The Flight Before Christmas Ch. 01

She laughed at me. "Are you trying to tell me I'm not?"

"No ! That's not what I meant at all. Jeez. Anyone that knows me knows I'm good at putting my foot in my mouth."

She grinned lightly. "Don't worry about it. I'm just having fun."

There was nothing at all wrong with her appearance. She wore comfortable-looking but nicely fitting clothes, her hair had been pulled into a pony tail, and her very light makeup highlighted her nice cheekbones and green eyes.

Her personality was hard to explain. In some ways, she was infectiously present and easily approachable. In other ways, she seemed so guarded and cautious. But regardless of any of that, she was astoundingly attractive. Her facial features were simply entrancing.

I chuckled after I caught myself staring, sizing her up. "Gotcha."

I selected attire from my suitcase and carried my selections, along with my shaving bag, into the smallish bathroom.

She'd apparently already anticipated my need, because a towel and washcloth were folded on the edge of the combo shower/tub. Next to them were a paper-wrapped bar of soap and a little bottle of shampoo, both from some hotel somewhere. They'd not been there the prior night. I laughed to myself because I would always snag those types of things, too. They're just so handy for travel.

I showered, shaved, and finished my grooming in record time. I needed maybe ten minutes, but I felt whole again. I stashed my prior attire in my case, then joined the two at the table.

Brenda had plated three pancakes and a couple of sausage patties for me. I buttered the flapjacks and drizzled them with syrup.

The little girl watched me as I sliced into the stack with the edge of my fork.

"Not like that, Mr. Todd. Like this."

I stopped what I was doing and observed. She took her knife and fork and sliced her next bite all proper-like.

"Stacie, mind your manners. He knows how to eat," her mother gently scolded.

"Well, by all means, young lady. When in Rome, I shall do as the Romans do," I agreed, and executed my next slice as she'd demonstrated.

The sweet little gal giggled. "You're not in Rome. You're in my house!"

"Is that so? I thought I was in Hawaii!" I said, feigning shock and looking around me as if I were lost.

"No! Remember? It's snowy outside!"

"We're in Alaska then?" I pressed.

"Our house isn't an igloo." She grinned broadly.

Stacie played more back-and-forth with me. I turned toward her mother, raising my eyebrows, pointing at her daughter with my thumb.

"Smart kid," I silently mouthed.

Brenda smirked and shrugged.

There was a knock at the front door.

Brenda left the table, and a few seconds later, I heard her inviting someone inside.

"He's here in the kitchen," I heard her say before a woman and a man stepped into the area. Both were wearing dark coats with "NTSB" printed on them.

With immediate recognition of their status, I stood from the table.

"Todd Carlson?" asked the female.

"That's me," I said.

"I'm Sarah Anchors, and this is Fred Mallory. We've been assigned as the investigators in this incident. We need to collect more information about the events of yesterday. Do you mind?" she asked, tapping the back of a chair.

I deferred, of course, to Brenda.

"Be my guests," she said, shooing Stacie off the other chair to the family room in front of the TV. "Coffee?"

"Oh, no thanks," the lady said, jostling her full-sounding thermal travel mug. The man simply shook his head with a smile.

Mrs. Anchors peppered me with tons of questions, and Mr. Mallory typed my answers on a ruggedized laptop.

"Sounds fairly cut and dried," the former offered, "except for one strange thing we observed outside."

"Are you referring to the discolorations and stains on the skin?" I asked.

"You noticed that, too?"

"No, she did," I said, nodding toward Brenda. "It didn't appear until hours after I'd touched down out there."

"Huh," she said, turning to the man sitting next to her. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Bleach?" he asked.

"Maybe, but definitely some sort of reactive contaminant. We'll need samples."

"On it," he said, standing from the table.

The woman slid the laptop from his spot to hers.

"Mr. Carlson, how is it even remotely possible you didn't notice the oil's condition during your preflight inspection?" she asked.

I detected the not-so-slightly judgmental tone in her query.

"Ma'am, with all due respect, I have spent almost a thousand hours ferrying all sorts of light aircraft around North America. I even have type ratings on a few heavier planes. Other than my own, and the ones I flew in training, I doubt I've ever flown the same airplane twice.

"Every plane I fly is an unknown, so, if you don't think I go over every single detail with a fine-toothed lice comb, you're out of your ever-loving mind."

