Chapter 8
Sharpe had stared death in the eye countless times. But this was different. It was a commercial airliner full of passengers and crew—people who had entrusted their lives to him and the other two pilots on the flight deck.
Despite the years of training and experience that had always brought him through before, he knew that this time he was going to need something else. Luck. Lots of it.
“Wind from two o’clock at fifty-eight knots,” he stated. “We need to turn straight into it for landing.”
“Working on it,” Fowler grunted, fighting to turn right. “We’ll use full flaps.”
The cockpit door was bulletproof, but not so thick that they couldn’t hear the flight attendants bellowing commands in the cabin. Burns gave them a two-minute warning on the PA, and they began shouting for everyone to assume the brace position.
“Mark our position,” Fowler said.
Sharpe created a new fix in the navigation system and named it Waypoint Zulu. Out of instinct, he committed the lat/long coordinates to memory.
The jet began slowing and, on Fowler’s command, Sharpe began lowering the flaps in increments.
By 1,000 feet, the flaps were fully extended, and they were flying at minimum speed. It wouldn’t be as much a landing as a controlled crash. Finally, the snow began to thin in the glow of the landing lights.
“We’re below the weather but I can’t see the surface yet,” Fowler remarked. “Still too much snow.”
“Five hundred feet,” Sharpe noted. “Four hundred.”
Obscure reflections finally began registering below. The surface gained contour. It wasn’t as smooth as Sharpe had hoped. Ridges in the ice pack creased upward, shiny aqueous pools between them. All of it flashed past in a blur.
“One hundred feet!” Sharpe exclaimed. “Descent rate is too high!”
Fowler tried to pull up, but a burst of Arctic wind countered his inputs. Pushing forward to porpoise the nose down, he overcorrected.
The jet’s aft fuselage made impact and the forward belly slammed down hard. Tremors shuddered through the entire aircraft. It was a brutal, ugly landing. And it wasn’t over.
With no landing gear, there were no brakes. With no engines, there was no reverse thrust. And with the flaps all the way down, there was no way to create additional drag. There was also no way to steer. They were barreling forward with a tremendous amount of speed, but no control whatsoever.
Directly ahead, Sharpe saw a vague shadow racing toward them. As it got closer, he began to read its contours, and his heart caught in his throat.
It was a hill of ice as tall as an eighteen-wheeler and as wide as a bus station. They had survived the landing only to now crash into a frozen wall. It was a bitter irony.
But seconds before their head-on collision, the jet’s starboard engine snagged on a fissure, initiating a spin to the right. It wasn’t enough, however, to save them. The airliner struck the ridge in an explosion of ice and snow.
As it did, the cockpit was sent soaring back into the air.