Ruthless.Com

Chapter Twenty

Whether jammed tightly into the coach section of some ready-for-the-scrapyard commercial jetliner, or, as was presently the case, hugged gently by a leather club seat in Gordian's state-of-the-art executive Learjet, Vince Scull was a white-knuckle flier all the way, no matter that he had logged hundreds of hours in the air fulfilling his professional responsibilities at UpLink.

A lot of risk-assessment people, especially those whose job it was to research international markets, relied on second-or third-hand source material — news reports, sociological studies, statistical reviews, and so on. Scull, however, thought that was for slackers who might as well have spent their time picking their underwear out of their cracks as writing up analyses. Iri his opinion, if you wanted to learn about a place, you went there, breathed the air, ate the food, and if you were lucky, kissed a few of the local frauleins or signoras. And, unfortunately, if you wanted to get to the foreign country you wanted to learn about, you had to fly.

So he flew. Which didn't mean he had to like it, or pretend to anyone else that zipping around the world the way he did merited flight wings, unless maybe they were the ones that belonged to that Greek kid Zorro or Aesop or whoever it was that went too close to the sun and got his tail feathers fried.

It was during the takeoffs and landings that Scull always had his worst anxiety attacks, mainly because somebody had once told him they were the times at which the airfoils were under the most stress from physical forces… not that he knew shit about physics or flying, except that it seemed there were more accidents at those critical stages than when the planes were under way, so maybe there was something to what he'd heard.

Be that as it may, the reason Scull was now gripping the armrest of his seat like a convict in the electric chair waiting for somebody to turn on the juice was that Gordian was making his final approach into Washington, one of those very stages of air travel that scared the living crap out of him, never mind the boss was an Air Force-certified Flying Ace. It was also why he was crooning a jumbled medley of Sinatra hits under his breath — the summer wind came blowin in across New York, New York, ring-a-ding and doobie-doo — serenading himself with old standards being another tried-and-true Scullian method of coping with tension and blocking the unwanted from his mind.

He did not care if he would have to endure ribbing about his nervousness from Megan Breen, who was sitting just across the narrow aisle to his right. Nor did he care if he heard about it from Nat Sobel or Chuck Kirby, who were immediately behind him, bullshitting with Meg like a couple of makeout artists at a cocktail party instead of helpless prisoners of a tin can that just happened to be capable of shooting through the troposphere at close to Mach One, the fucking speed of sound.

All he really did care about was reaching terra firma in one piece, and the rest of them could keep the Glenturret, which had admittedly gone down nicely, although his personal favorite malt was this brand from far western Scotland called Bunahabhain, an unpronounceable name that always left his mouth sounding like something Ralph Kramden might have said when Alice caught him red-handed in a lie….

Clutching his seat, singing quietly off-key with his eyes shut, Scull was trying his best to remain oblivious to the plane's descent when a sound from the cockpit — the sliding door to which was partially open because Gord had been talking to Chuck about something earlier in the fight — bored into his awareness like a drill bit.

He snapped open his eyes and peered into the cockpit. From the position at which he was sitting, he could see about half of Gordian's back, and about the same amount of the pilot's console. The boss didn't seem to be in any kind of panic, but that didn't mean anything. This was the guy with the cool head and bombardier eyes, the guy who had been released from a five-year getaway at the Hanoi Hilton, their special all-the-torture-you-can-take package, with his head high and his back straight and his lips sealed as tightly as the day of his involuntary check-in. This was definitely the guy you wanted beside you in the proverbial foxhole, and if something was wrong, you would never be able to tell from looking at him.

But the noise coming from the cockpit, the noise was like an electronic version of an automobile horn, a gratingly repetitive blaat-blaat-blaat that damned well sounded to Scull like a warning alarm.

He looked at Megan, glanced around at Richard and Chuck. All three of them were also trying to see into the cabin, and their faces said they were, if not quite as worried as he was, then still pulling high Nielsen distress ratings. Blaat-blaat-blaat-blaat…

"Anybody know what the hell's going on?" he asked in a loud voice. "Christ in a barrel, what's that noise?"

The others were silent.

Scull swallowed. His palms felt suddenly moist. And no goddamned wonder.

Coming from a plane full of talkers, that mute silence had frightened him more than just about anything he could have imagined.

Gordian breathed, filling his lungs with oxygen, his mind working rapidly. He was belting toward the runway at over a hundred feet a second without wheels, a situation that would have the gravest consequences unless he took action to change it. Which left no room for indecision.

Think logically, he told himself. The problem's evident, now isolate its cause.

