There is plenty of time to think.

It seemed to her now that she’d known in her heart from the beginning that they weren’t going to make it. She should have said no in the first place. She was a daytime flier, a visual-flight-rules pilot, and she’d never claimed to be anything else. Did the boss want to go to the Hawi airport? Fine, let’s go. Fly north along the eastern slope of the Kohala ridge with the coast on your right and keep an eye out for the runway, nothing to it. Hana? Just point the nose toward Maui and go; you couldn’t miss it. Even Honolulu, where they’d gone for the Cattlemen’s Expo-fix the bearing and keep flying until you see Diamond Head and the airport. But this instrument-flying, this flying in the dark, wasn’t for her; she wasn’t used to it. And a rushed, crazy flight like this-with barely enough time to do the chart, four hundred miles over empty ocean to some rinky-dink, flyspeck island in the middle of nowhere-that was plain stupid.

Still, she had done everything right, everything by the book. Scared or not, she’d used the North Pacific navigational chart to locate the damn island in the first place, find the distance, and plot the bearing. She’d contacted the flight services center for the wind conditions and adjusted the bearing accordingly. She’d checked everything three times. The plane was fully fueled, newly maintained, and ready to go. The destination was well within the Grumman’s range, especially if she flew high and kept to fifty-five percent power, which was her plan. Fortunately, the whiskey compass was as reliable as it could be, having been adjusted on the compass rose only four days earlier, and as they’d taxied slowly down the runway of the deserted Waimea airport she’d carefully set the gyrocompass to it and rechecked it against the correction card. And, daytime flier or not, she was a damn good pilot; she had a feel for flying, she could do this.

All the same, fifteen minutes into the flight, as the airport beacon shrank to a fading spark in the blackness, her courage failed her. “This is impossible. I can’t do this,” she said abruptly. “We have to go back.” She was already easing down the left rudder and beginning to turn the yoke to circle back toward the Big Island.