by Marc Cameron
“How about the back door?” Bowen yelled over his shoulder, thinking the shooters might have circled around.
“Nope, Gus Gus,” Thibodaux said. “They’ve definitely hauled . . . What the hell?” The Cajun jumped to his feet and pounded the table with his fist.
Bowen turned to find nothing but scabby carpet in the spot with Petyr Volodin used to be.
“Damn this eye patch,” Thibodaux said. “That meatheaded son of a bitch took advantage of my blind side and beat feet while I was lookin’ at the screen.” He hit the table again, his face as red as Nikka’s at having let the prisoner escape. “I am gonna beat his ass for sure.”
* * *
“That’s enough playin’ around,” Thibodaux said to Nikka ten minutes later. “You need to do yourself a favor and tell us where your boyfriend went.”
“I want lawyer,” the woman said, before breaking into a litany of slobbering Russian.
“What’s she sayin’?” The Cajun asked, looked at Garcia.
“You know how your wife only gives you five non-Bible curse words a month?”
Thibodaux nodded.
“Well,” Garcia said, raising her eyebrows, “the words she’s using would probably cause a Bible to catch fire.”
Thibodaux’s huge jaw clenched tight. His face was red, still steamed from letting Petyr Volodin slip away.
Bowen sat at the center booth, going through a pile of papers he’d grabbed from Minchkhi’s room. The pile was mostly made up of lottery tickets and receipts from her doctor for STD treatments, but he’d learned over years of fugitive work that tiny slips of paper often caught very bad men.
“I think I might have something here,” Bowen said, holding up a training schedule for a fight gym in Spanish Harlem. There was a phone number scribbled on the back as well as the cost of a cot and showers. He showed the flyer to Garcia who read it over before passing it to Thibodaux.
“You think it could be that easy?” she said. “Surely he would run further than Harlem.”
Nikka’s head snapped up when she heard the mention of Harlem. She’d not been able to see what they were looking at, and it had taken her by surprise.
“He’th not thtupid enough to go there.” She twisted sideways, trying to conceal the blotches on her chest that were a sure indicator that she was upset. “It ith next plathe anyone would look for him.”
Thibodaux rolled his good eye, grinning now that he once again had hope for catching Petyr the Wolf. “Yeah, and this is the first. And he sure enough showed his brilliance by not showing up here.”
Chapter 26
Alaska
The Piper Cherokee jumped off the gravel runway and banked to the left, with Lovita bringing it around to the north as she climbed.
A shaken Adam Henderson had promised to take care of the wounded Russian until Quinn could make contact with a passing airplane or pick up a signal with the satellite phone and get more authorities out to the lodge. Corey Morgan stood on the porch and held himself up against a log pillar as he watched his would-be girlfriend fly away.
The wind had died down but the boiling storm loomed like a black wall to the north, throwing the vast tundra below into muted shadows. A drizzling rain, pushed ahead in advance of the larger storm, streamed along the airplane’s windows and peppered the dozens of tiny, unnamed lakes. A small herd of about forty or fifty caribou strung out in a long line were moving at a good trot along a gravel moraine that formed a natural highway on the boggy tundra.
“Enukin are real you know,” Lovita said, turning to face Quinn as she flew. With her big green headset and dyed orange hair, the little woman looked pretty impish herself. “They’re strong enough to lift a whole caribou over their head and run with it. My friend Jason’s a bush pilot and he’s seen it happen—caribou traveling along the tundra on their sides . . .”
“I’m not arguing with you,” Quinn said. Running through plans and possibilities of the pending confrontation with Volodin and what had to be a box of deadly nerve gas, little imps were the furthest things from his mind.
Lovita’s shoulders relaxed when Quinn didn’t call her crazy. “You guys should try some of my akutaq,” she said, changing the subject. She leaned forward and gave one of the gauges a little tap with the tip of her finger. “I picked the berries and caught the caribou myself.”
