Skyhook

THIRTY ONE FRIDAY EVENING, DAY 5 ABOARD WIDGEON N8771B OVER THE GULF OF ALASKA, SOUTHEAST OF ANCHORAGE

Once again the terrain was rushing by mere feet beneath the thin metallic skin of the Widgeon’s fuselage. This time, however, a lethal mixture of ice and boulders replaced the meadow, their jagged surfaces clawing toward the small amphibian.

Scott McDermott was working to keep the aircraft just above stall speed, the engines straining at full power to keep up with the rising terrain as the ceiling above hung lower and lower toward the surface of the glacier. There had been nothing but murky gray ahead of them, but a hint of something else began to emerge where the overcast melded with the ice.

April’s knowledge as a pilot was fully engaged as she monitored Scott’s physical flying of the airplane. Airspeed, altitude, power, rate of climb, and the constant movements of the controls were familiar and almost comforting as they somehow remained airborne, but the alien landscape below them was simply too bizarre to register. She expected impact at any moment, followed by a blinding and painful plunge into snow and ice, accompanied by the sound of ripping metal.

But for some reason, in defiance of logic, it wasn’t happening. They were still aloft, still flying.

She thought several times of grabbing the controls and taking over, but they were committed. It was too late to turn back. There was no room to turn the aircraft around and no place to land safely. The only choice was continued flight over the vast upslope of a massive valley glacier to an uncertain destination.

“There!” Scott said in more of a shout than a statement.

April peered ahead, seeing nothing new.

“What?” she managed, her voice little more than a high-pitched squeak. She quickly cleared her throat and tried it again. “What do you see?”

“What I’ve been aiming for. Right where I figured. Stand by…”

There was something ahead now. She could almost make it out. It was a horizon line of some sort. Not well defined, but definitely a darker line between sky and ice than an illusion would be. They were still airborne, and Scott was actually throttling back now as the ice field below them flattened.

“There’s a lake up there,” Scott said, nodding in the direction of the nose.

The line ahead was coalescing steadily, and it became a small ridge now with a hanging mountain lake beyond, the surface of the water just a shade darker than the gray clouds almost enfolding their wings. April knew there had to be sheer rock walls of the mountain on the far side, but she couldn’t make them out. The ridge bordering the lake’s downsloped shoreline was drawing closer by the second, the lake beyond anything but a welcoming sight. It was a small body of water filled with huge chunks of floating ice, each of them jagged white ships afloat in a sea of milky blue-green water.

“You’re not planning…” she began, noticing in her peripheral vision that he was already nodding. She stole just a quick glance at him, as if her looking away would destabilize their flight path.

The sight of Scott McDermott grinning maniacally profoundly scared her.

“Stand by, April!”

“Those are icebergs!”

“Yep.”

“We can’t land in that! There’s no room!”

He chopped the power to idle just as they topped the ridge, shoving the yoke forward to drop the Widgeon toward the surface, then throttled up and flared as he walked the rudder to the right, clearing the largest ice floe and looking for enough clear water to allow a landing.

There were huge icebergs everywhere.

“Damn,” he said. “More than I figured for this time of year.”

She felt the Widgeon respond again as he shoved in more power and slipped safely over the back of an iceberg as big as a two-story house, then banked sharply left, right around another equally huge one, holding the fragile amphibian five to six feet above the icy surface at sixty knots.

Another large line of ice floes was just ahead, coming fast, and he popped up a few feet to see over the top. With the opposite end of the glacial lake approaching less than a quarter of a mile away and no room to turn around, Scott chopped the power once again and pushed the Widgeon over the top of another large chunk of ice, dropping the hull into the lake. He yanked back on the yoke, creating an impressive flare of water on both sides as the aircraft decelerated toward another large iceberg that sat just ahead and much too close.

April could see the angular facets of the iceberg in great detail now as it loomed in front of them. She could see the needle of the airspeed indicator still hovering above fifty miles per hour. There were no anchors to throw out or brakes to push, only the suction of the water as the aeronautical hull of the Widgeon slowly sank into the water and became hydrodynamic, killing the forward speed. It wasn’t happening fast enough.

We’re going to hit, April thought, the realization merely a fact to be stated. She leaned forward instinctively and buried her head on her knees, bringing her arms around her head, aware of a vague thought that maybe they would be slow enough to survive an inevitable impact with the ice wall ahead.

