Skyhook

THIRTY SIX SATURDAY, DAY 6 7:05 A.M. ALASKAN TIME

“Ready, April?”

Scott McDermott’s voice sounded strong and confident, but April had seen his hand vibrating slightly as he held the yoke of the Widgeon and tried to pretend the impending takeoff was no big deal.

She nodded.

“Okay. Call out my airspeed.”

His hand was already on the throttles that protruded from the ceiling of the cockpit, and he pushed them forward now to max power, holding the control yoke full to the right as both engines rose to a roar, and the amphibian began moving forward through the icy waters, a bow wave of water cascading over the nose and the windshield, obscuring everything.

They moved past the massive icebergs Scott had shoved out of the way with the Widgeon’s nose, the effect one of a runway between a row of twenty-story buildings.

Quickly the bow wave diminished and they could see. Scott pulsed the yoke, and April felt the Widgeon jump higher in the water, the hull no longer floating but now planing along the surface “on the step” as they accelerated.

“There’s forty,” she called over the roar.

She could see the other end of the mountain lake coming at them, its lip only eight to ten feet above the water’s surface, but the embankment from water to lip was catastrophically steep. If they weren’t high enough out of the water to clear the berm, the impact would probably kill them.

“Fifty-five!” she said. “Sixty… sixty-five.”

The end of the lake was looming close, and she felt herself mentally tensing.

“Seventy.”

Without warning Scott yanked both throttles to idle and pulled the yoke as far back as it would go, letting the Widgeon sink back into the water in a cascade of spray, the hydrodynamic pressure rapidly slowing them as they floated over the remaining distance to the western end.

He kicked the left rudder at the last second, swinging the nose parallel to the embankment with several yards to spare.

“We can’t make it?” April asked.

Scott nodded. “Not enough room that time.”

“That time?”

He turned to her, his tone matter-of-fact. “Yeah. We need more distance.”

Scott continued the turn to the left, aiming at the spot on the other end from where they’d started the takeoff attempt.

“Okay. How are we going to construct more distance? Avalanche? Earthquake? Tectonic event?”

Scott shook his head. “There’s another method we can use, April. We almost had enough that time, but… I just needed another ten miles per hour.”

“You’re not seriously suggesting we try that again?”

“Yep. I’m not leaving this bird up here on this lake.”

“We wait for more wind, then?” she asked.

“That’s one way, but it’s not likely to come.”

“Then how? Come on, Scott, you’re scaring me.”

“I’ll show you. It’s an old trick.”

“Does it work?”

“Sometimes.”

“I’d rather not crash, you know. I’m allergic to disintegrating airplanes.”

“Me, too. Crashing usually screws up my whole day.”

“Usually? You mean you’ve crashed before?”

“Of course. Goes with the territory.”

“Seriously?”

He grinned. “Been killed up here a bunch of times.”

“Uh-huh.”

She was gripping the sides of her seat again, wanting to be airborne, but rapidly losing faith in the technical possibility. “Well, I can promise that if you kill me trying to take off, I’ll never go out with you.”

He looked at her and laughed. “Then I’ll assume the converse is true.”

“Sorry?”

“If I don’t kill you, you’re committed to going out with me, and that’s one hell of an incentive.” He raised a finger for silence as they approached the end of the lake and swung the Widgeon to the right in an unexpected direction, moving nearly a hundred yards around the backside of one of the icebergs before spinning the amphibian around.

“Okay.”

“Okay, what? We’re aimed across the narrow part of the lake, if you haven’t noticed. We’re heading south. The so-called runway is due east. We can’t take off like this.”

“No, but if we use a sideways run to gain speed, then angle left around that berg to the middle of the channel we created, then head east, we’ll get a better start.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, the Widgeon has a bad habit of trying to dig her left pontoon in the water, and this helps keep that from happening,”

“Okay.”

“It’ll work, April. We’ll get up on the step before the turn.”

“Don’t you dare say ‘trust me’ again.”

Once more Scott gripped the overhead throttles and moved them forward. The Widgeon began plowing through the water, moving past one of the massive icebergs as the aircraft rose on the step. He worked the left rudder, swinging the Widgeon back to the original easterly heading, the airspeed already at twenty-five knots by the time he steadied the course.

“Forty-five,” April announced. She could see the end looming once more, but this time it seemed a bit more distant.

“Fifty-five.”

The engines were roaring and the throttles firewalled.

“Sixty-five… rising slowly to seventy… there’s seventy-five!”

They were at almost the same place as before, but this time the speed was obviously greater. Scott’s hand held the throttles full forward, his left hand on the yoke, but not pulling.