I felt Brenda's hand on my shoulder, reining me in, just as the investigator waved her hands in mild surrender. I took and exhaled a deep breath to calm myself before continuing.

"If whatever was put in the engine was heavier than oil, it would have sunk straight to the sump. It could have been in there for a long time not doing much of anything until the engine started running, mixing it up. Besides. Dipsticks don't go all the way to the very bottom. The stick and the oil both looked perfectly normal when I checked the level during the walk-around. It wouldn't be detectable short of draining some oil, which is above and beyond any preflight requirement. I will tell you this, though. Used oil smells different from plane to plane, I always give it a little sniff to make sure it doesn't smell charred. I've never come across any that had the scent of what got on my clothes yesterday. Not burnt, but … different. I didn't think much about it until what your partner said a few minutes ago."

She asked for a few more details and read back my verbal account to ensure it was accurate. There'd even be the voice recording of the conversation should they need to verify something later.

The whole process had taken a little over two hours, and I followed her outside. The other guy was flying a compact drone overhead, probably taking geotagged survey aerials.

Next to his feet was an aluminum hard-side full of tools and sundries. I saw vials sitting in a compartment which appeared to contain samples of the oil and fuel he managed to collect from the sumps.

"Mr. Carlson, Miss Mays, thank you for your time. We'll get out of your hair for now."

"Wait a second. What are you thinking?" I asked.

"It's way too early to even speculate. It's best you wait for the preliminary report."

The other guy landed the drone, folded it up, and stowed the whole kit in a Pelican case.

"I can't wait that long. With all due respect, your agency takes months or longer to publish those. I'll get an analysis myself if I need to."

The two investigators looked at each other.

"It's certainly your prerogative, and I feel for you, sir," she said summarily, "but it'd be irresponsible of us to make guesses."

"Okay. Understood, so I'll ask you a hypothetical. Is it possible it was intentional?"

"Possible? Sure. Probable? Who knows."

Brenda stood next to me. "Todd, what are you thinking?"

"If there's bleach in the oil, this was no accident," I said.

"Someone meant for this to happen?" she asked in a hush.

"Maybe, but I'm betting it wasn't supposed to be discovered. I've got an idea I want to check out. Do you have any wood matches around? The longer the better."

"Yeah, give me a minute," she said.

She walked into the house. The duo had already packed their stuff in their car, but they stayed put. I'd apparently piqued their curiosity.

Brenda returned with a cylindrical cardboard tube containing long fireplace matches.

I opened the cockpit and removed a passenger oxygen cannula from its storage spot, attached it into the overhead fitting of the built-in system, and turned on the flow. I took a very cautious whiff of the gas, confirming it was completely odorless other than the scent of the tubing.

When I struck a match and brought the cannula close to it, Mrs. Anchors yelled, "Are you insane?! You could start a fire⁠—"

She stopped speaking immediately on seeing the flame quickly extinguish.

I repeated the test with the same result.

I verified my hypothesis by using my portable bottle, standing well-clear of the craft.

When the gas from mine met the burning match, the flame immediately grew and vigorously burned the stick so quickly I had to drop it onto the snow-covered ground before singeing my hand.

Mrs. Anchors gasped. "Whoa."

"What the⁠—" Mr. Mallory said almost simultaneously.

I repeated that test, too, with identical results.

"Whatever is in its system obviously isn't oxygen," Brenda said, agreeing with my unspoken hypothesis.

"Well. We've got ourselves a whole new ballgame, don't we," Mrs. Anchors said.

What I was feeling fully settled on me.

"We'll get law enforcement on the case. We're going back to the federal building in Omaha. Please stick around. I'm sure they'll want to talk to you," said Mrs. Anchors.

I shook her offered hand only in polite reflex. My mind was spinning.

They wordlessly entered their vehicle and departed.

"You okay?" Brenda asked. "You've gone pale."

"No. I think I'm supposed to be dead."

I felt her hand at my back. She gently pushed, but my gaze was fixed on the plane.

"Come on, Todd. Let's go inside," she said, wrapping her arm around my shoulders. I followed her lead.

I sat at the table again.

"Need a drink?" she asked with a chuckle when she saw my expression.

"What? Huh?" The question yanked me out of my daze. "Uh … oh. No. It's barely eleven o'clock."

