Accidents Waiting to Happen (15 page)

***

The professional cursed from the protection of the sun-bleached brush.
 
Where’s he going?
 
Goddamn it.
 
He saw his plans trashed, again.
 
Michaels had survived the drowning in the Sacramento River and it looked like he was going to escape death again.
 
He watched Michaels’ minivan drive out of the parking lot.

His target wasn’t doing what he was supposed to do.
 
From his undercover work at the party, he’d discovered Michaels was meant to be flying this morning, but the view from his binoculars told a different tale, one that didn’t follow the plot.
 
How could something so good go so bad?

Getting invited to his target’s barbecue had been the perfect example of serendipity.
 
He’d only gone to Bob Deuce for background information, but finding out the insurance agent and Michaels were friends was fortuitous to say the least.
 
He could have been knocked down with a feather when Deuce asked him to the party.
 
And it got better when his target and his flying buddy blabbed about their plane—their pride and joy.
 
The plan that came to him was so simple, so obvious.
 

He’d come out to the airfield after the party and gone to work.
 
The plane was easy to spot with its ostentatious paint scheme.
 
All it needed was a sign, “I’m Josh Michaels’ plane.
 
Cripple me.”
 
The lack of airport security made his deed simple.
 
There were no gates or rent-a-cops.
 
He had all the time in the world to do what he wanted.
 

The professional ran over to the aircraft with a few simple tools in his hands.
 
He stared into the nose of the aircraft.
 
It was child’s play to tamper with a light aircraft.
 
All its sensitive parts were exposed.
 
It had pathetic door locks, no immobilizer, no alarm system, nothing.
 
The professional got to work.

He disconnected the unions to the oil cooler in the aircraft’s nose with a pair of wrenches.
 
He snipped the split pins to the nuts on the elevator and rudder and loosened the nuts, just for luck.
 
His work done, he slipped back into the night.

All had gone as planned until he watched his target rendezvous with his partner then walk away, get in his car and leave.
 
The professional wasn’t upset because the wrong person was about to fly the unsafe plane, but because it ruined his good work.
 
Nothing could be done now.
 
He couldn’t remedy the situation.
 

He watched the multi-colored airplane trundle onto the runway, wind up its engine, roar down the runway and lift off for the skies.
 
He took the binoculars from around his neck, wrapped the leather neck-strap around them and returned to his car.
 
Michaels hadn’t been aware he’d parked next to his predator.
 
The closeness of their vehicles amused him.
 
He got into his car and drove off to plan another accident.
 

***

As Mark Keegan roared down the runway, he failed to notice the oil dripping from the Cessna’s cooler hoses.
 
The plane climbed slowly.
 
Mark leveled out at two thousand five hundred feet and saw the world below him.
 
It was certainly a perfect day for flying—the crisp spring day brought with it an endless view of the San Joaquin Valley.
 
He had to take advantage of days like these as often as he could.
 
When the long California summer began, a layer of yellow smog smeared over the landscape would blight every flying day.
 

Josh will be kicking himself when I tell him what it’s like up here
.
 
He enjoyed the solitude flying gave, the world and its problems stayed below while he rode above it all.
 
Once he was in the air, his heart rate seemed to slow by five or more beats.
 
This was therapy, not a hobby.
 

Thirty minutes into the flight, Mark didn’t like the Cessna’s performance.
 
This was the third time he had to apply more throttle to maintain the engine revs and air speed.
 
The aircraft has just been serviced.
 
Nothing better be wrong with it
, Mark thought.
 
Even an aircraft as small and as simple as the C152 cost a lot of money to keep in the air.
 
To Mark’s and Josh’s credit they took every precaution, but something was wrong with this airplane.
 
Nervousness held him like the three-point harness that fixed him to his seat.
 
He checked his coordinates and ETA to Stockton.

Mark’s agitation made him cautious.
 
He made a safety sweep of the instruments for some clue to his plane’s poor performance.
 
He closed his eyes for a moment, took a breath and let it out with a curse.
 
He didn’t want to believe what the oil pressure and temperature gauges told him.
 
His nervousness changed to fear.
 
The two indicators were in the red.
 
The oil pressure had disappeared and the oil temperature was too high.

The dangerous levels meant this was an emergency.
 
Mark had an agonizing decision to make.
 
Did he shut the engine down and make an emergency landing or did he chance it and fly on to Stockton?
 
He checked his position through the Plexiglas window.
 
He had passed over Sacramento and was over empty fields, a good sign.
 
Mark wiped a clammy hand over his dry mouth and tried to swallow.
 

“Murphy, what have you done to this plane?”
 

He wanted to blame someone for the fear he felt; today, it was his mechanic.
 
He avoided the decision, hoping for a miracle.
 
Mark stared at the pressure and temperature needles—they weren’t returning to green.
 
He knew they never would.
 
He had to get with the program and follow his training.
 
His training would save him.
 
He murmured the steps for landing an aircraft without power.

Made keen by fear, Mark’s oversensitive hearing heard every missed beat of the engine.
 
