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Unfortunately the tower was right. The lower we descended, the denser became the soup of fog and smoke. I leveled off at four hundred meters. Even at this low level there was nothing to see but fog and smoke. At times the smoke was so black and full of grime that it smeared the windshield.
I realized that neither of us had any skills in flying a large aircraft in this sort of 'weather.' I could have given Igor the controls and we wouldn't have been any worse off.
By then we were flying strictly by radar. Finding a highway under these conditions bordered on suicide. We were required to land in a hilly terrain, and this with so far absolutely no visibility. Still, it had to be done. Too many people depended on us succeeding with the mission.
I knew approximately where the town should be. Alaska had had no detailed charts left. All they had were Xerox copies of a road map. The general route that everyone followed, as we were told, was superimposed on the map with a highlighter pen. We had to come in from the North, approach from the East, and exit southwest over the mountains. This rule was their collision avoidance procedure. Everything else was up to the pilot's individual imagination and skill, which Jack translated into, "blind luck, guesswork, and sheer daring."
Mostly it was daring!
"Trees!" - shouted Orlando as we came close to where we thought the highway should be. I opened the throttles and pulled the plane up.
"Don't you know these green stubs are trees?" said Orlando moments later, after we had all caught our breath.
"You never told me anything about us having a tree cutting license," Jack joked and put his coffee aside. He requested that he take the controls again.
It was clear now that we had no ceiling at all. I told Jennie and Igor to look out for a town. Jack concentrated on flying by radar, looking for hills and the highway. I kept an eye on the altimeter and the electronic compass.
"Let's switch the GPS back on," I said at one point.
Jack said no. "The satellite signal won't penetrate this muck, and if it did it would give us erroneous readings," said Jack. "The atmospheric reflections from the metal content in the fallout create interference patterns and phase shifts. That's probably why some of them crashed as they told us they have, and Gander advised to turn the system off. This was well known when we first got the GPS during the end of my days with SAC."
Eventually Jennie recognized a faint line in the fog. We followed it. It disappeared and re-appeared, but there was no landing strip that we could make out.
"We've gone too far," said Jack. The compass confirmed that we probably had. I turned us sharply to the northwest to set us up for a second try. After flying a huge loop we came in from the East again. This time we came in low enough to be able to see the city of Campbell River on radar. We still didn't see the landing strip, though.
Again we looped back for a third run, then a fourth. We knew where the highway was supposed to be in relationship to the town.
It wasn't until the fifth pass that Igor yelled into the telephone: "Stop right here and back up some, we've found it!" He said there was a straight stretch of road with fires burning on either end.
Our sixth pass was for a close up inspection. We came in extremely low. I could see the runway now. I could see it clearly enough to land. I could see the crowds of people waiting for us. But the runway was blocked. Damn! A plane was right in the middle of it. I noticed smoke coming from its fuselage.
"Shit!" shouted Jack as he pulled us back up into the clouds. "Aren't there any professionals around anymore? Those bloody amateurs! Everybody is screwing up! Where the hell do we go now?"
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Stories about
Sex
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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