Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

xiOUT OF CAPTIVITYtenance for all his adult life, to recognize that the relative silence in thecabin was not a good thing.I closed the biography of Che Guevara I’d been reading and lookedover at my buddy and coworker Marc Gonsalves. He’d been busy at hisstation, practicing with the camera gear and the computer. I wasn’t sureif he’d been so involved in what he was doing that he noticed anythingat all. The poor guy had only been f lying with us for just a few missionsand now we had a damn engine failure to deal with. I knew that TommyJanis and our copilot Tom Howes would instantly f lip the switch tofigure out if we were going to be able to get this bird over the mountainsand to the airport at Larandia, where we were scheduled to refuel.In my twenty-plus years of f lying, I’d had all kinds of training in avariety of different military and civilian aircraft. I’d been in tight spotsbefore and now I slipped easily into a don’t-panic-just-focus mindset.“Marc,” I told him, “make the mayday call.”“I’m too new to make a call this important,” Marc said. “I thinkyou better do it.”I couldn’t blame the guy for not wanting to make that initial call. Iimmediately got on the SATCOM radio to relay our location to the guysback at the base. The first thing I needed to do to was to let our commandposts know our location coordinates.“Magic Worker, this is Mutt 01, do you read me?”I waited but got no response. I tried them again. Silence.This was not good. Magic Worker was responsible for our commandand control. Normally, they responded almost instantly everytime we called in at our appointed half-hour intervals. The thought ofpossibly going in on an emergency landing without anyone knowingwe had a mayday was not something any of us wanted to do. I madeanother call to a Department of Defense group based in Florida calledJIATF East.“Mutt 01. This is JIATF East. How many souls on board?”