“I’ll just fly down,” he said quickly. He didn’t add that, while he might survive such a failure to complete his task, the prospects for those on the plane were a far sight grimmer.
“Then do it,” she said. “And hurry. Once the engine’s fail, we’ll start to plummet like a millstone.”
“I’ll be back in a flash.”
“Oh, wait! Dodge, I need to tell you something.” She leveled the column and switched on the autopilot, and then before he could even turn around, she slipped in between her adopted father and Hurley to embrace Dodge. Then she kissed him. “Good luck.”
In spite of the urgency of the situation, he blushed. “With a blessing like that, how can I fail?”
His confidence lasted about as far as the side door. Beyond that, only the urgency of the situation impelled him to action. He gathered the three exoskeletons and lashed them to his belt. Folded up, they seemed like nothing more than a bundle of steel rods. Hurricane and the Padre accompanied him to the side hatch, with the bigger man wrestling the door open against the fierce headwind. “Be careful!”
Dodge nodded, then activated his force field and stepped out onto the sloping top surface of the truncated wing-shaped sponson.
He kept a fierce grip on the doorframe, but immediately recognized that some of his assumptions, made from earlier empirical observations, were holding true. The energy bubble was deflecting the wind as effectively as if it were a solid object. More importantly, the field seemed to extend to anything already within its limits, creating a very tenuous bond with the exterior of the aircraft. The analogy of a bubble was apt; the closer he stayed to the plane, the more his energy shield sucked him against the smooth metal surface. However, despite the fact that Dodge was spared direct contact with the wind, he could feel its pressure against the force field, threatening to blast him loose. He might have been in a bubble stuck to skin of the plane, but that bubble was being blasted by a two hundred mile an hour wind.
The metal of the exoskeleton seemed to respond to his unspoken desire to cling to the aircraft, revealing a further property of the strange metal. Forcing back the instinctive impulse to hang on for dear life, he put his hands inside the spherical gauntlets and started moving along the side of the plane. The metal of the flying rig stuck to the aluminum skin like a magnet to steel. Heartened by the discovery, he commenced spider crawling down to the underbelly of the X-314.
This is actually going to work.
The catchall name for amphibious aircraft was “flying boat,” but the Boeing aircraft had been designed as a luxury cruise liner for the skies, and its dimensions were certainly on that scale. Dodge felt as though he had slipped beneath the Queen Mary; all he could see was silvery metal spread out in every direction. He sidled forward to a point where he could just see the wingtips, and went to work.
He released the right-hand grip and immediately slid a few inches along the remaining points of contact. To compensate, he flattened his body against the frigid aluminum, arresting his slide but constraining his freedom of movement.
I don’t have time for this.
He freed one of the exoskeletons from his belt and awkwardly brought it up to his working area where he braced it in place with a forearm then fumbled the clasp shut to activate its force field.
The insistent force of the wind relented as if a switch had been thrown. The second exoskeleton seemed to have added its power to his own, creating a refuge from the constant flow of air beneath the plane.
“That’s kind of nice,” he said, finally relaxing enough to breathe.
The bundle of metal rods remained exactly where he had placed it, affixed by some indescribable electric bond, but Dodge had already determined that a different, perhaps redundant, means of securing the exoskeleton was called for. He returned his hand to the basket-shaped gauntlet and directed a small but focused burst of electricity at the plane. When the sunspots faded from his eyes, he saw that the metal frame had been successfully fused into the aluminum surface.
“One down!”
He slid laterally to the opposite side of the fuselage and with a good degree more certainty repeated his efforts in half the time. He had just finished welding it in place when the engines began to backfire and die.
He felt the shift as the plane began to angle downward; Molly was putting the craft into a shallow dive, letting gravity make up for the loss of power. As long as wind continued to rush over the airfoil shape of the wings, creating an updraft above and pushing up from below, the plane would stay aloft. From their current altitude, he could see for miles. The green band of the Congo Basin was visible to the south, behind them, but below was the endless flat savannah that stretched all the way to the Sahara. There was only about five thousand feet of air between where they were and the ground, and the plane was losing altitude fast.
He scooted back out of the area protected by the two secured exoskeletons and immediately felt the push of wind rushing along the belly of the plane. His movements were hasty, but he was filled with a surety born of prior success. The fear that had slowed him before was gone. He crept like a fly to the predetermined apex of the triangle and reached back for the last remaining exoskeleton.
When his probing fingers did not immediately find it, he craned his head around, using his eyes to guide the search, but saw nothing. He stared in disbelief at the rope ties that hung impotently from his belt. It was gone.
Two force fields on opposite sides of the plane would probably suffice for an emergency landing, but the tail section would eventually settle onto the ground where it would be ripped apart by friction. They would probably survive, but the plane would never fly again. With one more force field near the tail, Molly might actually be able to save the plane, but now that wasn’t going to happen.
All for nothing, Dodge raged. Should have just bailed out in the first place.
But then another inner voice reminded him that he did have a third exoskeleton, the one he was wearing.
Dodge’s travails had not gone unnoticed. From the moment he had embarked on his desperate mission, Hurricane had begun searching for a way to back him up. He quickly discovered an abundance of rope in a storage area situated in the nose of the plane, under the flight deck. Because the aircraft was also a seagoing vessel, mooring ropes were a necessity, and sometimes needed to be replaced. Hurley cut off a short section and rigged a Swiss seat climbing harness, which he then secured to one of the mooring lines with a figure-eight knot.
“Go help her fly the plane,” he told Hobbs. “I’ve got this.”
The Padre nodded and went back to the cockpit while Hurricane crept out onto the sponson. He got into a good position to observe Dodge just as the latter finished securing the second exoskeleton, and gasped in horror when he saw the third one slip unnoticed from its restraint at Dodge’s waist and vanish in an instant.
“It’s enough! Come back.” His shouts were swept away in the wind. Dodge moved along the underbelly of the plane, unaware that anything was wrong.
He witnessed the moment where Dodge realized what had happened; saw the look of despair on the young man’s features. He continued to hurl his pleas into the atmosphere, but Dodge never heard him. And then to Hurricane’s utter amazement, Dodge began moving again.
He did not make his way to safety, as any sane man would have done, but instead scurried back to one of the fixed force fields and wedged his feet behind the assembly of rods. Then, as simply as if he were unbuttoning a coat, he deactivated his exoskeleton.
“No!” Again, Hurley’s cry went unheard. He understood now what Dodge intended, and saw just as clearly that the plan was beyond foolhardy; it was suicidal. But shouting about it wasn’t going to do a bit of good; he had to find a better answer.