“LOOK LIKE a water sky, ah?” Pudu shaded his eyes and squinted west through the haze.
Active tried it with his sunglasses on, then off. The wind whipped the guard hairs of his wolfskin ruff into his eyes. He blinked away the tears. “What? I don’t see it.”
“That dark place out there?” Pudu pointed across the ice.
Active stared over the fuselage of Cowboy’s Cessna 207 again. Maybe there was a black band along the horizon, maybe not. If so, it was far out to sea.
“Water sky?” Mercer said. “What’s that?”
“It’s when there’s open water somewhere out in the ice, Mom,” Pudu said. “The clouds over it are real dark. You remember, ah?”
“Thank you, Pudu, but I was asking our pilot. Cowboy?”
Cowboy shoved up his Ray Bans to survey the horizon, then shook his head. “Could be.”
“Open water?” Active said. “In this cold? Does that—”
“Yeah, it probably means weather coming.” Cowboy dropped the sunglasses over his eyes again. “Fog, a little snow maybe, warmer probably. We go, we might wish we hadn’t.”
“It’s certainly not warm now,” Mercer said with a shudder. “Can we go back inside while we make up our minds?”
Cowboy led them into the Lienhofer office with its smells of cigarette smoke, ancient vinyl furniture, and the oil heater in a corner. At least it was warm, Active thought.
Cowboy spread the aviation chart for northwest Alaska on the counter and swept a hand along the coast from Nome to Cape Prince of Wales, where Alaska almost touched Siberia. “They’re already getting it a little bit along here—Nome, Port Clarence, Tin City.” He ran his hand north up the shore toward Chukchi. “The FAA says we’ll probably have it in a couple-three days.”
“But we’ll be back tomorrow,” Mercer said.
“Sometimes the weather gets ahead of the forecast.”
Mercer rattled scarlet fingernails on the counter. “Or it never shows up. This is the Arctic. It could stay clear for the next week. Right, Cowboy?”
“It could,” Cowboy said. “But I don’t know how likely that is.”
“Governor, ah, Suka, maybe you should just wait here in Chukchi for the race to finish,” Active said. Could the water sky get him out of the bodyguard assignment?
Mercer looked at Pudu, who still had the video camera slung over his shoulder, then at Active. “We’ve got plenty of video of me walking around Chukchi. I didn’t come all this way to be grounded by a little weather that may not even happen.”
She turned summer eyes and the campaign smile on Cowboy. “You can get us through, right, Cowboy? You’re the famous Bush pilot. Don’t I remember the village girls calling you Clouddancer?”
Pudu snickered. Did Cowboy blush under the leathery skin he had acquired from years of Arctic sun and wind?
“Sure, yeah,” the pilot said with a shrug. “Weather craps out on us, we can sneak into one of the villages upriver till it blows over.”
Mercer looked at Pudu, then Cowboy. “All right, then. Let’s do this!”
They trooped out to the plane, where a brief discussion arose about seating arrangements.
Mercer wanted to sit in front, beside Cowboy. Pudu pointed out that he would have to shoot from behind, which would permit no good angle to capture the governor’s profile as she viewed the tundra, mountains, mushers, dog teams, and her husband.
“Good point, Pudu,” Mercer said. Pudu climbed into the right front seat with his camera and Cowboy swung into the pilot’s seat beside him. Mercer took the left rear seat, Active the right, and they donned headsets.
Mercer looked out the 207’s side window, then forward at Pudu. “This angle gonna work for ya, Pudu?”
Pudu twisted in his seat, pointed the camera at Mercer, and peered into the viewfinder. “I think so, Mom. Arii, it’s kinda dark inside this plane, though. I might have to use my light so you’re not too backlit against the snow.”
He pressed a button on the camera and a light came on above the lens. In the glare, Mercer looked like a suspect in a mug shot.
Pudu checked the viewfinder again. “Yeah, that should be good.”
Active wondered, but Mercer gave a thumbs up and turned the smile on him. “Off we go, eh, Nathan?”
