The Galaxy's tanks were awash with fuel. At Zaragoza Air Base in
Spain, they had taken aboard enough to make Peshawar in northern Pakistan without landing anywhere, with only one midair refueling, over the eastern Mediterranean. Now they could use only what little remained in the rapidly draining inboard tanks in the wings. The transport's captain was explaining, slowly and clearly as if lecturing trainee MAC pilots.
The Galaxy had looped well to the south of its most direct route, out across the Arabian Sea after crossing the interior of Saudi Arabia and the Omani coast, in order to avoid Iraqi and Iranian aircraft and the unlooked-for hazards of the Gulf conflict. Now it had already altered course to begin its long northward run to the coast of southern Pakistan, heading for Peshawar and the Afghan border. Langley had obtained permission for a landing only in Peshawar; the MiLs were to take off in darkness that evening, Tuesday evening. Gant looked at his adjusted watch. Local time, ten-fifteen in the morning. Tuesday morning—
— pointless anger against the sense of time passing; escaping. It had already run out, disappeared as fast as water might have in that expanse of gray sand that was Saudi Arabia. The green-blue of the Arabian Sea appeared illusory, misted and pearled as it was by the altitude.
Only too real. The Galaxy would have to ditch on that water, and soon. And yet it had enough fuel on board to take them another twelve hundred miles.
Complete failure itched in his muscles, knotted in his stomach. Because of a routine check. Just because of that — a handful of caption lights on the main instrument panel, and the flight crew had immediately seen the enormity and proximity of the problem they had uncovered. With every passing second, the four huge Pratt & Whitney turbofans were devouring what little fuel remained available to them.
The port side had indicated an imbalance; the fuel was simply not feeding from the outer to the inner tanks en route to the engines. It might be caused by an electrical failure, a closed and jammed valve, a clogging of the suction/relief valves, a fault in the balance controls of the booster pumps. Manual, auto, off — the fuel would not flow, not even with the attempted use of gravity feed. The problem was esoteric; its consequences were all too real. The Galaxy was tiring like a weakened, exhausted bird; it would fall out of the sky just as certainly. The mission was dead.
… point of no return in three minutes," Gant heard the pilot in charge drawl in his slow, apparently unruffled Carolina tones. Lecturing to trainees. He felt his disorientation swept aside, as if he had snapped to sudden wakefulness. Point of no return? He had known that, of course, but the words themselves had a douching, cold-water effect. The green-blue beneath seemed nearer now, like a destination. "We can't make it back to Oman, or Saudi Arabia, and even Karachi is on the wrong side of marginal — where, sir?" Anders was being addressed as mission controller. "We don't have landing permission for Karachi, anyhow," the pilot added superfluously.
"You're — you are certain of all this?" Anders asked reluctantly, the headset clutched against his cheek like a bandage on a wound.
Gant stood opposite him, body slightly hunched into a tense silence, hands formed into loose fists, as if to ward off the situation. Between them, near the window, a scattering of half-unfolded maps lay on the floor and a moving-map display screen and its linked computer trailed a lead away somewhere across the huge hold to a power source. Various cassettelike cartridges waited to be inserted into the display. Maps of the countries surrounding them, all too distant.
"Sir, it's all been triple-checked. Acting on all our options together to conserve what fuel we have, we can't offer any guarantee to any destination, not even to Iran — and I guess you wouldn't want to take our cargo there?"
"Is there nothing—?"
"We're going to have to send out a Mayday and ditch in the sea. I'm sorry, Mr. Anders, but that's the bottom line. We're fresh out of options."
Gant watched Anders' face as the man avoided his gaze. His cheeks appeared bloodless. His eyes moved rapidly from side to side, as if he were dreaming. Among the maps, the console, the small port windows, he found no solution. Only the waiting, pearly sea below them, still as a pond. Gant took the headset from almost unresisting fingers, and snapped into it: "There's no way, skipper?"
"In-flight — is that you, Gant?"
"Yes."
"Then you already know the answer. We can't diagnose and repair a fault in the cross-feed system up here." The careful, almost sensitive politeness the pilot had shown toward Anders did not, evidently, apply to Gant, a subordinate officer. His tone was hard, certain, his own numb anger showing through it.
"OK, OK," Gant replied with controlled vitriol. Condemning the man for possessing no solutions.
"Look, Gant, we're all disappointed."
"Disappointed?" he replied scornfully. "We're not going to a fancy-dress party and you haven't torn a hole in your Robin Hood tights! Another tanker?"
"To fill up the tanks we can use? I've asked, dammit! Nothing could reach us before we fall in the water."
"Can you land anywhere?"
Anders was watching Gant with a kind of stunned admiration, a beaten fighter eyeing his opponent, wondering at the degree of energy, rage, and skill that had combined against him.
Gant's mind whirled out ahead of conscious thought, like a rope thrown across a chasm. The water already seemed much nearer. Around him, the hold seemed to enclose him firmly; a trap now, no longer the thin shell that kept them from the numbingly cold air outside. The sea, cleared of its pearly wash, glittered. There was no land in sight, not even the yellowy smudge of a beach, a small atoll, a sandbar. The cargo hold was the clinging interior of a Venus-flytrap.
He shook the image away. Anders' face was pale, his eyes staring through one of the windows, downward. Mac, Garcia, and the others formed a loose, silent group watching him and Anders. They'd heard, but now, after their initial babble of surprise and nerves, they were silent. Waiting.
His hands clenched more tightly. He waggled the headset's jack plug as if it might be a weapon. His body felt hot with frustration.
"There's nothing," Anders murmured. "It's fucked, Gant, completely fucked up." His fist banged the bulkhead, which boomed flatly. Then he was quiet once more.
Despite the illusion of the sea nearing, the Galaxy was climbing slowly, conserving its remaining fuel at the highest effective altitude. Pointlessly. It might as well already be falling. They would ditch in the sea, lose the MiLs, and Winter Hawk would be kaput, finished, canceled because some circuits, valves, pumps, even a single switch, had malfunctioned. One tiny fucking switch.
Gant turned to the window. Far to the north of the Galaxy lay a strip of smudgy yellow-brown. Land, but no landfall. The narrow, hardly inhabited coast of southern Pakistan. No runways, no airfields, no flatness of sufficient area; they'd already looked at the maps. Nothing. The coast taunted him with its inaccessibility. The sky was empty and clean, stretching upward and becoming purple and seemingly infinite — all that sky, with the Galaxy hanging on it as on a cliff edge of air, about to loosen its grip and fall. Two specks of dirt on the Plexiglas seemed to hang in the sky. He rubbed at them. For a moment, they had seemed like other, smaller aircraft, drifting away from the Galaxy—
"A beach!" he shouted. He was looking at the MiLs, all neatly palletized for easier loading and storage. Anders seemed startled, and the others turned toward him as if expecting an announcement, or a reprieve. "A beach!"
He stared down the length of the huge hold. The MiLs rested on large pallets, rotors folded and locked along each fuselage. The railway for the pallets ran the length of the Galaxy, to allow straight-through loading and unloading, to save time. On a third pallet, closest to the tail, there were drums containing their fuel load and reserve. All ready to be off-loaded under cover of evening darkness in Peshawar, a thousand miles away.