THEY CLIMBED INTO THE Cessna and cranked up. The engine still had some heat left, and Active opened his parka gratefully as warm air filled the cockpit. Cowboy taxied uphill a few yards, then locked the left wheel, goosed the throttle, and rotated the plane into takeoff position. Soon they were bounding along the whitish mat of reindeer moss and chert that covered the crest.
A gust caught them, and the plane soared off the ridge, the right wing lifting in a way that made Active think of McAllister’s account of the crash that had killed Budzie Kivalina at Driftwood. Cowboy corrected the roll and climbed southward toward the Katonak River. The climb continued until the plane was level with the bottoms of the clouds draping the slopes of the Laird Mountains on the far side of the Katonak. Cowboy hunched forward to peer at the approaching peaks. Active had learned that this hunch was a bad sign in a bush pilot.
“Trouble?”
Cowboy gave one of his rumbling grunts and looked at the chart on his knee. “Fifty-fifty on Igichuk Pass,” he said. “If it’s closed, we gotta go way around like this to get over there.” He traced a long arc on the map, running along the north slope of the Lairds to where the mountains sank into the Katonak Flats less than fifty miles from Chukchi. From the Flats, Cowboy’s finger indicated, they would have to double back and fly up the Isignaq along the south slope of the Lairds to reach One-Way Lake. The pilot tapped one of his gas gauges. “But if we have to do that, we’ll have to run in to Chukchi and refuel first.”
“It’s your call,” Active said.
“Can’t hurt to take a look.” Cowboy continued his scrutiny of the Lairds as they reached the Katonak, followed it upstream to the mouth of the Igichuk River, and headed into the mountains. Now they were skimming the bellies of the clouds spreading north from the Lairds. Snow streaked past the windows. Active peered ahead but could not spot the pass, or guess the chances of it still being open.
Active studied Cowboy, trying to decide how serious the situation was. The pilot seemed to have relaxed a little. He was farther back in his seat and even looking out his side window at the valley below. He dipped a wing as they passed a spot where a creek fed into the Igichuk near a long, silky gravel bar. “There’s a nice little hot spring down there,” he said. “Good place for a getaway with someone sweet when the weather’s nicer. I could drop you guys in there.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Active said.
They continued up the Igichuk until a hard left turn around the end of a rocky granite ridge put them in a mountain bowl of gray talus slopes whitening with snow. Clouds capped the bowl like a lid on a pot.
Active looked for a way out and finally spotted a saddle up ahead that looked as if it might lead through to the south slopes of the range. It was at the same altitude as the Cessna and pretty much socked in, so it was hard to see over. “That the pass?” He pointed.
Cowboy nodded.
“The clouds are right down on it. Maybe it’s time for a one-eighty.”
“Ah,” Cowboy growled. “We came this far.”
Cowboy rolled the plane into a turn and followed the curving wall of the bowl. Active wondered about this indirect approach for a moment, then realized they would have no escape route if they flew straight at the pass and found it closed. This way, if it was closed, they could complete the circle inside the bowl and backtrack down the Igichuk.
Active watched as the pass crawled closer on Cowboy’s side of the plane. Through the mist and snow, he thought he glimpsed a rock-walled valley on the south side, with a thread of water in its center diving toward the Isignaq River far below. Cowboy yelled “Here we go!” over the intercom, and the world rotated ninety degrees as he snapped the plane into a punishing left turn. He leveled the wings just in time to skim across the saddle so low that Active thought for a moment he had decided to land and taxi to the far edge.
Then the terrain fell away, Cowboy dropped the nose, and they were under the clouds and in relatively clear air, hurrying down the rocky valley Active had glimpsed moments earlier. He let out a long breath and looked at the pilot, who was lounging back in his seat and scratching his nose with a thumbnail.
“Nice work,” Active said.
“What was?” Cowboy asked, all nonchalance. Then the bush-pilot grin spread over his face, and he raised his eyebrows. He consulted the chart and peered down the valley ahead. “Another few minutes and we’ll pop out of this canyon. One-Way Lake will be eight or nine miles off to our left. That ridge above the lake will be closest to us, so I’m gonna head straight for it while you glass it with these.”
He reached into the pouch on the back of Active’s seat and dug out a set of compact Nikon binoculars. Active took them, draped the strap around his neck, and adjusted the focus for his eyesight.
