Up Close and Dangerous (22 page)

He pulled on her waistband again. More than a little stunned, she found herself sitting beside him on the stuffed trash bag. The contents were a little uneven and she listed to one side; he put his arm around her shoulders to hold her upright.

“I’m being honorable here,” he said, slanting a glittering look at her, “and giving you fair warning. But this is probably the only time, so don’t get used to it.”

She started to ask, Fair warning about what? but was afraid she knew the answer. Maybe “afraid” was the wrong word. Alarmed, yes. Annoyed. Terrified. And most of all, excited.

“When I thought we would be rescued, I tried my damnedest not to do anything to scare you off,” he said as casually as if they were discussing the stock market. “I knew you’d be back on your own territory, able to call the shots and avoid me if I made my move too soon. But now, I know rescue isn’t coming, and I have you to myself for days, maybe as long as a couple of weeks. It’s only fair to tell you I plan to have you naked in a day or so, once we’re at a warmer altitude and we’re stronger, feeling better.”

Bailey opened her mouth to say something, anything, then closed it because no words came to mind. Her mind was oddly blank. She should be…what? All her usual responses to a come-on seemed to have taken a vacation, because she couldn’t think of a single one. She tried again to say something, only to once more close her mouth. She should shut him down cold, the way she usually did when people tried to push past her defenses, and it flummoxed her that she couldn’t.

“Is there a reason you’re imitating a guppy?” he asked with a little smile, tilting his head to the side.

Afraid she wouldn’t be able to say anything coherent, she shook her head.

“Any questions?”

A million of them flooded her brain, most of them wordless, all of them things she couldn’t say. She shook her head again.

“In that case, we need to get to work. We have a lot of preparations to make.”

He started to stand, but this time it was Bailey who did the waistband-grabbing.

“I left the pack of aloe wipes, and your clean change of underwear in there,” she said, indicating the shelter. She was glad her voice was working again, though what she was saying seemed completely inane. “You need to get cleaned up, or you’re sleeping outside tonight.”

Five minutes later, she could still hear him chuckling inside the shelter.

Getting her mind back on practical matters was an effort, but she was galvanized by the realization of how much needed to be done before they began trying to get themselves off the mountain.

One of the first things, as Cam had said, was to rehydrate themselves, and that meant melting as much snow as possible, as fast as possible. The rocks he’d placed around the fire absorbed heat, but didn’t seem so hot that the plastic mouthwash bottle would melt, so she packed the bottle with snow and put it on the outside of the ring, against the rocks.

The second thing, as far as she was concerned, was Cam himself. He was woefully unprepared for this weather.
She
had plenty of clothes, not a single item of which would fit him. On the other hand, she had plenty of them, and if one might not fit him, maybe two together would. His shoes were the big problem, but she had the leather from the seats. She needed to make a sort of overshoe that would provide insulation, keep the snow out of his shoes, and give him traction—a tall order, because she wasn’t a cobbler. She couldn’t cut and sew the leather into the proper shape. Neither could she waste the leather by cutting it in a way that wouldn’t work at all.

She got the notebook and pen to try drawing a diagram of how she needed the leather to fold, so she could work out the cuts beforehand. She clicked the pen and drew the point across the paper, but the paper remained blank. The ink in the pen was frozen. Frustrated, she laid it against the warming rocks, too. Some of the snow in the mouthwash bottle had already melted, she saw. No doubt about it, fire was a marvelous thing.

The plane had been sabotaged, and Cam’s logic about who had been behind it was hard to refute. Seth had tried to kill her, and hadn’t cared at all that he would have killed Cam, too. That was difficult to accept, difficult to comprehend. The last two days had been a nightmare of pain and freezing cold and sickness, of pushing herself far past her endurance. But sitting there watching the fire, she felt her spirits rise. No wonder primitive people danced around a fire; they were probably hysterical with joy to have heat and light. She leaned forward, stretched her hands out, and felt the heat on her palms. She would never, ever take heat for granted again.

She felt better. The swelling and redness in her arm had receded. Cam was better. No one was coming to rescue them, so they would rescue themselves. For the first time, she felt confident in her own mind that they would survive, because now they had fire.

