Skyhook

FOUR TUESDAY MORNING, DAY 2 VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

April scooped up the receiver on the first ring and snapped off an urgent hello, instantly relieved to hear Gracie’s voice on the other end.

“Okay, the Coast Guard’s launching a search for your folks.”

“Thank God!” April Rosen sighed as she massaged her temple and sank onto the edge of her bed. “I couldn’t get their headquarters in Juneau to do anything, since the FAA claims Dad didn’t file a flight plan and no one’s heard a distress call.” She reached for a Kleenex as the tears escaped her self-control. “Where are you?”

“In my sensory deprivation chamber. My windowless baby-lawyer office.”

“How’d you get the Coast Guard to listen?”

There was a chuckle on the other end and April pictured Gracie O’Brien leaning back in her plush leather office chair. April had surprised her with the expensive chair when her best friend landed the coveted junior associate position with the mega law firm of Janssen and Pruzan.

“Well, I had a little help from one of the senior partners, Dick Walsh,” Gracie was explaining. “Dick put pressure on the right people in Washington, D.C., for me.”

“Wow. You work with someone that powerful?” April asked.

“You could say that. Until last year, Dick was the Secretary of Transportation, and they kind of own the Coast Guard. Now he plays golf and calls in favors.”

“However you did it, thank you. Oh. You did give them the coordinates of the last fix I got, right?”

“No, April Rosen, I told them to look for your folks somewhere in the North Pacific where the waves are blue and fish swim. Of course I gave them the coordinates. They’re launching both a C-130 and something called a Jayhawk chopper out of Kodiak, which is only two hundred miles away, so they’ll be all over the area in a couple of hours. It’s just a matter of a little waiting time now.”

“I’m pacing a hole in the floor up here.”

“April, I’m sure your mom and dad are okay. I just feel it After all, you said yourself that there’s been no distress call and no emergency locator beacons heard in the area, and you know those beacons are picked up by satellite almost immediately.”

“I know, but…”

“This is premature panic, Miss Icewater-In-Her-Veins Newly Minted Cruise Line Vice-President. Take a deep breath.”

“Seriously, I’m scared, Gracie,” April replied. “I’m sorry. I know I’m overreacting, but I love my folks and this is exactly why I paid for that GPS tracking system Dad didn’t want… so I could make sure they had help if anything happened.”

“The day’s clear up there. If your folks are floating around, they’ll find them.”

“Think so?”

“Yes, I think so. But I also think that when they’re found, they’ll be aboard the Albatross tied up to some obscure pier with a dead battery waiting for a passing boat and boinking their brains out in the meantime.”

“Gracie!”

“Well, your parents are pretty lusty. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know. They embarrass me.”

“That’s their mission as parents. Especially yours. I just hope I still feel that lusty at their age. Of course, it would be nice to be married to a male of the species by that time, too.”

The comforting, familiar banter trailed off for nearly half a minute until April broke the silence with a sigh. “Gracie?”

“Yeah?”

“What… do we do if the Coast Guard can’t find them?” she asked, the words constrained by the sudden lump in her throat. “What if… something terrible’s happened?”

“April, listen to yourself! Who was the wise young woman who recently advised a certain panicked, unemployed female law graduate to hang in there and keep applying? I seem to recall her telling me, and I quote, that the saddest people of all are those who refuse to take risks and pursue their dreams.”

“You were probably listening to some sappy New Age priestess on a twenty-five-watt talk show,” April replied, chuckling in spite of herself. “Was she selling crystals?”

“As I recall,” Gracie said, “this little girl had dark hair, big boobs, and answered to the name of April. And her parents were having a ball flying all over creation, scandalizing their uptight daughter and pursuing their dreams.”

“My parents are juvenile delinquents,” April said, laughing and crying at the same time. “And if I get them back safely, I’m going to kill both of them!”

“Okay, now you’re scaring me, April. You’re sounding like my parents. I think the phrase is ‘anal retentive.’ Yeah, that’s the ticket. You’re definitely anal retentive.”

“I am not.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And my boobs aren’t that big, either.”

“Right. Tell that to all the men who can never stop talking to your chest. I’ve had a raging inferiority complex since I was twelve years old because of your enormous boobs.”

“Cut it out, Gracie!”

“April, just hang tight. Seriously. I’ll call the second I know anything.”

“They’re going to call you?”

“No, they’re going to call the former Secretary of Transportation, who’ll call me the second the Coast Guard confirms that Captain Arlie and Rachel are just fine.”

“Gracie?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Say a prayer, okay?”

“Already have,” Gracie said quietly.

The pace of operations in the Coast Guard’s Kodiak Air Station command post had been at high pitch for the previous hour as two C-130 rescue aircraft searched the area south of Prince William Sound, steadily reporting their progress. With an HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter inbound to the search box at 140 knots, the two C-130s had divided up the standard search pattern and begun flying separate back-and-forth grids south of Valdez, the crews carefully searching the waters on both sides for any sign of a downed aircraft, oil slicks, or survivors. The first hour had ticked by with no results, leaving the officer in Juneau who had refused April Rosen’s request feeling somewhere between smug and relieved as he monitored the radio traffic and waited.

“Just a panicked woman with political clout,” he’d grumbled to another officer when the order had come from Washington, overruling him and ordering the search.

