Horner looked at the clear night sky, then at his sick jet’s flashing warning lights, and then at the fuel gauges, all seeming to read zero fuel left, and let the supervisor of flying know where he could go. “I can’t make it to France,” he went on. “I’m coming home, I have to land, and can you get the crash crew out?” He was thinking that the presence of the big fire truck with its yellow-suited firemen might come in handy in the event he couldn’t get his landing gear down, or if it collapsed on landing, or if he lost heading control after landing because he didn’t have nose wheel steering, or if his drag chute failed and he ran off the end of the runway and wound up in a fireball.

As the night sky grew dark and the moon started to slide above the horizon, he could make out wisps of white fog filling in the low spots in the English countryside.

As they let down into the night, he began to check in his mind all the things that could go wrong, then instructed the wingman how to react—that is, how to avoid getting caught up in the explosion of Blue Leader’s jet. Meanwhile, to his credit, the SOF stayed cool (it occurred to Horner about that time that the SOF could afford to be cool, seeing as how his ass wasn’t in a sick jet trying to get on the ground before the field became socked in). By then, Horner could make out the lights from villages and from cars on the roads shining up through the wisps of fog. He had flown into the field hundreds of times, in far worse weather, but always with the calm assuring voice of their British air traffic controllers guiding his actions as they observed his flight path toward the field. Tonight, he thought, they’re all drinking ale in some pub because the weather was supposed to be good and we were the last flight and the radar needed periodic routine maintenance.

In the end, Horner found the field, dropped down to the treetops in the dark, and—using dimly lit references—found the runway. He landed, his drag chutes worked, and he gently used the emergency brakes to bring his wounded jet to a stop on the runway. By then, the fog was so thick that the fire truck that came racing down the runway almost collided with his jet. He sat there, wet with sweat, hands shaking more from fatigue than anything else, and realized one more time there was a God who didn’t want to talk with Chuck just yet. Just a routine day in the life of a fighter pilot, cheating death and thinking he did it on his own, but knowing in his heart it was divine intervention that let him beat the odds.