Miranda Chase

Chapter 4

Six days later

Boeing Field, Seattle

Elevation 17’

“Caravan 34Z, cleared for straight-out departure. Runway 32 Right. Climb and maintain fifteen hundred.”

Larry Block didn’t answer the Boeing Field Tower. With five hundred flights a day off their two runways, they didn’t want a radio call, they wanted you gone.

He eased the throttle lever forward, released the brakes, and rolled down the morning-shadowed runway. Right on schedule, they’d be climbing into the sunrise in moments.

“You’re in for a sweet ride,” he told the passenger in the copilot’s seat. The Cessna 208 Caravan was rated for nine passengers but had ten seats because everyone except the FAA had certified it for all ten. He never flew with a copilot, and therefore one lucky passenger got the sweet seat rather than being stuck in the middle of the cramped triple at the rear. He’d considered ripping it out, but it was a bonus space for the rear passengers. To keep it fair, he always let the passenger with the closest birthday sit up front. It had already gotten him several extra tourists who came back on their birthday to get the seat.

“Awesome!” Stephen’s thirtieth was only three days away. He was practically vibrating with excitement.

It was the first flight of the day, “The Sunrise Tulip Tour.” Bless Marie. His wife was great at marketing.

No plane liked to fly the way a Caravan did. Sixteen hundred feet down the runway at seventy knots, Larry eased back on the wheel and the plane floated aloft. To the left was all Boeing: big hangars and a line of parked jets undergoing customization or awaiting repairs. To the right lay the two flight schools, the terminal building with its tower, and his own little tour operation.

Larry Block waggled his wings to wave at Marie, who always watched from the office window—no better woman anywhere. She’d stuck with him through the service years while he’d been flying as a crew chief on C-130 Hercules cargo lifters in and out of war zones. Now he’d done his twenty years, gotten his pension, and they were in the good times.

He and his daughter had earned their commercial licenses together just in time for the spring tours. If business kept building like this, they’d be able to afford a second plane. Then, instead of having to take turns, the two Blocks of “Around the Block Air Tours” could fly simultaneously, even offering personal aerial photos from the other plane—for a fee of course. Another one of Marie’s great ideas.

“Wow!” Stephen gasped out.

As they climbed above South Seattle’s light industrial area, the city came into view just as the first sunlight peeked over the Cascade Mountains to light the tops of the downtown towers. Seattle was a shadowed spread, climbing the steep hills, wrapped in a crescent around the most beautiful bay in the world.

It was one of those crystal blue spring days, the white-capped Olympic Mountains to the west shone as bright as torches, and the even more impressive Cascades still silhouetted to the east.

He could hear the camera shutters snapping from the passengers behind him.

So could Stephen in the right seat. He jolted in surprise, grabbed his bag from where he’d stuffed it at his feet, and dug out a big SLR camera with a forearm-long lens. Then he jammed the bag back down.

Larry glanced over to make sure Stephen had followed instructions to keep it well clear of the rudder pedals as he’d instructed. Stephen had. The knapsack was tucked against the sidewall and he’d planted a foot on it to keep it there. Good man.

They were at a thousand feet over the Seattle waterfront. Larry eased the nose down to level the plane for a moment so that Stephen could get the best shot of the Space Needle rising from Seattle Center at the north end of downtown. At the moment, only the top saucer shape was sunlit, so it really did look like a UFO hovering over downtown.

Stephen’s camera made that zip-zip-zip rapid-fire photo sound. Oh God, he was one of those types. Larry made a bet with himself that the guy would shoot a thousand photos in the one-hour flight and never actually look at anything with his own eyes. He just hoped that Stephen didn’t run out of memory before they reached the La Conner tulip fields—the main selling point of this flight.

Right now, hundreds of acres of tulips color-blocked the Skagit Valley in glorious swathes of color. They weren’t quite peaked yet but they were close enough to wow the customers and ensure that he had four more full planeloads scheduled today. Each one, twenty minutes there, twenty minutes circling over the flowers and the San Juan Islands, twenty minutes back.

They were over Elliot Bay at the moment, and the curve of the shoreline placed the Space Needle directly ahead—a perfect shot.

Larry eased back on the controls to continue his climb to fifteen hundred feet as Stephen’s camera continued making its steady buzz of zip-zip-zip sounds.

Except the control wheel wouldn’t move.

He could twist it a little side-to-side, but it definitely wouldn’t pull back for a climb.

Had something broken?

He hadn’t heard anything, not that he could have over the stuttering barrage of Stephen’s cameras.

Airspeed was good. Engine RPM was fine. No imminent stall or engine failure.

He kicked the rudder a little to the right and left, he still had good control.

But the wheel wouldn’t pull toward him.

“Something wrong?” Stephen stopped with the camera and looked over at him.

“Not a thing.” Panicking a customer was never a good idea. But his voice must have given him away.

“What’s wrong?” Stephen’s voice was loud enough that Larry could hear it being picked up by the passengers behind them.

Larry shut out their escalating questions and focused on the problem.

The more he struggled to pull the wheel toward him, the more it moved in and angled the nose down.

down.Trim! He adjusted the trim to raise the nose.

No change.

From a high point of one thousand feet reached sixty-two seconds into the flight, the Cessna 208 Caravan began descending.

At seventy-three seconds, Larry Block gave up on trying to climb the plane as they descended toward seven hundred feet.

They were now exactly even with the top of the Space Needle, which towered six hundred and five feet above Seattle Center’s hundred-and-fifteen-foot elevation. It seemed to be drawing them like a giant magnet and he couldn’t get the plane to climb away.

If this was a C-130, he’d know exactly what had gone wrong. Every noise and shimmy of the four-engine Hercules was in his blood after twenty years.

He’d owned the Caravan for less than three months. It was a much simpler aircraft, yet he had no idea what had happened.

One mile—seventeen seconds—from the Space Needle, Larry knew this wasn’t going to end well.

Crashing into the Space Needle wasn’t an option.

He’d turn for the water and do his best there. The plane’s fixed tricycle landing gear would catch the waves and probably destroy the aircraft, but it was better than ramming into a crowd of civilians.

Except now the plane wouldn’t even turn.

The wheel was jammed and he couldn’t move it.

At eighty-seven seconds into the flight and three hundred and seven feet above sea level, he was now aimed at the center of the Space Needle.

He kicked the right rudder and managed to steer the plane aside and miss the tower, carving a circular arc around the spindly tower legs that looked so impossibly substantial this close up. The flight, captured on video by an early morning jogger, would make national news, and win several photography competitions for its drama and beauty.

The arc continued.

At ninety-three seconds and an elevation of two hundred and thirty-two feet, he glanced over at the petrified Stephen braced in his seat. He wanted to apologize that he’d never get to see his birthday. That—

Then Larry Block spotted what had happened to the controls.

At ninety-four seconds, two hundred and thirteen feet above sea level, and traveling at one hundred and eighty-three knots—two hundred and eleven miles an hour— the Cessna 208 Caravan slammed into the stage tower of McCaw Hall, Seattle’s opera house.