Air Force One Is Down by Alistair Maclean

Author:Alistair Maclean [Maclean, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

Fairman was sweating, and he knew Latimer had spotted it. The Commander was finding it difficult to do no more than rest his hands and feet lightly on the controls, following the effect of the pulses sent out from the computer brain that was really flying the machine. His eyes kept flickering to the airspeed indicator, resolutely steady at 110 knots.

‘Three miles or so, I reckon,’ Latimer said. ‘See anything?’

‘Not a thing,’ Fairman replied. His next words were cut short by Jagger.

‘There!’ Cody yelled, pointing ahead. They strained their eyes through the clouded night and saw, dimly, a signalling light a short distance away.

‘Altimeter setting,’ Fairman snapped.

‘One-zero-zero-nine,’ Jagger answered. ‘Wind, three-seven-oh degrees at one-six.’

‘Right on the nose, baby,’ Fairman continued. ‘OK, I have control.’ As he spoke, he flicked the switch on the left of his control column to cancel the automatic system, and settled down to pilot the Boeing manually.

The aircraft juddered as they hit a patch of turbulence, and the starboard wing dropped sharply. Fairman righted it again in what was really a reflex action. The runway, picked out by the flickering dots of the paraffin lamps, was in sight. Fairman eased his hands forward to start the landing.

He muttered to himself, not caring whether anyone else heard, that it was like being back at flying school. When the end of the runway slid down the windshield, you were too high. When it slid up, too damned low. So far it remained dead centre, and Fairman hoped, prayed, that it would stay there.

It was a long, dangerously slow, descent. Air Force One shot out the searching beams of its own landing lights, and a hundred tons of aeroplane followed the twin rays as they raked the pitted track between the smoking paraffin lamps.

Fairman completed the run in, and the great silver airliner burst on to the runway in a squeal of tyres. Fairman’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the steering column and fought to keep it under control.

‘Reverse thrust!’ he yelled. Latimer obeyed. The noise of the jets rose in an ear-splitting boom to a crescendo as all seventy-six thousand pounds of thrust were diverted to slow the liner’s progress along the absurdly short landing strip.

Air Force One rattled and shook, and the plane’s speed fell dramatically, throwing the stateroom passengers violently against their restraining belts. Crockery, personal articles, document cases, all flew off the tables and smashed against the bulkhead.

Outside, the girl’s hand flew to her mouth and cut off a shriek of terror as the huge shape bore down on them. She pulled at Smith’s arm, and he allowed himself to be dragged back behind the low wall, as if that afforded any ultimate protection from the racing jetliner.

Fairman watched the faint, flickering bank of lights at the end of the strip draw closer and closer. Then, suddenly, there was nothing in the windscreen but blackness.

Latimer, Kowalski and Jagger held on to anything that wouldn’t move, and the Boeing slewed into a hard right turn, its tyres smoking.

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