Killer Summer

54

Walt paced the Incident Command Center. His father had come through with the last-known whereabouts and vectors for the jet. The Mountain Home Air Force Base refused to admit they had radar capable of seeing into the mountains, so none of the information that Walt was given was official. And, since it wasn’t official, Walt wasn’t supposed to know that a pair of fighters had been scrambled to find the jet and shoot it down, if necessary, because it had been stolen. Walt reminded his father that he’d delayed reporting the jet as stolen in order to avoid what to him was a predictable response. His father had told him he couldn’t have it both ways, and to meet him in sixty minutes when he landed.

Evelyn Holmes, a civilian employee of Walt’s who typically ran numbers, approached Walt.

“Evelyn,” he greeted her. He had no time to discuss budget but didn’t want to seem dismissive. As a civilian, she had no business being in the Incident Command Center, but he wasn’t about to throw her out.

“Word is, you’re looking for someone to calculate a flight path.”

“As it’s been explained to me,” he said, not wanting to insult her, “it’s complicated stuff. Speed in the air, speed over ground, rate of descent, the fact that the engines are constantly losing thrust…”

“May I take a look at the data?”

“Sure. I don’t mean this the way it sounds, but, from what Steven Garman says, it is rocket science.”

“I was awarded my Phil-D in astrophysics from Imperial College, London.”

“You have a Ph.D.,” he said.

“And a master’s in material sciences.”

She was working for him for just a few dollars more than minimum wage.

“This valley…” he said.

“My son wanted to compete at the national level in snowboarding. His father and I made some sacrifices.”

“But you’ve been here-”

“Six years, yes. He broke his ankle and blew out his knee in his second season. His snowboarding career was over. But we all fell in love with this place. No way we were going back to southern California.”

He showed her what little information they had on the Learjet.

“I need to predict possible airports and landing strips,” he said.

Evelyn gave a cursory look at the data and grunted. “Okay, I’m on it,” she said.

A deputy knocked and entered the room. He hesitated at the threshold under the glare of everyone’s attention.

“Well?” Walt called out.

“EOC has a report of a UFO… That’s right, Sheriff, you heard me right… Seen south, southeast of Stanley. A yellow light, not running lights, that just hovered there in the sky for about a minute, then sank slowly over the horizon and vanished. EOC thought it might be your jet.”

“Give what you’ve got to Evelyn,” Walt said.

“The guy making the call is retired Navy. Made a big point of that. Didn’t want to be taken as a quack. He gave us his location in lat/long.”

“In order for it to appear not to be moving,” Evelyn said, accepting the note from the deputy, “he would have had to have been directly behind it, looking in its exact line of flight. I can work with that.”

Walt referenced a map that was projected on one of the overhead screens as Evelyn drew a line north, northwest across Stanley.

“There’s nothing out here,” he said. “No airports. There aren’t even roads.”

“Given the jet’s rate of descent, it went down somewhere here,” Evelyn said. She drew a line perpendicular to the first line, like crossing a T. She glanced at the wall clock. “Twenty to twenty-five minutes ago.”

“Went down?” Walt said.