“I wish I could do something to help. You daughter sounds lovely.” Her mouth crinkled at the sides as if trying to smile and frown at the same time. She was doe eyed and sympathetic, and wore something between a uniform and a dinner dress that was cinched in her favor at the waist. Not a blond hair was out of place, and her perfect teeth were an advertisement for whatever whitening agent she used.
Davis sank into the aft executive lounge chair, one of eight scattered in groups around the cabin. “She’s everything to me,” he said.
Stacy took the adjacent chair, an opposing basin of plump, cool leather, and between them was a rich wood table.
“Does her mother know yet?” she asked.
Davis hadn’t gotten that far, and the question put him in a square corner — no way out. He explained about his wife, and Stacy’s hand went to his arm sympathetically. Not the product of customer service training, but a gesture from the heart.
“You poor man. I’d be happy to—”
The goodhearted Stacy was cut short by a two-tone chime. She scurried to a panel near the front of the cabin and picked up a phone handset. She listened for a full minute, by which time Davis was standing next to her.
“What is it?” he asked as she hung up.
“The pilots want to talk to you.”
It was entirely new for Davis: living in a state of dread. When Diane died it had been straightforward, a dour state trooper at his door with one crushing sentence. There’s been an accident, sir. This was altogether different, a metered process of torture. Every ringing phone and doorbell sufficient cause for a coronary.
“Up front?” he asked.
Stacy the Good nodded.
Davis knew it was against the rules for passengers to enter the cockpit during flight. He also knew that some captains still allowed common sense to rule. He had introduced himself to the pilots on the ground, and established that he and the skipper, a former C-130 driver, had more than a few friends in common from active duty days. The cockpit door unlocked and Davis pulled it open.
The flight deck was much brighter than the cabin, and he squinted as his eyes adjusted.
“Come on in,” said the captain, whose name was Mike. “Take a seat.” He pointed to a fold-down jumpseat behind the two crew positions.
Davis pulled and pushed the thing into place, and then wedged his wide shoulders between the port and starboard bulkheads.
“Have you heard anything new?” Davis asked.
“No,” said Mike. “But we just sent that message you requested. We figured you’d want to be here if a reply came through.”
“Yeah, I would. Thanks.”
“Sorry about your daughter, Jammer,” said Ed, the copilot. “That’s gotta be the worst news a guy can get.”
“Like you can’t imagine. What’s our ETA?”
“Two hours to landing in Bogotá. We’ll go straight to Customs. We already called ahead to explain your situation — told them you were a special emissary of the United States Office of Foreign Aid. You know, like you might be delivering a big check or something.”
Davis grinned for the first time in eight hours. “Thanks,” he said, “that should get me through the gauntlet.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. His back and shoulders felt knotted, like a shirt that had been twisted into a rope and left to dry in the sun. “So what are you carrying down below?” he asked.
“Below?” Mike queried.
“Well, yeah. You’re clearly not moving passengers, so I figured you must have a belly full of diplomatic freight or mail. I was told this is a regularly scheduled State Department run.”
The two pilots swapped a look. “State Department? Nah, those guys have their own air force, although we do run occasional contracts for them. This is a private jet, and today’s load manifest is basically you.”
Davis was surprised. “Maybe the return leg back to D.C. is a full boat.”
Mike shrugged. “Could be, but you know how corporate flight departments work. They don’t tell us anything. We just answer the phone, try to show up on time and sober.”
A communications alert sounded, and on the navigation scratchpad a single word flashed to life: MESSAGE.
The pendulum of Davis’ situation went on a hard downswing. He watched Ed call up the message, and they all read it at the same time: FROM LG AT NTSB. NO NEW DEVELOPMENTS. CONTACT IN BOGOTA COLONEL ALFONSO MARQUEZ.
Davis blew out a sigh, then combed his fingers through his short brown hair.
“They still haven’t found any wreckage,” Ed offered. “That’s good. Maybe the jet lost an engine and diverted to some grass strip in the middle of nowhere.”
A depressing silence followed. Captain Mike typed.89 into the Mach window of the flight computer. “That’s as fast as we can go without peeling the paint off. Why don’t you go back in the cabin and get some sleep.”
“I will,” Davis said, knowing perfectly well he would not.
THREE
Davis didn’t sleep. Instead he stared out the window and checked his watch. He ignored a Forbes magazine in a sidewall pocket. He beat the hell out of his armrests. The coastline came into view an hour later, but it meant they were still four hundred miles from Bogotá. Positional awareness — the curse of being a pilot/passenger.
He had been to Colombia once before, a brief stay in Cali to interview the family of a pilot who’d been killed in a crash. As was often the case, that meeting had been awkward all around, Davis’ carefully couched questions leading to nothing but agony and tears. He’d gained little useful information that day regarding the captain of the mishap flight, a man who had landed his jet half a mile short of a Bahamian runway. In the Bahamas, a half mile short puts you in the Atlantic Ocean every time, and that’s where they’d found him, strapped neatly into his seat under thirty feet of emerald-blue water, a crustacean’s jackpot. So Davis had sat in the parents’ kitchen, turning a coffee mug by its handle, leaving unaddressed that their only child was suspected of flying for a drug lord, and that the six hundred pounds of uncut cocaine hydrochloride found in the cargo bay would likely result in a subsequent visit by the Bahamian police. On that day, the loss of a son whose confidence exceeded his skills was enough. Davis’ last trip to Colombia had indeed been awkward.
This one had the makings of a catastrophe.
The view gradually changed, becoming a framed oval of green forest and rising mountains. This was the top of the Andes, seventeen-thousand-foot peaks that divided the Pacific Ocean from the headwaters of the Amazon. It was rugged terrain to say the least, and combined with the dense vegetation made for the kind of topography that could make a small jet disappear for months. Even years.
Davis wondered if he could handle not knowing for a prolonged period of time. Every day chipping away at hope and giving new false leads. He’d been drifting in no-man’s-land for only eight hours, yet already felt like he was coming undone. He imagined himself hacking through the jungle with a machete in hand, tattered clothes and a full beard. If it came to that, he would do it. Anything to find his daughter.
As the Gulfstream slipped through the final miles, Davis’ thoughts were not his friend. In a classic case of self-reproach he tried to recall his last words to Jen, and decided it had been a fatherly warning about the lamentable morals of young Colombian men. Characteristically paternal. Characteristically regrettable. He searched for something more positive, trying to remember the last time he’d seen her smile.
The engines throttled back and the descent began. Stacy the Good came back one last time, and was saying something about a seat belt when he found himself staring at a birthmark on her forearm. Jen had a birthmark on her right ankle. Would it come to that? he wondered. Identifying marks and dental records?