Skyhammer (3 page)

Pate answered each call-out tersely and exactly as required. They were closing in on the surface of the storm. Boyd reached
up to flip on the landing lights. The twin beams, rotating forward from beneath the wingtips, showed ragged wisps of cloud
rushing at them from the darkness. Turbulence began to jiggle the airframe. Boyd reached up again and switched on the seatbelt
signs, then activated the ship’s anti-icing systems.

“Passing eighteen,” Pate said. “Niner five seven set.”

Boyd reset his own altimeters to local field pressure. A moment later they were into the top of the storm. Instantly the windshield
went blank, then ignited with millions of tiny ice pellets flying at them like sparks in the glare of the landing lights.
The plane bucked upward and settled again. Boyd tuned the navigation radios and brought up the volume levers to ID the instrument
landing system for Runway 5-right. Then he checked the panel again. They were just forty-one miles from the airport, a little
high still for the distance. He knew MD-80’s were fair gliders, descending slowly even in idle. But they had room; they’d
make it down in time.

Except now Pate was advancing the throttle, adding more power to the left engine. Boyd gaped at him.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Pate didn’t answer, didn’t even turn his head.

“We need to get down!” Boyd shouted, reaching out to tap the face of his altimeter.

“We need sixty-five percent,” Pate answered now. “For single-engine de-icing. Check the book.”

For a second Boyd didn’t understand. Then he knew what Pate meant. The anti-icing systems needed plenty of hot, compressed
air, but now there was only one engine to supply it. And the outside temperature gauge was registering minus two degrees Celsius—prime
condition for icing. Boyd unclipped his penlight from his shirt pocket and shined its narrow beam through the windscreen.
Nearly an inch of white rime had collected on the wiper post. Without enough heat, more rime would build up on the leading
edges, adding weight and drag, altering the critical shape of the airfoils. Pate was right. They would have to keep the power
up to the left engine.

But how would they get down in time? “We’re only thirty-eight miles out,” Boyd said. “You want a vector, to give us more spacing?”

Pate shook his head sharply, irritated. “Negative. We’ll get down just fine.”

“How?” Boyd demanded.

Pate didn’t answer, and wouldn’t—unless he ordered it? Boyd wanted to, but what if Pate knew something else he didn’t? He
wouldn’t risk looking stupid again, Boyd decided. But what
was
Pate up to?

His headset crackled. Indianapolis was calling, handing them off to Cleveland approach. The Cleveland controller responded
immediately, assigning them another heading and altitude, cutting the corner to shorten the distance to the airport. They
were still above ten thousand now, only thirty miles from the runway, and Pate was bringing the nose up to slow down to the
mandatory speed limit. Boyd checked the glide slope indicator. The marker was at the bottom of the scale, the plane well above
the normal descent path. If they kept to this trajectory they would miss the approach, overshoot and have to go around. Couldn’t
Pate see that?

“You want some speed brakes?”

“Who’s flying this thing?” Pate answered instantly, shooting him a sideways look, as if Boyd were merely an annoyance.

Until that moment, Boyd had still felt in command of the plane. But now it seemed Pate had taken charge. “Who’s the captain
of this thing?” Boyd shouted back at him.

This time Pate looked straight at him. “You want it,
captain
?”

Boyd knew he wasn’t bluffing. Pate would give up the yoke without hesitation, if Boyd so ordered. The plane rose and fell,
then pitched to one side as a draft caught it. The airframe creaked and groaned. Such battering would only get worse as they
neared the ground. Boyd decided he didn’t want to fly the landing. Besides, maybe Pate was setting him up? Goading him to
take over an impossible situation, then blow the approach and catch the flack for it.

Boyd shook his head. “You’re flying it—but screw the approach, Pate, and
you’ll
pay for it, not me.”

“Fine, pardner,” Pate said, already back on the gauges.

“Gear down.”

Now Boyd stared at him, wide-eyed. What the
hell
was he saying? They were still twenty-two miles out. They hadn’t even extended partial flaps yet.

“Gear down!” Pate looked over at him again, sternly this time. Boyd thought fast. They
were
under maximum speed for gear extension. And the gear would add a lot of drag to the plane.

