by Rick Mofina
The pilots started the engines and the plane climbed from the Great Plains to ascend the Bitterroot Range of the Rocky Mountains for the final leg of the trip.
The snow-capped peaks reached before them to the horizon.
Before departure, the pilot, RCMP Corporal Eric Banner and co-pilot, RCMP Corporal Ken Leclair, had checked the aviation forecast for any watches, warnings, or advisories for Idaho, eastern and western Washington. They knew that weather over mountains can change without warning.
Conditions were good, until they were over eastern Washington where the sky clouded and darkened.
Rain streaked the windshield.
It was not a concern until they received an updated advisory. A new disturbance was riding up and over the Yakima Ridge toward the Wenatchee Mountains with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms. Severe wind gusts and possible lightning were predicted.
“What do you think?” Leclair asked Banner.
“Let’s take things a bit north over Lake Chelan. We can climb over it. Advise the centers that we’re adjusting to steer clear of the mess.”
Leclair made the call, the rain came down harder. As the plane banked, the pilots looked through the cloud breaks over the North Cascades, reaching up majestically nearly ten thousand feet.
They saw a colossal range of broiling storm clouds pierced by lightning over Sawtooth Ridge. Leclair looked back starboard, not believing what he was seeing.
It was the same thing.
“What the hell’s happening? I’ve never seen anything move so fast.”
Leclair cursed under his breath as the plane began to bounce along pockets of rough air.
Banner scanned the port side realizing that massive walls of churning black clouds were closing in on them from all points.
They were being swallowed.
The rain intensified as if a wave had been unleashed.
The plane yawed.
“Let’s put her down,” Leclair said.
Banner agreed and switched on the cabin intercom to advise his passengers.
“We've got weather with an attitude so we’re going to land and sit things out. Be sure you’re buckled up back there. It could get bumpy.”
Banner switched off the intercom.
“Ken, check Lake Chelan for an unscheduled land --”
The plane heaved as if a gigantic fist gave it an uppercut throwing Leclair’s head against the console. Blood webbed down his temple.
“You okay, Ken?”
“I’m okay but I can’t believe this.”
Banner commenced requesting Seattle Air Center get them to the nearest strip as the plane swayed, bucked then jolted with a deafening bang.
The plane dropped.
“Fire in the starboard engine!” Leclair said.
The plane began yawing. The stricken engine flamed out. Cockpit alarms sounded. Instrument needles freewheeled as Banner fought to steady the aircraft.
“Something’s wrong with the ailerons,” Banner said. “Call in a mayday! We’ve got to put down now!”
The pilots struggled with the controls taking the plane into a rapid descent as the starboard wing ignited.
“We’re losing it!”
The plane was vibrating and increasing speed as it plummeted. The men in the cabin began shouting. One had reached for his cell phone and was attempting to call his family.
The man behind Yacine recited the Lord’s Prayer. The gum-snapper’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the armrests of his seat and choked back tears. Through the downpour, Yacine glimpsed alpine slopes and forests rushing toward them and embraced death.
Garrett’s heart filled with regret.
Was this the way he was going to die? Falling from the sky without making things right.
Garrett’s stomach lifted and his ears popped. Blinding wind-driven rain pounded the plane. It nosed downward, increasing in speed.
Cockpit alarms bleated.
Banner strained to pull the plane out of its dive as the surviving engine screamed. The nose was lifting, little by little.
Leclair released a cheer.
Relief was emerging on Banner’s face in the instant before they lost control and slammed into a mountainside.
The first 911 call went to the IceCom Dispatch Center in Jade Falls, Washington. It came on a sat phone from a local mountain guide, who was up lake with a group of tourists on horseback.
“It was a small passenger plane, maybe a jet!”
“Can you give me an approximate location?”
“Across the lake from us, near Ghost Ridge, but we can’t get to it!”
The dispatcher’s keyboard clicked as she burned through her agency alert list to activate the region’s search and rescue operation.
It was going to take some time to get everybody rolling.
Miles away, at the crash site, Robert Lazarus Yacine, was cold and wet.
If he could feel, he was alive.
He blinked at daylight and the small fires licking everywhere in the soft rain. He coughed, nearly gagging on the stench of burning plastic, carpet and rubber.
Aside from cuts and bruises, Yacine was unhurt. The plane was in pieces at the edge of a forest. While Yacine remained cuffed and shackled, the crash had freed him from his seat, which had broken from the floor. He undid his seatbelt, got to his feet and stumbled through the wreckage, chains chinking as he counted the dead.
The nearest body was missing its head.
