Grounded! Read online

  Opened her eyes, found her glasses twisted crookedly over her nose, her body wedged in the corner formed by her seat and the left-hand side of the fuselage. World was spinning like a top, left to right, so fast she couldn’t bear to look for more than a millisecond. Knew instantly what was happening, a state all fliers feared, the flat spin. Think of that top, spinning ’round and ’round on its central axis; now think of a plane doing the same thing, corkscrewing into the ground, in such a tight circle the wings can’t pull decent lift from the air or the control surfaces sufficient to maneuver. And if you’re not careful, when you apply power, all you do is spin faster and faster.

  No noise, silence where she should have heard the comforting thrum of the engines. Simple reason for it, both propellors were standing stock-still. Again, realizations flashing faster than conscious thought, so that by the time she verbalized them to herself her body was already reacting—flying at altitude, and to reduce both fuel consumption and engine wear, she’d been running the fans lean. Meant riding a very fine line, but ordinarily that was no problem. When she ran into the jet wake, she didn’t just have turbulence to cope with, but also the residue from its engines—which, on afterburners, with raw fuel being injected into the ignition chamber to intensify combustion, meant a foul soup of heavy hydrocarbons. For her engines, like flying into mud. Ruined the mixture, fouled the combustion cycle within her cylinders, starving them of the oxygen they needed to fire. Instant shutdown.

  The Baron was shuddering so hard, she couldn’t focus on the instruments, no notion of her altitude, didn’t matter anyway, wasn’t sure enough of her position to know how much clear air she had below her. Charts listed the ground as topping out at about five-six, but some of the ridge lines and attendant peaks didn’t go much above four thousand feet. In this kind of madcap descent, the rate-of-climb indicator was virtually useless; if she wasted time determining how much time she had, she’d be dead before she got around to actually trying to save herself. Again, while these thoughts were popping like fireworks across the panorama of her awareness, her hands were moving of their own accord, one shifting the mixture to full rich while the other worked the fuel pump to get fresh gas into the engine. Twin fans complicated the problem, the counterclockwise spin created a centrifugal effect that pushed fuel away from the port engine, but into the starboard one. What was sufficient to start one would either be too much or too little for the other, and she had no way of knowing which except her instincts.

  Turned the key, nothing happened. Hissed a curse, gritting her teeth as a burping hiccough pumped a mouthful of bile to the top of her throat. Repeated the process, concentrating on one engine, winced as a couple of popping explosions shook the aircraft, but thankful as well because the backfires meant there was combustion occurring in the cylinders. The propellor began to turn and she played with throttle and mixture, trying for the ideal combination to get it running, was surprised by the sound of her own voice crying, “Yes yes yes,” as the triple blades spun faster and faster, the sonofabitch was running rough, more backfires with accompanying gouts of black smoke out the exhausts, but it was running. She opened the throttle wide, shoving the yoke forward, the wheel hard over, rudder pedals as well. The Baron was falling tail down—tended to happen in flat spins—now, she had to get air flowing over the wings, generate lift so the control surfaces could do their job. Of course, if she’d lost too much altitude, she’d simply be diving herself the last stretch into the desert. Not that she had any choice. The plane shuddered violently—so much so she thought it would tear apart around her—but this was a design that had stood the test of time, the private aviation equivalent of the legendary Mack truck, and as the engine roar became a shriek, matched by one of defiant fury from Nicole herself, the flight profile stabilized, the horizon settled, and with breathtaking suddenness she was once more straight and level.

  For a moment all she could do was sit and stare in wonderment, while the Baron ripped through the sky a few hundred feet above the scrub rock and Joshua trees. Her breath came in the shallowest of gasps, the desperate, automatic gulps of air that a marathoner makes as he hits the “wall”—that part of the race where mind and body face their ultimate test. She didn’t move, wasn’t sure she could, tension had turned her into a living statue. Finally managed to reach out to the throttle and back it off from the firewall. Immediately, though, she felt a response from the controls, a dangerous sluggishness accompanied by a quiver from the altimeter; so far, she was holding her own but any less power and she’d once more be on her way down.

