Page 55 of Protecting the Flame

“Yeah?” Scott was practically vibrating. “Tell your girlfriend to watch her mouth.”

“Fine.” Will turned to Emma. “Would you please watch your mouth?”

“You guys. Comedians.” Hunter let go of a bitter laugh. “You do realize I’m dying here, right? Every minute I’m still in this fucking plane is another minute I get closer to fucking…dying. Do you not get that?”

“Yeah, sure,” Scott blustered. “But that doesn’t change the fact we’re stuck, it’s going on five days now, and we got to think about where we put our energy.”

“Oh, yeah.” Hunter showed his teeth in a nasty grin. “Heaven forbid you spend energy helping out a guy.”

Scott ignored him. “Maybe we need to be thinking of rescuing ourselves. Maybe we have to leave.”

“You can’t leave me,” Hunter said.

“No?” Cocking his head, Scott gazed up at blue, empty sky. “You hear any planes? Helicopters? Snowmobiles down valley? Yeah, me neither. Did it ever occur to you that us getting out now might actually help you?”

“You know it wouldn’t.” Hunter’s mouth trembled. Tears stood in his eyes. “You leave, you might as well put a bullet in my head.”

“No one’s going to leave,” Will said.

She hated to do it, but it had to be said. “Could there be something wrong with the ELT? All we know for sure is the antenna’s good.”

“No, the ELT has to be working. I checked the remote switch by Burke’s seat. It’s on.”

“But we haven’t actually looked at the unit.”

“Because it’s locked. Unless we find a key, I don’t see how we can check it out.”

Yeah, what was with Burke and his obsession with keeping things locked up? “What if we did find a key?”

Will scratched the back of his head. “If we can get the panel open, and the unit’s not working, I don’t know how to fix it.”

“What about you, Hunter?”

Hunter shook his head. “I don’t know much about electronics. I wouldn’t even know how to tell if it’s working or not.”

“There’s got to be an off-on switch.”

“I guess? It’s got its own battery, I know that, but…” Hunter shrugged.

“Well, is there anything else? What about the flight plan? How come no one’s searching along that?”

Hunter hesitated then said, his gaze slipping from hers, “I dunno. Bad luck?”

“Bad luck?” she echoed.

At the same moment, Will broke in. “Emma, we already went over this. We’re probably off course. It’ll take rescue time to backtrack, look at the weather patterns, figure out where we might have ended up. In a pinch, they could rely on our radar pings, but that presupposes the ELT’s not working and no flight plan which wouldn’t happen because if you fly IFR, you’re required by law to file a flight plan.”

But what if Burke hadn’t originally thought he would be flying via instruments? Were the rules the same?

Scott scowled. “What are pings?”

“Every air traffic control at every airport tracks planes via primary radar,” she said. “It happens automatically. The reflected waves give air traffic control a way of knowing, roughly, where a plane is, whether the pilot wants to be tracked or not.” The only way around that would be to fly low, beneath the radar. She recalled Burke’s boast about doing precisely that in Vietnam. So he could have done so if he wanted, but the conditions had forced him higher. Why would he even need to fly below the radar? She could think of only a handful of reasons, all of them both bad and nonsense. Burke had been carrying passengers, for God’s sake. “Even if an ELT stopped working, it should be possible to extrapolate a bearing on the basis of the last ping. It all depends on how far back the last ping happened and how radically we changed course after that.”

“Oh.” Scott digested this. “How often does that work? The pings thing?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Will said. “You remember that Malaysian airliner that went down somewhere over the ocean? Everyone knew where the plane was because of primary and secondary radar until it got over the ocean where’s there no radar. Air traffic control then has to rely on high-frequency radio and GPS, if it’s available. Even knowing a projected course, even pulling up satellite data later on, even though the plane regularly sent out pings…they’ve never found that plane.”

Scott pulled at his lower lip. “So, you’re saying that if they’re going by these pings…they might never find us.”

Will nodded. “It’s a possibility. We have to hope for the best.”

“Hunh,” Scott grunted. “Or plan for the worst.”

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