Slash and Burn

down with a lucky bullet but very unlikely.
    If the pilot was drunk and stoned as reported, he could easily have passed out and lost control of his ship. Most of the professional advice garnered for the report pointed to this as the most likely cause. The only problem here was that the team was certain they’d found the crash site yet they hadn’t turned up so much as a toenail in evidence. It was obvious that the craft had exploded above the ground, probably at the tree line. This fact was dubiously corroborated by the sorceress eyewitness who claimed to have seen the explosion. There was one hell of a bang sending helicopter parts far and wide, but something other than a mere engine fire had destroyed the surrounding jungle. This brought them to the cable.
    “Could he have been so out of his mind he let down the cable just for the hell of it?” Madame Daeng asked.
    Johnson explained that the controls for the cable were in the cabin beside the hatch. The pilot would have to leave the cockpit and climb down to the body of the helicopter to operate the winch from there.
    “Helicopters aren’t exactly gliders,” he said. “They’re very temperamental. You can’t just take your hands off the controls and float. You abandon the joy stick and the craft will likely toss you all over the place. You wouldn’t make it to the hatch.”
    The Lao considered this news.
    “OK, my turn,” said Civilai. He hadn’t spoken for a while and he would probably have asked a question just for the pleasure of hearing his own voice. But he had a serious query. “Let us imagine for a second that our young pilot had neither been shot nor overcome by drugs. Let’s imagine he was merely on a joy ride, enjoying the moonlight and the beautiful mountains of Xiang Khouang province. What un-extraordinary disasters might befall him?”
    Peach and the sergeant went through the options together.
    “The two most common reasons for coming down are running out of fuel and a mechanical fault. But Boyd’s chopper would have been checked by his mechanic, Sebastian, and refueled the moment they arrived in Long Cheng that afternoon. That was standard practice.”
    “Any chance of sabotage?” Phosy asked. “A fight with the mechanic?”
    “Unlikely. First, the mechanic usually flies with the pilot so that would be more like a suicide mission. Second, they were pretty good friends. It was the mechanic he’d chosen to get drunk with that night. Third, all the aircraft were double-checked by the head flight mechanic, an ex-pilot called Leon. I knew him when he was still with the marines. He was a bit of a deadbeat socially. I heard he lost his flying license for inappropriate behaviour. I was surprised to hear he was in Laos. But he’d been a good flyer and he was serious at his job. He wouldn’t have let anything untoward go by. Once they were checked, the helicopters were guarded all night.”
    “And the guard let a drunk climb into a helicopter and fly it away?” asked Madame Daeng.
    “He would have known Boyd was the pilot of H32. There weren’t that many American pilots in Spook City at any one time. Most of the planes were flown by Hmong pilots. And most of the guards were around twelve years of age so he wasn’t about to stop a hundred and ninety pounds of muscle from getting into his own chopper.”
    “So, a mechanical fault?” Phosy asked.
    “A mechanical fault is more likely than sabotage. There are a million things that could go wrong in a war-battered chopper. They’ve been shot at, flown badly and overloaded. That’s why every helicopter pilot flies with his own mechanic.”
    “So if the pilot was up there by himself and something went wrong, he wouldn’t know what to do,” said Lit.
    “Some do. A lot of pilots are pretty good mechanics too.”
    “What about Boyd?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “So, what happens when you’re dropping out of the sky in a big metal box?” Civilai asked. “I assume an ejector seat’s out of the question?”
    “The pilot might have a chance to operate the autorotate,” Johnson told Peach. “What that means is that you disengage the rotor from the engine and control the rate of descent by changing the pitch of the free-turning blades. It’s quite possible to land a craft on autorotate without any damage at all. A few of us back home have done it without causing any injuries. That’s why I was asking how long the gap was from when Boyd’s engine cut out to when the village woman