CHAPTER ONE
Jamie Forbes flew airplanes. That's all he'd done that mattered since he dropped out of college, back when, and got his pilot's license. If it had wings, he loved it.
He flew fighters in the Air Force, didn't much care for the politics and the additional duties and the odd lack of flying time. He chose to leave early, when the service offered it.
The airlines wouldn't have him. He applied one time and the questions on the pilot exam weeded him out.
“1. If you had to choose, would you be a tree or a stone?
“2. Which color is better, red or blue?”
He didn't answer these, as they had nothing to do with flying.
“3. Are details important?”
“Of course they're not important,” he said. “What's important is arriving safely on the ground, every time. Who cares if you shine your shoes?”
Wrong answer, he found, when the examiner looked him in the eye and said, “We do.”
But there's plenty to be done in aviation besides flying fighter planes and jet transports. There's charter and corporate flying and the scenic-ride business; there's crop dusting and air show aerobatics and pipeline patrol and aerial photography; there's aircraft ferrying to be done; there's banner towing, glider towing, carting skydivers up and turning them loose in the sky; there's air racing, television news flying, traffic reporting, police flying, flight testing, freight dogging and barnstorming old biplanes out of hayfields. And teaching, of course, always new folks coming along with the same destiny to fly as his own . . . there's always flight instructing.
He'd done it all as his life went by. These last years he had become a flight instructor and a good one, according to the adage that you tell the best instructors by the color of their hair.
Not that he was some old-timer, mind you, or that he had nothing left to learn. He'd just packed his share of flying into those decades since solo, coming up on twelve thousand flying hours. Not a whole lot of time, not a little. Enough that Jamie Forbes had learned humility.
Inside, though, he was still the kid wild to fly anything he could get his little paws on.
That's all as it should be, and nobody's interest, save for what happened last September. What happened then won't matter to some; to others it'll change their lives the way it did mine.
CHAPTER TWO
At the time, he thought it was coincidence. Jamie Forbes was flying his Beech T-34 from Washington State to Florida, turning winter to summer in his flighttraining business by pointing the nose southeast for sixteen flying hours, four hours at a time.
The '34, if you're not familiar with it, is the first airplane the Air Force trusted to an aviation cadet, years ago: a single engine, low wing, two-place tandem propeller-driven machine, 225 horsepower. Cockpit like a fighter plane's, so the transition from trainer to fighter would be easy for new pilots.
He never imagined then, marching and studying, memorizing checklists and Morse code and the rules of aerodynamics, that years later he'd own the same airplane himself, considerably spiffed up the way civilians do when they get their hands on a surplus military machine.
His T-34 today had the 300-horsepower Continental engine, for instance, a three-blade propeller, an instrument panel with navigation equipment that hadn't been invented when the airplane was new, skyblue military camouflage, restored Air Force markings. It's a well-designed aircraft and a dear little machine to fly.
He flew alone, from Seattle in the morning to Twin Falls, Idaho. Takeoff at noon from Twin Falls over Ogden and Rock Springs, toward North Platte, Nebraska.
It happened an hour out of North Platte, twenty minutes north of Cheyenne.
“I think he's dead!”
A woman's voice on the radio. “Can anybody hear me? I think my husband died!”
She was transmitting on 122.8 megacycles, the small-airport unicom frequency, her voice loud and clear—she couldn't have been too far away.
Nobody answered.
“You can do this, Mister Forbes.” Calm and patient, touch of the South in that unforgettable voice.
“Mister Dexter?” he said it aloud, thunderstruck. His flying instructor from forty years past, a voice he'd never forget. He shot a glance to the mirror, checking
the rear cockpit. It was empty, of course.
Not another sound but the engine rumbling loud and smooth ahead.
“Somebody God help me he's died!”
He pressed the microphone button.
“Maybe so, ma'am,” said Jamie Forbes, “but maybe not. You can fly the airplane without him.”
“No I never learned! Juan's over against the door, he's not moving!”
“We'd better get him on the ground,” he said, choosing “we” because of what he figured she'd say next.
“I can't fly an airplane!”
“OK,” he said, “then you and I'll get him down together.”
It happens once in practically never, a passenger at the controls when a pilot's incapacitated. Lucky for them all, it was a pretty day for flying.
“You know how the controls work, ma'am?” he asked. “You move the steering wheel, keep the wings level?”
“Yes.” That made it easy.