Hennings nodded. “Yes. Of course. I’ll see it through.” He pushed aside the blackout curtain, opened the porthole, and took a deep breath. Then, for the first time in more than forty years, he became sick at sea.
Sloan watched the man out of the corner of his eye. Hennings was a very weak link in a three-link chain. Matos was stronger, but he might break too. Now that the problem of the Straton was as good as out of the way, Sloan thought more about Matos and Hennings. He had pretty much decided how to deal with Lieutenant Peter Matos.
Sloan walked over to the end of the console where a half-dozen interphones, color coded to indicate their function, sat in a row. He picked up the green one and, before anyone answered, reached down and switched it off. “Operations? This is Commander Sloan. We have a problem. Navy three-four-seven, F-18, Matos, is in a critical fuel situation. I want a tanker from the closest coastal base to rendezvous with him.” Sloan gave Matos’s present coordinates into the dead phone. “Thank you.” He hung up and picked up the blue phone and switched it off. “Rowles? Sloan. Alert the Straton search party that they may have to split the mission and look for three-four-seven. Yes. He had a fuel emergency, but I have a tanker on the way and it should reach him in plenty of time. Just keeping you alerted. Right.” He hung up and slid a clipboard over the on-off switches, then turned toward the Admiral.
Randolf Hennings was a more difficult problem. As long as Hennings lived and breathed and spoke, with all his pent-up guilt and remorse, James Sloan would never have another good night’s sleep, never know when a summons to the captain’s office would be arrest. James Sloan couldn’t allow that. Not at all.
The view from the captain’s flight chair of the Straton 797 was spectacular. Berry sat, mesmerized by the churning mass of black boiling clouds in the distance. He had seen them first as a vague haziness on the far horizon, shafts of sunlight streaking from them into the ocean at a sharp angle. The closer he got, the more awesome they looked-and the more he knew he was in trouble.
He leaned forward and scanned the horizon. The line of storms stretched as far as he could see in either direction, like a great solid wall between heaven and earth. They’d dropped down into the sea like a curtain, hiding the horizon line, and towered up above them so high that he knew he could not climb above them.
Sharon touched his arm and spoke softly, worry in her voice. “I haven’t seen them this bad in a long time.”
Berry had never seen them quite this bad, ever. The only thing they had going for them had been the weather and the daylight, and he had begun to take that for granted, not believing that anything else could go wrong for Flight 52. “You’ve been through these before?”
“A few times. You?”
“No. Not on a commercial flight.”
“In your Skymaster?”
“No.” In his Skymaster he would simply have turned and found an airport. Out here there was no airport to turn to.
Crandall looked down at the weather radar screen on the center instrument panel. “Do you see a break in the clouds?”
Berry stared at the screen. A thin green trace line swept across the radarscope every six seconds, leaving patterns of colored patches in its wake. “I don’t really know how to work it or how to read it.” He glanced at the line of thunderstorms, then back at the radarscope. What he saw on the scope was supposed to represent what he saw from his windshield, but he could see no correlation. “I’ve read articles on weather radar, but I’ve never worked it.”
Crandall heard a noise behind her and looked back. Linda was curled up near the cockpit’s rear bulkhead, asleep. Crandall looked up at the door. An entire arm, right up to the shoulder, had slid through the opening and the hand was feeling around the inside of the door. The hand found the nylon hose and pulled at it, loosening the tension on the door and allowing his shoulder to slide through. She saw the blue shoulder boards of First Officer Daniel McVary, then saw his face peeking in at the opening. “John…”
Berry looked back. “For God’s sake.” He hesitated, then stood. He walked to the door and examined the knot around the latch. He took the disembodied arm and tried to force it out, but the hand grabbed his shirt. Berry stepped back. There was something grotesque about this arm reaching out to him. He was reminded of the stories told around a campfire at night. But this was real. He reached into his pocket and found the gold lighter that he carried. He lit it, hesitated, then reluctantly touched the flame to McVary’s hand. There was a long scream and the arm disappeared from the cockpit. Berry looked up at Sharon and met her eyes, but there was no censure in them, only understanding.
Berry knelt down beside Linda, who had awakened. “Go back to sleep.”
She closed her eyes. “I’m very thirsty.”
Berry patted her cheek. “Soon. Don’t think about it.” He stood and walked back to his chair.
Sharon fixed her eyes on the radar set. “Are these all the radar controls?”
Berry looked at her. There had developed a tacit understanding among the three of them that they were not to talk about the others. Berry looked down at the console. “Yes. Antenna tilt. Gain. Brilliance. Mode selector… Here’s one called erase rate. I’ve never even heard of that.”
Crandall looked up again at the black wall outside the windshield. It was closer now, and she could see its inner violence, the black-gray smoke churning. “Can we go around it without the radar?”
Berry shook his head. “These lines sometimes stretch for hundreds of miles. I don’t think we have the fuel to try an end run.”
“Hawaii?” She didn’t want to throw that up to him, but it seemed too important to be left unsaid.
“No. In addition to the other reasons I gave you, we don’t have the fuel for that any longer. We have only enough to fly straight to California.”
Crandall looked at the fuel gauges. They read less than one-third full.
Berry played with the radar controls. If he could understand the picture on the screen, he might be able to pick out a weak spot in the wall of clouds in front of him.
Crandall remembered other storms she’d gone through in other aircraft. The Straton 797 flew above the weather, and that, at least, was one advantage to traveling in subspace. “We can’t climb above it?”
Berry looked up at the sheer wall of clouds. “Not with this aircraft. It won’t hold its air pressure.” He looked at the oxygen mask hanging beside his seat. An oxygen mask should be enough, as long as they didn’t climb much above 30,000 feet. Was that high enough to clear these storms? He couldn’t tell for sure, but he didn’t think so. Besides, the oxygen tanks would probably be empty, and he didn’t know if there was a reserve tank.
Crandall was following his thoughts. “There may be an unused oxygen tank that we could switch to.”
“There might be. But do you think we should put those people through another period of oxygen deprivation? Don’t we have to draw the line somewhere?”
“Not if it’s our lives.”
“They are not dead, and we don’t know that they won’t get better, and even if they won’t… Besides, in order to gain enough altitude to get over this weather, I’d have to circle-spiral upward. I’d rather not try my flying skills at this point. Anyway, the maneuver would burn off a tremendous amount of fuel.”
“What you’re saying is that we’re committed to bucking into the storm.”
“I’m not sure. The other options look better in the short run, but I’m thinking of the California coast.”
“Me too.” She hesitated, then said, “Will the holes in the cabin… could the plane…?”
“I don’t think it will come apart.” But he didn’t know if the structure was weakened, how many longerons were severed. Completely airworthy craft had broken up in storms. He said, “It’s the wings that take the most punishment. They don’t appear to be damaged.”