Arcturus

“Captain Pagent! Turn around! Turn the plane around now!” “Gryff, what is it?” “Captain! Radar! That’s not rain up ahead. It’s a sandstorm! We're headed into a sandstorm!” Pagent didn’t ask questions. He needed no further clarification. When your first navigator shouts for you to turn the plane – now – you turn the plane. After all, they might as well have been flying toward the side of a mountain. At this point, the co-pilot, Hendricks, did what he should have, directing everyone to their tasks, including the crew in the back of the plane. This allowed the pilot to maneuver the aircraft in an undeclared emergency as he saw fit. The cause, however, had an effect that rippled down the line like so many dominoes. The sandstorm was now in its death throes. A tidal wave of sand, falling straight down through the atmosphere, was spread out across 120 miles of desert at which the Talon was fast approaching at 160 mph. Too large to fly around and too high at this distance to fly over, Gryffin made the right call in telling his captain to turn as quickly as he could. The problem was, as it was pitch black, nobody in the cockpit could see it. There was no glowing moonlight. No twinkling stars above passing by the windscreen. No ambient city light below. To Pagent, the storm made it look like they were flying inside a pillowcase. He knew that if the sandstorm enveloped the plane, there was a high probability that the props would be clogged and the engines, potentially all four of them, could shut down, leaving them to plummet nose-first into the sands of Anbar. Splat. 'This is not going to be a goddamned Desert One repeat,' Pagent thought to himself. To be sure, no one panicked. But everyone began to talk over the ships’ comms at once, disregarding the circumstances at the back of the plane. Whether it was fear, confusion, or a combination of the two, it proved disastrous. Then, the turbulence hit. Hendricks immediately began to ask for a new course heading. That was keeping navigator Volette occupied. The First Navigator, Captain Gryffin, ordered Comm. Officer Claypoole to get with Iroquois, tell them they were headed back to base, and advise them that they were caught in a sandstorm. In all this, the Flight Engineer, Captain William Gadson, went unheard. Following procedure, Loadmaster Cafferty punched the yellow button on the fuselage wall next to him, and the cargo ramp began its slow and steady process of closing. Simultaneously, Pagent powered up the engines and commenced a severe banking maneuver which again made all the men of the ODA – still standing – shift their weight either to their toes or to their heels, depending on which side of the plane they were. The men standing on the plane's port side were all thrown backward helplessly into their flight seats. This was all before the flight engineer could relay the official mission abort call to the pilot. Pagent couldn’t believe it. "What?" At this point, the plane was in a severe 45° bank to port. Chen screamed. “Pagent!” Chen's starboard squad began to heave toward the plane's port side. Chen had to grab a handful of cargo netting lining the plane's fuselage to keep from flying across the deck. Tregarrick and Willis were able to do likewise. Two others, Westlake and "Doc" Elias, were pitched into the equipment supply pallet, which was still sitting inert in the middle of the cargo bay. As the ramp began to close, the increased thrust of the engines created a vortex within the Talon's fuselage and began sucking everything that wasn't nailed down out of the back of the plane. This was normal. A few men that could hang on now reached out for the two men tumbling across the bay. The men thrown backward on the port side were held there by tremendous g-forces and could only watch as the scene played out, as most terrifying things do, in slow motion. As the Talon banked, Sergeant Landon and mission add-on WO Caine went sprawling forward from the starboard side and were headed for the floor of the cargo bay when, as anyone would have, Master Sergeant Westlake tried to grab one of them. It was instinct, after all. Caine somersaulted into the opposite wall, dazed. He was the lucky one. Unfortunately, Westlake reached further than he should have and grabbed what he could; the ripcord handle set next to Landon’s right rib cage, and as Landon fell forward, Westlake heard the “pop” of Landon’s parachute coming undone. Then, the master sergeant was thrown back against the fuselage like a ragdoll by the violent turbulence. As Westlake was shouting a plethora of expletives, Landon’s chute, carried by the vortex, snaked toward the still open ramp, the suction carrying it out the back of the plane – and him with it.