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Instinctually he raised his left hand to shield his eyes. Several seconds later, the piercing light went out. But the damage had been done. He’d been blinded at the most critical point of his landing.
He processed all this within a single heartbeat.
The ground would be coming up fast. Crashing was almost a given, and so was dying.
His last thought: About fucking time.
Chapter 2
1:46 a.m.
Pilot training, reflex, and survival instinct kicked in. Despite his blasé acceptance of almost certain death, Rye automatically and unemotionally began to think through options and react in a way that would better his chances to live and tell about this.
And he had milliseconds in which to do it.
Instinctively he eased back on the yoke to tilt the craft’s nose up and pulled back the throttle to reduce his airspeed, but not so much that he would stall.
If he could achieve a touch-and-go on the airstrip and stay airborne long enough for his vision to clear, he could possibly do a go-around and make another approach.
He would like to manage it just so he could kill Brady White.
But below him wasn’t wide-open spaces. If he overshot the runway without enough altitude, he would clip treetops. If he gained enough altitude to clear the trees, he would still have to get above the foothills, and he no longer trusted his ability to gauge their distance. With the fog, and purple and yellow spots exploding in his eyeballs, he was flying by feel.
Likely case: He didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. He couldn’t see his instruments for the frenzied dancing dots in front of his eyes. Without the instruments, his spatial orientation was shot. He could be flying the plane straight into the bosom of Mother Earth.
And then ahead and slightly to his left, he spotted a lighter patch of fog that intensified into a brighter glow that soon separated into two beams of light spaced closely together. Looked like headlights. A parking lot? No, the road. The road he’d noted in the aerial picture of the airfield. In any case, the lights gave him some indication of how close he was to the ground.
No time to ponder it. He went into an ever so slight left bank and aimed the craft toward the lights.
Nose up enough to clear the headlights.
Easy easy easy, don’t stall.
The plane sailed over the lights, stayed airborne for maybe another forty or fifty yards, and then hit the ground hard. The plane bounced back into the air a few feet. When it came down again, it did so on the left and front wheels only. Then the right gear collapsed. The plane slewed to the right, the right wing dipped, and, catching the ground, whipped the craft into an even sharper right turn, which Rye was
powerless to correct.
His instantaneous reaction was to stand on the brakes, but if the wheels had been torn off or even badly damaged, the hydraulic line would’ve been cut, so brakes were useless.
The plane skidded off the road and into the woods. A tree branch caught the windshield. The Plexiglas remained intact, but the cracks created a web that obscured his vision all the more.
Then impact.
The Cessna hit an obstacle with such momentum behind it that the nose crumpled, and the tail left the ground before dropping back down with a jolt that made Rye bite his tongue when his teeth clamped.
He was rattled, but cognizant enough to realize that, impossibly, he was on terra firma. The plane wasn’t engulfed in flames. He was alive. Even as that registered, he fumbled for and found the master switch to kill the electrical power and reached down to the floor between the seats to shut off the fuel selector valve.
Then he allowed himself time to catch his breath, slow his heart rate, and run through a mental checklist for likely injuries. The purple and yellow dots were dissipating. He could see well enough. He wasn’t hurting anywhere, only feeling pressure against his torso from the yoke, which the cockpit panel had jammed against his chest.
The plane was so old it didn’t have a shoulder restraint, only a lap belt. He labored to get it unbuckled, but was finally free of it. The door on his left appeared undamaged. He unlatched it and shoved it open. Cold, damp air rushed in. He sucked in a lungful and expelled it through his mouth.
It took several tries and teeth-gnashing effort, but he squeezed himself from beneath the yoke, out of the seat, and through the opening. His flight bag was on the floor in front of the copilot seat, crammed underneath the panel. It was a strain to reach it, but he snagged the leather strap and wrangled the bag free. He pulled it out of the cockpit and tossed it to the ground.
That left only the black box.
In a crash situation, the pilot was allowed by the FAA to take only his flight bag from the plane. Everything else was to be left as it was until an accident report was filed with the FAA and it was determined whether or not an on-site investigation was necessary.
But, remembering the urgency behind this cargo, he released the seat belt, picked up the box, and cradled it in his right elbow. As he backed out, he shut the door of the plane, then hopped to the ground like he’d done roughly ten thousand times over the course of his career.
