Bryce closed his eyes, the defeat crushing. No lights, no spinning instruments. No sign of life whatsoever after turning on the airplane’s battery. He felt suddenly immobile, weary, overcome by the inevitable.
Keep going, he told himself. Find another way.
He backed out of the cockpit, lighthoused his beam around the barn’s perimeter. The idea of hiking forty miles through freezing cold, in his present condition, all while being hunted, wasn’t realistic. He needed some means of transportation. A car, a motorcycle. Even a damned bicycle.
He saw nothing.
Workbenches and equipment lined the walls. A pile of old farm implements lay rusting in one corner, a pitchfork pointed skyward. Then his eye snagged on the most ordinary of sights in any workroom: running from a wall-mounted electrical socket, an extension cord snaked toward the airplane. He traced it using the beam: beginning at the wall, around the propeller, then upward through a cracked panel on the engine cowling. Bryce lifted the panel, and what he saw inside was nothing short of salvation—a trickle charger clamped to a battery with disconnected cables.
He quickly unclamped the charger, and when he reconnected the positive cable to the terminal a spark lighteninged between the two. Because I left the battery switch on. Bryce backed off and checked the cockpit, saw an array of instrument background lights and radios warming up.
“Well hoo-damned-rah,” he whispered.
More shouting in the distance. His window of opportunity was closing fast.
He found a wrench on a workbench, tightened the battery cables, then threw the charger clear. He circled once around the airplane, quite literally looking for red flags—any gust locks or safety devices would have a REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT flag attached.
Or is that not a Russian thing?
He found none until he reached the cockpit. There a pin with a red flag secured the control stick in a neutral position. He pulled the pin and threw it behind the seat. Bryce checked the fuel gauges—a Russian word he knew—and saw half-full tanks. He had no idea how much that was, but it would surely take him twenty miles.
For the first time he noticed what was under the skis—a pair of standard wooden pallets had been modified with a system of rollers. To one side he saw a tow bar, and he visualized how it would work. The plane would be connected to a truck or a tractor by the tow bar, then pulled out of the hangar on the roller system. Bryce had neither a truck nor the time. The floor in front of the airplane was compacted earth, and he saw no obstructions between the airplane and the doors. The wings would have perhaps five feet of clearance on either side. If it can ski over snow, he reasoned, with enough power it can ski over twenty feet of frozen dirt.
Everything was taking shape, but one important decision remained. Which came first: opening the doors or starting the engine? Both were sure to alert the soldiers outside. He decided the engine would be less obvious—with any luck the noise would be drowned out by the HIND which was still idling near the village.
Bryce climbed into the cockpit and looked over the instrument panel. He studied the gauges and switches, with their Cyrillic labels, and their Western scales and units. Manifold pressure, engine RPM, carburetor heat. The communications and navigation control heads were the least decipherable. Also, the least necessary. He didn’t plan on talking to anyone, and didn’t need to navigate to an airport. All he had to do was fly west for ten minutes and find Norway. At that point, any frozen lake would do as a landing strip.
This flight would be unlike any he’d ever undertaken. There would be no preflight planning, no precautionary ground checks. No flight plan or air traffic control tower. He had an engine and a propeller, a control stick connected to the flight controls. Fuel? Probably. Weather report? Look out the barn door, check the broken wind sock.
It was back to basics. A magnetic compass and a throttle.
Head west, go fast. Don’t talk to anyone.
Altogether, not much of a plan. But it was his only chance to get home.