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Page 398
The big airplane's landing lights bathed the camp in brilliance as the Starlifter swept over the shoreline, jets hushed, wings rocking in the heavy turbulence. Now it passed over Ryerson's head.
The engines doppler-changed in pitch as the jet swept by. The pilot evidently intended to use every foot of the steel mesh runway. The airplane sank lower, too low. It seemed to Ryerson that he could have reached up and touched it. Suddenly a wing dropped precipitously.
Oh my God, Ryerson thought. He's going to hit the other plane. Can't the bastard see it?
He could hear the engines utter a gasping roar. The drooping wing began to rise. But not far enough.
First came a dull, tearing sound, then an ominous rumble, and the morning dark exploded into flame as the drooping wing of the descending aircraft struck the tall tail of the wrecked Starlifter. Ryerson watched in horror as both airplanes crumpled into a single, vast fiery ball of metal and burning fuel. There was a noise like a massive blow on a loose-headed drum. The fireball grew, expanded in two directions, diagonally away from the strip into the taiga, and skyward into a towering mushroom of oily fire.
Ryerson stood stricken, paralyzed, while all around him the tents and Quonsets of the camp vomited people and the emergency vehicles on the airstrip began their futile wailing chase down the broad path of fire that lighted the camp, the Trudeau, the platform, and the storm-troubled December morning.
The sound of the explosion woke Morgan from a troubled sleep. The interior of Anna's tent was lit with a sullen orange light.
Anna sat up and said sleepily, ''What is it?"
Morgan rolled from the cot and pulled on his pants, threw a parka around his shoulders, and stepped through the flap into the flame-lighted night. "Holy Mother of God!" The almost forgotten oath of his Catholic childhood was ripped from him

 
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