The Coffin Dancer (41 page)

“Right,” Rhyme said. “It’d give the Dancer a better chance to get away from the airport before it blew.”

“But,” Cooper asked, “why go to all the trouble to fool us into thinking it was one kind of bomb and not another?”

Rhyme saw that Sachs figured it out just as fast as he did. “Oh, no!” she cried.

Sellitto still didn’t get it. “What?”

“Because,” she said, “the bomb squad was looking for a
time
bomb when they searched Percey’s plane tonight. Listening for the timer.”

“Which means,” Rhyme spat out, “Percey and Bell’ve got an altitude bomb on board too.”

“Sink rate twelve hundred feet per minute,” Brad sang out.

Percey gentled the yoke of the Lear back slightly, slowing the descent. They passed through fifty-five hundred feet.

Then she heard it.

A strange chirping sound. She’d never heard any sound like it, not in a Lear 35A. It sounded like a warning buzzer of some kind, but distant. Percey scanned the panels but could see no red lights. It chirped again.

“Five three hundred feet,” Brad called. “What’s that noise?”

It stopped abruptly.

Percey shrugged.

An instant later, she heard a voice shouting beside her, “Pull up! Go higher! Now!”

Roland Bell’s hot breath was on her cheek. He was beside her, in a crouch, brandishing his cell phone.

“What?”

“There’s a bomb on! Altitude bomb. It goes off when we hit five thousand feet.”

“But we’re above—”

“I know! Pull up! Up!”

Percey shouted, “Set power, ninety-eight percent. Call out altitude.”

Without a second’s hesitation, Brad shoved the throttles forward. Percey pulled the Lear into a ten-degree rotation. Bell stumbled backward and landed with a crash on the floor.

Brad said, “Five thousand two, five one five ... five two, five thousand three, five four ... five eight. Six thousand feet.”

Percey Clay had never declared an emergency in all her years flying. Once, she’d declared a “pan-pan”—indicating an urgency situation—when an unfortunate flock of pelicans decided to commit suicide in her number two engine and clog up her pitot tube to boot. But now, for the first time in her career, she said, “May-day, may-day, Lear Six Niner Five
Foxtrot Bravo.
”

“Go ahead,
Foxtrot Bravo
.”

“Be advised, Chicago Approach. We have reports of a bomb on board. Need immediate clearance to one zero thousand feet and a heading for holding pattern over unpopulated area.”

“Roger, Niner Five
Foxtrot Bravo
,” the ATC controller said calmly. “Uhm, maintain present heading of two four zero. Cleared to ten thousand feet. We are vectoring all aircraft around you ... Change transponder code to seven seven zero zero and squawk.”

Brad glanced uneasily at Percey as he changed the transponder setting—to the code that automatically sent a warning signal to all radar facilities in the area that
Foxtrot Bravo
was in trouble. Squawking meant sending out a signal from the transponder to let everyone at ATC and other aircraft know exactly which blip was the Lear.

She heard Bell say into his phone, “Th’only person got close to the plane, ’cept for me and Percey, was the business manager, Ron Talbot—and, nothing personal to him, but my boys or I watched him like a hawk while he was doing the work, stood over his shoulder the whole time. Oh, and that guy delivered some of the engine parts came by too. From Northeast Aircraft Distributors in Greenwich. But I checked him out good. Even got his home phone and called his wife, had them talk—to make sure he was legit.” Bell listened for a moment more then hung up. “They’ll call us back.”

Percey looked at Brad and at Bell, then returned to the task of piloting her aircraft.

“Fuel?” she asked her copilot. “How much time?”

“We’re under our estimated. Headwinds’ve been good.” He did the calculations. “A hundred and five minutes.”

She thanked God, or fate, or her own intuition, for deciding not to refuel at Chicago, but to load enough to get them to Saint Louis, plus the FAA requirement for an additional forty-five minutes’ flying time.

Bell’s phone chirped again.

He listened, sighed, then asked Percey, “Did that Northeast company deliver a fire extinguisher cartridge?”

“Shit, did he put it in
there?”
she asked bitterly.

“Looks like it. The delivery truck had a flat tire just after it left the warehouse on the way to make that delivery to you. Driver was busy for about twenty minutes. Connecticut trooper just found a mess of what looks like carbon dioxide foam in the bushes right near where it happened.”

