Her Last Flight(46)

Still she flew. She had no choice. There was nothing to do but fly.

Fly and calculate. If they maintained speed at ninety-five miles an hour, they should reach Baker in about fifty-four minutes. They should glimpse the island sooner, maybe forty or forty-five minutes, depending on its visibility in the moonlight. In three-quarters of an hour, Irene and Sam would know whether their calculations were accurate.

If they weren’t?

Now that Irene had shut off the line to the right engine, they weren’t losing fuel at a disastrous rate. Still, if they didn’t sight Baker on time, if they had to start making sweeps in search of it, they only had about an hour left to do this. An hour, and the ocean was so vast! They might have miscalculated the tailwind out of Honolulu, they might be a hundred miles north or south of this dot on the map they had imagined themselves. What if—

Another note. Reduce altitude to 1500 ft.

Irene nodded and brought the airplane carefully down. Her heart beat in enormous, steady strokes. She felt them in her neck. Her head ached from the keenness of her attention. The air smelled of salt and oil and pungent aviation fuel. She realized she was thirsty.

She scribbled, Coffee.

Half a minute later, Sam pushed a cup into her hand.

She drank swiftly. It was hot, but not too hot. In the thicker atmosphere at fifteen hundred feet, they had slowed to ninety-two miles an hour, and they were burning a little more fuel. But they were closer to the surface, and they could more easily spy any telltale interruption in the dark ocean beneath them. Irene’s armpits were wet; the sweat trickled down her sides and gathered between her legs, and yet she was cold. She handed the empty cup back to Sam. She had stopped wondering why he hadn’t taken the controls. He hadn’t, that was all. Maybe he figured it was more tricky to find Baker than to land on it safely, and that was why he remained at the navigator’s table, communicating on the radio, taking the speed and heading of the Centauri every five minutes, making the calculation, laying the ruler flat along the map and drawing a neat line that meant absolutely nothing, might be a hundred miles away from their actual position.

Still she flew.

Twenty minutes passed. Thirty.

The cockpit window, high and narrow, didn’t afford much of a view. She scribbled another note to Sam, which was probably unnecessary: Start looking.

Thirty-five minutes.

Forty.

Irene’s eyes hurt from straining into the moonlight. A white square appeared to her left. She ripped it from the clothesline and read: Reduce altitude to 1000 ft.

She tipped the nose down carefully. It was so disorienting, flying at night. Sometimes you had this wild, irrational feeling that up was down, and down was up, and the vast textured blackness beneath you was actually the sky. And even though the full moon lay within view, edging downward now toward the western horizon, Irene experienced an instant’s panic that the white disk in the sky was not the moon itself, but its reflection on the water.

But the altimeter needle dropped obediently. Twelve hundred feet, a thousand. Irene eased the stick back again and leveled the airplane. Her hands were clammy and slipped a bit on the rubber grip. Ahead of her was nothing, just the same black moon-speckled landscape, not the slightest interruption. She glanced at the altimeter (nine hundred and eighty feet) and the speed gauge (ninety miles an hour). Then the clock, which showed that four minutes had passed, that if their calculations were perfect, Baker Island should be thrusting up from the ocean any second now.

Forty-five minutes.

Fifty minutes.

Irene glanced over her shoulder at Sam. It was dark inside the cabin, lit only by the moonlight and the bulb attached to the navigator’s table, and in that glimpse she couldn’t tell if his expression, as he stared out the small, ovoid window, was grim or just flat.

She scribbled, See anything?

He replied, Box compass.



Of course they had discussed what to do if navigation failed, if a certain mass of land did not turn up when and where it was supposed to. There was no need to panic, at least not right away. On an ocean so vast as the Pacific, using navigation methods that relied on natural variables and imperfect human observations, errors would occur. You simply tried to keep the margin of that error within reasonable—that is to say, survivable—bounds.

So Baker Island had not turned up exactly where it was supposed to. It must still exist somewhere in the vicinity. According to the laws of geometry, from a point one thousand feet above the earth’s surface, the human eye could find the horizon across thirty-nine miles of open ocean in each direction; if you flew your airplane in four straight lines of forty miles each to form a square—boxing the compass, as they call it—you stood the best chance of detecting your objective before you ran out of fuel. At night, of course, your visibility wasn’t so exact. If the moon was bright and the weather was clear, as it was now, you might still have a hard time detecting some imperfection upon the ocean’s surface that might or might not represent an island. Still, you had to try. Sam and Irene had practiced this very maneuver atop the California desert over and over, by night and by day, and while Sam had always flown the airplane as Irene worked the navigation, still she’d passed him the necessary commands, she’d figured out which direction and for how long they should make their passes over the sand. Why, she’d had the tougher job! She knew what to do. She had just about expected this message from Sam, scribbled in block letters on a piece of square white notepaper.