Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

By the time the Buick squealed to a stop at the emergency entrance to the hospital, Jimmy had slipped from the real world entirely. For months to come, his father would hold him and stroke his head and tell him it wasn’t his fault. His father would plead with him to speak, to cry, to scream. He would hug his son and cry himself, but there was never any response from the boy.

Jimmy was locked up tight someplace dark and deep within himself: a private place, a secret place, a place where brain monsters and dead mothers couldn’t find him.

For the third time in ten minutes, Captain Jackson Peck read the computer printout of weather conditions between Washington’s Dulles International Airport and Los Angeles. The message hadn’t changed. This would be a rough flight from takeoff to landing.

Peck passed the half-sheet of computer paper across the triple throttles of the Sexton 811 to First Officer Jeremy Dodds, who was finishing a stack of preflight paperwork. With the exception of a few spring storms along the Gulf and in the Midwest, the nation was dominated by fair weather. But the accompanying high-pressure domes sitting over Ohio and Nebraska were unusually steep, and the spring winds spilling off the invisible pressure peaks were brutal fuel-eaters.

Almost all the way from the East Coast to the Rockies, winds above 23,000 feet were tearing out of the west and southwest at speeds exceeding 130 knots. Those headwinds, coupled with the inevitable traffic delays over Los Angeles, would mean significantly more time in the air than scheduled for Consolidated Pacific Flight 1117.

“We need new fuel data, Jeremy,” Peck ordered. “It’s breezy up top today.”

Carson grunted in understanding, and began to figure to the nearest pound how much extra Jet-A it would take to move 275 tons of airliner, 53,000 pounds of passengers, and 26,000 pounds of baggage and freight, plus the fuel itself, from Washington to Los Angeles against 130-knot headwinds. They would need enough additional fuel to divert to Long Beach if something prevented a landing at LAX, and still touch down with forty-five minutes of fuel to spare, as Federal Aviation Administration regulations required.

There were reports of airlines offering bonuses to crews to fly with less than the FAA-mandated reserve—for economy reasons; it burns fuel to carry fuel. But Consolidated Pacific wasn’t one of those airlines, and Jackson Peck was a rulebook pilot. As commander of Flight 1117, he had authority to load more fuel, and he ordered the ground crew to get to it. He had no choice, really. He’d filed a flight plan for 39,000 feet, and there was no alternative that would reduce headwinds and fuel consumption unless he went below 23,000 feet, which wasn’t practical. The fuel saved with lighter headwinds would be eaten up by denser atmosphere.

Chief cabin steward Frank Masselli materialized at the open cockpit door. “The SOBs are ready to board,” he announced.

Peck shook his head. “Hold ’em up, Frank. We’re going to pump a little more gas.”

“Right,” Masselli replied with practiced cheerfulness. “One order of fuel. Hold the SOBs. What, twenty minutes?”

“That should do it,” Peck replied.

Masselli stepped through the aircraft’s forward door into the mouth of the telescoped passageway that linked the 811 to Dulles’s squat, gray mid-field terminal. Instead of using the telephone intercom, he walked quickly up the ramp to notify the unlucky agent at the gate that the 321 impatient SOBs in her charge were going to have to sit for a while because their flight was delayed.

He wondered what the customers would think if they knew the airlines referred to them as SOBs. It was shorthand for passenger counts; SOB stood for Souls On Board. The term was not intended to offend, but it vaguely bothered Masselli, who thought counting souls related somehow to counting the dead. The thought made him queasy.

The pretty auburn-haired agent at the terminal door was plainly irritated. “We got the word to let ’em go,” she said with a frown, glancing over her shoulder as the elderly and people with small children approached the ramp. “Here come the kids and crips.”

“My fault. I thought we were ready,” Masselli conceded. “The crew decided to load more fuel. We don’t want to run out of gas over Pasadena. Rose Bowl’s not ’til January.”

Under the 811’s left wing, the ground crew attached the yellow-and-black fuel line. In the cockpit, Peck and Dodds could feel the gentle bumps of heavy baggage hitting the floor of the cargo hold. It created a subtle, almost subliminal rocking motion. Combined with the sunshine streaming in the windows, it threatened them all with drowsiness.

There would be enough of that to battle on the cross-country flight, Peck thought as he slid open his side window. He glanced at Dodds with a silent request to do the same.

Peck saw the ground crew move under the right wing to pump its fuel cells full, a process that would be duplicated under the left wing minutes later.

Thus it was when ConPac 1117 taxied for takeoff on a warm and breezy spring morning in April, its fuel tanks were filled to capacity with 9,000 gallons, of jet fuel.

It would make one hell of a fire.

Despite his usual heavy workload, Barry Raiford felt the effects of the warm spring day. He caught himself daydreaming about trout fishing. He shook the fantasy from his head but indulged in a few minutes of self-pity at having to work on the most perfect day of the year so far. It was one of those April spectaculars that caresses the mid-Atlantic seaboard each spring to reward the living things that survived the damp freezes of winter past and must endure the inevitable sauna of summer still to come.

The yellow haze that settles over the tumbling Virginia countryside with the humidity of summer still was weeks away. On this day, Raiford could see to the horizon in all directions, and most of what he saw was greening land domed by deepening blue sky, broken only by a solitary line of scudding clouds to the west, toward the Blue Ridge. To the south, a pair of red-tailed hawks slid along the brisk air currents effortlessly, shifting the angles of their wingtips and tail feathers to steer themselves in search of prey, but otherwise expending no energy at all to stay aloft. It was little wonder mankind yearned to fly. It was the epitome of freedom.

He glanced at the sea of aircraft hunkered around the airport. If you give determined men enough time, they’ll not only copy nature, they’ll convince themselves they’ve improved on it.

Raiford was a supervisor in the tower cab at Dulles, an airport nicknamed Dullest about two decades earlier, reportedly during a night shift when the underused airfield logged fewer than two dozen takeoffs and landings in a seven-hour period. But times change. So many people now lived within easy driving distance of the sleek airport, and so many businesses had opened in—or relocated to—the surrounding areas, that Dulles had become one of the fastest-growing airports in the country.

Although young by airport standards, Dulles had a great aviation tradition. It was one of the first American ports for the Concorde SSTs. Then the behemoth jumbo jets appeared, and only six months ago the Sexton 811 that flew the daily ConPac flight nonstop to Los Angeles.

The 811 was the hottest jetliner in the sky. With a scheduled departure of 10 A.M. and two gigantic engines that produced the speed to cut an hour off the transcontinental hop, the 811s that flew as ConPac Flight 1117 drew passengers who wanted to leave Washington at a civilized hour and get to the West Coast for lunch. It was little wonder bookings were almost always capacity.