Walker had a tooth with a hole in it. Food got stuck there and made him suck on the tooth. He should have gone to a dentist weeks ago.
He glanced at the ASI and saw the airspeed was down to 140 in the thinning dead air ahead of the storm front. He gave the throttles a boost, up to seventy percent of power, got the engines in synch and adjusted the trim tabs. “Look, we can turn north, go up to Ely or Elko and set down. We could steal another plane there or maybe even a car.”
“No.”
“Why the hell not? They’ll get it figured out we used a plane. They’ll start an air search. If we switch to a car they won’t be looking for us. Why the hell not?”
“Because I’m telling you. Because it’s all worked out down to the button. We’re not going to start changing the plan now,” the Major said.
The engines made a harsh drone and there was a loose rivet somewhere, rattling. Walker pointed at the blackness ahead of them. It ran right up out of sight above them. The mountain peaks, running alongside their course on the right-hand side, disappeared right into the opacity of weather. The Nevada state line was somewhere under all that. “Look, we’ve got four or five minutes to make a turn and get out of the way of it, that’s all. That thing’s no autumn shower, Major, that’s a fucking blizzard. You saw the weather map.”
He had picked up the map overlay this morning at five o’clock at the Reno tower, when he’d filed the phony VFR flight plan for Salt Lake City. That had been the midnight weather report. At that time the storm had been crossing the California-Nevada line somewhere south of Reno and the projections indicated it would hit Vegas around midmorning and keep moving east toward Kingman at about twenty-five or thirty knots. But obviously it had gathered speed and shifted course since then. Now it was getting sawed up by the mountaintops northeast of Vegas and that meant it was dumping moisture.
He said, “There’s snow and hail in there.”
The Major glanced at the quivering needle of the outside-temperature gauge. It stood at 43 degrees, but Walker shook his head. “You don’t get this. We haven’t crossed the front yet. Inside there you’ll get a ten- or fifteen-degree drop. You get a hailstone driven by a sixty-knot wind and you can get bullet holes in the wings of a light plane. This is no Air Force cargo job, Major.”
In back the others had stopped talking: they could see the storm for themselves and it was beginning to penetrate past their other fears and past the excitement the money had generated.
Now Baraclough leaned forward and Walker could feel the man’s menthol-cigarette breath on his neck. “Listen, Major, I think he’s right. That’s no monsoon rainstorm.”
“Ice,” said Eddie Burt. “We don’t want to go into that.”
“Now you’re getting the idea,” Walker said. His mouth felt powder dry. He locked both fists on the split wheel and toed the rudder pedal with his right foot. “I’m turning.”
The Major stiffened to speak but then they hit the front and the plane stuttered. The blast of the wind hit the underbelly of the banking plane and skidded it back, and Walker, feeling her begin to slide, had to give her a heavy left aileron. It leveled her off and he let the wind push her around and complete the turn for him, sideslipping rather than banking. But now the mountains were dead ahead and he had to put on full power and lift the nose into a climb, and in the low air pressure she responded only sluggishly. Half a minute of this and he could see it was no good.
“We’re not going to make it,” he said. “We’ve got to turn around and get some altitude.”
The Major didn’t say anything. Walker didn’t have time to look at him, to measure his expression, but he knew what the Major’s face would be showing: irritation, not fear.
At least the Major wasn’t arguing with him.
He completed the ninety-degree turn and now he was headed east again, the way they had come, and the winds of the storm’s leading edge were pushing him forward while he climbed. He would have to pick up at least five or six thousand feet of additional altitude before he could think about turning north again and crossing over the mountains; in fact it would be better to climb 7,500 feet higher because you never knew what kind of downdrafts you might hit over those canyons. And with the low pressure of the air and the heavy load inside the plane she wasn’t going to climb that high very fast. It was going to take a while.
When he had a chance he glanced at the Major and saw the thoughtful squint on the Major’s cold hawked features. In back the rest of them began to talk again in harsh snappish voices-they had the sweats, all of them-but the Major held his tongue, squinted forward, worked his jaw from side to side. The Major was thinking, hatching a plan. It would probably be a good one.