Final Winter

Pete pulled the engine throttles to idle and rolled into a banking maneuver, letting the nose of the aircraft fall below the horizon in one smooth move. Breathing the cold and rubbery-tasting air, he saw the airspeed increase to 250 knots and he extended the plane’s speed brakes. The trick, he thought, was to keep the spiral tight but not to exceed the two-and-a-half-G limit for aircraft like theirs. Anything under two and a half times the force of gravity was fine… anything more than that, well, he thought, they’d see just how damn good the maintenance crews were in keeping routine repairs updated.

But there were no G-meters in this aircraft; Pete would have to bring her in on experience and instinct alone, keeping the banking motion of the turn at a constant sixty-degree angle; anything too much higher than that and he and Jack and several tons of debris would be scattered over this desert floor…

Pete watched the airspeed and attitude gyro indicator as he dove the aircraft to the left. The desert landscape below them appeared to tilt up as they moved in a corkscrew, descending to the ground. The G-forces pushed both of them back into their seats. Thank God it was just him and Jack on this baby. A passenger flight would have had the passengers gripping their armrests and screaming in terror. Jack kept up the chatter as Pete kept the downward spiral as tight as possible, Jack’s voice sounding muffled through the oxygen mask as he read out their altitude and rate of descent.

‘Ten thousand feet,’ Jack called out. ‘Six thousand feet per minute down.’

The land continued to spin around. Pete forced himself to scan outside and then back inside to the instruments. Ignore everything else.

At four thousand feet it was time… time to descend as rapidly as possible and, then pull out at the last minute to attempt a type of landing that was so crazy they didn’t even bother to train for it in the simulators.

His co-pilot said, ‘Gear’s down, flaps thirty, landing checklist complete.’

Pete said, ‘Let’s do it.’

He pulled the throttles to idle, lowered the nose and extended the speed brakes. The aircraft, as one of his old instructors would have said, started to come down like a ton of shit.

Jack called out, ‘Three thousand feet!’

‘Roger,’ Pete said, as he retracted the speed brakes and started the turn to the final approach.

There you go, he thought. Below three thousand feet and somewhere in the belly of his aircraft — his responsibility! -anthrax was now spraying out. A few hours ago their original destination had been Los Angeles; he refused to think of how many would have ended up dead because of him if they hadn’t been stopped in time.

The aircraft seemed to vibrate more as they quickly lost altitude. Ahead of them was the narrow runway, and at five hundred feet they were now on final approach. Pete lined up the aircraft with the fast-approaching runway and increased throttle speed, to reduce their descent speed.

Jack was murmuring something, over and over, and Pete realized that the poor guy was praying…

A hard shudder, a screech.

Touchdown.

Things moved very quickly then. As the spoilers were deployed, Pete engaged full reverse on the engines, and pushed his feet down on the brake pedals for maximum braking. These old military fields were so damn short.

The plane vibrated some more as it started to roll to a halt. It was a bright, sunny day in the desert, and as they slowed and finally stopped Pete started breathing in the oxygen harder, thinking that he had never tasted anything so fine. The airstrip was deserted. Not even a single building. Well, so what? They were alive

As the engines whined down there was a thud-roar and another thud-roar, and he looked up. Two F-15s were rolling up and out above them, after giving them a close flyby.

‘What the hell was that?’ Jack asked.

‘Victory roll,’ Pete said.

‘Victory? Victory for what?’

Pete picked up a checklist, let it fall. For later.

‘Victory for not having to shoot us down,’ he said.

~ * ~

As they descended into their approach, Karen Hollister of AirBox 88 said to her co-pilot Mark LaMontagne, ‘We get through this, want to go to unemployment together tomorrow?’

His voice sounded odd through the oxygen mask: ‘What do you mean?’

She couldn’t believe that she laughed, but what else was there to do? ‘You think AirBox is going to be in business this time next week?’

‘Huh?’

‘Mark, old boy, a bunch of AirBox aircraft have been carrying anthrax for the past few hours. Do you think that’s a keen strategy for keeping our market share?’

Mark coughed. ‘Shit. Hadn’t thought about that.’

‘Plenty of time to do that later. Let’s go.’

And though this was going to be a landing for the record books and news magazines, it ended up being pretty routine. The touchdown was just a tad rough but when they were done, the plane at a halt, the landscape flat and pretty much abandoned, Karen sat back, breathing hard.

‘Not bad, eh?’ she asked.