“Absolutely, Suka.” Active cast a sidelong glance to see if the summer would leave her eyes. She took a tiny lapel mike from Pudu and clipped it to her parka hood.
As they taxied from the Lienhofer apron eastward down the runway, the west wind rattled the 207 from behind so hard that Active wondered if the flaps would come off. After all, from the Cessna’s perspective, it was flying backward at thirty or thirty-five miles an hour.
Cowboy didn’t seem to notice. He spoke into his headset and scrawled notes on a clipboard strapped to his right thigh. Active assumed he was filing a flight plan and going over the forecast again with the FAA.
Halfway down the runway, Cowboy hit the left brake. The plane spun on its main gear and stopped with the nose pointed down a belt of asphalt ending at the shore of the Chukchi Sea. The wings rocked in the river of frozen air rolling off the ice. Active was a little more convinced he could see the water sky.
Cowboy voice came over their headsets. “All set? Everybody strapped in?”
“Posilutely,” Mercer said.
“Good here,” Active said.
“Me, too,” Pudu said from the front.
Cowboy pushed the throttle forward, the engine snarled, and the 207 leapt into the sky like a startled cat. Before Active could check on the water sky, Cowboy banked right and wheeled over the village to head across the Burton Peninsula and the inlet behind it, toward the mouth of the Isignaq River. In a few miles, they ran out of the coastal haze. Ahead now was only incandescent spring sun and the broad white embrace of the Isignaq Valley, the meanders, sloughs, and cutoffs of the big river still deep in hibernation in the brush-nubbled bottomlands.
A HALF-HOUR UPSTREAM, Isignaq village came into view, a pretty hamlet perched on the north bank of the Isignaq River where Siksrik Creek came in.
Active gazed over Mercer’s shoulder as the village’s hilltop airstrip crawled across the bottom of the 207’s side window. He glanced forward and saw from Cowboy’s profile that the pilot was also hooked on the sight. Active hoped Cowboy would let it pass in silence, but, no, he spoke.
“Takes you back, huh?” came his voice in the earphones.
Active looked at Mercer and at the back of Pudu’s head. Neither showed any sign they had heard Cowboy.
“Is this just us?” Active asked.
“Roger that,” Cowboy said. “I got the other two switched off.”
“Yeah, it takes you back.” Isignaq strip was where Cowboy had crashed and killed Grace’s aunt, Aggie Iktillik. That event had delivered Nita into the hands of Grace’s father, which had yanked Grace back to Chukchi from shell-shocked exile in the Aleutian fishing port of Dutch Harbor.
And then Grace’s father, Jason Palmer, had ended up shot to death, supposedly by Grace’s cancer-ridden and dying mother, who supposedly did it to keep him from raping Nita the same way he had raped Grace all those years ago and fathered Nita.
Active took the story on faith, because he would take anything on faith if Grace Palmer said it while she looked at him with those quicksilver eyes. Besides, Jason Palmer’s killing was a city case, and Active had been a state trooper at the time, so it had been mostly not his problem.
But the cancer had finished off Grace’s mother before the case came to trial. So it was still open as a technical matter, still buried somewhere in the archive boxes Active had inherited with the new job from the late Jim Silver, who had been Chukchi police chief at the time. Now it was Nathan Active’s case, glowing like a radioactive ember in those archive boxes.
Active realized Cowboy hadn’t said anything more. “You all right, buddy?”
“As much as I ever will be, I guess.” Cowboy’s voice was husky in the headphones. “If I just hadn’t pushed so hard.”
“If it hadn’t happened, Grace would still be in Dutch Harbor and I’d still be…still be sleeping with perfectly nice village girls who deserved a lot more than I had to give them.”
“Like Lucy.”
“Exactly,” Active said. “Like Lucy.”
“Who can figure this shit out?” Cowboy said after a while.
“Not me,” Active said.
“Me neither.” There was a click, then static spritzed over the headsets. When Cowboy came back on, he was himself again. Or playing himself.
