Up Close and Dangerous (Page 54)

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

THE J&L OFFICE WAS LIKE A MORGUE. SHEER 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.”