A couple of hours out of Haiti, Cat stirred himself from his reverie to check the instrument panel, as he had every few minutes since Bluey had gone to sleep. The gauges still held steady, and their true airspeed was right at a hundred and fifty-six knots, just where it should be. Fuel flow was twelve and a half gallons an hour, and there were something over five hundred miles remaining to Idlewild. The ground speed, though, was displayed on the loran as a hundred and twenty-eight knots. Startled, he quickly checked the other instruments again. Everything was normal. He gave Bluey a shake.
“What?”
“The loran is showing a lower ground speed than our true airspeed. Have we got a head wind?”
Bluey glanced at the instruments. “Too bloody right, we’ve got a head wind. Damn near thirty knots of it.” He checked their time to destination on the loran against their remaining flying time on the fuel-flow meter. “Shit,” he said. “If we go higher, we might get even more head wind; if we go lower, the head wind might decrease, but we’d be burning a lot more fuel at a lower altitude. We’re best off where we are, but that ain’t so hot. Our reserve is going to get eaten up. I calculate that if the wind holds where it is and we cut, we’ll make the coast with six minutes of fuel remaining.”
“Is that enough to make Idlewild?” Cat asked, alarmed.
“Maybe,” Bluey replied, looking dour. “We’re past the point of no return; we’ve got to go on and hope for the best.” He reduced power slightly. “We’ll cut power to fifty-eight percent. That’s our most efficient setting, but it’s cutting another four knots off our airspeed, and that’s cutting into our time reserve for our window at Idlewild. We sure as hell don’t want to be late there. Maybe the wind will drop. Maybe the fuel-flow meter is inaccurate in our favor.”
Or, Cat thought, maybe the wind won’t drop and maybe the meter is inaccurate and not in our favor. Maybe we’ll have to ditch, or maybe we’ll be late at Idlewild and get machine-gunned for our trouble.
“Let’s start pumping our auxiliary fuel into the wing tanks,” Bluey said, fiddling with the fuel pump.
They flew on in silence for another hour, and their ground speed dropped another three knots. Their head wind was rising.
Bluey shoved the throttle in again. “We’ve got to go back to full power,” he said. “We’re at the outer limits of our time reserve now.”
The airplane flew on toward South America, and soon pink began to show in the eastern sky. Bluey did some more work with the loran. “Now it looks like four minutes of fuel when we cross the coast,” he said.
Cat said nothing. He was willing the airplane to fly faster, the wind to drop, the engine to use less fuel.
With eighteen minutes of fuel showing on the meter, Bluey let out a shout. “The coast! The bloody coast! We’re not going to have to swim ashore, anyway.”
Cat looked up to see a brown line of land ahead, lit by a rising sun.
Both men’s eyes alternated between the fuel-flow meter and the Colombian coastline, which seemed to be nearing at all too slow a rate.
“Bravo One, this is Bravo Two,” Bluey said to the radio. He was greeted by nothing but static. “We’re still too far out,” he said. Then his face fell, and he pointed at the loran. A red light had come on. “That means the signal is unreliable.” The red light went off. So did the loran display. “We’re at the outer limits of the loran chain.” The display came back on, then went off again. “Bravo One, this is Bravo Two. Do you read?” Static.
They crossed the coastline, and Cat looked at the fuel-flow meter. Two and a half minutes’ fuel remaining.
“I’m going to hold this course for another five minutes, then start a descent,” Bluey said, grim-faced. He switched on another navigation radio. “Maybe I can get a radial and a distance from the Barranquilla VOR.” He fiddled with the radio. “Dammit, we’re getting the VOR signal, but not the distance-measuring equipment. Out of range. Maybe...” As he spoke a red flag appeared on the instrument. “Correction,” he said, “we’re not getting the VOR, either. What else can go wrong?”
As if in answer to his question, the engine sputtered, then caught again. The fuel-flow meter was showing a minute and fifteen seconds. The engine sputtered again, and the meter read zero. The engine ran for another half a minute, then gave a final sputter and died. The nose of the airplane dropped.
“We’re landing this airplane,” Bluey said, somewhat unnecessarily, Cat thought. “Check your side for a place to put her down. Bravo One, this is Bravo Two. Cat, you make the radio call. I’ve got to turn this crate into a glider.”
Cat began speaking the code words into the radio while looking desperately out the window for someplace to land. “It looks pretty flat down there,” he said to Bluey. There was brown, dry-looking land, dotted with scrub brush, all around them.
“It is flat,” Bluey came back. “The Guajira Peninsula is shaped like Florida and looks like Arizona. It’s a desert down there, and I can put us down in one piece, more or less, but I don’t want to land in the middle of nowhere with no transportation, no refueling, and at the mercy of any bastard who’s inclined to shoot us for our shoes.” He had the airspeed down to eighty knots now, the airplane’s best glide speed. The altimeter was showing a steady decline, and the earth was getting closer.
“Bravo One, this is Bravo Two,” Cat repeated. “Bravo... Jesus, Bluey, what’s that?” He was pointing just ahead of the right wing, a couple of miles ahead in the bright morning sunshine.
Bluey rolled the airplane to the right slightly and looked where Cat was pointing. “I’ll tell you what that is,” he crowed, “it’s a goddamned dirt strip! Looks like an old crop duster’s field!” He pointed the airplane at the gash of earth. “We’ve got enough altitude, too. We’re going to make it! Oh, Jesus, I hope they’ve got fuel!”
“Bravo One, this is Bravo Two,” Cat said, mechanically, keeping his eyes glued to the strip. They passed over it at a couple of thousand feet.
“Is that some sort of tank down there?” Bluey asked, pointing.
Cat looked and saw what looked like a large metal cylinder lying on its side. “I hope it’s not a water tank,” he said.
Bluey made a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn to lose some altitude, then lined up with the dirt runway and let the airplane glide toward it. When he was sure they had it made, he lowered the gear and some flaps, and the airspeed came down to seventy knots. “Picture-book approach!” he chortled. They landed smoothly enough, and Cat marveled at how quiet it was with no engine. The runway was rough, but passable. Bluey let the airplane roll until it came to a stop on its own. Ahead of them about fifty feet, just off the strip, was what looked like about a five-hundred-gallon tank set on a wooden cradle about ten feet off the ground. “That’s fuel,” Bluey said, pointing. “Look, there’s a hose. Quick, let’s get the airplane over there.”
They scrambled out of the airplane and began pushing on the wing struts. The aircraft moved slowly across the pebble-strewn dirt strip. Cat looked around but saw only a shack with a tin roof about fifty yards on the other side of the tank. Was it really a fuel tank? Was there anything in it?
Finally, they were within reach of the hose. As Bluey ran for it Cat saw some letters roughly painted on the side of the tank: 100LL. It was aviation fuel.