A single light winked on the panel. It was the auxiliary power unit, the tiny jet engine housed in the tail, and it was starting to flicker. Something inside had found the spark and, once it was there, had decided to inhale. 'Come on,' Seabright muttered. 'Come on.' Then he watched, in hot, sweaty silence, as the rest of the panel came slowly, erratically back to life, a life that was as much amber and red as green — but that didn't matter. Seabright could have reached forward and kissed every one of them because what they promised was hope.
Seabright gripped the yoke. Shook it, knowing this was pointless, knowing there was no physical link here, that only the buzzing of electrons down the circuit — if it still existed — could help him fly the plane. It was rock-hard. Still frozen. He kept his hand there, just in case.
'The number-one engine's coming back up,' Mulligan said, his eyes flashing over the panels, just a tremor of excitement in his voice.
'It's something. You just watch what happens there. Don't push it too hard yet. Make sure we don't start to lose it again. Once you're happy with that, work on the others. Leave the controls to me.'
The altimeter was unwinding more slowly now. Down to around 800 feet per minute, the aircraft's descent cushioned by the single engine pushing out a modicum of thrust.
Time, Seabright thought. Just what he wanted. Then made the Mayday broadcast he'd tried to transmit what seemed like hours ago, made it all the way through, with a reading off the moving map, a reading that looked as if it just might be accurate. Someone came back on it too, a controller with a heavy Middle European accent and an undisguised note of urgency in his voice. Seabright turned down the volume, didn't even think about responding. There were better things to do. They knew there was an emergency. The aircraft was squawking its stricken presence through its transponder to anyone who wanted to listen. He had other tasks to occupy his time.
'We've just got number one, sir,' Mulligan said. 'I think I can keep that one up okay. The rest are dead.'
'Fine,' Seabright answered. One engine was better than none.
'If worse comes to worst, Jimmy, we're just going to have to fly this aircraft gently into the ground. I want you to drop the gear at fifteen hundred feet, then give us enough power on the one engine from one thousand to cut the descent rate to something as gentle as we can get. The terrain should be obvious by then. If necessary, we'll use the power to pop us over any obstacles we can see and then get this thing on the ground, and-'
Seabright stopped in mid sentence, turned to the horrified Mulligan, and smiled.
'Sorry, Jimmy. I didn't mean to worry you.'
'It was you?'
'Oh yes.' Seabright grinned. 'Oh yes.'
The movement was so familiar to them, such a part of the training routine. Out of nowhere, the aircraft had moved out of balance, yawed in the air, slipping sideways, moving them in their seats until Seabright realized what was happening, centred the rudder, brought the ship back into a straight line.
'You try it,' Seabright ordered. 'Try some right pedal.'
The same thing happened, shifting them in the opposite direction, then Mulligan relaxed, let the aircraft take up its natural position.
'I have control,' Seabright said, and added, mainly to himself, 'and now for the big one.'
He pulled back gently on the yoke, expecting to feel it lock against him. This time it moved — only half an inch — and then he let it centre again. But it moved. The nose of the aircraft rose gently against the horizon. The altimeter slowed, came down to 7,300 feet… and stayed there.
'Airspeed?' Seabright wasn't taking his mind off these controls. He intended to stay on top of these all the way until the moment their wheels gently kissed the ground.
'Three-fifty and settled.'
Both men peered out the window, out to pale nothingness, empty, bare rocky terrain. But flat. Flat enough, if it came to it.
'Get working on that map, Jimmy. Either you find me some airfield near here and straight ahead or we're going for a forced landing pretty damn soon.'
Mulligan wiped his face with his arm, came away with a mixture of sweat and blood and mucus on his skin, and stared at the display.
'There's a military base ninety miles away; you need to turn twenty degrees to the right.'
These were command decisions, Seabright thought. These were why they made you a captain.
'We'll go for it, and take her down on the way if we need to. It's probably the station that came back on the Mayday call.'
Then, gently, with a rate of turn that was so slow that no one in the aircraft would even notice it, he moved the plane through twenty degrees to the north and let it settle once more. The aeroplane moved steadily forward through the sky.
Seabright tried to compose his thoughts. He needed to talk to the people in the cabin. And after that another call — to the airfield ahead, to explain their predicament. To describe, in as much detail as he possibly could, what had happened to them, at what flight level, and where. This was good practice. This was just plain good manners. If something struck your aircraft out of the blue, you told air traffic so they could pass it on to anyone else in the area, make sure they were aware of the danger. There was no other reason than that, Seabright said to himself, and almost believed it.
'We'll make it, Jimmy,' Seabright said, then started to work the radio. When the Mayday was done, he called Air Force One again. There was nothing on the frequency but noise.
CHAPTER 6
Calvary
Lieberman waited outside the huge wooden entrance doors of La Finca, feeling like a wallflower waiting for a date. The mansion was something. He stood at the head of a long, broad driveway that led inland, out of the estate. At his feet was a vast Renaissance fish pond in golden stone with ancient, crumbling statuary and the odd orange shape bobbing up to disturb the opaque green surface. Beyond the water, which seemed out of place in this arid landscape, a line of cypresses ran like exclamation marks down each side of the road, winding through parched, dead fields of wheat into a narrow valley. The crop moved in the faint wind, a febrile dance without energy. This place had money, he thought. Money and class. But all that didn't buy a respite from this strange hiccup in the climate that seemed to have gripped the world. When he thought about it, he found it impossible to pinpoint when the weather had gone bad. Meteorology was not his field, and his gut feeling was that it was wrong to judge what was happening with the climate on intuition alone. Stone Age man had probably spent a large part of his life complaining that the weather just wasn't what it was. Maybe there was some neural circuit inside your head that filtered out the prolonged extremes from your childhood and turned it all into an episode of The Waltons, a little rain, a lot of sun, and then some snow now and again. But as far back as 1995 he had started to feel the climate was changing for real, and he wasn't the only one. Maybe it was global warming, maybe it was some new mischief on the part of El Nino. He had no idea, but this couldn't be just received wisdom. The ice caps weren't melting like crazy, the Gulf Stream hadn't shifted north as the pundits had predicted. It didn't look likely that one day you'd be planting vineyards in Scotland or watching reindeer wander the streets of Paris — depending on your particular point of view — but it was obvious something was happening. And to him it just seemed as if someone had turned the weather dial so that it was always set to full. When it got hot, it got very hot. When it rained, it poured. And when it snowed, the best part of Canada and New England could lock the doors, break out the Molsons, and prime the generator, because no one was going back to work in anything close to a hurry.