Джон Болл - Phase Three Alert

When everything was ready he pulled the cap off the flare and struck it expertly despite the cumbersome arctic mittens he had on his hands. When the hot chemical flame appeared, he brought it slowly close to the door handle and latching mechanism. He spent more than five minutes of cautious careful work, testing continuously, trying to get even the slightest sign of movement from the unyielding handle. Then, quite abruptly, it gave way and turned. Holcomb looked over his shoulder with a grin on his face. “It still works,” he announced. “It should. Nothing corrodes on the ice cap. It’s virtually impossible.”

Carefully wiping away the melted ice as fast as he got it to yield, he worked his way around the door jamb. By the time he finished the latch was again immovable, but the application of a little more heat released it once again. Like a magician presenting his climactic illusion, he jerked, yanked, used the flare at several points of resistance and then with one last concerted effort pulled the protesting door open. His success achieved, he threw the still-burning flare well out onto the ice cap where it could do no harm.

At Ferguson’s motioned invitation, Holcomb climbed in first. As he elbowed his way up through the opening, it seemed to him that he was invading a stark relic of a bygone age. Everything was in rigid, frozen immobility. A thick layer of snow covered everything that was flat enough to offer it a bed. Something about the scene seemed familiar, then he remembered. He had seen a movie not too long before in which part of the earth was shown after it had been presumably seared by a nuclear blast. It had been the same way — a kind of frozen animation, as though men had been here and then had suddenly gone a long time ago.

There was no odor whatever inside the old wreck, not a trace of the familiar aircraft smells of fuel, oils, metal, heavy fabrics, electrical insulation, hydraulic fluid, spilled coffee, and the coming and going of many human bodies. The absolute absence of any kind of scent gave the whole fantastic scene a strong aura of unreality. For the first time he realized how utterly and hopelessly dead the old bomber was. He was inside a cadaver.

Ferguson had come up and was looking inside the cockpit. It was mute and empty, still waiting for the skilled hands of the pilots who would never come. Despite three decades of merciless exposure, a few of the fittings still looked new, proof that the gallant old bird had been born only to meet an almost immediate and undeserved death. Ferguson felt the controls and found them as rigid as stone.

He wondered, if some great crane were to lift the wreck to a warm climate and let it thaw out there, how many of the multiple levers, switches, and handles could be made to move. It was idle speculation, because the Arctic was unrelenting in its grip, particularly at this high latitude. It might be another twenty years before any other human beings would visit this tragically deceased four-engined bomber.

He turned away to find Holcomb watching behind him. “Would you like to fly it, sir?” the sergeant asked through his thick white breath.

“If I could, I would,” Ferguson answered. “She deserved better than an end like this. I hate to go away and leave her out here.”

Holcomb thought about that for a moment. “Sir,” he inquired, “do you think we could take back something, some part of her, as a souvenir?”

“I was thinking the same thing, but I’d hate to hack her up to do it.”

“Certainly not,” Holcomb agreed. “No butchery. I won’t have it on my conscience.”

“Then anything you can get loose and out the door, I think we can have. But don’t take too much time, we’re expected back.”

“Yes, sir.”

While Holcomb returned to the C-130 once more to get what few tools he might need, the others in the party took their turns visiting the old bomber hulk. There was a mixed reaction; two of the Sondrestrom pilots were already bored and clearly wanted to get back home. Holcomb, on the other hand, and Jenkins, seemed willing to remain all day if it were possible.

Remembering his responsibilities, Ferguson set a twenty-minute time limit for the collection of souvenirs from the wreck. At the end of the allotted time, plus a five-minute dispensation to complete a job on hand, Jenkins had proudly recovered the ship’s octant; and Holcomb, with Stovers’s patient if not particularly sympathetic help, had a real prize — a communication set he had succeeded in removing from its brackets by heating them with a candle flame. The candle itself came out of a personal survival pack which Stovers had devised to contain everything that the regular equipment did not include.

The adventure over, Holcomb fired up the APU on the C-130 and the desolate ice cap echoed with the shrill scream of the turbine generator.

“I wonder if she can hear it?” he asked, only half in jest, of Jenkins, who was making a measurement on his chart.

“I’d like to think so,” the navigator answered as he plotted his best estimate of their exact position.

After the engines were started and the checklists completed, there was no real point in taxiing back to where they had first touched down; the ice cap appeared equally firm and solid ahead of them and there was still a good 4,000 feet of ski tracks to show where the surface had been tested.

Without a load on board, and in the cold, heavy air, the Hercules required only a short run, even at the high altitude and on skis. With the combined howl of four great turbines, the C-130 moved forward, gathered speed, and returned to her element.

“Did you get the tail number?” Ferguson asked his navigator over the intercom.

“Yes, sir,” Jenkins answered. “And I have her exact position plotted as closely as I could determine it. I’m within a five-mile circle, I’m sure of that.”

“Don’t forget that that octant you have is technically government property, although I expect they’ll let you keep it. The same goes for your radio, Holcomb — it won’t be of any use now, but let’s keep everything proper and above board.”

“Absolutely,” Jenkins agreed.

“Scotty, do you know Sergeant Murphy up at Thule?” the copilot asked.

“I’m not sure, what about him?”

“He hates the Arctic like the devil, but he’s an electronics genius. I’m going to ask him to get this thing working again, just to prove that it can be done. My money says that he can.”

“Five bucks,” Jenkins cut in.

“You’re on. Any time limit?”

Jenkins pressed his intercom button once more. “No, but he has to get the original set working and get a recognizable signal on it. He can use a reasonable number of new parts, if he can find them, but he can’t build the whole thing over.”

“Fair enough.”

Sergeant Holcomb made a contribution. “The instrument shop might be able to get that octant in shape again. It’s a Bendix Mixmaster and they won’t be able to get any parts for it anymore, but those guys are pretty sharp.”

Ferguson touched the intercom switch on the back of the yoke. “No bets on that; it may not be too hard. The thing has been in a weatherproof case and the fuselage gave it some added protection.”

During the quiet that followed for the next several minutes Sergeant Bill Stovers fought an invisible battle with himself. He had been incubating an idea ever since the takeoff, but his better judgment told him to forget it. He walked back and forth a few paces each way in the big empty cargo hold, pretending to inspect various pieces of equipment that he already knew to be in perfect order, while he thought the matter out. At last he overcame what he knew was his better judgment and returned to the flight deck.

He plugged in a headset, adjusted it, and then used the intercom. “Sir,” he asked, “do you think it’s possible that we might go back to that B-17 again sometime? If we took the proper equipment along, we might be able to salvage a propeller or something like that for the NCO Club.”