Skyhook

TWENTY ONE THURSDAY, DAY 4 ANCHORAGE, ALASKA EARLY AFTERNOON

The lobby of the Regal Alaskan Hotel had been designed to resemble the interior of a rough-hewn national-park lodge, but the hotel itself was anything but remote. The structure occupied the south end of Anchorage’s Lake Spenard, which each summer claimed the title of the busiest seaplane base in the world.

April alighted from the hotel’s airport shuttle van and unzipped her white parka as she entered the lobby, hardly noticing the array of mounted game trophies on the walls. Deer, elk, moose, and a selection of smaller animals were everywhere, but only the fire burning in the huge river-rock fireplace caught her attention.

She’d tried to fight off depression all the way from Seattle, but the dark bow wave of reality had been slowly winning. Arlie Rosen had not fallen off the wagon. Her mother would have known. She shoved the other disturbing aspects of Rachel’s responses to the back of her mind and tried to close them away.

The phone call she’d made to her mother in flight hadn’t helped.

“He’s taking this very hard, April.”

“Try to get him to go to a counselor, Mom.”

“I am trying. And he’s refusing. He says he’ll handle it, but…” April could hear her sigh deeply on the other end. “I’ve never seen your father this despondent.” The worrisome report had made the short drive to the hotel a blur of thoughts and renewed determination to extricate her father from the FAA-imposed purgatory consuming him, and her. But salvation would only truly come from raising the wreckage of the old warbird. If every one of those Anchorage-purchased liquor bottles could be found still stowed and unopened, the FAA’s case would fall apart.

Okay, where’s my pilot?

April surveyed the lobby, noting the huge, stuffed eight-foot-tall Alaskan brown bear in a glass case by the front desk. The hapless former bear had been posed by a taxidermist in all its grizzly ferocity, and even though it was long since deceased, April realized she was automatically giving it a very wide berth.

She walked toward the fireplace, spotting no one even remotely fitting the description of a bush pilot. She sat in one of the big chairs adjacent to the roaring fire and reread the note from Gracie.

The aroma of something more pungent than wood smoke was assaulting her nose. She recognized it as cigar smoke and turned to track it to the source, a long, Churchill-size stogie a man on the far end of the couch had just fired up. She wrinkled her nose in disapproval, but either he wasn’t looking or was pretending not to notice.

That figures, she thought. He had unkempt sandy hair and an abbreviated handlebar mustache, as well as a weathered brown leather jacket and a dirty, blue, oil-stained parka he’d draped boorishly over an adjacent chair. Your basic bush-class Alaskan, she concluded, rejecting the idea that he was merely some homeless male who’d wandered past hotel security. The ring on his right middle finger and the expensive boots he was wearing leavened the overall impression somewhat.

But to her mind, the cigar was a fatal flaw.

Why on earth would a woman want to get intimate with someone like him? she mused.

April cautioned herself that, objectionable or not, he’d seated himself around the fireplace first. But he’s stinking up the whole place with that thing.

“Excuse me,” April said, giving in to her irritation.

“Yes?” the man answered without looking at her.

“Would you mind not smoking that in here, please?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, taking an even deeper drag on the cigar and blowing the smoke out slowly. “As a matter of fact, I would mind not smoking this in here.” He grinned at her. He was in his thirties, she figured, and obviously an arrogant maverick. “After all, this is the smoking section,” he said. “That’s why they have ashtrays here.”

April tried to suppress her surprise. “They allow smoking here?”

“Yes, ma’am. This is Alaska. We aren’t very po-litically cor-rect up here,” he said, emphasizing the first syllables. He grinned at her, flashing surprisingly perfect teeth as he pulled on the cigar once more.

April rolled her eyes and stood up, moving away from the fireplace seating as she punched the number Gracie had provided into her cell phone.

“Puffin Flying Service,” a male voice answered on the second ring.

“This is April Rosen. I believe a Miss Gracie O’Brien arranged a charter from Anchorage to Valdez for me today?”

“That’s right, Miss Rosen. It’s all ready for you.”

“Yeah, well, I was told the pilot would meet me in the lobby of the Regal Alaskan, and I have yet to find him.”

“I know for a fact he’s there,” the man said, his voice echoing slightly, which was puzzling. She checked the volume of the cell phone’s earpiece, but it seemed normal.

“Have you talked to him? Where exactly is he?”

