The Minotaur (26 page)

He got himself rearranged in his seat and held his mask to his
face. “Rita?” Nothing. No sound in his ears. Now what? He had
forgotten to plug the cord to his helmet back in. He did so. ftGod-
damnit, Rita,” he roared- ”Snap out of it.”

Someone was talking on the radio. He listened. He could hear
the words now. It was Grafton. Toad keyed the radio mike. “We
took a bird hit. Rita’s a little dazed. We’re going to land at Fallen
when she comes around.”

“Understand you took a bird. Where?”

“Right in the cockpit, CAG. Hit Rita in the head. We’re going to
Fallen when she comes around. Now I’m leaving this freq and
calling Fallen on Guard.” Without waiting for a reply, he jabbed
the channelization switches and called Fallen tower. ‘Fallen
tower, this is Misty 22 on Guard. Mayday. We’re fifteen or twenty
mites out. Roll the crash truck.”

Which way are we heading? 120 degrees. He tugged the stick to
the right and settled into a ten-degree turn, which the autopilot
held. Fallen was off to the west here somewhere. He craned to see
over the instrument panel in that direction.

“Misty 22, Fallen tower on Guard. Roger your Mayday. Come
up . . .” and the controller gave them a discrete frequency.

Hey, stupid, look at the radar. He examined it. Be patient. Toad,
be patient. You’re doing okay, if only Rita comes around. And if
she doesn’t, well, screw it. You can figure out some way to eject her
right over the runway, then you can hop out. Too bad those penny-
pinchers in the puzzle palace never spent the bucks for a command
ejection system for the A-6. But you can get her out somehow. It’s
been done before. There—that must be the base there, just coming
onto the screen from the right. He waited until it was dead ahead,
then pushed the stick left until the wings were level. Now he dialed
in the Fallon tower freq and gave them a call.

Rita was using her right arm to get her left up to the throttle
quadrant. “Toad?”

“Yeah. You okay?”

“What—“

“Bird strike. All that goo on you is bird shit and gore. Relax, it
ain’t you. Can you see?”

“I think—right eye’s blurred. This wind. Left is red—blood—
can’t see …”

“Okay. I got the gear and flaps down and we’re on autopilot
motoring toward Fallen. After a while or two you’re gonna land
this thing. Just sit back right now and get yourself going again.”

She rubbed at her face with her right hand-

The autopilot dropped off the line. Automatically she grasped
the stick and began flying.

“See,” exclaimed Toad Tarkington triumphantly, “you can do it!
All fucking right! We’re almost home. Raise your left wing.” She
did so and he resumed his monologue, only to pause occasionally
to answer a question over the radio.

Rita Moravia flew by instinct, her vision restricted to one eye,
and that giving her only a blurred impression of the attitude instru-
ments on the panel before her. It was enough. She could feel the
plane respond to her touch, and confirmation of that response was
all she needed from her vision. Needed now. She would need to see
a lot better to land. The wind—it was part of the problem. The
wind wasn’t coming into the plane through the shattered quarter
panel at 140 knots—the closed cockpit prevented that—but it was
coming in at an uncomfortable velocity and temperature.

Cold. She was cold. She should slow some more.

She tugged at the throttles with her left hand. Her arm was
numb: her fingers felt like they were frozen. The power levers came
back, though the engine-RPM and fuel-flow tapes were too blurred
to read. Still she turned her head and squinted with her good eye.
She could make out the angle-of-attack stoplight indexer on the
glare shield and trimmed to an on-speed condition.

For the first time she looked outside, trying to see the ground.
Just a blurred brown backdrop. But Toad could get her lined up.

She tried to make her left thumb depress the ICS button, and
after a few seconds succeeded. “Where are we?”

“Come left about twenty degrees and start a descent to … oh,
say, six thousand. Can you see?”

“I can see to fly. Can’t see outside very well. Get me lined up
and all and I think I can do it”

Toad got back on the radio.

She made the heading change and only then retarded the throt-
tles slightly and let the nose slip down a degree or so. One thing at
a time. She had once had an instructor who liked to chant that to
his students, who were often in over their heads. When it’s all
going to hell, he used to say, just do one thing at a time.

