Gordian returned his attention to the HSI, saw that he was coming in range of his final landing fix, and prepared to resume his checklist procedures. At just below six hundred feet and about a mile west of the runway, he was set to enter the base leg, and could see the brightly lit sprawl of the airfield in easy detail.
He pulled down the lever to deploy his wheels, expecting to feel the mild thump of the gear mechanisms lowering through the doors.
Instead the red master warning light suddenly illuminated.
The landing gear alerts on his EICAS began to flash.
An electronic alarm tone sounded from an overhead speaker.
Gordian's eyes widened. The breath catching in his throat, he pulled the landing gear handle up, then down again.
The red lights kept blinking.
The horn kept blatting into the silence of the cockpit with deadly insistence.
Gordian felt his heart clench as the ground rushed closer and closer up on him, the runway spooling toward his windshield.
The wheels, he thought.
With less than two minutes to go until he hit the ground, the landing gear hadn't lowered.
Chapter Twenty
Whether jammed tightly into the coach section of some ready-for-the-scrapyard commercial jetliner, or, as was presently the case, hugged gently by a leather club seat in Gordian's state-of-the-art executive Learjet, Vince Scull was a white-knuckle flier all the way, no matter that he had logged hundreds of hours in the air fulfilling his professional responsibilities at UpLink.
A lot of risk-assessment people, especially those whose job it was to research international markets, relied on second-or third-hand source material — news reports, sociological studies, statistical reviews, and so on. Scull, however, thought that was for slackers who might as well have spent their time picking their underwear out of their cracks as writing up analyses. Iri his opinion, if you wanted to learn about a place, you went there, breathed the air, ate the food, and if you were lucky, kissed a few of the local frauleins or signoras. And, unfortunately, if you wanted to get to the foreign country you wanted to learn about, you had to fly.
So he flew. Which didn't mean he had to like it, or pretend to anyone else that zipping around the world the way he did merited flight wings, unless maybe they were the ones that belonged to that Greek kid Zorro or Aesop or whoever it was that went too close to the sun and got his tail feathers fried.
It was during the takeoffs and landings that Scull always had his worst anxiety attacks, mainly because somebody had once told him they were the times at which the airfoils were under the most stress from physical forces… not that he knew shit about physics or flying, except that it seemed there were more accidents at those critical stages than when the planes were under way, so maybe there was something to what he'd heard.
Be that as it may, the reason Scull was now gripping the armrest of his seat like a convict in the electric chair waiting for somebody to turn on the juice was that Gordian was making his final approach into Washington, one of those very stages of air travel that scared the living crap out of him, never mind the boss was an Air Force-certified Flying Ace. It was also why he was crooning a jumbled medley of Sinatra hits under his breath — the summer wind came blowin in across New York, New York, ring-a-ding and doobie-doo — serenading himself with old standards being another tried-and-true Scullian method of coping with tension and blocking the unwanted from his mind.
He did not care if he would have to endure ribbing about his nervousness from Megan Breen, who was sitting just across the narrow aisle to his right. Nor did he care if he heard about it from Nat Sobel or Chuck Kirby, who were immediately behind him, bullshitting with Meg like a couple of makeout artists at a cocktail party instead of helpless prisoners of a tin can that just happened to be capable of shooting through the troposphere at close to Mach One, the fucking speed of sound.
All he really did care about was reaching terra firma in one piece, and the rest of them could keep the Glenturret, which had admittedly gone down nicely, although his personal favorite malt was this brand from far western Scotland called Bunahabhain, an unpronounceable name that always left his mouth sounding like something Ralph Kramden might have said when Alice caught him red-handed in a lie….
Clutching his seat, singing quietly off-key with his eyes shut, Scull was trying his best to remain oblivious to the plane's descent when a sound from the cockpit — the sliding door to which was partially open because Gord had been talking to Chuck about something earlier in the fight — bored into his awareness like a drill bit.
He snapped open his eyes and peered into the cockpit. From the position at which he was sitting, he could see about half of Gordian's back, and about the same amount of the pilot's console. The boss didn't seem to be in any kind of panic, but that didn't mean anything. This was the guy with the cool head and bombardier eyes, the guy who had been released from a five-year getaway at the Hanoi Hilton, their special all-the-torture-you-can-take package, with his head high and his back straight and his lips sealed as tightly as the day of his involuntary check-in. This was definitely the guy you wanted beside you in the proverbial foxhole, and if something was wrong, you would never be able to tell from looking at him.
But the noise coming from the cockpit, the noise was like an electronic version of an automobile horn, a gratingly repetitive blaat-blaat-blaat that damned well sounded to Scull like a warning alarm.
He looked at Megan, glanced around at Richard and Chuck. All three of them were also trying to see into the cabin, and their faces said they were, if not quite as worried as he was, then still pulling high Nielsen distress ratings. Blaat-blaat-blaat-blaat…
"Anybody know what the hell's going on?" he asked in a loud voice. "Christ in a barrel, what's that noise?"
The others were silent.
Scull swallowed. His palms felt suddenly moist. And no goddamned wonder.
Coming from a plane full of talkers, that mute silence had frightened him more than just about anything he could have imagined.
Gordian breathed, filling his lungs with oxygen, his mind working rapidly. He was belting toward the runway at over a hundred feet a second without wheels, a situation that would have the gravest consequences unless he took action to change it. Which left no room for indecision.
Think logically, he told himself. The problem's evident, now isolate its cause.
He recalled the unusually quick drop in hydro pressure when he'd extended the flaps on takeoff. Yet if the pump motor had failed, the crew-alerting system would have detected it. Ditto if the sensors had gotten readings that indicated a low fluid level in the reservoir. Furthermore, the compressed nitrogen inside the fluid accumulator was supposed to provide supplemental pressure to system components in the event of leakage.. within a certain threshold. When the fluid loss from a specific component became too great, or there was too much air in the line, it would be unable to keep up with demand and bring the pressure back to where it should be.
Meaning what? Gordian gnawed his bottom lip. Meaning he was looking at a drastically reduced fluid level— and therefore a sudden and unmanageable demand — in a particular area of the system, possibly the landing gear actuator cylinder. The gear had a mechanical uplock that wouldn't release without hydro power, even with the lever in the down position… and there was no manual override.
Okay, next. Options.
He could Mayday the ground facility, wait for them to foam the runway and bring fire and medical crews to the scene should he need to make a gear-up landing. But having to circle the field had depleted his fuel reserve, and foaming took time. While he had enough Jet A in his nacelles to safely abort and execute a go-round, he didn't believe he could stay in the air long enough for the process to be completed. In which case he would have to belly onto the pavement, something that would very likely spark an explosive engine fire and leave little but ashes for the ground crews to clean up.