When he was only a few miles from his destination, Atlanta Center cleared him for the VOR approach. Rye told the controller he would cancel his flight plan once he was safely on the ground.
“Good luck with that,” the guy said, sounding very much like he meant it.
Rye signed off and tuned to the FBO’s frequency. “This is November nine seven five three seven. Anybody home?”
There were crackles in Rye’s ears, then, “I’m here. Brady White. You Mallett?”
“Who else have you got coming in?”
“Nobody else is crazy enough to try. I hope you make it just so I can shake your hand. Maybe even scare up a beer for you.”
“I’ll hold you to it. I’m on VOR/DME approach, ten miles out at four thousand feet, and about to do my first step-down. Go ahead and pop the lights.”
“Lights are on.”
“Descending to thirty-two hundred feet. Still can’t see crap. What’s your ceiling?”
“It’s whiteout almost all the way to the ground,” Brady White told him.
“Got any more good news?”
The man laughed. “Don’t cheat on the last step-down, because there are power lines about a quarter mile from the runway threshold.”
“Yeah, they’re on the chart. How bad are the crosswinds?”
Brady gave him the degree and wind velocity. “Light for us, but it’s a mixed blessing. A little stronger, it’d blow away this fog.”
“Can’t have everything.” Rye kept close watch on his altimeter. Remembering the name on the shipment paperwork, he asked, “Dr. Lambert there?”
“Not yet, but due. What are you hauling?”
Rye glanced over at the black box. “Didn’t ask, don’t know.”
“All the hurry-up, I figure it must be a heart or something.”
“Didn’t ask, don’t know. Don’t care.”
“Then how come you’re doing this?”
“Because this is what I do.”
After a beat, Brady said, “I hear your engine. You see the runway yet?”
“Looking.”
“You nervous?”
“About what?”
Brady chuckled. “Make that two beers.”
On his windshield, beads of moisture turned into wiggly streams. Beyond them, he could see nothing except fog. If conditions were as Brady described, Rye probably wouldn’t see the landing strip lights until he was right on top of them and ready to set down. Which made him glad he’d elected to fly the smaller plane and didn’t have to worry about overshooting the end of the runway and trying to stop that Beechcraft before plowing up ground at the far end. Also, he had near-empty fuel tanks, so he was landing light.
No, he wasn’t nervous. He trusted the instruments and was confident he could make a safe landing. As bad as conditions were, he’d flown in worse.
All the same, he was ready to get there and hoped that Dr. Lambert would show up soon. He looked forward to having the doctor sign off on the delivery so he could raid the vending machine—assuming Brady’s outfit had one—then crawl into the back of the plane to sleep.
Dash had removed the two extra seats to allow more cargo space. To save him the expense of a motel room for overnighters, he’d provided a sleeping bag. It stank of sweat and men. No telling how many pilots had farted in it, but tonight Rye wouldn’t mind it.
The nap he’d taken at Dash-It-All was wearing off. Sleeping wasn’t his favorite pastime, but he needed a few hours before heading back tomorrow morning.
He reminded himself to make sure Brady didn’t lock him out of the building when he left for home. Otherwise Rye wouldn’t have access to the toilet. Assuming there was a toilet. He’d flown into places where—
He saw the runway lights flicker through the fog. “Okay, Brady. I’ve got a visual on your lights. Is that beer good and cold?”
No reply.
“Brady, did you nod off?”
In the next instant, a laser beam was shone into the windshield and speared Rye right between the eyes.
“Bloody hell!”
Instinctually he raised his left hand to shield his eyes. Several seconds later, the piercing light went out. But the damage had been done. He’d been blinded at the most critical point of his landing.
He processed all this within a single heartbeat.
The ground would be coming up fast. Crashing was almost a given, and so was dying.
His last thought: About fucking time.
Chapter 2
1:46 a.m.
Pilot training, reflex, and survival instinct kicked in. Despite his blasé acceptance of almost certain death, Rye automatically and unemotionally began to think through options and react in a way that would better his chances to live and tell about this.
And he had milliseconds in which to do it.
Instinctively he eased back on the yoke to tilt the craft’s nose up and pulled back the throttle to reduce his airspeed, but not so much that he would stall.
If he could achieve a touch-and-go on the airstrip and stay airborne long enough for his vision to clear, he could possibly do a go-around and make another approach.
He would like to manage it just so he could kill Brady White.
But below him wasn’t wide-open spaces. If he overshot the runway without enough altitude, he would clip treetops. If he gained enough altitude to clear the trees, he would still have to get above the foothills, and he no longer trusted his ability to gauge their distance. With the fog, and purple and yellow spots exploding in his eyeballs, he was flying by feel.
Likely case: He didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. He couldn’t see his instruments for the frenzied dancing dots in front of his eyes. Without the instruments, his spatial orientation was shot. He could be flying the plane straight into the bosom of Mother Earth.
And then ahead and slightly to his left, he spotted a lighter patch of fog that intensified into a brighter glow that soon separated into two beams of light spaced closely together. Looked like headlights. A parking lot? No, the road. The road he’d noted in the aerial picture of the airfield. In any case, the lights gave him some indication of how close he was to the ground.
No time to ponder it. He went into an ever so slight left bank and aimed the craft toward the lights.
Nose up enough to clear the headlights.
Easy easy easy, don’t stall.
The plane sailed over the lights, stayed airborne for maybe another forty or fifty yards, and then hit the ground hard. The plane bounced back into the air a few feet. When it came down again, it did so on the left and front wheels only. Then the right gear collapsed. The plane slewed to the right, the right wing dipped, and, catching the ground, whipped the craft into an even sharper right turn, which Rye was powerless to correct.
His instantaneous reaction was to stand on the brakes, but if the wheels had been torn off or even badly damaged, the hydraulic line would’ve been cut, so brakes were useless.
The plane skidded off the road and into the woods. A tree branch caught the windshield. The Plexiglas remained intact, but the cracks created a web that obscured his vision all the more.
Then impact.
The Cessna hit an obstacle with such momentum behind it that the nose crumpled, and the tail left the ground before dropping back down with a jolt that made Rye bite his tongue when his teeth clamped.
He was rattled, but cognizant enough to realize that, impossibly, he was on terra firma. The plane wasn’t engulfed in flames. He was alive. Even as that registered, he fumbled for and found the master switch to kill the electrical power and reached down to the floor between the seats to shut off the fuel selector valve.