"It's gone now," he murmured. His relief was as evident as his puzzlement. There's something I ought to remember about the smell of kerosene in the passenger—"
"Cockpit voice recorder. Check the transcript. Hollis referred to it somewhere—"
"Where?"
"Maybe around five pages in where they go into the hold just prior to… descent back to Vance Aircraft. He wasn't concerned about it," he added. It could have been something as simple as a faulty or badly cleaned filter in the cabin environment system.
Vance flicked through the typewritten pages. The Canyon slipped like a brown and silver snake away from beneath the airplane's belly.
"Is this what you want? Lowell had been in the passenger cabin and reported a smell of kerosene. Then it disappeared…" He flicked the pages dismissively.
"Just like now. Here and gone. It can't mean anything can it?"
"Maybe not… There's a lot of detail missing from the recording.
Maybe it wasn't the first time?"
"He doesn't say here that he smelt it earlier something like that smell's back again. Maybe it hadn't happened earlier in the flight—"
Gant turned to Vance. There was a tension that enclosed them like an electric fence.
"It was there while we were in the left-hand orbit, over the Canyon… then it disappeared. Let's try to get it back—" He keyed the microphone.
"LA Centre 494.
We would like to stop our climb at flight level one-six-zero and make two left hand orbits before resuming on track to Flagstaff at—" He glanced at the clock on the panel. It seemed to be the only clock now, on the flight deck. The only one that mattered.
"At six minutes past the hour."
"Roger, 494 you're cleared to do that. Contact AlbuK Centre at the boundary."
As the 494 climbed, the landscape around the Canyon shrank like a memory.
"We're coming up to one-six-zero. I'll put the ship into a left-hand orbit." Gant cancelled the climb mode. The aircraft swung lazily into its orbit, like a bird adapting to a changed thermal. The Canyon came into view.
"Can you hold her in this orbit while I check?" Vance nodded.
"OK take control. I won't be long—" Gant slipped out of the pilot's seat and opened the passenger door. The scent of kerosene was palpable, though faint. The empty passenger cabin seemed somehow ominously deserted. Sunlight filled it, the landscape beneath the aircraft was visible through the windows. Yet there was something cold, even oppressive about the cabin as he moved along the aisle. He glanced to either side at the wings and the bulk of the two huge engines jutting from beneath them. Sensed the normal tremors of an aircraft in flight. The plane continued to swing through its orbit.
The passenger cabin tapered towards the aircraft's tail. The smell of kerosene remained constant, from the flight deck door to the door of the rear galley. He opened the door.
Squeezed into the narrow space, he ducked his body in order to look through the tiny window, craning to stare behind the aircraft, then back along the fuselage towards the wing, off which the sunlight gleamed.
Nothing… He turned his head. Nothing… something? In the turbulence of the engine exhaust, he thought, but clearer behind the aircraft. What looked like a narrow, brief vapour trail, grey-white, easy to ignore or miss… He looked back again towards the engine. It was invisible, that close to the engine, it was only behind the aircraft that it condensed in the airflow into an unnerving pretence of a vapour trail.
Gant heard his breathing, louder than the engine note, louder than the tumult of the air passing over the fuselage. If Hollis or anyone else had even looked, they might never have noticed. It was fuel… being dumped from the starboard wing inner tank and condensing behind the plane. Fuel… He closed the galley door behind him and hurried along the passenger cabin. He could see nothing as he paused at the window that looked out over the wing. He entered the flight deck and at once began reading the flight engineer's instrument panels. Fuel content as expected, fuel pressure OK… dump valves closed, the transfer valves and pumps reassuringly normal. There was nothing wrong… there was.
Gant slipped back into the pilot's seat and put on his headset.
"Find anything?"
"We're dumping fuel from the starboard wing tank I think…" He shook his head.
"We're dumping fuel." He regained the controls and Vance, releasing his control column, squeezed out of his seat and settled himself in front of the flight engineer's panel.
Twenty-one minutes to the crash point… There's nothing here!" Vance exploded.
"Everything's reading normal what the hell is happening? Every gauge is telling me we're not dumping fuel are you sure, Mitchell?"
Hollis had made left-hand turns in the holding pattern… they had made left-hand orbits over the Canyon and now again. Each time, there had been the smell of kerosene… He'd seen it, streaming from the wing tank. And the engineer's panel, the whole fuel management system, was lying to them… as it had lied to Hollis.
"We don't know how much fuel we have left," he murmured.
"And there's no way of knowing."
'494 Albuquerque Centre. Report your present position."
The voice in his headset alarmed him. Nerves ached in his wrists, his fingers seemed numb on the control column.
"What do you want to do?" Vance asked.
"Centre, this is 494. Just by Flagstaff Victor three-two-seven. Flight level three ten Estimate Phoenix and Vance Centre at — twenty…" He felt his mouth dry and his throat constrict, then made himself announce: "We have a slight distraction here."
"Roger, 494. Do you require assistance?" The unemotional, machine-like voice of Albuquerque Centre failed to calm. Instead, it seemed to distance the offer of assistance, make it impotent.
"Negative at present," he forced himself to say.
"We'll be looking for descent clearance in maybe nine minutes from now."
He glanced down at knee level at the repeater dials. Aileron, elevator and rudder indicated normal, where he expected the settings to be. He turned his attention to the manual wheels, low down on the centre console where their readouts were difficult to see.
"Jesus…" he breathed.
There was no correlation between the two sets of instruments. The airplane was badly out of trim possibly with stalled trim motors, an unknown fuel amount, and a monitoring system that was lying to them.
They had no way of knowing even where the fuel was. The fuel management system moved the fuel around the tanks to keep the fuselage balanced about a constant centre of gravity… Otherwise, it would become uncontrollable and fall out of the sky. Cold perspiration ran down beneath his arms, dampened the shirt across his back.
"Vance we have problems. Call the company, get Ron Blakey on the horn.
Tell him what's happening and ask him what we can do."
In another moment, Vance was talking animatedly to his chief research engineer.
Near stall to over speed… Brace, brace, brace. There was almost nothing else, now, that he could recall of the cockpit voice recorder's transcript. It was all he needed to remember, he told himself.
He felt or thought he felt a tremor in the control column, as if what was being registered was the struggle of the autopilot systems against a violent, increasing instability in the airframe. Flagstaff looked like a tiny, gleaming clearing in the stain of the Coconino National Forest far below the airplane. The mountains that reared up ahead along their flight path, and which surrounded Phoenix, seemed to press against the flight deck's windows.
"Ron Blakey says all we can do is come out of autopilot, sort the trim on manuals, and he said good luck…"
Gant's hand paused over the autopilot switch. Again, he sensed the unbalanced weight of the aircraft, the loss of fuel, the alien secretiveness of the 494. He was walking in a dead man's shoes down a road that a dead man had taken. His only advantage was that he knew the plane was losing fuel… Some advantage.