A report from one of the C-130s that two people had been spotted in the water in a small survival raft quickly changed the equation. With the Jayhawk minutes away and homing in on the C130’s coordinates for the rescue, the Juneau-bound lieutenant commander glued himself to the telephone link with Kodiak.

“The chopper has two survivors aboard, a male and a female, semi-responsive, both in exposure suits and both extremely hypothermic with extent of injuries unknown. We’re stabilizing and transporting to Anchorage Providence immediately.”

Gracie O’Brien thanked her senior partner profusely when he relayed the flash from Coast Guard headquarters and then dialed the Kodiak, Alaska, phone number he’d passed to her. She felt her heart pounding as she waited. Rachel and Arlie Rosen were family. She’d practically grown up in their home.

The duty officer answered and she fired a rapid string of questions at him, hurriedly taking down the vital information and confirming the names.

“What happened to their plane?”

“We don’t know. All we’re sure of is that they’re both semiconscious, they were found in a life raft and wearing exposure suits, and they had to be lifted out of the water in rescue baskets. But there’ve been no reports of aircraft wreckage or debris in the water.”

“You say they’re hypothermic? They’re both going to make it, aren’t they?”

“Well… I can’t give you a diagnosis, ma’am. There was some mention of possible back injury to the male.”

“Back injury? Was the word ‘paralysis’ used?”

“Well, I don’t know. There’s been a lot of radio conversation, ma’am. No one’s going to know anything until they get to the hospital.”

“But, you do think they’re stable enough to make it?”

There was a deadly silence on the other end of the line.

“Lieutenant, are you still there?”

“Ma’am, you’re kind of putting me in a corner here. I really can’t tell you anything more of substance.”

Gracie took a deep breath. “I see.”

“Those are cold waters out there, and if they were in a plane crash, that inevitably involves a lot of force and impact. Best just to say that we found them alive, and beyond that, I don’t know.”

She thanked him and disconnected, rolling the right words around in her head. She’d always been a terrible liar, and April could usually tell in a second when she was leaving something out or coloring reality. Gracie jabbed at the speed-dial button for April’s Vancouver condo and repeated the primary details as fast as she could when April answered.

“Oh my God!” April gasped. “Are they hurt? How bad?”

“They’re going to be okay, April, but they lost the plane and they’ve been in freezing waters for a couple of hours. They evidently had time to get into exposure suits and blow up a raft, so that’s something. The Coast Guard says they’re being flown directly to Providence Hospital and should be touching down any minute. April? You okay?”

“Yes,” a tiny voice replied.

“Okay, I’ll call your brothers. Have you talked to them?”

“Yes. I talked with Dean and left a message for Sam. Sam’s in Phoenix or somewhere.”

“I’ll call his cell phone. Are you dressed?”

“Huh?”

“Focus, April. Are you wearing anything but a stunned expression?”

“Ah, no. I mean… I’m not dressed.”

“Then put on some clothes, throw a toothbrush and your emergency face kit in a bag, catch the taxi I’m going to order, and head for Vancouver International. Call me from the cab as soon as the driver pulls away from your building.”

“Okay. Oh, Lord, Gracie! They crashed?”

“Your folks are going to need you there in Anchorage as soon as possible. I… can’t come immediately. I’m under the gun here.”

“That’s okay.”

“I’ll arrange a ticket and send the cab. Can you be downstairs in ten minutes?”

“Yes.”

“Hey, kiddo, they’ll be okay. Pull yourself together.”

“I’m together, Gracie. Really. Thank you. Let me ring off and get dressed.”

Gracie replaced the receiver and thought in silence for a few seconds, her mind constructing dark conclusions about the physical condition of Arlie and Rachel Rosen. Had he said paralysis, or had she?

Dear God, let them be whole and intact!

Gracie forced herself to yank up the receiver and start punching in numbers. She had to scramble a cab to pick up April and get her an immediate flight to Anchorage.

The past few hours of Arlie Rosen’s life had passed like a strange dream. There had been helicopters and cold, stinging ocean spray, and when he’d tried to turn over and go back to sleep, the dream got more intense with shouting and flying baskets and hands pulling at him. Now a new sensation was coursing through part of him, pins and needles and an icy hot feeling amid the cacophonous noise of an engine, which he finally decided must be real.

The dream had something to do with his aircraft, but what it was, wasn’t clear. He wondered if Rachel would roll her eyes at the bizarre nature of the story when he told her about it in the morning.

Rachel!

Wait… wasn’t she in bed next to him? Was he home? No, home wasn’t that loud, or cold. He recalled being very cold, and she was, too. He should ask her… if he could just roll over and hold her.

But rolling over seemed strangely difficult. His body wouldn’t respond.

Arlie forced his eyes open and looked to the left, past the hovering face of someone in an orange flight suit. Strange. Why would he dream about an orange flight suit? This dream was getting really weird, and he could see Rachel lying down a few feet away with people hovering over her, too.

“Rachel?” Arlie was pretty sure he had called her name, but he hadn’t heard his voice. Yet Rachel was moving her head and looking in his direction.

That’s okay then, he concluded, trying to smile back at her as he drifted off to sleep just as the door to the helicopter was yanked open by a waiting team of med techs.