“Buckley Tower, this is Vixen 03,” Gold was yelling into a microphone. “We have smoke in the cockpit. Request emergency-landing instructions. Over.”
“Taking over the controls,” said Vylander.
“She’s yours.” Gold’s acceptance came without hesitation.
“Burns?”
“Sir?”
“What in hell’s gone wrong?”
“Can’t tell for sure with all this smoke, Major.” Burns’s voice sounded hollow under the oxygen mask. “It looks like a short in the area of the radio transmitter.”
“Buckley Tower, this is Vixen 03,” Gold persisted. “Please come in.”
“It’s no use, Lieutenant,” Burns gasped. “They can’t hear you. Nobody can hear you. The circuit breaker for the radio equipment won’t stay set.”
Vylander’s eyes were watering so badly he could hardly see. “I’m bringing her around on a course back to Buckley,” he announced calmly.
But before he could complete the hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, the C-97 started to vibrate abruptly in unison with a metallic ripping sound. The smoke disappeared as if by magic and a frigid blast of air tore into the small enclosure, assailing the men’s exposed skin like a thousand wasps. The plane was shaking herself to pieces.
“Number-three engine threw a propeller blade!” Burns cried.
“Jesus Christ, it never rains … Shut down three!” snapped Vylander, “and feather what’s left of the prop.”
Gold’s hands flew over the control panel, and soon the vibration ceased. His heart sinking, Vylander gingerly tested the controls. His breath quickened and a growing dread mushroomed inside him.
“The prop blade ripped through the fuselage,” Hoffman reported. There’s a six-foot gash in the cargo-cabin wall. Cables and hydraulic lines are dangling all over.”
“That explains where the smoke went,” Gold said wryly. “It was
sucked outside when we lost cabin pressure.”
“It also explains why the ailerons and rudder won’t respond,” Vylander added. “We can go up and we can go down, but we can’t turn and bank.”
“Maybe we can slue her around by opening and closing the cowl flaps on engines one and four,” Gold suggested. “At least enough to put us in the landing pattern at Buckley.”
“We can’t make Buckley,” Vylander said. “Without number-three engine, we’re losing altitude at the rate of nearly a hundred feet a minute. We’re going to have to set her down in the Rockies.”
His announcement was greeted with stunned silence. He could see the fear grow in his crew members’ eyes, could almost smell it.
“My God,” groaned Hoffman. “It can’t be done. We’ll ram the side of a mountain for sure.”
“We’ve still got power and some measure of control,” Vylander said. “And we’re out of the overcast, so we can at least see where we’re going.”
“Thank heaven for small favors,” grunted Burns.
“What’s our heading?” asked Vylander.
“Two-two-seven southwest,” answered Hoffman. “We’ve been thrown almost eighty degrees off our plotted course.”
Vylander merely nodded. There was nothing more to say. He turned all his concentration to keeping the Stratocruiser on a lateral level. But there was no stopping the rapid descent. Even with full-power settings on the remaining three engines, there was no way the heavily laden plane could maintain altitude. He and Gold could only sit by impotently as they began a long glide earthward through the valleys surrounded by the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks of the Colorado Rockies.
Soon they could make out the trees poking through the snow coating the mountains. At 11,500 feet the jagged summits began rising above their wing tips. Gold flicked on the landing lights and strained his eyes through the windshield, searching for an open piece of ground. Hoffman and Burns sat frozen, tensed for the inevitable crash.
The altimeter needle dipped below the ten-thousand-foot mark. Ten thousand feet. It was a miracle they had made it so low; a miracle a wall of rock had not risen suddenly and blocked their glide path. Then, almost directly ahead, the trees parted and the landing lights revealed a flat, snow-covered field.
“A meadow!” Gold shouted. “A gorgeous, beautiful alpine meadow five degrees to starboard.”
“I see it,” acknowledged Vylander. He coaxed the slight course adjustment out of the Stratocruiser by jockeying the engine-cowl flaps and throttle settings.
There was no time for the formality of a checklist run-through. It was to be a do-or-die approach, textbook wheels-up landing. The sea of trees disappeared beneath the nose of the cockpit, and Gold cut off the ignition and electrical circuits as Vylander stalled the Stratocruiser a scant ten feet above the ground. The three remaining engines died and the great dark shadow below quickly rose and converged upon the falling fuselage.
