I did none of that before hurriedly unchaining the Ruptured Duck, tossing the suitcase into the plane’s luggage compartment, and jumping into the left seat.
With precious seconds ticking by, I dug the Duck’s ignition key out of the front pocket of my jeans, swiftly running my hand over the circuit breakers to ensure they were all in. Mixture control knob full forward. Key in the ignition, four strokes on the primer, primer control set and locked, throttle open one-eighth inch, master switch on. Feet firmly on the toe brakes. Seat belt tight across my lap.
“Clear!” I shouted with my window open — the same warning every pilot yells before starting any piston-driven engine so that no bystander lurking nearby gets pureed by the propeller.
I cranked the key.
The prop turned listlessly, the engine cold and unwilling, then stopped.
I pumped the throttle control in and out and tried the ignition again. Another half-hearted propeller rotation.
Nothing.
“C’mon, Duck, not now.”
Then I looked down to my right and realized the fuel tank selector valve was in the “off” position. I normally left it on “both” tanks. I could only assume that the late Chad Lovejoy, who’d met Savannah and me planeside when we first landed, had switched the valve handle for whatever reason while refueling my Cessna. I flipped the indicator to “both” tanks, waited another few seconds for the gas to drain down from the wings, and rotated the ignition key once more.
The engine came alive like it was factory new.
I began taxiing immediately, pulling on my headset and rolling toward the freshly plowed runway, faster than I should’ve, leaning the fuel-air mixture and setting my altimeter to accommodate the 6,269-foot field elevation, while spinning the elevator trim wheel to a slightly nose-up, takeoff setting. To my right, an orange windsock danced limply on the breeze. The wind was out of the northeast — a good sign. It told me I’d be flying with something of a tailwind, at least after takeoff. A tailwind meant faster groundspeed.
It meant I might make it to Santa Maria on time.
I scanned the sky left and right, forward and back, for any other aircraft coming or going. There were none. The radio was quiet. I should’ve gone through my pretakeoff checklist the way I always did before each flight, testing the control inputs and engine to make sure everything’s working correctly, but I did none of that, either. There was no time. The Duck was old, there was no denying that, but he’d never let me down in all the time we’d been flying together. I keyed the mic and hoped his dependability held true.
“South Lake Tahoe traffic, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima is rolling runway three-six with a right downwind departure, South Lake Tahoe.”
I squared the Duck to the runway’s centerline, twisting the directional guidance compass card to align with the strip’s magnetic heading, angled the ailerons into the quartering crosswind, then shoved the throttle full forward.
The Duck seemed to sense the urgency of our mission as the airspeed needle came alive. He accelerated quickly, faster than normal, it felt like. I lifted his nose in the cold air and we roared into the sky like an F-16. Well, maybe not like an F-16. Maybe not even close. But definitely not like an aging, four-seat airplane with faded paint and a 160-horsepower engine. We were making nearly 1,700 feet per minute in the climb. In a Cessna 172, that’s Guinness World Records material. I turned crosswind, then downwind.
“South Lake Tahoe traffic, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima is departing the pattern to the south. Final call, South Lake Tahoe.”
Prudence dictated that I navigate toward Santa Maria in the same cautious manner by which I’d flown into Lake Tahoe days earlier — mainly following passes while purposefully avoiding overflying the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Mountain flying is ever-unpredictable, offering pilots smooth, uneventful passage one minute and potentially deadly unseen air currents the next. Powerful downdrafts can suck you into the earth almost at will, while spiraling rotor waves of air that wash unseen over crest lines like giant ocean swells can break apart airplanes like so many toys. But, again, there was no time for such worries. I had to fly directly to Santa Maria, regardless of the risk, if I hoped to beat Dundee’s deadline. I spiraled upward, leveled off at 10,500 feet, and flew as the crow flies, skimming the tops of peaks, trusting in the Duck and fate.
The sky above me was a patchwork of puffy, cotton ball clouds — altocumulus in the meteorology parlance — positioned with precise equidistance from each other, as though someone had purposely arranged them that way. I could see no altocumulus lenticularis ahead — thin, lens-shaped clouds frequently touted by National Enquirer photographers as flying saucers, but better known to pilots as harbingers of severe turbulence, best avoided. The air was smooth. The Duck was running fine, all engine instruments were within normal tolerance. The GPS showed 235 miles to Santa Maria, with an ETA of 1107. If my tailwind held, I’d get there with less than ten minutes to spare.
I loosened my seat belt a little. For the first time since receiving Dundee’s call that morning, I allowed myself to breathe a little easier and pondered the mysterious cargo in the Duck’s luggage compartment.
Whatever was secreted inside that suitcase had sat untouched for nearly sixty years inside the hulk of a stolen airplane, the result of an intelligence mission gone wrong. The contents had come by way of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a since-closed, top-secret federal research facility tucked into the Simi Valley outside Los Angeles. All I knew of the lab was what I vaguely recalled from the one rocket science class I’d taken while at the Air Force Academy. We’d learned how liquid propellant fuels used on NASA’s Apollo spacecraft, the ones sent to the moon during the 1960s, had been formulated at Santa Susana.
But it defied logic, the notion that it was rocket fuel I was hauling.
Whoever had looted that crashed airplane regarded its cargo as so valuable that he’d murdered Chad Lovejoy for it. He’d then kidnapped Savannah to force me to fly it out of Lake Tahoe to lessen his chances of getting caught in a police traffic stop or checkpoint. Was he planning to sell those goods on the black market? That was my guess. But who’d buy a miniscule batch of ancient rocket fuel? Propellants have evolved light years since the 1950s. Nobody who knew anything about missile technology today would pay a dime for anything that old.
Something else was in that suitcase. Had to be.
I was so focused on speculating what that something was, I never saw the other airplane.
A white streak flashed from my left to right, perhaps no more than twenty feet above the Duck’s nose. I turned my head to look, but it was already gone — a twin-engine King Air, headed west, climbing up through my altitude. A millisecond earlier and we would’ve collided in midair. My heart felt like it was doing jumping jacks.
Maybe it was karma, the reason why it had taken as long as it had to get the engine started when the Duck and I were still on the ground. Or maybe it was sheer, dumb luck. Either way, I didn’t much dwell on it. I had a deadline, literally, and a delivery to make.
The airspeed indicator was down to less than 100 knots. The tailwind I’d enjoyed departing Lake Tahoe had turned into a headwind, chopping our speed across the ground by nearly one-third. My GPS now showed a projected estimated time of arrival at 1123.
We weren’t going to make it.
I tried not to think of the way Savannah had screamed over the phone. I tried not to think of the welfare of the child, my child, she was carrying. I tried to focus instead on the task at hand: getting to Santa Maria before 1115.