“Well, in a way I’ve talked to him, because he is me, and I know I’m here waiting for you. I’m your pilot.”

“You’re here?”

“Yes. In the lobby.”

April scanned the front desk and the entrance to the bar as well as the staircase without success.

“But where? I don’t see you.”

“Right this second I’m watching a very attractive lady who hates cigars talk on her cell phone.”

This time the echo of his voice in her free ear was too loud to ignore, and April turned toward the fireplace. The man with the handlebar mustache was grinning as he waved his cigar at her and nodded toward his cell phone.

Oh, great! she thought, punching off the call. She waited for him to approach, taking his offered hand reluctantly as she tried to ignore the firm grip and slightly calloused feel of his palm.

“Do you always treat your clients this rudely?” she asked.

He chuckled. “Just having a little fun. April, is it?”

“Miss Rosen will do fine,” she replied, a frosty edge in her voice.

“All right. Miss Rosen, then,” he said evenly.

“I’m not flying with an armed incendiary device. Understood?” she said, pointing to the cigar.

“It’s actually a Cuesta-Rey number ninety-five, but if you insist…”

“And I do.”

“Then I’ll be glad to put it out of your misery.” He pulled a black tube from his pocket and carefully inserted the still-burning cigar before screwing the lid in place.

“What are you doing?” April yelped. “That thing’s still on fire.”

“This is a new toy. It keeps a burning cigar nice and fresh for later,” he said, grinning at her, “although I’m sure you think a fresh cigar is an oxymoron.”

“Where’s your aircraft, Mr. McDermott?”

“Captain McDermott, if you please,” he said with mock seriousness. “Or, you can call me Scott. Your choice.”

“Very well, Captain. Where’s your plane?”

“Off the back deck of the bar, Miss Rosen.” He offered his arm. “May I escort you?”

“You may not. Just lead the way.”

“You have baggage?”

Just you, she thought, barely stifling a strong urge to voice the comeback that popped into her head. Gracie was obviously a bad influence. She nodded instead and pointed to a shoulder bag and a wheeled overnight bag, which he picked up after putting on his parka. He motioned her out through the Fancy Moose bar onto the terrace and the concrete walkway that was slick with Canada goose droppings all the way down to the water.

The small, six-seat 1952 Grumman Widgeon amphibian Gracie had chartered was tied up to the hotel’s tiny dock. Two small engines sat atop the wing, close into the fuselage, making the diminutive flying boat almost an abbreviated version of her father’s Albatross.

McDermott opened the side door along the left flank and loaded the bags before stepping back to let her maneuver herself inside and up between the seats into the right seat of the cockpit. He followed, securing the door and handing her a headset.

“Now, Miss Rosen, this aircraft can take off and land on water, and—”

She had her right hand up to stop him. “I’m a licensed private pilot with an instrument rating. And, I’ve got a floatplane ticket. So please don’t try to snow me.”

McDermott looked hurt. “What makes you think I’d do such a thing?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s just call it instinct.”

She saw him studying her eyes for a few seconds before chuckling and turning his attention to pulling an ancient, yellowed checklist from a sidewall pocket. He plopped it in her lap and pointed to it.

“If you’re a licensed pilot, you’re working crew, and in this case, you’re my copilot, whether you’re paying the bill or not.”

“Okay.”

“You read the checklist, follow my instructions, and speak up the instant there’s anything you think I should know.”

“Like, how to treat a woman and a client?”

“Well, what I had more in mind was a dramatic reading of the before-starting-engines checklist.” He arched his eyebrows in an attempt to look innocent, and the effect was too comical to ignore. In spite of herself, April started to chuckle. She tore her eyes away from him and looked at the checklist, clearing her throat and adjusting the microphone before speaking. “Very well. In the beginning, ’twas a dark and stormy night. Master switch?”

“Now, that’s dramatic,” McDermott said, grinning. “And my line is, ‘On.’”

“Preflight?”

“Complete.”

“Control locks?” April continued to the end of the checklist items and watched as he cranked both engines.

The takeoff from the glassy surface of the lake was quick, the Widgeon lifting off smoothly at eighty miles per hour and pitching up rather dramatically as McDermott banked to the east and began climbing, topping the Chugach Range at ten thousand before setting a course directly for Valdez. The engine noise was deafening, and April spent the time concentrating on the beauty of the passing terrain, aware that McDermott was sneaking long looks at her, running his eyes along her body when he thought she wasn’t looking.

