The Eye of Moloch

Chapter 57

The small radar screen in the front panel showed only a solid sea of pulsating multicolored blotches ahead and behind. Similar displays at ground stations or aboard any aircraft still in pursuit would show much the same. With no transponder, and hidden in the depths of all those angry clouds, their plane’s tiny signature would be all but invisible, just as their pilot had predicted.

When the radio was tuned to an automated weather station the report said there was an end-to-end string of severe thunderstorms forming up in a line across the region and far beyond, with worsening conditions likely to spawn the same kind of weather precisely along their route toward the East Coast. That meant this journey wouldn’t be getting any easier.

After a little over a hundred arduous, ground-hugging miles Bill McCord announced that he felt it was safe enough to ascend to an altitude where the turbulence might be less punishing. If they’d really slipped their pursuers then higher was better; it had been a brutal ride so far and more than once a sudden downdraft had nearly ended the trip.

They were tossed around repeatedly on their way back upstairs, and then without any warning the ride smoothed out and leveled off. There was a sort of kick and then a strong push from behind, and while watching his instruments the pilot explained that they must have happened onto an unusually low-traveling jet stream and were being temporarily borne along on the rapids of this powerful river of air.

For the first time there were a few moments to assess the situation and think.

All the shooting had done some damage and not all of it would be visible. A small section of the control panel was cracked and dark. There was a faint smell of sour smoke in the air, with no obvious clue to its source. Some gauges indicated warning conditions, none immediately serious but a few that seemed to be gradually worsening.

“Get a load of this,” Bill McCord said, pointing to an area of the panel near the controls for the landing gear. There were two lights to indicate that the wheels had retracted safely into their wells. Only one of them was lit green.

“What does that mean?” Noah asked.

“I hope it means that bulb’s burnt out. If not, I guess we’ll find out what it means when we go to put her down.”

It was nearly as noisy as it had been before but the unusual steadiness of the flight gradually induced a calming effect that was almost eerie. Outside of the occasional bumpy air there was no sensation of movement. McCord had informed Noah that due to the added thrust of the tailwind they were traveling quite a bit faster than this particular plane could normally go, at least under its own power.

“I’m going to go back and check on the others,” Noah said.

“That’s okay, but don’t stay unsecured any longer than you have to. This is nice and smooth right now but it’ll get ugly again without any warning.”

As Noah unbuckled his seat belt Ellen Davenport popped her head into the cockpit. Despite the stress of the situation she was now in physician mode and appeared calm and in perfect control.

“Mr. McCord,” she said, “I understand you’ve had quite a workout up here. Noah told me you might not mind if I came up and checked you out.”

“She’s a doctor,” Noah said.

“Aw, don’t spoil it for me,” McCord said, and he gave Ellen a friendly wink. “Here I was thinking that was the most flattering thing I’d heard from a lady in twenty-five years.”

Noah left the two of them alone and walked down the aisle to sit next to Molly.

“Are you holding up okay?” he asked.

She nodded. “Are we alone?”

“Yes.”

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Sure.”

She touched his face, again as though remembering the details of the sight of him with only the tips of her fingers, and then she pulled him close and held on tight.

“I’m scared,” she said softly.

At that moment there were any number of perfectly reasonable things to be afraid of, but he could tell by the way she’d spoken that she didn’t mean any of those.

Molly said no more and neither did he. They only held one another, and in that quiet togetherness there was an understanding that had no real use for words. She was afraid, and so was he. She was worried that maybe they weren’t doing the right thing after all, and so was he. But they both knew they were on the right side, without any doubt, and knowing that, maybe together they could find the strength to put their fears behind them.

After a time there was a gentle tap on his shoulder and he looked up.

“I need you up front,” Ellen said.

When they’d gone forward she stopped him after the last row of seats, near the array of medical equipment they’d seen earlier.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Now don’t panic.”

“I’ll do my best. What is it?”

“I think he may have had a heart attack,” Ellen said. “Come on, help me with this.”

She pulled a high-tech-looking electronic case from its clips on the cabin wall and handed it to him before searching out and gathering some other items from the cabinet beneath.

“What is this thing?” Noah asked.

“Among other things it’s an emergency defibrillator, but it can also show me what’s going on with his heart, and that’s the part I need. Come on.”

Bill McCord was still flying just as he’d been before, though Ellen had hooked him up with under-the-nose tubing fed from an oxygen tank she’d secured with duct tape to the armrest of his seat. There was no room for three in the cockpit, so Noah stood just outside, holding the now-activated device in his hands where the doctor could see its screen and reach its controls.

