The C-97 pushed her bulbous nose into the blowing snow and began her struggle down the long ribbon of pavement as Gold began calling out the increasing ground speed in a monotone.

“Fifty knots.”

All too soon an illuminated sign with a large number 9 flashed by.

“Nine thousand feet to go,” Gold droned. “Ground speed seventy.”

The white runway lights blurred past the wing tips. The Stratocruiser lunged onward, the powerful Pratt-Whitney engines straining in their mounts, their four-bladed propellers clawing at the rarefied air. Vylander’s hands were cemented to the wheel, his knuckles twisted white, his lips murmuring intermingled prayers and curses.

“One hundred knots … seven thousand feet left.”

Burns’s eyes never left his instrument panel, studying every twitch of the gauge needles, ready to detect the first signs of trouble. Hoffman could do nothing but sit there helplessly and watch the runway dissolve at what seemed to him an excessive rate of speed.

“One twenty-five.”

Vylander was fighting the controls now, as the vicious cross wind attacked the control surfaces. A trickle of sweat rolled unnoticed down his left cheek and dropped into his lap. Grimly, he waited for some sign indicating that the craft was beginning to lighten, but it still felt as though a giant hand were pushing against the cabin’s roof.

“One hundred thirty-five knots. Kiss the five-thousand-foot marker farewell.”

“Lift, baby, lift,” Hoffman pleaded as Gold’s readings began falling one on top of the other.

“One hundred forty-five knots. Three thousand feet left.” He turned to Vylander. “We just passed the go, no-go point.”

“So much for Admiral Bass’s safety margin,” Vylander muttered.

“Two thousand feet coming up. Ground speed one fifty-five.”

Vylander could see the red lights at the end of the runway. It felt as though he were steering a rock. Gold kept glancing at him nervously, anticipating the movement of the elbows that meant the major had engaged the controls for the climb. Vylander sat still, as immovable as a sack of Portland cement.

“Oh God … the one-thousand-foot marker … going, going, gone.”

Vylander gently eased back the control column. For almost three

seconds, which seemed an eternity, nothing happened. But then with agonizing slowness the Stratocruiser slipped the ground and staggered aloft a scant fifty yards before the asphalt stopped.

“Gear up!” he said hoarsely.

There were a few uneasy moments until the landing gear thumped inside their wheel wells and Vylander could feel a slight increase in airspeed.

“Gear up and locked,” said Gold.

The flaps were raised at four hundred feet and the men in the cabin expelled a great, collective sigh of relief as Vylander banked into a shallow turn to the northwest. The lights of Denver blinked beneath the port wing but quickly became lost as the overcast closed in. Vylander didn’t relax fully until the airspeed crept over two hundred knots and the altimeter showed thirty-five hundred feet between the plane and the ground.