Start the Chase

Chapter 2

2

She repowered the radio. It appeared to work, but no one was responding out here in the middle of the wilderness. Her mobile phone had no signal indicators. While national cellular coverage had improved greatly in the first three years of the new millennium, as far as she knew there was still no coverage between Washington State and Iowa. And she was in central Idaho.

From her current position along a valley floor, no airport was going to detect her emergency signal. And the transponder only responded when it was probed by a ground radar.

She switched it off to save the battery.

In case the crash hadn’t been sufficiently violent—five to seven g’s were required to trigger the ELT—she turned the Emergency Locator Transmitter from ARM to ON. Up above, the sky was a blank blue. She hadn’t crashed along a major air route. It would be chance at best if an airliner spotted her signal. That meant it was up to a satellite pass, that was listening on the correct frequency, to pick up a weak signal from the ground. It was the best she could do with the existing systems.

What next? What next?

Wracking her brain didn’t help.

Her hands had drifted back to the yoke to hold on; their grip slowly tightened once more until she could feel her throbbing pulse in every finger.

Perfect. Just perfect. She felt as if she’d been holding on too tightly for years.

Ever since her parents’ death on flight TWA 800 when she was thirteen, she’d studied NTSB reports. But when the National Transportation Safety Board ran an investigation, it generally stopped tracking events at the same time the plane stopped moving, unless there was a fire.

Miranda looked out both windows and sniffed the air.

No sign of fire.

She had no guidance from them of what to do next.

Is that what they’d teach her at the NTSB Academy? The first class started in just three days and she didn’t want to be late. She’d left an extra day for the cross-country flight to ensure that she wouldn’t be.

She looked at the clock. She should be over Missoula, Montana by now. They had an airport. She could have landed there if her plane had failed now.

But it hadn’t.

It had failed here.

At what time? She hadn’t noted the time.

She wouldn’t be able to note the exact time of the crash. Or properly note her flight time in her logbook. Had she been on the ground for five minutes, or fifteen?

It was easy enough to calculate the time from the engine failure to the landing—six minutes. Would it be acceptable to declare the time of engine failure by calculation rather than observation?

To be sure, she pulled out the Seattle and the Great Falls Sectional Aeronautical Charts, her ruler, and a notepad. She had her departure time from the airport on her family’s island in the San Juans of Puget Sound, Washington written in her log book.

Four minutes from engine start to takeoff. No, seven. She’d had to wait for a doe and her young fawn to clear the runway before she departed.

She calculated climb rates at present fuel loads and distance traveled. At economy cruise she would have had a transit time of two hours and eight minutes to her position near Trapper Peak. The descent, she back-calculated the six minutes of the gliding descent.

Miranda studied the dashboard clock, then double-checked it against her watch.

Was it a reasonable assumption that she’d crashed twenty-three minutes ago?

She didn’t think so. Her best estimate was less than five minutes had elapsed.

Then she noticed that she could see her breath in the cabin and had to suppress a shiver. It was unlikely for the plane to cool so much in just five minutes, or even twenty-three.

And how long had it taken her to do the calculations. Time always slipped by so easily when she was working on math or cryptography.

So, she noted down the calculated time, and then added a footnote of the eighteen-minute differential, then attached her calculations to the logbook in case an FAA inspector ever had any questions about the accuracy of her accumulated flight hours.

She made a second copy for the Accident Report file. If only she’d thought to bring a manila folder so that she could start one properly. But, beyond general preparedness for a cross-country flight, she hadn’t thought ahead about the possibility of a crash. It wasn’t a mistake she’d make again.

Once she’d completed that and restowed everything properly, she reached into the back seat and retrieved her jacket.