The impact was far less brutal than any of them had a right to expect. The belly kissed the snow and bumped lightly, once, twice, and then settled down like a giant ski. How long the harrowing, uncontrolled ride continued Vylander could not tell. The short seconds passed like minutes. And then the fallen aircraft slid clumsily to a stop and there was a deep silence, deathly still and ominous.
Burns was the first to react.
“By God … we did it!” he murmured through trembling lips.
Gold stared ashen-faced into the windshield. His eyes saw only white. An impenetrable blanket of snow had been piled high against the glass. Slowly he turned to Vylander and opened his mouth to say something, but the words never came. They died in his throat.
A rumbling vibration suddenly shook the Stratocruiser, followed by a sharp crackling noise and the tortured screech of metal being bent and twisted.
The white outside the windows dissolved into a dense wall of cold blackness and then there was nothing-nothing at all.
At his Naval Headquarters office in Washington, Admiral Bass vacantly studied a map indicating Vixen 03’s scheduled flight path. It was all there in his tired eyes, the deeply etched lines on his pale sunken cheeks, the weary slump of his shoulders. In the past four months Bass had aged far beyond his years. The desk phone rang and he picked it up.
“Admiral Bass?” came a familiar voice.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Secretary Wilson tells me you wish to call off the search for Vixen 03.”
“That’s true,” Bass said quietly. “I see no sense in prolonging the agony. Navy surface craft, Air Force search planes, and Army ground Units have combed every inch of land and sea for fifty miles along either
side of Vixen O3’s plotted course.”
“What’s your opinion?”
“My guess is her remains are resting on the seabed of the Pacific Ocean,” answered Bass.
“You feel she made it past the West Coast?”
“I do.”
“Let us pray you’re right, Admiral. God help us if she crashed on land.”
“If she had, we’d have known by now,” Bass said.
“Yes”-the President hesitated-“I guess we would at that.” Another pause. “Close the file on Vixen 03. Bury it, and bury it deep.”
“I’ll see to it, Mr. President.”
Bass set the receiver in its cradle and sank back in his chair, a defeated man at the end of a long and otherwise distinguished Navy career.
He stared at the map again. “Where? ‘ he said aloud to himself. “Where are you? Where in hell did you go?”
The answer never came. No clue to the disappearance of the illfated Stratocruiser ever turned up. It was as though Major Vylander and his crew had flown into oblivion.
Colorado-September 1988
Dirk Pitt released his hold on sleep, yawned a deep, satisfying yawn, and absorbed his surroundings. It had been dark when he arrived at the mountain cabin and the flames in the great moss-rock fireplace along with the light from the pungent-smelling kerosene lamps had not illuminated the knotty-pine interior to its best advantage.
His vision sharpened on an old Seth Thomas clock clinging to one wall. He had set and wound the clock the previous night; it had seemed the thing to do. Next he focused on the massive cobwebbed head of an elk that stared down at him through dusty glass eyes. Slightly beyond the elk was a picture window that offered a breathtaking vista of the craggy Sawatch mountain range, deep in the Colorado Rockies.
As the last strands of sleep receded, Pitt found himself faced with his first decision of the day: whether to allow his eyes to bask in the majesty °f the scenery or to feast them on the smoothly contoured body of Colorado congresswoman Loren Smith, who sat naked on a quilted rug, engrossed in yoga exercises.
Pitt discerningly opted for Congresswoman Smith.
She was sitting cross-legged, in the lotus position, leaning back and
resting her elbows and head on the rug. The exposed nest between her thighs and the small tautened mounds on her chest, Pitt decided, put the granite summits of the Sawatch to shame.
“What do you call that unladylike contortion?” he asked.
“The Fish,” she replied, without moving. “It’s for firming up the bosom.”
“Speaking as a man,” Pitt said with mock pompousness, “I do not approve of rock-hard boobs.”
“Would you prefer them limp and saggy?” Her violet eyes angled in his direction.
“Well … not exactly. But perhaps a little silicone here and a little silicone there …”
“That’s the trouble with the masculine mind,” she snapped, sitting up and brushing back her long cinnamon hair. “You think all women should have balloon-sized mammaries like those insipid drones on the centerfolds of chauvinist magazines.”
