Better To Rest

ELEVEN

Liam hadn’t been able to go home the night before, not even as far as the Jayco popup in the front yard. He was embarrassed and ashamed of his reaction to Karen’s advances. It bothered him that even in his sleep he hadn’t been able to tell Karen from Wy. He knew it was irrational but it was how he felt. He didn’t want to see Wy until he had calmed down. He wanted a shower before he saw her. He wanted to dip his penis in a jar of disinfectant before he saw her.

He didn’t want Wy to see him, was what it amounted to. He was afraid she would be able to read what he’d been doing all over his guilty face. Besides, Jo and Gary might still be there, and if she couldn’t read him Jo sure as hell could. The reporter had the most unnerving stare Liam had ever encountered, one that cut right through any bullshit he might be able to throw up about where he’d spent the last hour.

Besides, he told himself, with Gary there maybe Wy didn’t want him in the house.

He knew it wasn’t true, but it was an excuse he grabbed at. He went back to the post. He would have sacked out in the front seat of the Blazer, but he didn’t want anyone driving by the following morning to see him. The chair behind the desk was on casters but it was well padded and leaned back pretty far, and it wasn’t like he’d never slept in it before. He loosened his tie, propped his feet on the desk, and prepared to wait out the night.

His mind wouldn’t let him alone. Images of Lydia giving him the once-over, the pure female appreciation in her eyes even more unsettling when she depreciated thirty years in age and became her daughter Karen. The gold coin rolling out of the dead, desiccated hand, winding round and round and round on the dance floor of Bill’s Bar and Grill. Wy’s expression, comprised of horror at the sight of the arm and guilt at the presence of Gary in the booth with her. The slab of ice separating from the face of the glacier, falling he could believe almost intentionally right on top of the two of them.

The snarl of John Dillinger Barton over the phone: “What the hell’s keeping you; get on the goddamn plane!”

He grieved again for Charlie, but the grief was no longer the crushing, debilitating force it had been. Instead it brought his son back in all his round-cheeked, dimpled glory, and he was grateful, would always be grateful. He wanted to remember Charlie, always and forever. His son. Likely the only child of his body he would ever have.

He must have dozed off at some point, because the next thing he heard was a loudbang! For one disoriented moment he thought he was back at the foot of the glacier. “Look out, Wy!” he shouted, and dove for cover.

Only he fell out of his chair instead, into a sticky pool of coffee spilled the day before that he could swear he had cleaned up. He lay where he was, swearing feebly.

“That’s my boy,” he heard someone say.

Oh, no.

He raised his head cautiously to peer over the edge of the desk.

It was.

Col. Charles Bradley Campbell of the United States Air Force, eagles and all.

But wait, there was more. Colonel Campbell had not come alone. Behind and slightly to the right of the erect figure in immaculate blue was a slender young man in neat chinos and a light blue button-down shirt with a dark blue tie under a dark blue windbreaker. He had neatly cut straight black hair and round, no-rim glasses perched on the end of a thin, high-bridged nose through which he peered at Liam with some puzzlement.

Liam got to his feet. “Hi, Dad.”

Charles smiled. “Hello, son. Great to see you again.”

Uh-huh. Liam shook the hand extended to him and offered no explanation of his swan dive out of the office chair. Charles was tactful enough not to ask for one. “You must have had a late night.”

“Yeah.” Liam glanced surreptitiously at his watch. It was past ten. Where was Prince?

Firm footsteps sounded on the stairs, and the door opened to admit Prince. “Charles!”

“Diana,” Charles said, a wealth of information in that single word.

Prince recovered fast; Liam had to give her that. “How nice to see you again,” she said, eyes cast demurely down.

“How very nice indeed,” Charles said.

More footsteps. Already the morning was not turning out well, and when he saw who it was, he groaned inside.

“Liam,” Jo said, “I need to talk to you about this crash site. How do I get to it, and-”

At that moment Col. Charles Bradley Campbell sprang into her dazzled view. Liam, while not a vain man, knew that he was good-looking, and knew that he looked like his father, but although he’d had his share of women there was something about the elder Campbell that made them go down like ninepins in his presence. Jo, the hardest of hard-nosed reporters, all but went over flat on suddenly very round heels.