“Do it,” Pate said sharply.
“Now.”

Startled, Boyd reached across the panel and slammed the gear lever down. Through the soles of his shoes came the jarring thud
of the nosegear doors opening, and he could hear the roar of the slipstream sucking into the wheel wells. Then, as the gear
indicators blinked green—all three gears down and safe—he felt the massive drag take hold of the plane. It seemed to sink
from under him, the vertical speed shooting to four thousand feet per minute. They were dropping like a rock toward the glide
slope. Boyd could hardly believe it.

Yet Pate seemed as calm as ever, even though he was working hard, nosing the plane over to hold 240 knots. How could he stay
so cool, Boyd wondered. Was it all his years of experience, or was Pate what he seemed—one iron-tough customer?

“New World Five-five-four.” The controller’s monotone snapped Boyd’s attention back to the panel. “Turn left, heading zero
three zero. Maintain three thousand until established on the localizer: cleared ILS Runway five-right.”

Pate brought the plane around to the new heading. The controller was setting them up to intercept the final approach course
at a twenty-degree angle from the right. They were only nineteen miles out now, but suddenly the glide slope indicator left
the bottom of the scale, moving rapidly upward. Boyd couldn’t help feeling elated. The high-speed descent was working.

But now they were heading into the worst of it, battered by new waves of turbulence, more violent than before. The airframe
screamed and shook as the plane rocked one way, then the other, bouncing up and falling again. No flight simulator could duplicate
it. No, this wasn’t the same at all, Boyd realized. In the simulator there wasn’t any bouncing and rolling, no extraneous
radio chatter. And you knew what would happen, and when. Suddenly he understood why Pate had dropped them down at the last
minute. The high-speed descent had kept them out of the worst stuff for as long as possible.

At three thousand feet Pate leveled off. With the plane below the glide slope, he allowed the airspeed to bleed down to 220,
then called for the leading edge slats. Boyd moved the flap lever to the first notch. They were mushing along in the lowest
level of the storm. The cloud was much denser, the grainy, frozen particles of water rattling the cockpit’s aluminum shell
like blasted sand.

“Localizer alive,” he called. The course indicator had come off its peg.

“Roger,” Pate shouted over the roar of the ice storm. He was already banking the airplane, varying the angle, maneuvering
onto the electronic course. He leveled the wings with the course indicator centered.

Forty seconds later the glide slope indicator centered, and Pate called for landing flaps. They were seven miles from touchdown.
Boyd switched to the tower frequency and reported their position.

“Roger, New World Five-fifty-four.” The tower controller’s voice was clear. “Wind zero nine zero at twelve, gusting to twenty.
Braking action reported fair by a Boeing Seven-thirty-seven. Emergency equipment is standing by. Cleared to land Runway five-right.”

Boyd saw it sharply in that instant, not only the interior of the cockpit with its instrument banks glowing in the darkness—not
only the two human beings, himself and his first officer sitting close beside each other in their tiny dark space— but also
the plane hurtling along at almost 200 miles per hour through a soup of windblown ice. And he saw the two-mile-long stretch
of concrete that would turn them into cinders if they were not good enough. The crash trucks waiting at midpoint along the
runway, their multi-hued beacons flashing out of sync, to chase down the final portion of the landing roll. He peered through
the windshield. The ice had turned to snow, streaming at them, melting instantly as it struck the warm glass. Boyd gripped
his armrests as the jet bucked and rolled violently in the gusting wind. Crashes did happen on nights like this. Planes with
all
their engines working ended up as smoldering wreckage on TV news, glaring in the strobes as rescue workers picked through
the debris.

Pate never wavered. Though the plane bucked and yawed in the turbulence, he rode right with it, one hand guarding the throttle,
the yoke in his other hand moving like fluid in a glass. It was amazing. The way he sat there, calmly scanning his instruments,
gently working the machine to counter the drift, crabbing the aircraft into the crosswind, adjusting the heading to hold the
course.

“One thousand feet,” Boyd called. They were three miles from the runway. Still he could see nothing through the windshield.
Thirty seconds later he called five hundred and then four hundred feet. At just under three hundred the approach lights loomed
out of the murk.

