Cold Fire

it exploded. He could tell from the sound of it, I guess, so we'll get him in here, see if he can help.”
    At SAM, the General Electric expert on CF-6 turbofan engines came back at him: “What do you mean, he could tell by the sound? How could he tell by the sound? What did it sound like?”
    “I don't know,” Delbaugh replied. “We didn't notice any unusual noises or unexpected changes in pitch, and neither did the flight attendants.”
    The voice in Delbaugh's headset crackled in response: “That doesn't make sense.”
    McDonnell Douglas's DC-10 specialist at SAM sounded equally baffled: “What's this guy's name?”
    “We'll find out. All we know right now is his first name,” Sleighton Delbaugh said. “It's Jim.”
     

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    As the captain announced to the passengers that they would be landing in Dubuque as a result of mechanical problems, Jim watched Evelyn approach him along the port aisle, weaving because the plane was no longer as steady as it had been. He wished she would not ask him what he knew she had to ask.
    “… and it might be a little rough,” the captain concluded.
    As the pilots reduced power to one engine and increased it to the other, the wings wobbled, and the plane wallowed '
    like a boat in a swelling sea. Each time it happened, they recovered quickly, but between those desperate course corrections, when they were unlucky enough to hit air turbulence, the DC-10 did not ride through it as confidently as it had done all the way out from LAX.
    “Captain Delbaugh would like you to come forward if you could,” Evelyn said when she reached him, soft-voiced and smiling as if delivering an invitation to a pleasant little luncheon of tea and finger sandwiches.
    He wanted to refuse. He was not entirely sure that Christine and Casey—or Holly, for that matter—would live through the crash and its immediate aftermath without him at their side. He knew that on impact a ten-row chunk of the fuselage aft of first-class would crack loose from the rest of the plane, and that less damage would be done to it than to the forward and rear sections. Before he had intervened in the fate of Flight 246, all of the passengers in those favored seats had been destined to come out of the crash with comparatively minor injuries or no injuries at all. He was sure that all of those marked for life were still going to live, but he was not certain that merely moving the Dubroveks into the middle of the safety zone was sufficient to alter their fate and insure their survival. Perhaps, after impact, he would have to be there to get them through the fire and out of the wreckage—which he could not do if he was with the flight crew.
    Besides, he had no idea whether the crew was going to survive. If he was with them in the cockpit on impact …
    He went with Evelyn anyway. He had no choice—at least not since Holly Thorne had insisted that he might be able to do more than save one woman and one child, might thwart fate on a large scale instead of a small one. He remembered too clearly the dying man in the station wagon out on the Mojave Desert and the three murdered innocents in the Atlanta convenience store last May, people who could have been spared along with others if he had been allowed to arrive in time to save them.
    As he went by row sixteen, he checked out the Dubroveks, who were huddled over a storybook, then he met Holly's eyes. Her anxiety was palpable.
    Following Evelyn forward, Jim was aware of the passengers looking at him speculatively. He was one of their own, elevated to special status by their predicament, which they were beginning to suspect was worse than they were being told. They were clearly wondering what special knowledge he possessed that made his presence in the cockpit desirable. If only they knew.
    The plane was wallowing again.
    Jim picked up a trick from Evelyn. She did not just weave where the tilting deck forced her to go, but attempted to anticipate its movement and lean in the opposite direction, shifting her point of gravity to maintain her balance.
    A couple of the passengers were discreetly puking into air-sickness bags. Many others, though able to control their nausea, were gray-faced.
    When Jim entered the cramped, instrument-packed cockpit, he was appalled by what he saw. The flight engineer was paging through a manual, a look of quiet desperation on his face. The two pilots—Delbaugh and First Officer Anilov, according to the flight attendant who had not entered