  Belatedly, she realized no sounds were coming through her headset, discovering when she reached up that it wasn’t there anymore. Her hand came away scarlet and sticky; she decided to leave well enough alone and not go exploring. So long as she could function, she didn’t care how badly she was hurt; and if she couldn’t function, knowing the extent of the damage wouldn’t really matter. The headset and boom mike must have been torn loose when she hit the hull; she took off her glasses, stared at the mangled frame, one lens splintered by the impact. She was lucky she still had her eye.

  A check of the radio display told her it was functional—thank God, she thought, for small favors—and she switched it over to the cabin speakers, taking up the hand mike from its cradle between the two front seats.

  “Baron... ” she began, then had to stop in amazement at how calmly matter-of-fact she sounded. No shakes, no quavers, nothing but a little dryness to differentiate this from a normal call on a normal flight.

  “Baron One-Eight-Three-Six Sierra,” she said, “calling any station. Mayday, I repeat, Mayday. Position . . . uh, somewhere north of Barstow, within the Edwards MOA, altitude around six thousand. On one engine, pilot injured. Any station, please respond. Over.”

  The reply was instantaneous but growly with static, and she wondered if the spin had damaged her aerials.

  “Baron Three-Six Sierra, Edwards TRACON, receiving you, acknowledging your declaration of emergency. Identify yourself, please.”

  “Nicole Shea, Lieutenant, USAF. En route to duty assignment at Edwards. Cleared through MOA to Mojave. Something”—a pause, to gather and sort out recollections—“almost hit me. Very small, very fast, exhaust fouled my fans, lost both engines, got thrown into a flat spin.” Her forehead furled as she put some more pieces together, she’d fallen almost a mile in a matter of seconds; if she’d hesitated in the slightest, or made a wrong move, if the engine hadn’t fired that second time, there wouldn’t have been a third. Too damn close. “I’m out of it now, stable flight, maybe a hundred-ten knots by three hundred feet. I’d appreciate a vector direct to Edwards, over.”

  “Three-Six Sierra . . .”

  “Say again, Edwards, your transmission’s breaking up.” She fiddled with the squelch and gain controls, trying to clean up the reception, the thought striking simultaneously that perhaps it wasn’t the hardware glitching but she herself. Hearing wrong, or scrambling the input between ears and brain.

  “Barstow is closer, Three-Six Sierra.” The controller was speaking slowing, overenunciating the words to make sure she got it. “Suggest you divert . . .”

  “Understood, Edwards,” she interrupted, “but there’s high ground between me and Barstow, I don’t know if I can get over the hump. It’s pretty much downhill to you.”

  “How about your other engine?”

  “Next item on the agenda.”

  “Roger, Three-Six Sierra. We have a helo scrambled and en route. If possible, squawk five-five-zero-zero—double-five, double-oh—on your transponder.” The auto-sequencer was out, so she entered the code manually.

  “Transmitting, Edwards,” she told them.

  “Received, Three-Six Sierra, we got you. At this time, turn left to a heading of two-six-zero.”

  She made it a wide, slow, gentle turn, putting as little pressure as possible on her single engine. Once she’d settled back to the straight and level, she primed the other fan and turned the key.


  The explosion nearly blew her out of the sky. A sharp bang, accompanied by a hole the size of a softball erupting from the cowling, hardly any smoke, too much flame. She slapped the throttle closed, cut off all the fuel, pulled the fire bottle to flood the engine with foam, at the same time fighting to regain control of an aircraft that was wallowing like a dory in heavy swell. A buzzer announced what she already knew, that she was slipping down again at the tail, coming dangerously close to a stall. More power then to the good fan, all it would take, the hell with the consequences, shove the nose down, trade off altitude for control and gamble the price wouldn’t be too high. Turned out to cost a hundred feet and change. But too many red lights on the status telltales meant she didn’t dare try to get it back. The only way she’d grab herself some more sky was to stay where she was while the land dropped away beneath her. Automatically, she swept the locality for a place to set down, if worst came to worst. Though she knew if she did, that was the end of her plane. Nasty country, though, nowhere viable.

