by Em Petrova
“Hi, I’m Cora Hutton. You’ll be flying with us on the Hutton Husky today.” She gestured to the plane outfitted with pontoons to land in water. “I’ll need to weigh your bag, sir.”
His dark stare penetrated her as he handed over the duffel. She withdrew a fish scale from her pocket and hooked the bag strap over it. “Our limit is ten pounds, and you’re at twelve, but it’ll do.” She passed the bag to him, and he accepted it without a word.
The ice cold stare lingered with her long after she walked to the plane. Her father muttered, “He’s a nutter, isn’t he?”
“I think so,” she whispered.
“Escaped convict wanting to disappear in the bush?” her father asked with a cock of his gray brow.
It was a game she and her daddy played, guessing their passengers’ stories.
A shiver ran through her that had nothing to do with the dropping temps. “Definitely.”
“I’ll keep an eye on him. Climb in, Cora girl.” Her father’s rough tone always warmed her when he called her by the pet name. Since the time her mother passed from a quick battle with cancer when Cora was ten, she’d been flying with her father. He taught her everything she knew—about flying and about life.
One of her most cherished lessons had to do with being a good neighbor to everyone she encountered. A person never knew when their action could save another’s life, her father preached, and she lived by the bush code.
Settling in her seat in the cockpit, she glanced to the door as the passenger boarded. She noted how he scanned the controls, looking hard at the instrument panel before taking his seat and stowing his bag at his feet.
He’d booked with them using the name of Ron Smith, but she couldn’t attach that name to the man. He appeared foreign from his dark, dashing looks to the expensive imported boots he wore. She mentally shrugged—this was America. No ethnic group had a specific look and she couldn’t judge.
But she did judge his hard stare boring into her from behind while her father took the controls and started the engines.
She slipped her headset on and threw her daddy a glance. “We’re clear for takeoff. Please keep your seatbelt on during the flight,” she told the passenger.
He didn’t reply, which made her wonder even more what he was hiding. He could be Russian—they saw a lot of that this far west.
Her father lifted a finger to his temple and wiggled it to indicate the man was a bit touched in the head. She smiled and focused herself in order to assist her father. The engines whirred, freshly inspected and in good working order. Her father was a stickler about his planes and checked over them with a magnifying glass before each and every flight. It only required one small, bad part to take a plane down.
The plane skated across the freshwater lake, getting speed. The runways were short with the tree branches thick with snow, but they lifted off, gliding up above the trees. Cora loved this part best—looking down just after takeoff, feeling like she had a giant’s perspective of the landscape below.
Her father got the plane leveled out and buzzing at a steady speed, while she checked the weather doppler. They knew a storm was brewing but planned to be well out of it and back at home in front of their cozy woodstove before the snow hit.
“I keep thinking about that venison stew waiting at home to warm up,” she said through their headsets.
“My stomach’s been growling for it too.” Her father scoured the air, and she knew why his military buddies had nicknamed him Eagle. After years with the Air Force, he’d finally been stationed in Anchorage. He signed on for an extended term because he loved it so much, and the minute he served his time and retired, he moved his wife to Alaska and bought his first bush plane.
At that time, Cora had been born, and there were albums full of photographs of her growing up as a pilot’s daughter, with infant Cora in his arms in the cockpit before a flight and continuing through her teens. When she was twenty, she dropped out of the community college he insisted she attend, declaring she wanted to fly and use her knowledge from the business courses she’d taken to help him expand his business.
Ever since, they’d been shuttling people all over Alaska, mostly to the remote areas other plane services wouldn’t fly. With a website linked to the Alaska tourist page, they got plenty of business, but Hank “Eagle” Hutton wasn’t a man who flaunted money. They still lived in the same small cabin of her childhood and it’d taken a lot for Cora to even talk him into upgrading to a new woodstove that better heated their home.
The things her father wouldn’t skimp on, however, were supplies. He never left the hangar without enough food, water, bullets and other supplies to see them through “just in case.” She never wanted to think about the just in case, but she’d inherited her father’s practical common sense.
Being thirty years old in the Alaskan wilderness meant she didn’t have many chances to meet men, and lately, she felt the clock ticking. She never bought those magazine articles talking about women’s biological clocks, but for months now, she’d been waking to dreams of holding her own infant in her arms and raising a family in the bush.
During her waking moments, she accepted her life as it was and didn’t dwell over those strong urges brought on by hormones. Life always worked out—either she’d have a family or she wouldn’t.
In the distance, the gray bank of clouds threatened with the storm looming over them and counting down another clock to reach the destination and home before conditions grew too rough to fly.
“I hope this isn’t another May 1999,” she said to her father.
He shot her a glance. “Me too.”
In May 1999, she and her father had taken a couple guys to what was known as the Bear Grounds for a week’s hunt. After cautiously checking the weather in the days and hours leading up to the flight, it looked clear. But in true Alaska style, the winds changed and conditions went from decent to whiteout in an hour.
