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"This is getting bad. Better tell the weather pukes to stick their head out the window."

"They said eight inches."

"I got a buck says more than a foot."

"I never bet against you on weather," the co-pilot reminded the colonel.

"Smart man, Scotty."

"Supposed to clear tomorrow night."

"I'll believe that when I see it, too."

"Temp's supposed to drop to zero, too, maybe a touch under."

"That I believe," the colonel said, checking his altitude, compass, and artificial horizon. His eyes went outboard again, seeing only snowflakes being churned by the downwash of the rotor tips. "What do you call visibility?"

"Oh, in a clear spot maybe a hundred feet maybe one-fifty " The major turned to grin at the colonel. The grin stopped when he started thinking about the ice that might build up on the airframe. "What's the outside temp?" he murmured to himself.

"Minus 12 centigrade," the colonel said, before he could look at the thermometer.

"Coming up?"

"Yeah. Let's take her down a little, ought to be colder."

"Goddamned D.C. weather."

Thirty minutes later, they circled over Camp David. Strobe lights told them where the landing pad was - you could see down better than in any other direction. The co-pilot looked aft to check the fairing over the landing gear. "We got a little ice now, Colonel. Let's get this beast down before something scary happens. Wind is thirty knots at three-zero-zero."

"Starting to feel a touch heavy." The VH-3 could pick up as much as four hundred pounds of ice per minute under the right - wrong - weather conditions. "Fuckin' weather weenies. Okay, I got the LZ in sight."

"Two hundred feet, airspeed thirty," the major read off the instruments. "One fifty at twenty-five one hundred at under twenty looking good fifty feet and zero ground-speed "

The pilot eased down on the collective. The snow on the ground started blowing up from the rotor-wash. It created a vile condition called a white-out. The visual references which had just reappeared - vanished instantly. The flight crew felt themselves to be inside a ping-pong ball. Then a gust of wind swung the helicopter around to the left, tilting it also. The pilot's eyes immediately flicked down to the artificial horizon. He saw it tilt, knowing that the danger that had appeared was as severe as it was unexpected. He moved the cyclic to level the aircraft, and dropped the collective to the floor. Better a hard landing than catching a rotor in the trees he couldn't see. The helicopter dropped like a stone - exactly three feet. Before people aboard realized that something was wrong, the helicopter was down and safe.

"And that's why they let you fly the Boss," the major said over the intercom. "Nice one, Colonel."

"I think I broke something."

"I think you're right."

The pilot keyed the intercom. "Sorry about that. We caught a gust over the pad. Everybody okay back there?"

The President was already up, leaning into the cockpit. "You were right, Colonel. We should have left sooner. My mistake," Fowler said graciously. What the hell, he thought, he wanted this weekend.

The Camp David detachment opened the chopper's door. An enclosed HMMWV pulled up to it so that the President and his party didn't have to get too cold. The flight crew watched them pull away, then checked for damage.

"Thought so."

"Metering pin?" The major bent down to look. "Sure enough." The landing had just been hard enough to snap the pin that controlled the hydraulic shock-absorber on the right-side landing gear. It would have to be fixed.

"I'll go check to see if we have a spare," the crew chief said. Ten minutes later, he was surprised to learn that they didn't. That was annoying. He placed a phone call to the helicopter base at the old Anacostia Naval Air Station to have a few driven up. Until it arrived, there was nothing that could be done. The aircraft could still be flown in an emergency, of course. A fire-team of Marine riflemen stood