From Out of the Blue

by Nadia Nichols

  “Beautiful!” he proclaimed around his unlit cigar when his inspection was done. He gave Kate a grudging nod. “You done damned good, getting it for that price.”

  “Thanks. She’s a nice plane. Mitch seems to think I shouldn’t have bought it, but I’m hoping he comes to terms with the arrangement.”

  “First time he flies her, he’ll come to terms.” Wally chewed on his cigar with a perplexed expression, then his face cracked into a broad smile. “I think I’ll name her Lulu,” he said. “She looks like a Lulu.”

  “Over my dead body,” Kate said, relieved to see a trail of dust approaching up the airfield road. “Here comes my ride. Take good care of her, Wally.”

  “Don’t you wanna wait and see Mitch’s reaction?”

  “Nope,” Kate replied as Rosa gently brought the sedan to a stop beside her, and climbed out of the driver’s seat. “Just find another home for that Stationair—the sooner the better.”

  “That might be a little difficult.”

  Kate slid into the driver’s seat and said, “Try the Smithsonian. They have an interesting air-and-space museum.”

  THE TRIP OUT to base camp with the three climbers and two reporters was uneventful. Boring, even. But then, that pretty much defined most routine flights. Boring, just as driving a farm tractor was, unless you were burning trail in an F-16. But the thing about flying in Alaska was that the scenery was pretty goddamn magnificent. Mitch never tired of it. He could drone around aloft all day and never tire of studying the craggy mountain ranges and the broad river valleys or scouting for wildlife on the taiga. And those early morning or twilight flights were pure magic, the way the sun reflected symphonies of light against the glaciers and snowfields. There were times when he felt like bursting into song, except he couldn’t find the words or the music to define such staggering beauty.

  And besides that, the clients would think him strange.

  Would Kate?

  He didn’t think so. Somehow, even though he didn’t know her all that well, he sensed that she shared the same sensitivity toward the natural world. The same connection. She’d been raised in Montana. Maybe that was it, or maybe it was just wishful thinking on his part. But a part of him hoped. And what about Hayden? He wanted to go camping. Wanted to see grizzly bears and hear wolves howl. He was almost four years old and his life was just beginning. Handsome kid. Stoic, except when it came to his mom being sick…and maybe dying.

  “McCray!”

  A blustery shout interrupted his thoughts and he watched as one of the reporters who’d helped the climbers unload their gear inched toward the side door of the plane, crabbing along like the hunchback of Notre Dame and wearing a pair of thick rubber boots that made every step sound as if he were tramping on indignant ducks. “Is it always this windy here?”

  “Pretty much,” Mitch replied, handing out the last of the duffel bags. “Big mountain range, big wind.”

  “Will it be as rough taking off as it was landing?”

  “We’ll be lighter so it’ll be a lot bumpier.”

  “And you do this every day?”

  “If we’re lucky enough to get the business.”

  “What will happen to them?” he asked with a jerk of his head to indicate the group of climbers.

  “They’ll try for the summit. Some make it, some don’t. When they’re done doing what they came to do, they’ll call us and we’ll come pick ’em up. That’s the last of their gear. You about ready?” Mitch was anxious to conclude this trip. He didn’t much care for all the questions, most of which seemed sophomoric to him, and he didn’t like the look of the clouds that were building up around the peaks.

  Airborne again after the predictably bumpy takeoff, he headed the Stationair south-southeast and began the turbulent traverse of the Alaska Range.

  KATE HAD PROCRASTINATED telling Hayden about Mitch for as long as she could. After lunch, she took her son into town to pick up a few groceries, and on the way back to the Moosewood, she took a deep breath and dove in.

  “Hayden, we need to talk about something important. It has to do with your father.” She glanced at him in the rearview mirror to gauge his response, but he was gazing out the side window at the craggy mountains, hoping to spot an eagle or a mountain goat or a grizzly. “I told you he died in a plane crash, but that wasn’t true.”

  Hayden redirected his attention and sat up straighter in his seat.