Charles was a tall man, as tall as Liam, and the similarities didn’t stop there. His eyes were as blue, if less warm, his dark red hair, if shorter in style, as thick and as yet not gray even at the temples. His jaw was as firm, his shoulders as broad, his waist and hips as trim, his legs as long, and he looked just as good in the snug jacket and slacks of his dark blue air force uniform as Liam did in his trooper blue and gold.

Liam, looking at Charles through Jo’s eyes, remembered his state of deshabille and snugged up and straightened his tie. It was pretty much all he could do without a dry cleaner.

For her part, Jo, not a woman easily impressed, for the first time received an inkling of what was itching at her friend, Wy. What she didn’t see in Liam was manifestly obvious in Liam’s father. “Jesus,” she said, looking from one man to the other and pleased that her voice was light and steady. “The apple sure didn’t fall far from this tree.”

Charles Bradley Campbell grinned, a quick, lethal grin with razor-sharp edges. “Why, thank you, ma’am.”

Liam, Jo was interested to note, looked less than thrilled. “What are you doing in town, Dad?”

Charles looked wounded. “What, I can’t drop in once in a while to visit my son?”

“Drop in all the way from Washington, D.C.?”

Charles smiled with all the warmth and charm at his command, both of which were considerable. “Newenham’s just like everywhere else, son. A plane ride away.”

The man standing in back of him made a discreet noise.

“Why, I’m forgetting my manners,” Charles said. “Special Agent James G. Mason, trooper Sgt. Liam Campbell.”

“Special agent?” Liam said.

James G. Mason’s smile was slow and a little shy. “Of the FBI.”

“FBI?” Jo said. “What’s the Feebs doing in Newenham?”

“Good-bye, Jo,” Liam said.

“Come on, Liam-”

“Allow me to introduce you around. Jo Dunaway, reporter for theAnchorage News, ” he said to his father, who was too smooth to show alarm. The FBI man looked confused, but that may have been cosmetic. “Good-bye, Jo,” he repeated. At his look, Prince went to the door and held it for her, not without some small feeling of triumph at being the woman left behind with Col. Charles Bradley Campbell.

Liam waited for the disgruntled footsteps to fade well out of hearing. “Special Agent Mason.”

“Sergeant Campbell.”

“How can I help you?”

The agent looked at Charles, who shrugged. His glasses slipped farther down his nose and he pushed them back up again, a nervous habit. “Well, we heard you had found the wreckage from a plane crash.”

“And this merits attention from the FBI?” And the air force, he thought, looking at his father, who looked blandly back.

“Well”-Mason flushed slightly-“er, yes, we think it does. Um, we think it might be the wreckage of a plane that crashed into Carryall Mountain the night of December twentieth, 1941. It was a C-47, a Lend-Lease aircraft meant for Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces in China.”

“And the FBI is interested in this crash-why? Is there some indication that this was other than an accident?”

If possible, Mason looked even more apologetic. “The special agent in charge in Anchorage sent me down as an observer, just in case.”

Liam looked at Charles. “There were three people on board, a pilot, a copilot, and a navigator. We bring our boys back.”

It was simply said, and Liam had no doubt that Charles, a career man to whom the United States Air Force was life and breath, meant every word. Nevertheless, he couldn’t escape the feeling that something had been left unsaid. “I imagine you want to go up there.”

Charles nodded. “Can you take us?”

Prince looked chagrined. “Our plane is still on floats.”

Charles looked at Liam and smiled a slow, knowing smile. “Know an air taxi we can charter?”

Liam, expecting a Fury when he called, found Wy vague and distracted. Well, if she couldn’t be bothered to ask where he’d spent the night, he sure as hell couldn’t be bothered to offer the information. He explained the situation in crisp and businesslike tones. “Can you get the Cessna in there with everyone on board?” There was a long silence. “Wy?”

“You want to fly back to the C-47 wreck?”

“Yes,” he said. “I just said that. Didn’t I just say that?”

“I don’t know. I… yes, I guess so.” She seemed to pull herself together. “All right. How much do they weigh?”

“A hundred eighty,” Charles said.

“One forty-five,” Mason said.

Liam heard pencil scratching on paper. “We’ll make it.”

Liam remembered the tiny dirt strip carved out of the snow, no bigger in his fevered memory than a Band-Aid, and carefully kept anything he might be feeling from showing on his face. “She says it’s a go,” he said, hanging up. “Need a ride?”

