Skyhook

THIRTY FRIDAY AFTERNOON, DAY 5 SEQUIM, WASHINGTON

Arlie had noticed the dark blue Chevy van earlier in the afternoon, a utility version with no windows motoring down the road leading past his property. The van stopped for several minutes before moving on. Addresses were hard to find among the widely spaced properties in the area, but it was the third appearance of the same van within three hours that snagged his attention as unusual. When it showed up several cars back in traffic as he drove into nearby Port Angeles, Arlie realized he was being followed. He turned suddenly near the center of the downtown area and turned again into a hotel parking lot, racing past the separate lobby structure and around the back, where his car would be hidden. He sat, waiting for several minutes, before deciding to investigate on foot.

He reached the main street and walked several blocks in each direction, but the blue van was nowhere to be seen, and he retraced his steps to the hotel parking lot feeling slightly foolish.

I must be getting paranoid, he thought, as he rounded the corner of the building and looked up to see the dark blue van parked right next to his car.

“Captain Rosen?” A male voice startled him from directly behind, and he turned abruptly to find himself facing a broad-shouldered man with a weathered face.

“Yes? Who are you?”

The man smiled and looked around before meeting his gaze. His hands were stuck in the pockets of a long black leather coat, and he held himself with easy confidence. Arlie glanced at the broad pockets of the coat and wondered if either contained a gun.

“Consider me a friend, Captain.”

“Okay, but do you have a name?”

The man ignored the question and fixed Arlie with a cold stare. “I have a vital warning for you, and I did you the favor of coming a long distance to deliver it in person.”

“What, you couldn’t ring my doorbell?”

“I doubt you would want your wife to be as frightened as you’re about to be.”

“Excuse me?”

“Captain, you’ve blundered into something way over your head, and your daughter and her pretty friend, Gracie, are making some very powerful people very upset with their questions and lawsuits.”

“What the hell are you—”

A large right hand came out of the jacket, motioning for silence, and the accompanying look on his face stopped Arlie cold. “I’m not here to answer questions. I’m here to warn you to call your girls off, withdraw your lawsuits, fire your lawyers, and just hunker down. You will withdraw those legal actions on Monday and bring your daughter back now. If you do, your license will be reinstated in a few weeks. If you don’t, you’ll never fly again, and someone’s very likely to get hurt.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Rosen, the people you’re challenging will stop at nothing to protect their interests. Do you understand what that means?”

“Yeah. You, or they, are threatening my family. If you’re a government agent, I’ll have your badge for this!”

Once more the man smiled and studied his feet before replying. “Who I am is not important. What’s involved is. Stop your little war and you’ll get back in the cockpit. Keep it up, and lives will be changed drastically, jobs extinguished, and careers ruined. Especially your daughter and her friend. Do not tell them, or anyone else, about this conversation, or I’ll be back to deal with you.”

Arlie’s jaw was set and his fists clenched as he stepped forward, but he was unprepared to see the man’s left hand pull a silenced Glock 9mm from his coat in one unbroken motion. He raised the gun to Arlie’s chest, and just as quickly jerked it to the right and pulled the trigger. A surprisingly loud, muffled noise caused Arlie to jump and whirl to his left in time to see shattered glass falling from his side-mounted rearview mirror, which now featured a bullet hole in the very center.

“What the hell…” he yelped.

The man shoved the gun back in his pocket. “Don’t delude yourself into thinking this isn’t just as serious as I said.”

“Jesus Christ, man!” Arlie was backing up, his eyes wide with alarm as the man turned and walked past him to the blue van, turning at the rear bumper.

“We’re not kidding, Rosen. Don’t risk it.”

The voice in their headsets came from nowhere.

“Unidentified aircraft flying at two thousand feet five-zero miles east of Seward, come up on guard frequency, one-twenty-one-point-five, immediately.”

“Who’s that?” April demanded.

Scott looked to the left, then back to the panel, confirming that one of the radios was, indeed, tuned to the emergency “guard” frequency. He flipped a switch and pressed his microphone button.

“Who’s this?”

“This is a U.S. Air Force fighter, Husky Eighteen. You have violated restricted military airspace and we are intercepting you. You are directed to comply with our orders and follow us back to Elmendorf Air Force Base to land.”

“I haven’t violated any airspace, Husky Eighteen. I’ve got two GPSs and they both confirm I’ve never been over the line.”

“State your call sign.”

“That’s a negative. You don’t need to know my call sign, and I will not follow you.”

“State your call sign, unidentified aircraft. We are proceeding with the approved rules of interception. If you do not comply, you will be shot down.”

“Scott? What does he mean?” April asked in alarm. The shock she’d seen on his face moments before was turning to anger, and she could see his jaw set.

“Hang on, April.”

