The Rescue Pilot

Chapter 3

Dinner worked out quite well, given the arduous conditions outside. At least they weren’t going to starve, Rory thought. Cait even managed to swallow a cup of soup and another cup of heavily sweetened tea. This time she asked to join them in the cabin.

Rory’s heart swelled almost to breaking. As soon as she bent to lift her sister, Chase appeared and did it for her.

“Nice you can join us, little lady,” he said as he carried her, wrapped in her blankets, to one of the chairs near the table. “You get too tired, just let me know, okay? And if you want, the seats recline all the way so you can lie down out here.”

“Thanks,” Cait managed.

Rory could only look at Chase with gratitude. He had stepped in at the right moment and said exactly the right thing. Not too much, not too little.

And Cait looked content for the first time since Rory had come home to learn how sick she was. These plane seats were wider than normal and deeply padded, so Cait seemed to have no difficulty curling up in a way that made her feel comfortable. She didn’t say much, and occasionally she seemed to doze, but she also paid more attention than usual to the conversation around her. She even accepted another cup of tea, and this time held it herself.

There was hope, Rory thought. There was definitely hope. She glanced toward Chase and saw the same expression in his eyes that she was feeling. He, too, seemed to see something promising in Cait’s effort.

But the wind and the cold soon reminded them that this was no social occasion. The plane groaned loudly again as a particularly strong gust buffeted it, but nothing moved. They’d be buried by morning, Rory thought. Completely and totally buried in snow. Then what? Panic fluttered through her in a single quick wave.

“Let’s get down more blankets,” Chase said. “Then I think we should bundle in for the night. I’ll take first watch.”

“Watch?” Rory asked.

He nodded. “We’re going to burn at least one candle all night—more if necessary. Someone has to keep an eye on it. We also need to watch the cabin temperature so we don’t turn into popsicles overnight.”

Cait had dozed off again. “She’ll be warmer here, won’t she?”

“Probably,” he answered. “As long as she’s comfortable, I’d leave her.”

“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Wendy said. “Yuma and I are just going to curl up together on these seats right behind her. Why don’t you take the chance to stretch out in the back for a bit?”

“I don’t feel sleepy,” Rory admitted. Not in the least. Her mind wouldn’t stop racing; she had too many worries.

“Fine,” Chase said. “You can come up front and keep first watch with me. Make sure I don’t fall asleep.”

She almost offered to stand watch in his stead, but caught herself just in time. He was the captain of this plane, after all, and she suspected that meant pretty much the same thing in the air as at sea. And while she didn’t defer to men simply because they were men, she did defer to rank unless given good reason not to. There was just no point in stepping on some toes.

“Thanks, I think I will.”

Maybe it would ease the terror at the back of her mind, the terror that they wouldn’t be found in time to save Cait. She’d seemed better for a while, but Rory knew how illusory that could be.

They settled in the two cockpit chairs with the accordion door closed behind them. There was no light at all, except one small red one.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Control for the emergency lights. I can operate them manually when I need to. Thank goodness.”

Thank goodness indeed. She suspected that if all those cabin lights had been left burning, the ones that guided the way to the emergency exits, they’d have gone dark for good by now. “Everything else is down?”

“For now. No point wasting any resources yet.”

“I suppose not.” Then, “So you really think a fuel line broke or something?”

“Or something,” he agreed. In the dark, he kept his voice quiet. “We have wing tanks, but there’s a central compartment where the fuel meets and mixes so that the tanks can be balanced. Make sense?” “Yes.”

“We could get in trouble if one tank or the other got used up too fast. We’d not only be struggling to balance ourselves, but we might lose an engine. So everything meets in the middle and fuel is passed back and forth. Considering that we lost fuel from both tanks simultaneously and rapidly, I figure something went wrong in the central holding tank. And at the rate we were losing fuel, I suspect it was being pumped out of the plane.”

“There’s a mechanism for that, right, to empty the fuel?”

“Yes. We can dump fuel for an emergency landing.”

“So that might have gotten screwed up?”

“Maybe. Something sure as hell did, and we won’t know until the NTSB takes a look. I know I got no cockpit warning of any kind until the fuel started to get too low. I’d already noticed the gauges were falling too fast, but no indication as to why.”

“And there should have been?”

“The way these babies are designed, this plane shouldn’t hiccup without giving me some kind of alert. What’s more, once I noticed the fuel dropping, we were over the mountains, airports behind us were closed and I still thought for a while I’d have enough. I never cut it that close, despite the weight of excess fuel.”

“So maybe two things went wrong.”

