Cold Fire

with Jim—were struggling with the controls, trying to wrench the right-tending jumbo jet back onto course. To free them to concentrate on that task, a red-haired balding man was on his knees between the two pilots, operating the throttles at the captain's direction, using the thrust of the remaining two engines to provide what steering they had.
    Anilov said, “We're losing altitude again.”
    “Not serious,” Delbaugh said. Aware that someone had entered, Delbaugh glanced back at Jim. In the captain's position, Jim would have been sweating like a race-lathered horse, but Delbaugh's face glistened with only a fine sheen of perspiration, as if someone had spritzed him with a plant mister. His voice was steady: “You're him?”
    “Yeah,” Jim said.
    Delbaugh looked forward again. “We're coming around,” he said to Anilov, and the co-pilot nodded. Delbaugh ordered a throttle change, and the man on the floor complied. Then, speaking to Jim without looking at him, the captain said, “You knew it was going to happen.”
    “Yeah.”
    “So what else can you tell me?”
    Bracing himself against a bulkhead as the plane shuddered and wallowed again, Jim said, “Total hydraulic failure.”
    “I mean, something I don't know,” Delbaugh replied with cool sarcasm. It justifiably could have been an angry snarl, but he was admirably in command of himself. Then he spoke to approach control, obtaining new instructions.
    Listening, Jim realized that the Dubuque tower was going to bring in Flight 246 by way of a series of 360-degree turns, in an attempt to line it up with one of the runways. The pilots could not easily guide the plane into a straight approach, as usual, because they had no real control. The disabled craft's maddening tendency to turn endlessly to the right was now to be incorporated into a breathtakingly conceived plan that would let it find its way into the barn like a stubborn bull determined to resist the herder and follow its own route home. If the radius of each turn was carefully calculated and matched to an equally precise rate of descent, they might eventually be able to bring 246 head-on to a runway and all the way in.
    Impact in five minutes.
    Jim twitched in shock and almost spoke those four words aloud when they came to him.
    Instead, when the captain finished talking to the tower, Jim said, “Is your landing gear operable?”
    “We got it down and locked,” Delbaugh confirmed.
    “Then we might make it.”
    “We will make it,” Delbaugh said. “Unless there's another surprise waiting for us.”
    “There is,” Jim said.
    The captain glanced worriedly at him again. “What?”
    Impact in four minutes.
    “For one thing, there'll be a sudden windshear as you're going in, oblique to you, so it won't drive you into the ground. But the reflected updraft from it will give you a couple bad moments. It'll be like you're flying over a washboard.”
    “What're you talking about?” Anilov demanded.
    “When you're making your final approach, a few hundred feet from the end of the runway, you'll still be at an angle,” Jim said, once more allowing some omniscient higher power to speak through him, “but you'll have to go for it anyway, no other choice.”
    “How can you know that?” the flight engineer demanded.
    Ignoring the question, Jim went on, and the words came in a rush: “The plane'll suddenly drop to the right, the wing'll hit the ground, and you'll cartwheel down the runway, end over end, off it, into a field. The whole damn plane'll come apart and burn.”
    The red-haired man in civilian clothes, operating the throttles, looked back at Jim in disbelief. “What crock of shit is this, who the hell do you think you are?”
    “He knew about engine number two before it blew up,” Delbaugh said coolly.
    Aware that they were entering the second of the trio of planned 360-degree turns and that time was swiftly running out, Jim said, “None of you in the cockpit will die, but you'll lose a hundred and forty-seven passengers, plus four flight attendants.”
    “Oh my God,” Delbaugh said softly.
    “He can't know this,” Anilov objected.
    Impact in three minutes.
    Delbaugh gave additional instructions to the red-haired man, who manipulated the throttles. One engine grew louder, the other softer, and the big craft began its second turn, shedding some altitude as it went.
    Jim said, “But there's a warning, just before the plane tips to the right.”
    “What?” Delbaugh said, still