaps befalling the crew of the Stratofreighter.

Then, just half an hour ago, Lieutenant Winger had noticed the engines were running hot. Delaney had opened the cowls around the four Pratt and Whitneys in an effort to cool them, adding more drag to the aircraft and slowing them further. The tactic had worked for a while but the temperatures began creeping inexorably back toward the red. That was when the number one engine began to misfire. It cleared itself for a few minutes and then started sputtering again, vibrating the airframe until her aluminum ribs creaked. Delaney had no choice but to shut it down.

“When the temp drops enough, we’ll try to restart the engine,” he told Winger. “Tom, are there any landing strips on this side of Greenland?”

“No, sir. Chart shows nothing except mountains and ice. There is a place called Camp Decade about a hundred and fifty miles south of where we’re going to cross the coast, but its strip’s designed for planes with skis.”

“Damn.” Delaney paused, his mind working out distances and odds. “All right. If the engine doesn’t refire smoothly, we’ll swing around and try for Iceland.”

“Major, that’s about two hundred and thirty miles behind us.” There was a tight edge in Sanders’s voice. He was too young to have seen combat during the war, and Delaney suspected that this was the first time the young officer had tasted true fear.

During the five minutes the pilot waited for the number one engine to cool, the flight deck was quiet, even when the towering ramparts and dark fjords that protected eastern Greenland came into view. Delaney had never seen such a forlorn place. The mountains were all snowcapped, and behind them, the relentless Greenland ice shelf pressed against their landward side so that great glaciers spilled between the valleys, tumbling to the ocean like frozen waterfalls. Delaney knew that, beyond the small strip of coast, there was a sea of ice about eight hundred and fifty thousand miles square and as thick as any ocean was deep.

“Okay, Major, temp is down in number one. In fact, it looks like all the horses are running in a row now.”

Delaney scanned the gauges and saw that the open cowlings had worked in cooling the engines again. He restarted number one and it began purring sedately, as though there had never been a problem. Working the prop controls, he felt the four blades bite into the air and the C-97 become more responsive.

“That’s a little better,” he breathed and Winger and Sanders exchanged grins. “Feet dry in about five minutes.”

The plane cleared the mountains at one hundred and eighty knots, well below her optimum cruising speed and much lower than her most efficient altitude. Beyond the strip of ice-carved mountains, Delaney and Winger were faced with an expanse of ice that stretched far beyond the horizon. Under the immense weight of new snow dropping in the interior, the billions of tons of ice were slowly moving toward the coast like an endless conveyor belt. As the ice moved, it scraped against the underlying rock so that any irregularities under the mile-thick mantle appeared on the surface as huge fractured ridges. The cap was so riven that to Delaney it looked like a hurricane sea had been flash frozen, every wave rendered in razor-sharp crests that sometimes reached a hundred feet into the air.

“Jesus,” he said under his breath.

Lieutenant Winger was just turning to say something to Delaney when engine number one exploded. The double banks of cylinders came apart like a bomb, shrapnel and oil and burning fuel blasting apart the nacelle like it had been hit by antiaircraft artillery. In seconds, the wing around the burning engine was blackened by flame, and soon it began to come apart as the wind ripped at the tears in the aluminum caused by red-hot debris.

The C-97 winged over as she lost lift on her left side. Delaney fought the plane, taking just an instant to see the altimeter spinning backward in a blur. He noted that Winger was already shutting off fuel to the wrecked power plant. Good man.

“Tom, what do you see?” the pilot shouted, his lips pulled back around his teeth from the exertion of keeping his crippled plane in the air.

The navigator looked out the tiny window next to his station. His training had taken over, and rather than give in to the fear that cramped his stomach, he spoke calmly. “The engine’s gone and the wing looks like it’s about to let go too. She’s still burning. Wait. She’s going out.”

“Fuel’s off,” Winger said as he straightened back to the controls and added his strength to Delaney’s on the 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 seemed that the plane was turning to the right, toward the mountains. The shaking vibrations continued unabated, the airframe shuddering. Delaney’s head pounded with the strain of trying to see what was happening. He kept his hands away from the control yoke, but his feet remained on the rudder pedals. Now he was sure the plane was turning to the right, so he applied left rudder, hoping to straighten them out to avoid the rocky projections that fronted the mountains. When he felt he had corrected the skid, he released the rudder and prayed he was right.

Blinded by the maelstrom of snow blowing around the hurtling aircraft, Delaney couldn’t have known how wrong his perception had been. The plane had been following a straight line until he hit the rudder pedal. The pilot’s actions turned the Stratofreighter, and now she was traveling toward a gentle hill that rose out of the ice. The plane hit it and climbed up to its crest. The low friction between aircraft and ice had not reduced her speed enough and for a moment they became airborne again.

Lifting off the surface, the plane flew out of the snow it had kicked up. Delaney screamed, seeing they were headed for the rocks. The C-97 hit the ground a second time, more violently than the first. The ice here wasn’t level. It sloped down toward the mountains, riding up and over hills that aeons of glaciation had worn down. Incredibly, the plane picked up speed like a toboggan. Delaney’s vision was obscured once again, and for this, he was thankful. There was nothing he could do.

The aircraft hit an outcrop of rock. The crash twisted it on its axis so that the port wing led its headlong rush. Momentum tilted the plane until the wing hit the ice and gouged a furrow into it, throwing off tons of material like a snowplow. This was the drag the plane needed to slow, and when the wing finally snapped near its tip, it was moving at no more than thirty knots. Another impact with a rock scrubbed off more speed and Delaney felt that they would make it.

Several windows had shattered and snow blew into the cockpit on a shrieking wind. Delaney’s face was scoured as though hit by a sandblaster. Even numbed, he knew he was bleeding. The C-97 stopped suddenly when her nose dug into a snowbank on the leeward edge of a foothill. Avalanches of snow poured through the broken windows, piling into the cockpit until Delaney’s legs were buried. But he was alive.

At first everything felt silent and still. He sat there, his labored breathing producing billows of condensation like cigarette smoke. But he could not hear it or feel it. Everything just felt calm as his terror subsided into immeasurable relief. And with relief came pride. Not one in twenty pilots could have pulled that off. Not one in fifty.

Only then did he become aware of the wind howling outside and the volleys of ice that raked the fuselage like machine gun fire. He wiped his cheeks, and his hands came away covered with blood. He felt no pain — he was too numb for that — but it reminded him of Winger. In his seat, the copilot was dead, his eyes wide and sightless. The blood on his face had turned into a frozen mask.

“Tom?” Delaney called to the navigator behind him. “Tom, are you okay?”

There was no response. His crew was dead. The veteran pilot couldn’t allow himself grief just yet. He knew that if he didn’t act soon, he’d be joining his men. First, he had to dig himself out of the cockpit. So much snow had blown through the windows that he couldn’t move his legs more than a fraction of an inch, and even that took all his strength. He felt weak, weaker than he should have. Delaney wanted to close his eyes and rest for just a minute.

A particularly loud fusillade of ice pummeling the aircraft roused him even as his eyelids drooped. Once he was free of the flight deck, Delaney was sure he’d be all right. Loaded onto the Stratofreighter were thirty tons of supplies destined for Thule, including fuel, food, survival clothing, and other Arctic gear — everything he would need to survive on the ice until rescue came.

Of that he was supremely confident. They would be searching for him within hours of his overdue arrival at the base. He could use the plane as a base until then, warm and with his belly full. It was only a matter of time, a few days, maybe a week at the most. But they would find him.

If only his head didn’t ache so much. If only he could stop the nosebleed that continued to pour coppery fluid into his mouth…