“You got a plan yet?” Cowboy asked.
“First let’s see if he’s there.”
They continued down the canyon, jolted occasionally by turbulence, as the snow diminished almost to nothing. The wall to their left dropped away, and they could see in the distance what even Active’s unpracticed eye recognized as the ridge above One-Way Lake.
Pingo shouted “Arii!” and there was a commotion from the back seat, followed by silence.
“I showed him the Taser,” Long said over the intercom.
Active lifted the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the ridge ahead.
“Yeah?” Cowboy prodded.
“Nothing yet. Well, one speck that could be—hold on! Yes, it’s definitely a 185.”
“Anybody moving?”
Active was silent, the toy plane on the ridge growing in the binoculars as the Lienhofer Cessna ate away at the distance. “Nope,” he said finally. “Nobody around it. I think I can see tiedown ropes under the wings.”
Cowboy grunted. “Let me take a look.” He put the glasses to his eyes for a moment and gave a chuckle of satisfaction. “He fucked up.”
Active took the glasses back and studied the plane on the ridge. “How’s that?”
“He parked it at the end of the strip.”
“Eh?”
“If he would have parked in the middle, I wouldn’t have had enough room to land. This way I can.”
Active said nothing, still glassing McAllister’s Cessna.
“Do you want to land?” Cowboy asked.
“Let’s look it over first.”
Cowboy banked the Cessna into a wide circle a couple of miles off One-Way Ridge, and Active scanned the make-do landing strip on the crest and the valley climbing into the mountains above. The snowline was a couple hundred feet higher than the ridge and the lake was still open, except for a crescent of ice under the bluff at the upper end.
“McAllister must be back in there at his spike camp, right?”
Cowboy nodded. “Seems like.”
“And we can’t flush him out from the air?”
Cowboy peered at the clouds shrouding the peaks above the ridge. “Negatory. It’s socked in tight up there.”
Active chewed the situation over in his mind.
“We could land on the ridge and wait him out,” Cowboy said. “He’s gotta come back to his plane eventually. And when he does, there’ll be three of us to his one. Not counting Pingo.”
“Maybe,” Long said. “Unless he waits till dark and sneaks up and picks us off.”
“No problem,” Cowboy said. “We’ll just leave at sunset and—shit, look at that!”
A red four-wheeler with a little trailer in tow was bouncing down from the mountains toward the Cessna parked on the ridge.
Cowboy was at the outside of his circle, the farthest point from the ridge. Active looked at the pilot, now hunched forward in the seat again. “Can you land and block him before he gets rolling?”
“I think,” Cowboy said. He dropped a wing, and the Cessna wheeled to the right, heading for the lower end of the strip on the ridge.
Active swore under his breath as the seconds ticked past on the clock on the Cessna’s instrument panel and the ridge loomed larger in the windshield.
Cowboy rolled into a tight left turn and snapped out on course for an uphill landing on the ridge, pointing straight at McAllister’s plane squatting at the far end. By now, the four-wheeler was parked beside it, and there was no sign of the tie-down ropes Active had seen earlier. Nor was there any sign of McAllister. He must already be inside, Active was thinking when the propeller jerked, then spun into a blur. McAllister’s plane began to roll, a plume of powdery new snow streaming off the ridge behind it.
The Lienhofer Cessna bounced onto the crest, once, twice, and then was down and rolling fast.
“Cowboy?” Active shouted as the planes closed in on each other.
“Hang on,” the pilot said, his hands a blur at the controls. “I got it.” The windshield filled with McAllister’s plane, just lifting off. Cowboy swerved the Cessna left. The engine roared and, so fast that Active couldn’t sort it out, McAllister’s plane vanished, and they were headed straight for the tundra at the foot of One-Way Ridge. Then Active realized what had happened: Cowboy, rolling too slowly to take off, had plunged the Cessna off the side of the ridge and was now diving down the slope to get up to flying speed.
“Cowboy.”
“No sweat,” the pilot said, easing the Cessna out of its dive a few yards from the bottom.
“We should maybe be a little more conservative about some of these things in the future,” Active said after a long silence.
