In front of him Larry Duval was listening to something inside his head screaming: ‘Close it down.’
After years of flying Duval’s fingers were doing the job almost unbidden: flicking off one switch after another, fuel, electric circuits, hydraulic lines. But the starboard en
gine was blazing. The in-housing fire extinguishers operated automatically but were too late. The starboard F-100 was tearing itself to pieces in what is known as ‘catastrophic engine failure’.
Behind Duval, the wizzo was telling McChord, ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, starboard engine on fire—’
He was interrupted by another roar from behind him. Far from shutting down, fragments of the starboard engine had torn through the firewall and were attacking the port side. More red lights blazed. The second had caught fire also. With reduced fuel, which he had, and one functioning engine, Larry Duval could have made it down. But with both of its engines dead, a modern fighter does not glide like those of long ago; it plunges like a bullet.
Captain Johns would tell the inquiry later that his pilot’s voice remained calm and level. He had switched the radio to ‘transmit’ so that the air-traffic controller at McChord did not need to be informed; he was hearing it in real time.
‘I have lost both engines,’ said the major. ‘Stand by to eject.’
The wizzo looked one last time at his instruments. Height: twenty-four thousand feet. Diving; dive steepening. Outside the sun still shone but the cloud bank was seething towards them. He glanced around, over his shoulder. The Eagle was a torch, flaming from end to end. He heard the same calm voice up front.
‘Eject. Eject.’
Both men reached down for the handle beside the seat and pulled. That was all they needed to do. Modern ejector seats are so automated that even if the airman is unconscious they will do everything for him.
Neither Larry Duval nor Nicky Johns actually saw their plane die. With seconds to spare their bodies were hurled upwards through the shattering canopy and into the freezing stratosphere. The seat retained their legs and arms so they would not flail and snap off. The seat protected their faces from the blast that could push their cheekbones through the skull.
Both falling ejectors stabilized with tiny drogues and plunged towards the ground. In a second they were lost in the cloud bank. Even when they were able to see through their visors, the two aircrew could only watch the wet grey cloud rushing past them.
The seats sensed when they were near enough to the ground to release their charges from their ‘chutes’. The restraining straps just flicked open and the men, now separated by a mile from each other, fell out of the seats, which dropped into the landscape below.
The men’s parachutes were also automatic. They too deployed first with a small drogue to steady the falling men in the air, then with the main canopy. Each man felt the heaving jerk as a terminal velocity of 120 mph slowed to around fourteen.
They began to feel the intense cold through their light nylon flying suits and G-suits. They seemed to be in a weird wet, grey limbo between heaven and hell until they crashed into the topmost branches of pine and spruce.
In half darkness beneath the cloud base the major landed in a form of clearing, his fall cushioned by springy conifer branches lying flat on the ground. After several seconds dazed and winded, he released the main chute buckle at his midriff and stood up. Then he began to broadcast so the rescuers could get a fix on him.
Nicky Johns had also come down in trees, but not in a clearing; he was right in the thick of them. As he hit the branches he was drenched in the snow that fell off. He waited for the ‘hit’ of the ground, but it never came. Above him in the freezing gloom he could see that his canopy was caught in the trees. Below, he could make out the ground. Snow and pine needles, he thought, about fifteen feet down. He took a deep breath, hit the release buckle and fell.
With luck he would have landed and stood up. In fact he felt the left leg snap neatly at the shin as it slid between two stout branches under the snow. That told him that cold and shock would start to eat into his reserve without mercy. He too unhooked his transmitter and began to broadcast.
The Eagle had attempted to fly for a few seconds after its crew had left it. It turned its nose up, wallowed, tilted over, resumed its dive and, as it entered the cloud bank, simply blew up. The flames had reached the fuel tanks.
As it disintegrated both its engines tore themselves from their fixtures and fell away. Twenty thousand feet below, each engine, five tons of blazing metal roaring down at five hundred mph, hit the Cascades wilderness. One destroyed twenty trees. The other did more.
The CIA special ops officer who commanded the garrison on the Cabin took over two minutes to regain consciousness and pull himself off the floor of the chow room where he had been eating lunch. He was dazed and felt sick. He leaned against the wall of the log cabin amid the swirling dust and called names. He was answered by groans. Twenty minutes later he had made his inventory. The two men playing pool in the games room were dead. Three others were injured. The lucky ones had been those outside on a hiking break. They had been a hundred yards away when the meteorite, as they thought, hit the Cabin. When they had confirmed that of twelve CIA staffers two were dead, three needed emergency hospitalization, the two hikers were fine and the other five badly shaken, they checked on the prisoner.
They would later be accused of being slow on the uptake, but the inquiry found in the end that they were justified in looking out for themselves first. A glance through the peephole of the Afghan’s room revealed there was too much light in there. When they burst in, the door from the living area to the walled exercise court was open. The room itself, being of reinforced concrete, had survived intact.
The wall of the compound was not so lucky. Concrete or not, the falling F-100 jet engine had taken a five-foot chunk out of the wall before ricocheting into the garrison quarters. And the Afghan was gone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
As the great American sea-trap closed around the Philippines, Borneo and eastern Indonesia, all the way across the Pacific to the US coast, the Countess of Richmond slipped out of the Flores Sea, through the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok, and into the Indian Ocean. Then she turned due west for Africa.
The distress call from the dying Eagle had been heard by at least three listeners. McChord AFB of course had it all on tape because they had actually been talking to the crew. The Naval Air Station at Whidbey Island, north of McChord, also kept a listening watch on Channel 16, and so did the US Coastguard unit up at Bellingham. Within seconds of the call they were in contact, to say they were standing by to triangulate on the positions of the downed aircrew.
The days of pilots bobbing helplessly in a dinghy or lying in a forest waiting to be found are long gone. Modern aircrew have a lifejacket with a state-of-the-art beacon, small but powerful, and a transmitter that permits in-voice communication.
The beacons were picked up at once and the three listening posts had the men located to a few yards. Major Duval was down in the heart of the state park and Captain Johns had fallen in the logging forest. Both were still closed for access owing to the winter.
The cloud cover right on top of the trees would prevent extraction by helicopter, the fastest and the favoured way. The cloud base would force an old-fashioned rescue. Off-road vehicles or half-tracked vehicles would take the rescue parties to the nearest point along one of the tracks; from there to the downed airmen it would be muscle and sweat all the way.
The enemy now was hypothermia, and in the case of Johns with his broken leg, trauma. The sheriff of Whatcom County radioed to say he had deputies ready to move and they would rendezvous in the small town of Glacier on the edge of the forest within thirty minutes. They were nearest to the wizzo, Nicky Johns, with his broken leg. A number of the loggers lived around Glacier and knew every logging road through the forest. The sheriff was given Johns’s exact position to a few yards and set off.