It was the man who’d sat behind him; RCMP Corporal Terry Cox, according to the ID Yacine fished from his pocket. No handcuff keys. The man who’d sat beside Yacine, Deputy U.S. Marshal Moss Johnston, had no pulse or handcuff keys, but he did have a lot of cash.
Both pilots were impaled in the trees.
That’s four dead, two to go.
What about Dark Eyes?
Yacine scanned the wreckage, glimpsing a hand under the twisted metal of a wing. Dark Eyes had a bloodied face. Yacine felt for a pulse, not sure he had one. Then moaning sounded nearby.
Yacine left Dark Eyes.
The gum-snapper, his taunter, was near the tail. A long strip of metal fuselage was embedded in his legs, slicing deep into both above the knee in a near-amputation. A brilliant blood pool was growing under him.
“Help me,” he pleaded. “Please.”
Chains jingled as Yacine probed his pockets, finding the ID of Marshal Arlo Phife. Yacine grinned when he found handcuff keys in Phife’s pants and freed himself. Then he opened the luggage of his escorts and changed from his prison greens into jeans, a button-down shirt and a leather jacket. He returned to Phife and took his boots, lacing them onto his feet. Snug, but they’d do for this terrain.
“Help me, please,” Phife pleaded.
“Hang on there, partner.”
“Thanks, man, than --”
Yacine took Phife’s head in his hands gritted his teeth and twisted hard, watching Phife’s eyes balloon as vertebrae snapped.
All of them were dead now.
Yacine found binoculars in the cockpit. He climbed to the highest point and scanned an eternity of forests and mountains until he spotted a road and a town, miles off.
Smiling, he started in that direction.
At that moment, some seven to ten miles south of the crash site, in a small double-wide perched on a hill crowned by ponderosa pine on the shore of Ice Lake, Nancy Dawson answered her phone.
“It’s Eileen,” her daughter-in-law’s voice broke, “I’m at the hospital with Craig.”
“The hospital, but he looked so well on Sunday?”
“He was good, but he woke up in the night, in pain, so we brought him here to Harborview. Then he got worse and worse. It’s bad. Doctor Pollard said to call you now because, because, I’m sorry, Craig doesn’t have much time left. They’ve moved him up the national list but they don’t think he’s going to make it.”
Nancy’s hand flew to her mouth. Craig, her only child, the father of her grandchildren, had severe chronic kidney dise
ase.
“I’m on my way. Eileen? Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“You tell Craig I’m coming now!”
“OK.”
Garrett floated to consciousness in the rain-misted gloom, recalling the earth rushing up to hammer the plane.
Now, as he lay in the wreckage, he could not sense his right leg, pinned under a wing. He shifted his position to see below his hip. His legs didn’t look bad. His brain flashed with images of someone helping.
Where did they go?
“Everybody OK!” Garrett called, unbuckling his seatbelt, extracting himself from the debris. His voice echoed. No one answered and no one aided him as he struggled to stand, massaging his leg until circulation returned.
Good.
He was sore but could move. Brushing blood and dirt from his eyes he took careful stock of the aftermath. Moment by moment, body by body, as he checked on the others, the toll emerged: Cox, Leclair, Banner, Phife and Johnston.
They were all dead.
Garrett pulsated with shock.
Steadying himself against a tree – where’s his prisoner? -- Garrett seized on the metallic glint of cuffs, chains, leg irons and tracks in damp earth, leading into the forest, until it became clear there was a second survivor.
Yacine had escaped.
Reaching deep inside, clawing for whatever he had left, Garrett did what he was trained to do.
He pursued his prisoner.
For Yacine, the pine-scented mountain air was almost as sweet as freedom. Moving fast over the rugged high country, he embraced the whip crack of needled branches against his pale skin.
Anything was better than his cage in Saskatchewan.
But he had to stop. Again. Disciplined bodybuilding did not make him a long-distance runner.
He doubled over, gulping air and thinking. His sources on the outside had tipped him to what the patriots in the U.S. justice system had planned for him in Seattle, with their special witness, who was going to make some kind of deathbed ID.
Yacine laughed at his luck.
In just a few days, there would be nothing connecting him to any of his contract work in Seattle, or D.C., or London, or Madrid, or Athens, or anywhere else.
They thought they had this old boy nailed.
They thought wrong.
Yacine was strong and the strong survived.
He caught his breath at a clearing that offered a sweeping view. He scanned it calculating that all he needed was to get to that road, get into a vehicle, and he was gone.
He saw patches of highway beyond the next ridge and grinned.
He was almost there.
Nancy Dawson set her suitcase in the passenger seat of her SUV, closed the door and got behind the wheel. She went through a mental checklist as she rolled along Little Timber Road to the highway and Seattle where her son was dying.
No he’s not! Don’t say that. Concentrate. Focus on the checklist.
