all of whom she had loved and still loved. No one person could have
occupied her thoughts for more than a fraction of a second, yet the
nearness of death seemed to distort time, so she felt as if she were
lingering with each beloved face.
What flashed before her was not her life, but the special people in it
though in a way that was the same thing.
Even above the creak-rumble-shriek of the jet, and in spite of her focus
on the faces in her mind, she heard Christine Dubrovek speak to her
daughter in the last moments of their shaky descent: “I love you,
Casey.”
Holly began to cry.
Three hundred meters.
Delbaugh had the nose up.
Everything looked good. As good as it could look under the
circumstances.
They were at a slight angle to the runway, but he might be able to
realign the aircraft once they were on the ground. If he couldn’t bring
it around to any useful degree, they would roll three thousand or maybe
even four thousand feet before their angle of approach carried them off
the edge of the pavement and into a field where it appeared that a crop
of some kind had been harvested recently. That was not a desirable
termination point, but at least by then a lot of their momentum would
have been lost; the plane might still break up, depending on the nature
of the bare earth under its wheels, but there was little chance that it
would disintegrate catastrophically.
Two hundred meters.
Turbulence gone.
Floating. Like a feather.
“All right,” Anilov said, just as Delbaugh said, “Easy, easy,” and they
both meant the same thing: it looked good, they were going to make it.
One hundred meters.
Nose still up.
Perfect, perfect.
Touchdown and TWANG! -the tires barked on the blacktop simultaneously
with the queer sound.
Delbaugh remembered the stranger’s warning, so he said, “Power number
one!” and pulled hard to the left. Yankowski remembered as well,
though he had said it was all a crock, and he responded to Delbaugh’s
throttle command even as it was being given. The right wing dipped,
just as they had been told it would, but their quick action pulled the
plane left, and the right wing came back up. There was a danger of
overcompensation, so Delbaugh issued a new throttle command while still
trying to hold the craft to the left. They were rolling along, rolling
along, the plane shaking, and he gave the order to reverse engines
because they couldn’t, for God’s sake, continue to accelerate, they were
in mortal danger as long as they were moving at high speed, rolling,
rolling, moving inexorably at an angle on the runway, rolling and
slowing now, but rolling. And the right wing was tipping down again,
accompanied by hellish popping and metallic tearing noises as
age-fatigued steel-trouble in the joining of wing and fuselage, Jim had
said-succumbed to the stress of their wildly erratic flight and
once-in-a-century crosswinds. Rolling, rolling, but Delbaugh couldn’t
do a damn thing about a structural failure, couldn’t get out there and
reweld the joints or hold the damn rivets in place. Rolling, rolling,
their momentum dropping, but the right wing still going down, none of
his countermeasures working any longer, the wing down, and down, oh God,
the wing Holly felt the plane tipping farther to the right than before.
She held her breath or thought she did, but at the same time she heard
herself gasping frantically.
The creaks and squeals of tortured metal, which had been echoing eerily
through the fuselage for a couple of minutes, suddenly grew much louder.
The aircraft tipped farther to the right. A sound like a cannonshot
boomed through the passenger compartment, and the plane bounced up, came
down hard. The landing gear collapsed.
They were sliding along the runway, rocking and jolting, then the plane
began to turn as it slid, making Holly’s heart clutch up and her stomach
knot. It was the biggest carnival ride in the world, except it wasn’t
any fun at all; her seatbelt was like a blade against her midriff,
cutting her in half, and if there had been a carny ticket-taker, she