He’d succeeded in putting out the fire, but in doing so, he’d also killed the engines.
The Conquest was now hurtling toward the sea. Disconcertingly, it was still doing that in a controlled manner, the autopilot maintaining it in a clean, linear glide slope.
A heading Reilly needed to overcome.
He tightened his grip on the wheel and pulled it hard toward him. He felt the plane’s nose edge up a touch, but it was too hard to maintain the pull on it, and the second he relaxed his grip, even barely, the nose went right down to its diving stance, rushing toward a watery grave. He was fighting a losing battle. Something was blocking his efforts and keeping the plane stubbornly glued to its trajectory.
Then he spotted it. The small, red switch on the pilot wheel marked “A/P DISCONNECT.”
Autopilot disconnect.
He had nothing to lose. If the autopilot was running the show, it was the enemy. It needed to be eliminated.
He hit the switch and heard something that sounded disconcertingly like a loud doorbell. The wheel immediately went looser in his hands. He hauled it back again, making sure he kept it and the pedals centered to keep the wings level. This time, he felt a change. The nose was edging up. Not much, but enough to be noticeable. It fueled him to try even harder. He kept pulling, as much as he could. He saw the water level rising up dizzyingly to meet him and pulled even more. It felt like he was trying to physically lift the plane up himself, which, in a way, he was.
With each concerted pull, the Conquest’s nose came up some more, and as it did, the plane’s airspeed decreased. But then if Reilly relaxed his grip, even marginally, to regroup for a new pull, the nose fought him and went back down. It was like trying to reel in a monster marlin. By the time he could see the texture of the individual ripples in the sea’s surface, the indicator was telling him he was traveling at a little over a hundred knots. Water was rushing past below him now, an endless dark blue conveyor belt that was whizzing by, tantalizingly close and welcoming and yet easily deadly if the ditching went wrong.
Reilly tried to steady his breathing and kept the plane straight and almost level, avoiding any banking and bringing it down ever so gently. He was in no rush to hit the water. Unless a tanker appeared in his flight path, he felt safe where he was. As long as he didn’t try to land, he didn’t run the risk of plowing into the sea and getting shredded in the process.
Still, he had to land at some point. And he had to do it before he hit landfall, which was out there somewhere.
He concentrated hard, and kept massaging the wheel to keep the nose more or less level and control the glide. Then a continuous horn blared—the stall warning.
He had to bring it down now.
He nursed the wheel forward by a fraction of a millimeter. The plane drifted lower, one foot at a time, slowly, gracefully. It skimmed the tips of the small swells in a veil of spray, then it touched down. The sea was pretty calm, and although the Conquest’s fuselage skittered across the white tips, it didn’t flip over or break up. The feathered props helped keep the ditching smooth, and the small aircraft kept bouncing along until the weight of the water finally overwhelmed its forward momentum and it plowed to a sudden stop in a cloud of white foam.
The deceleration was brutal, ninety knots to zero in under a second. Reilly was thrown forward against his shoulder harness, but it did its job and kept him from slamming into the controls or flying out the windshield.
Water started rushing into the cabin instantly.
Reilly knew he didn’t have long to get out. Not with the cabin doors sheared off. He yanked his harness off, got out of his seat, and scrambled out of the cockpit and through the narrow gap between the two front seats, over the dead pilot’s body. Several inches of water were already sloshing around in the cabin, with more flooding in every second. His eyes darted around, searching for a life jacket. They found something better, another bright yellow pouch, this one tucked away behind the other front club seat and smaller than the life raft’s valise. Big blue letters across it told him it was the “Emergency Grab Bag,” which sounded just right to him.
He grabbed it and bolted to the cabin door, then he stopped in his tracks and cast his eye toward the back of the cabin, to the crates that were stacked between the rear seats and the partition behind which he’d been stowed.
The texts.
The ones that had survived since the dawn of Christianity.
The two-thousand-year-old legacy that Tess had brought to light.
His chest constricted at the thought of losing them, of letting Tess down, after everything that had happened.
He had to do something.
He had to try to save them.
He stormed up to the crates, scanning the cabin around him, looking for something he could use to save them, something he could put them in that was watertight. Anything. A bag, some plastic sheeting—part of the life raft. It was there, ripped apart, big chunks of yellow plastic sloshing around in the rising water.
It would have to do.
He grabbed hold of a big chunk of it and pulled it toward him, looking for a decent piece that would be large enough to do the job. He found a section that might work, part of the tubular ring of the raft. He pulled out his knife and sawed away at it, cutting out a duffel bag-shaped section that was open at one end and sealed at the other.
The water was now at his knees and rising fast.
He stomped across to the crates, pulled the top one open, and started loading up the leather-bound codices into the nylon tube, one by one. He knew he wasn’t handling them with anything near the care they deserved, but he didn’t have a choice. He knew he wouldn’t be able to save them all, he knew that, but even saving some of them, a few of them, was still something.
The water reached his thighs.
He kept going. Popped the top off the second chest, started loading books from it too.
The water was now at his waist. Which meant the third chest was now submerged.
He had to go. He had to try to seal the top off the nylon tube and get out of there. If he didn’t move fast, he’d be trapped in the cabin.
He twisted the top of the tube around on itself, tightening it as much as he could. It wouldn’t be watertight, he knew that. But it was the best he could do. He grabbed its neck and fought the torrent of water all the way back to the cabin door.
It was like trying to climb into a storm pipe during a monsoon.
He took a deep breath, ducked under water, and pushed himself through the narrow opening, pulling the nylon tube with one hand, the grab bag with the other.
He came out on the other side with the plane partially submerged, and stepped onto the wing. He scuttled across to the port engine and sat on its cowling, which was still just above water. He rummaged through the grab bag and pulled out a life jacket, which he slipped on and inflated, and a personal locator beacon, which he clipped onto the jacket and activated.
He rode the cowling down as it slipped below the surface. The Conquest’s tail followed and went under less than a minute later, leaving him floating around with the eerily serene white silhouette of the plane disappearing into the darkness below him.
He hung on to the nylon tube, gripping its neck as tightly as he could with both hands, fighting to keep the water out of it. But he knew it was hopeless. He could see water seeping in through the folds in its neck. The nylon it was made of wasn’t designed to be easily folded. It was designed to be tough, to withstand punctures and heavy seas. And much as he tried, Reilly knew he was fighting a losing battle.