The climb rate was anemic, and he watched the airspeed barely holding at 145. There wasn’t enough distance left between where they were in the valley and the steep walls of the cirque to have any hope of climbing straight ahead. They would have to follow Lead Four-Two to the right and down the small canyon as planned.
“You want the memory items and the engine-failure checklist?” Rusty asked, his voice tight and thin.
Clark nodded. The words weren’t coming easily, and his mouth felt like dry cotton. There was a rising level of apprehension he usually kept bottled up, but he could feel it now, boiling like a roiled stomach and threatening to distract him, and that in itself was a distraction. Nothing ever scared him in flight. Why this? They practiced engine loss. They just never practiced panic.
He checked his control positions. He was using half of the left rudder throw against the tremendous asymmetric thrust from the two large propellers on the left as they churned the air with double the normal power, pulling the single-engine right wing forward. The unbalanced power on the left wing was trying to roll them to the right even more, and he worked to crank in all the left rudder trim he had.
“Check METO!”
“We’ve got METO. It’s checked.”
He could see Rusty’s hand jump back to the throttle levers as he watched the engine gauges and worked to spur on every last horse they had.
“No. My entire life and a few very steamy experiences flashed before my eyes a few times, but no lakes.”
“Okay, I hate to screw up someone’s fishing hole, but I should have pickled the load already. Punching it off now.”
Clark reached over and set the dump rate to open all the remaining gates before hitting the main dump switch. He pushed up the throttles as more than fifteen thousand pounds of slurry sprayed from the belly, emptying all the tanks and causing the old bird almost to leap into a far healthier climb than before.
The cascade of red retardant fell in a vertical column from the belly of the old Douglas, the weight of the slurry keeping it together for part of the drop as the leading edge took on the shape of an angry wave and the back end spread out to resemble a gigantic plume of pink cotton candy, the manmade cloud moving downward until it landed on the trees below like a science fiction writer’s vision of pinkish rain on some alien planet.
“I think we’re okay, aren’t we?” the copilot said, the mix of statement and question following Clark’s own thinking.
“Yeah. We’re flying and we’re climbing, Rusty,” he said, not sure which of them he was trying to reassure. “We’ll be fine. Just run the engine-loss checklist and check the tanks for indication of fuel leaks on the right. Is there a lot of damage on the right wing?”
“It’s…pretty torn up by the prop blades, but I don’t see any fuel…I mean, I don’t think it got the tank.”
Another unbidden sparkle of fear shuddered through him, triggering an equally disturbing flash of anger at losing his internal cool. This time it had been the mention of the fuel tank, which held gasoline, which was amazingly explosive if given enough air and a spark.
Rusty began reading the checklist items as Clark watched the Baron disappear in a right turn around the corner ahead and into the canyon. They were at least fifteen hundred feet above the ground now, and still climbing.
Speed 152 and coming up. Good! Clark thought. More than enough energy margin for a turn.
The turn was about a mile ahead. Beyond the narrow escape pass there would be a broad valley falling off from eighty-five hundred feet to seventy-five hundred, with a small river in the middle. They could bank left and follow the river safely back to the town of Kelly, and all the way to Jackson Hole Airport, if need be.
But it wasn’t looking that serious, other than the obvious damage to the right wing and number-four engine, which was literally drooping off the mangled engine mount.
“You want me to declare an emergency?” Rusty asked as he worked on answering the question of a fuel leak. “Lead Four-Two doesn’t even know we’ve got a problem.” His voice was as taut as his eyes were huge.
There was a microsecond of internal debate as Clark wrestled his fears to the mat with a combination of relief and bravado. No, thank you. He could do without telling the world he was scared to death. At least for a few moments. It would be Rusty’s voice, of course, not his. Right now I’d be an octave higher than normal, he thought.
“Let’s get safe first. Tight right turn coming up.”
“Can we…make it?” Rusty asked, immediately regretting the verbal fear he’d just banner-lined.