“So, folks, if you’ll look out the left side of the aircraft, you’ll see beautiful downtown Isignaq, tonight’s rest stop for the mushers of the Isignaq 400. Speaking of which, we should pick up the race leaders in another half hour or so.”
Cowboy followed the main channel of the Isignaq upstream, a thousand feet or so above the riverbed, wings about level with the tops of the bluffs and ridges lining the banks. Here and there, bands of caribou worked their way up the slopes, buglike with distance as they drifted north in the spring weather toward the calving grounds on the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea.
Once they came upon an ancient Chevy Suburban speeding upstream along the well beaten trail on the river ice. “Hey, it’s Roland Sweetsir,” Cowboy said. “Must have some folks going up to watch the racers come by.”
He dropped the Cessna’s nose, dived down to treetop level and roared past the rusty old rig, wings rocking.
“Roland’s still running Isignaq Ready-Ride?” Mercer asked. “Get out!”
Active looked back at the Suburban and saw an arm emerge from the driver’s side, waving back at the Cessna.
“Oh, yeah,” Cowboy said. “His river taxi business is still going strong. Roland’s a lot cheaper than a 207 and he can go in worse weather than us. Of course he’s a lot slower, too, plus you never know when he’s gonna hit overflow and go through, but the village folk keep riding with him.”
They spotted the first dog team twenty-five minutes past Isignaq village, a string of the compact little huskies that had proved best for long-distance races. The musher at the back of the sled kicked with one foot and stood with the other on a runner.
“That’s not Brad,” Mercer said from beside Active. “Why isn’t he in the lead?”
Active studied the team as they roared over and Cowboy dropped the Cessna’s nose to swing around for another look. “Not Brad?” Active said. “You could tell? I didn’t even have time to count the dogs.”
Mercer shot him a look and even Pudu pulled his eye from the viewfinder long enough to give Active a warning glance.
“Brad’s all red,” Mercer said. “Red parka, red snow pants, red sled bag, red harness on the dogs, red everything. His sponsor is Dodge, you know, and they like red. It’s the power color, Nathan.” She pointed out the window as Cowboy pulled past the team again. “This guy’s got a blue bag and blue harnesses on the dogs and…my God, tell me he is not wearing Carhartts! What is he, homeless?”
“That’s Bunky Ivanoff, ma’am,” Cowboy said. “You remember him. He’s got a camp way up the valley by a caribou crossing there, a few miles this side of Tuttuvak. Lives out most of the year, hunts and fishes all the time, gets a lot of respect. I brought him and his dogs down to Chukchi last week.”
“Sounds like one of them old-time Eskimos, all right,” Pudu said. “From early days ago.”
Mercer was silent. “Oh, Bunky Ivanoff, yes, I think I do remember him. A fine Alaskan and a credit to…the entire Chukchi region!”
Active was pretty sure Mercer had been about to say “to his people” until she noticed the camera on her.
“Hell of a musher,” Cowboy said. “Great guy, too. He runs—”
“I’m sure he is,” Mercer said. “But where is Brad? We need some footage of me waving at Brad. I told him not to use Buster.”
“Buster?” Active said. “Is that one of—”
“Buster’s good enough as a team dog or a even swing dog, but he’s no leader. I told Brad not to put him in the lead, but would he listen to me? Duh!”
“There’s a problem with Buster?” Active said.
Mercer and Pudu shot him more looks.
“He’s male,” Cowboy said.
Mercer touched Active’s arm. “Females make the best leaders, Nathan. Or, as dog breeders call them, the bitches. Everybody knows that.”
She seemed to expect an answer, but Active couldn’t think of one.
“Everybody but you and Brad, apparently,” Mercer said at last. But she gave him a smile. “All right, Cowboy, let’s see if we can find him. What on earth is his problem this time?”
Cowboy wheeled the Cessna into a wide, easy circle over the brush and snow banks of the riverbed and they continued upstream.
