Will cut his airspeed and dropped to four hundred feet. The vehicles below were moving between seventy and eighty miles per hour. At ninety knots, he was rapidly overtaking them, but also moving into position to land in front of the Rambler. As he approached the congested line of cars, he lowered his landing gear and went to full flaps. This further reduced his speed, bringing him more in line with the speed of the vehicles below, though he was still overtaking them.
When he descended to a hundred feet, fear announced itself in the pit of his stomach. This was no deserted stretch of Delta highway. This was I-55, where cars and trucks managed to slam into each other every day without the help of rogue airplanes. He could smell the exhaust of the big diesel trucks below. From this altitude they looked like aircraft carriers on a concrete sea.
Airspeed was eighty-five knots, still too fast. He would have given a lot for a cold winter day, good dense air for the propellers to bite into and to keep his stall speed low. This was the worst weather for what he was about to do. Cheryl leaned forward, watching the concrete rise toward them and endlessly repeating Hail Marys. Apparently, if she was going to die, she wanted to see it coming. A perverse instinct, perhaps, but a human one.
“Can you do it?” she asked softly.
A brief crosswind tried to push the tail around, but Will corrected for it. “We’re about to find out.”
She pointed through the windshield. “There they are!”
He shut everything out of his mind but the scene ahead. In the right lane: the white Rambler, moving slowly, seeming to pull an endless chain of cars along behind it, cars which were actually trying to whip into the left lane so that they could pass the cars holding them back. In the left lane: the fast movers, cars and trucks racing up and passing the sideshow in the right lane at eighty miles per hour. In front of the Rambler, where he needed to set down, were the speeding cars in the left lane and a couple of dawdlers in the right. A Mercury Sable about sixty yards ahead of the Rambler, and a minivan some distance ahead of that. An intricate ballet of mechanical dancers that would remain in their present relationships for a very brief time.
It was now or never.
He centered the Baron on the broken white line and dropped toward the roof of the Rambler at eighty-two knots. He couldn’t see what was happening behind him, but he felt sure that the sight of a twin-engine plane dropping toward the road with its gear and flaps down and a wingspan as wide as the interstate had sent a lot of feet to a lot of brake pedals.
The Baron overtook the Rambler with a speed differential of thirty miles per hour. Will flew half the distance to the Mercury Sable, then eased the yoke forward and and reduced power further. The Baron seemed to stutter in midair, as though he had applied the brakes to a car.
Then it fell like a stone.
Three miles behind the Baron, Hickey gaped and pointed through the windshield of the stolen Camry.
“Look at that crazy son of a bitch! If he’s got to crash, the least he could do is get off the highway to do it.”
Karen said nothing. The instant the Baron had dropped out of the sky and lined itself up over the interstate, her heart had jumped into her throat. It had to be Will. It had to be.
“What’s he doing up there?” Hickey wondered aloud. “He’s a kamikaze, this guy. He must have lost an engine.”
He looked to Karen for a response, but she sat still and silent, staring at the dashboard. If Will was risking his life to land on the interstate, that could only mean one thing. Abby was somewhere up ahead. And she was alive.
“What’s with you?” Hickey said. “You gotta see this. This’ll make CNN tonight.” He punched her on the shoulder. “You sick or something? Why are you…”
He faced forward again and watched the plane drop to the level of the cars ahead, then disappear.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch!”He floored the accelerator and started to pass the Cadillac ahead of them.
Karen grabbed the wheel and wrenched it toward her, throwing the Camry into the right lane and driving the Cadillac off the road in a cloud of dust.
“Let go!” Hickey yelled, hammering her head with his fist.
Karen clung to the wheel like a sea captain in a gale. The Camry veered onto the shoulder, which dropped precipitously to the woods below. She didn’t care if they flipped three times and crashed into the trees, so long as it kept Hickey from reaching Abby. She had made that decision hours ago.
“Let go, you crazy bitch!”
He slammed an elbow into her ear and yanked the car back onto the road. Karen blacked out for a moment. She knew she had, because when she came to, her hands had slipped from the wheel, and the Camry’s engine was whining as Hickey streaked past the cars ahead. She saw then that he was steering with only his left hand. His right held Will’s. 38, and it was pointed at her stomach.
“Do it again and I’ll kill you,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.
She backed against the passenger door.
As the speedometer needle went to ninety, then a hundred, Karen studied the gun in Hickey’s hand. It was somehow more frightening than the idea of a wreck. A wreck at this speed would certainly kill them both, but the gun might kill only her. And Abby was so close-
Hickey cursed and applied the brake. A long chain of flashing red lights had appeared ahead. Brake lights. Something was happening up there. And that something had to be Will’s plane. Hickey swerved across the left lane onto the median shoulder and raced past the braking cars. The hatred in his face was like a sulfurous fire burning beneath his skin.
Fixing an image of Abby in her mind, Karen began to pray. The image she saw was not Abby as she was now, but as an infant, the miracle of flesh and bone and smiling eyes that Karen had given up her career for, that she would give up everything for. A profound sadness seeped outward from her heart, but with it came a peace that transcended her fear. In the silence of her mind, words from Ecclesiastes came to her, heard long ago but never quite forgotten. There is a time to kill, and a time to die. She closed her eyes.
“I love you, Abby,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, Will.”
“What?” Hickey said, fighting to keep the Camry moving past the bumper-to-bumper cars.
Karen curled her fingers into claws and launched herself across the console with murder in her heart.
Hickey fired.
The Baron hit the concrete hard, and Will’s plan instantly began to disintegrate. The driver of the Sable must have slowed, because the Baron was racing toward it far too fast to stop. Will hit the throttles and hopped over the car like a student pilot practicing a touch-and-go landing. When the wheels hit again, he saw that the minivan which had been comfortably ahead of the Sable had also braked, probably because the vehicles ahead of it had slowed or stopped to watch the crisis unfolding behind them.
He pulled up his flaps, cut power, and applied the brakes, but he saw in an instant that he wouldn’t be able to stop in time. He no longer had enough power or distance to skip over the minivan, as he had the Rambler, and his props were spinning with enough force to chop the van into scrap metal. Yet the driver wouldn’t get off the damned road to avoid the crash. Like Will, he was blocked by the wooded hill of the median on the left and the steep drop into woods on the right. But either would be preferable to being hit by an airplane. Then Will saw the group of heads in the back of the van.
Kids.
He swerved left and shut off his mixture, fuel, and master electrical switch. He felt a moment of euphoria as they passed the van, but it turned to horror as his right wingtip clipped the vehicle and they began to spin.
Time decelerated with sickening slowness. Cheryl was shrieking, and at some point in the whirling chaos Will saw a log truck barreling up from behind them. Sitting in front of the log truck like a Matchbox toy was the white Rambler. The Baron’s nose gear crumpled as the plane spun, and one of the props hit the cement in a storm of sparks, sending a blade hurtling off into space. As they came around to face the Rambler again, Will saw the little car suddenly scoot forward out of the log truck’s path, but his relief died as it went over the narrow shoulder and plummeted down the slope toward the trees.
“We’ve got to get out!” he shouted, gripping Cheryl’s arm.
The plane had come to rest facing north, and the thirty-ton juggernaut of steel and wood that was the log