He swore he heard the pistons binding up with every passing second.
 
The plane jolted like a sledgehammer had struck it from beneath as it rode a thermal.
 
Mark’s heart skipped again.
 
For a moment, he’d thought it was the end.

With a shaking hand he initiated the safety procedure. He pulled back the throttle to idle, the mixture to lean, switched off the fuel pump and turned the magnetos key to the “off” position.
 
The prop slowed and shuddered to a halt.
 
The plane began to fall from the sky.

The silence was eerie.
 
As a pilot, his ears had become accustomed to certain sounds in flight.
 
Now, the whistle of the air flowing over the wings was the only sound to be heard.
 
Mark’s heart raced.
 
His sweat chilled him and his clothes clung to his flesh.

Rapidly losing altitude, the plane fell at more than six hundred feet per minute.
 
Mark saw the increasing rate of descent on his gauge.
 
He focused on the crash landing simulations he’d practiced so many times, but this wasn’t practice, it was for real.
 
Josh had always ragged him about his compulsion to plan for the worst.
 
Josh would be thanking him if he were here right now.
 
Mark wished he was here to share the burden of this task, the most frightening of events.
 
A crash landing.
 

Mark quickly established a glide decent that left him approximately four minutes of flight time.
 
He looked out for a landing sight and focused on a field directly below.
 
He would circle the damned thing until he ran out of altitude.
 
He made his distress call to the Stockton Air tower.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.
 
Stockton tower, this is November, two, three, seven, two, niner.”
 
Dread filled Mark’s voice, his words slow, hindered by an inflexible tongue that clung to the roof of his mouth.
 
Relieved the words had come, the safety procedure started, he knew he could do it.
 
The practice attempts never prepared him mentally to deal with the real thing, but he was coping.
 
Silently, he thanked God that his mind hadn’t seized.
 
Everything was going to be okay.

A concerned air traffic controller at Stockton came back and allowed him to pass his message.
 
Mark gave his details—the plane type, the nature of the emergency, location, plan of action, and who was on board.
 
His monotone speech was textbook perfect, his instructor would be proud, although he probably would have complained about his slow delivery.
 
But how many times had his instructor crash-landed?
 
He gave cursory attention to Stockton tower.
 
He concentrated on landing the plane.
 
They could do nothing for him.
 
It was his bird to land.
 
He just wanted them to know where to pick him up.
 
Mark guided the plane on its downwind leg for landing.

The Cessna’s rate of descent increased, increasing airspeed as a result.
 
Mark eased back on the column to get the airspeed under control.
 
Nothing happened.
 
The plane continued to fall at a faster rate.
 
He pulled back on the controls even more.
 
The column moved without resistance.
 
Something else was wrong.
 
Mark stared back at the tail and pulled back on the column again.
 
The elevator didn’t move.
 

“No.
 
This can’t be happening.”

He stamped on the rudder pedals.
 
The rudder didn’t obey his inputs either.
 
The tail-plane was dead.
 
It was still there, but it wasn’t responding.
 

It can’t all be going wrong.
 
He’d kept his panic in check, but he couldn’t prevent it from overwhelming him now.
 
His aircraft was going down and he was just a passenger at its controls.
 
He glanced at the altimeter—four hundred feet.
 
It would all be over in less than a minute.

Mark fought to control the Cessna.
 
The plane descended and the speed increased.
 
Every knot in increased airspeed reduced his chances of survival.
 
With a paralyzed tail, he’d never be able to bring the plane down for a soft landing.
 

The air speed indicator read seventy knots…seventy five knots…eighty knots…

The altimeter read three hundred…two hundred and fifty…two hundred…

Mark stared at the field rushing up at him with increasing velocity, pulling on controls that didn’t comply while keeping his thumb on the radio transmit button.

He screamed, “mayday, mayday, mayday,” over and over again.

***

Josh peeled off the freeway to Bob Deuce’s home.
 
He listened to an alternative rock station pump out track after track from their latest play list.
 
He’d passed through Sacramento and was in the residential district of Laguna when the newsflash interrupted the next scheduled record.

“Wow, some tragic news.
 
A small airplane has crashed between Sacramento and Stockton and not very far from Interstate Five.
 
Rescue services have arrived and are at the incident,” the disc jockey said.
 

Josh stamped on the brakes, bringing the Dodge to a shuddering halt.
 
Vehicles behind did likewise, but with angry hands on horns.
 
Fortunately, nobody hit each other. Tires fighting for traction on the asphalt, Josh made a U-turn on the two-lane blacktop.
 
The minivan roared off in the direction of I-5.

Josh instinctively knew the downed aircraft was his and he had to see if Mark was okay.
 
Not a believer in clairvoyance, premonitions or anything else found on the X-files, he still knew the news report was linked to him.
 
Without a care for himself and other road users, Josh tore along the interstate.
 
He listened to the rest of the DJ's announcement for the approximate location site.
 
He kept his eyes trained on the fields to either side of the four-lane highway.
 
To his left he saw drivers rubbernecking out of their vehicles at something in the field.