A mile farther along, they encountered another team, this one with green dog harnesses and sled bag. Another mile, and they spotted the team with the red rigging. There at the back, kicking from the runners in his red parka, was Brad Mercer, now known as the First Mate, thanks to an anonymous blogger called Tundrabunny who had stuck him with the nickname. The First Mate’s leader was the biggest animal in the team and very masculine-looking. Active surmised this must be the inadequate Buster.
“Humph,” Mercer said. “Third place. How’s that gonna look? How far do they have to go, Cowboy?”
Cowboy studied his instrument panel and pulled at his chin. “Trail miles? Ah, maybe one-forty to the mandibles on Beach Street.”
“So he could pass Bunky before they finish.”
“Yeah, right,” Pudu seemed to mutter. Mercer didn’t hear.
“I’m sure he will, ma’am,” Cowboy said.
“He better,” Mercer said.
The First Mate spotted them and made a big show of waving as they approached.
The governor made a big show of smiling and waving back as they roared past. “Yep, that’s Buster,” she said with a grimace. “Dammit, the man will not listen. You get that, Pudu?”
“Arii, Mom. I was kinda shooting into the sun, all right. Cowboy, could you go around so we’re coming the other way when I shoot him?”
“Roger that.” Cowboy started a big turn to the left and soon the First Mate and his team came into view through Mercer’s window again. This time, the plane’s right wing, not the left, pointed at the sun.
Mercer repeated the wave and the smile for the camera. “How was that one?”
“Pretty good, all right,” Pudu said. “But maybe one more, ah?”
“One more!” Cowboy groaned over the headsets. “We’re—”
“One more will be fine,” Mercer said. “Right, Cowboy?”
Cowboy didn’t answer, but he circled for a third pass.
After this one, Pudu said he had enough video and Cowboy asked what his passengers wanted to do next.
“Walker village is another ten or twelve miles up the river,” he said. “If anybody needs a, er, ah, rest break, we could set down there for a few minutes. Or, we could boom on back to Isignaq for the night.”
“Oh, Isignaq by all means,” Mercer said. “Pudu and I have several events this afternoon, then I have to greet Brad when he pulls in for the night. We certainly didn’t drink any coffee this morning and I’m sure a couple of bush rats like you two wouldn’t do it before getting in a Cessna, right?”
“Not me,” Cowboy said.
“Not me,” Active lied. But he figured his bladder could tough it out for another half hour or so.
“Roger that.” Cowboy pushed the throttle forward, the note of the engine deepened, and soon they were topping the cliffs along the river again.
“What the hell is that?” Cowboy said over the headsets as they cleared the last treeless, snow-breasted ridge blocking their view downstream.
Then the intercom went silent. Active surmised Cowboy had switched over to the Cessna’s radio to talk to the FAA about the thick batt of wool that blanketed the lower end of the Isignaq Valley.
Cowboy clicked back onto the headsets. “The FAA says the weather got a little ahead of itself. Chukchi’s flat on its back and Isignaq village ain’t a whole lot better.” He rolled the Cessna into a turn. “Looks like it’s Walker for us tonight.” He came out of the turn and aimed the Cessna’s nose upstream again at the Isignaq valley’s radiant uplands. The pilot’s shoulders relaxed. Active realized he hadn’t noticed they were hunched.
“Cowboy,” Mercer said. “Pudu and I need to get into Isignaq. You’re the original scud-runner?”
Long seconds passed before Cowboy answered. “I did my share of that when I was young and wild. Now I’m old and careful.”
More silence crackled over the headsets. Mercer twisted in her seat and peered back at sea of fog behind them. “Oh, Cowboy, you’re overexaggerating. It doesn’t look that bad.”
Cowboy’s voice clicked on. “Yo, Nathan. It’s just us now. Any thoughts here?”
“Me? What do I know? You’re the pilot. What’s your gut telling you?”
“It’s telling me I did what the governor wants a hundred times back in the day, and here I still am.”
“And here you still are,” Active said. “Your call.”
“That stuff’s only a couple-three thousand feet deep. If things go sideways on us, I guess we can punch up through it and get into the clear and head back up to Walker.”
They glimpsed a scatter of buildings basking in the sunlight on the left bank of the river four or five miles ahead. “That Walker?” Active asked.