Ellen prepared two adhesive pads and applied one to the upper-right side of McCord’s chest and the other lower down and toward the left. She then connected the long thin wires and plugged them in, made some adjustments, and touched a button on the front of the unit.

She watched the display as the machine began to read and analyze the inputs and report its findings. As she looked up at Noah he could see there was bad news but when Ellen spoke her voice was calm.

“Bill, your heart is beating a little too slowly and I think we need to give it some help. You know what a pacemaker does, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“That’s what we need to do; we’re going to regulate your heartbeat. One of the functions of this machine is something called external pacing. Most pacemakers are implanted under the skin, but we’re going to accomplish that very same thing from the outside.”

“Okay.”

Ellen made her final checks and adjustments. “This can get very uncomfortable. I know you can handle it. Normally I’d give you a sedative and something for the pain but I can’t do that in this situation. Understand?”

“I understand. Let’s do it.”

She patted his shoulder, checked the attached pads again, and touched a switch on the machine.

“Do you feel that?” she asked.

“Yeah, that’s just a little tickle, doesn’t hurt a bit.”

“That’s because it’s not doing its job quite yet.” Her eyes were on the display screen as she slowly turned a knob on the front panel. “I’m going to increase the current now until I find your capture threshold—that’s the point where your heart responds to the signal we’re sending. As I do that what you feel is going to get more intense.”

Bill McCord was as engrossed in his piloting as ever but his expression hardened bit by bit as the current advanced. At last the machine gave a tone and then began to beep softly at an even, steady rhythm and Ellen left the setting where it was. Without disturbing his grip on the yoke she took his pulse at the wrist as she counted off the necessary seconds on her watch.

“That’s good,” she said. “You’re doing great. Other than the jolts this machine’s giving out, you should be feeling better. Do you?”

McCord didn’t speak, but he glanced up at her and nodded. Despite the sharp and repeating irritation he must have been enduring, he did look much better already, from the strength of his posture to the color returning in his face.

“I’m going to stay up here with you and make sure you’re all right. What we need to do next is find the nearest place to land so we can get you to a hospital.”

Noah started to speak up but she shut him down with one sharp glance.

“Doctor,” Bill McCord said, “could I see you alone for one minute?” His voice was stressed by the treatment he was receiving, but there was also a good deal more vitality behind it than there’d been before.

“Of course,” Ellen said, and she took the device from Noah and excused him to the passenger compartment.

It was quite a while later when Ellen Davenport emerged from the cockpit and motioned for Noah to join her up there again, which he did.

“Mr. McCord feels very strongly,” she said, “that he can persevere with this flight all the way to the end. I did everything I could to convince him otherwise, but he wouldn’t be persuaded. So I made a deal with him. I’m going to stay up there with him, and if I see any change, anything in his condition that I don’t like, we’re going to find an airport and call ahead and be met by an ambulance for him.”

“Right behind that ambulance there’ll be more of the same kind of men we saw back in that hangar.”

“I know that.” She took a step into the narrow doorway, keeping half her attention on the monitor and lowering her voice so her patient wouldn’t hear. “This man’s got third-degree AV block, probably brought on by a heart attack. I don’t even know how he stayed conscious through all this, and without that little battery-powered machine I’ve got plugged into a cigarette lighter? We’d all very likely be dead by now. I’m making the only choices I’ve got in a bad situation, Noah. This is just life support, and there’s no guarantee it’ll last very long. My obligation is to do what’s best for him, and if I make the call, that’s what we’re going to do.”

“You’re right,” Noah said, “of course you are. That’s the way it should be.”

“I’m glad you feel that way.” A moment or two passed, her expression softened a bit, and she went on. “He’s doing what he’s doing now because of Molly, you know,” Ellen said. “While I was up there rendering my clinical opinion all he was talking about were the things he’d heard from her and her mother over the years. He thinks we’re at some big turning point right now; he told me he was up here serving his country again, flying this one last mission, and that it was a lot more than the three of us he’d be letting down if he failed. I’d say it was the morphine talking, but I haven’t given him any.”

They flew through a brief patch of turbulence and when it evened out Ellen reached over to make a tiny adjustment to the defibrillator. When she seemed satisfied that things were stable again she turned back to Noah.

“Those people who’re after you and Molly—at least I see now why they’re so desperate to get rid of you,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“This vision she’s got for the country, it seems to be contagious.”

Later, as the flight proceeded, Noah and Molly sat close together and spoke about a subject they’d never had much time to cover before. They talked about their future, on the wild assumption that such a time would ever come.