was barely more than a cattle trail. Altitude two thousand . . . Air speed one-fifty. Ten miles to go, then five.
The left engine’s propeller flopped to a standstill and the cockpit went silent, except for the muffled rush of wind outside. He was a glider pilot now.
“Oh my God, Wes! Oh my God!”
“Easy, easy,” he said, expelling every unnecessary thought and emotion, summoning up all he’d learned in a lifetime of flight. Find the balance between three vectors—the plane’s forward momentum, the friction of the air it passed through, and gravity. Deflect the flaps to increase lift, but not so much as to cause excessive drag, which could cause the plane to stall. A kind of physics problem, which, if he failed to solve it, would cost him and Mary their lives. Altitude one thousand . . . Airspeed one-thirty. The airstrip showed as a lane of grass and shrubs between the tall trees. He waited till the last possible second to call for the landing gear. Too soon and the increased resistance could add to the turbulence created by the deflected flaps and give the Hawker the flying characteristics of Isaac Newton’s apple.
“Gear down and locked!” Mary said.
Altitude five hundred . . . airspeed one-fifteen. The Hawker was wobbling, about to surrender to gravity. Fighting to keep the nose up, Dare now saw that what had appeared to be shrubs from higher altitude were in fact saplings ten feet high. From the northwest end, they encroached well out onto the runway. To make sure he cleared them, he had to put down almost in the middle of the strip, leaving a mere six hundred yards before he rolled into the treacherous southeast end. The Hawker swooped in, quiet as a bird, and bounced through the high grass at ninety miles an hour. Without power, he could not use the props for aerodynamic braking. All he had to slow his roll were friction and the hydraulic brakes. He pressed the brakes. Mary cried out, “We’ve done it! We’ve made it!” There was a fearsome bang and thud as the nose gear collapsed. He and Mary were wrenched forward against their harnesses. The plane skidded nose first, then slewed sideways, the main gear breaking. A shriek of tearing metal, rivets popping, glass shattering as the Hawker slammed broadside into a row of trees, spun part way around, and came to rest.
When he regained consciousness, he was shivering from shock, blood was running down the side of his head, and each breath brought a sharp pain, as though someone were stabbing his lungs with an icepick. The yoke had crunched against his ribs, fracturing them. The right side of the cockpit, Mary’s side, was stove in. She was slumped face-down across the pedestal, her back peppered with shattered glass. The stink of aviation fuel permeated the air—there hadn’t been enough time to dump it all—and smoke curled into the cabin from the mangled cargo compartment. The smell and the smoke gave him the necessary adrenal rush to overcome his shock, unbuckle his harness, free Mary from hers, and pull her out of the wreckage. Taking her by the wrists, he dragged her as far as he could. The effort exhausted him, and he nearly blacked out from the pain.
He propped Mary’s legs on a fallen log, to prevent blood from draining from her head, and kneeling on both knees, he held her wrist and felt a faint pulse. Her face was a mass of lacerations and blue-black lumps, her right eye a slit in a contusion half as big as a man’s fist. Her right side had been crushed by the cabin bulkhead, punched inward by its meeting with the trees. The severity of her injuries, the razing of her beauty made him choke. He cradled her head in his hands and brought his lips to her ear.
“Don’t you die on me, Mary girl,” he whispered. “We’re less than an hour’s flying time from Loki. They know where we are. They’ll send a plane to look for us. We’re gonna make it out of this, but y’all have got to not die on me.” She made a sound, a rattling gasp. “That’s the stuff. That’s my lady.”
He staggered back to the plane and tried the radio. Dead. He got the duffel bag containing the water, food, and first-aid kit. He saw what had happened. The southeast end of the runway was black cotton soil, mushy as loam. The surface crust had