Amerika (43 page)

Four hours from touchdown, just as we were crossing the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, I felt a faint shudder go through the plane. Up until that point I had been staring transfixed at the desolate mountain range below that marks the southernmost tip of the Rockies. From here the mountains climb northwest on a two thousand-mile majestic march across the United States and up into Canada.

The   late   afternoon   sunlight   cast   indigo   blue   shadows   on   the unforgiving, waterless land below. But I no longer gave a damn about what was below, because the clipper had shuddered and I didn’t know why.

‘Pilot to engineer, which engine?’

Orlando said, ‘Don’t know yet.’

‘Did you feel it?’

‘Yes, but it happened so fast I couldn’t spot it because - standby.’

Ava and I exchanged silent looks as we waited like two patients for the doctor’s verdict.

‘Number three,’ Mason shortly announced.

Both men hunched over the control panel, their hands moving from instrument to instrument, like hypnotists trying to cast a spell, or break one.

‘Magnetos okay?’ I said.

‘Affirmative,’ Orlando said. ‘But the cylinder head temps are through the roof.’

Mason added, ‘Might be a frozen intake valve.’

‘See if the cowl flaps can cool it down.’

‘Roger.’

The floor hatch banged open and Ziggy practically flew out, his eyes bugged, his mouth moving but no sound came out. He finally managed to gasp, ‘Oil everywhere! Coming from the wing!’

‘Which side?’

He pointed to starboard. ‘All around the front of an engine.’

As if on cue, the control wheel began vibrating like mad. I tried looking over Ava’s shoulder to see the inboard engine, but couldn’t get a clear view.

Orlando said, ‘She’s swallowed a valve for sure. Better feather before we blow a cylinder.’

Fortunately the clipper could fly easily on three engines, just not as high or as fast, which complicated my calculations. I had wanted to arrive at the refueling base before dark. Even now I was cutting it close, getting there around eight o’clock, when there’d still be enough light to sit her down. Now I wasn’t so sure.  As with everything else in flying, truth trumps dreams.

I stabbed the red ‘feather’ button to swivel number three’s propeller blades into the airstream and keep them from spinning. I cut the fuel feed and the magneto, and that’s when things went to hell faster than I could stop them. The plane began shuddering even worse.

‘She’s not feathering!’ Orlando shouted.

I slammed the feather button again, and the pitch control too. Nothing. Halfway through the feathering cycle the blades had jammed in full increase takeoff pitch. Not enough oil pressure in the mechanism to rotate them further. She started pulling hard to the right from the drag. I applied left rudder to keep her from yawing.

‘Help me on the pedals.’

Ava added her foot power to mine and the pressure eased slightly.

Then to Orlando, ‘Try feathering from your end.’

A tense ten seconds as number three engine’s tachometer climbed toward three thousand RPM; twice what it should be. At this speed, the propeller blades were spinning knives, and if that engine came apart, they’d slash through our fuselage like soft butter. I reduced speed as much as I dared to ease the RPMs to a mushy one-twenty-five knots.

Orlando said, ‘No dice. Those blades are stuck for good.’

‘Cross-feed oil?’

‘Not on these.’

The Wright radial engines were beautiful to behold; compact, powerful, twenty-four-cylinder works of art designed to perform reliably and under strenuous conditions. But the good folks at Wright hadn’t designed their engines to withstand Nazi machine gun bullets blasting through intricate wiring  harnesses  and  complicated  plumbing  and  ricocheting  off  piston heads. Which no doubt was the cause of this runaway propeller that we couldn’t stop.

I didn’t want to look at the altimeter because I already knew we had lost at least a thousand feet. And when I finally had to, even worse. I regarded at the rugged mountains below. Not a trace of water for hundreds of miles and we were in a flying boat.

‘Sam?’ Ava’s voice was soft on the intercom, but insistent, nonetheless.

‘We’re going down,’ I said.

‘Here?’

