Джон Болл: Phase Three Alert

“Gear down, God damn it!”

Across the edge of fear, Ryan reached out and started the wheels down. Miller rolled the trim tab, then checked the indicator until he saw that the gear was down and locked. After that he shut out the rest of the world and flew like a man in a trance. With the aid of his remaining two engines, he guided his aircraft down through the violent air until he felt a sudden smoothening and knew that it had to be ground effect. At once he pulled the yoke back and tried to hold in a level position, the descent arrested, but not stopped. In a quick flash he seemed to see something through the windshield: a slightly different texture within the all-encompassing whiteness. He came back harder on the yoke, trying to set up a partially nose-high attitude.

The turbulence abruptly let go. For a second or two he was airborne in a whirling snowstorm that filled the entire universe around him with its mad dancing, then he felt the gear hit.

He pulled hard back and held, risking a horrible bounce and knowing it. For a deadly three seconds the aircraft tried to climb back into the sky as she believed she had been ordered to do, but with very little power and a deadly drag on her wheels, she was helpless. At ninety-two miles an hour she absorbed the shock of the touchdown, softened as it was by a mass of loose snow, and ran blindly ahead.

In the cockpit Miller continued to pull back with all of his strength, fighting to hold her tail down. Despite him, the heavy drag on the gear tried to throw her onto her nose. The instant he sensed it he countered by pushing forward partway on the throttles. The fresh blast blew the tail down hard until, despite the added power, the speed lessened. Then Miller eased off on the live throttles and almost sedately The Passionate Penguin ground looped, struggled during a few more desperate seconds of life, and then came to rest at 9,100 feet altitude, somewhere on the Greenland Ice Cap.

After many weeks of hibernation, the Arctic sun had at last reappeared; as it hung low and brilliant in an almost cobalt sky it gave out abundant light if very little warmth. The long period of almost total darkness was over, a welcome respite for those who, for one reason or another, had spent the barren winter months north of the Arctic Circle. The welcome sunlight threw back the curtains of the long-lived night and gave fresh promise of an eventual springtime, at least in name.

In the crisp cold of early morning Technical Sergeant William T. Stovers walked across the sharply crunching snow, his parka hood safely protecting his neck and ears and his thermal boots insulating his feet from the twenty-four-degrees-below-zero (Fahrenheit) temperature. As he breathed in the biting air he noted that it had warmed up somewhat during the past twenty-four hours. The blessing was academic because he would be leaving Sondrestrom shortly and he did not know when he would be back.

Sergeant Stovers knew that he was in a somewhat dour mood and that fact in itself he found upsetting. Deeply within himself he had a determined pride in his professional skills and he had schooled himself to keep free of any involvements that might interfere with his efficiency. As he continued on at a steady pace, he concentrated on the thought that he had work to do and banished all other considerations from his mind.

In a matter of another two minutes he reached his airplane, which was out on the ramp awaiting him, and climbed up into the main cargo hold. It was one of the few C-130 Hercules turboprop airlifters in the Air Force that was equipped with auxiliary ski gear. Because it was normally used to support the DEW Line sites far out in stark isolation on the ice cap, it required a loadmaster of more than ordinary abilities. In that capacity Sergeant Stovers knew precisely how to allow for the added weight and drag of the cumbersome ski gear. In addition, he had an expert’s knowledge of snow and ice cap operations that few men shared. The aircraft itself was in superb condition, he had no concerns there. Two things, however, were bothering him: the first, that his aircraft commander happened to be Lieutenant Scott Ferguson and, the second, that as far as he could see in any direction, it was a bright and beautiful day.

Normally he was highly in favor of lovely days. He had enjoyed many of them in Europe. In the tropics he had made the most of them in a variety of different ways. In the Orient he had used them to pass out candy to eager youngsters or to go walking with the pretty and polite girls who still found a frequent place in his thoughts. In the Arctic they inspired him to draw in deep lungfuls of the crystal-clear air, except when he happened to be in Greenland and in Lieutenant Ferguson’s crew. Then, experience had taught him, they could be a portent of possible trouble.

Sergeant Stovers liked Greenland, not because he was inspired by low temperatures and the total absence of anything at all that could be called a tree, but because of the towering, incredible ice cap that was a professional challenge unmatched in the world. To him it was greater than the Grand Canyon, both as a spectacle and as evidence of nature’s ability to do things on a scale that mere humans could never dream of duplicating. Not even the Great Wall of China could challenge it.

The ice cap, which covered all but the edges of the immense island, kept the nature of the inland terrain forever shrouded in a perpetual mystery. The vast frozen monolith rose from the bare ground near the shoreline to a maximum thickness of 10,600 feet — more than two vertical miles of solid ice that exerted a pressure almost beyond calculation. It had been variously estimated that if the Greenland Ice Cap were to melt, all of the oceans and seas of the world would rise from 23 to 30 feet.

Because of the fantastic pressure, the ice at the lower edges was continuously forced to break off and become the icebergs that harassed vessels using the North Atlantic sea lanes. Some of it, he knew, formed the basis for a new industry — it was cut into small cubes and shipped under refrigeration as far as Tokyo to cool drinks with the pristine purity of the ice age. In the central region the vast sea of ice, the only true Arctic desert, remained largely static — an immensity of size, bulk, and weight which, even when seen from the panoramic heights of a pressurized aircraft, was beyond the capabilities of the human intellect to comprehend.

The C-130A, which at the moment was Sergeant Stovers’s main responsibility, could land on the ice cap. The 6,200-pound ski gear, in addition to the wheels, made it possible for the powerful turboprop to fly to the isolated DEW Line sites, which perched like spacecraft on some far-removed planet, and to set down on the marked-off landing areas known to be free of crevasses and other hazards common to wilderness ski flying. There the airlifter could deliver tons of supplies for the men who manned the cubical structures with the bulging radomes on top. They perched above the ice on massive steel legs which constantly sank, inch by inch, into the frozen sea underneath. To keep the stations in position, they were lifted every few days; when the tops of the steel supports were reached, fresh sections were bolted on and the process continued.

Taking off on skis from the ice was not a simple matter. The impromptu runways were not smooth, but hilly. The skis themselves added very substantial weight and drag. The altitude was usually 9,000 feet, plus. The friction was much greater than that of wheels rolling down a clean paved runway. The four mighty engines kept their turbines screaming and their propellers torturing the air during those takeoffs, and every one was a thrill. Adjusting and securing the load each time so that the plane would make it successfully took knowledge and talent. That was Sergeant Stovers’s job.