at”—Pamela went to her radio log—“at twelve-oh-five. She sounded quite scared, and you know Tara—she never sounds that way. There was something about fire, and then she repeated the Mayday and gave that set of numbers and then the radio went dead. All I got was static, and another noise, like a screech, a split-second screech, and then nothing.”
A morbid silence pervaded the room. Fitzhugh knew what that screeching noise must have been—the sound of impact. He was semiliterate in map reading, but he stared at the map regardless, trying to divine where Tara might have crashed.
“Where is her flight plan?” he asked.
“Won’t do you any good. It’s false. She was headed for a no-go zone. The Nuba mountains, Zulu Three.”
“Zulu Three?” His question sounded more like an exclamation.
“Yes.”
“What was she taking there?”
“What bloody difference does that make?” Pamela said. “Besides, it was who, not what. Three passengers. A woman and two men. Journalists. They’d chartered her just this morning, a last-minute thing.”
Fitzhugh felt slightly nauseous.
A firm look gathered on Pamela’s face. “It’s Knight’s responsibility to look for her. If you don’t have a plane available, divert one. You people are responsible for this. In the old days she never would have taken a charter like this, at the very last minute, if—”
“We’re responsible,” Wesley said, swinging through the door with Mary. “It was our charter.” Fitzhugh and Pamela stared at him. “Loki tower picked up the Mayday. It’s all over town. Okay, Pam, give us what you’ve got.”
She repeated the information she’d given Fitzhugh. Dare asked for Tara’s takeoff time. Nine forty-five, Pamela replied.
Taking the paper with the coordinates, Dare went to the map. “If she was flying the standard route,” he murmured, tracing a course with a pencil, “at a Caravan’s cruising speed—one eighty-five, right Pam?” Pamela confirmed the speed, and Wesley took out a pocket calculator. “That would have put her somewhere in here when she called the Mayday.” He drew a small square on the map. “Fits with the coordinates she gave you—that line runs right through here. It’s a valley, pretty flat. If she still had control, she might have been able to make an emergency landing.”
“That’s very near New Tourom,” Fitzhugh said.
“Middle of the square would be about thirty miles southeast. Arab nomad country.”
“We could radio Michael. It’s near enough for him to send out a search party.”
“Too risky,” Dare said. “There’s an army garrison here, another one here”—he jabbed with the pencil—“if they intercept the message. We do not want them to know there’s a plane down in the area. They’ll have patrols crawlin’ all over. Y’all heard the word fire,” he said to Pamela. “She was on fire, she had a fire? What?”
“I don’t know. Fire, that’s what I heard.”
“How about ‘taking fire.’ ‘We’re taking fire,’ somethin’ like that.”
Pamela gnawed her lip. “It could have been, I don’t know.”
“See, you thread a kinda needle flyin’ into that airstrip, between those two garrisons. Don’t have to stray too far off course to get smack over one or the other. And that close to destination, Tara would of been into her descent, seven, eight thousand figure. In range.”
“But it was probably some mechanical failure,” Fitzhugh said, unwilling to entertain the possibility that Tara had been shot down; for if she had been, it meant that no one on that small aircraft had any chance of surviving.
“From what Pam said, it would of been a catastrophic failure,” Dare said. “But there’s not a pilot in Africa more careful about maintenance than Tara.”
“The UN has planes at Malakal, that’s close,” Pamela said. “We could ask them to send one to search the area.”
“They’ll tell y’all to wait till they get Khartoum’s okay to enter a no-go zone.”
“And you might as well wait for Khartoum to invite the pope for a visit,” Mary scoffed.
“You’re ready to fly?” Pamela asked.
“Ground crew fueled the plane early this morning,” Dare said. “How about it, Mary girl. I ain’t doin’ this without your say-so.”
“It was our flight, could have been us,” she said. “Only option I see is the one I couldn’t live with.”
Fitzhugh heard Wesley say in an undertone, “Picked a winner this time.” He was obviously proud of her. So was Fitzhugh—and ashamed of himself. He felt he had somehow willed this disaster to happen, as though a desire to be rid of Phyllis for good and all had taken refuge in his unconscious mind and petitioned the fates to make it happen. He asked Dare to go along—“another