“You bet.” Cowboy bared his teeth in the bush-pilot grin. He pulled the Cessna’s nose up and started a climbing turn back toward the ridge. “You see Dood anywhere?”
Three pairs of eyes scanned the horizon. There was no sign of a Cessna 185, other than the one they were in.
“Where’d he go?” Long said from the back seat.
“Let’s just see.” Something in Cowboy’s tone said he already knew the answer. He pushed the throttle forward, and the Cessna roared over the ridge above the lake. “Whattaya think?”
Active didn’t say anything. He just admired the view. A quarter-mile out in the lake, McAllister’s plane was sunk up to its wings, with McAllister himself huddled on top, in the snow spitting down from the ragged gray overcast.
“I didn’t figure he had enough room to get up flying speed before he hit the lake,” Cowboy said. “That’s why I went left.”
Active regarded the pilot in silence. How could a man who consistently talked liked a fool—who had actually said “Let’s jet” only a few minutes earlier—be such a genius in an airplane? An idiot one moment, the most competent member of the group the next.
Cowboy rolled the Cessna into a slow circle above the lake. “I gotta give him credit, though. Most guys would end up on their backs if they had to ditch a 185, but Dood kept ’er upright.”
“We better get down there before he swims ashore and takes off,” Active said.
Cowboy snorted.
“I don’t think so,” Long said. “Most Eskimos can’t swim, all right. They never learn. The water’s too cold.”
McAllister looked up at them as they passed over, then stepped down onto the engine cowling, grabbed a propeller blade sticking out of the water, and jumped off. His head went under, and for a moment only the hand grasping the propeller was visible.
Then he surfaced, hauled himself onto the nose, and made his way back to his place atop the wing.
“See?” Long said. “He can’t touch bottom. He’s stuck.”
“How long will it float?” Active asked.
“Maybe long enough to ground out if he hadn’t filled his tanks yet when we chased him off the ridge. Plus, he’s got that cargo pod on the belly, so, if it was empty too. . . .” Cowboy pointed at the waves rolling down the lake. “And One-Way’s pretty shallow at the lower end.”
To Active’s eye, it did appear the plane had already moved a few yards toward the outlet at One-Way Creek. “I think we better get down there.”
Cowboy nodded, broke out of the circle, flew down the lake, made a tight turn to the right, and set them down on the ridge again.
“Alan, you stay here and watch Pingo,” Active said as they bounced to a stop near McAllister’s four-wheeler with its trailer-load of red jerry jugs. Cowboy jumped out and used McAllister’s tie-downs to tether the Cessna against the wind rolling out of the hills.
“Stay here?” Long said. “You’re going to take on McAllister by yourself?”
“I doubt he’ll be in any shape to cause trouble.” Active nodded toward the Cessna in the lake. McAllister was huddled on the wing-top, hugging his knees and betraying no inclination to test the water again.
“I could help,” Cowboy growled. He rummaged in the duffel compartment at the back of the cabin and came up with a big revolver in a leather holster. “This is a .357 Magnum. It stopped a grizzly once, so it sure oughta stop Dood McAllister.” He flipped out the cylinder and spun it to check the loads.
Active glanced at Long, then at the pilot. Who would he rather have at his back if McAllister turned out to have some fight left?
“Alan, keep Pingo handcuffed to the seat till we get McAllister in custody, then bring him down.”
Long’s face fell, but he climbed back into the plane.
“Let’s go, Cowboy,” Active said.
Decker had parked the Cessna at the upper end of the ridge, beside the cliff where Active had found Jae Hyo Lee’s rifle stuck in the rocks five days earlier. The sides of the ridge here were nearly as steep as the cliff, so they hurried along the crest to the foot of the ridge, then made their way down the slope to One-Way Creek and forded the stream at a spot slightly shallower than their boots.
The Cessna was no longer moving, presumably grounded. The wing was just under water, and the only part showing above the surface was a propeller blade. McAllister was still on the wing, standing upright and slapping himself in an apparent effort to fight off the cold. Active and Decker raced to the nearest spot on the shore.
“What the hell you assholes doing?” McAllister yelled. “You wrecked my plane. You gotta rescue me now.”
“You wrecked your plane. And you’ve got bigger problems than that,” Active yelled back. “You’re under arrest.”
“What for? I didn’t do anything.”
