Parallax View (9 page)

“Get your hands
off my airplane,” he said.

16

May 30, 1987

11:32 p.m.

Atlantic Ocean, 35 miles off the
coast of Maine

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.

***

May 30, 1987

11:49 p.m.

Bangor, Maine

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.

He seemed to have
the same thought. “We gotta get this thing down,
now,”
he said, and
pushed forward on the yoke, pulling back on the power, forcing the bird’s nose
toward the ground. The engines quieted and Tracie could hear the wind screaming
around the air frame. She realized she was holding her breath and her hands
gripped the sides of her seat so tightly she wondered how her fingers remained
unbroken.

The ground rushed
up at the B-52, rising impossibly fast. The lights of the tiny city of Bangor
and its sister city, Brewer, shone in the distance, straddling the Penobscot
River a short distance from the airport. Centuries-old evergreens,
tightly-packed and massive, filled the wind screen, growing larger and larger
until Tracie was sure the plane would fly straight into the forest.

At what seemed
like the last possible moment, Wilczynski eased back on the yoke, lowering the
landing gear and the flaps, and the plane leveled off and slowed like someone
had stood on a set of brakes. The runway appeared again in the wind screen as if
by magic. Tracie marveled at the skill of the B-52’s only living crew member,
badly injured, maybe fatally injured, but still handling the gigantic craft
like the professional he was.

The trees flashed
past under the wings as the B-52 descended steadily. They were maybe three
miles from the approach end when Wilczynski turned to Tracie and smiled. His
lips were white and so was his face, and blood flowed steadily down his left
cheek as if the gauze bandage had never been applied. He looked like death warmed
over but incredibly he was smiling.

“I’ve got it
slowed as much as I dare. We’re going to make it,” he said, and then without
warning his eyes rolled up into his head and he slumped forward. His safety
harness kept him in his seat, but the force of the movement pushed the yoke
forward and the B-52 dropped like a rock. Tracie grabbed for the yoke
instinctively and missed, and the plane descended into the forest.

The wings sheared
off trees. The interior rocked and bucked and the only sound Tracie could hear
over her own screams was sheet metal shrieking as the wings tore completely
clear of the fuselage. The cabin bounced hard, ricocheting off a treetop and
coming down onto another and then what was left of the plane rolled and tumbled
and dropped to the forest floor.

And something
struck Tracie in the head and the world went black.

17

May 30, 1987

11:49 p.m.

Bangor, Maine

Shane Rowley’s Volkswagen Beetle
bounced along the deserted country road toward Bangor International Airport.
Bob Seger’s amplified voice filled the car’s interior, drowning out the
eggbeater sound of the engine as it strained to keep up with Shane’s lead foot.
Seger was bragging about getting lucky in “Night Moves,” one of Shane’s
favorite songs, and singing along with the lyrics almost made Shane forget, if
only for a few minutes, the paralyzing fear and bitter disappointment he had
felt this afternoon.

It had been a long
day at Northern Maine Medical Center, yet another in an endless string of
appointments with specialists to determine the cause of the debilitating
headaches he had been experiencing over the last few months.

Today had been the
worst. “A brain tumor,” this specialist had said after examining X-rays and CAT
scans and the results of numerous tests. “I’m very sorry, but there’s nothing
we can do. The tumor is advanced and growing rapidly. We can make you
comfortable as the end draws near,” the man had said, and Shane had barely
heard him. He felt outside himself, like he was watching a bad TV movie of his
life.

Shane had feared
the worst almost since the nasty headaches had begun. “How long do I have?” he
asked numbly, and the specialist, an older, officious-looking man, said, “Hard
to tell,” as if he were analyzing a theoretical concept instead of the end of
another human being’s life. “Anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months.
Probably no longer than that.”

And Shane had
thanked the man. He still didn’t know why, it just seemed like the thing to do.
Then he had stumbled out of the office and gone home, driving all the way on
auto-pilot, unable to remember a thing about the trip when he nosed into the
parking spot outside his apartment.

He had so much to
think about, but he needed to sleep. As an air traffic controller at Bangor
International Airport, he was accustomed to working shifts at all hours of the
night and day, and tonight he was scheduled to work midnight to eight in what
he knew would be one of his final shifts ever. Once the FAA flight surgeon
learned of his diagnosis, Shane would be medically disqualified from working
traffic, and that would be the beginning of the end. He knew he should have
informed his superiors already of his medical issues, but had not been able to
bring himself to do so.

