“No, he…hasn’t called.” Karen spoke as if she was barely able to move her lips. She swallowed. “He didn’t make the fuel stop at Salt Lake.”
A tiny muscle in Bret’s jaw began to twitch. “He stopped somewhere else,” he said flatly, after a moment. “Before Salt Lake. If there was any trouble, he’d put down—”
Slowly, wobbling a little, Karen shook her head.
Bret hung there, staring at her while he absorbed what she was telling him. Then he bolted for his office, grabbed his trash can, and vomited into it. “God,” he said in a strained voice, when he could talk. He pressed both fists over his eyes. “God in heaven. I can’t—I can’t believe…”
Karen hovered in the office door. “An alert has been issued.”
“Fuck an alert,” he said savagely, swinging around. “A search—”
“You know the protocol.”
“They’re wasting time! They have to—”
Her only answer was another agonizingly slow shake of her head.
Furiously he kicked his chair, sent it slamming into the wall. “Shit!” he bellowed. “Shit, shit, shit!”
Then he picked up the phone and began calling people, only to be told over and over that protocol would be followed, that if Cam hadn’t checked in somewhere within a couple of hours, a search would be initiated.
Slamming down the phone for the last time, he went over to the map on his wall and traced a line from Seattle to Denver, marking the route Cam would have taken. “Over a thousand miles,” he muttered. “He could be anywhere. Anything could have gone wrong. Have you talked to Dennis? Did Mike write up the Skylane yesterday for anything?”
The two questions were directed at Karen, who had been listening to his calls, hoping against hope that he could kick-start the search. “I’ve already checked,” she said. “There wasn’t anything. Dennis said there hasn’t been anything on the Skylane except normal maintenance.” She hesitated. “Whatever happened…didn’t have to be mechanical. A bird could have hit them, or he could have gotten sick and passed out…” Her voice trailed off.
Bret was still staring at the map. Cam’s route had been over some of the most rugged, remote terrain in the country. “He could have set it down,” he insisted. “In a field, a canyon, on a dirt-bike trail—anywhere. If it can be done, Cam can do it.”
“They’re doing a communications search,” she said. “If he could land it, he’ll radio in. An FSS will pick up his transmission.” Her voice wavered a little as she said, “All we can do is wait.”
Flight Service Stations were air-traffic facilities that performed a lot of different functions; among them was the constant monitoring of the aircraft emergency frequency. Cam had filed a Visual Flight Rules flight plan, which placed him in the FSS system of graduating emergency levels. When Cam hadn’t arrived in Salt Lake at his estimated time, the system went into a distress phase. A communications search notified all the communication sites and airports along his route that he was late in arriving and asked for any information.
The protocol was that, after an hour, if the plane hadn’t been found, the communications search was intensified and expanded, and all possible landing sites were checked. After another hour of no results, the FSS would hand the search over to Search and Rescue. Cam’s friends and relatives would be called. Only after three hours was an actual, physical search initiated; a satellite would pick up the Emergency Locator Transmitter on the plane and lead the Search and Rescue team to it, but depending on how remote the location was, that could take several more hours.
Karen was right. All they could do was wait.
Bret paced. Karen returned to her desk and sat staring at nothing, stirring only to answer the phone whenever it rang. The minutes ticked by so slowly that time might have been a variation of Chinese water torture.
Then Karen answered the phone one last time, in a strangled voice said, “Yes, thank you,” hung up, and burst into tears.
Bret dragged in deep, ragged breaths. He stood frozen, his fists knotted. “They found wreckage?” he asked hoarsely.
“No.” She wiped her eyes and firmly set her jaw. “No distress calls were received, no radio contact made. If he’d made an emergency landing somewhere—” She didn’t have to say it. If Cam had landed, he’d have radioed in, but landing and crashing were two very different things. “SAR has been initiated.”
Brett’s color had gone gray and his shoulders were slumped. “I’d better…I guess I should call Seth Wingate.” Returning to his desk, he dropped heavily into his chair and fumbled with the phone book. Karen quickly pulled up the family’s file on her computer and called out the number to him.
“Yeah, what’s up?” a slightly slurred voice greeted him. A television played loudly in the background.
He was already drunk? It was the middle of the afternoon. “Seth?”
“The one and only.”
“Bret Larsen, of J and L.” Bret propped his elbows on his desk and covered his eyes with one hand.
“I thought you were taking the step-bitch—sorry, my dear, dear stepmommy—to Denver today.”
“Cam, Captain Justice, took the flight at the last minute.” He felt as if he were running out of air so he sucked in a quick breath. Get this over with. “We’ve lost contact with the plane. They never arrived at the refueling stop in Salt Lake.”