Quinn couldn’t help but smile in spite of the situation. He’d always liked the way Alaska’s Yup’ik and Inupiaq Eskimos referred to hunting as catching instead of killing. Caribou and seal were caught the same way you caught a fish. And he’d eaten enough traditional Native dishes to know there wasn’t much that went unused. From fish eyes to seal guts, most of any animal could be turned into what someone somewhere considered a delicacy.
Lovita licked her lips and looked sideways to wink at Quinn. He caught the glint of something in her eyes that he couldn’t quite make out. If she’d been any other person, he would have said it was worry, but Lovita wasn’t the type to fret over much. “Man that bou had some nice backfat,” she said. “Whiter than Crisco—”
Beaudine’s muffled voice interrupted her. She’d forgotten to put on the headset again. Instead of taking his off, Quinn pointed at the set hanging off a bungee above her armrest.
Lovita fell silent waiting for Beaudine to speak. Quinn pressed his nose to the window, studying the terrain below. They followed the twisting silver snake that was the Kobuk River. Row after row of oxbow lakes, left isolated when the river had changed its meandering course, bracketed the slow moving water in countless parentheses of green and gray. Beyond the river the tundra turned to forest, and the forest rose into green hills that nestled into the lap of the Kobuk Mountain Range a dozen miles to the north. Lone spruce trees shot upward spirelike, here and there, from thick stands of willow. They dwarfed their tiny tundra cousins and choked the riverbank in thick green and yellow.
“What do we do when we find them?” Beaudine asked once she’d situated her headset.
“We’ll find a place to land,” Quinn said, scanning the water for any sign of Volodin or a boat.
“Are there any?” Beaudine asked. “Places to land, I mean.”
“A few,” Lovita said. “Not right here on the river, though. We’ll have to go up and look around some when we spot them.” She gave the temperature gauge another tap and then looked at Quinn. “You want to try the radio again?”
“Whoa,” Beaudine said. “Are those what I think they are?”
“Depends,” Quinn said, twisting in his seat to look out Beaudine’s window. “If you think it’s a brown bear sow with a couple of two-year-old cubs, you’d be right.”
“She looks like she could take care of our Dr. Volodin problem,” Beaudine said under her breath.
Quinn shrugged. “We’re part of the food chain up here.”
He keyed the radio mike and tried to hail a passing plane, with negative results. No one else was foolish enough to be out with the approaching storm.
Lovita tapped the gauge harder this time—the way pilots did when they sense something is wrong but don’t want to believe it.
Quinn snapped the mike back in its clip on the console. “Okay,” he said. “You’re about to knock that gauge through the firewall. Want to tell me what’s up?”
“We’re runnin’ a little hot,” Lovita said, chewing on her bottom lip the way she did when she held something back.
“Hey,” Beaudine said, her voice buzzing as she pressed her face against the window. “I see them. I see the boat!”
“Keep an eye on them,” Quinn said, eyes still fixated on Lovita. “How hot?”
“Just touchin’ the redline,” Lovita said through clenched teeth. She shot a worried look at Quinn, the thin vertical lines of chin tattoos quivering slightly as she spoke. “But the needle’s still climbing.”
“What do you think it is?” “Quinn asked.
“Engine’s not getting’ enough oil,” Lovita said.
Quinn’s ears began to pop as she
put steady backpressure to the yoke, adding just enough power to keep them climbing.
“I need to climb higher,” she said. “Look for a place to set us down if it doesn’t correct itself.”
“Wait. What?” Beaudine poked her head up from the back seat. “What has to correct itself? Why are you taking us higher if we need to land?”
A sudden thought crossed Quinn’s mind. “Could you have been unconscious long enough for someone to mess with the engine?”
Lovita began to chew on her lip again. She said nothing, nodding instead as she took the plane up through four thousand feet.
Beaudine pounded on the backseat. “Somebody better tell me what’s goin’ on!”
Quinn rummaged through the pocket in the door beside him, finding the chart for the area he believed they were flying over. He unfolded it while he spoke, knowing it would do no good to scold Lovita now. She needed all her attention to fly the airplane.
