[Magazine 1967-­05] - The Synthetic Storm Affair - Edmonds I. G. - Страница 21

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"Clearly, sir," Illya said quickly.

"Then here is what the aviation and weather experts suggest," Waverly said. "They say it is your only chance."

"We'll take it!" Illya said.

Rain from the cracked window splattered his face and dripped to the flight deck.

"You must get into the eye of the storm. In your crippled condition you can't stay aloft in this violence. All prediction is for it to get worse. Get into the eye. Then, if you can keep circling for the next forty-five minutes, the typhoon will move directly over Alofa. After that you can crash land the best you can. Do you read me?"

"Yes, sir," Illya said.

"It's a desperate chance," Waverly said. "But it is all you have. Good luck. We'll all be pulling for you here!"

The next hour was the longest either of the men from U.N.C.L.E. had ever experienced. The drawn out terror of fighting the awful battering of the storm was the worst moments of their lives. They struggled to the point of total exhaustion to keep the plane flying a halfway level course. Those able to take the controls spelled each other until worked into exhaustion themselves.

The pitching of the plane was so bad all except Kuryakin were airsick. The rain and hail slammed the unfortunate plane. Once a terrific gust of wind seemed to whirl them in a circle. The plane side-slipped, at one point falling so far the crippled engines almost failed to bring her back up. Once the nose went down and the tail acted as if it wanted to take the lead. For a breathless moment the plane was completely out of control.

Kuryakin and Solo were at the controls. The injured pilot was thrown from his perch between them, slamming heavily against the instrument panel.

Both men from U.N.C.L.E. hung on to the wheel, fighting to bring the plane's nose back up. Two of the crewmen pulled the pilot up, but a sudden shift of the wind piled them all on top of Solo. He lost his grip on the wheel. The savage fury of the wind was too much for one man to hold.

Kuryakin struggled, but the plane's nose went down again.

The plane picked up speed, plunging down at a forty-five degree angle.

"Some one help me!" Napoleon Solo gasped.

One of the crewmen sprang to his aid. Solo got his hands back on the other wheel. One of the other crewmen gave him a hand. The other tried to get the pilot back on his feet.

"Quick!" Solo gasped. "Ask him what we do now! We can't seem to bring it out of the dive!"

"He's out completely!" the sergeant bent over the pilot cried.

"Then what in Hades do we do?" Napoleon grated. "Doesn't anybody know how to fly this confounded thing?"

"Major Patterson! Can you take over these controls for me?" Illya said hurriedly. "I'll see if I can raise New York on the communicator again. Maybe Mr. Waverly can get us a pilot who can give us directions!"

"You had better get him in the next minute or two," Solo said. "The way we're going down, it won't be long! I can't see the ground, but it must be down there somewhere. The ocean, I mean."

Major Patterson slipped into the pilot's seat as Illya relinquished his grip on the wheel. He started to step back. As he did the plane gave a mighty lurch. The nose was thrown up until the plane almost stood on its tail.

Solo and Patterson, who had been pulling back on the controls with all their strength in an impossible attempt to bring the nose up, now frantically reversed procedures to try and bring it down again.

Illya's grip on the back of the pilot's seat was torn loose. He was thrown back, slamming against the back of the cockpit compartment with a jarring force that momentarily stunned him. He hit the flight deck and his instinct for survival caused him to try and fight his way back on his feet again.

He got to his knees when another sickening turn of the plane threw him heavily against the back of the co-pilot's seat. He staggered up, hanging on the back of the seat occupied by Solo.

He was swaying so badly he did not immediately realize that the terrible wind had ceased.

He looked around in surprise. The slashing rain was gone. There were stars visible overhead. He blinked, still too dazed to comprehend the sudden stillness of the air about them.

Then Solo's voice cut through his hazy brain: "We're in the eye! Don't tell me we did that!"

"Not us," Patterson said from the pilot's seat. "It was the plane! It must have been, for I surely didn't know what I was doing!"

"I guess these planes are like the cavalry horses. The old soldiers used to tell recruits just to let the horses alone and they would get them through the drill. Horses had more sense than soldiers in those days!"

"We're still going down," Napoleon said, suddenly sobering after the first burst of jubilation at getting out of the wild winds of the spinning typhoon.

The plane was losing altitude as its overtaxed engines started cutting out momentarily, but not as badly as before.

"Can you see the atoll?" Patterson asked anxiously.

"I can't see a thing," Napoleon said. "Do you think the eye has already passed the island?"

Below it was dark, but they could easily make out the frothing sea. It looked white for the trapped waters were churned into a mad frenzy by the circling wall of terrific winds.

Nobody spoke for a moment. Each knew it was death for the plane to drop in those anguished waters.

"How is the pilot?" Solo asked. "Is there any way of bringing him to long enough to give us some instructions?"

Patterson crouched over the pilot's body looked up. He shivered.

"No, sir!" he said in a thick voice. "He's dead!"

"And the flight engineer is dead too," Solo said in a stricken voice.

Illya pulled himself together and reached for the pen-communicator. He shakily extended the aerial. All he got was a thick crackle of static from the boiling ring of clouds circling about the typhoon eye with speeds above one hundred and seventy-five knots.

Solo glanced back over his shoulder. "Illya! Can't you raise New York?"

"No," Kuryakin said, shoving the communicator back in his pocket.

"Well, that's it," Solo said grimly. "That looks like the atoll ahead. It is just emerging from the storm into the eye."

"Yes! That's it!" Patterson cried.

"But how do we land?" Solo said. "I wouldn't know what to do if there was a ten thousand foot runway. What can I do on a coral strip covered with coconut palms, and most of them blown down by the wind?"

They were still circling, trying to stay within the forty miles radius of the typhoon eye. But at the same time they were gradually losing altitude.

It was only a matter of minutes before they had to come down somewhere. Each second, the mad, vicious ocean was getting closer and closer to the belly of the doomed plane.

"What do we do?" Patterson said, his voice hoarse.

"Let's try to figure out something!" Solo replied. "What do you do when you land? You go down, level off, touch the wheels and roll. Going down is no problem. We're doing that any way."

"We can't roll," Patterson said. "So we can't use that to eat up our landing speed."

"How about pulling back on the stick just before we strike? That should bring the nose up and then the tail can drag and slow us down before the nose drops?" Illya suggested. "It seems to me that is the big problem. We have to get our speed down before we take the big bump."

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