Heat

Chapter 61

At dawn Jesse was yawning, trying to stay awake. He had expended so much adrenaline in the past few hours that he had precious little to get him through the remainder of the flight. He did an instrument scan to keep himself awake. They had a nice, twenty-knot quartering wind, he thought, since the ground speed on the GPS was that much faster than their airspeed, as shown on the gauge.

They were an hour out of Salt Lake City, and they had fuel for another two hours and twenty minutes of flight. They were in good shape. The only thing that worried him now was a thick layer of clouds about a thousand feet under them. He hoped that would break up before Salt Lake City, because he had no idea how to fly an instrument approach. He checked the back seat; the girls were still sound asleep.

Jenny stirred and opened her eyes. She was turned toward him, a blanket over her, and she pushed it away to have room to stretch.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Okay, I think. I seem to have gotten some sleep.” She reached over to kiss him on the neck.

As Jenny pulled back from him he smiled at her, and he saw her eyes widen. She put her headset on.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She pointed past him. “Look,” she said.

He swiveled in his seat and looked out the left side of the airplane. There, a mile and a half or two miles away, was a bright red shape.

“It’s an airplane,” Jenny said.

“You’re right; I guess we’re not alone up here, even at this hour of the day.”

“What kind is it?” she asked, and she sounded worried.

Jesse squinted at the shape. “Low-winged, looks like a Piper.” He looked back at her.

“Jack Gene has a Piper Commanche,” she said. “And it’s red.”

Now the conversation about airplanes between Coldwater and the Reverend Packard came back to Jesse: Packard had the King Air, and Coldwater had said he owned a Commanche. Something else came back; in the big hangar at St. Clair, the airplane immediately behind the Cessna had been a red Piper. He looked back at the airplane, but the sun was now peeping above the clouds, and it blinded him.

Had the occupants of the Piper seen them? Certainly, the Cessna, given its position in relation to the sun, would be easy to see. Certainly, too, if Coldwater and Casey were in the Piper, they had figured out where he was going. Salt Lake City was certainly the logical airport, if the Cessna was heading south.

“It’s Jack Gene, I know it,” Jenny said. “What can we do?”

Jesse unfolded the chart in his lap. There were other airports he could head to, but they were smaller towns, without easy air connections to the coast. His eye fell on the southern tip of Nevada. Quickly, he picked up the airport directory and looked up Las Vegas. There were three airports; Las Vegas International, for scheduled service, North Las Vegas, which looked like the place where corporate jets might go, and one other: Henderson Sky Harbor. Sky Harbor was smaller than the other two, and a little farther from the city; its only services were fuel and rental cars. Jesse dialed the identifier, L15, into the GPS and pushed the button twice. They were three hundred and twenty-one miles from Sky Harbor, Las Vegas. He tuned the course into the autopilot, and the airplane turned right, then settled down on the new course. Jesse waited until the ground speed settled down, then checked the time to the airport. The new course did not take as much advantage from the wind: two hours and thirty-one minutes. He looked at the fuel computer for their remaining flying time: two hours and sixteen minutes.

“Oh, shit,” Jesse muttered to himself.

“What did you say?”

“I said, we’re going to Las Vegas,” he said, reducing rpm’s by a couple of hundred. He watched the fuel computer recalculate: they now had two hours and twenty minutes of flying time.

“Is everything all right?” Jenny asked.

“Everything’s fine,” Jesse lied. On their present heading they would cross one of the emptiest deserts in the United States, and Jesse didn’t want to think about being on foot out there. He switched the GPS to its calculator mode; there was some sort of wind speed function in there somewhere; he was sure he had read about it. He found what he thought was the right function; he entered his true airspeed and heading, and the computer showed the winds to be twenty-three knots from 300 degrees. If the wind stayed where it was, they would run out of fuel eleven minutes from the airport; if the wind moved toward the west, ahead of them, they would run out of fuel over an empty desert; if the wind moved to the north, behind them, they might make the airport. Jesse decided to gamble.

He searched his memory for discussions with his first flying instructor about airplanes. What sort of range did a Piper Commanche have? As much as a Cessna 182? More? Less? Jesse prayed that it had less range.

As he thought about this, he looked out the right side of the airplane. There, a mile or so away and slightly behind them, sat the red Piper. Jesse pored over the chart again. There was an airport called Morman Mesa, fifty or seventy-five miles northeast of Las Vegas. If, when he reached Morman Mesa, the fuel computer and the GPS told him he still didn’t have enough fuel for Las Vegas, he could land there.

But it was a small place, and it could be a dead end for him. He leafed through the airport directory until he found Morman Mesa: there was a two-thousand foot dirt strip there, with fuel by prior arrangement, whatever that meant. Probably, you had to have an appointment with somebody. No rental cars. He did not want to land at Morman Mesa.

Jesse got the aircraft operator’s manual out and read about fuel. The wings held thirty-eight gallons of usable fuel each, for a total of seventy-six. Usable fuel. There were another two gallons on each side that the FAA considered unusable, because it could not be depended upon, especially if the aircraft was maneuvering, as in a landing.

An hour and quarter passed. The red Piper remained a mile off their right wing. Slowly, tentatively, the wind swung to the north. Jesse recalculated the windspeed every five minutes. The Cessna’s ground speed inched up six knots. A comparison of the GPS and the fuel computer showed forty-four minutes of flying time left and forty-two minutes of fuel. Morman Mesa was looming ahead, and if Jesse was going to land there he had to make the decision now. He looked over at the Piper. “You first,” he said.

As if the pilot had heard him, the red airplane began a descent. Jesse laughed aloud. “He doesn’t have the fuel for Las Vegas,” he said to Jenny. “He has to land at a jerkwater airport and try to find somebody to sell him fuel. Once we’re in Vegas, he’d need an army of cops to find us.”

Jesse consulted the GPS and the fuel computer again. Either of them could be wrong, he knew; his first instructor had told him often enough never to rely entirely on electronic equipment. He had made his decision. Sky Harbor, Las Vegas, even if it had to be on unusable fuel.

With thirty minutes of flying time showing on the fuel computer a light began to flash. “Low fuel,” it said, over and over. Jesse couldn’t find a way to turn the thing off.