Silent Enemy by Tom Young Page A

rattler had injected all its poison into the stick. The ER doctor told Parson he’d not been envenomed. His father told him he’d been protected by the god who watches over fools and children.
    Well, then, Parson thought, maybe I’ll need the same kind of protection now. He coordinated his new flight plan to Rota with Air Traffic Control. The controller cleared him direct, so he entered the airfield identifier, L-E-R-T, into the FMS. With the touch of a LINE SELECT button, he activated the new course. The jet exited the holding pattern and pointed its nose toward Spain.
    Piloting duties complete for the moment, Parson looked outside. Beautiful day over Italy. Wisps of stratus like smears of sea-foam. On the ground, greenery in the ordered lines of cultivation. Orchards and vineyards. Food and drink. Life.
    He could not believe his existence was so temporary and fragile, like that of the stone flies he’d seen in trout streams or the fuzzy seed heads of foxtail grass along field borders where he’d hunted doves. And the younger people on this plane had their whole lives ahead of them.
    The EOD guys will just have to come up with a plan, he thought. Tell us to look for a wire to cut, a battery to disconnect. Even guessing would be better than just praying the bomb turns out to be a dud.
    Parson doubted an amateur could make this kind of bomb. If it really was triggered barometrically, and on descent rather than climb, it might require some kind of complicated circuit with a latching relay. Parson knew little of bomb making, but he knew aircraft systems, and they used electricity, too. No, whoever had designed this thing knew what the hell he was doing, and he probably didn’t make any mistakes.
    A warning from the flight engineer broke into Parson’s thinking: “Gentlemen,” Dunne said, “don’t move the throttles.”
    “Shit,” Parson said. There was only one reason an engineer told you to stay off the throttles. “Which one is it?”
    “Stand by,” Dunne said. Tapped on his computer. “Abnormal vibration in number four.”
    Parson thought he noticed a different sound from his aircraft, a chord change in the thrum of the engines.
    “That one again?” he said. “How bad?”
    More keystrokes. Dunne brought up a waveform display. “Fifteen mils,” he said.
    “So we can keep it running,” Parson said.
    “For now.”
    “Son of a bitch.”
    General Electric built a damned good engine, Parson knew, about as reliable as they came. But he had heard that in the rare cases when these big TF-39s failed, they failed in spectacular fashion. He knew an old-school engineer who called it the Jerry Lee Lewis phenomenon: Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On followed by Great Balls of Fire. Parson pulled off his right glove, touched the stem of the number four throttle with the end of his little finger. Sure enough, he felt vibration, transmitted through the control cables from all the way out there in the rightmost engine pylon.
    “What’s our three-engine ceiling?” he asked.
    Dunne flipped pages, looked at his outside temp gauge, consulted a chart. “Just over twenty thousand.”
    “Good.” So if we lose that engine, Parson thought, we can stay high enough not to trigger the bomb. Well, at least high enough to stay above the altitude where that C-130 blew up.
    Much of Parson’s simulator training had included compounding malfunctions. Difficulties that cascaded until he found himself wrestling with an airplane trying to go in every direction except the one he wanted. And forcing him to think hard at the same time: This landing gear problem means we’ve lost some brakes, which means we need more runway, which means Martinsburg is too short, so we’ll go to Andrews, where the weather just went below minimums, so we’ll go to Dover, if we have the fuel. And over his headset, a taunt from the instructor: “If you fuck this up, you’re buying the beer.”
    But even the most sadistic sim instructor could not have