“Any ideas of where to put down?” he asked, running a finger over the paper chart.
Left hand on the yoke and right on the throttle levers, Lovita scooted forward in her seat. She peered over the console, then glanced back and forth out the side windows. She looked incredibly small in her oversized pink fleece jacket, like a child in charge of the airplane—and all of their lives. But as small as she was, she was handling this emergency like someone with twice her flying experience.
“That’s not good,” Lovita muttered, half to herself as a spider of black oil began to crawl up the windscreen. There was a loud pop and an instant later oil covered the screen completely, robbing her of any forward visibility. She checked her console, then looked at Quinn.
“I was hoping we’d make Ambler or at least Needle, but that’s not going to happen.” She banked the plane slowly to angle farther north, away from the river—into the storm. “There’s a little mine about three miles up.” Lovita’s teeth were beginning to chatter from nerves, but she continued to fly the airplane.
Quinn found the airstrip on the chart noted by a single line in a circle—which told him it was at least 1500 feet long. “How much room do you need to put us on the ground?”
“About a thousand feet,” Lovita said without looking at him.
Quinn looked over his shoulder at Beaudine who’d buckled herself in and sat on both hands staring out her window. “See if you can get a call out on the sat phone,” she said. “We need to report our position.” He gave her a weak thumbs-up in an effort to let her know everything would be okay—which was a bald-faced lie. Things were completely and hopelessly out of his control. He could not remember a time when things had been much further from okay.
“Quinn!” Lovita said, drawing his attention back to the front. She nodded toward a trail of thick gray smoke pouring out of the engine compartment, streaming down both sides of the plane. A terrific clattering noise rose from the engine. Quinn stifled a cough as the entire cabin filled with the acrid smell of burning metal.
“We’re not even going to make it to the mine,” Lovita said, banking slowly to the left, nose against the side window. “Looks like a wide spot in the gravel by that stream below us. I’m gonna get set up for a crash while I still got an engine.”
Chapter 27
Quinn knew how to do a lot of things, but flying an airplane was not one of them, so he left it to the twenty-two-year-old expert. The way Lovita managed the airplane—and herself—during the middle of a life-and-death crisis made him hope his daughter Mattie would be able to keep her cool in such a way. Mattie. Of course he would think of her at a time like this. She was the one and only constant in his life.
The airplane went suddenly quiet as the engine locked up, starved for oil and pouring smoke but yet to catch fire. Absent the roaring noise of engine and propeller, the whir of wind and spatter of rain seemed deafening against the thin metal fuselage. Quinn’s stomach rose in his chest as the bottom of the plane seemed to fall away and they dropped toward the hills three thousand feet below.
“Make sure you know how to get out of your seat-belts,” Lovita said through clenched teeth. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the yoke. “Good chance we’ll have a fire with this much fuel. Get out quick.”
The Inupiaq girl moved like a machine, making minor adjustments to her aircraft. With her windscreen completely obscured by thick black oil, she slipped the plane sideways every few seconds, crablike. The maneuver sacrificed altitude and airspeed but gave her tiny increments of forward visibility.
Quinn caught the glimpse of a silver ribbon of gravel out the side window during one of her slips. The tundra was rising up quickly to meet them. Green hills and now treetops loomed out the windows, shooting by at an alarming rate.
To her credit, Agent Beaudine kept trying to get through on the satellite phone through the entire process.
“Everybody hang on,” Lovita said raising her chin and looking out the side window as she slipped the Cherokee sideways one last time. She straightened out the nose a moment before touchdown.
The last clear picture Quinn had before impact was the bright orange of the Eskimo girl’s hair resting on the dingy collar of her pink fleece. It brought back memories of the year before, when she’d saved his life flying a Piper Super Cub.
The plane hit hard, slamming Quinn forward against his shoulder harness, before bouncing and driving him back into his seat. Behind him, Beaudine gasped but didn’t scream. Quinn reflexively gripped the narrow leather grab strap on the door. Lovita continued to fly the plane without a word.