The plane sank slowly, the altimeter needle swinging counter-
clockwise with about the speed of an elevator indicator. So they
had all day. Go down slow and you have an easy transition at the
bottom. Go down too fast and … As she sat there she continued
to blink and flex her left arm. Doesn’t feel like anything’s broken,
just numb. Maybe the world’s most colorful bruise on my shoul-
der, some orange-and-purple splotch that will be the envy of every
tattooed motorcyclist north of Juarez.

She was hurting now. As the numbness wore off she was hurting.
Her face felt like someone had used a steak hammer on it. Like she
had slid down the sidewalk on her cheekbone for a couple hundred
yards.

“Come right about fifteen degrees or so and you’ll be lined up,”
Toad said. “You got fourteen thousand feet of concrete here, Rita,
but I think we should try for a wire.” He reached up with his left
hand and pulled the handle to drop the tailhook. “Just keep it lined
up and descending wings level and we’ll be in fat city.”

“Fuel? How’s our fuel?”

“About ten grand or so. Just a little heavy. Let’s dump the fuel
in the wings.”

Rita reached with her left hand, up there under that blown-out
quarter panel, for the dump switch on the fuel management panel.
“I can’t get it,” she said finally.

“I’ll get it.” Toad leaned across and hunted until he had the
proper switch.

“Landing checklist.”

“Okay, you got three down and locked, flaps and slats out, stab
shifted, boards?” She put them out and added some power. It took
a while to get the plane stabilized on speed again.

“Pop-up?” Toad murmured when she once again had everything
under control. “Can you check the fiaper on pop-up?” The switch
was on her left console. She had to lower her head and look as she
rumbled with numb fingers. “Watch your wings,” Toad warned.

She brought the wings back to level.

“Screw the pop-up,” Toad announced, figuring that she just
couldn’t ascertain the switch position. “It’s probably still on.
Check the brakes.”

This also took some doing. She had to lift both feet free of the
deck where her heels rested and place the balls of her feet on top of
the rudder pedals, then push. She had never before realized what a
strain that put on her stomach muscles. She was weak as a kitten.
She struggled and got her feet arranged and pushed hard. They
met resistance. “Brakes okay.” She would have to do this again on
the runway if the hook skipped over the short-field arresting gear
or she landed long. For now she let her feet slide down the pedals
until her heels were once again on the deck.

“My mask.” She gagged. “Get my mask off!”

Toad got her right fitting released just in time. She retched and
the vomit poured down over her chest.

Seeing Rita vomit and smelling that smell, Toad felt his own
stomach turn over. He choked it back and helped her hold the
plane level until she stopped heaving.

“Okay,” she said when she finally got her mask back on, “check
your harness lock and we’re ready to do it.” She took her hand off
the stick and locked the harness lever on the forward right corner
of the ejection seat.

“Oh, poo,” Toad said. She glanced his way. He was reconnecting
his Koch fittings- “Sort of forgot to strap myself back in,” he ex-
plained.

She ran her seat up as far as she could and yet still reach the
rudder pedals. This put her a face a little higher out of the wind,
and in seconds she could see better, but only out of her right eye.
Her left was still clogged with blood.

“You’re coming down nicely, passing six thousand MSL, eigh-
teen hundred above the ground. Let’s keep this sink rate and we’ll
do okay. Come left a couple degrees, though.”

She complied.

“A little more. And gimme just a smidgen more power.”

When she squinted and blinked a few more times, she could
make out the runway. There was a little crosswind and Toad had
her aimed off to the left slightly to compensate.

The approach seemed to take forever, perhaps because she was
hurting and perhaps because she was unsure if she could handle it
at the bottom. She would just have to wait and see, but it was
difficult waiting when she was so cold, and growing colder.

She let the plane descend without throttle corrections, without
wiggling the stick or trying to sweeten her lineup. With three hun-
dred feet still to go on the radar altimeter, she made a heading
correction. She was going to have trouble judging the altitude with
only one eye, and she thought about that. She could do it, she
decided. There was the meatball on the Optical Landing System.
She began to fly it, working mightily to move the throttles. Still
coming down, on speed, lined up, across the threshold. Now!
Throttles back a little and nose just so, right rudder and left stick
to straighten her out … oh yes!’

