Dodge left his force field off only long enough to squirm out of the restraints. As soon as he was clear, he folded it up and clasped the belt once more. The exoskeleton adhered to the plane just like the others, with Dodge holding onto it like the rung of a horizontal ladder. He pushed it along the hull as far as he could, but his effort was limited by his reach. The apex of the critical triangle was only five feet from its base; not nearly enough to keep the plane from sustaining damage upon landing. He worked his foot loose and placed the sole of his shoe against the exterior of the plane, bracing himself upside down. The energy bubble sheltered him from the rush of air, but it could not alter the inexorable attraction of gravity. His face turned purple from the exertion and the rush of blood pulled down from his extremities, but inch by inch, he pushed the charged exoskeleton toward the tail of the plane.
Hurley’s horror was grudgingly giving over to admiration, but there remained only one possible finale for Dodge’s heroics. He might have time to complete his task, but once the third force field was in place, he would be stranded where he was, clinging to his tentative handhold as the plane scraped across the veldt at more than a hundred miles an hour. If Dodge was going to survive, he was going to need some help from above; help, not from God, but from a Hurricane.
The plane was dropping about fifty feet a second. The landscape below still looked like something captured by an artist’s brush, but there could be no denying that it was getting closer. He was only going to get one chance to save Dodge, and it was going to take split second timing. With his legs gripping the edge of the sponson like the back of champion bucking bronco, Hurricane measured out thirty feet of the mooring line and tied off the excess. At that same moment, Dodge made his final adjustment, positioning the exoskeleton dead center on the hull, at the edge of the point where it began to taper up toward the tail.
Hurley threw himself into the wind, pushing off so that when his full weight hit the end of the line, he swung like a pendulum toward the place where Dodge hung on for dear life. As the rope snapped taut and he began arcing up toward Dodge, he threw his arms wide to catch his friend. His estimates were dead on; the line was exactly the right length, his trajectory had perfectly compensated for the rushing wind, his timing was right on the mark. He had only forgotten one thing.
When he tried to close his arms around Dodge’s inverted torso, something slapped him away. He bounced away from the force field as though he had hit a brick wall, and fell back into the wind.
His eyes met Dodge’s in that moment — a horrible instant of time, bloated to an eternity, where both men knew that a crucial opportunity had been lost. Hurricane could see the strain in his friend’s face, the quivering of muscles fatigued by the already inhuman expenditure of energy just to hold on. He made a final desperate attempt, knowing that it was futile, knowing that he was too far away….
But Dodge was already gone.
CHAPTER 13
HARD LANDING
Hurley fluttered at the end of the rope like a tattered flag in a windstorm. The chaotic air currents turned him in the gyre and repeatedly threw him up into the hull of the plane. Every time he hit, the aluminum buckled with the impact, but the bell was still made of tougher stuff than the clapper. Bright spots of blood dotted the fabric of his shirt, and would have been streaming from his nose and mouth were the drops not snatched away instantly in the turbulent headwind.
He felt none of it.
Dodge, what have I done?
Another brave soldier lost on his watch. It was a wound struck deeper than anything his physical body was enduring. In his mind’s eye, he saw the company of ghosts — the men that had died fighting under his leadership — welcoming Dodge into their ranks. No, damn it! No more.
The rope was an appropriate metaphor; he was dangling at the edge of an emotional precipice. But nothing would be served by surrendering to gravity, and there might yet be a chance to avenge his fallen brother. Like an automaton, he found the taut umbilical connecting him to the airplane, and began to haul himself in.
The ground continued to rush up. Molly had angled the plane down for maximum airspeed, but very soon she would have to bring the nose up to start slowing their downward plummet. Once she did that, they would be only seconds away from a hard landing on the plain below.
As he advanced up the safety line, Hurricane managed to do what he had always done; he found the strength to drive on. Dodge had sacrificed himself to save the rest of them; himself, the Padre and Molly, even the three hapless mercenaries who would have slit his throat for the change in his pocket. He couldn’t let that be for nothing. Using his legs to propel himself faster, he reached out and found the open frame of the side hatch. He left the door as it was and took only a moment to struggle out of the harness before charging up to the flight deck.
Hobbs turned at the sound, and a gasp escaped his lips — whether because of beholding Hurley’s bloodied form, or perhaps because he saw the ghastly horror of Dodge’s demise written in the big man’s eyes.
“Where’s Dodge?” Molly did not look away from the windscreen, but her tone evinced more concern for the absent member of the group than for the safety of the plane.
Hurricane sank wearily into one of the remaining cockpit chairs, but tried to fill his voice with urgent enthusiasm. “He did it. The force fields are in place. Take her down, Molly.”
Hobbs continued to hold his gaze and saw the unspeakable truth. His lips parted in a silent prayer and he surreptitiously crossed himself before turning back to the co-pilots’ controls. “Tell me what to do, Mol.”
“Get ready to pull back on the stick,” she instructed. “I’ll need both hands to feather the flaps. We’re only going to get one chance to do this right.”
Though she didn’t dare let it show, Molly felt like she was in over her head. She had pulled off more than her share of hairy landings, but always in a single engine aircraft where she could at least see the ground. Even the Duck — their Grumman amphibious plane, currently in the possession of Krieger and his river pirates — had a fully glassed canopy that could be slid back in-flight for a better view of the water when coming in for a landing. With this bird, she was flying blind. The flight deck windows looked out over the nose, and the only land she could see was the distant horizon.
She checked the altimeter, but didn’t put much value in the reading. Twenty-five hundred feet above sea level might mean as little as a thousand feet between the belly of the aircraft and the savannah below. And knowing when to haul the nose up, stalling the plane at exactly the moment they made contact, was the difference between a good landing — one they would walk away from — and getting smeared across half of French Equatorial Africa.
Airspeed was a whole lot more important right now. She trimmed the plane, watching as the needle dropped steadily, then nosed down again at about 120 knots. She didn’t know what the enormous craft’s stall speed was, but she figured that would put her in the general neighborhood.
“That’s it,” she declared. “Nothing to do now but wait for the ground to come up.”
The altimeter had just tipped a thousand feet when Molly spied brown earth over the crest of the nose. That was the cue she had been waiting for. “Pull up, now!”
Hobbs gripped the wheel and drew back with steady pressure, even as Molly joined the effort. The plane seemed to hop upward for a moment, the nose once more eclipsing the horizon, but then their stomachs dropped again as the aircraft settled into a stall — still moving forward, but without enough speed to achieve lift.