Scott reduced power and kicked the Widgeon into a sudden, tight right, descending turn, as he spotted the lights of the two fighters coming in from behind with a closing speed of several hundred knots.

“Scott! I do not want to get blown out of the sky.”

“Those clowns are not going to get a firing solution on me… not to mention the fact that they don’t have authorization to fire. It’s a standard bluff.”

The nose of the Widgeon was pointed down at a twenty-degree angle and April felt herself grasping the edges of her seat. Scott pulled the throttles all the way back to idle and extended the flaps as he continued the spiral to the right. The water was coming up, the land mass in partial shadow on her right, then her left, as she began calling out the altitude.

“Six hundred… five hundred… four hundred.”

“I’m leveling. We’re going up one of those fjords.”

“Scott… two hundred… one-fifty… one hundred.”

He worked the controls to level the wings and bring the nose up, flattening their trajectory just above wave height. There were more strident calls from Husky Eighteen.

“Unidentified amphibian, this is Husky Eighteen. We say again, you must obey the rules of interception and follow us, or you will be shot down.”

“Sure I will,” Scott snorted to April. “He’s getting frustrated.”

“Unidentified amphibian, be advised you can’t get away from us even down in the weeds!”

Scott brought the Widgeon toward the northern bank of a fjord leading inward and began hugging the cliff, less than a hundred yards from the passing trees.

“Scott? Couldn’t they get your license for evading them?”

“Prove I’m out here. They don’t have my registration number and they’re not going to get it.”

“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” April said, trying to catch his eye, but worried about distracting him with the cliff mere yards away to the right. The daylight was fading fast as the jagged coastline they were shadowing wound its way toward a glacier she could see looming a mile or so ahead.

Scott craned his neck above the dash panel to spot the fighters.

“There! Hah!”

“Define ‘hah’ please.”

“They had to go halfway to Anchorage to turn around, and now they’re trying to get in behind and lock us with their tactical radar down here in the so-called weeds. They’ve got ‘look-down, shoot-down’ capability, April, but they’ve got to have a stable target, and we’re going to deny them the pleasure. I know a place to hide.”

“You mean, they could shoot us with guns?”

“Missiles. Technically yeah. It’s really hard to do… but not impossible.”

“Oh, that’s a comfort!”

There was a gentle upslope over the top of the cliff leading to a clearing on the right and they saw it simultaneously. Scott banked right and brought the Widgeon less than thirty feet over the top of the ridgeline, flying between the trees as he flew up the meadow and turned with the meandering terrain. He added power to climb with the slope as he extended the flaps to the fully deployed position.

“This’ll keep us as slow as possible. The air farce up there can’t get much below two hundred and we can fly at seventy.”

“Scott?”

“Yeah.”

“Why, exactly, are we doing this?” she asked.

“No time to explain. I have a plan.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Care to share it?”

“No. Whoa!” He pulled up and over a row of trees that hadn’t appeared to be as high as they were, and followed a small draw to the left where the terrain ended at the edge of a thousand-foot-high promontory. April watched spruce and lodge-pole pines zip by on either side, their tops soaring considerably above the small aircraft’s altitude.

The vertical face of a giant valley glacier lay beyond, its base sitting in an inlet of milky blue-green water filled with newly carved icebergs.

“What are you planning, Scott?” April asked, tensing as he descended the Widgeon to less than ten feet over the meadow leading to the drop-off. The terrain and alpine grasses were flashing by at a dizzying speed, and a startled pair of Dall sheep jerked their heads up in alarm and took off to the right. The edge of the drop-off leading to the glacier and the inlet was coming up quickly, the illusion of speed intensified by the low altitude as they traversed the last thirty feet before the cliff.

And suddenly the feeling of speed disappeared in an instant as the rushing ground gave way to a thousand feet of air over the choppy, frozen waters below. April felt as if she were hanging motionless over the glacial waters, the illusion of instant deceleration a physical shock, the sheer rock face disappearing unseen behind them.

“Wow!” she said, involuntarily.

“I love this stuff! Although I don’t usually get chased into it by fighters.”

The F-15 lead pilot was back on the radio, his voice betraying a touch of upset. “Unidentified amphibian, we observe your progress and have you locked up on radar. You will immediately climb and pick up a heading of one-nine-zero degrees, or we will fire. This is your last warning.”

“You’re sure they’re bluffing, Scott?” April asked.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

She looked at him wide-eyed. “Pretty sure? What do you mean, ‘pretty sure’? We need to be absolutely sure!”

He pointed to the right, to a gap in the glacial ice field at least a hundred yards wide. It was a giant crevasse, or valley, slicing the glacier in half and leading inland and upward, and she realized in a flash of fear that he intended to fly into it.

“No, Scott!”

“Yeah.”

“No, really! Let’s not do that, please?”

He turned and grinned. “I know where this leads.”