“Thanks, the commander out at Chinook was kind enough to loan us a vehicle.”

“You flew into Chinook?” Chinook Air Force Base was forty miles south of Newenham. It was a small base, fully manned only during the height of the Cold War, and would have been closed years earlier if the senior senator from the state of Alaska hadn’t had enough seniority to head up the military appropriations committee.

It certainly offered Liam’s father far too easy access to Newenham, and to Liam.

“Of course.”

“You fly in with him?” This to Mason.

“Yes,” Mason said.

“What did you fly in on?”

Charles grinned. “Nothing like an F-15 to shrink the spaces between places, Liam. You ought to let me show you what mach speed looks like from the inside.”

“Thanks anyway,” Liam said. One of the sorest spots between father and son was the son’s complete inability to appreciate the magic of flight.

“You coming with us?”

Liam couldn’t have put his finger on how he knew Charles didn’t want him at the crash site, but he did. He looked down at the list of names belonging to Lydia’s book club. He looked up at his father, into the blue eyes so like his own, so determinedly clear of guile.

He handed the list to Prince. “Talk to them all, see if she was worried about something, fighting with someone; you know the drill.”

“Yes, sir,” Prince said, very glum.

“See you later,” Charles told her.

She brightened visibly.

Liam followed Charles and Mason in the Blazer, out the gravel road to the airport, ten miles from Newenham, complete with hangar and tie-downs and Gift Shoppe. Wy was waiting for them, 68 Kilo fueled and ready. They climbed in and took off.

It was a much shorter ride this time, and a much louder landing. Liam was certain they were going to end up in the trees, a place they had already been in a plane once this year, thank you very much, when a hard kick to the rudder swung the tail around and they rolled mercifully to a stop.

“Nicely done,” Charles drawled over the headphones.

“Thank you, Colonel,” Wy said.

“Charles, please.” He smiled at her. Liam, watching from the backseat, noticed that while she inclined her head in acknowledgment she didn’t smile back. Maybe that was why he loved her, the one woman left in the world Charles Bradley Campbell had yet to charm.

Give him time.

They hiked up the trail to the glacier, encountering fresh bear scat and a gray-muzzled cow moose, who gave them an incurious stare before moving placidly into a stand of diamond willow. It was overcast today, and colder. Their breath made little clouds that hung in the air, only to swirl, disperse and vanish as the line of people walked through them.

“It’s going to snow,” Wy said, looking at the horizon.

“How much and how long?”

She measured the clouds with narrow eyes. “A couple of feet by morning.” She saw Liam’s face. “I’m kidding.”

All the same, he kept an uneasy eye on the horizon after that. The last thing he wanted to do was take off into a snowstorm. They’d had to land in one the month before. He wasn’t enthusiastic at the possibility of repeating the experience.

They emerged from the trees into the clearing at the foot of the glacier.

“Where is it?” Charles said. Behind him, Mason was staring upward, openmouthed.

“There,” Liam said, and pointed.

Charles looked. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said, but it was more prayer than curse.

The face of the glacier looked to the southwest, and even in late October one day of sun had done enough melting to throw the outline of the plane into even starker relief, most of the fuselage, what was left of the right wing. The glacial backdrop was stunning, too. The cloudy day brought out the colors hiding in the ice, green, purple, a little red, a hundred different shades of blue, from powder to navy. Some trick of the light made it seem as if the tail of the craft were protruding, and at the same time made the whole thing look semitransparent, almost phantasmic. And why not? Liam thought. It was indeed an apparition, the specter of a time gone by and a war long since won. Only the spirits of the men who had been her last crew had the right to walk here.

Charles took an involuntary step forward.

“Hold it,” Wy said, barring his way with one hand. “That glacier calves. The whole thing could come down on top of you at any moment.”

“We’ve got to get up there.”

“You can’t.”

“How’d you find the wreckage, then?”

“It’s falling off the face of the glacier a little bit at a time,” Liam said. “A couple of hunters were passing by, and stumbled over some… pieces.”

“We’ve got to recover the bodies.” Charles seemed shaken out of his usual sangfroid.

“They’re dead, Dad.”

There was a spark of anger in Charles’ eyes when he turned to look at his son. “There are three of our own up there, Liam.”

Parts of them might be, Liam thought. “Who were they?”