And when they got back to Seattle, there was going to be hell to pay.

23

T
HE
J&L
OFFICE WAS LIKE A MORGUE
. S
HEER PHYSICAL
necessity had forced both Bret and Karen to go home for sleep on the second night, but as Karen said as she left, “It feels as if we’re abandoning him.”

The Civil Air Patrol search grids had turned up nothing. Bret had requested all the Skylane’s service records and he and Dennis, the head mechanic, had gone over and over them, looking for any unresolved problem that could have become catastrophic. There was nothing; the Skylane had been reliable, in for the normal maintenance and small things like the pilot’s window defroster.

The man in charge of the search, a stocky gray-haired man named Charles MaGuire, was dedicated but pessimistic. He was a veteran of these searches, and he knew they almost never turned out well. If there were survivors, you knew it almost immediately. Otherwise, if the crash was in a remote site, the bodies, or what was left of them, would eventually be recovered…most of the time.

“The transponder signal was lost…here,” he said, pointing to a point east of Walla Walla. “In the area of the Umatilla National Forest. We’ve concentrated the search grid there. But FSS picked up a garbled Mayday transmission about fifteen minutes after that. A lot of static, only a few words came through. We don’t know if it’s the same plane, but we don’t have anything else corresponding with a Mayday message. Obviously we don’t know the rate of speed or altitude, but we have to assume that the plane was in trouble from the time the transponder was lost.”

“Cam would have radioed then, he wouldn’t have waited fifteen minutes,” Bret pointed out.

“Maybe he tried. Obviously there were problems with the radio, too. I don’t know of any electrical problem that would take out both the radio and the transponder, but an accident of some kind…they were hit by something, maybe.”

“If the plane was capable of staying in the air that long, Cam would have landed it,” Bret said positively. “You’re talking about a guy who never panics, who was practically born with wings.”

“If something hit the aircraft, he could have been injured,” MaGuire said. “The passenger, Mrs. Wingate…was she the type who would panic and be useless, or would she have grabbed the wheel and kept the plane from nosediving?”

“She’d have grabbed the wheel,” Karen said immediately. As usual, she was right there, listening to every word. “And the radio. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the radio. But she was in the backseat; she’d have had to lean over the seats and reach around Cam to get the wheel.”

“Anything could have happened up there. If they lost the windshield, you’re talking about a tremendous wind force, but you can’t drop your speed enough to make any real difference, or you crash. She probably wouldn’t have known how to reduce power, anyway.” MaGuire shrugged. “The point is, something was very wrong with the aircraft. We can think of scenarios, but we simply don’t know what happened, only that something did. If we take the point at which the transponder signal was lost, estimate the distance they could have flown in the length of time before the Mayday transmission was received, then that stretches the search area all the way to Hell’s Canyon. That’s a damn big area, and some of the roughest terrain in the country. My guys are in the air every daylight minute, but this is going to take time.”

Bret was a member of the Civil Air Patrol, but he was excluded from the search for several reasons, the most compelling being that J&L Executive Air Limo hadn’t closed its doors when Cam’s plane disappeared. There was still a business to run, and people who depended on that business for their living. He hadn’t flown the day before because he hadn’t had any sleep, but today he had to take a charter. Karen refused to let the business grind to a halt, even though her eyes were swollen from crying and every so often she would bolt to the bathroom for another crying jag. Bret would make the flight she’d scheduled, or answer to her.

“There’s also the possibility the plane was tampered with,” Karen told MaGuire, giving Bret a defiant look. She was sticking to her theory, regardless of what he said. He wearily pinched the bridge of his nose.

MaGuire looked startled. “What makes you say that?”

“Mrs. Wingate’s stepson called the day before the flight, asking about it. He’s never done that before. They aren’t friendly, and that’s an understatement. She controls all the money, and he wants it.”

Scratching his cheek, MaGuire darted a glance at Bret. “That’s interesting, but in itself doesn’t mean anything. Would the stepson have had access to the aircraft, and would he have known how to sabotage a plane so it wasn’t detectable beforehand?”

