Killer Summer

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.”

“Out there? Starboard engine’s at forty percent and still burning.”

“That’s where we land,” Cantell said. “That strip. We can make that.”

“You’re suddenly the pilot?” McGuiness stole another look at the MaxViz. He glanced over at Cantell.

“We can do this,” Cantell said. “We put it down there. We make the call. Not so different than what we had planned.”

“The checklist,” McGuiness shouted.

The nose of the jet slowly moved away from the lights of Stanley and pointed northwest.

“Thata boy,” said Cantell.

He then flipped the laminated sheets and began reading aloud.