“Yeah, so do I, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not die with you until I get to know you better.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“If it’ll get you to stop this, yes!”

He chuckled as he worked the throttles and controls to slide the Widgeon around a sudden turn to the right.

“Well, if I was sure I could take you to dinner sometime…”

“That’s blackmail!” she said almost absently.

He nodded as the towering ice walls enfolded them on either side and the Widgeon entered the ice canyon, the unique deep blue of glacial ice soaring above them for at least a hundred feet.

A shuddering explosion suddenly burst somewhere to their left, and the image of an orange fireball reflected off the icy canyon walls. April jerked her head around in time to see the leading edge of a massive cascade of fragmented glacial ice barely missing them.

“What was that?” she gasped.

“Oh, shit!” Scott muttered.

“What? WHAT?”

“I didn’t expect that!” He looked at her, real apprehension reflected in his eyes. “The bastard actually fired a missile at us!”

“Husky Eighteen, Crown. What’s your status?” Mac MacAdams asked as he watched the maneuvering F-15s on the computer-generated scope chase a target now too low to be visible to the AWACS’s radar.

“He’s hugging the terrain, Crown, and literally flying up a glacier. We’ve launched fox one unsuccessfully and are maneuvering for another shot.”

“You WHAT? Cease fire! You were ordered to proceed without deadly force.”

There was a prolonged silence.

“Crown, we heard the order as ‘Force him to land at Elmendorf. If compliance is refused, destruction authorized.’”

“Unauthorized, dammit! The order was destruction UN-authorized.”

There was a long pause before the F-15 lead pilot pressed his transmit button again. Mac could imagine him thinking fast to use the right words.

“Sorry, Crown. We did not copy the ‘un’ part.”

Mac shook his head and sighed as he punched the transmit button. “Well, thank God you didn’t hit him, Husky.”

“Scott, this canyon has to end somewhere,” April said through gritted teeth, her eyes riveted on the unfolding chasm of ice. “Now would be a very good time to climb!”

“In a minute.”

“I don’t think we have a minute.”

“See the cloud cover ahead?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I’m aiming for.”

“You want to go on instruments playing Star Wars down the middle of a giant crevasse? Are all Navy pilots insane and suicidal, or did I just luck out with you?”

“You’re just a lucky gal, I guess. Stand by to climb. We’ve got to get under that layer of clouds ahead.”

There was another sharp bend in the ice canyon some thirty degrees to the left and Scott guided the Widgeon around the turn as April realized that the vanishing point she was seeing ahead was actually the end of the canyon.

“CLIMB! NOW, SCOTT!”

“I see it,” he said, firewalling the throttles and pulling back sharply on the yoke, trading his small surplus of airspeed for altitude as they slid beneath the cloud cover overhead. The Widgeon popped above the top of the walls on each side and Scott guided them to the right, over the broken and deeply crevassed surface of the glacier beneath an overcast hanging no more than two hundred feet above them.

“See?” He grinned.

“See what? Aren’t there cliffs in these clouds?”

“Yeah… but there’s a little place I know over to the right…”

“Not another one?”

“Hang on.”

“I really hate it when you say that!” April replied, her hands still in a death grip on the armrests of her copilot’s seat.

The Air Force F-15 pilot pulled his ship around sharply to the right, racking up nearly eight Gs in the turn to get another look at the amphibian. His wingman was working hard against the G forces to hang in position on his left wing and barely succeeded as they rolled out of the turn together.

“You have him, Two?” Lead asked.

“Negative. I think he ducked under that cloud cover.”

“He’s crazy if he did.”

“Well, I rest my case,” the wingman said. “What now?”

“Let’s orbit and see if he comes back out,” Lead replied, his concentration still divided by the fact that they’d apparently misunderstood a rules-of-engagement order and almost succeeded in accidentally destroying a civilian aircraft. The prospect had made him queasy, something no amount of G force or maneuvering had ever done.

“I’m ten minutes to bingo fuel, Lead,” his wingman announced.

“Yeah?” Lead replied, looking at his own fuel gauges and feeling further embarrassed that his wingman had to be the one to remind him. “Roger. Crown, Husky Eighteen. Thanks to the dash in burner and the maneuvering, we’re almost at bingo fuel and we’ve lost him now beneath cloud cover over the glacier.”

The voice from the AWACS belonged to a general officer, the lead pilot knew, which made the previous mistake all the more worrisome. He could hear the general key his microphone now and give a subdued sigh before he spoke.

“Very well, Husky. Head back. We’ll try to track him from here. Where do you think he’s headed?”

“I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t crash, Crown. He’s under cloud cover over a glacier in a high mountain valley. The guy’s nuts. I’d recommend you launch a search-and-rescue op immediately. But I think you’re only going to find spare parts.”