Charles seemed to pull himself together. “Capt. Terrance Roepke of Minot, South Dakota. First Officer Aloysius”-all three of the men winced-“March of Pasadena, California. Flight Engineer Obadiah Etheridge of Birmingham, Alabama. All U.S. Army Air Corps.”

“What were they doing over the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta in a C-47 on December twentieth, 1941?”

“You ever hear of Lend-Lease?”

“Yes. Sure. Of course. Okay, refresh my memory.”

“It was Roosevelt’s way of funneling equipment and supplies to the Allies before we actually got into the war. The C-47 was a standard piece of Lend-Lease equipment.”

Liam nodded at the wreck. “Where was this one going?”

“Russia.”

Wy’s brow creased. “Weren’t most of those planes ferried through Nome by way of Fairbanks by way of the Alcan?”

“Yes.”

“What was this one doing so far south?”

“I don’t know. Bad weather, instrument failure, extreme cold, any of those things. We’re talking 1941, real seat-of-your-pants flying, especially up here.” Charles looked and sounded a little wistful. “These guys had to be good, or good guessers.”

Liam looked up at the glacier. This crew hadn’t been that good.

Mason, finally having gotten his mouth closed, grabbed Liam’s arm and pointed involuntarily. “Look!”

As they watched, a section of the glacier shuddered and split from the main body of ice. It was so large it seemed to take a long, long time to fall. At about the time the first piece of ice hit the ground, the firstboom! hit their eardrums, followed by a loud, continuous thundering crunch of ice striking bottom and breaking up.

The ghost of the C-47 seemed to ripple. They held their breath, watching, but the plane stayed where it was. “We’ve got to get up there,” Charles said. “We’ve got to get those men out.”

“Sooner or later they’ll come to us, Colonel,” Wy said. At his look she added, “You can’t climb up the face of the glacier for the same reason. You can’t rappel down from the top for the same reason. The whole thing is just too unstable. Really the only thing you can do is wait.” She paused, and then, because she too was a pilot, repeated gently, “They’ll come to us.”

There was a brief silence. “How long?”

Wy shrugged. “It’s a glacier. It’s also October. It’s going to get colder very soon, and it’s going to snow a lot. I’d leave any recovery attempt until next year. Check it out in the spring, see what kind of a snowfall there has been, see how long it will take to melt off. Try to get in sometime between then and when the glacier goes into full calving mode. No guarantees it won’t have, and no guarantees the whole thing won’t slide off the face of the glacier the moment we fly out of here, but at least nobody else gets killed.”

They stood staring at the glacier. After a moment, Wy touched Liam’s arm. “Liam? Do you hear it?”

“Hear what?” Liam became aware of a faint buzzing noise, increasing in volume. It got louder and louder, until he looked over his shoulder at where the trail ended at the edge of the trees to see five four-wheelers burst into the clearing. Their drivers saw the little group and the man in the lead shouted out a warning but it was too late.

“Look out!” Liam said, and picked up Wy around the waist and leaped left. Charles and Mason both jumped right. The vehicles skidded to a halt.

Paul Urbano looked at Liam picking himself out of the blueberry bushes, his uniform smeared with blue stains, and said, “Oh, shit.”

Teddy Engebretsen, John Kvichak, and Kelley MacCormick looked as if they were trying to will themselves into invisibility.

The fifth man, Evan Gray, laughed out loud.

Peering around him, her short cap of blond curls ruffled and adorned with the odd desiccated birch leaf, so did Jo Dunaway.

December 10, 1941

That plane that went in four days ago? They found two of the guys! Both pilots were kilt in the crash but there were two other guys on board and although they were hurt they fixed up some kind of wooden slats they call skis (they use these skis to travel over the snow in Norway, I hear) and strapped them to their knees and feet and crawled out. They only made it three miles but that was enough for them to be seen from the highway and be picked up. The story is it was fifty-eight below. I cant believe they’re alive. Nobody can.

I wonder if Ill ever be abel to tell my son what I did in the war. I cant even tell them at home where I am. Its this big secret that were giving planes to Russia and China. Like March said the other day, theres hundreds of planes going through Nome every day, do the brass think the Germans and the Japs havent notised? He was taking a talley on a tablet and saw I was watching is why he said it. He said if I can keep cownt anybody can.