“You killed Budzie Kivalina and Jae Hyo Lee and then eight more people when you set the Rec Center on fire. That’s not wrong?”
McAllister didn’t say anything.
“Take off your clothes and swim ashore,” Active shouted.
“Fuck you, I can’t swim,” McAllister yelled back. “You gotta come get me.”
Decker and Active looked at each other. “You got a raft in the plane?” Active asked.
Decker shook his head.
“I guess we wait him out,” Active said. “Maybe he’ll decide to swim for it after all.”
But McAllister stayed on the wing. As the minutes dragged by and the wind continued to whip down the lake, he stopped slapping himself and dropped to a sitting position. Soon he was flat on his back in the water lapping over the wing. Had he passed out? Active wondered.
“We have to get him off of there. If he’s not faking, he’s going to die of hypothermia or wash off of that wing and drown.” Active looked at Cowboy and pointed at his gun. “You can actually hit something with that thing?”
Cowboy lifted his eyebrows and drew the .357 from its holster.
“All right. I’m going to wade out there and drag him back. Don’t shoot him if you can avoid it.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Cowboy growled.
“Only shoot him if I tell you to or if he renders me unable to do so.”
“Ah.”
“You stand off to the right, and I’ll come in from the left. That way you should be able to keep a clear line of fire.”
“Got it.” Cowboy waded into the lake until the water neared his boot-tops, raised the .357, and drew a practice bead on McAllister. Then he holstered the gun. “Maybe we should just let nature take its course.”
“What?”
“We could leave him out there and say we couldn’t get to him in time.”
Active studied the inert figure on the wing, then turned to Cowboy. “Just let him die?”
Cowboy shrugged. “What about Jim Silver and those people at the Rec Center? Cammie Frankson and those other kids? He’ll never get enough prison time to pay for that.”
“That’s not how we do it, Cowboy. Besides, what if it wasn’t him? Alan and Sergeant Cave still think it was Pingo.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“There’s what I believe, and there’s what I know. What I know is, that’s not how we do it.”
The pilot shook his head and stared into the water at his feet. But he drew the gun again. “Yeah, go ahead. I got you covered.”
Active studied his route out to the plane. He would have to swim the last few yards, which meant it would be impossible to keep his Smith and Wesson dry. He kicked away the snow to make a clear spot on the moss by the lakeshore, then unbuckled his belt, wrapped it around the holster, and dropped the gun onto the moss. Then he realized he would have to take off far more than his gun belt. He probably wouldn’t be able to swim at all once his Sorels filled up with water, besides which, he hadn’t brought any other boots. Plus, his other clothes were still in the Cessna parked on the ridge at least fifteen minutes away, through the wind and snow.
“Christ,” he said, and began stripping.
“You didn’t tell me about this part,” Cowboy said. “I never saw a naked Trooper before.”
“You just keep your eyes on McAllister,” Active said.
He studied the gear at his feet, grabbed his handcuffs, and clenched them between his teeth. Then he screamed as he imagined Pickett’s Rebels must have screamed on the charge up Cemetery Ridge and plunged into the water. As it reached chest level, there was a moment of cold shock when he lost his breath and couldn’t move and thought he wouldn’t be able to finish. But the paralysis passed, and he could breathe and move again. He walked until his feet lost the lake bottom, and then he swam the last few yards, his skin burning with the cold, his breath coming in gasps, saliva spraying around the handcuffs. From the corner of his eye, he saw Cowboy off to his right, arm raised, the .357 trained on McAllister.
Active reached the plane and used the propeller blade to heave himself onto the cowling, feeling colder than ever now, the wind burning his bare, wet skin even more. McAllister was still motionless, his head near Active, his feet pointed at the wingtip. His hands, bobbing slightly in the water, were beside his thighs.
How to do this? Bending over to reach McAllister’s wrists and snap the cuffs on would block Cowboy’s shot at McAllister’s upper body. There would only be his legs for a target. What if McAllister was faking? Could one of those hands conceal a weapon?
“McAllister,” Active said, his teeth starting to chatter. “Raise your arms. I’m going to handcuff you. Dood!”
There was no response.
