Stuart Woods: Heat

He came to an intersection and turned left, missing a Federal Express truck by inches. There was a soldier at the wheel. Checking the rearview mirror, he saw lots of headlights in the town behind him.

Two minutes later he turned onto the airport road. His hands were nearly frozen to the wheel since there wasn’t much windshield to keep out the frigid night air. The moon came out, and he could see the outline of the big hangar ahead of him, with the Reverend Packard’s King Air parked next to it. He had to get out of this airport before C-130s starting landing on it.

He screeched to a halt next to the hangar, grabbed the plastic bag, got out of the truck and kicked open the flimsy door of the flight office. He vaulted over the counter and played his flashlight on a board festooned with airplane keys, looking for the right one. He found it, then ran out of the office and toward the hangar. He shoved open first one big door, then the other, then the idea of a possible pursuit occurred to him. He pulled the pistol from his belt, and, taking careful aim, shot out the nosewheel tire of the King Air.

“Jesse?” Jenny’s voice called.

“I’m here, sweetheart! Stay in the airplane!”

He ran around to the pilot’s door, tossed the plastic bag into the airplane and leapt in, slamming the door behind him.

“What’s that?” Jenny asked.

“A new life,” he replied. “I’ll explain later.”

He stuck the key into the ignition and groped between the seats for the checklist. Oh, the hell with it, he could remember enough to start it. He shoved the mixture and propeller control forward, flipped on the master switch, and began priming the carburetor. As he did, he looked up and saw, a mile away, a car’s headlights; they were coming toward them at a high rate of speed.

Jesse turned the ignition key and prayed that the engine wasn’t too cold to start. It caught, and after running roughly for a few seconds, revved smoothly.

No time for warmups, runups or checklists. Jesse shoved the throttle halfway in, and the airplane roared out of the hangar. Who could be in the car, he wondered; Coldwater and Casey couldn’t have eluded the invading forces so easily. Could they? He stood on the right brake so hard that the airplane nearly spun back in the direction from which it had come.

The car was moving directly toward the airplane now, and if Jesse tried to taxi to the runway he would collide with it. Instead, he pointed the nose of the plane down the narrow taxiway and shoved the throttle to the firewall. The airplane began to pick up speed. Airplanes don’t have rearview mirrors, so Jesse couldn’t tell where the car was; instead of worrying about it, he flipped in the first notch of flaps and watched the airspeed indicator. He could fly at sixty knots.

Forty, then fifty, then the needle crept to fifty-five. Jesse was aware that headlights behind him were lighting his way. At sixty, he yanked back on the yoke, and the little airplane leapt into the air. As it did so, a car roared underneath it. Somebody had tried to ram him from behind.

He couldn’t see the car now, because he was climbing too steeply. His airspeed was falling, and he pushed the yoke forward to let it rise again. As soon as he had eighty knots, he turned right ninety degrees; never mind waiting for the usual five hundred feet. He wondered if they were shooting at him, if they would somehow cripple the airplane.

He pushed the nose of the airplane down again, wanting to gain speed and put as much distance between him and the airport as possible. Trees rushed past him in the moonlight, fifty feet below, his recent reconnoitering made him feel safe, knowing that there were no high obstacles immediately to the south.

The GPS was still set to the St. Clair airport, so he could watch his distance increase on its screen. At five miles out, still at a hundred feet, he started to climb. He grabbed a headset from between the seats and handed one to Jenny.

“Are you and the girls all right?” he asked.

She pointed at the back seat. “I gave them each some bourbon in tea,” she said.

Jesse looked back. The two little girls were sound asleep under a blanket. He went back to flying the airplane, establishing a cruise climb speed. When the climb was stabilized, he turned to the GPS and dialed in SLC, for Salt Lake City.

Jenny watched him do it. “How far is it to Salt Lake City?” she asked.

“Four hundred and eighteen miles,” he said, pointing to the GPS.

“How long will it take us?”

“About three hours and a half, if there’s no headwind. When we level off, the GPS will tell us exactly.”

He continued climbing. His course was east of south now, so he needed an odd-numbered altitude, plus five hundred feet. He decided on eleven thousand five hundred, for the moment. Later, he’d have to climb to thirteen thousand five hundred, in order to clear the mountains south of St. Clair.

As he climbed, he made a ninety-degree right turn; it would take him off course, but he wanted to look back at the town.

As the airplane came around, he pointed toward St. Clair. “Look at that,” he said.

The two of them stared at the conflagration atop the mountain. Occasionally a shell would cut an arc into the air, like a Roman candle.

“What is it?” Jenny asked.

“It’s the end of Jack Gene Coldwater,” Jesse replied, with some satisfaction. He turned the airplane back on course and dug behind the seat for a chart. Now he had to navigate them to Salt Lake City without coming to a sudden stop against a mountain.

At dawn Jesse was yawning, trying to stay awake. He had expended so much adrenaline in the past few hours that he had precious little to get him through the remainder of the flight. He did an instrument scan to keep himself awake. They had a nice, twenty-knot quartering wind, he thought, since the ground speed on the GPS was that much faster than their airspeed, as shown on the gauge.

They were an hour out of Salt Lake City, and they had fuel for another two hours and twenty minutes of flight. They were in good shape. The only thing that worried him now was a thick layer of clouds about a thousand feet under them. He hoped that would break up before Salt Lake City, because he had no idea how to fly an instrument approach. He checked the back seat; the girls were still sound asleep.

Jenny stirred and opened her eyes. She was turned toward him, a blanket over her, and she pushed it away to have room to stretch.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Okay, I think. I seem to have gotten some sleep.” She reached over to kiss him on the neck.

As Jenny pulled back from him he smiled at her, and he saw her eyes widen. She put her headset on.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She pointed past him. “Look,” she said.

He swiveled in his seat and looked out the left side of the airplane. There, a mile and a half or two miles away, was a bright red shape.

“It’s an airplane,” Jenny said.

“You’re right; I guess we’re not alone up here, even at this hour of the day.”

“What kind is it?” she asked, and she sounded worried.

Jesse squinted at the shape. “Low-winged, looks like a Piper.” He looked back at her.

“Jack Gene has a Piper Commanche,” she said. “And it’s red.”

Now the conversation about airplanes between Coldwater and the Reverend Packard came back to Jesse: Packard had the King Air, and Coldwater had said he owned a Commanche. Something else came back; in the big hangar at St. Clair, the airplane immediately behind the Cessna had been a red Piper. He looked back at the airplane, but the sun was now peeping above the clouds, and it blinded him.

Had the occupants of the Piper seen them? Certainly, the Cessna, given its position in relation to the sun, would be easy to see. Certainly, too, if Coldwater and Casey were in the Piper, they had figured out where he was going. Salt Lake City was certainly the logical airport, if the Cessna was heading south.