Chapter 21 #3
She pushed the nose over into a tiny descent. She was willing to sacrifice a few hundred feet of altitude and maybe one degree of temperature to pick up one more notch of airspeed and break her plane’s personal best speed record.
She held her breath, watching the airspeed gauge intently.
169.
“Yes!” she shouted. She’d done it. Exultation filled her to bursting. She was living her dream. Honestly, she couldn’t think of a single thing she wanted more in life than to be right here, right now.
The plane jerked hard, throwing her forward. Thankfully, her hands were on the stick, and she caught herself before her forehead hit the dashboard.
What was that? Thermals threw planes up, and downdrafts made them drop precipitously. But since when did air currents slam an airplane forward or backward?
She checked her gauges quickly. The engine oil temperature had climbed a bit. And her airspeed had dropped off to 160 knots. Whoa. That was a lot of airspeed to lose instantaneously.
She checked all around the plane, especially behind her. Had a big thunderstorm blown up that she hadn’t seen? Sometimes thunderclouds could send violent gusts of winds flowing out horizontally without warning. But usually those types of gusts happened directly beneath thunderclouds.
Only blue sky stretched over her head. Indeed, she spotted no storm clouds in any direction. Just a smudge of brown on the horizon behind her, which was the dust storm she’d left behind.
That jolt had to have come from her plane. More specifically, from her engine.
Her body tightened, every muscle suddenly taut. She tipped her head to one side, listening to the engine. Frustratingly, it sounded absolutely normal.
She stuck her face into the wind, but as she did so, the plane jerked again.
But this time, the engine stopped.
Hell’s bells! Her adrenaline spiked so hard she felt weightless, as if she could jump out and fly herself.
The prop had a lot of momentum and was still spinning fast, plenty fast to turn over the cylinders.
She hit the starter button.
Nothing.
The igniters weren’t making their distinctive popping noise. The engine was completely dead.
Her airspeed was bleeding off quickly now. She had to work fast. Her hands flying over the switches, she pulled the throttle back, set the choke, leaned the fuel mixture the way she would if she were starting the engine on the ground, and hit the start switch again.
Still nothing.
She was so intent on restarting that she didn’t notice how far her airspeed had dropped. The nose of the plane pitched over suddenly into a stall.
You nitwit. Fly the plane first.
She pushed the nose over even more to help it regain flying airspeed.
She’d practiced this maneuver dozens of times in her own Travel Air, and it was usually a quick recovery.
But this time, her wings wobbled left, then right, and then the nose fell off hard to the left, dropping into the beginnings of a spin.
Not good. Not good!
She fought the stick desperately, trying to counteract her corkscrew descent. But it was to no avail. The spin tightened and became steeper until she was twisting toward the ground nearly vertically.
The terrain rushing up at her was terrible for an emergency landing. It was a big tree-filled ravine that sprawled between two craggy lines of rocky ridges.
She glanced left and right as the plane’s descent rate accelerated. If she’d had more altitude and more time, she might have been able to spot somewhere to put the plane down in a dead-stick landing. But even if she could get out of this spin, there was no place to land.
She had to bail out and use her parachute.
A moment’s reluctance to give up on her plane and let it crash passed through her, but she overrode the instinct. Her hands shook so badly she fumbled to unlatch her seat belt, but it finally popped free.
Grabbing the top edge of the windshield, she pulled herself up to stand on her seat.
But the plane was falling so steeply she ended up standing on the windshield and jumping up, letting the plane fall away beneath her.
She grabbed the parachute release handle on her chest and yanked it with all her might.
The sound of fabric unfurling and snapping in the wind told her the chute was deploying.
The ground was coming up at her awful fast.
Open up. open up!
Below her, the plane hit the ground with a mighty crunching noise of metal and shattering wood. The fuel tanks burst, and the hot engine ignited the spraying gasoline. It exploded upward in an orange fireball that was impossibly hot, speeding toward her as if she were on a rotisserie.
She sucked in her breath, feeling the intense heat through the soles of her boots.
Hot . . . hot . . . hot!
The fireball dissipated, leaving a bonfire-sized conflagration to consume the wreckage of her plane. Thankfully, the wind was already carrying her off to one side. She wasn’t going to land in the fire.
But the parachute still wasn’t slowing her fall. The ground was getting way too close, and she was falling way too fast! She looked up and saw only a tangled mass of silk and cord flapping over her head.
She reached up above her shoulders and grabbed fistfuls of cords rising from the parachute harness strapped around her body. She shook the risers back and forth with all her strength.
Come on!
She felt something give. There was a white flash overhead as the partially untangled parachute silk caught some air and started to balloon out.
She was going to make it. The parachute was going to save her.
She was still falling fast, though. Her eyes widened as she realized how close to the ground she was.
Marvel looked up at the parachute, trying to decide whether it had inflated enough to stop her from slamming into the ground and to her death.
Only God knew.
She was in his hands now.