At the end of the day Nick was the last to eat. No doubt Ivins was proving a point by making her wait. One at a time the others had been released from their plastic handcuffs long enough to swallow down some cold energy bars. Tyler ate first, followed by Barlow, Hurst, and finally Nick.
A warm meal was out of the question, Ivins had said, because he didn’t want to risk filling their lean-to with smoke. Nick didn’t buy it, though, because the log walls were a maze of cracks and chinks. If they hadn’t been, the kerosene lantern would have asphyxiated everyone long ago. The truth, Nick suspected, was that Ivins didn’t want to risk cooking anything that might attract the bears.
“Now, is everybody comfy?” Ivins said once they were all handcuffed again. Outside, the wind howled as if punctuating his comment.
“You’re nuts,” Hurst told him. “We’re never going to dig up that airplane before we freeze to death.”
Ivins settled onto the dirt floor, crossed his legs Indian-style, and rested the Glock on his thigh. “I’ll settle for a wingtip, or even a glimpse. Hell, I don’t actually have to see it. Just knowing for sure where it is will be good enough.”
“What good’s that going to do you?”
“I’ll tell you what, we’ll call it a bedtime story,” Ivins said. “Now, let’s see. Where to begin. Oh, yes”—he flashed a toothy smile—“once upon a time, shortly after World War One, a small band of ex-fighter pilots decided to make their fortune here in Alaska. The fact that it was a wilderness didn’t bother them a bit. They’d survived a war. They thought themselves invincible. They pooled their money to buy a Junkers F.13. At the time, it was the best plane for the job, maybe the only one. It was sturdy and it didn’t need much room to land or take off.
“They named their plane the Flying Dutchman, presumably a tribute to the Lost Dutchman mine or maybe that guy that kept sailing around in that opera. Anyhow they took off for Alaska and landed here.”
“Wait a minute,” Nick said. “You said there wasn’t enough gold here to buy a dress.”
“That’s because they didn’t have enough time to dig it out of the ground.”
“Are you saying the gold’s still here?”
“Who knows? Who gives a shit?”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s simple enough,” Ivins went on. “Time ran out on them because they’d brought along a deadly female passenger. Back then they called her the Spanish Lady, their nickname for the Spanish influenza. She killed thirty million people in less than a year before she was through, including our band of pilots. We know it from the diary one of them left behind.”
Ivins ran his thumb back and forth across his fingertips like a man counting money. But it was Karen who spoke. “At the moment, their frozen bodies are worth more than gold to a company like E-Group. This flu virus is different from any virus mankind has seen before or since.”
“What’s so special about the flu?” Tyler said. “I had it last year. No big deal.”
“Oh, you’ve never had flu like this,” Karen replied. “It likes the strong, it kills the healthy. Your lungs turn to rubber and you drown in your own fluids. Most of its victims were between twenty and twenty-nine. How old are you, Mr. Tyler?”
Tyler visibly paled. Karen continued, “Once you dig the bodies up, I’ll be able to extract cultures of the virus so that a vaccine can be synthesized.” The rapturous look on Karen’s face reminded Nick of her father when he was expounding on his Anasazi.
“Then why the guns?” Hurst asked. “If the doctor comes up with a vaccine for the Spanish flu, she’ll be as famous as Jonas Salk. She’ll win the Nobel Prize, fix Christ’s sake. Why didn’t you ask for our help instead of treating us like convicts?”
Nick swallowed convulsively against the bile rising in her throat. What the hell was Gordon thinking about? These people weren’t out to help humanity. If they had been, they wouldn’t have killed a helpless old man, and then have the gall to admit it.
“Show her the diary,” the doctor insisted.
“Don’t expect to get your hands on the original,” Ivins told Nick. “You of all people ought to appreciate its value as a historical document. At present, it graces the personal collection of our chairman, Jonathan McKenna. He’s an authority on Eskimo art, in case you didn’t know.”
“I don’t think a diary qualifies as art,” Nick said.
“Let’s call it an artifact, then. It came to the attention of one of Mister McKenna’s scouts when he ran across it at an Eskimo trading post. It was cheap enough, so he bought it as a kind of memento if nothing else. When he tried to trace its origin, he was told that it had been brought into the trading post years ago by an Eskimo who said he found it at the site of an old airplane crash. But too many years had passed to trace the Eskimo, so the diary remained a mere curiosity piece for years. Then Erickson’s story appeared in an Army Air Corps newsletter. That’s when Mister McKenna knew he’d struck gold.”
Ivins chuckled. “You see, Ms. Scott, if you’d bothered to read that newsletter for yourself, you’d not only have known about old Erickson’s Val, but his sighting of the Junkers. At the time, though, the old fart didn’t know what he was looking at. In any case, we suspect that the man who wrote the diary is probably still inside the Junkers.”
“If he is, he might not be frozen,” she pointed out.
“It doesn’t matter. He buried the others close by, as you’ll see from the diary. Find that plane for us, Doctor Scott, and we’ll know where to start digging holes.”
She shuddered at the thought.
Ivins grinned. “I thought you loved airplanes.”
Nick closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing deeply to keep from being sick. In the darkness she heard Elaine, her mother, gloating. You see what happens when a girl plays with airplanes instead of dolls. Mark my words. You’ll end up like your father, running away from his responsibilities, from me.
Someone laughed.
Nick opened her eyes, but saw no one smiling. Maybe it was Elaine’s laughter she was hearing.