A loud bang split the frenetic air followed immediately by the groan of protesting metal as the nose gear snapped off, and the airplane’s belly gouged into the earth. Quinn was vaguely aware of being thrown sideways, then up, and then sideways again. Smoke choked his lungs and seared his eyes, making it impossible to see. Everything was a blur—the console, the trees whipping by outside the window, even Lovita beside him. Yanked back and forth, he felt as if he was caught up in the jaws of a great bear that was shaking him to death. The pressure of the harness against his chest combined with the thick smoke to choke the life from him. His head bounced off the window post as metal screamed and groaned.
And then they were still.
* * *
Quinn wasn’t certain if he’d been unconscious for minutes or moments. He could hear the static chatter of electrical circuits arcing somewhere in front of him. His head felt oddly heavy and it took him a few precious seconds to realize he was upside down, trapped in his seat harness. Through the smoke he could see Lovita hanging beside him, the arms of her pink fleece trailing above her head, hands in the rising water. The creek outside didn’t look deep, but the plane must have dug a trench as it slid to a stop in the gravel bed, a trench that was now filling rapidly with water.
Quinn braced himself against the dash so he didn’t break his neck, and then popped the release on his harness. His ribs lit up with pain as he slammed against the ceiling, shocked into full consciousness now by the incoming hiss of freezing water. Floundering in the overturned airplane, jammed between the dash and the backrest of what had once been his seat, Quinn peered into the back passenger compartment to find Agent Beaudine also hanging upside down in her harness, arms trailing above her head as if she were riding a roller coaster. Blood covered her face like she’d been scalped.
“Hey!” Quinn shouted. “We have to get out of here!” Beaudine moaned but didn’t move.
It was often necessary to triage medical patients during an emergency, prioritizing the nature of their wound or illness by urgency of treatment. Quinn had no idea which of the two women had the most severe injuries. The dead often moaned, and for all he knew they were both gone already. But if they weren’t dead yet, they certainly would be in moments if the water covered their faces before Quinn did something about it.
Lovita was the shorter of the two, which gave her marginally another few seconds over Beaudine, who hung lower in the water. Quinn left Lovita were she was and went for Bea
udine first. Ducking his head underwater, he wriggled along the ceiling between the headrests. The release on her harness gave way as soon as he touched it, and he did his best to break her fall. Her head went under but he brought her up before she could suck in any water. A quick dunk in the river water momentarily exposed a deep gash across her forehead and nose. Typical of a head wound, a curtain of blood washed down her face a moment later. She stirred, blinking and sputtering.
Quinn gave her a pinch on the back of her upper arm to get her attention. She winced, opening her eyes long enough to look at him.
“Wait here!” he said, propping her against the side window of the airplane. The water was to her waist, and still rising, but she could breath. In another ten seconds, Lovita would not have that luxury.
Quinn didn’t wait to make sure Beaudine had heard him. He wriggled backward, crawfishlike between the headrests, making it to the front as Lovita took a last desperate gasp and the water rose above her face.
Quinn took a deep breath and ducked under beside Lovita’s face, covering her mouth with his to give her a rescue breath as he reached up to release her harness. She fell away in his arms and he pushed her to the surface, kicking at the passenger door again and again until it finally opened enough to pull her out.
Fuel dripped from the shredded metal sheeting. Steam rose from the engine compartment, but so far at least, the initial splash of impact had extinguished any flames.
Sliding and slipping over snot-slick rocks, Quinn cradled Lovita’s limp body in his arms and carried her to the gravel shore twenty feet away. Her breath was shallow, but she was still alive. Quinn got her situated as best he could on the damp ground before sloshing quickly back into the icy water, moving on autopilot to retrieve Beaudine.
From the perspective of even this short distance, Quinn wondered how any of them had survived. The Piper looked more like a crushed beer can than an airplane. He smiled in spite of himself, chalking it up to Lovita’s ability to fly all the way to the bitter end. She was a tough girl, and she’d saved his life again.
