Stuart Woods: Heat

“It’s Jack Gene, I know it,” Jenny said. “What can we do?”

Jesse unfolded the chart in his lap. There were other airports he could head to, but they were smaller towns, without easy air connections to the coast. His eye fell on the southern tip of Nevada. Quickly, he picked up the airport directory and looked up Las Vegas. There were three airports; Las Vegas International, for scheduled service, North Las Vegas, which looked like the place where corporate jets might go, and one other: Henderson Sky Harbor. Sky Harbor was smaller than the other two, and a little farther from the city; its only services were fuel and rental cars. Jesse dialed the identifier, L15, into the GPS and pushed the button twice. They were three hundred and twenty-one miles from Sky Harbor, Las Vegas. He tuned the course into the autopilot, and the airplane turned right, then settled down on the new course. Jesse waited until the ground speed settled down, then checked the time to the airport. The new course did not take as much advantage from the wind: two hours and thirty-one minutes. He looked at the fuel computer for their remaining flying time: two hours and sixteen minutes.

“Oh, shit,” Jesse muttered to himself.

“What did you say?”

“I said, we’re going to Las Vegas,” he said, reducing rpm’s by a couple of hundred. He watched the fuel computer recalculate: they now had two hours and twenty minutes of flying time.

“Is everything all right?” Jenny asked.

“Everything’s fine,” Jesse lied. On their present heading they would cross one of the emptiest deserts in the United States, and Jesse didn’t want to think about being on foot out there. He switched the GPS to its calculator mode; there was some sort of wind speed function in there somewhere; he was sure he had read about it. He found what he thought was the right function; he entered his true airspeed and heading, and the computer showed the winds to be twenty-three knots from 300 degrees. If the wind stayed where it was, they would run out of fuel eleven minutes from the airport; if the wind moved toward the west, ahead of them, they would run out of fuel over an empty desert; if the wind moved to the north, behind them, they might make the airport. Jesse decided to gamble.

He searched his memory for discussions with his first flying instructor about airplanes. What sort of range did a Piper Commanche have? As much as a Cessna 182? More? Less? Jesse prayed that it had less range.

As he thought about this, he looked out the right side of the airplane. There, a mile or so away and slightly behind them, sat the red Piper. Jesse pored over the chart again. There was an airport called Morman Mesa, fifty or seventy-five miles northeast of Las Vegas. If, when he reached Morman Mesa, the fuel computer and the GPS told him he still didn’t have enough fuel for Las Vegas, he could land there.

But it was a small place, and it could be a dead end for him. He leafed through the airport directory until he found Morman Mesa: there was a two-thousand foot dirt strip there, with fuel by prior arrangement, whatever that meant. Probably, you had to have an appointment with somebody. No rental cars. He did not want to land at Morman Mesa.

Jesse got the aircraft operator’s manual out and read about fuel. The wings held thirty-eight gallons of usable fuel each, for a total of seventy-six. Usable fuel . There were another two gallons on each side that the FAA considered unusable, because it could not be depended upon, especially if the aircraft was maneuvering, as in a landing.

An hour and quarter passed. The red Piper remained a mile off their right wing. Slowly, tentatively, the wind swung to the north. Jesse recalculated the windspeed every five minutes. The Cessna’s ground speed inched up six knots. A comparison of the GPS and the fuel computer showed forty-four minutes of flying time left and forty-two minutes of fuel. Morman Mesa was looming ahead, and if Jesse was going to land there he had to make the decision now. He looked over at the Piper. “You first,” he said.

As if the pilot had heard him, the red airplane began a descent. Jesse laughed aloud. “He doesn’t have the fuel for Las Vegas,” he said to Jenny. “He has to land at a jerkwater airport and try to find somebody to sell him fuel. Once we’re in Vegas, he’d need an army of cops to find us.”

Jesse consulted the GPS and the fuel computer again. Either of them could be wrong, he knew; his first instructor had told him often enough never to rely entirely on electronic equipment. He had made his decision. Sky Harbor, Las Vegas, even if it had to be on unusable fuel.

With thirty minutes of flying time showing on the fuel computer a light began to flash. “Low fuel,” it said, over and over. Jesse couldn’t find a way to turn the thing off.

Fifty miles out of Las Vegas, Jesse tuned in the unicom frequency for the airport. “Sky Harbor Unicom,” he said, “This is November one, two, three Tango Foxtrot. Do you read?” Nothing. He repeated the transmission until, twenty miles out, he got an answer.

“Aircraft calling Sky Harbor,” a voice with a thick foreign accent said.

“Sky Harbor, this is November one, two, three Tango Foxtrot. My name is Smith; I’m landing in fifteen minutes; can you arrange a rent-a-car for me?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Smith,” the voice said. “The active runway is three-six.”

Jenny had not noticed the blinking “low fuel” light, and Jesse saw no need to mention it to her. He began to get ready for his landing. He had descended to thirty-five hundred feet and reduced power when he spotted the airport at twelve o’clock. His instruments said he had four minutes to the airport and three minutes of fuel. He was approaching from the north, so in order to land on runway three-six he would have to fly around the airport and turn back to the north. The hell with runway three-six, he thought. I’m approaching from the north, and I’m going straight in to one-eight. He got on the radio. “Sky Harbor traffic, Sky Harbor traffic, this is November one, two, three, Tango Foxtrot. I am short of fuel, and I am straight in for runway one-eight.”

A voice came back, “Tango Foxtrot, this is Whiskey Romeo; the active runway is three-six, and I’m already on base.”

Jesse had the runway in sight now. “Whiskey Romeo and all Sky Harbor traffic, Tango Foxtrot is on a three-mile final for three-six and short of fuel. I say again, short of fuel. I’m landing on one-eight, so get the hell out of my way.”

There was a brief silence. “This is Whiskey Romeo; one-eight is all yours.”

Over the runway numbers, Jesse began to breathe normally again. He taxied toward a row of tied-down airplanes and spotted a space between two other Cessnas. Camouflage, he thought. He turned into the space and stopped. As he reached for the mixture control to stop the engine, it stopped itself. The airplane was out of fuel.

“Okay, everybody, out of the airplane!” he cried.

Jenny woke the girls and, carrying their luggage, they walked to the terminal. Jesse kept a particularly tight grip on the plastic bag.

He persuaded the man at the counter to accept a five hundred-dollar cash deposit in lieu of a credit card, and a hundred-dollar bill for himself, in lieu of a driver’s license. Jesse explained that he had left his wallet at home.

The car was filthy; it appeared never to have been washed, the ashtrays were full and it had eighty thousand miles on the speedometer, but Jesse loved it. No one would give it a second glance. On the drive into town, a happy thought occurred to him: they were in the one city in the United States where no one would bat an eye at the sight of large numbers of one-hundred-dollar bills.