“Piece of cake,” Clark shot back, working to show the traditional pilot dismissal of danger as he gripped the yoke hard and muscled the heavy old airliner into a thirty-degree right bank with the aid of a little less left rudder. The view out front of the cockpit was filled with trees and rocks at first, but slowly the scene melted into the image of the pass with the broad river valley beyond.
Clark felt his heart rate slowing at last. He was thoroughly in control. There had never been any doubt, yet something had spooked him.
The canyon walls on each side were soaring at least fifteen hundred feet above them, even with a steady climb. They were almost out and over the broad valley ahead when there was another lurch and number four shifted farther downward on what was left of its mounts. Clark could almost feel it swinging on the remaining attach point. He gripped the controls a little more firmly.
“It may well fall off, Rusty. We’re going to be headed for a whole community. I’m going to get us up higher and try not to fly over any buildings.”
“Roger.”
Clark toggled the transmitter. “Lead Four-Two, Tanker Eighty-four. Sam, we’ve got a problem. We puked the number-four engine, and we’ve dumped the load.”
“Roger, Eighty-four, you’re cleared out of here.”
“Just a second,” Clark said, both hands on the yoke as he began a left bank and continued the climb. “Help me with the yoke, would you?”
Rusty grabbed the copilot’s yoke and added pressure into the left bank. “Jeez, this thing is heavy.”
“Sure is.”
“May I ask you a question, O Captain, my Captain?”
“Okay. Provided you don’t get sarcastic.”
“Moi? Not possible. But shouldn’t we declare an emergency and go into Jackson? Like right about now?”
“The reason I don’t want to go into Jackson Hole, Rusty?”
“Yeah?”
“It’ll cost Jerry Stein three times as much to get this old tub flyable again if he has to work on it there, and it’s just possible, with too much scrutiny around and not enough heavy maintenance, that she might never fly out. This old warhorse could end her days rolling out of Jackson Hole in torched-up pieces on the back of a flatbed, and we desperately need her flyable. If we can safely get her back to Jones at West Yellowstone, he can probably patch her back together.”
There was a contemplative silence from the right seat, and Clark glanced over, glad to see that the copilot clearly understood that their airplane was on the ragged edge of being scrapped, and what that meant. No airplane, no job.
“I’m talking safety, though, too. So what do you think?” Clark asked.
Rusty nodded. “I concur.”
“But go ahead with the emergency declaration. I should already have let you do that.”
Rusty keyed the transmitter and made the call, broadcasting their position and the fact that one engine was shut down.
“One thing,” Clark added. “The turbulence heading back may knock the engine completely off, but it can’t be any worse than it is now. We’ll just be prepared for it.”
“How do we prepare? Pray a lot?”
“Couldn’t hurt.” Clark looked over at Rusty and managed a strained grin, which was gratefully acknowledged with a nod.
“See any lakes ahead?” Clark asked.
Clark turned the old Doug toward the north, the ridgelines falling away on both sides as they climbed safe
ly through twelve thousand feet with the valley spreading out below.
“Okay, Rusty, now you can take a breath and call Ops, in that order. Tell them what we’ve got. We’re returning to base with an ETA of twenty-five minutes, but we’re going to dogleg north to avoid any populated areas.”
“Nice job, skipper,” Rusty said.
“And good teamwork, as usual,” he said, his mind racing ahead, trying to make sure the return to base was going to be no more complicated than setting course for the home base and keeping her in the air until they got there.
A mental image flared in his head, like a full-color, three-dimensional map, with the central feature the black hole where Tanker 86 had gone down. He knew precisely how many miles ahead it was, and he could see the glow of the new fire the crash had sparked as it undulated on the horizon. And it seemed, suddenly, that aside from any consideration of saving their own hides, the most important reason for working so hard to get home safely was the cold fact that his community couldn’t handle a second loss in one day.
