The rear of the jet scraped the runway for the first hundred yards, sending a fountain of sparks behind her. Hendrickson smoothly pushed the stick forward until the nose wheel touched with a screech. They were forty knots over speed when he reversed the two engines.
“Now!” Both men pushed the sticks forward, to the console. The Maiden’s nose drooped toward the runway.
With no speed indicator, Captain Hendrickson had to go by dead reckoning when judging if he could weave the 747 to each side of the runway as he had before. He tapped the brakes, just to check, but they were nonexistent.
“It looks like they’re waiting for us,” Michael said, seeing the rotating strobes at the far end of the runway.
“Let’s oblige by not creaming them.”
The sensation of speed was diminishing. A terrible screeching roar was coming from below the aircraft, signaling that the blown tires had disintegrated, leaving the metal wheels to drag along the pavement. The friction was welcome, as it slowed the Maiden, but it required compensation as it also pulled the jet to the right.
They passed the halfway point at about a hundred knots. Hendrickson started weaving about then, when his ‘aviator’s stomach’ said it was okay. “Help with the rudder.” It was getting harder to weave and compensate for the right-pulling drag.
Michael touched the pedal. It was down and stiff.
“Now some right,” Hendrickson said. They worked it together, going left to the edge of the pavement, and back right, though not as close to that side. Back and forth, and back and forth. On the fourth weave the Maiden’s nose wheels blew.
“Jesus!” Michael yelled. The violent contact of metal to pavement vibrated through the rudder pedals, jabbing an invisible spear into his heel. Instantly the aircraft slowed considerably.
“Easy left. Easy left.” The captain wanted to bring the Maiden back onto the centerline, but her steering system, crippled by the last blowout, followed the right-leaning groove into the grass at the runway’s edge. Rain had soaked the earth. The nose gear dug in and sank a full two feet into the ground, and a second later the right mains did the same.
Then, it was over. The Clipper Atlantic Maiden came to a full stop.
Captain Hendrickson killed the remaining two engines. His body leaned forward, his head resting on the dark instrument panel. A few breaths came rapidly and deep, then he sat back up.
Michael let go of the column and examined his hands. They trembled, but were dry as his mouth.
“Come on.”
The reluctant co-pilot looked up.
“Michael, let’s get out of here.” Hendrickson reached for his arm. “You did good. We’re down. Now, we need to get out. You have a little lady back there, right?”
That struck home. “Right. Let’s go.”
The Delta troopers and the flight attendants opened only the forward doors, deploying the yellow evacuation slides with them.
“Lewis. Makowski.” Sean looked to them both. “You go out first, one on each side, and direct everybody forward. Anderson says not to let anybody near the rear of the aircraft.” The two sergeants slid out before the rows of passengers lined up to follow, directed by the flight attendants.
Sean ran aft one final time, rubbing the deathwatch under his cuff. “Anderson. Anderson!” It was quiet finally.
“Who the hell landed this thing?” Joe cringed. His fingers were cramping badly. “Get somebody in a nuke suit to bring me locking pliers. Hurry.”
“You got it.” The Delta captain went forward, just as the last of the passengers were evacuated.
“Cap.” It was Antonelli.
“Where’s Bux?”
“Upstairs with…”
Sean nodded. He knew what was meant. “The crew off?”
“Everybody,” Antonelli replied. A crash truck pulled up, its red and yellow lights sweeping across the field outside.
“Tell Bux and Goldfarb to take Blackjack off. Then you, Jones, and Quimpo get the other bodies down — the co-pilot first.” There was a hierarchy even in death.
“Got it.”
Sean leaned out the open portside door. A lift-equipped fire truck pulled up. Two crewmen were in its basket, but they weren’t wearing the standard crash suits. Of course. A minute later they stepped off the lift and into the cabin.
“There’s a guy back in the hold. He needs some help.”
The bubble-helmeted crewman nodded, then pulled a heavy visor over the face mask, leaving only a slit for viewing. His partner signaled for Graber to get off the aircraft immediately.
“Cap,” Antonelli called from the starboard door. “You and me are the last.”
Sean looked aft, wondering if he would ever see Anderson again. It was a question that would have to wait to be answered. He walked to the starboard door and followed Antonelli down the inflatable slide.
Bud set the phone down. “They’re down. The passengers are safe.”
“Whew!” the president said, slapping one knee.
Herb Landau smiled and looked to the floor. “They did it.”
The president left little time for glee. “We can celebrate more later, gentlemen. There’s a funeral in a few hours.”
“I think some sleep is in order,” Gonzales suggested, directing it specifically at his boss.
“Yes. Everybody.” The president gave a mock ‘out’ signal with his thumb. “Bud, I want to speak to you for a moment.”
The door closed last behind the chief of staff.
There were no words for a few seconds. “We stopped them, Bud. Probably for the first time we fought them on their own ground and won.”
Bud agreed, nodding. “Yes. We did that.”
The president, in addition to being a bold young man, was keenly observant. “How many, Bud?”
‘Two. The commander of the assault force, and the copilot of the 747.”
What words there were would not be sufficient, the president knew. “Two more funerals, then.”
“The last from this affair, God willing,” Bud said. It might be a hope, but…
“Maybe, though, we can prevent some,” the president said.
“If your policy idea goes through, we might just be able to deal some preemptive justice.”
“We can do that, but it’s going to have the same tainted feel to it.” Bud knew that killing, by any standards, was what its name said it was.
The president thought about that for a moment. “That may be so, but I’ll suffer with that if it saves some innocents.”
Epilogue
BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE LIGHT
From the slight rise of the mesa three miles away, Joe Anderson was watching the burial of the would-be destroyer. His eyes strained without their glasses to see the scene through the binoculars, a task made more difficult by the late-morning heat shimmer rising from the desert sand.
He had been to this part of the Nevada desert many times during his career. Most of those times he had observed underground nuclear tests, and the other times things not far removed from those detonations. The DOE did all of its testing here, as it had for twenty years, for reasons of safety and security. Treaty restrictions on aboveground testing were the primary reasons, though.
Joe pulled the binoculars away and rubbed the sweat away from his eyes, then put his glasses back on. With the naked eye the huge white jet, whiter than the desert around her, was visible almost fifteen thousand feet away, her nose pointed toward the dark area before her. Two solid months it had taken to dig the mammoth grave, and another three weeks to line it properly. Nothing could be allowed to leak or escape from the tomb once sealed. Joe had seen to the details and planning himself, a thought that he had chuckled at numerous times in the previous month. He was going to bury his killer, and he would soon join her, though his grave would be in a shady spot somewhere in the Minnesota backwaters. Only three months after his exposure he was already in stage-one leukemia. The president had offered a full military ceremony and burial at Arlington, but Joe had decided to leave that place for the real heroes.