CHAPTER 65
Cotton prepared himself for what lay ahead and asked into the headset, “You there, Andrea?”
“Right here.”
“We need to use the next few minutes to test how bad this is going to be.”
“My thoughts too.”
He gripped the yoke in a tight hold and banked right fifteen degrees. Sluggish. Slow. More clanking came from underneath. He straightened back out and tried a move to the left. Same thing. But he got there and back.
“Left to right is dicey. Let’s see up and down.” He pitched up five hundred feet, then back down to two thousand. “Elevators seem okay, but the flaps are responding slow. There’s a delay. Things aren’t controlled. The drop is going to be quick.”
Which was why they were practicing. To eliminate surprises and see how the aircraft would handle at landing. There was a definite delay from inputting a command to seeing the result. That meant the glide slope down to the runway was going to be steeper and faster than normal.
He tried the flaps. One set was gone, the other worked. The drag generated a lot of vibration. Definitely more lift on the left wing than the right. He was going to have to compensate for that with the yoke and the engines. It was going to be a rough ride down.
“I been in tough spots before,” Ivan said. “But this one is top of list.”
“This is not as bad as you might think.”
“You bad liar.”
“I just need a long straight runway to get this thing on the ground.”
More clanking and the right engine sputtered.
His gaze raked the dials and stopped at fuel. The levels had dropped. A slow leak? Damn. What else could go wrong?
“We’re pissing fuel,” he said into the radio to Andrea. “Slow, but steady.”
“Will you have enough to get to Karup?”
“We should. We had full tanks when we took off. I estimate we’re about ten minutes out.”
“Then it’s not a problem. Let’s worry about what is.”
He liked her attitude.
“The control tower is ready to have a look at your underbelly,” Andrea said. “Bring her in low and slow for a pass. In the meantime, we need to lose even more fuel.”
“Tell me which switches to flip.”
Stephanie was regretting going along with what Koger had wanted Cotton to do.
The whole thing, baiting a canary trap for an informant, had been fraught with danger.
True to his nature, Cotton had seen the need to take the chance.
So they’d selectively passed along information on the switch of the codex, along with the change of flights that included Ivan’s exit from Sweden.
And it had made its way straight to Moscow.
Koger had been right. The SVR would throw caution to the wind, not taking the time to care about protecting its source. Instead, they would immediately act on the intel and deal with their source later, most likely just eliminating it to avoid any further complications.
But that was not the problem of the moment.
Cotton stared down through the windshield and saw Karup Air Base and its long landing strip.
Vehicles moved back and forth across the pavement spraying fire retardant foam.
He pulled back on the throttle and slowed their airspeed.
The EMB shook with strong vibrations that rattled the cabin.
He’d already acted on the instructions Andrea had provided and ditched ninety percent of the fuel left in the tanks.
Which had been tricky with the damaged control surfaces, trying to keep the plane level.
The yoke had bucked in his hands hard, but he’d managed to rid it of the excess fuel.
Or at least enough to not have a huge fireball on landing.
He lost more altitude and prepared for the flyby so the control tower could take a close look at his landing gear.
He tilted the wings and dropped to about a hundred feet, coming in low and slow across the airfield.
The plane bucked and rattled as they flew past the tower.
“They got a good look and some video,” Andrea said. “The front and left rear gear are okay. The right one is gone. Its pieces are just hanging there. So you have nothing supporting the right wing.”
He’d been hoping there might be something there.
He flew past the end of the runway and powered back up to a thousand feet, swinging north about twenty miles from the base. He needed a long glide slope to maneuver down.
“You ready?” Andrea asked him.
“Let’s do it.”
“Just handle it like you did that fighter and missile. That was some good flying,” she said.
“Even a blind-eyed squirrel finds a nut now and then.”
“Let’s find another one.”
She was definitely cool under pressure.
“I have a live video feed,” she told him. “I see you.”
He swung the plane back to the east for a downwind run and lined up with the runway in the distance. The yoke held steady, but there was a lot of shimmy. He wondered if the right wing was going to hold together under the stress.
“You need to run through it with me?” Andrea asked.
He knew what she meant. “Obviously, I have to keep the right wing off the deck as long as possible. Once it dips the props are going to shatter and send shrapnel everywhere.”
“Keep the nose up until the wing stalls,” she said.
He agreed. Then it would just collapse onto itself. Which might or might not be a bad thing. But shrapnel. That was the danger.
He could feel more lift on the left than the right and he was using the yoke and what few control surfaces remained to compensate, along with working the engines.
“Strap in tight,” he said to Ivan. “This is going to get rough.”
“I’m ready. Get us down.”
He glanced at Ivan. “There’s going to be a lot of spinning once we hit. So hold tight until we come to a stop.”
They were about five miles out and he could feel they were coming in too fast, but there was nothing he could do. The control surfaces were barely responding.
“Mr. Malone,” Andrea said in his ear.
“I know. Too fast. It’s going to be a hot navy landing.”
The joke was an old one. Navy pilots liked to hit the deck hard and fast, part of being able to land quick on a carrier deck at sea. Air force pilots touched down on smooth concrete runways with a gentle kiss of their wheels and plenty of room to stop.
He reduced power and the vibrations escalated.
The entire plane shook as if in a convulsion, the yoke vibrating violently in his hands. They drifted left, then right, coming back and forth off the center of the foamed runway.
“By the way, Captain,” he said. “That last name of yours. I bet you catch hell for it.”
“I’ve heard every malarkey joke there is. How are you doing?”
“Trying to hold it together, but we’re falling fast.”
Emergency vehicles were parked to one side, waiting, their lights flashing.
At once comforting.
And disturbing.