  “Three-Six Sierra, we mark a drop in altitude.”

  “My engine, she broke bad. Looks like, blew a cylinder. Had a fire, but that’s under control. So’s the aircraft. But it is not a happy puppy, Edwards.”

  “Treat it right, Three-Six Sierra, Baron’s sure to do right by you.”

  Man knew his aircraft. Good for him. And maybe for her. “So far, so good,” she told him. She craned forward for a better look through her windshield. “I believe, Edwards, I have your helo.”

  “Affirmative, Three-Six Sierra, and vice versa.”

  “Big sucker,” she said, mostly to herself, “very impressive.” Understatement actually, the Sikorsky dwarfed her Baron, each of its five rotor blades longer than the Beech’s wing-span, with a cargo bay that could have easily fitted the entire fuselage. It took up station off her left side, maintaining a respectful distance, not wanting the wash of its own propellors to slap her down.

  She’d been about fifty miles out—usually a fifteen-minute flight, unless the winds were totally rotten—but the better part of an hour passed before the sprawling expanse of Rogers Dry Lake, and Edwards itself, swam into view in the distance. A couple of times on the flight, between regular calls from TRACON, to see how she was faring, she’d been startled by a strange sound in the cockpit, realizing with a chagrined shake of the head that it was herself, making a noise that was more than a hum, less than outright singing, an absently subvocalized rendition of one of her favorite Lila Cheney songs. And remembered Paolo DaCuhna laughingly telling her—the remains of a ceviche and paella dinner and a bottle of prime tequila littering the table between them—it was what she did when she was pushed right to the edge, with everything riding on her next move and how well she performed it. Sharp pang inside—Damn, she thought, the timing of some things, absolutely no sense of place—and she wondered if she’d ever stop missing him. Wondered if this was her time to join him, and Harry Macon. No effort at all to auger in.

  “Three-Six Sierra, Edwards.”

  “Go ahead, Edwards,” she acknowledged, grateful to have that train of thought broken, “Three-Six Sierra.”

  “You have field in sight?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Okay then, we’re handing you over. Contact the tower on one-two-zero-point-seven.”

  “One-two-zero-point-seven,” she repeated, “thanks for all the help, TRACON.”

  “Our pleasure, Three-Six. You’ve come this far just fine, take it home.”

  “Do my best.” She entered the frequency on the secondary com channel, then switched it to the primary; that way, if there was any mistake, she could always reverse back to TRACON. The Tower was waiting for her.

  “Altimeter zero-eight, Three-Six Sierra,” they told her and she adjusted the pressure setting on her altimeter accordingly. Backup to a backup to a backup, because the same information was displayed—far more precisely—by an inertial radar altimeter and another one slave-linked through the transponder with ground control. If she wanted, she could see her height charted to the millimeter. As it was, without making any effort, she’d managed to give herself a good twenty-five hundred feet of grace, thanks to the ground’s downward slope from the high country at five thousand to the dry lakebed’s twenty-two hundred. Unfortunately, as the flight progressed, her remaining engine had begun growling ever more vehement protests. The compression readings refused to settle-down and she was virtually certain at least one of the cylinders was misfiring, the head possibly—strike that, probably—cracked.

  “Winds bearing three-one-one... ”

  “Damn,” she said with quiet vehemence. Nearly a broadside crosswind.

  “ ...at fifteen, gusting to twenty-five.”

  Worse and worse. And she began to consider the option of ignoring the runways and putting the Baron down on the dry lake itself. No major problem with that, Rogers Dry Lake was one of Edwards’ reasons for being. A flat, hard pancake surface that went on for miles, an ideal place to land an aircraft. And she made the suggestion to the Tower.

  “We concur, Three-Six Sierra. If you’re flying that close to the edge, that might be the best approach.”

  Terrific. Now all she had to do was pull it off.