“God
damn!”
Percey glanced involuntarily toward the engine. “And I installed the fucker myself.”

Bell asked, “Rhyme wants to know about heat. Wouldn’t it blow the bomb?”

“Some parts are hot, some aren’t. It’s not that hot by the cartridge.”

Bell told this to Rhyme, then he said, “He’s going to call you directly.”

A moment later, through the radio, Percey heard the patch of a unicom call.

It was Lincoln Rhyme.

“Percey, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear. That prick pulled a fast one, hm?”

“Looks like it. How much flying time do you have?”

“Hour forty-five minutes. About.”

“Okay, okay,” the criminalist said. A pause. “All right ... Can you get to the engine from the inside?”

“No.”

Another pause. “Could you somehow disconnect the whole engine? Unbolt it or something? Let it drop off?”

“Not from the inside.”

“Is there any way you could refuel in midair?”

“Refuel? Not with this plane.”

Rhyme asked, “Could you fly high enough to freeze the bomb mechanism?”

She was amazed at how fast his mind worked. These were things that wouldn’t have occurred to her. “Maybe. But even at emergency descent rate—I’m talking nosedive—it’d still take eight, nine minutes to get down. I don’t think any bomb parts’d stay very frozen for that long. And the Mach buffet would probably tear us apart.”

Rhyme continued, “Okay, what about getting a plane in front of you and tethering some parachutes back?”

Her initial thought was that she would never abandon her aircraft. But the realistic answer—the one she gave him—was that given the stall speed of a Lear 35A and the configuration of door, wings, and engines, it was unlikely that anyone could leap from the aircraft without being killed.

Rhyme was again silent for a moment. Brad swallowed and wiped his hands on his razor-creased slacks. “Brother.”

Roland Bell rocked back and forth.

Hopeless, she thought, staring down at the murky blue dusk.

“Lincoln?” Percey asked. “Are you there?”

She heard his voice. He was calling to someone in his lab—or bedroom. In a testy tone he was demanding, “Not
that
map. You know which one I mean. Well, why would I want that one? No, no ...”

Silence.

Oh, Ed, Percey thought. Our lives have always followed parallel paths. Maybe our deaths will too. She was most upset about Roland Bell, though. The thought of leaving his children orphans was unbearable.

Then she heard Rhyme asking, “On the fuel you’ve got left, how far can you fly?”

“At the most efficient power settings ...” She looked at Brad, who was punching in the figures.

He said, “If we got some altitude, say, eight hundred miles.”

“Got an idea,” Rhyme said. “Can you make it to Denver?”

chapter thirty-three

Hour 36 of 45

“Airport elevation’s fifty-one eighty feet,” Brad said, reviewing the
Airman’s Guide of Denver International.
“We were about that outside of Chicago and the thing didn’t blow.”

“How far?” Percey asked.

“From present location, nine oh two miles.”

Percey debated for no more than a few seconds, nodded. “We go for it. Give me a dead-reckoning heading, just something to play with till we get VORs.” Then into the radio: “We’re going to try it, Lincoln. The gas’ll be real close. We’ve got a lot to do. I’ll get back to you.”

“We’ll be here.”

Brad eyeballed the map and referred to the flight log. “Turn left heading two six six.”

“Two six six,” she repeated, then called ATC.

“Chicago Center, Miner Five
Foxtrot Bravo.
We’re heading for Denver International. Apparently it’s a ... we’ve got an altitude-sensitive bomb on board. We need to get on the ground at five thousand feet or higher. Request immediate VORs for vectoring to Denver.”

“Roger,
Foxtrot Bravo.
We’ll have those in a minute.”

Brad asked, “Please advise the weather en route, Chicago Center.”

“High pressure front moving through Denver right now. Headwinds vary from fifteen to forty at ten thousand, increasing to sixty, seventy knots at twenty-five.”

“Ouch,” Brad muttered then returned to his calculations. After a moment he said, “Fuel depletion about fifty-five miles short of Denver.”

Bell asked, “Can you set down on the highway?”

“In a big ball of flames we can,” Percey said.

ATC asked, “
Foxtrot Bravo
, ready to copy VOR frequencies?”

