Liam Campbell was a civilized man and an intuitive and generous lover, but that evening something feral had gotten off the chain. He took her down to the deck with hands that were rough and impatient, and he knew it and didn’t seem to be able to control it. He ripped open her shirt and pushed up the T-shirt and bra beneath it and put his mouth on her breast, sucking hard. She made a sound deep in her throat, her own hands fumbling with his clothes, but he would have none of it. He didn’t want her participation; he wanted her submission, and he pulled at her jeans until they tangled around her feet, unzipped his, and pushed inside.
“Liam!” The word was almost a scream.
He managed to hold it together for one frantic, heart-thumping moment. “Don’t let me hurt you.”
“You aren’t. You won’t. You couldn’t.” She pulled one foot free of her jeans and hooked it around the small of his back, tilting up and pulling him deeper. “Do it.”
She screamed for real this time, a sound swallowed up by the wind and the snow and the dark. For a split second he could feel everything as if with a separate sense. The sudden quick flush of heat rising up from her torso. The kiss of snowflakes on his ass. The long, lovely line of her throat as she arched up into him, like she couldn’t bear an inch of space between them.
“Do it again,” he muttered.
Her eyelids fluttered. “What?” Her voice was slurred.
He thrust again. “Come on,” he said, “come again for me, baby.”
“No, Liam, I can’t-”
“Sure, you can.”
And she could.
And then he followed her into the dark.
Neither of them moved for long moments afterward, lying in a stupor of sexual satisfaction on the deck, the wind gusting to twenty-five knots, the temperature dropping another degree every minute, the snow moving from a snow flurry to a snowfall. Liam thought he could stay there, in that position, on top of that woman, forever, and he might have, if she didn’t eventually exhibit some signs of being unable to breathe.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and shifted his weight to his elbows.
She smiled without opening her eyes. “Don’t be.”
“Okay.” He nuzzled her neck.
He felt a laugh catch in her breast.
“The only time a man is sane,” he said, belatedly going for a little foreplay with her ear, which he knew she loved, “is the first ten minutes after orgasm.”
She laughed out loud this time.
He raised his head and smiled down at her. “It’s true.”
“Says who?”
“Says Dapper Dan.”
“And who, may I ask, is Dapper Dan? Not that I’m contesting his thesis.” She raised her hips and exercised a muscle or two.
“Oh, man, I’ll give you a week to quit that.” He gave her a hickey, just to reestablish his supremacy. “Dapper Dan was a friend of Damon Runyon’s.”
“Why’d they call him Dapper Dan?”
“Because he was very dapper, and a very successful ladies’ man.”
“Not unlike someone else we might name.”
“The only woman I want to be successful with now is right here. Lying under me, as a matter of fact.”
She raised a hand to trace his eyebrow, nose and lips. He sucked her finger into his mouth. She shivered, and he smiled.
But when they managed to pull themselves off the deck, get dressed and go back inside, the constraint came back. “I’m supposed to meet Dad for dinner at Bill’s.”
“Tell him to come here instead.”
“He wants to talk about that wreck on the glacier, and he doesn’t want civilians around when he does.”
She grimaced. “Okay.”
“Wy?”
“What?”
“You seemed a little out of it when I got home. What’s going on?”
She made a wry mouth. “So much for my powers of concealment.”
“I love you.” He said it simply, without flourishes. “I’ll always see more than you want me to.”
Her eyes softened. “Oh, Liam.”
“There is something, isn’t there?”
“Yes.”
He took a deep breath. Damn the torpedoes. Remember theMaine. Tora, tora, tora. “Is it about the job John offered me in Anchorage?”
She looked as relieved as he did to finally open up the subject to discussion. “No.”
“All right, then.” He had not spent so many years walking through the fire to get to her to give up without a serious fight. He’d go to war for Wyanet Chouinard. He just didn’t know if he’d live in Newenham for her.