  She backed off a little on the throttle, nudging the yoke forward into a nose-down attitude, initiating a cautious hundred-feet-per-minute descent. Next move on her dance card was turning closer into the wind, using its force both to slow her further and give her more stability while doing so. In a single-engine aircraft, lose the engine you were essentially in a big, ugly, not ferociously aerodynamic glider. Flying a twin, though, with one fan gone, the operative engine tended to torque the aircraft in the opposite direction—in this case, the starboard engine pulling the plane perpetually to the left. You countered that by going full right rudder, engine going one way, control surfaces the other, resulting in a reasonable facsimile of stable flight. Turning left was no hassle, since that was the direction the plane tended to naturally; right meant backing off on engine power, to give the rudder ascendancy. She gave it a try, saw the compass begin to pivot.

  The airframe trembled about her—could have been the passage through a rough patch of air, the equivalent on the ground of bouncing over cobblestones or a stretch of classic Manhattan potholes—but she knew instantly that wasn’t the case. A glance at the panel, then at the engine, confirmed it. There was a significant falling off of RPM, even to the naked eye the propellor was spinning markedly more slowly. She restored the throttle to its initial setting, heard more dyspeptic growl than roar from her right, and saw no significant change in revs.

  “Edwards Tower,” she called, “I have a problem. I think I’m losing my good fan. Going for the deck, down and dirty.”

  “Three-Six Sierra, this is One-One Bravo”—the helo—“we’ll follow you down. We have fire suppression and rescue personnel aboard if needed.”

  “Hopefully not, One-One Bravo,” she said, “but I appreciate the consideration.”

  She shoved the yoke forward, tripling her rate of descent, putting the Baron as close as she dared into a dive. Approaching five hundred, she leveled out, took a second to steady the aircraft, then dropped gear and flaps together. The plane bucked as the suddenly messy silhouette disrupted the smooth passage of air around the airframe, but she managed to settle it, maintaining airspeed while her speed over the ground dropped to a virtual crawl. Nothing about her was at rest, body attuned to every nuance in the plane’s motion, both hands on the wheel, staying a beat ahead of every wayward move, eyes flicking ceaselessly from the ground ahead to the panel before her and back again. Unaware she was chanting a singsong mantra, interweaving another Lila song with a soft exhortation to her plane: “C’mon, Baron, that’s my big babe, you can do it, almost there, c’mon c’mon c’mon, there we go, no problem, almost there, that’s a fella, c’mon, Baron.”

  Less than a hundred feet to go, at a speed most highway-configured cars could top with ease, but which to Nicole seemed
far too fast. Goosed the nose up a tad, final flare to touchdown, cursing as a sudden gust combined with ground effect—the cushion of air formed by the compression of air between the wings and the ground below—to bounce the plane too high, send it skidding sideways. No more time to be gentle or worry about the consequences, shut down the fan completely, push full forward on the yoke. Instantly turning the Baron from aircraft to a brick with wheels, dropping it the last dozen to twenty feet so hard on its gear that her teeth snapped together, body hammered into its seat. Plane made a halfhearted bounce—Christ knows, she thought, what this impact’s doing to my shocks, minor miracle the struts haven’t smashed, aren’t smashing, all the way up through the wing, thank God Beech built this beast so well—and rolled a few hundred desultory feet before coming to a stop.

  She knew she should get out, put as much space between her and the aircraft as possible, just in case something decided to blow. But she felt gripped by a weird certainty that nothing would. The plane had done its best to save her, somehow seemed like a betrayal to run away now that it had. She turned off the switches, listened to the master power system whine down to silence as the avionics display went dark, then gave the panel a gentle pat of appreciation and a murmured “Thank you, little plane,” before releasing her safety harness, wincing as she flexed her shoulders. The heavy straps had scraped the skin over her collarbones raw as the plane’s motion had bounced her violently back and forth. She was glad for the four-point restraints, though; standard seat belts would have made it a lot more difficult, perhaps impossible, to reach the controls on the far side of the cabin.