Chapter 2 - Dancing with the Monster
The aircraft shuddered violently as a pocket of severe turbulence slammed into our starboard wing, pushing us closer to an unrecoverable tail-spin.
Outside the cockpit windows, the sprawling forests and jagged mountain ridges of the Pacific Northwest rushed upward at a terrifying velocity.
“Airspeed is decaying rapidly! We’re stalling!” the co-pilot yelled, his hands hovering uselessly over dead controls.
“Hands off the stick!” I ordered sharply, my voice cutting through his panic like a scalpel. “If you fight me, we go into a flat spin. Let the bird fly.”
I closed my eyes for a microsecond, letting my fingertips absorb the subtle vibrations humming through the control column.
With zero hydraulic pressure, conventional flight surfaces were completely useless; trying to pull back on the yoke was like trying to steer a freight train by leaning against the walls.
There was only one way to fly a dead bird: differential thrust and engine torque.
It was a suicidal maneuver I had tested only once in a flight simulator back at Edwards Air Force Base—a desperate, high-stakes gamble that engineers swore could never work in a commercial airliner.
“Phoenix to engines,” I whispered to myself, engaging manual fuel metering and overriding the automated flight management computers.
I slammed the port throttles forward while simultaneously cutting power to the starboard engines, using the massive asymmetric thrust of the twin turbofans to force the heavy fuselage to roll back toward level flight.
The plane groaned, its metal frame screaming in protest as immense aerodynamic forces tore at the wings.
A collective gasp echoed behind us as the cabin doors shuddered; the passengers who had been bracing for a vertical nosedive suddenly felt the violent rotation halt.
The violent banking stopped.
The nose rose—ever so slightly—away from the jagged earth below.
“Holy mother of God,” the co-pilot breathed, staring at the altimeter as the rapid descent slowed from twelve thousand feet per minute down to three thousand. “You... you actually stabilized the roll.”
“We aren't out of the woods yet,” I growled, sweat beading on my forehead as the intense heat from my old burn scars flared up under the stress. “We’re heavy on fuel, we have no flaps, no slats, and no landing gear deployment capability. We’re going to have to belly-land this two-hundred-ton aluminum tube on a dry dirt airstrip, and we only get one shot at it.”
“There’s an emergency military strip twenty miles ahead—Fort Lewis auxiliary field,” Reed chimed in, having regained some of his composure as he monitored the navigation systems. “It’s got a ten-thousand-foot dirt runway, but the crosswinds are gusting at forty knots!”
“Good,” I said, a grim, defiant smile touching the corners of my mouth. “I like a challenge.”
As I banked the dying aircraft toward the coordinates of the secret military strip, my thoughts drifted away from the flashing cockpit lights and out toward the horizon where Seattle waited.
Fifteen years of silence.
Fifteen years of my daughter Emily believing the media lies that her mother was a reckless, disgraced killer who had murdered innocent people in an experimental crash.
She had finally discovered the classified test reports proving I was the scapegoat, sending me that unexpected wedding invitation that had brought me onto this flight.
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I had survived a military conspiracy, decades of isolation, and a broken heart.
I wasn't about to let a mechanical failure stop me from walking down that aisle to see my daughter’s face.