Sitting right here in this seat, she couldn’t see anything through the thick white flakes and swirling winds, but somehow her father had managed to set them down safely on a lake that had recently thawed.
There, she and her father sheltered with their two passengers, who were equipped for hunting in warm clothes. What camping gear they carried with them saw them through for several days, along with the stores her father insisted on carrying.
Soon their plane would be grounded for the season, and they’d spend their winter doing other things such as harvesting what food they grew in their greenhouse and hunting for meat. What they didn’t buy, they were able to supplement. Cora might sometimes long for a warm man next to her in bed, but she didn’t care about gourmet food or civilization.
Though she did like a good pizza those times she went into town.
“How long until we reach the destination?” The man behind her spoke for the first time. His perfect English alerted her to the fact that it may not be his first language. Not that it mattered.
“An hour to go,” her father answered.
The man didn’t respond with more, and Cora felt a sort of relief sweep over her. She’d been working in Hutton Tours long enough to read people, and she didn’t like the crawling feeling on her spine each time she thought of his very cold black eyes.
Eyes seen in an animal, and not a cute little puppy dog either.
She suppressed a chill sneaking over her, and focused on the instruments. All appeared to be shipshape. The next hour she spent evaluating winds and keeping a close eye on the weather system. She did not wish to wait out a storm with Ron Smith, if that was really his name.
She also checked on her father, which she often did in flight. Checking that he appeared comfortable and maintained focus.
When they began to near the destination, she noted the thick snow already on the ground here, and the pond would have just as much snow on the thick ice. They were taking chances by flying this late in the season in Alaska, but after the request for a flight came in, her father decided they could make one
more run.
She shifted in her seat, blinking at the white of the snow below, blinding despite her sunglasses. God, she loved this land. Every day she woke knowing the day would bring a new adventure—
A click next to her ear jerked her head around.
Her father did the same, and their eyes met over the gun their passenger held in their peripheral.
“Change of plans. We’ll be landing at these coordinates.” He recited the coordinates. Ron Smith’s perfectly spoken words shot terror down Cora’s spine.
“That’s thirty miles more, directly into the storm.” On the first word, her voice started off as a wobble, and by the last, she’d steeled herself, girded her loins and pulled up her big girl panties all in a split second.
“You’ll land where I tell you to land, or I’ll take control of the plane myself.”
Her father, diplomatic as ever when it came to customer service, also was no pushover. He was a hard-nosed military man who’d been living in the bush for more than twenty years, and he wouldn’t take shit off anybody.
“You’re going to put that gun away and let me do what’s best for all of us,” her father said evenly. She saw the telltale flicker of a tendon in the crease of his jaw, something only displayed when her father got angry.
“I’m going to tell you one more time—land at those coordinates.”
Cora didn’t often feel afraid. She could count a handful of times in her life when she didn’t know what to expect next, and this was one of them.
“Look, we can’t fly that far west without real danger. The storm is coming from the west, and we’ll be lucky to get in and get home before—”
Hard steel slammed against her cheek. Pain blasted through her. Stunned by pain and a fog of fear, she could only bring a hand to the place where Ron Smith slammed the pistol into her face.
“Just a damn minute!” Her father’s shout echoed in her skull. “Nobody strikes my daughter. If you don’t put that weapon away, you’re going to find yourself in the bottom of a ravine for the bears to eat come spring.”
Some of Cora’s wits returned. She put a hand on her father’s arm, tense and seeming to vibrate with power under her fingers.
Talking sense to the guy was out of the question. Clearly, he had a rendezvous point that had changed, and when she saw the satellite phone in his other hand, she understood he’d received a text message.
Her instincts about the guy were right from the beginning—he was a criminal, possibly one of the many traffickers they heard about on the news running through the state, carting drugs from Russia through Alaska to distribute to the lower forty-eight—cocaine or meth or even yaba, meth in tablet form manufactured in Southeast Asia.
She glanced at his duffel, thinking she should have asked to search it. But in these parts, finding a gun in someone’s luggage was the norm.
Fighting to reason a way out of this, she nodded to her father. “Maybe we can accommodate him if we fly around the storm.”
Her father started shaking his head, but Ron Smith spoke. “I need to arrive by one p.m. to make my meeting.”
“Look here, thirty miles west puts us all in serious danger. If we go down in the storm in that area, we won’t have much of a chance of being found let alone getting out. It’s rough terrain—mountains, hidden ice caves. You’re not going to just walk—”
He struck her father across the face with the pistol. Cora screamed and had no memory of unlatching her seatbelt to dive in front of her father. The plane dipped as her father’s hands went slack from the blow. Seeing things could get out of hand fast, she grabbed the controls.
“You son of a bitch,” her father ground out. He shoved Cora into her seat and took over again. She had a feeling her father would not back down from this fight. Some fights a man couldn’t walk away from.
“Dad, let’s figure this out. Can we get him there by one o’clock?” She stared at her father’s handsome and aging face, the straight nose like her own and the bruise rising on his cheek just like her own. They shared coloring too—blue eyes that tended to appear gray in certain lights or brighter blue if they wore blue shirts. And her blondish brown hair did not yet have the streaks of silver gray his did.