Male chauvinist porker, she concluded, forcing her thoughts back to the challenge of raising her father’s aircraft.

The focus was the propeller on the Albatross’s right engine. She hoped, when they pulled it to the surface, only two of the three propeller blades would still be in place, and the third would be either partially or completely missing. The conclusions would then be obvious and ruinous to the FAA’s case. A thrown blade in flight would horribly unbalance an engine, creating an unbearable vibration sufficient to tear the engine off the wing, or lead to the loss of the aircraft.

Nearly thirty minutes had passed when April felt the engine power being reduced. She glanced over to see McDermott’s hand on the throttles and gave him a quizzical look. He pointed to the right as he banked the Widgeon in the direction of a break in a thin deck of cumulus clouds and descended through them. “Valdez is just below,” he said.

They came through the bottom of the cloud deck and a spectacular scene of green and gray mountains capped by continuous glaciers emerged all around them. April felt herself gasp involuntarily. The deep blue of the oceanic inlet from Prince William Sound east into Valdez was spread beneath them, and she realized McDermott’s hand was reaching past her chin, his finger pointing at something on the right as he banked the amphibian.

“Over there is the tanker terminal. Opposite side of the bay from the town.”

“That’s the south side?” April asked.

He nodded. “That’s where the Exxon Valdez loaded up before sailing into history.”

“I see.”

“And on the far end, ahead of us, you see those washed-out structures? That’s the original town of Valdez, which stretched and dropped below sea level in the 1964 Alaskan earthquake.”

“So, where’s the town now?”

“Back to the left. They rebuilt the whole thing.”

McDermott throttled back and extended the flaps as he studied the water condition below and looked for an indication of wind. He satisfied himself it was blowing from the west and turned the Widgeon back in that direction as he called for the “descent” and “before landing” checklists.

April finished the checklist sheet and stuffed it in the side pocket as they descended rapidly toward the water with the engines back to idle. McDermott set up the last portion of his glide and brought the power back in, touching down smoothly in the lee of the town dock on the back of a lazily rolling wave.

“I’ve watched my dad do the same thing,” April said.

Scott McDermott was nodding as he glanced in her direction. “Incredible terrain, right?”

The prickly meeting in Anchorage momentarily forgotten, she responded, “Absolutely! Nice landing, too.”

“Thanks,” he said, bringing the power back in to stay on the step as he high-speed-taxied through the calm waters toward the dock.

At the dock, a thin, older man in an oil-stained, olive-drab army parka was waiting for them, two tie-down lines in his weathered hands. Scott McDermott asked April to get out of the seat so he could duck under the copilot’s side of the dash panel and through a tiny passageway to pop out of the forward hatch on the nose in time to catch the lines. They secured the aircraft and he turned to help April out of the cabin into the icy chill of a stiff wind.

“You must be Mr. Dobler,” April said to the man on the dock.

The man grinned, extending his hand, his voice warm and gravelly. “Well, if I must be. Hi, I’m Jim.”

“And I’m April. And this is…” she started to say, arching a thumb in McDermott’s direction as he leaped to the dock from the nose of the Widgeon.

Jim Dobler interrupted her. “I know this scruffy young seadog all too well, April,” he said, taking McDermott’s hand and pumping it as he slapped his shoulder with his other hand. “Lieutenant Commander McDermott. As skipper of this dock, I grant you permission to come aboard… even though you failed to ask.”

“Lieutenant commander?” April repeated, looking at Scott McDermott for the slightest confirmation that he could have ever been in a military unit.

“You didn’t know you were flying with a highly decorated Navy carrier pilot, April?” Jim asked.

Several Gracie-class replies flitted across her mind, but she was too off balance and outnumbered to use them.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Mustache fooled you, huh?” Scott McDermott said with a laugh.

“Among other things,” April replied, her hands involuntarily on her hips. She forced herself to cross her arms and took a deep breath. “Where can we talk?”

Dobler led them to a small, insulated office on one side of the dock, dominated by a potbellied stove that was keeping the interior all but oppressively warm while perfuming the air with little wisps of wood smoke. He shucked his coat and McDermott followed suit, noticing April’s hesitation as she held her white parka and looked for a non-greasy place to put it.

“Here,” the pilot said, nodding to a peg in the far corner. “That one’s clean.”

