Wilczynski added power and placed the aircraft in a shallow climb, moving slowly and deliberately. Tracie guessed he was mentally reviewing a checklist, although she doubted his Air Force training had ever included flying a B-52 with part of his skull blown off and the rest of the crew lying dead in the cabin. His face was ashen and his lips were white. She wondered how long it would take for him to pass out again; it seemed inevitable.
“Fifty feet,” he said thickly. “That’s what I call cutting it close.”
“Too close for comfort,” Tracie said, her hands shaking.
“I need you to call air traffic control and let them know we’re in trouble.” Wilczynski lifted the radio mike off a metal stand and handed it to her.
“Who will I be talking to?”
“Everybody.” The pilot tuned the radio to UHF frequency 243.0. “This is the emergency frequency. Every ATC facility monitors it. Everyone within range of our transmission will hear it. In a few seconds we’ll have more help than we know what to do with. Just make a Mayday transmission. Identify us to the controllers as Bulldog 14.” Wilczynski closed his eyes and slumped in his seat and Tracie feared he had lost consciousness again, but a moment later he reopened them and began adjusting power settings.
Tracie keyed the mike. “Mayday. Mayday. This is Bulldog 14 with an emergency situation.”
The response was immediate. The radio crackled to life. “Bulldog 14, this is Boston Center, we’ve been looking for you. You missed checking in at a compulsory reporting point. What’s the nature of your emergency?”
Tracie looked at Major Wilczynski. “What do I tell them?”
“Tell them the rest of the crew is incapacitated and we need a vector direct to Bangor International Airport. It was a SAC base in World War II and it’s the closest airport with a runway big enough to land this beast on.”
Tracie relayed the message and the controller said, “Roger that, Bulldog 14. Radar contact seven-zero miles northeast of the Bangor Airport. Cleared to Bangor via radar vectors. Fly heading two-five-zero, climb and maintain one-six thousand. Bangor altimeter two-nine-eight-seven.”
“You get all that?” she asked Wilczynski. He nodded.
“Roger,” she said into the mike.
“What assistance will you need when you land?” the controller asked, and Wilczynski said, “Tell them we’ll need ambulances and the crash crew standing by. We’ll need everything they’ve got.”
Tracie relayed the message and as the B-52 gained altitude, climbing steadily and reassuringly, she said, “Bangor? As in Maine? Isn’t that city tiny?”
“The city is small, yes, but the airport is huge. It’s the former Dow Air Force Base, and although they only have one runway, it’s mammoth. Eleven thousand feet, with a one thousand foot overrun at each end. That’s almost two-and-a-half miles of pavement for us to land on, and the way I feel right now, we’ll probably need every last inch of it.”
Tracie fingered the letter to President Reagan. She had removed it from her jacket and placed it in the back pocket of her trousers before using the jacket to stanch the blood flowing from Wilczynski’s head wound. The envelope was flecked with spatters of blood but otherwise appeared undamaged. The aircraft — and thus the letter — seemed to be out of danger, at least for the moment, but Tracie knew the odds against Major Mitchell’s sudden deadly rampage being unrelated to the secret communique from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev were astronomical. Those kinds of coincidences just didn’t happen.
“Uh, isn’t there a military base we could divert to? Wouldn’t that be more secure?” She recognized the lack of logic inherent in the question — after all, this flight had originated from a United States military base and had been manned entirely by U.S. military personnel, and they had still nearly ended up in the Atlantic Ocean after a bloodbath inside the plane. If the attack was the result of someone trying to prevent delivery of that communique, that someone’s influence was obviously far-reaching. And deadly.
Tracie knew all that, and she knew landing at a military base might not make any difference. She didn’t care. It had to be safer than landing unprotected at a civilian airport.
Her question became moot, though, with Wilczynski’s answer. “Well, there is Loring Air Force Base, in northern Maine. It’s a SAC base and it’s got plenty of runway. Problem is it’s in the wrong direction if you’re trying to get to Andrews, and it’s farther away from our current position than Bangor. And that’s why I don’t want to land there: I don’t know how much longer I can stay conscious. The way I feel right now, our best bet is to get this Big Ugly Fat Fucker on the ground ASAP.”
Tracie knew the flight commander was right. She had no way of ascertaining the extent of his injuries, but having seen the gaping head wound, with the splintered skull bones and massive blood loss, she realized his actions were nothing short of heroic.
“Bangor it is, then,” she said.
Runway 17 at Bangor International Airport stretched out in front of the B-52 like a ribbon, visible to Tracie on this moonlit night even from probably twenty miles away. The weather was clear, but the controllers at Bangor Tower had lit the airport up like a Christmas tree. The approach lights glowed and the sequenced flashers stabbed through the night, an insistent finger of light pointing toward the approach end of the runway.
In the few minutes since Major Wilczynski had regained control of the aircraft, the flight had proceeded smoothly but his condition seemed to deteriorate steadily. Blood continued to soak the bandage wrapped around his head and now it seeped through the gauze and ran slowly down the side of his face, disappearing under the collar of his jumpsuit. He had stopped talking and seemed to be focusing all his energy on landing the plane.
He moaned softly and his head bobbed onto his chest before bouncing back up sluggishly. He wavered in his seat.
“Hang in there, Stan,” Tracie said. She squeezed his hand and he nodded weakly.
The B-52 turned onto a long final approach, wobbling unsteadily as Wilczynski struggled to maintain control. He had asked for at least a fifteen mile straight-in, explaining to Tracie that although the goal was to get on the ground as quickly as possible, he didn’t trust his ability to get the aircraft stabilized if they turned any closer than that. Through the wind screen she could see flashing emergency lights lining the runway on the side closest the control tower. At least one rescue vehicle had been placed at each runway intersection, Tracie assumed, to provide for the quickest response no matter where along the two-mile stretch of pavement they landed.
Or where they crashed.
The wings rocked and the aircraft shuddered, the runway sliding from left to right and then back again as Tracie watched anxiously. Wilczynski was struggling to keep the B-52 lined up with the runway centerline. He shook his head and cursed and grabbed the microphone. “Wind check,” he demanded, and the controller’s response was almost instantaneous.
“Wind two-zero-zero at eight, cleared to land.”
The B-52 dipped suddenly, the left wing dropped like an elevator until pointed almost directly at the ground. “Goddammit,” Wilczynski muttered and added power, wrestling with the yoke and somehow straightening the big aircraft out again.
Against all odds, they were still lined up with the runway, but Tracie knew now they were too high. The thirteen-thousand-foot-long expanse of pavement stretched out in front of them, promising safety, but it seemed far below. It looked to Tracie like they would have to drop almost straight down to avoid overshooting the runway, and she wondered whether the injured pilot had enough left to make a second try if they ended up too high and had to go around.