Vixen 03 Part 2

"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," Vylan-der 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 alt.i.tude 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 G.o.d," 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 alt.i.tude. 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 c.o.c.kpit, 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 b.u.mped 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d ... 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 gla.s.s. 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 Ba.s.s 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 Ba.s.s had aged far beyond his years. The desk phone rang and he picked it up.

"Admiral Ba.s.s?" came a familiar voice.

"Yes, Mr. President."

"Secretary Wilson tells me you wish to call off the search for Vixen 03."

"That's true," Ba.s.s 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 Ba.s.s.

"You feel she made it past the West Coast?"

"I do."

"Let us pray you're right, Admiral. G.o.d help us if she crashed on land."

"If she had, we'd have known by now," Ba.s.s 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."

Ba.s.s 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 h.e.l.l did you go?"

The answer never came. No clue to the disappearance of the ill-fated Stratocruiser ever turned up. It was as though Major Vylander and his crew had flown into oblivion.

Part 1

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 ma.s.sive cobwebbed head of an elk that stared down at him through dusty gla.s.s 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.