One more shift,
he had told himself,
for old time’s sake,
and then had tumbled into
bed for a few fitful hours of sleep. In the morning, at the end of his shift,
he would advise Air Traffic Manager Marty Hall of the tumor. Then he would turn
in his headset and go home to die.

Shane crested a
hill, the Beetle’s engine wailing. He was lost in Seger’s voice, trying not to
think about the cancer growing in his head, when a gigantic airplane whooshed
overhead. “Holy shit!” he blurted to no one, and ducked instinctively. The
plane’s strobes filled the interior of the car with a pulsing light, and Shane
wrestled the steering wheel, fighting to keep the Beetle on the road as the
huge aircraft roared seemingly inches above the treetops.

Shane’s heart
thumped madly. The plane—it was too dark for Shane to identify the aircraft
type, but the thing was enormous—rocked left and right, barely under control,
and Shane knew instantly it would never make the airport. He knew it would
never make another hundred feet unless it climbed immediately, and he was
right. The hulking jet no sooner cleared his car than it veered right and
descended straight into the forest.

Shane slammed on
the brakes. The Beetle screeched to a halt in a spray of gravel and dust. The
airplane had disappeared from sight, but moments later a deafening crash shook
the ground, then a muffled
Boom
rolled through the night.

The guys working
up in the control tower would even now be alerting the airport rescue vehicles
to the accident. Shane knew that like he knew the back of his hand. He even
knew who was working up there—it was the crew he was on his way to relieve on
the midnight shift. But although the crash scene was probably no more than two
or three miles from the airport, finding the downed aircraft in the dense
forest would be no easy task.

Rescuers would
likely be forced to locate the crash site by helicopter, a process which would
take a considerable amount of time. Shane knew there were probably no
survivors, but in the unlikely event anyone
had
survived, they would
need help immediately. Help no one else was around to give.

He shut down the
Beetle and rummaged around in the glove box for a flashlight. He flicked it on
and grimaced at the weak yellow beam. He tried to recall the last time he had
replaced the batteries in the damned thing and couldn’t remember ever having
done it.

Shane leaped out
of the car and plunged into the nearly pitch-black woods. The moon was full and
the skies were clear, and there was a fair amount of ambient light out in the
open, but by the time he had traveled ten feet into the dense forest, it was as
if the moon had gone into hiding. He reluctantly flicked on the light,
wondering how long it would take for the batteries to die, and began picking
his way deeper into the woods.

The going was slow
and Shane had no idea whether he was even traveling in the right direction.
Getting lost in the woods would be easy to do, especially at night. If he
wasn’t careful he could find himself wandering in a big circle and missing the
crash site entirely, or walking off in the wrong direction and not being able
to find his way back to the road. He picked his way around boulders and over
downed trees, moving slowly toward where he guessed the plane had gone down.

Ten minutes later,
sweat covering his body despite the chilly nighttime Maine temperatures, a hint
of a glow suffused the darkness and Shane knew he was getting close. Then he
heard the sound of fire crackling and smelled the oily stench of burning fuel
and something else, thick and metallic. He picked up his pace and burst into a
small clearing created by the downed aircraft.

The wrecked
fuselage lay in a heap, charred metal twisted almost beyond recognition. The
nose of the aircraft was canted to one side, half-buried in the forest floor.
Long slabs of sheet metal, probably parts of the wings, littered the wreckage,
some hanging from neighboring trees, some slashed into the forest like
knife-blades.

A fire had begun
burning in the middle of the fuselage and was rapidly spreading along the
airframe in both directions, sending noxious black smoke skyward. The heat from
the blaze was unrelenting. Shane shaded his eyes with a hand and peered into
the artificial brightness. After the near-complete blackness of the forest, the
sudden intense light was unnerving.

He scanned the
length of the wreckage quickly. If any passengers had been sitting in the
middle portion of the plane, they were by now dead, consumed by fire even in
the unlikely event they had survived the impact.

