take off the earphones. “Could I talk to you a moment?”
“Sure,” the mechanic said, switching off his Walkman. “I’m not busy.”
“I see that. This must be a private conversation.”
VanResenberg squinted with one eye. “Don’t notice anybody listening in.”
“It has to do with Wesley’s crash,” Fitzhugh explained. “His plane had been overhauled a few days before. Do you know who did the work?”
“No. It wasn’t any of our people.”
“I was talking to him on the radio before he went down. He said some odd things. He was having trouble with his fuel pumps. Then he asked me to fetch a water jug and some plastic bags from a rubbish bin near the hangar. He told me not to empty the jug if there was anything in it.”
“And?”
“There was nothing in the jug, only a little dirty water. The bags were clean. What do you suppose he meant? What’s the connection between a discarded water jug and his fuel pumps?”
VanRensberg asked to look at the jug, and Fitzhugh brought him to the company truck and pulled the container out from behind the seats. The mechanic screwed off the cap, poured a drop or two of the contents into his palm, sniffed, and stood staring at the jug for several moments.
“If you had enough of that sludge in your fuel tanks, it could foul up the fuel pumps. Maybe that’s what he meant.”
“How? Give me a lesson in aircraft mechanics.”
“You’ve got two pumps for each engine,” VanRensberg began. “A low-pressure and a high-pressure. The first one brings the fuel up from the tank and to the engine. The high-pressure pump sprays the fuel into the burners. If crud clogged up the filters in the low-pressure pump and it quit, the high-pressure pump would feed fuel to the emergency fuel controller. Are you following me so far?”
Fitzhugh nodded.
“So that wouldn’t be a good situation—you’d have unfiltered fuel going into the engine—but it would still run. If there’s water in the fuel”—VanResenberg hesitated. “I’d better back up a little. Fuel is what lubricates the high-pressure pump. If there’s water in the fuel, it could cause the pump to seize up and shut down because water isn’t a lubricant. The pump quits, the engine quits. That’s a bad situation no matter what you’re flying, but it’s bloody bad if you’re in a Hawker as old as Wes’s—a seven four eight that vintage doesn’t have auxiliary engine power controls like, oh, say a Cessna two-oh-eight or a Let. Nothing you do will get the engine running again. And if it happens in both engines, you are well and truly fucked. But I don’t think that’s what happened to Wes, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Fitzhugh leaned against the Toyota, trying to absorb the technical information. “Why not?”
“Here’s a lesson in elementary chemistry. Water is heavier than aviation fuel. If Wes had water and mud in his tanks, it would have sunk down to the sump—that’s the lowest point in the tank. And it’s automatic in preflight to drain the sumps. Any water and crud would have been drained out.”
“I see. Of course Wesley wasn’t known for the thoroughness of his preflight checks.”
“He would’ve done that, Fitz. Like I said, it’s automatic.” VanRensberg’s teeth showed through his sweat-dappled beard. “I get what you’re thinking. Did somebody put muddy water in Wes’s tanks? Well, even if sombody did, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Wes would have gotten rid of it on preflight.”
“I will tell you why I think so. Wes said another odd thing. That whoever left those things—the jug and the bags—did it because he had to clear out in a hurry. He suspected sabotage. I am guessing, yes? But I believe he meant that the culprit fled in a rush because he saw someone coming, someone who might have caught him in the act.”
“Nasty, Fitz. Very nasty thought.”
“Yes, very. Please don’t mention to anyone that we had this conversation.” He placed the earphones back on VanRensberg’s head. “Keep feeling good.”
The next day, while Douglas and Tony were off on one of their Busy Beaver missions, Fitzhugh borrowed a spare key from the compound’s manager and broke into Tony’s hut. Inside, from among the stack of flight and operations manuals, he dug out repair and maintenance manuals for a Hawker-Siddley 748 and a Rolls-Royce 514 turboprop—the engine on Wesley’s plane. Tony’s coveralls had been laundered and were on a hangar. Although someone as sloppy as he wouldn’t notice that the manual was out of place, Fitzhugh was