Willy had been to Chillagoe so could picture the place. “Part of the old Cairns Railway then?” he commented.
“Yes, built a hundred years or so ago to service the mines. It was… Uh oh!” Mr Drew said. He shook his head and listened and then studied the gauges. “We are in trouble I think. If we don’t get down quickly the engine is going to overheat and seize up.” He bent and looked down at the map Willy had spread between them. “Where’s our nearest airstrip?”
Willy slid his fingertip across the map to the closest of the small black circles that indicated an airfield. “Here at Barrabong Station,” he answered.
“How far?”
Willy did a quick calculation. Despite feeling pressured and anxious his fingers moved deftly to side the ruler across the map and then to the scale. “About ten nautical miles,” he answered.
“And Muldarga?”
Once again Willy did a quick measurement, aware that he was sweating more than he had been and that his fingers felt stiff from nervousness. “Twenty-five.”
“Hmm. OK, we try for the closest. Give me a bearing for this Barrabong place and then start looking for emergency landing grounds,” Mr Drew answered.
As though to emphasize his words the engine gave a distinct blip and spluttered noticeably. Willy went tense and looked down, noting again how unpleasant the country looked. The long, jagged ridges of grey stone suddenly appeared close and threatening.
Tearing his eyes from the view Willy ruled a pencil line on the map and quickly and deftly used his protractor and pencil to calculate a Grid Bearing. It was the work of seconds to convert this to a Magnetic Bearing by subtracting the magnetic variation. Seven degrees east, he reminded himself. To be sure he did the calculation on paper and said, “Bearing is five degrees magnetic.”
Mr Drew did not question or argue. He at once turned the aircraft sharply to port onto the new course, and began a gentle climb. “To get some height to give us more glide distance,” he explained. He then began talking on the radio. First, he called the Air Traffic Control people in faraway Cairns and informed them of the situation and planned destination. They replied and said they would have the emergency services notified if things got worse. Then Mr Drew called the Air Race organizers at the temporary base at Muldarga. They thanked him and said to keep them informed so they could send a ground crew to help with repairs or a rescue crew if they needed it. They also said they would send the next aircraft to overfly the area to check that they were safe.
All of that made Willy feel much better but he still swallowed from nervousness. Looking down he noted a single meandering vehicle track running roughly parallel to the old railway line but a kilometre or so to the north of it. But everything else was just bush and the jumbled ridges of rocks. There wasn’t another mark of human settlement to be seen.
That got him staring ahead, trying to pick out any sign of their destination in the heat haze. The first thing his eyes noted was a distinctive peak thrusting itself up from the distant jumble of hills. It was almost in line with their new course and he checked the map to see if it was named. It was and he pointed to it and said, “Mt Whetstone.”
Mr Drew grunted and at that moment the engine gave another shudder and blipped. Mr Drew shook his head. “No good. I’m shutting down. Sorry son but I don’t think we will make it. At our best angle of glide, we might make about another three or four miles at most. Start looking for a clearing we can put down in.”
He then turned his attention to shutting down the engine and then calling the Race Control on the radio to let them know what was happening. The silence that followed the shutting down of the motor caused Willy to shiver with apprehension and he had to fight down waves of emerging fear to try to stay looking calm and relaxed. Good training if I survive, he told himself. But that led to thoughts of how to survive a serious crash and of what it might be like to die.
But thinking about dying was a dark tunnel of gloom Willy had already been down several times in his young life. Two years earlier the timber thieves had threatened to kill him and only a few months before the Columbian drug smugglers had seriously tried so rather than dwell on such terrifying and morbid thoughts he made a conscious effort to think about something else. Very deliberately he made himself study the instruments. Noting the angle of descent, he began to ask questions about how best to glide an aircraft and what was the minimum safe speed before there was a danger of stalling. Mr Drew answered him a voice that sounded calm enough except for a slight edge to some of his words.
Willy stared ahead and compared the relative closeness of Mt Whetstone, now an even sharper edged silhouette against a dusty grey haze, with his memory of it a few minutes earlier. He then noted the altimeter reading and tried to estimate the distance they had travelled over the ground. He saw that they were already down to four thousand feet and he thought they had travelled about three miles.
About a mile for every thousand feet. We might make it, he mused.
As the gliding aircraft sank lower it came more and more under the influence of the heated thermals in the lower atmosphere. It began to buck and rock, dropping in sickening swoops and then shuddering up and almost stalling on the updraughts.
Mr Drew struggled to keep the aircraft at its optimum attitude and angle of glide. Beads of perspiration broke out on his brow and the cabin began to rapidly heat under the influence of the brassy afternoon sun. Willy wiped sweaty palms on his trousers and then his lip with his shirt sleeve. “Hot now the air conditioning is off,” he commented.
“Yes. You can open the side windows. We will want them open anyway if we have to do a forced landing,” Mr Drew replied.
Willy did so and found some immediate relief from the cool air that came sucking in. Then he stared out to starboard and found the view even more startling. They were below two thousand feet now and from that height the low the ridges of grey limestone appeared to stretch off to the hazy horizon in jagged and threatening rows. One obvious pointy hill out to starboard caught his eye and so did a row of sharp teeth like knolls on another ridge.
This is not good, Willy thought.
Rather than scare himself by staring at the uninviting prospects Willy bent to the map. Devil’s Pinnacle, he read. Near it was another feature named Devil’s Eye. In the hope of estimating their chances he placed his finger on the pencil line where he estimated they were and began measuring the distance to the landing ground. As he did he noted a tiny black square half-hidden by the pencil line. Next to it was the name Whetstone. A vehicle track was marked leading to it.
A hut or a house or something, he thought. It was on the south bank of a large creek. Limestone Creek, he read.
Looking up Willy pointed and said, “There is a building of some sort on the map,” he said to Mr Drew. “It might be a cattle station or something.”
“It will have to do. How far?” Mr Drew asked.
“Less than two miles. Just over the next couple or ridges,” Willy answered. He looked ahead and was shocked to see that they were now so low that the ridges ahead appeared to be almost the same altitude. From that angle they looked to be even more forbidding, two stark and jagged lines that looked very ugly.
Will we make it? he wondered.
Chapter 2
AN INTERESTING PLACE
As the first limestone ridge grew rapidly closer Willy gripped his seat and held his breath. But he was then ashamed of himself as he saw that they were actually several hundred feet higher than it and floated over quite safely. As they did the turbulence thrust the aircraft upwards and then just as quickly dumped them in a frightening and sickening swoop. Mr Drew struggled with the controls and Willy saw that he was biting his lip and looking very anxious. He then stared down through the side window and muttered.
Willy looked down through his own window and saw that they were over