“Scott, pull us up! Eighty. Scott?”

The end of the lake loomed ominously. Suddenly the yoke came back and the nose popped up to a frightening angle as the Widgeon obediently leaped free of the water, rising to what seemed insufficient altitude to make it over the embankment.

The sound of the metal hull brushing the upper crust of snow and ice on the edge of the embankment was unmistakable and gentle, the noise little more than that of a pine branch brushing the plane. A spray of white from the glancing blow showered the air to the right and was gone as the slope ahead dropped out from under them. Scott pulsed the yoke forward, dropping the Widgeon’s nose as the stall warning horn shut off, and the aircraft traded altitude for airspeed and stabilized as a flying machine once again. He banked slightly to the left, following the downslope of the glacier as he built more airspeed, holding them under the overcast layer of clouds and heading for the massive face of the glacier several miles to the east.

When they’d gained more than a hundred feet over the ice, Scott looked at her with what was supposed to be a nonchalant grin, the effect betrayed by the twitching muscle in his jaw and the slight flutter in his right hand.

She smiled shakily and nodded.

When the face of the glacier was behind them, Scott dropped the Widgeon to less than fifty feet above the water and hugged the coastline as they headed northeast, crossing an open channel to stay equally close to another island. He checked his GPS display and wove an unpredictable course to the rendezvous point.

As arranged by phone during the night, Jim Dobler was waiting for them twenty minutes later in the appointed cove. Scott flew overhead, confirming the identification, before pulling up for a tight turn back into the wind. They touched down smoothly in the protected waters of the little inlet.

There had been no sign of any fighters out searching for them and no more radio calls on the guard frequency, but Scott had kept the radar and his transponder off just in case.

“You want me to get the bow line this time?” April asked as he reached to the overhead panel and brought the mixtures to full lean, killing both engines.

“Yeah, thanks.”

She pulled the Velcro-ed curtain back from the small alcove in front of her copilot seat and released her seat belt, ducking under the instrument panel into the tiny passageway to the nose and popping open the hatch in time to catch the line Jim threw to them. Scott slid back the pilot’s-side window as Jim waved.

“I brought the tarp, Scott.”

“Tarp?” April asked as she stood up in the nose hatch.

“To cover the airplane. We’ll tie ’er up to my tug.”

“We’re towing the airplane?” she asked.

“No. We’re going in the small boat.” Jim pointed over his shoulder to an eighteen-foot-long wooden whaling boat sitting suspended in a sling held by a deck crane. Compared to the tug or the Widgeon, which was thirty-nine feet long, the boat looked puny and dangerous. April recalled the discussion on the satellite phone, but somehow had expected a larger vessel for the open ocean.

“The Coasties can’t see this one on radar.”

It took twenty minutes to secure and cover the Widgeon. Jim and Scott cranked the wooden-hulled boat into the water, and Scott climbed aboard to load the gear and check the GPS and the satellite phone, as well as test the portable Honda generator. After several minutes of intensive effort he stood up and flashed Jim the thumbs-up sign.

The temperature was hovering around sixty and the winds were light, but with the boat pushing through the waves at fifteen knots, April had to zip her parka to stay warm, and Scott noticed.

“You’d be warmer back here, April,” he called out. April turned from her position in the front of the open boat and shook her head.

“This most wonderfully clears the mind,” she said, smiling at him.

“Ah, Samuel Johnson. Seventeen hundred something.”

She nodded, her smile even larger. “An educated man. I’m impressed.”

“Impressed, huh? Guess that’s better than being surprised,” Scott said out of the side of his mouth to Jim. He got up and moved forward with two paper cups and one of the Thermos bottles Jim had prepared. He sat down beside her and poured two steaming cups of coffee.

“As I recall,” he said, handing her a cup, his eyes on the gray of the horizon as the boat pitched gently up and down. “Johnson’s exact quote was, ‘Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ I don’t know exactly what year that was spoken, but it came from a book about him called Life of Johnson.”

“It was written by a fellow named Boswell,” she said. “I know. I was taking liberties with the quote.”

“Shameful.”

She sipped the fragrant liquid, wondering why coffee always tasted so much better in the open, even in a paper cup.

“Where did you go to college, Scott?”

“Oh, a little liberal arts school on the upper East Coast.”

“Did it have a name?”

He nodded.

April chuckled. “Scott, there’s nothing wrong with getting your degree from some unknown little liberal arts school. Sometimes they can be better than the big expensive schools.”

“Okay.” He turned away from the horizon to look at her all hunkered down over her coffee cup, her raven hair blowing in the steady breeze, her eyes sparkling. “Where’d you go to school, April?” he asked.