"Then it's five o'clock in England."

She took my emptied coffee mug from the table and rinsed it at the sink. She poured a snort of whiskey into it and placed it in front of me. I swallowed it in one gulp. It burned all the way down.

"Again," I rasped, holding the cup out.

She smiled. "Let that one go to work first."

Her fingers brushed the back of mine as she reached for the cup. They were warm and felt calming. I released my clutch, and she drew it out of my hand, placing it on the tabletop. About ten minutes later, the booze began to relax my shocked state.

I pulled my iPad and my kneeboard from my flight bag. I clicked a little lead to the tip of a mechanical pencil and started scribbling down times and figures on the notepad, consulting the performance graphs in the Cirrus's manual and the IFR enroute low altitude charts stored on my iPad.

"What are you thinking?" Brenda asked.

"Like I said before. I believe I'm supposed to be dead," I answered, still furiously working.

"Don't say that," she whispered.

"No. Of course I am.

"Think about it. Unless whoever owns the plane is an absolute idiot, he knows it's equipped with a recovery parachute. He would have to assume I'd use it, so he'd have to make it where I couldn't .

"There's only one way I know of to disable the chute. It's a safety pin which gets installed to prevent accidental deployment during certain maintenance tasks. It can't really be overlooked during a preflight.

"He'd also have to assume I would check that the CAPS was functional, so he wouldn't have simply tried to remove it entirely.

"So … he couldn't disable the CAPS system, so he had to disable me . Here's what I suspect might have happened if I'd made one single different choice."

I studied my math and figures again for a few moments.

"If I'd chosen to use the onboard oxygen, I would have become hypoxic by the end of the first hour. That's if the gas is inert. If what's in the cylinder out there is toxic, well, I might be dead even earlier. But, for the moment, assume I'm only unconscious or, at least, incoherent. I wouldn't be able to command the autopilot to descend below the oxygen-requiring altitudes when clear of the mountains, so I'd stay that way. I wouldn't have been talking to ATC, either.

"Then the oil 'malfunction,' happens," I air-quoted, "and I'm too out of it, or too dead, to notice or care. With no oil, at some point, the engine would have failed. Probably catastrophically. The autopilot would still try to maintain altitude and would either aerodynamically stall the plane or disconnect itself. Wouldn't matter when, see?

"The AP would have added so much nose-up trim by then to maintain the altitude, and I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. The plane would porpoise until it either rolled inverted or spun in.

"If an engine fails like that, it can come off its mounts and fall out of the cowl, leaving the plane completely imbalanced where it could even come down tail first.

"Either way, I wouldn't be awake to deploy the CAPS. I fall out of the sky from an altitude of 17,000 feet."

"Or get blown out of it," Brenda said.

That thought hadn't occurred to me, but she was astute and absolutely correct. The airspace in the United States was treated much differently after 9/11/2001. If I was non-communicative for a long-enough duration, I'd have been intercepted by the military, and certainly before nearing the major airspace of Kansas City.

"Jeez. You're right. The timing of the oil thing would have to be unpredictable, yes? If the oil problem didn't happen at all, interceptors might find me physically incapacitated, but not be able to do anything about it. They certainly wouldn't risk me being over a heavily populated metroplex when the tanks emptied."

"And there wouldn't be much evidence left to piece together."

"Definitely not if I was blown out of the sky. If there was more than a dozen gallons of fuel still in the wings, I'm sure post-impact fire would destroy all the evidence. The oxygen tank in the tail would probably be ruptured by impact forces. If not, the burst disc would pop due to the high pressure caused by the heat of the fire."

"Holy shit." She gasped. "Sorry," she added, realizing her profanity.

"Yeah. Holy shit indeed."

"Now?" I asked, thumping the rim of the coffee mug with a finger.

She fetched the bottle and another matching cup. She poured heavy doses into them. We did our shots simultaneously.

She put her hand on mine. I grasped it gently. Reassurance passed both ways. I saw something along the skin of her knuckles, wondering if the lighting was creating odd artifacts on her hand. I didn't give it another thought because I was too inside myself by that point.

"Okay, Todd Carlson, I have to ask you considering you're sitting in my house with my very young child."

"Anything," I said.

"Who are you, and who wants you dead?"