She’d already taken Tipper to AJ’s kennel, locked the house, and asked Leo, her neighbor, a retired firefighter, to watch over her place.
“I’ll say a prayer for Craig, Nance.”
On the highway, Nancy noticed her fuel gauge rested on “E” and wheeled into Grizzly’s gas station. As she filled her tank, she looked up at a helicopter thumping by, wishing she could use it to fly to Seattle.
Wishing for a miracle.
Garrett drew on all he’d learned from survival and tracking courses he’d taken near Yellowknife. As his blood warmed, he pushed himself harder, gaining speed.
He came to a clearing and studied the panoramic view, fixing on slivers of a highway in the distance. A few hundred yards off, he noticed a tiny burst of black near the sway of bush.
A bear?
Garrett locked on to the spot and saw another streak of black then a tiny flash of pale white.
A face. That’s him.
Garrett was close.
For Nancy Dawson, Seattle was some three hours away, but Craig was in her heart.
As her SUV threaded through the mountains, she bargained with God.
“Please don’t take him. Eileen and the kids need him. I need him.”
Hadn’t Nancy’s small family endured their share of hardship?
Chet, her husband was killed ten years ago while changing a flat on his pickup near Coulee City. A Freightliner hauling logs hit a deer and lost its load. Chet never had a chance.
Craig took it so hard.
Then five years ago, nine people were shot dead during a robbery of the Seattle bank where Craig was a junior manager.
He saw the whole thing.
They never caught the killers.
For over a year afterward, Craig struggled with the post-traumatic stress and during that time he was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. Gradually, the severity of the disease increased and now, despite radical treatment, it was reaching the final stage.
Then, just last month, the FBI said they needed to show Craig some sort of important new evidence.
Lord, wasn’t he under enough strain.
Nancy continued reasoning with God.
“If you have to take my son, please keep him alive long enough for me to get to his side; to tell him how much I love him. To say goodbye.”
Nancy was a brave woman but her fears were crushing. She broke down as she approached a two-mile stretch that curved around dense bush.
Stepping from the forest, Yacine exhaled and walked to the edge of the highway.
Bending over, breathing hard through a broad smile, he shook his head. Nearly home free. Gasping, Yacine kept his eyes on the lonely road and waited for a vehicle, ready to hitch a ride.
He’d be long gone before anybody got to the wreck and figured things out. He’d get to L.A. where he had support; cash, passports and contacts. He’d fly to Frankfurt, then Lisbon, then Algiers and back to work.
He had to be the luckiest sonofa-
Crack!
Stars exploded and Yacine thought a rock had fallen on him just as he recognized Dark Eyes, whose swing of a club-sized tree branch had landed on Yacine’s jaw, breaking it on impact.
Yacine staggered.
Garrett took the murderer to the ground, manhandling him to his stomach, driving his knee into the back of his lower neck, drilling his face into the pavement, reaching for plastic handcuffs in his jacket, turning to the flash of a massive grill.
Tears blurred Nancy Dawson’s vision when her SUV, traveling at seventy-one miles an hour, came upon Garrett and Yacine.
It ended when it started, before Nancy could react. Before her brain issued the command to take her foot from the gas to the brake, before her mouth opened and her hands spasmed on the wheel, Nancy felt the heart-sickening thud.
Something – a man? - streaked over her windshield as something grazed under her!
Nancy shrieked, her stomach clenched, ice shot up her spine, her skin tingled.
She stopped the SUV but it was too late.
Rooted in shock, Nancy’s memory of what followed came in rapid, staccato bursts. Two men, twenty-thirty yards apart bleeding on the road, other cars stopping, concerned faces, cell phone calls, blankets; the wail of sirens, ambulances, sheriff’s deputies, Washington State Patrol.
Garrett was lying on his back, alive, but frozen in moments scored by sirens and emergency radios.
A distraught older woman was sobbing near a police car.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t see them! What were they doing on the road? I have to see my son in Seattle. I have to go! Please I’m so sorry!”
Garrett felt nothing, saw faces, paramedics tending to him, getting a board under him, lifting him to a gurney, soothing him.
“Sir, your friend is going to be fine. He went under the car, just some scrapes. But we want to get you to a hospital fast.”
Garrett searched hovering faces; saw the Stetson of a trooper or deputy and grabbed her wrist hard. She had a kind face, smooth skin. Warm. His eyes bore into hers
for a connection. He squeezed harder and she met him in the moment.
Garrett heard words – it could’ve been him – but someone said – “I am RCMP Corporal Garrett.” And recited his regimental number. Paramedics tried to quiet him but the trooper was making notes, her thumb holding Garrett’s badge and ID to her pad as she wrote.
