Stuart Woods: Hot Pursuit

The flight was predictably smooth for the first hour. They grilled each other, this being more of a first date than a qualifying flight for the insurance company. Pat was from a small town in Georgia, Delano, which somehow had a familiar ring for Stone. She had started flying after college, had flown air taxi and package delivery, then corporate jets, then for an airline. By the time that went bust, she had made captain, and she took herself to another airline. Finally, she had made the break.

“I’m starting a business,” she said. “I’m calling it The Pat Frank Flight Department, something that the charterers and the corporates have as a matter of course, but not the owner-flown jets. I’ll do all the paperwork, keep the maintenance schedule, update the logbooks weekly, et cetera, et cetera.”

“I could use a service like that,” Stone said. “My secretary has been doing all the work, but since she knows nothing about airplanes, it’s hard for her. You’re hired.”

“Great! My first client! Of course, I can’t have dinner with you tonight, for professional reasons.”

“You’re fired,” Stone said.

“Well, I guess I can make an exception, your being my first client and all.”

“You’re rehired.” Stone looked at the multi-function display before him. “There’s the weather the forecast predicted,” he said, pointing at a green mass ahead of them that was dotted with yellow areas. “We’ll fly over the bulk of it, but when we start our descent on the arrival procedure, we’ll have to contend with it and maybe with some ice, too. And we’ll need an instrument approach.”

“Your airplane is equipped to deal with it,” she reminded him.

Stone tapped an icon or two and brought up the weather at Teterboro. “Six-hundred-foot ceiling, six miles of visibility, wind 040 at twelve, gusting twenty,” he read. “No problem. We’ll keep an eye on it, though.”

“There was some light snow in the forecast, too,” Pat said.

They entered into the arrival procedure, a loop to the north, then back to the south, that the air traffic controllers used to line up and keep distance between the conga line of airplanes that would be landing at TEB. ATC gave them a lower altitude, and Stone turned on the ice prevention systems that heated the leading edges of the wings and tail and the windshield. Five minutes later they were in Instrument Meteorological Conditions and blind, except for their instruments. They continued their descent on the arrival, and at the end of it they were vectored to the Instrument Landing System for runway 6 at Teterboro. ATIS told them that the weather had deteriorated to three hundred feet and two miles of visibility, with blowing snow.

Once established on the ILS, Stone watched the indicator for the glide slope and put down the landing gear. The three green lights that indicated that the tricycle gears were down did not come on. “Uh-oh,” he said, then recycled the gear switch. “I guess we’re going to have to blow the gear down.” There was a tank of nitrogen aboard that could be used to force the gear down in the event of a hydraulic failure.

Pat reached forward and twisted the knob that selected night or day flying to “day,” and the three green gear lights appeared. “Some ass turned it to ‘night,’” she said. “And the daylight washed out the dimmed lights.”

“That’s a relief,” Stone said.

She read out the landing checklist, and the autopilot flew them down the glide slope; all Stone had to do was control the airspeed. At three hundred feet they broke out of the clouds, into light snow, and the runway lay directly ahead of them. At 160 feet, Stone turned off the autopilot and landed the airplane smoothly by hand.

“And your first landing is a greaser!” Pat said. “You’ve just passed your insurance check ride!”

Stone called ground control, requested taxi to Jet Aviation, where he kept the airplane, and was given the route. Five minutes later Pat was reading the shutdown checklist, and he was shutting down the engines and switching everything off. He noted the flight time on the Hobbs meter and entered it into his logbook. “We’re home,” he said.

Pat left the cockpit, opened the airplane’s door, and kicked down the steps, which lowered themselves gently into place. Stone went to the rear luggage compartment, switched off the battery to conserve power, and handed a lineman the engine and pitot covers for installation. He locked up and went to the forward luggage compartment, removed his and Pat’s bags, and handed them to another lineman, who put them onto a cart.

“Put her in the barn,” Stone said to the other lineman, then he and Pat followed their luggage through the Jet Aviation terminal and out to where Stone’s factotum, Fred, waited with the Bentley.

“Good flight, sir?” Fred asked.

“A great one, Fred. This is Pat Frank.”

Fred tipped an imaginary cap, and they got into the car.

Pat produced her phone. “I didn’t book a hotel for tonight,” she said.

“Don’t bother,” Stone replied. “I have guest rooms.”

“How kind you are!”

“Saves picking you up for dinner.”

Half an hour later they were in the garage, and while Fred dealt with the luggage, they took the elevator to the third floor. “We’ll put you in here,” Stone said, showing her to the largest guest room. “I’m right down the hall.” He looked at his watch: “You’ve got two hours to get gorgeous,” he said. “We’ll meet in my study for a drink at seven — it’s on the first floor.”

“How are we dressing?” she asked.

“You mean you have more than one dress in that little bag?”

“The option is jeans.”

“Wear the dress. See you at seven.” He walked down the hall to the master suite.

At seven he was reading the New York Times in his study when she walked in, clad in a tight LBD and sporting pearls and very high heels.

“You got gorgeous,” Stone said. “What would you like to drink?”

“What are you drinking?”

“Bourbon. Knob Creek. I have gimlets and martinis already made and in the freezer, and most other drinks, but I can’t make a banana daiquiri.”

“I’m a Georgia girl,” she said. “I’ll have the bourbon.”

He poured them both a drink. “Some friends are meeting us at the restaurant,” he said. “Dino and Vivian Bacchetti. She’s called Viv.”

“Fine.”

“In my extreme youth I was a cop, and Dino was my partner. Now I’m a failed cop, and Dino is the police commissioner of the City of New York.”

“How did you fail?”

“I got shot in the knee, and I disagreed with my betters on the handling of an important case. They used the knee as an excuse to dump me.”

“And how did you go about becoming a lawyer?”

“I was already a law-school graduate. I took a cram course and passed the bar, and an old school buddy had a job waiting for me.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“I was lucky. I had inherited this house from a great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, and I was renovating it, doing most of the work myself. I was more than a year into the job, my savings were gone, and I was in debt to the bank and a lot of building suppliers, when I ran into my old friend Bill Eggers, of Woodman & Weld. The rest, as they say, is history.”

“A pretty successful history,” she said, looking around. “The place is beautiful.”

“Fairly successful. When my wife died I came into some money that had been made by her first husband.”

“Thus, the gift of a jet to your son.”

“Thus. How do you happen to be moving into an apartment in New York tomorrow?”

“My sister got married and moved to the suburbs. She owned an apartment and rented it, until I could clear the decks for the move. The tenant’s lease is up tomorrow. I’ll probably buy the place from my sister, eventually.”