Chapter 5
IN FLIGHT, CALIFORNIA TO WEST YELLOWSTONE
Jerry Stein replaced the receiver of his sky phone and sat back hard in the tiny cabin of his Lear 23. He already felt like a sailor trying to bail a sinking freighter with a tin cup, and now his ragged, battered corporate ship was taking on even more water.
He leaned forward just as suddenly as he’d sat back and cupped his chin in his right hand, his elbow on his knee, oblivious to everything but the need to plan for the onslaught.
“What now?” Diana Stein asked softly. After twelve years of marriage she could read her older husband very well, and it was obvious his stress level was approaching red line.
Jerry looked over as if surprised to find her in the seat to his right.
“What…what?”
“Something new has obviously gone wrong. What is it?”
He sighed and straightened up, running his left hand through his thinning sandy hair as his right probed for the stockinged texture of her shapely left leg, stroking it slowly. It was an annoying habit she’d learned to accept in public or private. She always wore skirts for him, knowing how much he hated pants on a pretty woman. And she was fond of eliciting scandalized reactions from her more sophisticated East Coast girlfriends with an explanation rooted in the reverse snobbery of marrying a Montanan: “Having a wife would make no sense to Jerry if she wasn’t always receptive to no-notice intimacy. Skirts, for him, are an accessibility issue.”
“Babe, Tanker Eighty-four is in trouble and limping back to West Yellowstone with number-four engine barely hanging on the wing. Clark Maxwell’s the captain. You remember Clark?”
“Of course.”
He shook his head. “We’ve lost two good men and a DC-6, and now we’ve trashed another very expensive engine I just overhauled, and the prop, and done major sheet metal damage to the wing.”
She was sitting forward in alarm and searching his slightly craggy face. “He is going to make it, isn’t he?”
Jerry nodded. “Oh, he’ll make it, all right. I’m just…calculating the damage, in terms of money and contract compliance. And…the human costs, of course.”
She watched him silently. “How much, you think?” she asked. He never seemed reluctant to answer her questions regarding the business, but the answers were seldom complete, especially when it came to his financial gymnastics. She knew he’d danced around the abyss of bankruptcy more than a few times in his career, so when things were tight, she was never certain whether the wolf was at their door, or already dining in their parlor.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. More than we can afford, probably, but I’ll think of something. I still can’t believe we lost Jeff.”
“And the copilot,” she prompted.
“Of course. I’ve…just forgotten his name. Oh, yeah. Mike Head.”
Jerry looked forward at his empty captain’s seat in the cockpit of the small corporate jet. He usually flew the Lear on takeoff and departure, then came back and worked in the cabin, letting the copilot do the flying at altitude and returning before descent. The Lear had only enough fuel to stay aloft a little over two hours, but they could make Denver from Modesto in one hop.
Jerry’s left hand flailed the air in a gesture of frustration. “They’re gonna be crawling all over us now, the Forest Service and the FAA and the NTSB and Congress and God knows who. There’s no way we’re going to keep the DC-6s in the air past next week without another round of ruinous inspections.”
“Even if the Jackson Hole fire continues?” she asked.
He nodded, and they both fell silent for a few seconds. Diana reached over and began massaging his neck with her left hand, noting that the muscles were as taut as steel bands. She saw the copilot cast a questioning glance back into the cabin, wondering if the phone call was going to affect his instructions. But she caught his eye and shook her head ever so slightly. He was a fairly new employee and very young, but savvy enough to get the message that now wasn’t the time to interrupt.
Diana could always recognize Jerry’s deep-thought mood. Most of his business career had been a marathon of trying to think a couple of moves ahead in a game that changed its rules from week to week.
Massaging his neck was soothing to her, too, and she let her eyes wander around the once-plush cabin of the tiny 1970 model Learjet as she worked. Like most of the aircraft Jerry Stein owned, the Lear had been purchased toward the end of its useful life for a bargain-basement price and was in great need of constant maintenance. The interior wasn’t shabby, but it was obviously overdue for refurbishment, with cracking leather on the seats, stained headliners, and a tiny galley that didn’t work. But when it came to getting them anywhere in the United States fast, the Lear did the job, and that was all he cared about.