  Kate tightened her grip on the wheel. “The truth is, your father’s not dead. I never told you about him because I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him again, but I was wrong.”

  Long silence. She looked at him and caught him studying her with a confused expression. “He’s alive?”

  Kate nodded. “Yes, and I believe he’s a good man, so yesterday I told him about you, and now I’m telling you about him, and I hope both of you can get to know each other.” She hesitated, drew a sharp breath and spoke aloud the words she’d practiced. “Hayden, Mitch is your dad.”

  She felt Hayden’s eyes on her for a moment longer before he stared out the window again. In a serious voice he asked, “Does he like me?”

  “He likes you very much.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Hayden turned to look at her. “Does he like you?”

  “I don’t know. Right now he’s pretty mad at me for not telling him about you before.”

  “Is he going to stay mad?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate repeated. “But he’s not mad at you. Do you like him?” Another long silence followed. “Hayden?” she prodded.

  “If he’s mad at you, I don’t like him,” he announced.

  Damn, Kate thought. “I’m sure he’ll get over being mad and I really don’t blame him for it. Everything’s going to be okay, you’ll see.”

  But as she drove back toward the Moosewood, she couldn’t help but wonder if she was telling Hayden another lie.

  AT 2:00 P.M. the cabin phone rang. Rosa answered it.

  “It is for you, señora. Someone named Wally.”

  No doubt Wally wanted to tell her about Mitch’s reaction to seeing the plane parked and waiting for him at the airstrip. She took the phone from Rosa. “Well, has he come to terms with it yet?”

  There was a brief silence, and when he spoke, Wally’s voice was somber. “Mitch radioed in at eleven to say the weather had taken a turn after he dropped off the three climbers and was heading for home. Heavy hail, high winds. He’d lost visibility and was hoping to climb out of it. He gave his coordinates and that’s the last we’ve heard from him,” Wally said. “That was three hours ago.”

  Kate’s heart constricted. “Have you contacted the proper authorities?”

  “All the Talkeetna air services are keeping an eye out and the park service has sent two choppers to search the area.”

  “Top up the Porter’s fuel and have his flight plan and last coordinates ready for me. I’m on my way.” Kate hung up and caught Rosa’s eye across the room. “There’s been some trouble with Mitch’s plane. I’m going out to the airfield.”

  Hayden intercepted her before she could get out the door. “Can I come, Mumma?”

  She knelt and gripped his shoulders. “No, honey, you can’t. You stay here with Rosa.”

  “Did Mitch’s plane crash?”

  Kate felt a jolt to her core as her son spoke these words. “I’m sure everything’s fine. You be a good boy for Rosa. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  By the time she reached the car, her hands were shaking. Could this really be happening? And could the timing be any worse? She’d only just told Hayden his father hadn’t died in a plane crash. Had she lied to her son again?

  WALLY WAS PACING back and forth just outside the warming shack when she arrived, and Campy came out, shrugging into a windbreaker, wearing a pair of dark sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. “Hey, hon,” she said as Kate threw her day pack into the plane. “I’m coming along as a spotter. My eyesight’s a whole lot bette
r than Wally’s.”

  “Good,” Kate said, grateful for the offer. “Two pairs of eyes are better than one. Climb aboard.”

  Wally handed her a chart with the flight plan drawn in and Mitch’s last coordinates circled. Kate felt her heart sink when she saw the expanse of mountain range he’d been flying over. “How long have the other aircraft been searching?”

  “An hour, maybe less. An Alaskan State Trooper helicopter’s been dispatched out of Fairbanks and the civil air patrol is getting some aircraft up, as well. The Talkeetna pilots are reporting bad flying conditions around the mountain. Zero visibility, severe winds, whiteouts and downdrafts, and most’ve turned back. The radio transmission from the base camp reported the same heavy hail that Mitch did. They said it was big stuff. Fist-sized.”