That rising bruise on her father’s cheek broke her heart. It made her want to grab the man’s gun and shoot him through the heart, and then toss him out of the plane for the bears as her father had said.
Her father gave her a side-eye look. One that froze her more than anything had yet, because she knew the man was about to pull an act of heroics.
“Dad—” She didn’t get the words out of her mouth before her father unbuckled and launched himself at Ron Smith. The plane dipped, and she had no choice but to take over at the controls while they struggled for the weapon in the small space behind her.
She hardly got the plane leveled out before something hard struck her in the temple. Her fingers went lax on the controls first, and then her arms dropped from her slumping shoulders. She felt each part of her body shut down one by one until she knew without a doubt that they were going down.
In the wilderness.
With a storm coming.
She could only hope none of them would survive.
Chapter Two
Cora woke with pain shooting up her spine and into her skull. Her first thought was she couldn’t be paralyzed or else she wouldn’t feel pain. But that didn’t make the realization better.
She lay crumpled over the controls, her face pressed against the cracked windshield after being launched from her seat. Icy air rushed through the plane from an open door.
All at once, the events returned to her, smacking her brain like a freight train hitting a stationary object on the tracks.
“Dad!” Heedless of her injuries, if she had any, she scrambled to get up, to find which direction was up, and turn herself around to see her father lay on his side on the floor of the plane. One wing jutted into the air higher than the other, telling her they’d landed on uneven terrain or possibly even on the side of a mountain.
A look at her father’s closed eyes made her heart pound. Adrenaline flooded her system—a little late to the party, but she’d make use of the energy rush.
The passenger was nowhere to be seen.
Scrabbling to the rear of the small craft, she called out to her father again. “Dad, are you all right? Open your eyes if you can hear me!”
When she glanced out of the opening and spotted footprints in the snow, her heart picked up pace. The man had lived. Ron Smith had attempted to hijack their plane and almost stole their lives too. What measures would he go to in order to shut them up? She didn’t want to think about it.
She placed her shaking hands on her father and found him freezing to the touch. How long had they laid here, unconscious? Looking outside didn’t offer any clues—the storm system was fast approaching.
“Dad. Oh God. Dad?” She felt for his pulse and found it immediately. Relief washed through her, but things could go south fast. She had to work quick before he froze to death out here.
She needed to access the supplies. In some bush planes, the cargo was kept in a bay beneath the plane. Luckily, her father kept some supplies in the tail. The water they filled up on at the lake, along with blankets, an ax…and ammo for the weapon he carried on his hip.
He could have pulled it on Ron Smith at any time, but in trying to make peace and negotiate, he’d waited until it was too late.
After fumbling her way to the tail, she laid her hands on the plastic box equipped with their supplies. She grabbed the blanket, the ax and a couple weapon clips. If she couldn’t find the flares, she’d use her father’s gun to shoot into the sky and hope somebody heard or saw.
Fat chance, her brain told her before she finished the thought.
She crawled to her father and placed the blanket over him, tucking the edges under his heavy body to trap in as much warmth as possible. The cold permeated her as well, and she stuck her gloved fingers in her armpits
for a minute to gain warmth. Trembling with terror for her father, she glanced outside. If Ron Smith lurked out there, he could come back and finish the job of killing them.
She almost wanted to laugh at the thought that he was nowhere near his first landing point let alone the one thirty miles away. By her account, they were in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization. The remote area of Skwenta looked like New York City compared to this. In fact, Alaskans called it No Man’s Land.
At least Ron Smith will die.
We’ll probably all die.
She needed to send up a mayday. She checked on her dad again, and finding him out cold, she scooted to the front of the plane to see if the radio worked.
As soon as she fiddled with the controls and heard the resulting static of the radio, tears burned in her eyes for the first time. Thank God. They could be rescued and her father get medical attention. Ron Smith could be hunted down and made to pay for his crimes, but right now all she could think about was getting her father to a hospital before the storm hit in full force.
“This is Hutton Husky. Mayday, mayday. This is Hutton Husky. We are on the ground. Repeat, we are on the ground and request rescue. Mayday.”
“So this is Snowfuck, Alaska.” Penn looked around at the barely there blip of a town. If he told Nash about his base, he’d never live it down. It wasn’t a base so much as a glorified storage shed. It better be filled with ammo and supplies or he’d be pissed.
Shouldering his bag, he crossed the parking lot from the SUV he rented after the emergency landing in the field. Two other trucks were parked out front, and he knew he was the last of the team to arrive.
His plans of grabbing dinner and bonding were out, unless they picked up canned goods from the local general store and fixed it themselves in the galley. The most he could hope for was an MRE ration.
As soon as he opened the metal door and ducked inside, five men snapped to attention.
Penn met each man’s eyes and finally nodded. “I’m Penn Sullivan. You can call me Captain or Penn. But don’t call me Sully—that’s my brother’s name.”
