The Blackbird

Twenty-Seven

“Grofield!”

He was freezing, and somebody was jostling his shoulder. His face was covered by a cold damp blanket, and when he pushed it away snow spattered all over his face and neck.

He sat up, shocked awake by the cold, to find he’d been covered by nearly an inch of powdery snow overnight. It was daylight now and no longer snowing, though the sky was covered completely with gray clouds, as though the earth was wearing a shower cap.

“I missed sunrise!” he said, starting to get up, but she tugged him violently down again and he fell amid another little swirl of snow. “What the hell?”

“The plane’s back!” She was talking in a hushed whisper, as though the plane were hulking just past her shoulder.

It wasn’t. Grofield looked at her, blinking, and said, “When did it get here?”

“I don’t know. I just woke up a minute ago, and there it was.”

Grofield got to his feet, and went up the snow dune at a shambling crouch until he could see over the top, and there was the plane. He could see now it wasn’t the same one that had brought him up here, but it was the same or a similar model. He watched for a minute, and nothing happened around the plane, and he went back down to where Vivian was waiting. “I suppose the thing to do,” he said, “is wait and see what happens next.”

“Do you think they’ll leave?”

“Nobody there knows where the canisters are. The snow wiped out our trail, so even if they think I know where they are they can’t come after me to ask. I can’t think of any reason for them to stay.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said. “God, how I want to get warm again.”

“While we’re waiting, let’s eat.”

“I wish we could have a fire.”

“Keep on wishing,” he said unhelpfully.

They ate cold canned food, sitting on their folded blankets, and were just finishing when they heard the plane engines, a faint sound, muffled by all the fresh soft snow. They climbed to the top of the dune again and watched the troops loading into the plane across the way. It didn’t take long, and then the plane cumbersomely turned around and rolled slowly past from right to left. At the far end of the lake it turned again and came back, this time steadily gaining speed and finally lifting into the air, raising its nose toward the clouds.

Grofield watched it climb until it was way up, then looked across the lake at the lodge. “We’ll give them a chance to get out of sight,” he said, “and then we’ll—”

“Look!”

He looked at her, and she was staring skyward. He followed her gaze, and there were three planes in the sky all at once, the lumbering cargo plane and two slender, darting sharks. “Where the hell did they come from?”

“They dropped out of the clouds,” she said. “They’re Migs.” She looked at him. “Russian.”

“Who’s minding the UN? Everybody’s here.”

They watched the three planes, saw the two Migs zooming past the heavier plane, flashing by and then turning to make another pass. They couldn’t hear the firing, but they saw the black smoke start on the cargo plane’s right engine, saw the plane seem to dip as though tired, saw it falter, and then all at once it was falling out of the sky, the Migs circling higher, fading into the clouds before the plane hit the ground far away. A pillar of smoke rose up black to mark the place where it had hit.

“It looks to me,” Grofield said quietly, “as though nobody wanted the Chinese to get that stuff.”