So the Vermilion car was found on the twenty-seventh. The public warning went out to the airport on the thirtieth. Now, days had passed without news of local vehicles going missing or any strange happenings at any other airport in the region. Colt had to be in the area, and he wanted a plane.
On Thursday, July 1, AOPA finally came out with an alert about Colt through its weekly email newsletter, which goes to virtually every private pilot, flying student, and anyone else remotely connected to general aviation in the country.
That same afternoon, Bruce Payton slipped out of work and headed down to Nashville to see a songwriter friend of his who had a gig. The trip was a birthday present to himself. Everything back at the airport had seemed secure, and even though he hadn’t noticed any additional police or FBI activity, Payton felt sure they must have had the place under surveillance. The entire facility is surrounded by a ten-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire that are angled out, making it extremely hard to climb. “It looks a lot like a prison,” he says. The only chink in the security, according to Payton, is that some of the private hangar owners don’t bother waiting for the motorized gates to close behind them. They take about thirty seconds to close, long enough for someone hiding nearby to sneak in, especially after dark.
Normally, Payton would have spent at least a couple of nights down in Nashville, “but I had a funny feeling.” He struck up a conversation at dinner with some folks from Chicago who mentioned they’d seen news reports about the Barefoot Bandit. “I told them that he was suspected of being in our area up at Monroe, and said, ‘You know, I should probably get back there.’” Payton drove back up on Saturday, but everything seemed safely locked down.
Colt had gotten to Bloomington on Sunday the twenty-seventh. His favorite reconnaissance tool, Google Earth, showed a number of places to camp inside the fence of the one-thousand-acre airport. In fact, there’s so much wild ground and woods on the property that it supports a growing population of coyotes. For a week, they’d have to share their haunts with Colt.
One stretch of woods at Monroe is cut back into the shape of a person’s lower calf, ankle, and foot, with its toes pointed directly at runway 24. It’s just one hundred yards off the taxiway, but with the trees sporting their full complement of summer leaves, the wooded patch offered perfect camouflage for someone who wanted to watch all the activities. No one could see him, but Colt had an ideal view of everything, especially the secluded private hangars at the south end. He set up camp.
Over the following nights, Colt crowbarred his way into four of the seven private hangars and comfy’d up his camp with blankets and a couch pillow. He stocked his larder with pilot snacks, including Oreo cookies, peanut butter crackers, power bars, cans of soup, nuts, and even Tyson precooked chicken breasts. He took plenty of water and a good week’s worth of food out of the hangars. To help ensure no one saw his head peeking out of the leaves, he even borrowed a camouflage ball cap emblazoned with the Indiana University logo. The cap covered a freshly shorn head—he’d cut his hair and shaved inside one of the hangars, leaving the hair in the sink.
Colt couldn’t risk raising a shelter, but he enjoyed perfect weather. He lay back among the trees listening to music on his iPod and flipping through the magazines he’d liberated from a corporate hangar. Sticking with his style, he took a stack of
Colt’s backpack held everything he felt important enough to carry across the country: personal mementos, a laptop, and a loaded Walther PPK (James Bond’s favorite pistol) with its serial number filed off. He also had a very cool little Contour video camera. Designed to shoot high-def footage of extreme sports from the extremist’s point of view, the five-ounce camera can be attached to a headlamp strap or the dashboard of a car or airplane. If someone wanted to take a video showing off his skills—say, taking off in a plane—this would be the camera.
Along with his eclectic mix of music, Colt had loaded his iPod with media files. Some were news reports following the career of the Barefoot Bandit. There were also airplane photos and flight training videos, including instructionals on landing several types of planes. One model featured with both a picture and a how-to training video was the Cessna 400 Corvalis, the same model Bill Anders had, which Colt had studied back on Orcas, and that Spider Miller had taken to Georgia.
At noon on Saturday, July 3, Colt’s ship finally came in.
SPIDER LANDED HIS YEAR-OLD Corvalis and taxied to his hangar. “I was due for an oil change, so I called the guy at the FBO and asked him if he wanted to knock it out. He said he had time that evening, and towed it across the field to his hangar.” The mechanic serviced the plane and started the engine again to check for leaks. Everything looked good, so he taxied it back to Miller’s hangar and then brought over the fuel truck to top off the Cessna’s tanks. Bingo.
The weather was ideal. The plane was perfect. It was extremely similar to the Cirrus SR22, which Colt had safely landed twice. He knew the Corvalis was equipped with the Garmin G1000 navigation package. And he knew the performance specs: a 310-horsepower turbocharged engine that produced enough thrust to drive it 270 mph— faster than any other plane of its type. If you understood how to lean the fuel mixture, the plane had a range of more than 1,200 miles. As the mechanic pulled away in the fuel truck, Colt even knew it had full tanks without having to risk breaking into the hangar. Everything was falling into place better than he could have dreamed. There was only one potential problem: he’d been unsuccessful getting into this style of plane if its gullwing doors were locked.
The mechanic—who’d been briefed by Bruce Payton about the Bandit—locked Spider’s hangar behind him, but he’d left the Corvalis keys inside the plane and its doors unlocked. Problem solved.
COLT KNEW THAT THE tower crew started work at 6:30 a.m. Dawn began brightening the eastern sky at 5:53 that day, though, so there was plenty of light outside as he raised the big bifold doors of Spider’s hangar. He rolled the plane out, then put the hand tug back in the hangar and closed and locked the doors. With any luck, no one would notice the plane was missing for hours, maybe days if he caught a break like he did at Granite Falls and no one paid attention to its emergency beacon.
Colt cranked the engine and taxied to the runway. At exactly 6:01, a security camera captured Cessna Corvalis N660BA taking off into the clear purple sky. It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day.
Part 5
WILD BLUE YONDER
Chapter 28
The transponder on the Millers’ Corvalis was set to automatically ping 1200, telling air traffic controllers that it was adhering to visual flight rules (VFR). Under VFR, a pilot takes responsibility for not crashing into mountains, colliding with other planes, or running out of fuel and falling out of the sky. As Colt knew, by simply staying below eighteen thousand feet and avoiding controlled airspace around airports, military installations, or any FAA temporary flight restrictions, small-plane pilots enjoy the full freedom of the American skies. A VFR pilot doesn’t need to file a flight plan or even talk to anyone on the radio.
He had a fine plane and he had a plan that made sense, at least to him.
Instead of a short hop, this time Colt planned to leapfrog far ahead of his pursuers. Not that he had any reason to be unnecessarily concerned that they were catching up to him. After all, he had just spent an entire week at an airport within a half mile of where he dumped the last stolen car. This flight would be the big one, bigger headlines, bigger splash. He had a plane that could carry him out of the country to the first stop on a voyage to get to where the good life lives.
Once at his cruising altitude headed south, Colt leaned out the fuel mixture. On paper, the Corvalis could just make it to Cuba. In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt signed an extradition treaty with Cuba that covered fugitives wanted for