Active deliberated, shivering, then grabbed the hood of McAllister’s anorak and yanked him off the wing. McAllister slid into the water and finally came to life a little, thrashing weakly and scrabbling at the wing. Active grabbed one upraised hand and cuffed it, then the other, and pulled up on the cuffs to keep McAllister’s head above water.
“McAllister. Dood! Can you hear me?”
Recognition shone in McAllister’s eyes for a moment, then flickered out.
Active dived over McAllister’s lolling head and made for shore, towing the guide behind him like a log.
“Come on, Cowboy,” he shouted when his feet hit bottom and he could raise his head clear of the water. “We have to get a fire going.”
Active dragged McAllister onto the moss and dropped him. He felt himself shivering, but the wind didn’t seem so cold now, which presumably meant his skin was going numb and he was approaching hypothermia himself. “See what you can do for him,” he told Cowboy. “I’ve gotta get something on.”
He dried himself as best he could on the outside of his anorak and, shuddering violently, began pulling on his clothes as Cowboy hurried into the brush nearby and returned with an armful of branches.
The pilot kicked the snow off a patch of moss, built a little teepee of branches, and pulled a Bic lighter and a wad of crumpled paper out of his parka pocket. Active saw a greasy napkin, a Snickers wrapper, and an envelope that appeared to have a shopping list on the back of it. Cowboy caught him watching and explained needlessly: “I always carry some fire-starter. Good habit to get into.”
“Thanks,” Active said. He was dressed now, but shuddering as much as before. He slapped his shoulders and jogged in place as Cowboy tucked the fire-starter under the branches and applied the Bic. A tiny flame began to eat at the base of the teepee, and a wisp of smoke curled up. Cowboy blew on it, added more twigs, then larger branches, and they watched the fire grow.
Active jogged into the trees and returned with a bundle of larger branches, including a couple of chunks that qualified as logs in the Arctic. He tossed them beside the fire, and they dragged McAllister closer to the blaze.
Cowboy shook his head. “He’s gonna need dry clothes too. I’ve got some stuff in my emergency kit in the plane— another parka, some sleeping bags, probably a pair of snowpants. Maybe I better get on up there.”
“Let me,” Active said. “I need the exercise.” He bent and went quickly through McAllister’s clothing, turning up nothing more sinister than an Old Timer jackknife on his belt. He pulled a set of plastic FlexCuffs from his own pocket and fastened them around McAllister’s ankles. Then he removed the metal cuffs from McAllister’s hands and refastened them behind his back.
“Watch him,” he told Cowboy. “Not that he’s in any condition to do much, but—”
“Yeah, you never know with a guy like this,” the pilot said.
Active turned and looked down the shore toward One-Way Creek. He was still cold, still shuddering as hard as ever. How long had he been in the water? Ten minutes, fifteen at most. That should be survivable. Once cooled past a certain point, he knew, the body couldn’t re-warm itself. External heat was required. But he thought he recalled reading that you hadn’t reached that point if you were still conscious and shivering.
He set off at the best sprint he could muster, feeling out of it at first, a little uncertain about where to put his left foot down, a little slow remembering how to lift his right foot and bring it around past the left, almost drunk. But it seemed to get easier as he went, and the shuddering seemed to be letting up.
By the time he crossed One-Way Creek and started up the ridge toward Cowboy’s Cessna, he figured his body temperature was approaching normal. By the time he reached the plane, he’d probably be sweating.
Halfway along the crest, Active found himself jogging through fog and realized the descending clouds had now covered the upper end of the ridge. He peered ahead but Cowboy’s Cessna was invisible, swallowed up in the mist.
“Alan,” he called. “Alan!”
No answer, but it probably wouldn’t matter. The crest was narrow enough that he surely couldn’t miss the plane, even in the fog.
But he did, realizing his error only when he stumbled into a rock outcropping. There was nothing like that around McAllister’s tiedown, though he remembered seeing rocks farther up the hill. He stopped and opened his parka, happy to find himself actually hot. He let his breathing calm for a moment, then called Long again, again without result. The fog must be muffling his voice, he decided. But how to find the plane in the murk?
He turned and pointed himself directly down the ridge, as best he could judge, then set off. He tripped twice as he peered into the void trying to spot the plane. After that, he kept his eyes on the reindeer moss and gravel at his feet, trusting gravity and his sense of direction to lead him down the crest of the ridge rather than over the side.
