Cold Fire

had left. He was braced, but a hard landing was not going to be kind to him.
    They were coming out of the third and final 360-degree turn. The runway was ahead of them, but not straight-on, just as Jim—damn, he'd never gotten the guy's last name—had predicted.
    Also as the stranger had foreseen, they were descending through exceptional turbulence, bucking and shuddering as if they were in a big old bus with a couple of bent axles, thundering down a steep and rugged mountain road. Delbaugh had never seen anything like it; even if the plane had been intact, he'd have been concerned about landing in those treacherous crosswinds and powerful rising thermals.
    But he could not pull up and go on, hoping for better conditions at another airport or on another pass at this one. They had kept the jumbo jet in the air for thirty-three minutes since the tail-engine explosion. That was a feat of which they could be proud, but skill and cleverness and intelligence and nerve were not enough to carry them much farther. Minute by minute, and now second by second, keeping the stricken DC-10 in the air was increasingly like trying to fly a massive rock.
    They were about two thousand meters from the end of the runway and closing fast.
    Delbaugh thought of his wife and seventeen-year-old son at home in Westlake Village, north of Los Angeles, and he thought of his other son, Tom, who was already on his way to Willamette to get ready for his junior year. He longed to touch their faces and hold them close.
    He was not afraid for himself. Well, not much. His relatively mild concern for his own safety was not a result of the stranger's prediction that the flight crew would survive, because he didn't know if the guy's premonitions were always correct. In part, it was just that he didn't have time to be concerned about himself.
    Fifteen hundred meters.
    Mainly, he was worried about his passengers and crew, who trusted him with their lives. If any part of the crash was his fault, due to a lack of resolve or nerve or quickness, all the good he had done and tried to do in his life would not compensate for this one catastrophic failure. Perhaps that attitude proved that he was, as some friends suggested, too hard on himself, but he knew that many pilots worked under no less heavy a sense of responsibility.
    He remembered what the stranger had said: “… you'll lose a hundred and forty-seven passengers …”
    His hands throbbed with pain as he kept a tight grip on the yoke, which vibrated violently.
    “… plus four flight attendants …”
    Twelve hundred meters.
    “She wants to come right,” Delbaugh said.
    “Hold her!” Anilov said, for at this low altitude and on an approach, it was all in Delbaugh's hands.
    One hundred and fifty-one dead, all those families bereaved, countless other lives altered by a single tragedy.
    Eleven hundred meters.
    But how the hell could that guy know how many would die? Not possible. Was he trying to say he was clairvoyant or what? It was all a crock, as Yankowski had said. Yeah, but he knew about the engine before it exploded, he knew about the washboard turbulence, and only an idiot would discount all of that.
    A thousand meters.
    “Here we go,” Delbaugh heard himself say.
     

----
     
    Bent forward in his seat, head between his knees, gripping his ankles, Jim Ironheart thought of the punchline to an old joke: kiss your ass goodbye.
    He prayed that by his own actions he had not disrupted the river of fate to such an extent that he would wash away not only himself and the Dubroveks but other people on Flight 246 who had never been meant to die in the crash. Because of what he had told the pilot, he had potentially altered the future, and now what happened might be worse, not better, than what had been meant to happen.
    The higher power working through him had seemed, ultimately, to approve of his attempt to save more lives than just those of Christine and Casey. On the other hand, the nature and identity of that power was so enigmatic that only a fool would presume to understand its motives or intentions.
    The plane shivered and shook. The scream of the engines seemed to grow ever more shrill.
    He stared at the deck beneath his feet, expecting it to burst open in his face.
    More than anything, he was afraid for Holly Thorne. Her presence on the flight was a profound deviation from the script that fate had originally written. He was eaten by a fear that he might save the lives of more people on the