Jack Du Brul
Pandora's Curse
GREENLAND AUGUST 1953
The entire length of the Air Force C-97 Stratofreighter shuddered as the port-side outboard engine began misfiring again. This time was much worse than before and rather than risk his plane becoming too unstable, Major Jack Delaney shut down the twenty-eight-cylinder Pratt and Whitney Wasp. He reduced the drag by feathering the prop so the blades cut the slipstream edgewise, but the plane still felt sluggish in his hands.
“We’re in a world of hurt, aren’t we, Major?” asked his copilot, Lieutenant Jerry Winger.
Delaney didn’t respond as he studied the gauges for the three working engines. Every instinct told him that they hadn’t seen the last of whatever had affected the power plant. The remaining engines were running hot, making him think that the problem wasn’t with the plane, but with the fuel they’d taken on in England. Most likely poorly maintained tanker trucks had contaminated the fuel. He looked out the windshield, known as the “greenhouse” throughout the Air Force because it was made up of nineteen individual panes of Plexiglas. It resembled the cockpit of the venerable B-29, on which the Stratofreighter was based.
Eighteen thousand feet below the Military Air Transport Service cargo plane, the desolate north Atlantic was as dark as the slag heaps in Delaney’s native West Virginia. The sky was thankfully clear. Only a few stringers of high cirrus clouds smeared the air high above the plane, but Delaney didn’t know how much longer his aircraft would remain aloft.
“Yeah, Jer, we might just be,” Delaney finally replied. Glancing at Winger, he saw his own concern reflected in the younger man’s eyes. Despite the heat blasting into the pressurized cabin, the major felt a chill race across his skin like sheet lightning. “Tom, where the hell are we?”
Tom Sanders, the navigator, was seated at his tiny desk behind the cockpit, a chart spread before him and a worried frown on his face. “Closer to Greenland than Iceland if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” the pilot grunted.
“I’d say we’re about forty miles from the Greenland coast.”
Delaney’s experience was that it took a series of small mishaps to lead to the catastrophe of a crash. Except, he thought darkly, during the war when flak or a Japanese Zero came out of nowhere. He’d had a few close scrapes during his command of a B-29, but Delaney had never lost a man. Now, however, his luck might have finally run out. This time fate was dealing him one problem after another, and there wasn’t much the major could do.
It had started an hour out of England when they were rocked by a sudden wind gust that shifted an improperly secured cargo pallet in the hold of the giant aircraft. It was not a mortal problem; it merely caused the C-97 to fly out of trim. Delaney was forced to keep firm pressure on the wheel so the plane maintained an even keel. He had reported the incident back to the controllers and had them inform the isolated Air Force base at Thule, Greenland, that their supply plane would be coming in late. He also said he wanted the head of whoever was responsible for tying down cargo when he returned. The crew then had several trouble-free hours until an electrical fault had sparked in the radios, shorting out the entire system. They were one hundred miles past Iceland, flying northwest, and suddenly the plane was without communications. Tom Sanders had tried to fix the set but got nothing for his troubles except some singed fingertips. Delaney had considered turning back, except problems at Dover Air Force Base, where normal cargo flights to Thule originated, had hampered three recent attempts to resupply the base above the Arctic Circle. He also knew the narrow weather window they were enjoying would close before another mission could take off. He now considered his decision to press on as another of the small mishaps befalling the crew of the Stratofreighter.
Then, just half an hour ago, Lieutenant Winger had noticed the engines were running hot. Delaney had opened the cowls around the four Pratt and Whitneys in an effort to cool them, adding more drag to the aircraft and slowing them further. The tactic had worked for a while but the temperatures began creeping inexorably back toward the red. That was when the number one engine began to misfire. It cleared itself for a few minutes and then started sputtering again, vibrating the airframe until her aluminum ribs creaked. Delaney had no choice but to shut it down.
“When the temp drops enough, we’ll try to restart the engine,” he told Winger. “Tom, are there any landing strips on this side of Greenland?”
“No, sir. Chart shows nothing except mountains and ice. There is a place called Camp Decade about a hundred and fifty miles south of where we’re going to cross the coast, but its strip’s designed for planes with skis.”
“Damn.” Delaney paused, his mind working out distances and odds. “All right. If the engine doesn’t refire smoothly, we’ll swing around and try for Iceland.”
“Major, that’s about two hundred and thirty miles behind us.” There was a tight edge in Sanders’s voice. He was too young to have seen combat during the war, and Delaney suspected that this was the first time the young officer had tasted true fear.
During the five minutes the pilot waited for the number one engine to cool, the flight deck was quiet, even when the towering ramparts and dark fjords that protected eastern Greenland came into view. Delaney had never seen such a forlorn place. The mountains were all snowcapped, and behind them, the relentless Greenland ice shelf pressed against their landward side so that great glaciers spilled between the valleys, tumbling to the ocean like frozen waterfalls. Delaney knew that, beyond the small strip of coast, there was a sea of ice about eight hundred and fifty thousand miles square and as thick as any ocean was deep.
“Okay, Major, temp is down in number one. In fact, it looks like all the horses are running in a row now.”
Delaney scanned the gauges and saw that the open cowlings had worked in cooling the engines again. He restarted number one and it began purring sedately, as though there had never been a problem. Working the prop controls, he felt the four blades bite into the air and the C-97 become more responsive.
“That’s a little better,” he breathed and Winger and Sanders exchanged grins. “Feet dry in about five minutes.”
The plane cleared the mountains at one hundred and eighty knots, well below her optimum cruising speed and much lower than her most efficient altitude. Beyond the strip of ice-carved mountains, Delaney and Winger were faced with an expanse of ice that stretched far beyond the horizon. Under the immense weight of new snow dropping in the interior, the billions of tons of ice were slowly moving toward the coast like an endless conveyor belt. As the ice moved, it scraped against the underlying rock so that any irregularities under the mile-thick mantle appeared on the surface as huge fractured ridges. The cap was so riven that to Delaney it looked like a hurricane sea had been flash frozen, every wave rendered in razor-sharp crests that sometimes reached a hundred feet into the air.
“Jesus,” he said under his breath.
Lieutenant Winger was just turning to say something to Delaney when engine number one exploded. The double banks of cylinders came apart like a bomb, shrapnel and oil and burning fuel blasting apart the nacelle like it had been hit by antiaircraft artillery. In seconds, the wing around the burning engine was blackened by flame, and soon it began to come apart as the wind ripped at the tears in the aluminum caused by red-hot debris.
The C-97 winged over as she lost lift on her left side. Delaney fought the plane, taking just an instant to see the altimeter spinning backward in a blur. He noted that Winger was already shutting off fuel to the wrecked power plant. Good man.
“Tom, what do you see?” the pilot shouted, his lips pulled back around his teeth from the exertion of keeping his crippled plane in the air.