Skyhook

ELEVEN WEDNESDAY MORNING, DAY 3 ANCHORAGE HILTON

April had been battling to ignore the sound of the alarm clock for the previous ten minutes. She gave up and pulled it to her. She’d left a wake-up call for 8 A.M., but it was 5:50.

Dean, one of her two brothers, was due in at 10 A.M., and she had to get to the airport as well as make a half dozen calls back to Vancouver. And, if her folks were to be released by mid afternoon, there were airline tickets to Seattle to arrange.

April turned out the lamp on the bedside table and pulled a pillow over her head to try to recapture sleep, but it was no use. After less than ten minutes she sat up abruptly and tossed the pillow across the room in frustration, wide awake. Something was rolling around in her mind and she couldn’t quite capture it.

Okay. I’ll try the shower.

Anchorage was hunkered down under a slate sky on a particularly frigid morning when she slid out from under the bedcovers and padded over to the window to look out. She thought about her state of undress, but her silk robe was back in Vancouver, and besides, there were no high buildings across from the Anchorage Hilton.

April pulled the curtains back to an otherwise exhibitionistic extent and folded her arms beneath her breasts as she watched a flight of four Air Force F-15s landing at Elmendorf one by one. She waited until all four had crossed the threshold and disappeared onto the runway before heading for the bathroom and inserting herself into the comfortable cocoon of hot water and white noise, letting the spray block out all but her thoughts.

Long, hot, luxurious showers had always been her best thinking time, something her brothers had never understood — especially when they had to wait endlessly for their little sister to release the bathroom.

But the never-ending supply of hot water in a major hotel was a wonderful luxury, and she’d taken advantage of such opportunities all her life — so much so, Gracie was fond of saying, that her name had become a permanent feature on the environmentalist hit list of international water wasters.

April closed her eyes and tried to remember what it was about the conversation with her mother the night before that was bothering her so. She’d left the hospital around seven and checked into the hotel, then had gone downstairs for a quick sandwich. But her mother was already ringing her room phone by the time she returned. Rachel Rosen needed to go over everything in great detail once more, and it had been therapeutic for both mother and daughter.

Something, however, had been bothering April ever since.

Okay… Dad said the prop threw a blade and everything started shaking wildly.

She let her mind replay her parents’ narratives.

Mom said Dad’s description of the prop blade must be right because there was this incredible noise, just as he said.

She turned around, letting the cascade of water inundate her face, standing in thought a few more minutes, melding her memory of the Albatross with their description of the moment.

April’s eyes fluttered open as an alternate possibility popped into her head, a slightly bizarre thought that propelled her out of the shower and into a bath towel. She glanced at her watch, calculating the distance to the airport and wondering if there was enough time for a critical errand before her brother arrived.

April wheeled the rental car into the entrance of the FAA facility and stopped at the guard shack, ready to show her driver’s and pilot’s licenses. As a pilot, it had taken little more than a phoned request and a quick background check to secure the permission needed to visit the windowless radar rooms of the center. Pilots were always welcome, they told her.

April left her car and walked to the entrance, where the man she’d talked to was waiting with an outstretched hand.

“Ms. Rosen? Jay Simpson.”

“Yes. Thanks so much for arranging this at the last minute.”

“My pleasure,” he said, his eyes appraising her in a way that validated his words. “You said you wanted to sit and watch a sector for a little while, right?”

She nodded. “That’s what I didn’t get to do at the Seattle ARTCC.”

“The one in Everett?” he asked, obviously testing her.

“It’s actually located in Auburn,” she said, smiling at his pleased reaction.

Simpson handed her a clip-on security badge and led the way through a series of heavy doors into the subdued light of the main control room. The room was lined with glowing computer-generated screens tracking virtually all airborne traffic over the state of Alaska.

“You already know the basics about our airspace?” he asked.

April nodded with a smile. “I know you work traffic from south of Ketchikan all the way to above seventy degrees north, Kotzebue and Nome and the Bering Strait on the west, and Canadian airspace on the eastern border.”

“You got it,” he said, handing her a small brochure. “That’ll give you the statistics if you ever need them.” They moved up quietly behind one of the control positions and waited until the male controller finished handing off a Russian Aeroflot passenger jet to an adjacent sector. Simpson tapped the controller’s shoulder and the man turned and rose from his chair with a smile as Simpson handed April a headset and plugged it in.

“I’m Rusty Bach, Miss Rosen,” the controller said.

“April, please. Are you any relation to the author? Richard Bach?”

“I wish, but no.”

She could see no evidence of a ring on his left hand, which, she figured, partially explained his enthusiastic reception of her visit.

