Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

The cargo? The U.S. Medical shipment weighed exactly 478 pounds. That would buy them some miles.

But even as she considered this, she knew she’d never do it. If there was any chance she could salvage the flight, salvage the Company, she would.

Come on, Lincoln Rhyme, she thought, give me an idea. Give me… Picturing his room, picturing sitting beside him, she remembered the tiercel – the male falcon – lording about on the window ledge.

“Brad,” she asked abruptly, “what’s our glide ratio?”

“A Lear thirty-five A? No idea.”

Percey had flown a Schweizer 2-32 sailplane. The first prototype was built in 1962 and it had set the standard for glider performance ever since. Its sink rate was a miraculous 120 feet per minute. It weighed about thirteen hundred pounds. The Lear she was flying was fourteen thousand pounds. Still, aircraft will glide, any aircraft. She remembered the incident of the Air Canada 767 a few years ago – pilots still talked about it. The jumbo jet ran out of fuel due to a combination of computer and human error. Both engines flamed out at forty-one thousand feet and the aircraft became a 143-ton glider. It crash-landed without a single death.

“Well, let’s think. What’d the sink rate be at idle?”

“We could keep it at twenty-three hundred, I think.”

Which meant a vertical drop of about thirty miles per hour.

“Now. Calculate if we burned fuel to take us to fifty-five thousand feet, when would we deplete?”

“Fifty-five?” Brad asked with some surprise.

“Roger.”

He punched in numbers. “Maximum climb is forty-three hundred fpm; we’d burn a lot down here, but after thirty-five thousand the efficiency goes way up. We could power back…”

“Go to one engine?”

“Sure. We could do that.”

He tapped in more numbers. “That scenario, we’d deplete about eighty-three miles short. But, of course, then we’d have altitude.”

Percey Clay, who got A’s in math and physics and could dead reckon without a calculator, saw the numbers stream past in her head. Flame out at fifty-five thousand, sink rate of twenty-three… They could cover a little over eighty miles before they touched down. Maybe more if the headwinds were kind.

Brad, with the help of a calculator and fast fingers, came up with the same conclusion. “Be close, though.”

God don’t give out certain.

She said, “ Chicago Center. Lear Foxtrot Bravo requesting immediate clearance to five five thousand feet.”

Sometimes you play the odds.

“Uh, say again, Foxtrot Bravo. ”

“We need to go high. Five five thousand feet.”

The ATC controller’s voice intruded: “ Foxtrot Bravo , you’re a Lear three five, is that correct?”

“Roger.”

“Maximum operating ceiling is forty-five thousand feet.”

“That’s affirmative, but we need to go higher.”

“Your seals’ve been checked lately?”

Pressure seals. Doors and windows. What kept the aircraft from exploding.

“They’re fine,” she said, neglecting to mention that Foxtrot Bravo had been shot full of holes and jerry-rigged back together just that afternoon.

ATC answered, “Roger, you’re cleared to five five thousand feet, Foxtrot Bravo. ”

And Percey said something that few, if any, Lear pilots had ever said, “Roger, out of ten for fifty-five thousand.”

Percey commanded, “Power to eighty-eight percent. Call out rate of climb and altitude at forty, fifty, and fifty-five thousand.”

“Roger,” Brad said placidly.

She rotated the plane and it began to rise.

They sailed upward.

All the stars of evening…

Ten minutes later Brad called out, “Five five thousand.”

They leveled off. It seemed to Percey that she could actually hear the groaning of the aircraft’s seams. She recalled her high-altitude physiology. If the window Ron had replaced were to blow out or any pressure seal burst – if it didn’t tear the aircraft apart – hypoxia would knock them out in about five seconds. Even if they were wearing masks, the pressure difference would make their blood boil.

“Go to oxygen. Increase cabin pressure to ten thousand feet.”

“Pressure to ten thousand,” he said. This at least would relieve some of the terrible pressure on the fragile hull.

“Good idea,” Brad said. “How’d you think of that?”

Monkey skills…

“Dunno,” she responded. “Let’s cut power in number two. Throttle closed, autothrottle disengaged.”

“Closed, disengaged,” Brad echoed.

“Fuel pumps off, ignition off.”

“Pumps off, ignition off.”

She felt the slight swerve as their left side thrust vanished. Percey compensated for the yaw with a slight adjustment to the rudder trim tabs. It didn’t take much. Because the jets were mounted on the rear of the fuselage and not on the wings, losing one power plant didn’t affect the stability of the aircraft much.

Brad asked, “What do we do now?”

“I’m having a cup of coffee,” Percey said, climbing out of her seat like a tomboy jumping from a tree house. “Hey, Roland, how d’you like yours again?”

For a torturous forty minutes there was silence in Rhyme’s room. No one’s phone rang. No faxes came in. No computer voices reported, “You’ve got mail.”

Then, at last, Dellray’s phone brayed. He nodded as he spoke, but Rhyme could see the news wasn’t good. He clicked the phone off.

“Cumberland?”

Dellray nodded. “But it’s a bust. Kall hasn’t been there for years. Oh, the locals’re still talking about the time the boy tied his stepdaddy up ’n’ let the worms get him. Sorta a legend. But no family left in the area. And nobody knows nuthin’. Or’s willing to say.”

It was then that Sellitto’s phone chirped. The detective unfolded it and said, “Yeah?”

A lead, Rhyme prayed, please let it be a lead. He looked at the cop’s doughy, stoic face. He flipped the phone closed.

“That was Roland Bell,” he said. “He just wanted us to know. They’re outa gas.”

Hour 38 of 45

THREE DIFFERENT WARNING BUZZERS went off simultaneously.

Low fuel, low oil pressure, low engine temperature.

Percey tried adjusting the attitude of the aircraft slightly to see if she could trick some fuel into the lines, but the tanks were bone dry.

With a faint clatter, number one engine quit coughing and went silent.

And the cockpit went completely dark. Black as a closet.

Oh, no…

She couldn’t see a single instrument, a single control lever or knob. The only thing that kept her from slipping into blind-flight vertigo was the faint band of light that was Denver – in the far distance in front of them.

“What’s this?” Brad asked.

“Jesus. I forgot the generators.”

The generators are run by the engines. No engines, no electricity.

“Drop the RAT,” she ordered.

Brad groped in the dark for the control and found it. He pulled the lever and the ram air turbine dropped out beneath the aircraft. It was a small propeller connected to a generator. The slipstream turned the prop, which powered the generator. It provided basic power for the controls and lights. But not the flaps, gear, speed brakes.

A moment later some of the lights returned.

Percey was staring at the vertical speed indicator. It showed a descent rate of thirty-five hundred feet per minute. Far faster than they’d planned on. They were dropping at close to fifty miles an hour.

Why? she wondered. Why was the calculation so far off?

Because of the rarified air here! She was calculating sink rate based on denser atmosphere. And now that she considered this she remembered that the air around Denver would be rarified too. She’d never flown a sailplane more than a mile up.