"I have no idea. Seriously, Ms. Mays, I don't. But I guarantee you I'm going to find out."

There was another knock at the door just after two o'clock. Brenda went to answer.

"Well! Hello again, Missus Gates !" said a boisterous, mocking male voice.

"It's Mays ! I told you never to use that name again, understand?"

I not only heard the stress in her voice, I could taste it.

I exited my seat to intervene, but slowed my approach when I observed the man was a uniformed LEO.

"The fibbies called me a while ago as a courtesy informing my office that they're going to be in the area investigating another mess you've made for yourself," he drawled at her.

I stepped beside her to say, "My mess, Officer. Not hers."

"And you are?" he asked with frothed spittle in the corners of his mouth.

"Todd Carlson. I was piloting the plane."

Brenda made a hasty retreat. The officer made a motion to follow her, but I squared myself in the doorway, blocking his intrusion.

"How can I help you?" I said and stepped forward onto the porch.

He quickly took a step back. "Well, I don't guess you can. But hear me, boy, you'd best keep an eye on yourself. Missus Gates has a history I wouldn't want see repeated on you," he said, trying to peer around or over me deeper into the house.

"Thank you, Officer."

"It's Sheriff  ," he barked, comically attempting to thrust out his chest to highlight his badge. All it served to do was highlight his man-boobs and dunlop. "Sheriff Otis Farber."

"Good afternoon, Sheriff," I said, and closed the door.

"What a dick ," I said to myself as I returned to the kitchen.

Brenda and Stacie were absent. The younger was no longer in the living room, but the TV was still on. I felt too uncomfortable to extend my search beyond the areas of the home I'd previously been welcomed to use, so instead, I sat back at the table.

The sheriff's words echoed in my head.

"The knock at the door will be for you!" Brenda's voice came from somewhere upstairs about twenty minutes later.

I went there and met two men in suits.

"We're looking for someone named Todd Carlson."

"I'm him," I said, closing the door behind me as I stood on the porch with them.

Both men displayed their credentials.

"Mr. Carlson, we're with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I'm Special Agent Rich Tucker, and this is Agent Stan Rittle. Looks like you've had an interesting couple of days?"

"I have. Is it about to get worse?" I asked cautiously.

"Maybe in terms of inconvenience, but that's all," he answered succinctly but with an easy-going attitude that made him come across as completely nonthreatening.

"What can I do for you?"

"The NTSB investigators you spoke with this morning contacted us because they have reason to believe your accident was no accident."

"Indeed. And?"

"Care to explain?"

"Didn't they?" I asked.

"They did, but we need to know more. Like, whose plane is it?"

"I've got some information inside. Let me get it."

I turned to reenter the house and saw Brenda standing in the opened door.

"Gentlemen, please come in," she offered. Her eyes were red and puffy. It appeared she'd been crying.

Once again, two ordinary adults sat at a table with two federal investigators.

I dispensed the facts I knew, and mentioned I'd been able to contact neither the buyer nor seller since the event but that I'd spoken to the seller the night before the ill-fated flight commenced. They were particularly interested in the topics of the conversations I'd had with either party to the transaction. The lead investigator asked a pointed question.

"So, in all that time, you never once saw them face to face?"

"No, but that's not unusual. It was a ferry flight. I've done hundreds. There's often no need at all for a face-to-face meeting. I mean, sure, I'd say we'll meet more often than not, but sometimes the business is concluded in the blind, so to speak."

The quieter agent spent several minutes taking photographs of the various documents I had. The insurance paperwork caught his attention.

"Know any specifics about this?" he asked, tapping the document.

I relayed what I knew about the policy.

"Whoa. Rather extreme way to get a payout. Stan, do you remember the guy who cashed out on a burned-up Citation in east Texas, and then him and another man ditched a Bonanza in the gulf of Mexico?" the senior agent asked the other.

The junior agent was snapping his fingers to jog his memory. "T. R. Wright and Ray Fosdick. The ATF was investigating them, too, right?"

"I couldn't recall their names, but that's right. Netted millions in fraud, but no one got hurt."

"You think this is an insurance thing?" I asked.

"Three million dollars on that hull? Yeah. Probably. But we'll back-track and see what else might be there. Mr. Carlson, where is your primary residence?"

"Houston."

"Okay. I think we're done. I appreciate your time, and I'm glad everything worked out for you."