“Approach lights in sight. Eleven o’clock.” Boyd reached up to the overhead panel to turn both windshield wipers on high,
and they leaped across the glass, their electric motors shrieking. At two hundred feet he could finally make out the red lights
of the runway threshold; a second later the visual approach slope indicators materialized, the twin banks of lights glowing
red-over-white, confirming them on glide path.

“Runway in sight!” he called.

“Roger. Going outside.” Pate shifted his attention from the panel.

At a hundred feet he lowered the right wing slightly, neutralizing the drift, then ruddered the fuselage parallel to the runway.
At thirty he flared the plane onto the centerline.

The right main gear impacted first. The touchdown was firm, exactly what was recommended for a slick runway. The automatic
speed brakes deployed. Pate lowered the nosegear gently to the pavement and opened the left reverser, then shifted his feet
up the rudder pedals and carefully applied the brakes.

The plane decelerated rapidly, the runway lights sliding by slower, then slower, the danger easing with each passing second.
Boyd sank into his seat, let out his breath.

They were down.

“You got the airplane,” Pate said when they had slowed to taxi speed.

Boyd actually wished he
didn’t
have to steer the plane to the gate. He was exhausted. But the nosewheel tiller was on his side. Reluctantly, he took hold
of it, and turned the plane toward the terminal.

He pulled to a complete stop when he saw a swarm of flashing lights approaching from their right. “Have them check the right
engine,” he told Pate. “If they confirm no fire, we’ll taxi on our own power.”

Pate shook his head. “Have her towed.” He folded a stick of gum into his mouth. “One engine’ll turn you against the brakes
on this ice.”

It didn’t anger Boyd at all this time that Pate was right again. He was grateful, and too glad to be down. And while they
sat in silence, waiting for the maintenance crew, he realized that Pate had kept him out of quite a bit of trouble. Not that
he couldn’t have landed the plane himself, but he had to admit it, his own approach would not have been so efficient nor so
well controlled. He might have missed the first approach, or might have needed abnormal power and slammed the plane down.
He might have lost it taxiing to the gate, and
that
he certainly would have answered for later.

Realizing all this made Boyd mad at himself. He had not done well nor acted properly and Pate knew it. He had blown his cool,
whereas Emil Pate had kept his, shot a beautiful approach, made a perfect landing. Boyd felt envy—he couldn’t deny it. He
looked over at his first officer now. Pate had cased back in his seat and was gazing out through the windscreen, chewing his
gum steadily, ignoring Boyd, just as he’d done for the past three days. But he seemed different—old and ordinary again but
not so broken down. Rough-edged maybe, in a weatherbeaten way, his black hair showing the beginning of gray. Boyd saw something
else, too: Pate’s face with its high cheek bones and hawk’s beak nose was no longer blank. He was sad. Plainly, deeply sad.
And Boyd thought he knew why. The whole Westar takeover, the merger—it had ruined him. Pate deserved some slack for his behavior.
Some credit for his performance.

“That was nice work,” Boyd said, putting his head back, gazing up at the overhead panel. “I appreciate all of it.”

As he might have expected, Pate made no answer.

“Seriously,” Boyd added. “And I want you to know, I think you guys did get a raw deal.”

When he looked at Pate again, Pate had stopped chewing. He had turned an eye toward Boyd, and for a long moment he regarded
him without a readable expression on his blunt, hard face, not even the sadness. But then, turning forward again, he said,
“You never lost an engine before, did you?”

It was like a slap across the face. Boyd stared at him. How could Pate still be acting this way? After what they’d just come
through. And after he’d given him the goddamn credit for it—had even made a damn apology!

Big mistake, Boyd realized. He had left himself wide open, and Pate had jumped him again. Boyd seethed now. It was the contempt
that galled. So what if Pate had more experience? And so what if the landing had been routine to him? So what if he’d lost
his seniority? It made no difference if Pate had ten thousand hours in the left seat. None of it gave him any call to slap
down a captain, not under any circumstances.

“I was just trying to tell you,” Boyd said through clenched teeth. “I sympathize.” He leaned forward to
make
Pate look at him. “I can
understand
why you’re so god-damn pissed off.”