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.
After Thursday, he's got the Cessna. Caleb looked at Garrett with an expression that communicated several things simultaneously, including that he had not asked for that information to be offered, and that he was not entirely displeased that it had been. "What's the rate?" Caleb asked. He was looking at Sloan again now. His voice was professional.
"Whatever else this was, that part of it was going to be clean and simple." "Whatever your billing," she said. "Plus 20% for the turnaround. Plus 25," Garrett said from the doorway. Garrett, Caleb said. I'm just doing math, Garrett said.
Caleb looked at Sloan. Plus 20%, he said. And I work with your engineering team, not for them. I'm not taking direction from Howell. I'll consult.
I'll run the diagnostic. I'll tell them what I see. They do the repair. Agreed, Sloan said immediately. He pulled out his phone and looked at the time.
I can be there by 1:00. Booked. He arrived at 1:14, which Sloan registered from the window of her office, but did not go down to meet. That was deliberate. He didn't need an audience for his arrival, and she had learned slowly that the instinct to be present for everything that mattered was sometimes its own form of making things about herself.
Howell came to her office at 1:45. He sat down in the chair across from her desk with the expression of a man who has just witnessed something that rearranged some portion of his understanding. He ran the elevated thermal diagnostic. Howell said. Took him about 22 minutes to get the fault to present consistently.
And wiring bundle behind the secondary avionics panel, not the primary one. There's a section where the shielding braid is pinched against a structural rib. Probably happened during the last cable routing update. Someone pulled it too tight. Under elevated heat, the insulation softens just enough to let the interference bleed through.
He paused. We've been looking at the wrong panel. If we'd pulled the primary panel, we'd have found nothing and lost 2 days. Can you fix it? 3 hours, maybe four.
It's accessible once you know where to go. He looked at her. He walked through the bay once and pointed at the secondary panel. Just pointed at it. Said the fault signature on the diagnostic was consistent with a ground loop from that location.
Another pause. He hasn't worked with that specific avionics configuration before. He looked it up on his phone on the way over. Sloan looked at her desk for a moment. "Okay," she said.