“Have a seat, April.”

She let him guide her through the intricacies of the sector of airspace he was working, quietly pleased it covered the Valdez area and the sea lanes to the south. A steady procession of Alaska, Delta, and American Airlines flights, along with foreign airliners, Air Force jets, and private and corporate flights were all moving in various directions across the screen, tagged by tiny “data blocks” giving information on altitude, speed, and heading.

April noticed another controller quietly plugging into the same position to watch over their shoulder. Safety backup, she figured, and probably a standard procedure with a visitor present.

“How low can an aircraft still be tracked by your radar out here?” April asked. “Let’s say… here.”

“Well, you’re pointing to the area over the water east of Whittier,” the controller replied. “We can track targets pretty well down to eight hundred feet over the water out there. Sometimes less.”

“But if they’re very low, such as a hundred feet or so…”

“Then we can’t give them flight-following services, you know, keep them clear of other traffic, because we can’t see them. They become stealth aircraft. Maybe we’ll get an occasional transponder hit, but that’s all.”

They talked between radio calls, and she let the conversation drift to other areas before asking one of the key questions that had sparked the visit.

“Rusty, I understand you record virtually everything these scopes see, and in the case of an accident, you can reconstruct what was showing at the time. Right?”

He smiled. “That’s a bit oversimplified, but it’s essentially correct. If it formed a target on this screen, it’ll be on the tapes, digitally. Why do you ask?”

She smiled her most alluring smile and felt an instant, resonant response. “I’ve flown out there in a seaplane before, really low,” April said, “and I wasn’t able to reach you guys to even ask for flight following. I remember wondering if you could see me, or if the radar tapes were at least watching me.”

He shook his head, doubly eager to impress her now. “I sure wish we could. But we can’t. Now… there are a lot of military radar sites around the state, and there’s the Coast Guard’s vessel-traffic radar in Valdez, which can see you down to the water. But we can’t use those signals.”

“Yes, but about the tapes you do have; you keep those for months, right?”

He raised a finger, his eyes on a flight approaching the edge of his sector. “Alaska Three Twelve, descend now and maintain one-one thousand. Anchorage altimeter three-zero-two-two.”

The voice of the commercial pilot boomed through her headset and she reached up to turn down the volume. “Roger, Anchorage, Alaska Three Hundred and Twelve out of flight level three-three-zero this time for one-one thousand. Beautiful day out here south of Anchorage, Center.”

“Thanks!” Rusty replied, laughing. “I really needed that, stuck as I am in a windowless room.”

“Sorry,” the pilot responded. “If you like, we could describe it to you.”

More laughter.

“Negative, Alaska Three Twelve,” Rusty was saying, “but you can tell the next guy. Contact the Anchorage Center now on one twenty-two point six.”

The pilot repeated the frequency change as Rusty turned back to April, trying hard to keep his eyes above her neckline. She glanced at her watch, feigning surprise as she got up to go, thanking him profusely.

But Rusty gently caught her sleeve and pressed a business card in her hand.

“My number. Just in case, you know, you want someone to show you around,” he said. The hopeful look in his eyes was unmistakable, and she smiled and patted his shoulder.

“Thanks, Rusty. I’ll keep that in mind.”

As the comely female visitor departed, the controller who’d been shadowing Rusty Bach unplugged and moved to the far end of the room to a small workstation. He keyed in his password and called up a series of databases, paging back to the flight plans from two days before. The information he was searching for eluded him, however, and he collapsed the screen and pulled a phone to his ear instead, to punch in the number of the acting facility chief.

“Ralph? Ed here. Something odd. Maybe it’s nothing, but… thought you might need to know.” He described April’s questions in detail, and the area south of Valdez that had seemed to interest her.

“What’s your point, Ed?”

“Okay, you recall the search-and-rescue effort out there yesterday morning, just about the same place?”

“Yes. They found survivors of what I guess was an old Grumman that went down the night before.”

“Right. You know the name of the captain? I can’t find a flight plan.”

There was hesitation on the other end. “No… not offhand. You think her visit was connected?”

Ed snorted and shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know. I just get curious when someone starts asking how long we keep tapes, can we see to the waterline, and that sort of thing. Kind of what a smuggler would ask, you know?”

“Yeah… or a seaplane pilot.”

“Could be.”

“Forget it, Ed.”

“Okay.”

In an office one floor away, the acting facility chief replaced the receiver for a moment and checked a phone number on a business card he’d stuffed in his pocket, then raised the receiver and punched in the number. He thought better of it then and hung up, recalling that all government phones were subject to monitoring. Instead, he pulled out his personal cell phone and entered the same number.