“That’s Walker,” Cowboy said. The right wing dropped, the Cessna started another turn, and Walker vanished behind them.
The headsets sprayed more static and Cowboy crackled on again. “I guess it can’t hurt to take a look.” The Cessna rolled out of the turn, its nose pointed at the gray-black wall downstream. Cowboy added power and the nose angled up. “We’ll head for Isignaq village on top and see if we got enough visibility down through this stuff to land.”
“And if we can’t?” Mercer asked.
“Then we’ll come back up here, drop down to treetop level and do some good old-fashioned scud-running.”
“Excellent,” Mercer said. “I’m sure we’ll make it in. I get a little testimony whenever God has something in mind for me.”
Active shot her a sidewise glance. A little testimony? If she was kidding, it didn’t show.
Ten minutes later the upstream edge of the scud passed under their wings and the river, ridges, and tundra vanished beneath them. Active peered downward and saw only an impenetrable gray murk. It was like looking into three thousand feet of dirty dishwater.
“Arii,” Pudu said. “I never see nothing down there. “
“Me, neither,” Active said.
“Cowboy?” Mercer said.
The Cessna’s left wing dropped and Cowboy stared down into the fog. “Scud-running it is,” he said. The Cessna did another one-eighty and a few minutes later they crossed the upstream margin of the fog bank. Cowboy chopped power and put the Cessna into a wide spiral toward the sunlit, blue-shadowed riverbed. He ran a finger over the chart on his knee, scanned the ridges along the banks and nodded. “Got it,” he said over the intercom. “We’re about five miles upstream of Shelukshuk Canyon. Pretty easy run from here down to Isignaq village if ya got even a quarter mile of visibility.”
He leveled off a couple of hundred feet over the brush and lowered the wing flaps for slow flight. They sailed toward the fog bank, so solid and forbidding that Active found himself bracing for impact as they hurtled into the wall of mist.
Now he could see the riverbed when he looked straight down, but the terrain to either side vanished within a couple hundred yards. A quarter mile of visibility? He wondered if Cowboy had half that.
He looked forward. Cowboy’s shoulders were hunched again and he strained into the seat harness, his head on a swivel. Ten seconds straight ahead, a glance left, then right, then ahead for another ten seconds.
Then Active noticed that Cowboy didn’t just look down at the river bed when he glanced sideways; he also looked at the wing struts and the undersides of the wings. And he spent more time looking sideways. Now it was the path ahead that got the glance, then it was back to the wing.
Active looked where Cowboy looked and in an instant understood the pilot’s hunched shoulders. Ice sheathed the leading edges of the struts and the underside of the wing. Even as Active watched, the ice under the wing seemed to get a little thicker and creep back a little farther.
Active glanced ahead to check Cowboy’s shoulders and saw why the pilot wasn’t looking forward any more. Ice now glazed most of the windshield. Cowboy could see only sideways.
Active had been aboard before when a Bush plane encountered icing, usually just a thin white rime on the struts and wings, with no hunched shoulders involved. But he had never seen ice like this, not so rough and building up so fast. Always before, Cowboy and every other Bush pilot Active had flown with had turned back at the first sign of serious ice, or shoved the throttle forward to climb through the clouds into the sunlight above. This kind of ice weighed down the plane and spoiled the airflow over the wings. This kind of ice could drag a plane out of—”
“Shit, Nathan,” Cowboy said over the headset, his voice high and tight. “We got fucking freezing rain here. The weather service didn’t say anything about freezing rain.”
There was a flurry of clicks and Cowboy, sounding more himself now, spoke again as the engine roared to full throttle and the nose lifted. “Sorry, folks, this ain’t gonna work. We’ve gotta get on top and go back up to Walker to wait this out.”
“But, Cowboy—” Mercer began.
“Sorry, Governor. The weather’s in charge today.” Mercer gazed out her window as the riverbed faded into the mist. “Couldn’t we just turn around and follow the river upstream till we’re out of it again?
