He glanced at it again, not even really taking in the time shown there. “We crashed about half an hour ago, and the sun just came up, so it’s around six in the morning.” Her eyes opened wide, perhaps remembering when they were supposed to arrive. “Exactly. We were supposed to arrive last night at ten p.m. local time, eleven p.m. our time, but we only just crashed, which means we kept flying for another six or seven hours.” He pointed at the wreckage far below them. “I’m guessing that’s why the fire burned out so quickly, because there was no fuel left.”

“But if we reached Costa Rica and kept flying for seven hours…”

“We’d be somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The pilot must have changed course.”

“Like that Malaysian plane.”

“Like that Malaysian plane. That’s why I was checking my watch, because it’s set to the time back home. It’s just getting to be time for breakfast.”

She looked distracted by that final detail, probably thinking that her family would know by now, would be distraught and waiting for news.

Quickly, to take her mind off it, he said, “It means we’re somewhere in South America. Costa Rican time is an hour behind us, but I guess my watch is just about right for where we are. So we’re some place in the same time zone as back home, and looking at this landscape…”

“So we’re in South America. But if the plane flew for an extra seven hours, we could be anywhere—Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia…” He nodded when she paused. “We could be anywhere,” she said again, her voice full of resignation and all the things that didn’t need to be said.

If the pilot had changed course on purpose, he’d probably turned off the plane’s transponders, just like in that Malaysian plane. If they’d flown for seven hours off radar, they could be anywhere within hundreds of thousands of square miles, and even with satellite data to help narrow down the search, the rain forests of South America were probably as tough a search zone as any ocean.

There would be no rescue party, he was certain of that now. He’d already sensed they might have a long wait, but unless someone had actually seen or heard their plane cutting through the early morning dark, they might as well have vanished off the face of the earth.

Right now, they would have become a mystery, filling news bulletins all over the world. But this was the reality of that mystery—most of them were dead, and the survivors would have no choice but to find their own way out of this vast and undoubtedly hostile jungle.