The tail section
had not yet begun to burn, but accessing that area due would be impossible due
to the intense heat of the fire. He had emerged from the woods directly in
front of the nose, and reaching the rear of the aircraft would take too long at
the rate the fire was progressing. Any survivors back there faced a hideous
death. Shane hoped if anyone had been seated in the rear, they had died
instantly in the crash.

An image rose in
his head of innocent people choking and suffocating on that thick black smoke
before being burned alive, and he forced it away, focusing his attention on the
front of the aircraft. The flames had not quite reached it, although that they
would soon. The windshield was gone, and all that remained were jagged shards
of glass thrusting haphazardly out of the frame.

He moved forward,
stepping around razor-sharp pieces of torn sheet metal, some tiny and others as
big as his VW Beetle. Wreckage littered the landscape. It was hard to believe
all of it had come from the massive hulk now burning out of control in front of
him. The closer he came to the plane, the more the heat threatened to overwhelm
him. He shrugged out of his jacket and held it between the flames and his face
in an effort to gain a bit of relief from the searing heat.

At last he reached
the twisted metal of the cabin. The crackling of the fire had become more
pronounced, roaring and wheezing like a living being as it raced along the
plane’s airframe. Shane knew he was running out of time. The temperature was
becoming unbearable and the entire aircraft would soon be engulfed by flames.

As he scrambled up
an unidentifiable piece of equipment torn clear of the fuselage, he could feel
the heat radiating through the soles of his sneakers. He wrapped his jacket
around his right arm and hand, hoping it would provide protection against the
shards of glass and ripped sheet metal. He grabbed the windshield frame for
support and hoisted himself up, then peered through the smashed windshield into
the face of death and destruction.

Victims littered
the cockpit, none of them moving. Two men wearing United States Air Force
flight suits had been tossed around the interior of the craft during the crash.
Their bodies were smashed and broken. One of the men was missing most of an
arm, the bloody stump extruding from his uniform. The other had been wedged
into a tiny opening along the side of the cockpit, bent awkwardly backward, his
spine clearly broken.

Two other people—one
man and one woman—remained strapped into their seats. The man also wore a
flight suit. His head was wrapped in a bloody gauze bandage, as if he had been
attempting to fly the plane while badly injured.

The woman,
however, did not wear a flight suit. She was dressed in civilian clothing, a
pair of jeans and a button-down blouse. Her eyes were closed and her head
lolled on her shoulder. Blood oozed out of a deep gash on her left leg.

They were all
dead. They had to be. The two crew members lying in the cabin, bent and broken
like dolls after a child’s tantrum, were obviously beyond hope, and the other
two must have been killed by the force of the crash. Fire licked at the small
open doorway at the rear of the flight deck, the guttural roar of the blaze
sounding to Shane like the shriek of some inhuman monster. Poisonous black
smoke roiled at the top of the wreckage, accumulating fast. The suffocating heat
radiated through the broken windshield.

Shane shook his
head. Was there any point crawling into the plane and risking being trapped
inside with the other victims? The damage was so extensive survival seemed
unlikely in the extreme. In just the few seconds he had been checking out the
interior of the cabin, the flames had engulfed the doorway and threatened to consume
the cockpit.

It was time to get
away from here before he perished, too.

He prepared to
drop to the ground and the woman moved. She lifted her head off her shoulder
and moaned, her eyes still closed.

This changed
everything. Without thinking—he knew if he hesitated at all he would never be
able to do it—Shane pushed off with his feet and hooked his arms at the elbows
over the metal windshield frame. He pulled himself up and scrambled through the
smashed-out windshield into hell.

He tumbled through
the opening, landing face-down atop the body of the crew member with the
missing arm. The man’s body slumped sideways from the impact and Shane could
see that half his skull was missing.

He pushed off,
sickened by the sight. Something had gone horribly wrong inside this airplane,
something more than just a mechanical problem. Maybe the damage to this man’s
skull had been caused by the crash. Maybe. But that strange injury, together
with the bloody gauze bandage around the pilot’s head and the presence of a
civilian woman where one of the crew members should be, set alarm bells ringing
in Shane’s head.

But none of that
mattered, at least not at the moment. The inferno was advancing, gaining
momentum, racing toward Shane and the crash victims like an out-of-control
demon. The intensity of the heat was excruciating. The flames greedily consumed
the oxygen, making it nearly impossible to breathe.