“Not safe to make a turn down in this canyon with visibility this low,” Cowboy growled.
The riverbed sank into the dishwater and then it was the four of them and their thoughts and the snarl of the engine as the Cessna labored upward and the ice crept backward under the wings and thickened on the struts.
Pudu pulled his camera back onto his lap and stared into the void. “Arii, Mom. I don’t like this.”
“Be a man,” Mercer gritted. “And keep that damned camera rolling.”
“OK, Mom.” He swiveled in his seat and aimed that camera at her.
Mercer looked straight into it and flashed a campaign grin. “Yee-ha!”
Active leaned over and peered between Cowboy and Pudu’s shoulders for any lightening above that would mean they were about to break out on top, about to burst into that luminous heaven of sunlight and blue sky above the clouds, free of the fog and freezing rain and ice that wanted to turn Cowboy’s 207 into a falling coffin.
Nothing, no change in the gray mass overhead.
He shifted his gaze forward and peered past Cowboy’s shoulder at the instrument that told the story of the Cessna’s struggle to get above the icing. The instrument was called the vertical speed indicator, if Active remembered right. It had a black dial with white numbers and a white needle that pointed straight left if the plane was in level flight. If the needle angled upward, that meant the plane was climbing. If it angled downward, that meant the plane was diving.
Just now, the white needle was angled up, but not by much. Active was too far back to read the dial in the half-light of the cabin, but it looked like the needle was indicating maybe four hundred feet a minute of climb. At that rate, they should get through three thousand feet of cloud in seven or eight minutes.
The problem was, a Cessna 207 on a cold day should climb a lot faster, even with four people on board. Active was pretty sure he had seen this very Cessna climb seven or eight hundred feet a minute with a similar load. If the ice had already cut the climb rate in half, what were their chances of getting on top before the plane became unable to climb at all?
As Active watched, the white needle dropped a little towards the horizontal. Cowboy glanced at it, then at a part of the instrument panel Active couldn’t see, then lowered the nose a little. The white needle dropped a little closer to horizontal. Now they were climbing two hundred feet a minute if they were lucky, Active figured. He watched, paralyzed, as the needle continued to drop until it finally pointed straight left. Zero climb, and the engine screaming at full power.
He leaned his head against the side window and craned his neck to look up again. Still no sign they were close to breaking out. He tried to read the altimeter, which was right above the vertical speed indicator. Did it really say they were only at two thousand feet?
Cowboy clicked onto the headsets as the vertical speed indicator dropped below horizontal. “Listen, folks. This airplane’s given about all it’s got and we’re not gonna come out on top of this stuff. We have go back down through it till we spot the terrain and I can find a place to set us down. So everybody look out your window and keep your eyes peeled for anything that looks like a hill or a rock or a bush or a creek bank. And when you see it, yell out real loud and say which side.”
The pilot dropped the nose a notch and backed off the throttle as the airspeed built. The engine note eased and the needle on the vertical speed indicator slid downward until it stabilized at what looked to Active like a descent rate of a couple hundred feet per minute. Then he remembered Cowboy’s instructions and fixed his gaze on the gray chaos outside his window. Gray chaos with slabs of jagged granite in it.
Time crawled past. What if they hit a mountain and he never saw Grace Palmer again? How much thicker was the ice on the wing? Had they been droning down through these ice clouds for five minutes or thirty? Would Grace Palmer end up on back on the street if he didn’t make it through this? What if he’d taken up with Lucy, spent his life in the glow of that sunny normalcy of hers, instead of with the irresistible and damaged Grace Palmer? Would he be any happi—
“Cowboy!” Pudu shouted. “Isn’t that Shelukshuk Mountain? On the right! On the right!”
Cowboy shot a fast glance out Pudu’s window. “Yeah, and that’s Shelukshuk Creek,” he said. Then he backed off the power, nudged the ice-crippled Cessna into a gentle left turn, and they started down.
Now Active could see it, too, a brush-bearded furrow of white crossing a slope toward the Isignaq River, invisible and an unknown distance away in the fog.