‘If I add power, the RPM will go up and the engine will eventually disintegrate. Twenty four pistons going every which way. Might take out the engine next to it, and the wing along with it.’

‘There’s no water.’

‘Maybe I can find a level piece of ground.’

‘For good, you mean.’

The rudder pedals dug painfully into my bare feet and my calf muscles were starting to cramp.

I shouted over my shoulder. ‘Ziggy, cut up one of those blankets and make me some foot pads.’

‘Coming up!’

The altimeter unwound through three thousand feet. Not the soaring Rockies but mountains just as threatening with low peaks, deep valleys and nowhere to land. We had five, maybe six minutes of flight time remaining. The engine was cycling in and out of sync with the others as the runaway propeller kept up its demonic spin and made the whole plane shiver and shake like a hard-run horse.

I hated to do it, but I keyed the intercom and announced, ‘We are going to make an emergency landing. It would be nice if there were some water down there to do it on but there isn’t so it’s going to be a rough ride. Ziggy, strap in at the radio operator’s station. Professor, you and Mason strap in at the commander’s station.’

As they scrambled to do as ordered, Ava pointed out the window.

‘Your eleven o’clock. What do you think?’

A patch of land looked to be level desert, half-hidden in the late afternoon shadows. I put the plane into left bank, which wasn’t easy considering our starboard drag. Some kind of animal, a deer maybe, darted across the ground at the sound of our engines, and its movement helped me estimate the length of the field on which we were going to crash land.

Trying to gauge distance when you’re higher than a couple thousand feet is tricky. The eye is fooled into thinking things are larger, longer, slower or faster than they really are. Only experience can save you in times like this. But in my case I had no experience trying to land a flying boat on the desert.

The altimeter kept unwinding. Two thousand feet now, and that bit of level land would never accommodate us unless I stood her on her wing and made a diving approach. But I wasn’t sure of her performance envelope. Airplanes, like people, have limits, and unless you know them as sure as you know your own, you can exceed them and find yourself in a jam. In my case, a jam of broken metal and broken people scattered on the ground because I ended up stalling this big whale of a plane instead of bringing her down in one piece.

I dug back into my years of flying experience to see if I could bring anything to bear on our predicament. Had Fatt ever had something like this happen to him? Had anybody? People say pilots love to ‘hangar fly’ and spin yarns about their profession because it’s fun. But it’s only half true. The other half comes from sheer necessity.

We fly alone up here and it’s our neck on the chopping block if something goes wrong. And believe me, something always goes wrong. And when it does, and if you survive, you tell other pilots what happened and how you solved it. Not for bragging rights, but to share the knowledge in hopes that the same thing won’t kill the other guy if it ever happens to him.

A jabbing pain in my foot. ‘Cramping up,’ I said. ‘Can you handle the rudder?’

‘Both feet on it, go,’ Ava said.

I bent over and dug my thumbs into my instep, trying to undo the locked-up muscle. To my surprise, my foot felt slippery, traces of oil on the rudder pedals or something.

Oil.

‘Captain Ross!’ I whispered as the answer came to me in rush. I applied full power and the plane nosed up and away from the approaching ground.

‘Orlando, cut oil to number three!’’

‘It’ll melt the pistons.’

‘Do it!’

A slight hesitation, then, ‘Wilco.’

Engines were like children to Orlando; complicated creations, each with a life of its own; thousands of interconnected, perfectly machined parts moving in perfect synchrony, bathed in soothing oil that I had just ordered cut off. But unlike humans who, when losing blood will simply die, a radial engine deprived of oil can die in a much more dramatic fashion, sending parts and pistons flying.

I was banking on that not happening, however.

For two reasons; one, I felt lucky. Two, my sudden memory of Captain Roscoe Ross, a flamboyant, highly-renowned Pan Am pilot who flew the Caribbean Division, once told me how his S-42 Sikorsky got a prop locked in coarse pitch, just like ours, and he had done what I was doing now; starving the engine of oil. But whether or not I’d get the same result as Roscoe depended on factors over which I had no control.

