Pandora's Curse - v4 Read Free

slightly. Air beneath the wings was forced against the ice, providing a cushion called ground effect that the plane gently sank through.
    “Speed’s one hundred knots.”
    Delaney’s concentration was total. This was nothing like the countless flights he’d done for the Berlin Air-lift, where planes were stacked up four and five high waiting for landing instructions. This was a one-time thing: land her safely or crash. There was no third option.
    In the clear air, the ground came up deceptively fast. He held her aloft for a moment longer, then felt pressure against the yoke as though a weight had been forced against Winger’s column. He turned and saw his copilot slumped forward in his seat, his stiffened arms pushing on his wheel. Winger spasmed, throwing himself back again. Droplets of blood from his nose and eyes splattered the inside of the cockpit. A scream came out as a gurgling cry. More blood fountained from his lips. Delaney guessed that it was the effects of the smoke inhalation. Fortunately he hadn’t gotten it as strongly as his two crewmen.
    There was no time to help. Delaney focused his vision on the landing just as the fully loaded plane hit the ice. With a rending scrape, her belly smashed into the ground. Delaney was instantly blinded by a fury of ice particles and snow. He felt the props on the two working engines tear into the surface and then shatter, the huge blades breaking off, one sounding like it had scythed through the aluminum skin of the payload area.
    The engine drone was replaced by the sound of the plane being ripped apart by the ice. Every jarring crash into a ridge slammed Delaney against his seat restraints until his shoulders felt broken. It went on and on. The airspeed indicator had barely dipped below one hundred knots. It wasn’t possible, Delaney thought. They should have been slowing.
    His view was completely whited out. He had no references, nothing to judge their position or progress. But it seemed that the plane was turning to the right, toward the mountains. The shaking vibrations continued unabated, the airframe shuddering. Delaney’s head pounded with the strain of trying to see what was happening. He kept his hands away from the control yoke, but his feet remained on the rudder pedals. Now he was sure the plane was turning to the right, so he applied left rudder, hoping to straighten them out to avoid the rocky projections that fronted the mountains. When he felt he had corrected the skid, he released the rudder and prayed he was right.
    Blinded by the maelstrom of snow blowing around the hurtling aircraft, Delaney couldn’t have known how wrong his perception had been. The plane had been following a straight line until he hit the rudder pedal. The pilot’s actions turned the Stratofreighter, and now she was traveling toward a gentle hill that rose out of the ice. The plane hit it and climbed up to its crest. The low friction between aircraft and ice had not reduced her speed enough and for a moment they became airborne again.
    Lifting off the surface, the plane flew out of the snow it had kicked up. Delaney screamed, seeing they were headed for the rocks. The C-97 hit the ground a second time, more violently than the first. The ice here wasn’t level. It sloped down toward the mountains, riding up and over hills that aeons of glaciation had worn down. Incredibly, the plane picked up speed like a toboggan. Delaney’s vision was obscured once again, and for this, he was thankful. There was nothing he could do.
    The aircraft hit an outcrop of rock. The crash twisted it on its axis so that the port wing led its headlong rush. Momentum tilted the plane until the wing hit the ice and gouged a furrow into it, throwing off tons of material like a snowplow. This was the drag the plane needed to slow, and when the wing finally snapped near its tip, it was moving at no more than thirty knots. Another impact with a rock scrubbed off more speed and Delaney felt that they would