She seemed to make up her mind about something. “I’ll banish Tim to his room the minute he gets back. We’ll talk then, really talk.” A half smile. “Don’t be late.”
When he was gone the house seemed very empty. She checked for messages on the answering machine. A teacher in Togiak wanted a competitive bid for bringing four students and herself into Newenham over the Thanksgiving weekend for the Bristol Bay Academic Olympics. Dagfinn Grant had given her a quote and she thought it was too high. Wy, knowing Finn, thought it probably had been, and called her back. They arranged fares and pickup times to their mutual satisfaction, and Wy filled in the dates on her calendar. She’d been looking for a toehold into business with the various school districts. This was a start.
Ronald Nukwak had called from Manokotak, needing a ride for his family to Newenham for a wedding. That one she let go, reluctantly, because Ronald already owed her for seven round-trips, Manokotak to Newenham and back again. If one of the kids had been sick, she would have rolled out the Cub, but this wasn’t an emergency. She hated losing Ronald’s business, not to mention pissing off the half of Manokotak to whom Ronald was related, but she had bills to pay, too.
She heard enough of the next message to understand the speaker was calling from Ualik, but they were on a cell phone that faded in and out. Somebody wanted a ride, but she didn’t know who and couldn’t figure out when, so she let that one go, too.
She closed her calendar and leaned back with a sigh. The first time she’d flown into Ualik and landed on the runway that also formed the main street of the town, she’d found Tim Gosuk crouched, shivering, beneath his own porch, hiding from his next beating. The village hadn’t improved in the interim. The last time she’d been there her fare had been late getting to the plane, and during her wait two men had staggered by, and a third had stopped and threatened her, followed by two small children, who also smelled of drink and who threw snowballs at her. She wouldn’t have minded the snowballs so much except that they hit the plane. She had run them off, and they’d come back with their father just as she was loading the passenger, a woman who was also drunk and who she was very much afraid was going to throw up en route. The father cursed her most foully and, what really scared her, got in front of the plane after she’d started the engine. She knew from firsthand experience what a prop could do to a human head, and she was just about to cut the engine when he staggered off again. The kids threw snowballs until she was in the air.
She had been incredibly lucky that no one had managed to lay hands on a gun. It wouldn’t have been the first time a stranger to a village had been attacked. Alcohol, the blight of the Alaskan Bush, was almost always involved. Usually the incident wound up involving the community health representative, the troopers, and sometimes the medical examiner. She was glad she couldn’t understand the last message, and then she was ashamed that she was glad. They were her people, after all, Yupik, Alaskan, Bush rats. That she hadn’t wound up an alcoholic herself was due only to the fact that, at least once, the cards had fallen for her instead of against her. God knows she carried the gene.
The time she’d spent with Moses on the deck the night before came back to her, along with his words.
“No,” she said out loud. “Not now. Later, when Liam comes home.”
She picked up a copy ofThe Fiery Cross, her current book, but she was too restless to read. Liam was readingNathaniel’s Nutm
eg, but that didn’t hold her interest either. She clicked on the television. Ninety-nine channels and nothing on. She paced. Finally she went to the computer and got on-line, checking the Nushugak Air Web site for messages, finding none.
Then she remembered the Web site she had visited when she was looking up stuff on Lend-Lease, before Moses came over. She clicked on the bookmark and found the page of links. One went to the full texts of the various Lend-Lease acts. Another went directly to the United States Navy’s Web site, and the cargo ships that plied the Atlantic run funneling Lend-Lease materials to Britain, in the teeth of the U-boat wolf packs. There were links to the air force and the army as well. She followed another link and fetched up at a site sponsored by McDonnell Douglas, these days aka Boeing, which contained a brief history of the C-47.
In 1941 the Army Air Force (recently transmogrified from the Air Corps) selected it as its standard transport aircraft. The floor was reinforced and a large cargo door added, and hey, presto, the Skytrain was born. It could carry up to six thousand pounds of cargo, a fully assembled jeep, a thirty-seven-millimeter cannon, twenty-eight soldiers in full combat gear, or fourteen stretcher patients and three nurses.