  Kate couldn’t have described her feelings as she took off from that little airfield that encompassed all of Mitch’s dreams. She was badly shaken, but didn’t want Campy to guess at her mental state. She was grateful for the big engine in the Porter because she knew she might need every last ounce of horsepower and grit it could give her. She wished that she and Mitch had parted on better terms. And more than anything she wished she’d never told Hayden that his father was still alive because these Alaskan mountain ranges were formidable, and if Mitch’s plane had gone down in the Alaska Range, the odds of him surviving such a crash weren’t all that good.

  Campy had obviously flown enough to know how to put on the copilot’s headset and key the intercom. “I gotta tell you, hon, I’m scared shitless.”

  “Don’t worry, he’ll be fine,” Kate said, knowing her words were unconvincing. “Mitch is an excellent pilot.”

  “Oh, I know that. That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said as she matter-of-factly organized the air charts on her lap, draped the binoculars around her neck and readjusted her headset. “I’m scared shitless of flying.”

  IT TOOK NEARLY forty-five minutes for them to reach the coordinates Wally had penciled in on the air charts, and during that time, Kate made contact with all the other aircraft in the search and worked out grid plans and respective search areas. They had nearly four hours of daylight left, but the weather was proving problematic. The Porter was bounced all over the place by the fickle winds once they got over the Alaska Range and Campy started turning green, though she never once complained. She kept the binoculars to her eyes and scanned the mountain slopes through breaks in the cloud cover while Kate flew the grid and tried to give Campy as smooth a ride as was possible under the circumstances. She came to understand fairly quickly what Mitch had meant by kick-ass, seat-of-the-pants flying. She just hoped the wings held fast. The sudden downdrafts were incredible. Throw in zero visibility and a bad hailstorm like Mitch had been flying through and Kate wondered if anyone could have kept it all together, especially piloting that Stationair.

  She worked her grid pattern religiously in spite of the turbulence, staying in radio contact with the other aircraft, but three hours passed without any of them spotting anything, and the sun, when it showed itself in brief glimpses, was low on the horizon. It was a big, wild, rugged area to search, and the odds of finding them quickly, when there was no signal from the emergency location transmitter on the plane, were next to nil. Seconds seemed like minutes, minutes like hours and the hours like an eternity stretching toward darkness. She heard the chopper pilots discussing how much longer they could search before calling it quits for the night. Too soon they’d have to head back because the deepening twilight would prevent any effective search, and at this altitude, in such high winds, the bitter temperatures would finish off anyone who might have survived the crash.

  Desperation took firm hold as time passed and the sun set behind the mountains. Kate had finished her grid, but there was one area she wanted to double back over, try to get closer to. Then after a particularly rough spate of flying on an upwind leg that paralleled a spiny ridge, she heard Campy draw a sharp breath.

  “I see smoke,” she said—three electrifying words—pointing with one hand and holding the binoculars to her eyes with the other.

  Kate had to top the ridge before she saw it, and for a few moments she forgot to breathe. The minute the plane cleared the bare knife-edge of rock, a downdraft nearly sucked them into oblivion. At full throttle she kicked the rudder hard, clearing a jagged outcropping before sliding through the air over a narrow snowfield that serpentined between two sheer walls of rock for maybe a hundred yards, then dropped off the side of the mountain into a deep crevasse.

  “I see the plane,” Campy said, her words taut with emotion.

  So did Kate. She radioed their position in a calm and controlled voice, verbally detached from the tragedy of the moment even while her heart raced and her eyes struggled to pick out some signs of life in the wreckage of what had once been Wally Gleason’s Stationair. The plane’s nose was buried in the glacial scree, completely obscuring the cockpit’s windshield. The left wing had caught a rock outcropping and snapped off, spilling fuel and igniting the plane, which still plumed black, oily smoke. The fuselage was intact but crumpled and blackened from the fire.

  “I’m going to make another pass,” she said, and Campy nodded tersely, binoculars at the ready.

  It was a bumpy pass, and lower than the first. She knew she was erasing her margin for safety, but she was hoping beyond all rational hope that Campy would spot something other than charred bodies in the wreckage.

  “I see something moving!” she shouted so loudly that Kate quickly adjusted the volume on her headset. “There! In those rocks! See?”

