“The airport’s right there,” Fiona said, pointing out the obvious. “Let me just run over there and look for him.”
“If you want to, sure,” he said, climbing out of the car. “Check with Pete.” He tossed the keys into her lap. “I’ve got to stay on point.”
“Happy to do it,” she said.
“Hey!” he said, stopping her as she hiked up her dress to climb behind the wheel. “Pick-up sticks. That was a good call.”
Caught!
She nodded, wiggling and tugging her dress down.
He shoved the car door shut and headed for the entrance.
His cell phone vibrated.
The caller ID read KEVIN CELL.
Walt pressed the CALL button.
“Where the hell are you?” he said by way of introduction.
The line crackled and spat.
“Unc… alt?” Kevin’s voice was nearly unrecognizable.
A roar erupted in the background.
“… got… her,” he thought he heard. He missed everything else.
He didn’t want to hear the true confessions of a teenage conquest. Playing Kevin’s surrogate dad required they both walk a fine line.
The roar grew ever louder. It dawned on him that it wasn’t static but background noise.
A plane-a jet-took off to the north, and he glared at it.
Maybe the background noise hadn’t come over the phone after all.
It took him several seconds to connect it with the jet. Even allowing for the delay over the phone, the two were inseparable. It meant Kevin was close by. Maybe at a hangar party, some rich kid throwing a rave.
“Where… are… you?” Walt hollered into the phone.
“I’m on-” Kevin’s voice stopped midword.
Walt checked the phone. It had lost its connection.
On? he wondered. It was the operative word that lodged in his thoughts.
He waved for Fiona to hold up, rushed to the car, and motioned for her to lower the window.
“Kevin just called. Have Pete check the north hangars. And see if Teddy Sumner owns or operates a private jet, and, if so, have Pete check that out as well. I think Kevin’s right here, somewhere ridiculously close.” He realized he was ordering her around like he would a deputy. “That is… if you wouldn’t mind?”
“I wouldn’t mind at all,” she said.
He looked up. The jet’s lights blinked in the gray of the evening sky.
“Aren’t you glad I came along?” she said.
“If I’m overstepping… There are people here…”
“Shut up, Walt. I’m happy to do it. This, and… more.”
She backed up the car. Her hair caught in the window when she put it up.
Amused, Walt stood there a moment wondering how long it had been since anyone had told him to shut up.
44
Dave McCormick’s gloved hands gripped the parasail’s plastic handles, sensing the amazing control he maintained over the ribbed fabric overhead. Before him, an astonishing waterfall of red-and-orange light cascaded into the craggy horizon. Without referencing the altimeter on his wrist, Dave could tell by his shortness of breath and the sudden bite to the air that he’d exceeded eleven thousand feet. He didn’t want to go any higher or stay aloft too much longer, it being far darker on the ground than in the air, making for a difficult landing.
He spilled some wind from the sail and began a descending spiral. He spotted a dark V, coming from the north, aimed directly for him. It was several hundred geese.
He glided lower, hoping to join the formation, and descended into the twilight incredibly fast. He arrived within yards of the lead goose, startling the formation and scattering their symmetry. The V quickly reformed, Dave McCormick suddenly a hundred yards in its wake.
A blinding strobe won his attention.
A jet. Coming fast, at an absurdly low altitude.
He saw what the pilot could not: the jet was on a collision course with the geese.
And quite possibly with him.
He tugged on the parasail’s controls, trying to drop down and outrun the jet’s blowback. The plane hit the geese like a dart, the V scattering as orange flares rose from the jet’s engines.
Smoke streamed thickly from the port jet.
He reached for the portable two-way radio strapped to his chest just as a blast of engine thrust hit him, driving him upside down and away from the plane like a seed. He struggled to control the fall.
45
Bird strike!” McGuiness called out, leaning back to look at the wing, his right hand searching out toggles overhead.
Cantell grabbed for the dash.
“Mac,” Cantell said, “tell me we’re all right.”
McGuiness studied the instruments.
“Starboard’s producing three-quarter… check that… fifty percent power.”
“Mac?”
“Not good.”
McGuiness reached for the buttons on the GPS.
“I’ve got that,” Cantell said.
“Known airports,” McGuiness said.
“Known airports,” Cantell acknowledged. “Mac…”
“The GPS can show us all-”
“Nearby airports. I got it. But we can’t put down at an airport, Mac.”
“Fuck that! We’ve lost our port engine. Starboard’s currently on fire.”
“So put out the fire,” Cantell said, eerily calm.
“I hit the extinguishers and I extinguish combustion. We go down like a rock.”
“Fix it.”
“We’re not going to reach the Nevada field. We need to put this thing down now, and it can’t be some grass strip. We need length.”
He’d worked the GPS without Cantell’s help.
“Stanley. That’ll work. Fifteen miles. Look it up in the book. How long’s the strip?” He kept his eyes on the instruments. “I need the length of that runway.”
“I’m on it.”
“I need it now! And here…” He tossed a set of laminated pages at his copilot. “Emergency landing checklist.”
Cantell had not moved.
“Read me the goddamned checklist!”
“We’re not putting it down in Stanley,” Cantell said. “We do that, we walk away.”
“We don’t do that,” McGuiness said, “and they’ll be shoveling us into body bags.”
“We’re flying. It’s flying, right?”
“It’s on fire. Forget about everything else, damn it.” His eyes searched the various instruments. “Forty-five percent and falling. We are losing that engine. We are going down. We need to put this bird down! I am not trained for this. This is not good. Now, are you going to read the goddamned checklist or not?”
“What’s that?” Cantell asked, pointing to a black-and-white screen on an instrument labeled MAXVIZ, a night-visioning system designed to help spot deer on runways, among other things. At this altitude, the screen showed the whole of the Sawtooth Valley before them-mostly black, representing cold, but intersected by a thin white ribbon, heat emanating from the warm asphalt of Highway 75 running north from Galena up through Stanley. The streets of Stanley showed as well. The highway then curved right toward Challis.
Cantell was pointing to a perfectly straight white line about an inch long in a sea of black well northwest of the spotty glow of Stanley.
“That’s nothing, an anomaly. It’s in the middle of nowhere,” McGuiness snapped. “Now, read the goddamned checklist, Chris!”
“But if it’s white like that,” Cantell countered, “it’s asphalt.”
“I doubt it. The signature is weak. See how faint it is?”
“No, no, it’s almost the same heat signature as the highway. It’s got to be asphalt. A private strip.”