All the Allies flew it, on every continent and in every major battle of World War II. By 1945 there were more than ten thousand of them in the air, answering to the nickname of “the Gooney Bird.” General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself called it one of World War II’s most important pieces of military equipment.
Her eyes dropped down to the specs with professional curiosity. It had a wingspan of ninety-five feet, six inches and was seventeen feet high. Its maximum ceiling was twenty-four thousand feet, with a normal range of sixteen hundred miles and a maximum range of thirty-eight hundred miles. It weighed thirty-one thousand pounds and cruised at one hundred sixty miles per hour, powered by two twelve-hundred-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines. It was a three-holer, pilot, copilot and engineer, although she thought they’d been called navigators back then.
There was a picture, too, black-and-white, the aircraft gray with the barred white star on the fuselage just before the tail, and the tail numbers small and white on the vertical tail above and behind it. It was a shock to see what the wreck on Bear Glacier had looked like whole and proud.
Twenty-four thousand feet. And according to Colonel Campbell, they were on their way to Russia, to Krasnoyarsk, so already they were way the hell and gone off course. She wondered what the weather had been like that night. She did another search and raised the National Weather Service’s site, which was excellent but was more focused on forecasts than on history.
Well, hell. You could see Carryall Mountain from Newenham, couldn’t you? She tried to picture the horizon in that direction. She thought so. If you could, and if it had been clear that night, someone might actually have seen the plane auger in. There were a lot of Alaskan old farts in Newenham, a lot of people who’d been around from well before war had broken out. The plane must have made one hell of a bang when it went in, and that wasn’t something you forgot.
She’d make a few calls tomorrow, she promised herself. She shut down the computer and resumed pacing away the minutes until Liam got home.
FOURTEEN
Charles was already at Bill’s, vamping every female in sight. Tasha Anayuk, Natalie Gosuk’s roommate, was leaning up against the booth, gazing into his face as if he was the answer to all her prayers. Bill made sure his glass never ran dry. And Jo Dunaway was sitting across from him.
“Liam,” Charles said, catching sight of his son and breaking into a warm and well-practiced smile.
“Dad.” He nodded at Jo.
Special Agent James Mason was sitting next to Charles, and nodded to Liam, his round-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose again.
Liam wondered about those glasses. They looked like plain glass, and the brown eyes behind the glass seemed to be very shrewd. During an interrogation, a perp might find those glasses less alarming than the eyes.
Jo had a notebook out, he noticed, and several pages were already filled with her cramped scribble. A curl fell over her eye and she flipped it back with an impatient gesture. “You giving an interview?” Liam said to Charles, careless of the incredulity in his voice.
“The air force brings back its own,” Charles said, smile gone. “No matter how long they’ve been gone. I think that’s a damn good story, and one the public has a right to know.”
“Their families are all likely dead by now. Why not leave them where they are, declare the area a graveyard?”
Jo and Liam both waited for Charles’ answer. He made a show of thinking it over, and when the silence had drawn out long enough to be anticipatory, said simply, “They’re ours. They were members of the force when they took off from Nome that evening. They were members of the force when they went off course. They were members of the force when they slammed into that glacier. Just because they’re dead doesn’t make them any less ours. We don’t leave anyone behind. We defend the nation and we protect our own.”
Liam could see that Jo, hard-nosed seeker of truth that she was, was nonetheless impressed by this speech, and Tasha was either in love or getting ready to enlist, or maybe both. Liam ordered a beer.
Jo flipped through her notes. “I think that’s all for now, Charles. If I have any further questions, may I call you?”
The smile was back and full-bore. “Of course. But why don’t you stay and have dinner with us?”
Her gaze rested for a speculative moment on Liam’s face. “Sure. Why not?”
“I can’t stay long,” Liam said.
Mason took a gulp of beer.
