He's in the back. Garrett didn't move. Can I ask what this is about? I have a problem with an aircraft, she said. An intermittent electrical fault my engineering team can't locate.
We have a delivery deadline in 6 days. Garrett studied her for a moment. His expression said that he was weighing something. Not whether she deserved help exactly, but whether Caleb should be the one to give it to her, and whether that was Garrett's call to make. "He's his own person," Garrett said finally.
"You can ask him yourself." He led her through the workshop to the rear where a door opened into a smaller secondary bay. B. Caleb was on his back on a wheeled creeper underneath the elevated twin engine aircraft, visible from the knees down. His boots were the same worn pair from the hangar 4 months ago. There was a work light positioned beside him and she could hear him doing something involving a ratchet.
"You've got a visitor," Garrett said. The ratchet stopped, a pause. Then the creeper rolled out from under the aircraft, and Caleb looked up at her from the floor, which was, she recognized with a sharp and uncomfortable clarity, almost exactly the position she had first seen him in. She didn't laugh. Hey, he said.
Hey," she said. He sat up and looked at her without moving to stand immediately. There was no anger in his face. He just looked like a man deciding how to understand the situation he was in. "This is a work visit," he said.
It came out as neither a question nor an accusation, just a category he was establishing. "Yes," she said. "I'm not here about anything else." He nodded and got to his feet, wiping his hands on a rag from his pocket. "Okay, tell me." She described the fault. She was precise about it because she had spent the drive over going through the technical notes Howell had sent her.
She described the intermittent presentation, the failed diagnostic attempts, the hypothesis about shielding and wiring bundle cross interference, the location behind the primary avionics panel. She did not editorialize or frame it as an emergency in a way designed to create pressure. She just described it. Caleb listened with his arms crossed and his eyes on the middle distance. the way he listened when he was actually processing information rather than waiting for his turn to talk. When she finished, he was quiet for a moment.
"Which aircraft?" he said. She gave him the model designation. "Where's the forward electronics bay on that config?" He wasn't asking rhetorically. "He was testing himself against his own memory." "Port side forward of the main spar," she said. He nodded slowly.
"Your team pulled the harness connectors but didn't pull the panel." "Correct. Have they run the diagnostic under thermal load? Not standard operating temp. I mean elevated. 40° above nominal.
She reached for her phone and called Howell's direct line. He picked up on the second ring. She asked the question. He put her on hold for 90 seconds. When he came back, his voice had a different quality to it.
"No," he said. "We ran it at standard." "Why would elevated thermal load change the presentation?" she asked Caleb, keeping the phone to her ear. Because if the shielding on that wiring bundle is degraded, it won't cause significant interference until the insulation softens under heat. At operating temperature, it's marginal enough to come and go. You push the thermal load, it stays present long enough to locate.
He paused. It's a 20-minut test. You'll know exactly where to pull the panel. She relayed this to Howell. He was quiet for 4 seconds.
Then, tell me who I'm talking to. Someone who knows the aircraft, Sloan said. another pause. "Okay, I'll set it up immediately." She hung up and looked at Caleb. He was already turning back toward the creeper in the aircraft behind him. "Thank you," she said.
"That was a phone call," he said. "That's not really a favor." She stood there for a moment. She had more to ask and she knew it, and she knew he knew it. And the fact that they were both letting the silence sit was its own kind of conversation. "I need someone on site," she said.
"Not to do the repair. Howell's team can do the repair once they find the location, but I need someone who can run the thermal diagnostic correctly and tell them exactly where to pull. Caleb looked at the aircraft he'd been working on. Then at Garrett, who was leaning against the door frame with his coffee and not pretending to be doing anything other than watching this happen. He's got two days clear, Garrett said to no one in particular.