“University of Washington. But tell me yours.”

“Is it important?”

“No. But now you’ve got me curious.”

“It didn’t affect me much. I managed to forget most everything I learned when I got my commission.”

“Aha! Navy ROTC?”

“No.”

“Annapolis?”

“Please! Do I impress you as Annapolis material?”

“You never know. You could be in rebellion.”

“No. I barely made it through officer school. Emphasis on the ‘barely.’ I was in the I-hate-regimentation division. They’d order me to make my bed so they could bounce a quarter off it, and I would, and then sleep on the floor for six weeks so I wouldn’t have to disturb my work.”

“You were going to tell me the name of your alma mater,” April prompted again, “even if it was small and obscure, I’m sure it was a very good school.”

“It was.”

“So, what was the name?”

“Princeton.”

“Princeton?”

“Yeah.”

“The Princeton?”

“I think probably there’s just one.” He smiled.

“And I was starting to feel sorry for you for being academically deprived.”

Jim called from the stern and they turned to see him pointing to the left.

“Large vessel over there.”

“What kind?” Scott called.

“Too small for a tanker. Not the right size for a Coast Guard cutter. Might be that same ship out of Adak you recognized Thursday.”

“Can they see us?” April asked in some alarm.

Jim shook his head. “Not if we hold this course. But if they’re patrolling, they’ll spot us if we take too long over the wreck.”

Scott had moved back to check the handheld GPS receiver Jim was watching. “Another three miles?”

Jim nodded. “Why don’t you two get the generator going and make everything ready, then drop the camera and light bar over the side to about two hundred feet and start the video recorder. That way when we get there, we’ll save a bunch of time.”

April was looking up and pointing.

“What?” Scott asked.

“Blue sky.”

He followed her gaze, noting the ragged end of the overcast rapidly blowing east and leaving a vista of higher cumulus clouds admitting a brilliant shaft of sunlight.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she prompted, her eyes on the sky as his refocused on her.

“Sure is,” he said, mostly under his breath.

The electrical generator was running and the color TV camera holding at a depth of two hundred feet as they closed on the point where the Albatross had sunk.

“Another thirty yards, Jim,” Scott said, calling down the numbers. “Reverse her.”

Jim slowed the outboard and shifted to reverse, throttling up until the GPS velocity readout hit zero.

“Perfect.”

“We’re there?” Jim asked.

“Dead over where we were before.” He moved to April’s side. “Why don’t you watch the monitor now while I let the camera down to the same depth. When we spot the wreckage, we’ll work it around to see that right engine and prop.”

April seated herself in front of the color monitor and draped a small tarp over her head and the entire unit while Scott finished playing out the line. Jim began moving the boat at dead-slow speed, watching the GPS screen and crisscrossing the targeted coordinates.

“Anything, April?” Scott called.

Her disembodied voice came from beneath the tarp. “I see ocean floor, fish, and weeds, but no sign of the airplane.”

Jim reversed course and came back fifty yards to the north, parallel to their first pass, reversing again on the other side. Still April could spot nothing resembling the Albatross wreckage.

“Scott, are you absolutely sure we have the right coordinates?” April asked thirty minutes later.

“If you recall, April, you wrote them down yourself and triple-checked them.”

“Oh. Yeah. And you’re sure the GPS is working, right?”

“It checks normal. Look, let’s start running the pattern again at right angles. We were probably just lucky the first time.”

Jim worked the boat back to the middle of the targeted coordinates and was lining up for a north-south search sequence when he once again pointed to the horizon.

“We’ve got company, boys and girls.”

“Shit,” Scott muttered, following his gaze.

“I think that one is Coast Guard,” Jim replied. “Good news is, they’re not aiming for us, at least not yet.”

Scott turned his attention to the lump under the tarp. “April, you’re not asleep under there, are you?” Scott asked.

“No.”

“Just checking.”

“I’m seeing zip, but I heard what you said. They’re not coming toward us?”

“Not yet.”

It was almost an hour later when April emerged from under the tarp, blinking and shaking her head. “Could a sunken airplane just drift away?”

“Well, you saw it before on the screen, April,” Jim said. “Did it look like it was well seated in the sand on the bottom?”

She nodded.

“I don’t know of any current around here strong enough to move it.”

“Let’s try the whole grid again, starting with a wider circle,” she said, and once more Jim began piloting the wooden boat to the starting position and noting the coordinates on his log. They were crossing the precise middle of the coordinates when she yelped something inaudible from beneath the tarp.

“What?” Scott asked.

“I said, hold it! Hold your heading, stop the boat.”