They ordered, ribeye for Charles, filet mignon for Jo, New York for Liam, steak sandwich for Mason. All the fishermen whose boats were still in the water had taken one look at the horizon and had stayed inside the breakwater that morning, so there was no fish or shellfish on the menu that night. Charles ordered a bottle of wine, and Liam, recognizing the signs, wondered if he ought to give Jo some kind of alert. He decided not to. He didn’t like her job, but he liked her just fine, and in spite of the crap she’d dumped all over him on Wy’s behalf he was glad Wy had such a staunch friend. But she was a grown woman who made her own choices.
He winced away from the prospect of Wy’s best friend and his father in the sack together, but then he’d winced at the reality of Diana Prince and his father in the sack together and it hadn’t killed him. His father was a rounder. If a woman was even halfway presentable and even a tenth of her was willing, it was as inevitable as the sun rising in the east that Charles would hit on her. Liam still thought the impulse to nail everything in sight came from Liam’s mother’s abandoning the both of them for a German nightclub owner when Liam was barely six months old, but that was his father’s problem to work out, not his. He didn’t do therapy. He kept his nose buried in his beer and spoke only when spoken to.
The bar was about half-full, mostly of drinkers. Moses was at his usual table, playing chess with Clarence Saguyuk, another old geezer who looked twice Moses’ age and had maybe half as many teeth. Neither factor seemed to affect his playing ability, if the forest of pawns, knights, rooks and one queen at his elbow was any indication. Eric Mollberg sat a little behind Clarence, a glass in one hand. He looked almost sober. Maybe he was finally coming out the other end of the tunnel. Liam had been down that same tunnel and he knew just how long it was.
Moccasin Man was holding forth in his usual booth, too, and Liam saw him make at least two sales. Gray was getting bolder with every day that passed without an arrest. Fine by Liam. Pretty soon Evan Gray would have enough rope to hang himself, and Liam would be there, ready to haul on the other end of it.
He wished with all his heart that the politicians in Juneau and Washington, D.C., would get a clue and legalize and tax all drugs, from dope to crack to ecstasy. If people wanted to go to hell in a pile of white dust or at the end of a needle, let them, instead of overworking law enforcement and overcrowding the jails to the po
int that every third bust was a drug bust and that the U.S. had more people in jail today than the Soviet Union ever did in all their gulags combined.
The result was the Evan Grays of this world, with a marijuana grow stashed somewhere in or near Newenham and a profitable and growing retail business. Admit him to the ranks of businessmen and be done with it, and while we’re at it, tax the hell out of him, Liam thought, watching Tasha Anayuk slide out of the booth opposite Gray, tucking something into her pocket. She saw Liam watching, and instead of flushing and scurrying away like the lawbreaker she was, she flashed him a brilliant smile and a little wave.
“Don’t you think, Liam?”
“Sorry?” he said, turning back to his father. “I didn’t hear you.”
“There ought to be a museum dedicated to Alaska’s World War II effort.”
Liam cut a piece of steak. “Why not?”
“Really,” Charles insisted. “The Alcan was built to support Lend-Lease planes to Russia and China. The war in the Aleutians drew enough Japanese strength north to make the victory at Midway possible.” He was at his most winning and it was all directed straight at Jo Dunaway, who was looking, in spite of herself, a little dazzled. Although that could have been the face Jo always put on when she got ready to seduce more information out of a source than they had previously known they had. According to Wy, such sources were legion, and Jo left them all lamenting their failure to recognize this fact.
“Maybe you could get in touch with the air museum in Anchorage,” Jo said. “They’re underfunded and going out of business every other week. If you could find a sponsor, they’d probably greet you with open arms.”
“It’s a thought,” Charles said, with a warm smile that applauded such a wonderful idea and the wonderful person who had had it.
Be careful what you wish for, little girl, Liam thought. Half a steak to go, some chitchat, and he was out of here.
“Liam.”
“Dad?”
“How have you been?”
“Fine.”
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