Time dilation took over, the feeling of time slowing down in the midst of a crisis reaching new heights. The seconds ticked by with agonizing sloth as she waited for impact, tensing her body, listening to the diminishing sound of the water pounding on the hull until it, too, had subsided.

A sudden quiet replaced the cacophonous sounds of seconds before, and still she waited as the Widgeon’s forward speed through the ice-laden lake all but exhausted itself, the kinetic energy ending with an anticlimactic thunk and a slight shudder as the nose bumped gently, harmlessly, into the ice.

April heard Scott exhale. A nervous burst of laughter followed, causing her to unfold quickly from her brace position and take stock of the reality that they’d survived.

“Wow!” he exclaimed.

“Wow, what?” she managed.

“I wasn’t sure we were going to stop in time. Whew!”

April looked at the twenty-five-foot-high iceberg soaring above their nose, words failing her for a few seconds.

“You okay?” Scott asked.

She turned to him, emotionally exhausted, and weakly flailed her right hand in the general direction of the iceberg. “Other than the fact that I think both the Air Force and you were just trying to kill me, yeah. Other than the fact that we’re sitting God knows where in the middle of an icy lake in which no sane pilot would have tried to land, and from which we won’t be able to take off. Yeah. Sure, Scott. I’m fine.”

“Good.” He grinned. “Quite a show, huh?”

She looked around again, out the windscreen and the windows on each side. The overcast above them was darkening.

“Scott, we’ll never get your airplane out of here, and if you haven’t noticed, it’s already nightfall.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re stuck! I mean, what do we do? It’s cold out there!”

He was nodding, a more appropriate look of seriousness crossing his face as he looked around. “Yeah, takeoff will be a challenge.”

“A challenge? How…? Where…?”

He was grinning again, and the expression fed her growing anger.

“Damn you! How are we going to get out of here? Huh? It’s nightfall, there are armed fighters trying to shoot us down, my family will think I’ve been killed, and…”

Scott reached out and tried to put a hand on her shoulder but she shrugged it off.

“Don’t touch me!”

He withdrew his hand. “Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m serious, McDermott. What do you propose we do to survive, let alone get back? I was out here trying to help my dad, not give him a heart attack when he hears I’m missing.”

“April, calm down.”

“Calm down? I’m very calm. Considering what you just put us through, I’m incredibly, awesomely calm.”

“Then listen to me, okay?”

“Do I have a frigging choice?”

“Not really.”

She folded her arms, trying to retain some professional control. She was the client, after all. And for all his on-again, off-again help, she had apparently retained a maniac. “Go ahead.”

“I had a good reason for not complying with that fighter pilot’s orders, April.”

“I’d love to hear it,” she said, shaking her head.

“Whatever’s going on out here is very clearly a military project, and classified. Probably top secret classified.”

“So?”

“I’ve already told you I think whatever they’re doing is tied in to what happened to your dad. Remember?”

She nodded.

“Okay. If I had followed them back to Elmendorf like a good little pilot, not only would I be out of the ball game and unable to help you get a camera back on your old man’s plane, you’d be out of the game as well. Hell, they might even lock us both up for awhile.”

“You’re trying to tell me you almost got us killed to protect me?”

“And your mission, yes.”

She turned to him, nursing the scowl on her face. “You know, you’re so full of it, McDermott. You must think I’m a brainless bimbo.”

“No, I don’t think you’re brainless,” he said, almost under his breath.

“Oh. Just a bimbo, huh?”

“No, no, no! I misspoke. I don’t think you’re either a bimbo or brainless.”

“Right.”

“A real babe, perhaps,” he said with a smile.

April shot him a scathing look. “Enough of that!”

Both palms went in the air. “Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”

She leveled an index finger at him, sighting along it as if it were a gun. “No, the real reason you ran from those fighters up there is very simple. No one tells Scott McDermott what to do. Right?”

“Now, wait…”

“Am I right?”

He sighed. “Okay, maybe a little of that is true, but, honestly—”

“Honestly? I’m not sure you know the meaning of that word.”

“Hey. Let me finish, okay?”

She paused, staring him down, before responding. “Go ahead.”

“The truth is, I was very irritated at their trying to ensnare me illicitly when I’d been surgically careful to stay out of their restricted area, and… just as I said… I knew if they’d grounded us, you’d never get the wreck videotaped. Besides, tonight told us a lot.”

“Oh? Such as?”

“April, that aircraft that almost hit us was coming out of their restricted area.”

