Start the Chase

Chapter 6

6

Her second day in the mountains started less propitiously than the first.

Twenty-four hours ago, she’d already woken, showered, had a final breakfast of oatmeal and dried fruit on the island, then taken off and turned east toward the sunrise.

In the days before departure, she’d carefully apportioned all her perishables so that she’d finished the last of them during her final dinner on the island. It would be months before she returned to Spieden. For now, its lone inhabitants would be the birds, deer, and other fauna.

Last night she’d slept through dinner.

This morning’s breakfast was trail mix. Perhaps it was a good thing she hadn’t fed any to the Steller’s Jay asking its question of, “What? What? What? What? What?”

Her water bottle was half frozen. She slipped it into the inside pocket of her jacket because she’d read that’s how Arctic explorers had kept their water from turning to ice.

The morning was cloudy as she crawled out of the cabin.

Sadly out of options, she selected a hammer and used it to break the ice from the engine cowlings. It would cause additional damage that hadn’t already been caused by the crash. She was careful not to look at the port side wing because she could feel its pain where the tree had pierced it multiple times.

A part of her knew that this plane would never fly again. In fact, it would probably never be recovered from this remote wilderness. In some distant future, when loggers were again harvesting this slope, they’d stumble on the wreckage and perhaps wonder what had happened here.

Yes. Making sure to answer that question for them was the correct course of action.

Still, the first blow was so difficult. This was her father’s favorite plane. It had become her favorite plane.

Even hammering gently at the ice, the engine cowling was soon dimpled with dozens of dings.

By the time she had both cowlings open, a flurry of snow dusted down over the engine. She’d best hurry.

Miranda built herself a flat table of hard-beaten snow—she didn’t want to have any parts she set on it falling into the depths.

She hadn’t yet reached the turbine engine portion of her Aircraft Maintenance Engineer training, but they’d already covered piston engines in depth.

Stage by stage she disassembled the Lycoming IO-360 engine. First the outer layer of starter and alternator. Both turned freely, the belts were unbroken. Then she began testing the electrical system with her voltmeter.

Several times she had to return to the baggage compartment for additional tools.

The snow was becoming a problem, it kept dusting over the parts on her workbench.

Her lightweight flying jacket made an effective snow shield if she grouped the removed parts very closely on her snow bench.

By the time she was using a headlamp, she had the engine sufficiently disassembled that she finally found the problem. A failed cylinder head had allowed a significant amount of fuel to build up. The muffled bang she’d heard had been an uncontrolled explosion of the excess fuel. The piston hadn’t survived. It would take a great deal of metallurgy to determine if it was a fault in the manufacture, or there had been excessive wear that hadn’t been spotted in last year’s overhaul.

But the root cause had been determined, and she had all of the information possible outside of a laboratory.

She could proceed with writing the report now.