There were, of course, bragging rights available to those who owned a flyable private jet, regardless of its age, and that meant a lot to a former debutante like Diana who could have married more steady money with her Swarthmore degree and her eastern connections—not to mention the twenty-one-year age difference.
But Jerry had been a lot more fun than the men she’d sampled in her postcollegiate years, even if social status, to his way of thinking, was based on how you survived rather than what you owned. According to Jerry, if they had social status anywhere, it was entirely because of what he’d accomplished in the aviation business, not because of how much he’d bought with the proceeds.
While his Wild West show of business management had been amazingly successful, his sartorial style was iconoclastic, and sometimes embarrassing. His penchant for jeans and western shirts versus business suits for almost all occasions was a trial to her, and a trademark to him.
She’d learned not to panic about his roller-coaster wealth, or the apparently endless company names that adorned first one, then another of the dizzying array of corporations and partnerships he owned. The name changes used to bother her, since she knew well some of them were to escape from bad dealings and rocky reputations. But now she took it in stride. Jerry was not a dishonest man, merely an artful dodger, and they had a prenuptial agreement she’d insisted on that made her family trust fund untouchable. At thirty-six and still beautiful, she was wealthy enough to survive any calamity Jerry might get them into—regardless of his ultimate net worth.
Of course, she was always guessing about his net worth, and often wondered if he was stashing money away in some off-shore account.
“Better?” she ventured, noting that his right hand had stopped massaging her leg and was merely sitting there.
“Um-hum.” He was still lost in thought.
Predictably, her family had been scandalized by their marriage plans. But she had evaluated all the pluses and minuses and decided that he was the best of the field of those actively pursuing her. Love hadn’t been a factor—until the morning some six months after eloping when she suddenly raised up on one elbow in their bed in Helena, looked at him sleeping p
eacefully beside her, and realized she had actually fallen in love. How, or why that could happen, she could never decide, but the feeling was still alive and well—as was their insatiable physical passion for each other.
Jerry patted her leg and leaned forward enough to be heard over the white noise of the slipstream at forty-one thousand feet.
“Jim, how soon to descent?”
The copilot turned. “About ten minutes.”
He nodded and unsnapped his seat belt, leaning over to kiss her lightly. “The media could be waiting.”
“I know the drill,” she replied. “And don’t get sidetracked by the business aspect. We have two funerals to help plan.”
IN FLIGHT, TANKER 84
Clark Maxwell’s left arm was aching from the constant twenty pounds of left bank pressure he was maintaining on the control yoke, and he desperately needed something to drink. Coffee, water, anything would do, but there was no time for either of them to run back to the ice chest. The last of Jackson Lake had already disappeared under the nose and another ten minutes lay between them and the field at West Yellowstone.
“Why don’t you let me take it for a few minutes?” Rusty asked.
Clark nodded, relinquishing the yoke as the copilot substituted his own muscles.
It was easy to trust Rusty, and not just because they’d flown five seasons together before Clark’s temporarily revoked retirement. Rusty’s penchant for hauling old airliners around as a copilot and turning wrenches on airplanes as a mechanic belied the fact that he was a lawyer who hated lawyering and loved aviation. He’d tried to practice for nearly ten years in what he described as junior-partner hell in Denver. But the pressures had led to a major lifestyle meltdown and a couple of years of drifting, plus a lost marriage, and the scruffy beard he was wearing the day he enrolled in a junior college mechanic’s course.
The junior college had been intimidated enough to try to keep him out when they found he had a B.A., a J.D., and an M.B.A. degree. As Rusty told it, he’d renewed his legal license by ten A.M. one morning, threatened a major federal lawsuit by eleven, and been in his first class by noon in coveralls carrying a Gucci briefcase with nothing but a sandwich inside.
Fire Flight Page 7
