The Coffin Dancer

Chapter Thirty-three
    Hour 36 of 45
    “A irport elevation’s fifty-one eighty feet,” Brad said, reviewing the Airman’s Guide of Denver International. “We were about that outside of Chicago and the thing didn’t blow.”
    “How far?” Percey asked.
    “From present location, nine oh two miles.”
    Percey debated for no more than a few seconds, nodded. “We go for it. Give me a dead-reckoning heading, just something to play with till we get VORs.” Then into the radio: “We’re going to try it, Lincoln. The gas’ll be real close. We’ve got a lot to do. I’ll get back to you.”
    “We’ll be here.”
    Brad eyeballed the map and referred to the flight log. “Turn left heading two six six.”
    “Two six six,” she repeated, then called ATC.“Chicago Center, Niner Five Foxtrot Bravo. We’re heading for Denver International. Apparently it’s a . . . we’ve got an altitude-sensitive bomb on board. We need to get on the ground at five thousand feet or higher. Request immediate VORs for vectoring to Denver.”
    “Roger, Foxtrot Bravo. We’ll have those in a minute.”
    Brad asked, “Please advise the weather en route, Chicago Center.”
    “High pressure front moving through Denver right now. Headwinds vary from fifteen to forty at ten thousand, increasing to sixty, seventy knots at twenty-five.”
    “Ouch,” Brad muttered then returned to his calculations. After a moment he said, “Fuel depletion about fifty-five miles short of Denver.”
    Bell asked, “Can you set down on the highway?”
    “In a big ball of flames we can,” Percey said.
    ATC asked, “ Foxtrot Bravo , ready to copy VOR frequencies?”
    While Brad took down the information, Percey stretched, pressed her head into the back of her seat. The gesture seemed familiar and she remembered she’d seen Lincoln Rhyme do the same in his elaborate bed. She thought about her little speech to him. She’d meant it, of course, but hadn’t realized how true the words were. How dependent they were on fragile bits of metal and plastic.
    And maybe about to die because of them.
    Fate is the hunter . . .
    Fifty-five miles short. What could they do?
    Why wasn’t her mind as far-ranging as Rhyme’s? Wasn’t there anything she could think of to conserve fuel?
    Flying higher was more fuel efficient.
    Flying lighter was too. Could they throw anything out of the aircraft?
    The cargo? The U.S. Medical shipment weighed exactly 478 pounds. That would buy them some miles.
    But even as she considered this, she knew she’d never do it. If there was any chance she could salvage the flight, salvage the Company, she would.
    Come on, Lincoln Rhyme, she thought, give me an idea. Give me . . . Picturing his room, picturing sitting beside him, she remembered the tiercel—the male falcon—lording about on the window ledge.
    “Brad,” she asked abruptly, “what’s our glide ratio?”
    “A Lear thirty-five A? No idea.”
    Percey had flown a Schweizer 2-32 sailplane. The first prototype was built in 1962 and it had set the standard for glider performance ever since. Its sink rate was a miraculous 120 feet per minute. It weighed about thirteen hundred pounds. The Lear she was flying was fourteen thousand pounds. Still, aircraft will glide, any aircraft. She remembered the incident of the Air Canada 767 a few years ago—pilots still talked about it. The jumbo jet ran out of fuel due to a combination of computer and human error. Both engines flamed out at forty-one thousand feet and the aircraft became a 143-ton glider. It crash-landed without a single death.
    “Well, let’s think. What’d the sink rate be at idle?”
    “We could keep it at twenty-three hundred, I think.”
    Which meant a vertical drop of about thirty miles per hour.
    “Now. Calculate if we burned fuel to take us to fifty-five thousand feet, when would we deplete?”
    “Fifty-five?” Brad asked with some surprise.
    “Roger.”
    He punched in numbers. “Maximum climb is forty-three hundred fpm; we’d burn a lot down here, but after thirty-five thousand the efficiency goes way up. We could power back . . . ”
    “Go to one engine?”
    “Sure. We could do that.”
    He tapped in more numbers. “That scenario, we’d deplete about eighty-three miles short. But, of course, then we’d have altitude.”
    Percey Clay, who got A’s in math and physics and could dead reckon without a calculator, saw the numbers stream past in her head. Flame out at fifty-five thousand,