Skyhammer Read Free Page B

ground. Boyd decided he didn’t want to fly the landing. Besides, maybe Pate was setting him up? Goading him to
     take over an impossible situation, then blow the approach and catch the flack for it.
    Boyd shook his head. “You’re flying it—but screw the approach, Pate, and
you’ll
pay for it, not me.”
    “Fine, pardner,” Pate said, already back on the gauges.
    “Gear down.”
    Now Boyd stared at him, wide-eyed. What the
hell
was he saying? They were still twenty-two miles out. They hadn’t even extended partial flaps yet.
    “Gear down!” Pate looked over at him again, sternly this time. Boyd thought fast. They
were
under maximum speed for gear extension. And the gear would add a lot of drag to the plane.
    “Do it,” Pate said sharply.
“Now.”
    Startled, Boyd reached across the panel and slammed the gear lever down. Through the soles of his shoes came the jarring thud
     of the nosegear doors opening, and he could hear the roar of the slipstream sucking into the wheel wells. Then, as the gear
     indicators blinked green—all three gears down and safe—he felt the massive drag take hold of the plane. It seemed to sink
     from under him, the vertical speed shooting to four thousand feet per minute. They were dropping like a rock toward the glide
     slope. Boyd could hardly believe it.
    Yet Pate seemed as calm as ever, even though he was working hard, nosing the plane over to hold 240 knots. How could he stay
     so cool, Boyd wondered. Was it all his years of experience, or was Pate what he seemed—one iron-tough customer?
    “New World Five-five-four.” The controller’s monotone snapped Boyd’s attention back to the panel. “Turn left, heading zero
     three zero. Maintain three thousand until established on the localizer: cleared ILS Runway five-right.”
    Pate brought the plane around to the new heading. The controller was setting them up to intercept the final approach course
     at a twenty-degree angle from the right. They were only nineteen miles out now, but suddenly the glide slope indicator left
     the bottom of the scale, moving rapidly upward. Boyd couldn’t help feeling elated. The high-speed descent was working.
    But now they were heading into the worst of it, battered by new waves of turbulence, more violent than before. The airframe
     screamed and shook as the plane rocked one way, then the other, bouncing up and falling again. No flight simulator could duplicate
     it. No, this wasn’t the same at all, Boyd realized. In the simulator there wasn’t any bouncing and rolling, no extraneous
     radio chatter. And you knew what would happen, and when. Suddenly he understood why Pate had dropped them down at the last
     minute. The high-speed descent had kept them out of the worst stuff for as long as possible.
    At three thousand feet Pate leveled off. With the plane below the glide slope, he allowed the airspeed to bleed down to 220,
     then called for the leading edge slats. Boyd moved the flap lever to the first notch. They were mushing along in the lowest
     level of the storm. The cloud was much denser, the grainy, frozen particles of water rattling the cockpit’s aluminum shell
     like blasted sand.
    “Localizer alive,” he called. The course indicator had come off its peg.
    “Roger,” Pate shouted over the roar of the ice storm. He was already banking the airplane, varying the angle, maneuvering
     onto the electronic course. He leveled the wings with the course indicator centered.
    Forty seconds later the glide slope indicator centered, and Pate called for landing flaps. They were seven miles from touchdown.
     Boyd switched to the tower frequency and reported their position.
    “Roger, New World Five-fifty-four.” The tower controller’s voice was clear. “Wind zero nine zero at twelve, gusting to twenty.
     Braking action reported fair by a Boeing Seven-thirty-seven. Emergency equipment is standing by. Cleared to land Runway five-right.”
    Boyd saw it sharply in that instant, not only the