He recalled the unusually quick drop in hydro pressure when he'd extended the flaps on takeoff. Yet if the pump motor had failed, the crew-alerting system would have detected it. Ditto if the sensors had gotten readings that indicated a low fluid level in the reservoir. Furthermore, the compressed nitrogen inside the fluid accumulator was supposed to provide supplemental pressure to system components in the event of leakage.. within a certain threshold. When the fluid loss from a specific component became too great, or there was too much air in the line, it would be unable to keep up with demand and bring the pressure back to where it should be.

Meaning what? Gordian gnawed his bottom lip. Meaning he was looking at a drastically reduced fluid level— and therefore a sudden and unmanageable demand — in a particular area of the system, possibly the landing gear actuator cylinder. The gear had a mechanical uplock that wouldn't release without hydro power, even with the lever in the down position… and there was no manual override.

Okay, next. Options.

He could Mayday the ground facility, wait for them to foam the runway and bring fire and medical crews to the scene should he need to make a gear-up landing. But having to circle the field had depleted his fuel reserve, and foaming took time. While he had enough Jet A in his nacelles to safely abort and execute a go-round, he didn't believe he could stay in the air long enough for the process to be completed. In which case he would have to belly onto the pavement, something that would very likely spark an explosive engine fire and leave little but ashes for the ground crews to clean up.

Come on, come on. You want to avoid a messy outcome, get to the essence of all this.

He had compromised hydraulics. Gear assemblies stuck in the up position. And an urgent need to bring them down.

No, wait. Not down. Off.

He had to be precise in his thinking. What the hydraulic pressure really did was keep the gear assemblies in the retracted position by making them rest on the uplocks. If he could only get the assemblies cy^the uplock brackets, their own weight load would finish the task, causing them to drop through the well doors. In other words, they would bring themselves down.

Gravity.

Gravity was the problem, and it was also the solution.

Gordian reached for a selector button under his multifunction display and punched up the G-meter screen. The bar was level at one-G — which meant the gravitational force on the aircraft was "normal," or equivalent to that of an object at rest on the ground.

Shooting a glance at the display, Gordian reduced flaps, gripped the control column with both fists, and pulled back on it abruptly, tilting up the nose of the plane, hauling it into a sharp climb. An instant later he shoved forward on the column, dropping the plane toward the runway again.

Gordian's stomach lurched. The airframe shimmied around him. The roller-coaster bump in altitude thrust him back and down into his seat, then up and out so violently he would have smashed into the windshield had he not been strapped in.

So far, so good.

He reached for the landing gear lever, not bothering to check the MFD. With his bottom floating off his seat as if he were being hauled up by an invisible hand, Gordian already knew he was at zero-G. And if he'd reckoned correctly, he would not be the only thing floating.

The gear would be too.

Right off the uplock.

Praying that God, Sir Isaac Newton, and his own common sense were at oneness, he pulled the lever down for the third and last time.

The wide band of his seat belt cutting into his flabby middle, his eyeglasses first clamping down on the bridge of his nose and then flying off his face, his thin fringe of hair flattening out and then sticking straight up, Scull felt like the ball in some maniacal game of ping-pong.

Buffeted by wildly shifting Gs, the cabin pitched and shook. Magazines swept past him in a tumultuous flap. His eyes large with fear and confusion, he saw Megan's briefcase shoot up the carpeted aisle like a stone skipping over water, followed by a file folder Chuck Kirby had been perusing behind her, paper spewing from inside it. A banana somebody had been eating was next, then a pen that fired past like a small missile. He heard bottles of liquor, soda, and spring water clank and rattle in the wet bar, heard Richard Sobel uncharacteristically shouting out invective. Carry bags whumped against the interior of overhead storage bays.

"Shit!" he screamed, attaching his own contribution to Sobel's sting of epithets.

Suddenly he heard a thump under his feet.

Several thumps.

Pure, unalloyed terror leaped into his throat, jetted icily up his spine.

He stopped yelling.

Certain he was going to perish, Scull suddenly remembered that he wasn't alone, remembered there were four other people in the plane with him and — call him a dinosaur chauvinist, what was the fucking difference now anyway? — realized one of them was a woman who might need comforting.

Thinking he would do what he could, he turned toward Megan, reaching out to grip her hand—

And was stunned to see relief beaming from her face.

"It's okay, Vince, calm down," she said, leaning toward him, her hand falling gently over his wrist. 4 'Listen, the cockpit alarm's stopped."

"Huh?"

"The alarm," she repeated slowly. "It's stopped. We're landing."

He perked his ears. It had indeed stopped. And so had the rocking. But what had those thumping noises been about?

Suddenly the intercom crackled to life.

"Everyone, I'm sorry for the jostling. There was a little problem releasing the landing gear, but our wheels are down now and we're fine," he heard Gordian say, as if in answer to his unvoiced question.

"Landing gear," he muttered.

"What?" Megan said. "Couldn't hear you."

He looked down at where she was still holding his arm, and smiled.

"Just saying I love you, too, babycakes," he said.