The battle had lasted only a few minutes, but in the abrupt silence that followed, Dodge felt as though he had lived an entire war in that short space of time. Hobbs and Hurley were likewise winded. The clergyman was characteristically stoic but Hurricane wore a grim smile of satisfaction.
“We showed him!”
Dodge nodded breathlessly, and gazed about the plane to survey the damage. He recalled that he had been on the verge of asking a very important question in the moments before the final showdown, and it came back to him in pieces. What’s missing here? “Molly!”
Hobbs jerked as if receiving a latent jolt from the dark god’s scepter. “What about Molly? Where is she?”
Dodge shook his head. That was the wrong question; there was something even more urgent that he was forgetting… Something about the… “The plane! There’s no one flying the plane!”
Hurley was already moving, scaling the broken remains of the ladder to reach the cockpit, but Hobbs focus had not shifted. He grasped Dodge by the shirtfront. “What about Molly?”
Before Dodge could answer, Hurricane’s voice roared over the engine noise, thundering down through the gaping hole in the upper deck. “She’s here, Padre. She’s flying the plane!”
Both men hastened up to the flight deck, where they indeed found her seated at one of the two red captain’s chairs in the foremost quarter of the long cockpit. She gripped the steering wheel-like control column and looked very much like she knew what she was doing. Hobbs, in a rare display of emotion, hugged her shoulders, unable to suppress the tears that welled from his eyes.
Dodge sagged against a bulkhead in relief. “You can fly?”
She laughed at the silliness of the question. “I told you; you’ve got to be able to do a little bit of everything out here.”
The joyous reunion was short lived and punctuated by a flashing red light on the instrument panel. Molly frowned and inspected the gauges. Her fingers brushed over a bank of switches, and then came to rest on a t-bar handle which had been left fully extended. “Damn.”
“What is it?”
“He dumped the fuel tanks,” she answered grimly. “We’re out of gas.”
CHAPTER 12
THE HIGH COST OF AIR TRAVEL
Dodge scanned the unfamiliar gauges, as if he might somehow in his ignorance, discover that she was mistaken.
“Can you glide her down?” asked Hurley.
“Sure… well, maybe. This is an awfully heavy bird. But it doesn’t really matter. Have you looked outside?”
Dodge did so, seeing once again the familiar golden brown of the veldt spreading in every direction toward the horizon. “We’ve left the jungle.”
“We’ve left the river,” she said slowly to underscore the clarification. “We’ve been on a northerly course for a while now — north, away from the river. I don’t know if there’s enough fuel to get us back over water.”
Hobbs placed a reassuring hand over hers. “What about a crash landing? Think you can pull it off?”
Molly was equivocal. “I don’t know if this bird will hold together through that.”
“What about the river? Shouldn’t we turn around?”
“If I have to set her down on land, I’d rather take my chances out in the open then over the forest.” She pulled back on the yoke and the nose of the plane came up. “I’m going to climb while we’ve still got some fuel in the lines. The purpose of the fuel dump is to get rid of excess fuel so that the plane doesn’t explode if you have to pull off a crash landing. There’s still a little bit left to play with. Once we lose the engines, we can use the speed of our descent to keep from stalling, but it won’t allow much room for maneuvering.”
Hurley wasn’t about to surrender to gravity. “Maybe there’s something else we can do; parachutes or…” His gaze settled on Dodge. “Hold on. There are three more of those flying packs below decks. We took ‘em off those mercenaries. Dodge, can you give us all a crash course in how to fly one?”
“Crash course? I’ll assume the pun was intended.” Dodge felt a glimmer of enthusiasm. “I think we can manage that.”
“That’s it then. We can bail out and we still won’t have to walk back to civilization.”
Hobbs stopped him before he could leave the cockpit. “And what about those poor souls we tied up down there?”
Frustration snatched Hurley’s elated smile away, but he made no retort. It was an old argument between the two — almost as old as their partnership. Dodge had written of it in fiction, but could not believe that, in the face of certain death, the Padre’s mores would thwart their one chance at salvation.
To everyone’s surprise, Molly stated the obvious. “What about them? Let them figure out how to land the plane. They’d do no less to us.”
A cloud of disappointment darkened Hobbs’ countenance. “Molly —”
“Don’t ‘Molly’ me, dad. They killed everyone at the settlement; defenseless old men and women, murdered. Don’t give me a sermon about respect for life or turning the other cheek.”
“That was Krieger’s doing.”
“It makes no difference.”
“The difference is me, Molly. I made a promise to God —”
Hurley interposed. “Dodge, couldn’t we could carry them along, piggyback style? The packs can lift that much weight, right?”
Dodge’s gaze flickered from face to face in the small control cabin. Although he shared Molly’s sentiment, something about Hobbs’ passionate plea for mercy reached him. Maybe it was the simple fact of bringing Hobbs to life with ink and paper for the better part of three years that made him understand how someone could value another’s life — even an enemy’s — more than his own.
He thought about Hurricane’s suggestion. It had merit, but was there really time to instruct the others in operation of the exoskeletons, compounded with the difficulty of carrying unwilling captives? There had to be a better way.
“Molly, if this bird had wheels, could you bring her down in one piece? Even if we ran out of gas?”
“Sure.” She stared at him quizzically. “But where are you going to get wheels?”
He turned to Hurley and Hobbs. “This is a nice airplane and we worked awfully hard to get her. It might come in handy later.”
The two old friends exchanged a glance then Hobbs spoke. “That sounds like something the Cap might say.”
“Darn right,” agreed Hurricane, shooting Dodge a wink. “What have you got in mind?”
“You asked if the flying rigs can bear the weight of two people; I think they can support a whole lot more than that. The force field itself acts like a cushion, and the more energy against it, the more it will push back. If we attach them to the hull —” he drew an imaginary outline of the plane on a table top, then indicated three points on the fuselage, two in the front by the wings and one further back near the tail — “I think we can land her just like she had wheels.”
“Attach them how?”
“I can weld them in place using this.” He raised one of the spherical gauntlets.
“You mean to do this from outside? Out there?” Hobbs looked about as enthusiastic as a kick in the shins, but Hurricane nodded slowly.
“It’s crazy, no doubt. But if you think you can do it, I’ve got your back.”
“It’s insane,” declared Molly from the pilot’s chair. “What if you fall?”