White Cargo by Stuart Woods Page A

risking his life and his liquid wealth on a fool’s errand to find a girl who couldn’t be found because she was at the bottom of the sea?
    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 thewind 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 lorandisplay. “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