“Were the fighters chasing us by mistake, then? You’re saying they should have been chasing the jet?”

He was shaking his head as her eyes flared in sudden understanding and her arms came unfolded. “Oh my God! You’re saying that jet was coming out of the restricted area because it was part of whatever they’re doing!”

“Exactly. He came out at an angle, but that’s where he came from.”

April sat back heavily. “And the same restricted zone was created on Monday night when my folks were there, but then it didn’t extend to the surface.”

He was nodding more forcefully now. “Right. So now they reinstitute the same restricted area with one significant change. Now it extends all the way down to the surface. Why the change?”

“Because,” she finished the thought, “the change was an incorporation of a lesson they learned Monday night.”

“Yes! Dammit, yes! That’s what I was trying to tell you before, April. Something happened to them Monday night that prompted them to restrict the airspace all the way to the water tonight, and that something was your old man.”

“I hate that reference.”

“Okay, your dad.”

She nodded, her eyes on the rapidly darkening field of icebergs floating around them, her ears picking up the gentle sounds of the water lapping at the Widgeon’s hull. “So, do you think the same aircraft or something like it came streaking out of the blue Monday the same way and hit my dad’s Albatross?”

He shrugged. “I wish I knew. I do know they’re testing an aircraft at low altitude and high speed, as we saw. Maybe that same aircraft we saw traded paint with your dad.”

“But how, Scott? He lost a prop, and that’s most likely the cause of the right engine rotating off its mount and the prop blades chopping into the right wing.”

“Some of that damage could have been from a collision,” he said.

April was nibbling her lower lip in thought. “Yes… or maybe… one small spot on the jet contacted one single prop blade, causing it to fail.”

“Did your father report another aircraft in the area?”

She was shaking her head no, then stopped. “Wait a minute. I seem to recall Dad mentioning some sort of rushing or whooshing noise just as the prop broke.”

The sound of Scott snapping his fingers caused her to jump slightly.

“That’s it, April! He heard a jet go by as one of the blades hit it and broke off!”

She thought for a second. “Could be.”

“No, that has to be it. Whoever’s doing these tests — Air Force, Navy, Army — they had to know they clipped a civilian aircraft. April, you want to know what all this is about? Why they had the Coast Guard jump us and take the tape? Why the FAA seems to be on a vendetta against your old… your father? Because they’re covering up a midair collision.”

“Why would they try to cover it up?”

“Because they were doing a high-speed, low-altitude test ran of some sort without making sure the restricted area was completely empty of all aircraft at all altitudes. They screwed up and failed to extend the prohibited area all the way to the surface.”

“You think the FAA’s in on this, too?”

“Oh, yeah. Doesn’t it make sense, April? If our government can prevent any photos of the wreckage, or any other examination of it, then they won’t have to admit to making a big mistake.”

“A government cover-up is hard to pull off, Scott. That sounds like a conspiracy theory.”

“No, look. What’s the first thing frightened people try to do when they’ve made a huge mistake that no one’s caught as yet? They cover it up. They try to pretend it didn’t happen. Make it go away. Sometimes repairing a problem and then pretending there never was any damage to begin with is part of the syndrome, but the tendency is always to pretend it didn’t exist.”

“This is so hard to believe,” she said.

“Yes, but trust me. We’re just as good at it in the military as the civilian world.”

She sat in thought for a few seconds. “If your theory is right, Scott, they won’t just stop with preventing me from taking pictures or video. They’ll come in there and raise the wreckage themselves and steal it.”

“You could be right.”

“Which they could be doing right now while we float around on some nameless lake,” she added, turning to him. “Seriously. How do we get out of here? And when?”

Scott was smiling and nodding as he looked around, then met her eyes. “We’re okay until morning. I’ve got sleeping bags in the back, emergency food, a small stove that’s carbon monoxide — safe to keep us warm, coffee, and even a satellite phone to let your parents know you’re okay.”

“We… don’t need to call for help?”

“Last thing we need to do. That would bring the Navy and Air Force and whoever else is involved right down on our heads. No. Just pray the cloud cover remains until morning.”

“And then what? We swim out?”

“No, we fly out.”

“Using what for a runway? There are enough icebergs floating around in this lake to sink an aircraft carrier!”

“We’ll take off between the icebergs.”

“Between the… How?”

He had a finger in the air. “Trust me.”

April sighed and shook her head. “I was truly afraid you were going to say that.”