“Wishing will make it so.”
She threw him a pouting look. “Too bad. You’ll have to make do with my thirty-four B-cuppers. They’re all I’ve got.”
He reached out, wrapped an iron arm around her torso, and dragged her half on, half off the bed. “Colossal or petite”-he leaned down and lightly kissed each nipple-“let no woman accuse Dirk Pitt of discrimination.”
She arched up and bit his ear. “Four whole days alone together. No phones, no committee meetings, no cocktail parties, no aides to hassle me. It’s almost too good to be true.” Her hand crept under the covers and she caressed his stomach. “How about a little sport before breakfast?”
“Ah, the magic word.”
She threw him a crooked smile. ” ‘Sport’ or ‘breakfast’?”
“What you said before, your yoga position.” Pitt leaped out of bed, sending Loren sprawling backward onto her sculptured bottom. “Vťhich way is the nearest lake?”
“Lake?”
“Sure.” Pitt laughed at her confused expression. “Where there’s a lake, there’s fish. We can’t waste the day dallying in bed when a juicy rainbow trout lies in breathless anticipation of biting a hook.”
She tilted her head questioningly and looked up at him. He stood tall, over six foot three, his trim body tanned except for the white band around his hips. His shaggy black hair framed a face that seemed eter—
VixenOB I 15
nally grim and yet was capable of providing a smile that could warm a crowded room. He was not smiling now, but Loren knew Pitt well enough to read the mirth in the crinkles around his incredibly green eyes.
“You big conceited jock,” she lashed out. “You’re putting me on.”
She launched herself off the floor, ramming her head into his stomach, shoving him backward onto the bed. She wasn’t fooling herself for a second with her seemingly super strength. If Pitt hadn’t relaxed and accepted her momentum, she would have bounced off him like a voile yball.
Before he could fake a protest, Loren climbed over his chest and straddled him, her hands pressing against his shoulders. He tensed himself, circled his hands behind her, and squeezed her soft cheek bottoms. She felt him grow beneath her and his heat seemed to radiate through her skin.
“Fishing,” she said in a husky voice. “The only rod you know how to use doesn’t have a reel.”
They had breakfast at noon. Pitt showered and dressed and returned to the kitchen. Loren was bent over the sink, vigorously scrubbing a blackened pan. She wore an apron and nothing else. He stood in the doorway, watching her small breasts jiggle, taking his time about buttoning his shirt.
“I wonder what your constituency would say if they could see you now,” he said.
“Screw my constituency,” she said, grinning devilishly. “My private life is none of their damned business.”
” ‘Screw my constituency,’ ” Pitt repeated solemnly, gesturing as though he were taking notes. “Another entry in the scandalous life of little Loren Smith, congressional representative of Colorado’s graft-ridden seventh district.”
“You’re not funny.” She turned and threatened him with the dishpan. “There is no political hanky-panky in the seventh district, and I am the last one on Capitol Hill who can be accused of being on the take.”
“Ah … but your sexual excesses. Think what journalistic hay the media might make out of that. I may even expose you myself and write a best-selling book.”
“As long as I don’t keep my lovers on office payroll or entertain them on my congressional expense account, I can’t be touched.” ‘
“What about me?”
16
VIXEN 03p>
“You paid your half of the groceries, remember?” She dried the pan and set it in the cupboard.
“How can I build a business out of being kept,” Pitt said sadly, “if I have a cheap screw for a mistress?”
She put her arms around his neck and kissed his chin. “The next time you pick up a horny girl at a Washington cocktail party, I suggest you demand an accounting of her financial assets.”
Good lord, she recalled, that awful party thrown by the Secretary of Environment. She hated the Capital social scene. Unless a function was tied in to Colorado interests or one of her committee assignments, she usually went home after work to a mangy cat named Ichabod and whatever movie was playing on television.
Loren’s eyes had been magnetically drawn to him as he stood in the flickering light of the lawn torches. She had stared brazenly while carrying on a partisan conversation with another Independent Party congressman, Morton Shaw, of Florida.
She felt a strange quickening of her pulse. That seldom happened and she wondered why it was happening now. He was not handsome, not in a ‘ Paul Newman sort of way, and yet there was a virile, no-nonsense aura about him that appealed to her. He was tall, and she preferred tall men.