“He has some knowledge of planes,” Bret said. “He’s taken a few flying lessons, I think. But whether or not he’d know enough—” He shrugged.

“He could have hired someone,” Karen interrupted irritably. “I didn’t say he had to do it himself.”

“True,” MaGuire admitted. “What about access?”

Bret scrubbed his hand over his face. “This is a small airfield. It mostly serves private planes, and our charter service. There’s a fence around the field and security cameras, but nothing like what there would be at a commercial airport.”

MaGuire walked to the window and looked out, his hands stuffed in his pockets. “You don’t want to think there’s foul play involved, and I have to say, in all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen anything that made me think a plane had been deliberately sabotaged. Until someone presents some evidence that tampering took place, I don’t see any point in worrying about it. On the other hand, it’s always good to think about security. Is someone here twenty-four hours a day?”

Bret shot a look at Karen. She’d narrowed her eyes and looked belligerent, but she didn’t say anything. He guessed that if MaGuire worked here, his personal mail would disappear for the next millennium. “Sometimes, but it depends. The mechanics may work late, or we may have a late flight scheduled. A private plane may come or go. I’d say there’s no predictable pattern.”

“Not knowing when someone might show up would make it difficult to plan something like that. In the absence of, say, a hole cut in the fence or a break-in here in the terminal, I don’t think that’s an avenue of investigation that we should pursue. We’d be better off directing our available resources to locating the crash site.”

That was the correct response from a man who’d had to make hard decisions before, but Karen didn’t like having her theory shot down. She’d accepted that Cam was dead, but she hadn’t yet accepted that there was no one she could blame for it. “Stick your heads in the sand then,” she snapped, and stalked out of Bret’s office.

Bret sighed and dropped heavily into his chair. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “She’s having a hard time accepting this. We both are, I guess. I pulled all the Skylane’s service records and repair write-ups, and the mechanic and I have gone over them looking for something, anything, that could indicate what went wrong. It’s hard, not knowing what happened.”

“I’m sorry,” said MaGuire. “I wish I could do more. These situations, where we know they’re gone but we can’t find them, are the toughest we deal with. People need to know. One way or another, they need to know.”

“Yeah,” Bret said heavily. As if compelled, he picked up the Skylane’s file and opened it again, leafing through each copy of the maintenance reports, the fueling slips, the myriad pieces of paper required on each of their aircraft. Karen had everything on computer, backed up at an online data bank, but in the early days they’d lost all their records because of a catastrophic computer crash and filing their tax reports had been a nightmare. Since then they’d also kept a paper file, regardless of how redundant and archaic. Bret and Dennis had even compared each report with the computer file, to see if anything had been left out or entered incorrectly, something they hadn’t breathed a word of to Karen because she’d have taken their heads off for even suggesting she’d made an error.

MaGuire watched him with sympathy, knowing how difficult it was to accept that sometimes shit did just happen, with no rhyme or reason.

Suddenly Bret stiffened, and flipped back to the beginning of the file. MaGuire frowned, reading his body language, and went to stand beside him. “Don’t tell me you found something.”

“I don’t know,” said Bret. “Maybe I read it wrong. It was the fueling report for that morning.” He leafed through the file again, pulling out the paper that was third from the top and staring at it. “That’s wrong!” he said forcefully. “That’s just fucking wrong!”

“What is?”

“This is! Look at the number of gallons pumped. There’s no way.”

MaGuire looked at the fuel report. “Thirty-nine gallons.”

“Yeah. The Skylane’s usable capacity is eighty-seven gallons. This doesn’t make sense. The fueling order was to fill the tanks. With a full load, he’d have had to refuel in Salt Lake City, so there’s no way he’d take off with less than half what he needed to get there. Even if he had, when he saw the reading he’d have radioed in and refueled at Walla Walla, not flown right past it.”

“Yeah.” MaGuire frowned at the report, thinking hard. Karen had come to the doorway and stood there, watching and listening, every cell of her body broadcasting her alertness. “We need to get in touch with the fuel company, find out what their records show. Maybe this is an error.”