“So it would seem. But it did happen awfully fast. I’m just glad I was able to get us down in one piece. For a while there, I didn’t think I was going to.”

“I’m glad you did, too.”

She heard him shift, and as her eyes adapted to the near absence of light, except for the tiny bit of red from dash, she could see that he looked her way as he spoke.

“Look, I’m worried about your sister, too. Seriously worried. But if we had to crash in a blizzard, having an intact plane is about as cozy as it could possibly be.”

“I guess. Right now it feels like a damn prison.”

“That, too.” He didn’t argue with her, and for a moment she felt a bit embarrassed by her ingratitude. But then she let it go. Right now this plane was a prison as much as it was a shelter.

“So what exactly do you do?” he asked her.

“I own a consulting firm. We prospect for oil, and supervise initial drilling to ensure that our clients locate the well optimally. Most of my work these days is in Mexico.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“It’s like a great big treasure hunt, in one way. In another it’s a pain.” “Why?”

“Because it’s a man’s world, why else? More so south of the border.”

He was silent for a minute. It was a silence so intense she could hear their breathing. Apparently, between the soundproofing of the plane and the mounding snow, nothing else could penetrate this cocoon.

“That would be rough,” he said finally. “I watched plenty of women pilots face that stuff in the military. At least they had regulations on their side. You wouldn’t.”

“And a whole culture against me. Well, not entirely, but you know how that goes. At one job, I had a curandera come out and promise to place a curse on anyone who gave me a hard time. It was a last resort, but it worked.”

“Can you work anywhere else?”

“Most of the oil in the world seems to be in the wrong places for women to go.”

“But you get hired anyway?”

“I’m good at what I do. It may be a boy’s game, but I play it with the best. So I charge enough to pay some bodyguards, and sometimes to get a bruja, a witch, on my side.”

“Sounds almost like being in a war zone.”

“Sometimes. It’s not the pros who give me trouble, it’s the local hires. Usually they settle down with time. They know where the pay is coming from.”

“But what about that blowout you mentioned?”

“Ah, that. Well, a couple of guys with more machismo than sense didn’t listen when I told them our seismograph readings indicated that we were about to hit a pocket of natural gas. You always hit some gas, and there are precautions to take. I mean, depending on the depth, that stuff explodes out of the well under some huge pressure and a single spark is enough to cause a conflagration. We weren’t ready to open the gas pocket, I told them to wait, but they had some kind of incentive or bet on the line and ignored me. I’m just glad I got everybody else out of the area. Then, of course, we had a messed-up rig and a roman candle to put out.”

“And the guys?”

“They lived. Nice burns, though. I don’t think they’ll ignore orders again.”

She saw him shake his head, though she couldn’t read his expression. “You live an exciting life.”

“Sometimes. Ah, I mostly like the people I meet down there. I love the little towns, the pace of life, the color, the music. Roughnecks are just a tough group anywhere. When I’m viewed as a tourist I have a great time. The problem starts when I’m the boss.”

“I guess I can see that.”

“And it would happen just about anywhere. It’s like anything—you take the good with the bad. So you were a military pilot?”

“Yeah. I flew off carriers.”

She leaned back a little and twisted, trying to see him better. “I read a story about that once. A true story.”

“What’s that?”

“It was in Korea, I think. Some navy and air-force pilots were arguing about whether the navy pilots had a tougher landing to make, and the air-force pilots claimed they could land on a carrier no problem.”

At that a snort escaped him. “Why do I know how this is going to end?”

“Probably because you’ve landed on carriers. I guess they went out and drew the outline of a carrier deck and took turns landing. Needless to say …”

“I can imagine. And the navy guys probably crowed that the deck wasn’t even moving.”

“I believe that was part of it.”

“There’s a part they probably left out, though.”

“Which is?”

“The tailhook.”

Rory wouldn’t have believed it was possible, but she laughed out loud. “You’re right. I don’t think that was mentioned.”

“Of course not,” he said drily. “Look, I won’t tell you it’s easier landing on a moving deck, but with the navigational aides we’ve got and the tailhook, it’s not as hard as trying to land in that amount of space on flat ground without a tailhook.”

“I don’t need a map to get that one.” She hesitated, then asked, “Why’d you leave? You seem too young to have retired.”

“I failed my flight physical. And before you get all upset because I’m still a pilot, let me explain. Flight physicals in the military are rigorous beyond belief. Most guys will fail before they reach thirty-five. So some little glitch shows up, one that won’t keep you from flying, won’t prevent you from getting a job with a commercial airline, but it will prevent you from flying combat missions or doing carrier landings. Those are the rules. We’re still allowed to fly, to keep our flight status, but we’re off the books for actual missions.”