She thanked him and relinquished the coat, accepting a cup of coffee as they pulled up chairs around the stove. “Cold out there,” she said, sampling the slightly oily smell of the shack’s interior.

“This is a heat wave compared to the dead of winter,” Jim chuckled, picking up a notepad. “Now, all I know so far, April, is that you need an old Albatross raised from the bottom about sixty miles south of here.”

She pulled out her tiny laptop and read off the last geographic coordinates to be transmitted by N34DD, and then ran through the facts of the crash, noting with alarm the number of times Jim Dobler glanced at Scott McDermott with a worried expression.

“What?” April said during one such aside.

“Sorry?” Jim asked, apparently surprised she’d noticed.

“You two keep exchanging mission-impossible glances.”

Scott McDermott was looking away and trying not to laugh as Jim simply looked caught.

“Well, that’s not exactly…”

McDermott turned suddenly and cut him off, talking through a broad grin. “He’s not reacting to this job, Miss Rosen, but to one we tried together a number of years ago.”

“Oh. What was that?” she asked.

Both Jim Dobler and Scott McDermott exploded in laughter, Jim’s slide into uncontrollable mirth beginning with a sound somewhat like the venting of an overstoked steam engine.

“Okay, guys, this is getting intimidating,” April said, fighting the urge to laugh at their laughter. McDermott was doubled over and Jim had tipped his chair back on two legs, his eyes closed, as his laugh accelerated into a high giggle.

“Okay!” Scott said, his hand up in a stop gesture. “All right! We’ve got to get serious here.”

Jim closed his mouth and swallowed the remaining yaks, letting silence return between them for a second before uttering one additional word.

“Glub!” Jim said, sending both of them into more gales of uncontrollable laughter, this time joined by a puzzled April.

When they’d regained some semblance of self-control and were actively engaged in wiping away tears, April cleared her throat. “Any chance you two comedians are going to tell me what that was all about?”

Jim was nodding, but Scott spoke first.

“A small barge sank in the channel several years ago, just after I got off active duty, and this genius decided he needed a partner to claim it and salvage it, and I signed on to help him find the wreck and position his barge and raise the thing. I flew him out there. We mapped the area, brought his barge out and hooked on—”

“Then proceeded to sink my barge with its own crane,” Jim added. “Turns out we were hooked onto the wrong wreck. We just cranked that sucker right under.”

Scott was giggling again. “Yeah. Davey Jones Dobler here hooked the wreck of a thousand-ton freighter that sank thirty years ago and tried to hoist it with a six-ton crane.”

She was shaking her head. “And this is a confidence builder?”

“We’ve learned our lesson, April,” Jim said.

“Okay, now how soon can we get out there and start looking for my father’s airplane?” she asked.

“Well, first we need to check on whether we need an environmental application, and—”

“A what?” April asked.

“Environmental application,” Jim replied. “There was fuel and oil aboard that airplane, right?”

“Yes, but…”

“Well, remember this is environmentalist alley, and I can’t even sneeze in the open without five permits.”

“How long will that take?” she asked, apprehension creeping into her tone.

Jim Dobler sighed. “It just depends on where the airplane came to rest. If it’s inside protected waters, it could be anywhere from a few weeks to never, depending on what the state and the federal government decide to do.”

“I can’t wait that long!” She explained the urgency, and the fact that Arlie Rosen was losing large sums of money every day.

“Miss Rosen,” Scott said, “around here, compliance with environmental rules is very important to your economic health.”

Jim was nodding. “If I pull your aircraft up without a permit, April, and it spills a drop of anything but Perrier, the Environmental Attack Agency will harpoon me, and the media will accuse me of killing birds and polar bears and God knows what.”

“That’s crazy! The airplane’s down there leaking as we speak.”

“I know it, but we don’t write the rules. Touch a tree around here and they chase you down with court orders and Uzis.”

“Miss Rosen,” Scott McDermott began, but she cut him off and turned to look him in the eye.

“It’s all right. You can kill the ‘Miss Rosen’ thing now and call me April. I was just ticked at your attitude back in Anchorage.”

“Yeah?” Scott replied, turning to grin at Jim. “She doesn’t like my attitude.”

“Hell, Scott, no woman this side of Atsugi has liked your attitude since you escaped from the Navy,” Jim said.

