Stuart Woods - Lucid Intervals

“The difference is, if you can prove that Hackett is Whitestone, you’re going to do something terrible to him, and Strategic Services would probably come crashing down without him to run it. Then where would I be?”

“Not at Woodman and Weld.”

“Exactly.”

“If that happened,” Dino pointed out, “you could sell your hypothetical jet and live on the proceeds.”

“Sell my hypothetical jet?” Stone asked. “Never!”

Felicity managed a laugh.

“You should do that more often,” Stone said. “You’ve been working too hard.”

“No harder than usual.”

“Who’s minding the store in London while you’re here?”

“I have a very competent deputy who handles the administrative side. The rest I am doing from the office here.”

“Don’t you ever have to make an appearance?” Dino asked.

“Eventually,” Felicity replied. “It’s not as though I’m the prime minister or some other public figure. I don’t have to appear in the newspapers or on television every day or be interviewed by anyone.”

“How much longer can I count on having you as my houseguest?” Stone asked.

“At least until we get to the bottom of the Hackett/Whitestone riddle,” she replied.

“Then I’ll have to work more slowly,” Stone said.

Stone submitted to the tender ministrations of Ms. Ida Ann Dunn for the remainder of the week. Felicity was little seen and reported no further progress on substantiating the identity of James Hackett.

On Friday afternoon Ida Ann closed the operator’s manual, switched off her projector and handed Stone a thick sheaf of papers. “Your final examination,” she said. “You have three hours.” She tucked the manual in one of her cases. “So you can’t cheat,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

Ida Ann disappeared and came back in two and a half hours. “Are you done?” she asked as she walked into Stone’s office.

“You said I have three hours,” Stone replied.

“I didn’t say you had to take three hours.”

“Give me a minute, all right?”

“Take your time,” she sighed.

Ten minutes later, Stone handed her the completed answer sheet. She placed a template over it and ran down the columns with a finger. “My, my,” she said.

“That bad?”

“That good. One hundred percent.”

Stone sagged with relief, because he knew that if he had missed any answers he would have had to undergo a further lecture on the misses.

Ida Ann tucked the answer sheet into her briefcase and offered her hand.

Stone shook it.

“Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, please meet Mr. Dan Phelan, your flight instructor, at Jet Aviation at Teterboro Airport. And take along your logbook, license and medical certificate.”

“But tomorrow’s Saturday,” Stone complained. “Don’t I get the weekend off?”

“You do not,” she replied, and with a little wave over her shoulder she departed.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING at eight, Stone walked into the pilot’s room at Jet Aviation and looked around. Various uniformed corporate crews sat around gazing blankly at CNN on a large television set. A man in a battered leather flight jacket, dark trousers and a white shirt stood up and walked over.

“Stone Barrington? I’m Dan Phelan.” They shook hands.

“I guessed.”

“Let’s go sit down in a quiet corner for a few minutes.” They took a vacant table and two chairs. “Let me see your license, your medical certificate and your logbook.”

Stone handed them over, and Phelan started with the license. “I understood you’ve been flying a JetProp,” he said. “How come you have a multiengine rating?”

“I got it in anticipation of buying a Beech Baron twin, but then I changed my mind and bought a Malibu, and later had it converted.”

“So the only twin time you have is your training for the rating? Six hours?”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, by the time you take your check ride for your Mustang-type rating, you’ll have a lot more.” He examined Stone’s medical certificate and handed it and the license back to him, then he began flipping through the logbook. “I see you’ve flown in and out of Teterboro a lot over the past few years.”

“I’m based here,” Stone replied.

“That will stand you in good stead,” Phelan said. “Teterboro is the busiest general aviation airport in the country; if you can handle an airplane here, you can handle it anywhere.” He handed Stone a sheaf of copies of New Jersey instrument approaches. “Today, we’re going to fly out west of here to a practice area and do some air work: steep turns, slow flight and stalls. Then we’ll grab some lunch and fly some approaches at other airports. When we’re done, we’ll come back here and fly whatever approach is in use. Got it?”

“Got it,” Stone said.

Phelan opened his briefcase and unfolded a very large photograph of the Garmin G-1000 instrument panel in the Mustang. “I understand you’ve already got a couple of cross-country flights in with Mr. Hackett, so you must be a little familiar with this.”

“Jim did all the avionics operation,” Stone said. “I just flew the airplane. I have read the cockpit reference guide, though.”

Phelan produced a checklist for the airplane and had Stone go through it step-by-step and show him where the controls were for each item. Then they did it again. An hour and a half later, Phelan said, “Okay, let’s go flying.”

They took over an hour to do a detailed preflight inspection of the aircraft, then go through the checklist of the startup procedures, entering the weights of people, baggage and fuel to be carried; getting a clearance; and entering a flight plan into the G-1000. Finally, they were ready to taxi, and fifteen minutes later they were in the air, climbing to 10,000 feet and headed west.

Phelan explained each air-work procedure they would do and then gave Stone the throttle settings and speeds for each. Stone performed them twice-a little shaky on the first try but much more confidently on the second-then they flew an instrument approach into an airport, had a hamburger and got back into the airplane. They flew another half-dozen approaches into various airports, a couple of them by hand without the help of the autopilot, then headed back to Teterboro and flew an instrument landing system to a full-stop landing.

They put the airplane to bed and walked back into the terminal. “You did well,” Phelan said. “You’re clearly up-to-date on your instrument procedures, and you did a pretty good job of hand-flying the airplane.”

“Thank you.”

“Tomorrow we start on engine-out procedures: approaches, missed approaches and landings, all on one engine. It’ll be fun.”

Stone shook the man’s hand, walked back to his car, got in and rested his head on the steering wheel. He felt as though he had been machine-washed and fluff-dried; every muscle ached. He got out his cell phone and called Mei, a Chinese lady, and scheduled a massage before dinner.

BY THE TIME Mei had finished with him, he felt human again and hungry.

Dino was waiting for him at Elaine’s. “You look like shit,” he said pleasantly.

“Let me tell you how I got that way,” Stone said, taking his first, grateful sip of his Knob Creek.

When Stone walked into his bedroom, he found Felicity sitting up in bed, reading from a folder with a red stripe stamped across it. She closed the folder and put it into her briefcase, which was next to her on the bed. “How goes the flying?”

“Pretty good, but I’m exhausted,” he said, peeling off his clothes and getting in bed beside her.

“No playtime tonight?”