“We can work our way down to the Isignaq, then follow the bank upstream to Walker,” Cowboy said. He glanced at the ice on the underside of the wing. “Assuming we stay in the air long enough to get out of this crap.”
Cowboy nursed the Cessna along the thread of the creek until the bank of the Isignaq swam dimly into view, then eased into another turn and started upstream, shoulders hunched harder than ever against the harness.
The pilot added power again and again in the effort to keep the Cessna in the air. The roar of the engine built up, the ice built up, and, Active sensed, the airspeed dropped. Cowboy lowered the wing flaps a notch farther and that seemed to stabilize the situation for a minute or two. Then the airspeed began to bleed away once more.
“It’s just us, Nathan,” Cowboy said over the headset. His voice was high and tight again. He didn’t sound like Cowboy. “I’m about out of airspeed, altitude and ideas here. We gotta set down and I need you to do what you can for the governor back there. Try to help her with what I’m gonna say next.”
Another click, and Cowboy was back on the intercom to all of them. Somehow, he had recovered his Bush pilot drawl. “Folks, this airplane’s about done flying, so we’re going to have to land. There’s a slough about a mile ahead that usually blows clear of snow this time of year, and I’m gonna head for that. So slide your seat as far back as it will go, buckle in tight, and hold something soft in front of your face if you can find it.”
Active put his arm over the seat back and fumbled through gear in the Cessna’s cargo space. Finally he fished a down mummy bag through the safety webbing and passed it to Mercer, who cradled it in front of her. Active couldn’t reach anything for himself, so he crossed his arms in front of his own chest.
Cowboy lifted his right hand from the throttle and raised his arm over his head. “Everybody look up here. You see my arm? There’s a good chance we’ll finish this upside down. If we do, wait till we come to a stop, then brace one arm hard against the ceiling over your head like I’m doing now to help break the fall, then unbuckle your seat belt. Everybody got that? Governor, Nathan, take anything sharp out of your pockets and put it in the seat back in front of you. Pudu, you give your camera to Nathan and let him put it in the cargo space behind the seats.”
There was a scramble in the cockpit as everyone complied, then another click, then silence. Then a hurricane howled in as Cowboy swung the bottom of his window out a few inches and peered ahead through the resulting slot.
“Arii,” Pudu said.
“What’s going to happen?” Mercer asked over the intercom. “Cowboy?”
More silence.
“I think he switched off so he could concentrate,” Active said. He pointed at Cowboy, his face in the hurricane as he nursed the plane through the fog with only—as far as Active could see—a fringe of willows and alders along the riverbank for navigation.
Slower and slower, lower and lower, the Cessna slogged through the murk. Then the plane jerked into a left turn and a squeal sounded that Active recognized as the stall warning.
“Cowboy?” Mercer said.
The 207 shuddered and sagged out of the air. Active braced for impact, but it never came, and he realized they were rumbling across a field of river ice, bare except for a spiderweb of snowdrifts a few inches high.
Cowboy raised the flaps, brought the plane to a halt, pushed open his door, and vomited into the blast from the propeller.
No one spoke as he pulled his head back in, closed the door, stopped the engine, and flipped switches to “OFF”.
Active looked out at the wing and strut on his side of the plane. The ice had to be an inch thick in places. He could see one propeller blade on his side. It was sheathed with ice on the leading edge, too.
Cowboy still hadn’t said anything. Neither had Pudu or the governor.
“Thanks, Cowboy,” Active said into the thunderous silence. “Nobody else would have—”
“Would have gotten us into this mess?” The pilot sounded at once bitter and mournful, a man who had pushed himself past the limits of his competence, as when he had killed Aggie Iktillik.
“Would have gotten us down in one piece, I was going to say.”
“I knew you could do it, Cowboy.” Mercer’s tone was bright. She sounded like a mom taping a child’s drawing of a rainbow to the refrigerator.
“Just doing my job, ma’am,” Cowboy said, back in Bush pilot mode.
“Now what?” Mercer asked.