While Brad took down the information, Percey stretched, pressed her head into the back of her seat. The gesture seemed familiar and she remembered she’d seen Lincoln Rhyme do the same in his elaborate bed. She thought about her little speech to him. She’d meant it, of course, but hadn’t realized how true the words were. How dependent they were on fragile bits of metal and plastic.

And maybe about to die because of them.

Fate is the hunter
...

Fifty-five miles short. What could they do?

Why wasn’t her mind as far-ranging as Rhyme’s? Wasn’t there anything she could think of to conserve fuel?

Flying higher was more fuel efficient.

Flying lighter was too. Could they throw anything out of the aircraft?

The cargo? The U.S. Medical shipment weighed exactly 478 pounds. That would buy them some miles.

But even as she considered this, she knew she’d never do it. If there was any chance she could salvage the flight, salvage the Company, she would.

Come on, Lincoln Rhyme, she thought, give me an idea. Give me ... Picturing his room, picturing sitting beside him, she remembered the tiercel—the male falcon—lording about on the window ledge.

“Brad,” she asked abruptly, “what’s our glide ratio?”

“A Lear thirty-five A? No idea.”

Percey had flown a Schweizer 2-32 sailplane. The first prototype was built in 1962 and it had set the standard for glider performance ever since. Its sink rate was a miraculous 120 feet per minute. It weighed about thirteen hundred pounds. The Lear she was flying was fourteen thousand pounds. Still, aircraft will glide, any aircraft. She remembered the incident of the Air Canada 767 a few years ago—pilots still talked about it. The jumbo jet ran out of fuel due to a combination of computer and human error. Both engines flamed out at forty-one thousand feet and the aircraft became a 143-ton glider. It crash-landed without a single death.

“Well, let’s think. What’d the sink rate be at idle?”

“We could keep it at twenty-three hundred, I think.”

Which meant a vertical drop of about thirty miles per hour.

“Now. Calculate if we burned fuel to take us to fifty-five thousand feet, when would we deplete?”

“Fifty-five?” Brad asked with some surprise.

“Roger.”

He punched in numbers. “Maximum climb is forty-three hundred fpm; we’d burn a lot down here, but after thirty-five thousand the efficiency goes way up. We could power back ...”

“Go to one engine?”

“Sure. We could do that.”

He tapped in more numbers. “That scenario, we’d deplete about eighty-three miles short. But, of course, then we’d have altitude.”

Percey Clay, who got A’s in math and physics and could dead reckon without a calculator, saw the numbers stream past in her head. Flame out at fifty-five thousand, sink rate of twenty-three ... They could cover a little over eighty miles before they touched down. Maybe more if the headwinds were kind.

Brad, with the help of a calculator and fast fingers, came up with the same conclusion. “Be close, though.”

God don’t give out certain.

She said, “Chicago Center. Lear
Foxtrot Bravo
requesting immediate clearance to five five thousand feet.”

Sometimes you play the odds.

“Uh, say again,
Foxtrot Bravo.
”

“We need to go high. Five five thousand feet.”

The ATC controller’s voice intruded: “
Foxtrot Bravo
, you’re a Lear three five, is that correct?”

“Roger.”

“Maximum operating ceiling is forty-five thousand feet.”

“That’s affirmative, but we need to go higher.”

“Your seals’ve been checked lately?”

Pressure seals. Doors and windows. What kept the aircraft from exploding.

“They’re fine,” she said, neglecting to mention that
Foxtrot Bravo
had been shot full of holes and jerry-rigged back together just that afternoon.

ATC answered, “Roger, you’re cleared to five five thousand feet,
Foxtrot Bravo.
”

And Percey said something that few, if any, Lear pilots had ever said, “Roger, out of ten for fifty-five thousand.”

Percey commanded, “Power to eighty-eight percent. Call out rate of climb and altitude at forty, fifty, and fifty-five thousand.”

“Roger,” Brad said placidly.

She rotated the plane and it began to rise.

They sailed upward.

All the stars of evening ...

Ten minutes later Brad called out, “Five five thousand.”

They leveled off. It seemed to Percey that she could actually hear the groaning of the aircraft’s seams. She recalled her high-altitude physiology. If the window Ron had replaced were to blow out or any pressure seal burst—if it didn’t tear the aircraft apart—hypoxia would knock them out in about five seconds. Even if they were wearing masks, the pressure difference would make their blood boil.