Vibration rippled through the plane like a tuning fork. Deprived of its oil, the engine screamed like a tortured banshee. Would it freeze gradually, piston by piston? Or would all twenty-four cylinders let loose like hand grenades  ripping  the  plane  to  shreds  and  sending  us  spinning  out  of control?

Any second now.

I said to Ava, ‘Help me get her into a left turn, so that when the engine blows the pieces will fly uphill.’

We  no  sooner  heaved  on  the  control  yokes  together  when  a tremendous shock rippled through the plane as the Wright radial seized, not with a trembling explosion but with a beautiful BANG. An instant later something flashed past us on the right, shining in the late afternoon sun. The radial had quit so suddenly that the drive shaft twisted in two, torn like a French baguette, sending the propeller rocketing off on its spinning journey  to  earth,  and  the  plane,  suddenly  freed  from  the  drag  forces, became a dream to handle.

I began a slow, easy, vibration-free climb away from the rocks below and to the sky above.  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Thank you Captain Ross, wherever you may be.’

The good news was that we were still flying instead of staring at a crumpled pile of aluminum in the desert.  The bad news was that we only had three engines. The additional bad news was that we lost ten knots from our cruising speed. But the flip side of that coin was that we weren’t burning as much fuel - still leaking like a sieve, mind you, but not as much if you worked the numbers, which was what everybody seemed to be doing during the remaining hours of flight we had before Sentinel Island was schedule to appear beneath our wings.

My numbers had to more to do with weather: isobars and barometer readings. So far we had been blessed. Other than a brief line of low-grade thunderstorm activity near Albuquerque, the gods had taken a high pressure broom and swept the skies clean from Louisiana to Northern Arizona, leaving only a stray cumulus cloud here and there to drift past in silent salute.

But  their  divine  beneficence  was  not  to  be  counted  on  when  we reached the vicinity of Lake Mead. Large bodies of water are in a constant state of evaporation, which leads to clouds, and clouds lead to updrafts and minor weather patterns that can turn big and ugly before you know it.

Give me winter flying any day. There’s snow and ice to deal with, but not the Wagnerian-like, hail and lightning-filled cumulo-nimbus monsters that can bloom sixty thousand feet or more before you know it, and to fly through one of those is to fly through hell itself.

I didn’t anticipate that kind of weather, but in truth didn’t know what might be waiting for us when we made our night landing. My mouth got a little dry thinking about it, but then I remembered Captain Fatt greasing us into Rio by flying the clipper right onto the water. If he could do it, then so could I, but a few more hours on the Boeing would have helped.

Time to spell Ava, who to her credit sat up straight and alert in the co- pilot’s seat, monitoring the autopilot’s heading as if she didn’t trust it as far as she could throw it. Compared to my short sleeve shirt with a button missing and a torn pair of cotton pants, she looked surprisingly fresh and fit,  considering  what  we’d been  through  since our  escape  from  Couba Island.

‘What’s our ETA?’ she said as I settled into the left hand seat.

‘Two hours, five minutes.’

She tapped the quivering RDF indicator needle. ‘We’re about to lose the big band sound.’

I stifled a groan, heaved myself out of the seat and went back to the radio operator’s station, where Ziggy sat listening to the headphones, bobbing his head to some unheard music.

I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Time to change stations, jazz boy. We’re passing over this one.’

I flicked on the speakers, twisted the tuning dial up and down the frequencies in search of a radio station to the west of us on which I could get a bearing. Within seconds a fire-breathing, preacher with a Texas accent began warning me of ‘The wiles of SAY-tan and his lowly MIN-yuns.’

‘Let us pray,’ I said as I locked in the frequency, entered it into our direction finder and watched the needle swing smartly fifteen degrees southwest to some small church where a cowboy minister sat thumping his bible. Once we locked onto the radio station, a piece of cake to enter our bearing to Lake Mead on the secondary needle.