The Rescue Pilot

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?”