The mainmounts kissed the concrete.

The pilot used the stick to hold the nose wheel off as she
smoothly closed the throttles. She had no more than got the en-
gines to idle when she felt the rapid deceleration as the tailhook
engaged the short-field arresting gear. The nose slammed down. As
the plane was jerked to a rapid stop, she applied the brakes.

She got the flap handle forward with her left hand, but knew she
wouldn’t be able to tug hard enough to pull the parking brake
handle out. Toggling the harness lock release by her right thigh,
she got enough freedom to reach it with her right.

Toad opened the canopy. As it whined its way aft a fire truck
came roaring up and screeched to a halt with firemen tumbling off.

Canopy open, Rita checked that the flaps and slats were in. Her
left shoulder was aching badly now and it was difficult to make her
fingers do as she wished. One of the firemen ran out from the wheel
well and made a cutting motion across his throat He had inserted
the safety pins in the landing gear.

Both throttles around the horn to cutoff, engine-fuel master
switches off as the RFMs dropped. Then the generators dropped
off the line with an audible click and everything in the cockpit went
dead. Exhausted, she fumbled with the generator switches until
they too were secured.

It was very quiet. She got the mask loose and, using only her
right hand, pried the helmet off. The compressor blades tinkled
steadily, gently, as the wind kept them turning, like a mobile on the
porch of your grandmother’s house when you returned after a long
absence.

A man was standing on the pilot’s boarding ladder. He looked at
her and drew back in horror.

“A bird,” she croaked.

She heard Toad give a disgusted exclamation. “Wipe it off her,
man! It’s just bird guts. It ain’t her brains!”

They were loading Rita into an ambulance and the crash crew was
filling out paperwork when a gray navy sedan screeched to a halt
near the fire truck. Jake Grafton jumped out and strode toward
Toad as white smoke wafted from the auto’s engine compartment.

“Looks like you were in a hurry,” Toad said, and managed a
grin. He was sitting, leaning back against the nose wheel, too
drained to even stand. He felt as if he had just finished a ten-mile
run. The crash chief tossed the captain a salute and he returned it
even though he wasn’t wearing a hat. He obviously had other
things on his mind.

“How’s Rita?”

“Gonna be okay, I think. When they looked at her they thought
she had brains and eyeballs oozing out everywhere, but they got
most of it cleaned off. Never saw so much shit. Must have been a
damn big bird. They’re taking her over to the hospital for X rays
and all.”

Jake Grafton deflated visibly. He wiped his forehead with a
hand, and then wiped his hand on his trousers, leaving a wet stain.

“How come you didn’t answer me on the damned radio? I about
had heart failure when you started doing whifferdills.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I disconnected my plugs and got a little un-
strapped so I could reach over and fly the plane. Rita was sorta out
of it there for a little while.”

Jake climbed the pilot’s ladder and surveyed the cockpit. He
examined the hole left in the plexiglas quarter panel by the late
buzzard or eagle or hawk. “She come around okay?”

“Came to and landed this thing like it was on rails. Real damn
sweet, CAG. Never saw a better landing.”

A sailor drove up aboard a yellow flight-line tractor. He swung
in front of the plane and backed a tow bar toward the nose wheel.
“Well,” said Jake Grafton as he made a quick inspection of the
Athena antennas, all of which seemed to be firmly in place, “you
better zip over to the hospital and let them check you over too. I
gotta get this plane put someplace private.”

“Uh, CAG, you’re still gonna let us fly the prototypes, aren’t
you? I mean, it wasn’t like we tried to hit that bird or anything.”

Jake looked at Toad, slightly surprised. “Oh,” he said, “you two
are my crew. If the doctors say you can fly. Now get over to the
hospital and find out. Better get cleaned up too. You look like
you’ve been cleaning chickens and the chickens won.”

“Yessir. You bet. But, uh, I don’t have a ride. Can I take your
car?”

“Aw, Toad. you’re gonna get that bird goo all over the seat.” He
glanced at the car. Smoke was still leaking out. It was junk. “Keys
are in it. But be careful—it’s government property.”