“Sure.”
“Then let’s boogie,” Bergin said. He fed in power and the Cessna trundled out onto the asphalt runway. Estelle rested her feet lightly on the pedals, feeling them work. The landing lights in the Cessna’s left wing picked up the white centerlines, and the thrust pushed Estelle back in her seat as Bergin firewalled the throttle. In a thousand feet or less, the vibration of wheels against pavement ceased and Estelle felt an odd surge of disorientation as the landing light halo on the asphalt disappeared. They thundered up into the night, and as they turned south, she saw the spread of village lights off to the left.
“It makes a good landmark,” Bergin said. He reached forward with his right hand and popped a circuit breaker, dousing the plane’s dash lights, plunging them into complete darkness. His left hand held the yoke back, keeping the Cessna in a steep, spiral climb. “You want to be scanning for moving lights, things that aren’t stars,” he said. “Red light on the right, green on the left. There’s not a lot of traffic out here, but there’s some-and it ain’t all legal.”
After a minute, the nose sank as Bergin pulled back on the power and spun the trim wheel. Receding behind them, the mat of lights that was the village spread thin and frayed around the edges, and Estelle strained to see the dark outline of the mountains to the south. “How high are we?”
“About fifteen hundred feet.” He rested a hand on the dash cowl, pointing off to the right, over toward the Torrance Ranch to the northwest. Headlights inched across the desert, then abruptly disappeared. “See that vehicle? A turn, a tree, go behind a barn-it don’t take much to hide lights,” he said. “Not when you have a picture this big. It’ll take your eyes a while to get used to it. Just relax and drink it all in.”
A set of lights appeared far out to the southwest, just a pinprick through the trees.
“That’s comin’ over Regál Pass,” Bergin said.
“And it’s unlikely that he could see us,” Estelle said.
“Especially if I turned out the nav strobes,” Bergin said. He looked over at Estelle. “But I ain’t about to do that. They don’t bother us none. But chances are good your flyboy had his off. Flyin’ dark.”
She leaned forward, staring into what first looked like an endless void. But as her eyes adjusted, she could make out the smooth shadow that marked the mountains against the sky. Here and there, a single faint light marked a ranch or vehicle. “You have to know where you are,” she said. “Are we on someone’s radar now?”
“We might be. Get a little higher, and we might show up on the screen at Cruces. Other than that, someone would have to be lookin’. And contrary to popular belief, they aren’t always. One thing’s for sure-whoever did this knew the country.” He relaxed back, eyes still scanning the heavens. “There’s three ways to fly at night. One is to know the country. Or you can trust your instruments-and this plane’s equipment isn’t adequate for IFR. Or you can be damn fool lucky.”
“Can you fly west to about Encinal? That would put us past the mountain. Then turn around and come back to the strip.”
“We can do that.” Bergin pointed again. “If you look northwest, way out, you can see that faint wash of light? That’s Lordsburg. And stare right through the spinner, you’ll catch the glint of the state highway heading down to the pass at Regál. We got just enough moon that it picks up on the shine of the asphalt.”
“That’s how he found the gas company’s airstrip, then.”
“Helps. But he had to know it was there, Estelle. He had to. For one thing, no matter what direction you approach the runway, you got the village lights in your eyes. It ain’t much, but it’s enough to kill a lot of your night vision and be a distraction.”
A surge of air bumped the airplane upward, and then just as smoothly let it back down, like riding a small boat over a large smooth wave. Bergin paralleled the San Cristóbals, staying as far south of State Highway 56 as he could and still keep an obvious margin of safety between the plane and the sawtoothed mountain ridge. Estelle picked out the single small light of the Broken Spur Saloon, and knew that just a mile or so farther down the highway, County Road 14 came in from the north.
“If he flew around the west end of the mountain, he’s got a pretty good valley there. He could stay low, out of anybody’s radar,” Bergin said.
“How low?” Estelle asked.
Bergin’s electronic chuckle crackled in her headphones. “Two feet? Ten feet? You got one set of power transmission lines that runs east-west down there, and that’s it. It’s marked on the nav chart. Other than that, the tallest thing is a runty juniper. And those dirt roads show up pretty well at night, too. Good landmarks. See,” and he shifted a little in his seat, fingers resting feather-light on the control yoke. “Most folks think it’s a hair-raising, dangerous thing to fly low. But I gotta tell you-low ain’t what kills you. It’s hittin’ things that ruins your day. Trees, barns, stock tanks, trains…even power poles. The truth is, you can leave a nice trail down a dirt road, flyin’ so low that your tires suck dust. Don’t hurt, as long as you don’t catch a post, or a tree, or a power pole. You got to pay attention. No trick to it.” He adjusted his position in the seat. “Crop dusters do it on a daily basis. When they kill themselves, it’s almost always from hitting something they should have avoided. Like the ground.” His chuckle sounded like static in the headphones.
“In fact,” he added, “you get down low enough, and you have a good cushion of compressed air between the wings and the ground. That’s called ground effect, and you can make it work for you.”
“So he could avoid being spotted on the radar.”
Bergin grunted in disdain. “’Course he could. That’s one of the great myths, that radar sees all. Radar is good-if it’s turned on, and if someone is looking. But it can’t see through mountains, and it can’t bend around corners and peek down valleys.”
In a moment, Estelle saw a faint twinkle to the southwest, the lights of three or four ranch houses that marked Encinal, a tiny settlement near the far west end of the San Cristóbals, well out of Posadas County. Farther to the northwest, the spread of Lordsburg’s lights had grown, and she could see the necklace of traffic on the interstate.
“For what it’s worth, my guess is that they came around the mountains,” Bergin said. He pointed toward Encinal. “Come up the valley there, and you’re out of sight. You got just the one power line to remember, and a road to follow.” He turned in a quick, sharp bank southward toward the mountain, flying directly toward Regál Pass until Estelle felt the slight sag of air flowing over the peak. Bergin turned then, and cut the power, letting the Cessna sink in a graceful turn back around to the north, away from the mountain.
“I’m going to take us down to about five hundred feet,” he said. “That’s low enough to give you the impression.”
“How high do you think he was?”
“A lot lower than that. He was. Not us.”
Twisting in her seat, Estelle searched the darkness off to the northeast until she once again found the two sodium vapor lights in the parking lot of the Broken Spur Saloon. A faint mark that might have been the gas company’s runway stood out only because it was perfectly straight and defined in a dark world of smooth, dark shapes. A couple of miles north, two faint lights marked what would be Herb Torrance’s ranch.
She held up her cell phone. “Can I use this in here?”
Bergin nodded. “You won’t hear diddly, but knock yourself out. They’ll hear you okay.” She slipped off the headset, blocked her opposite ear, and held her cell phone tight to her head after dialing. Torrez’s response was difficult to hear on any phone, but this was all but impossible. She spoke loudly and slowly, hoping he could hear her.
“Bobby, we’re southwest of your position, and we’ll be heading in.” He said something she couldn’t understand, and she added, “Not a single flashlight,” although she knew that the sheriff didn’t need the reminder. “No headlights.”