The next minute, he stumbled into the tail fin of Cowboy’s Cessna. “Alan,” he said, rubbing the bruise on his forehead.
There was no answer, no movement inside the plane. He circled the tail and opened a rear door. The plane was empty.
He stepped back and called Long again, then Pingo.
Silence, except for the faint sigh of wind sweeping down the ridge. Where—but wait, hadn’t he told Long to bring Pingo down to the lake once McAllister was secure? That was it. They must have missed each other in the fog.
He dug through the storage area behind the seats and found Cowboy’s survival gear: two pairs of snowshoes, a nylon backpacker tent, the clothes and sleeping bag the pilot had mentioned, a tiny gas lantern, an equally tiny single-burner camp stove with fuel and cooking utensils, the inevitable roll of Visqueen plastic sheeting, a hank of nylon camp cord, a folding saw, and a canvas bag with a seemingly random assortment of Mountain House freeze-dry and military-surplus MREs. He thought it would be too much to carry in one load, until he found a pack frame at the bottom of it all. He lashed everything but the snowshoes onto the frame, closed up the Cessna, and started downhill.
He was nearly to the foot of the ridge when he came out of the fog. He turned and studied the shoreline near McAllister’s grounded Cessna. McAllister was still stretched out by the fire, now covered with what appeared to be Cowboy’s parka. The little blaze had become a bonfire, and Cowboy was hunched over it with only a wool shirt and a down vest covering his upper body. But that was it. No sign of Alan Long or Pingo Kivalina.
Active swiveled and surveyed the tundra on the other side of the ridge. The snow was heavier now, and there appeared to be some fog in the air, even here below the clouds. No sign of human presence was detectable in the limited range of his vision.
He swore and jogged the rest of the way down the ridge, the pack frame flopping against his back and throwing him off balance. He was out of breath by the time he crossed One-Way Creek and sweating when he reached the fire. He dropped the pack frame, and Cowboy knelt and went to work on the lacings.
“You seen any sign of Alan or Pingo?” Active asked.
Cowboy looked up in surprise. “What?” he said, peering down the shoreline. “I thought they’d be with you.”
“Jesus,” Active said. “The plane was empty when I got there. Absolutely no sign of them, no response when I called, nothing.”
The pilot looked up at the gray wool draping the ridge across the lake. “Where the hell could they be?”
Active shook his head. “God knows. That Alan. . . .”
“Maybe Cave was right about Pingo,” Cowboy said, shrugging on a parka from the load Active had brought down the hill. “Maybe he really did set our fire in Chukchi, and now he’s. . . .”
“Yeah, he got the drop on Alan somehow and took off?”
“Uh-huh, and, ah, Alan is, ah, lying out there somewhere. . . .”
“Yeah.” Active looked around at the weather closing in on them. “And right now there’s no way to search for them.”
“Huh-uh. Not in this.”
Active chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment, then nodded at McAllister, motionless beside the fire. “How’s he doing?”
Cowboy grimaced. “No change. I gave him my coat, but he’s not any warmer that I can tell. He’s still breathing, at least.”
“Well, let’s get him into dry clothes and a sleeping bag and see if we can get him warmed up.”
Cowboy kicked at the edge of the fire. “I found some rocks and put them in there to heat up. We could stick them in the sleeping bag with him.”
Active nodded, impressed again by Cowboy’s competence within his own universe.
They undressed McAllister, got the dry clothes on him, worked a sleeping bag around him, and slid in the rocks from Cowboy’s fire. Active watched as snow dusted the sleeping bag and McAllister’s nose and mouth, the only part of him they had left exposed. “We probably ought to get him into the tent.”
“Nah,” Cowboy said. “I’ll build him a Visqueen lean-to. We can put the open side toward the fire and he’ll get more heat that way.”
“I’m thinking I’ll go back up to the plane and get your Emergency Locator Translator.”
Cowboy raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, I guess we could use some help finding Alan and Pingo.”
“And you probably ought to keep the .357 handy. In case Pingo is our guy.”
“Jesus.” Cowboy looked into the trees around their campsite. “I hadn’t thought about that. There’s no telling what he’s liable to do.”
“Yep.” Active checked the Smith and Wesson on his hip and set off for another trip up the ridge.