Free Deja Blue by Robert W Walker Page B

sped off to some crime scene location to join forces with the BSU personnel on a case, ostensibly to give them any ‘fresh’ perspective on the kidnapping or murder. Within an hour, she was looking down over a manmade plateau that’d been carved out of the mountainside and flattened into an airfield. Yeager Airport looked from the sky about the size of a postage stamp, and almost all the commercial flights going out of this place were propeller powered.
     
    Rae had been standing, leaning in over Captain Parsalls’ shoulder here in the cockpit, so she easily saw what the pilots stared at down below. “Damn, is it safe to land this thing here?” she asked.
     
    “Piece of cake,” replied Rosiek, the co-pilot even as the jet was turned over to him for landing in an
     
    exaggerated, mock-ceremony between pilot and co-pilot, ending with Parsalls’ saying, “Just don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
     
    “Not to worry, Nick,” replied Rosiek, eager to prove himself. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt this baby.” “Ever land here before?” Rae asked, sensing it a rhetorical question.
     
    “Strap in, Dr. Hiyakawa,” ordered Parsalls, indicating the jump seat. “I insist.”
     
    Rae frowned at getting no answer, sat and pulled the jump seat straps over each shoulder. The harness style seat belt reminded her of a theme park roller-coaster ride.
     
    “In answer to your question, Dr. Hiyakawa,” began young Rosiek who looked to Rae about as mature as the boy genius Copernicus, “no, I haven’t had the pleasure of landing on Yeager’s plateau before, but Nick’s done it a few times, right, Nick?”
     
    Nick’s done it…. It sounded to Rae like a line from a Hemmingway novel. “That’s a comfort,” she half-joked.
     
    “Nothin’ really to worry about, Doctor,” Nick reassured her, but again outside the cockpit bubble there did not appear much of an airport to land at.
     
    Rosiek piped in again with, “And besides they land commercial jets here.” She saw the young co-pilot shrug in his seat. “And a commercial airliner takes almost twice the runway we do.”
     
    “OK…if you guys say so,” she relented, “but please beware of stray elk and hunting dogs out there…please.”
     
    This made the pilots chuckle. “Hey, this is the home of flying ace Chuck Yeager,” said the captain, “first man to fly into space, so please, a little respect, Dr. Hiyakawa.”
     
    The landing went as smoothly as if they’d touched down on glass and hadn’t shattered a thing; it proved so smooth a landing, in fact, the pilot asked his co-pilot, “How’d you do that, Rosiek?”
     
    The younger man said, “Don’t ask, ‘cause I don’t know.”
     
    “A perfect landing,” agreed Rae, who’d developed a fascination for small planes and had been thinking seriously of taking lessons.
     
    “Didn’t run over any furry animals, either.” The captain and co-pilot laughed as the plane taxied to the terminal.
     
    Once in the hangar-like small terminal, Rae dragged the large suitcase hauled from the belly of the Cessna—the big one she hadn’t wanted to bring. She followed at a distance as Orvison and Kunati searched for their ride. They’d walked through the terminal in less than two minutes and found the half-filled outside lot hugging the terminal. An unmarked police car took up a space below a sign stating that it was for Charleston police use only. A row of others signaled state vehicles only. Parking meters graced all the other outdoor spots, and the parked cars here proved sporadic at best. A nearby parking garage rose to four levels, a giant steel and concrete turtle if one used imagination, an overture to a sweeping architectural design, more a kind of wedding cake if Rae worked at it, but it appeared as empty as a wedding reception hall after the band had gone.
     
    All the same, whatever Charleston lacked in the way of traffic to be seen hunkered down at the municipal airport, it did not