“Now we wait,” Cowboy said. “The FAA in Chukchi knows where we are, at least generally. I told them what we were doing before we started down. I’ll turn on our emergency beacon and a satellite will tell ‘em exactly where we are in a few minutes.” Cowboy reached out and flipped another switch on the instrument panel, this time to ON.
“And then what?” Mercer asked. “Will they send a helicopter?”
Cowboy shook his head. “Not even a helicopter can fly in this crud. They’ll probably send snowgos from Isignaq. Or Walker, maybe.”
“What? How long will that take?”
“Hard to say,” Cowboy said. “Sometime tonight, maybe tomorrow.”
“No, I have appointments and events.”
Cowboy opened his door, swung his legs out, looked back at Mercer, and raised his eyebrows. “Right now, I gotta cover this engine and then hit the bushes. There’s tissues in the seat backs if anybody else needs to.”
He climbed out, zipped the oil-stained Bush-pilot parka with its duct-tape patch, pulled up the hood, dug the orange engine cover out of the baggage compartment in the plane’s nose, and bungeed it into place.
Then he trudged off across the slough, Sorels crunching on the snow as he faded into the murk.
“Nathan!” Mercer’s tone was outraged. “Can’t you do anything?”
Not a damned thing, Active said to himself. To Mercer he said, “I think he needs a moment. I’ll go talk to him in a bit.”
Mercer said nothing, just pulled her phone out of a pocket.
He debated telling her the odds of getting cell bars on the upper Isignaq but decided against it and stepped out of the plane.
Mercer put the phone away with a “hmmph!” She looked ready to snap, but she climbed out and zipped up. She reached into the pouch behind the front passenger seat and came up with a packet of Kleenex, then climbed down and stalked off in the opposite direction from where Cowboy had gone.
Active climbed out, zipped up and covered up, then swung around to what must be south, as that was where the murk was lightest. The sun was still above the horizon, but the long slow slide into evening would come in a few hours and their slough would be black as only the Arctic wilderness could be on a foggy night. At least it wasn’t too cold—five below at most, he estimated—with just a light breeze moving. Either the wind hadn’t reached this far upriver yet, or it was petering out as it spread inland. Snow sifted down, snow with pinpricks of sleet in it when it hit his cheek. He started across the ice after Cowboy.
He found the pilot sitting on a downed spruce, a Marlboro between his lips and a lost look on his face.
“Hey, buddy.”
Cowboy dragged on the Marlboro and didn’t speak for a long time. “A man is what he does,” he said. “And when he can’t do it anymore, then he’s not.”
“You can still do it. You just had the governor of Alaska on your case.”
“Yeah, but why did I listen?”
“She’s got something.”
“I know, but what?”
“Charisma,” Active said. “Something. You want to do what she wants.”
Cowboy nodded, took a drag, and exhaled. “And you think she’ll think you’re not a man if you don’t do it.”
“Mm-hmm,” Active said.
Cowboy smoked. “And a man is what he does.”
Active stepped a few paces away from the lost cause and relieved himself. Cowboy would have to extricate himself from the conundrum.
“Be getting dark before long,” Active said.
Nothing from Cowboy.
“We need to do any organizing here?” Active motioned at the Cessna, a ghost plane in the fog. “Put up a tent or something?”
“Whatever she wants.” Cowboy shrugged. “I got an Arctic Oven in my emergency stuff. But we could wait it out in the plane. We’ve got enough gas to keep warm by running the engine every couple hours. I’ll taxi over close to the brush here and we’ll build a fire. Nothing like a fire to brighten things up. Plus, I got some pilot bread and freeze-dry in my emergency stuff, mac-and-cheese, chili, I don’t know what-all.”
“Arigaa, real bellywarmers,” Active said.
Cowboy stood and stretched and they headed for the plane, Sorels crunching in the fog. “She puts some kind of whammy on you,” he said.
“Mm-hmm.”
Their heads jerked up as one.
“What the hell!” Cowboy said.
“Was that a rifle?”
The crack came again, then again and again. Active broke into a run.