“That seems extreme.”

“Probably not. We do pull a lot of high Gs. Anyway, once I couldn’t make carrier landings anymore, I didn’t want a desk job so I resigned.”

“And built your own little airline.”

“One plane and me, a long way from my own airline, but basically, yeah.”

“And now your livelihood is lying buried in snow on the side of a mountain.”

“So it is.” His voice sounded tight, but then he let out a breath. “The important thing is getting everyone out alive. Then I’ll deal with the NTSB, the company that did the overhaul and my insurance carrier. By the time all that’s taken care of, I would almost bet I’ll be ready to kill someone.”

“You’ll certainly be older.”

A quiet laugh escaped him. “Goes without saying.”

Concern for her sister, which had been eating her alive for weeks now, cracked open just a little, allowing her to feel for him. “I’m sorry. I know how miserable that crap can be. I went through it on the blowout. I don’t know what was worse—dealing with the investigators or dealing with the insurers.”

“They were probably both equally bad. They have the same goal after all—to give somebody else a hard time.”

Another chuckle escaped her. “Oh, yeah. And to pin blame, preferably somewhere that doesn’t cause them any problems.”

“So what did they decide on that blowout?”

“I feared it was going to be pinned on me as long as the roughnecks stuck together. Easier to blame the gringa than the guys you have to work with. I was more than a little surprised to find out that a certain amount of gratitude made them tell the truth, how I had ordered the drilling stopped, and then, when I was disobeyed, cleared the area. At least nobody tried to say I should have halted the drilling myself.”

“Could you have?”

“Short of shooting two men, no. And by the time I got back to the site, it was too late. I’d ordered the drilling stopped that morning, then I had to run over to another site where they were complaining that the hole was dry, and by the time I got back … well, we were minutes from disaster. All I could do was tell everyone to clear out.”

She paused to sigh. “Oil wells stink when they’re pumping oil. Gas is mixed in, of course, but the hydrogen sulfide smell—rotten eggs—is enough to make you gag. There was no smell. They drilled into a pocket of pure methane, and it was odorless. That is so freaking rare. I had no idea they had already broken through when I started shouting for everyone to get away, and screamed again for those guys to stop the drill. No idea. I expected the smell. Maybe they did, too. I don’t know.”

“So the gas was everywhere?”

“Damn near. It couldn’t have been long, though.

Methane is heavier than air. It sinks to ground level. If enough of it had been out there, people would have started getting asphyxiated, and the flash fire would have singed everything at ground level. Instead, we just blew the well.”

She twisted toward him. “That’s why we have to burn off the escaping gas if we can’t manage to capture it. Because it sinks, and when it sinks it’s deadly. In the case of that well, we may have been saved by a good breeze. I don’t know. I’ll never know. I wasn’t there when they initially busted into the pocket so I have no idea how much gas just dissipated on the wind or how little escaped right before the explosion.”

“But why would those guys press on against orders?”

“Because I’m not the only boss. I’m the geologist. I find the oil, I try to keep them on track until they get the field open. There are other bosses, there isn’t anything like unions for those workers, people get paid crap, and if the guy running the drilling operation, say, is getting paid by the well, and not by the hour, he’d have a lot of incentive not to want things to slow down. And he might create incentives for his crews to push on, regardless of safety. I don’t know. I really, truly don’t know. I know what they want me to know, and I know what I can figure out from my explorations. Beyond that …” she shrugged. “The actual business end of what’s happening is opaque to me. I hear rumors, sometimes, but that’s it.”

“Sounds like a dangerous situation to be in.”

“Not usually. Most drillers are cautious and good at what they do. Most of the people working these jobs want to bring in a sound well, not a rocket. We have more problems from faulty equipment than from greedy people. For all I know, the entire thing may have happened because someone didn’t want to take orders from a woman.”

“Will you be going back when your sister recovers?”

She appreciated the way he posed that question. Her chest tightened a bit, but she squelched the feeling. She’d been alone for a long time, and she could handle this situation on her own. She couldn’t afford to show weakness because a stranger was being kind. “I’m not sure,” she said finally. “We’ll have to see how it goes.”

She heard his seat creak as he shifted. “I’m going back to check on the candle, make sure everyone’s okay.”

“I’ll go with you.” She couldn’t stand the thought of sitting here alone in the dark with that one red, unblinking eye. And checking on Cait had become an absolute compulsion for her.

“How come you have so many candles?” she asked him just before he opened the door.