“Oh, that cuts, Mr. Dobler, sir!” He turned back to April. “And just for the record, Miss Rosen — April — it so happens there was nothing wrong with my attitude in Anchorage.”

“The heck there wasn’t!” she snapped, looking at him incredulously.

“The heck there was!” he countered. “I wasn’t the sweet young thang that came flouncing in the door of an Alaskan hotel in high heels and a high-fallutin’ coat from needless markup, telling the scruffy locals not to smoke in a smoking area.”

“I never saw the sign. And the coat is from Nordstrom’s, thank you.”

“Okay, children,” Jim interjected. “Maybe we should get back to the subject.”

Scott reached over and offered the same large hand she’d shaken so reluctantly in Anchorage, and April took it, this time with more enthusiasm.

“Look,” Scott said, “I do apologize for being a bloody boor.”

“Accepted.”

He held her hand for a second and cocked his head. “You know, you’re, like, totally welcome to counter the ‘boor’ part at any time.”

“I’ll get back to you on that,” she said.

He nodded as she let his hand go and turned back to Jim. “You said if the airplane came down outside of some boundary, the rules don’t apply?”

“Well, maybe. These coordinates may be outside of restricted waters, and, if so, permits probably won’t be needed.”

“Can’t we go try to find the wreckage at least? I understand you have side-scanning sonar to help locate it.”

Jim nodded. “A crude form, yes.”

“And we’ve still got daylight. Can’t we start?”

Jim shook his head. “Well, see, I’ve got a problem. The engine’s down on my tug. They’re working on it, but it won’t be ready until tomorrow. And I only make fifteen knots at full throttle, which means it’ll take at least four hours to get there.”

“April,” Scott McDermott interjected. “Tell me exactly what you’re trying to accomplish.”

“What do you mean? I’m trying to raise my dad’s plane.”

“Time is obviously critical, but what do you need to discover in that wreckage?”

“Oh. Right.” She explained the need to prove a propeller blade had broken away in flight. “And, there are certain items I need to recover from inside the airplane, if they’re still intact.” The image of shattered liquor bottles flashed through her mind. If even one wasn’t intact and sealed, Gracie had warned, the FAA would never let it go. She ignored a cold chill and tried to smile.

“Okay.” Scott turned to Dobler. “You’ve got underwater cameras, don’t you, Jim?”

“Sure. I’ve got your basic fish cam, your little cameras, your big cameras, and even your fancy steerable cameras for underwater hull inspections.”

“And they all operate on battery, or one hundred ten volts?”

“Yes. But—”

“And I know you’ve got one of those little Honda generators.”

Jim was nodding.

“Good. This can work. And there’s obviously a hatch on the nose of my plane. So why don’t we go out to those last known coordinates with the video gear and the generator, drop a camera over the side, and see what we can see. It’ll take all of thirty minutes to get there.”

“It’s open ocean, Scott,” Jim said, looking alarmed.

“Hey, I can handle it. I used to land impossibly large jets on a pitching carrier deck at night for a living. Compared to that, landing in open ocean in a Widgeon is a piece of cake.”

Dobler scratched his chin and nodded. “It’s not you I’m worried about.”

“You mean your stomach?”

Jim nodded as Scott looked at April and gestured toward the veteran mariner. “He can take twelve-foot seas in a dinghy without a problem but he gets seasick whenever my airplane is in open waters.”

“It moves funny,” Jim said.

“And he’s a pilot to boot,” Scott added.

“I guess I’ll be okay, Scott. I’ve got those wristbands.”

“I’ll keep it as smooth as a baby’s…” Scott paused, glancing at April, who rolled her eyes and shrugged.

“Oh, go ahead. I know you’re dying to.”

He flashed her a broad smile. “Baby’s behind! Thanks. That felt better.”

“I can just imagine,” she said.

“April, one thing,” Jim said. “Even with the right coordinates, the chances of finding the wreckage quickly are slim. We could be wasting our time. I’ll almost certainly need the side-scan sonar to locate it, and that’s mounted on my boat.”

“I understand,” she replied, “but I’d really appreciate it if we could at least try right now.”

Both men checked their watches as if on cue before Jim got to his feet with a loud grunt. “Aw, hell, why not,” he said, winking at April. “Nothing else going on.”

“You’ll be okay, Jim. I guarantee it.”

“Yeah,” he grumbled, as he headed out the door to assemble his gear. “Like I haven’t heard that before.”