  “I’ll try to make another pass, but it’s pretty rough.”

  Kate didn’t see what Campy had. She was too busy flying the plane and trying to avoid the mountainside. How could anyone have survived that crash? Dare she hope? She racked the plane around and came back at the crash site from behind while the downdrafts tried to rip them out of the sky. She felt her heart leap when she saw a human form step away from the rocks and raise his arms in a motion that made her feel instantly light-headed.

  “They’re okay,” she said, weak with relief. She pulled the plane up over the ridge and fought to control both the aircraft and her emotions. “They’re okay.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s what his signal meant, that they’re all okay.”

  Campy’s rebel yell nearly busted Kate’s eardrums.

  They made one more pass while Kate radioed the coordinates to the helicopters and reported that all three men who’d been on board had been spotted. Then she radioed Wally on the airstrip’s frequency. “They’re alive. The park service choppers are ten minutes from the crash site. I’ll fly high cover and guide them in. It’s a pretty tight spot and the weather’s dicey.”

  She fully understood Wally’s inability to speak because after the choppers had arrived, after the rescue had been made and after the second park service chopper had radioed that they were transporting the men directly to the Fairbanks hospital, Kate had no idea how she managed to fly the Porter. Campy was equally quiet on the way in, and after landing at the Fairbanks airport, both women sat in silence for a long moment in the arctic twilight.

  “I’m not the least little bit religious, hon,” Campy said, pulling off her headset with hands that shook visibly, “but seeing that plane all burnt and broken apart, I gotta say it’s a true miracle any of them survived. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that Mitch really is okay. That they’re all okay.”

  They took a taxi to the hospital and collapsed on hard plastic seats outside the E.R. while two state troopers, having been alerted by the park service pilots, took their statements and the crash survivors were tended to by the medical staff. Information as to their status was something that wasn’t dispensed freely in the long hour that followed. Finally, Campy lost her patience and stalked over to the desk.

  “Listen,” she said to the charge nurse. “All we want to know is, are those boys going to make it?”

  Before
any answer was forthcoming, Kate heard the E.R. doors swing open and turned to see Mitch walking through them. He came to an abrupt stop when he saw her. Kate would have stood but she didn’t have the strength. Seeing him standing there, bruised and bandaged but very much alive, sapped the last of her reserves. She could only stare as if he were an apparition.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” he said, looking as dazed and exhausted as Kate felt.

  “My God, Mitch, you gave us quite the scare,” Campy said as she crossed the distance between them and gave him a tender hug. “I guess that’s the end of Babe. She’s finally crashed her last. Are you all right? Are they letting you walk out of here? Your face is all cut up, hon. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. John has a busted leg. Mike has a concussion and some fractured ribs. They’re being admitted.” His eyes caught Kate’s over Campy’s shoulder. “The chopper pilot said you found us.”

  “Kate had a hunch. She’d already flown over that area but she wanted to take another look, and she was right,” Campy said. “It was pretty nasty up there, but she did great.”

  Mitch was watching Kate with those keen eyes as she studied the crisscrossing of cuts on his face, one that had required stitches. He dropped into the chair beside her. “I’m sorry I put you through that.”

  And at his words, and the surprisingly tender way he spoke them, Kate lost it. In front of the hospital staff, in front of Campy, in front of Mitch, she curled over and buried her face in her hands, shaking all over. She felt his arms go around her and pull her near.

  “It’s okay,” he said in that same rough yet tender way.

  She lifted her head and pulled away from him. “How can you say it’s okay? What was so okay about it?”

  “Well, the landing was a little rough, but we walked away from it, and we’re all right, thanks to you finding us. We were getting damn cold about the time you flew over and was that the Porter you were flying? How’d she handle the downdrafts?”

  “How can you ask about stuff like that now?” Kate said. She tried to stand but a wave of dizziness overwhelmed her and she sat back down and doubled over, breaking out in a cold sweat. She closed her eyes and drew several deep breaths, hoping she didn’t make a fool of herself and pass out.