Scott Free

by John Gilstrap

  Isaac’s brain fired a shiver before he fully comprehended why. It was the song on the radio—Andy Williams crooning “Moon River.” His heart racing, Isaac checked his watch and verified the time: it was precisely 3:00. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered.

  The signal had been set up years ago. Isaac would listen to the obscure radio band every afternoon. If there was a problem, then straight-up at three o’clock, he’d hear “Moon River.” So, this was a first. “Moon River” meant that Isaac had somehow screwed up, and the very thought of it baffled him. Isaac never made mistakes.

  Then he remembered the man in the truck stop. The one who kept looking at him and then looking away. He’d sensed that something was wrong even then, but was distracted by Maurice before he could act on his suspicions.

  “I will be damned.” He said it again, because it was the only thing he could think of to say.

  Isaac checked his watch again, this time to verify the date: February 25; 2/25. It would be 2:25 tomorrow morning before he would be able to pick up the coded message, and in the meantime, he’d just have to wonder. Surely it was a mistake.

  Just to be on the safe side, Isaac wandered into the little study hidden behind the panel in the kitchen wall, and over to the vault. He dialed in the combination, pulled the door open and scanned the collection of weaponry. Until he had some notion of what was going on, he traded in the little .38 snub-nose that always graced his waist for an H&K 9 mm. Then, just to be sure, he slipped a full magazine into an MP5 assault rifle before closing and locking the door again.

  With a deep sigh, Isaac turned off the radio, selected a Rimsky-Korsakov CD for the player and settled back into his chair.

  Try as he might, mental peace would be hard to come by on this night.

  • • •

  SCOTT AWOKE THINKING somebody had hit him. Out of nowhere, a cramp seized his stomach, pulling his knees up to his chest. It was a deep, grinding pain that started low and spread quickly, like a kick in the balls, leaving him wondering if he might puke. He clenched his jaws against the bile that flooded up behind his tongue, willing the contents of his stomach to remain where they were. A minute later, the pain was gone, but it left him feeling weak, shaky. He needed food. Water, too, probably. He scraped a glove full of snow away from the inside wall and shoved it into his mouth. To hell with Sven and his warnings. He had to chew to make it melt, and as he swallowed, he could feel every inch of its progress down his gullet.

  He closed his eyes.

  Work to stay awake, Sven told him. Sleep is a very dangerous thing.

  As he drifted off again, Scott dreamed of dying.

  AIRPLANES.

  Scott bolted upright, fully aware before he was fully awake. Propelled by adrenaline, he scrambled for the shelter door, pushing it open and crawling out into the snow.

  The thick canopy overhead distorted the sound of the aircraft engines just enough that Scott couldn’t tell where they were coming from. They could be overhead, or they could be two miles away, propellers churning the air relentlessly. As he listened, Scott’s spirits soared.

  “They’re looking for me,” he announced to the forest.

  That had to be it. A passing airliner or a military plane would have jet engines; the sound of people in a hurry to get where they’re going. But propellers were for cruising. For rescuing. He let out the war whoop of all war whoops.

  This was it. The best moment of all. Wrap a lifetime of Christmases and birthdays into one package, throw in seventh grade, when he made straight A’s all year long, and even the day he got his driver’s license, and you wouldn’t come close to the jubilation of this moment. His war whoop rattled the trees, and he found tears tracking down his face—hot trails on cold-numbed flesh.

  Truly, they were here.

  But did they know? Could they know? The trees were too thick! He needed to make it easier for them somehow. He needed to send a signal so they’d know how close he was.

  So, how close was he?

  He had no idea, and with only one flare in the gun, he couldn’t afford to make a mistake. The sound came from everywhere. Well, everywhere but directly overhead.

  Scott closed his eyes and executed a painfully slow pirouette, hoping to pinpoint the direction where the sound of engines was strongest. After two rotations, he wrote off the half of the world that lay beyond the wreckage, and concentrated instead on the half that lay beyond the new shelter. According to the compass on the zipper fob on his coat, that put it on the western half of the globe. But where? Before he started chasing after a noise, he’d better know where the hell he was going. He shuddered to remember how disoriented he’d become the night before. Never again.

  He could do this. If he paid careful attention to the compass as he walked, and used the knife from the survival kit to blaze a trail, he should be able to go wherever the sound took him, and still be able to find his way back. Hell, he’d done it a thousand times on Scout trips. So what if the penalty for a mistake was a little higher? Okay, a lot higher.

  He even had a map to follow: that ratty, overfolded USGS map he’d found in the cockpit. He hadn’t really looked at it yet, so for all Scott knew, it was a map of Poughkeepsie, but maybe not. If he took it along, maybe he’d see some landmark that would tell him exactly where he was. Who knows? Maybe he’d break into a clearing and discover that they were right at the foot of Mount Rushmore. Okay, that would put them way off course, but still. Certainly, it couldn’t hurt to take it along.

  It all came back to him quickly, once he started walking. Use your compass to sight in on an object, then lock onto the object with your eyes and walk to it. When you get there, use the knife to mark it with a blaze for the return trip and take another sighting. The process was tedious as hell, but this was no time for shortcuts.

  He gave himself an hour—forty minutes out and twenty minutes back; the return trip shorter because he didn’t have to stop to mark blazes. Progress was slow. What looked smooth as white icing in fact hid countless rocks and dead falls. Thank God his ankle was feeling better—not perfect by a long shot, but a heck of a lot better. According to the rules for orienteering, success depended on never letting your eyes wander from the selected target, but he had to look down every now and then, just to see where he was putting his feet. If, when he looked up again, he couldn’t decide whether his original target had been the tree on the right or the left, he’d have to shoot another azimuth.

  He quickly learned to choose landmarks with character—something to distinguish them from all other features. A dangling branch, maybe, or an odd growth pattern. For the blaze itself, he preferred to strip a section of bark, leaving a white stripe against the dark wood of the trunk, but he was flexible. For one blaze, he’d actually tied a knot in the top of a four-foot hemlock sapling. It took more time than he could afford, but it was kind of fun.

  An hour into it, he realized that his forty-minute goal had been foolhardy. His arms ached from all the cutting and hacking, and as sweat dripped down the crease between his nose and his cheek, he had to chuckle at the irony. Cold as witches’ titties, and here he was breaking a sweat by walking.

  The ticking clock was a problem. Not only was darkness moving closer, but he worried how long the planes would continue to buzz the air before they just gave up and went home. They’d come this far; the rest was up to him, and he still didn’t know where he was going.

  But the noise was closer. Maybe it was just the thinning trees, but honest to God, he swore that the sound of the engines had grown louder by half. He could almost feel the sound in his chest.

  Breaking through a wall of spruces, the gentle slope he’d been climbing for so long grew sharply steeper. But of course. What better time to encounter a huge hill than when your legs are screaming for you to sit down? The growl of the engines drew him closer still.

  Leaning into the slope, his boots started to slip. Steeper still, and now he used his hands. Soon, the terrain was more vertical than horizontal. Eve
ry muscle screamed for him to stop, but he wouldn’t listen. He couldn’t. After this much effort, there had to be a reward, even if it was just a level patch of ground where he could rest for a few minutes.

  Finally, the crest. Blood pounded in his ears as he scaled the last twenty feet.

  But the crest wasn’t a crest at all; merely a high spot before a gentle downward slope through thick trees, beyond which Scott could just barely see a cliff that looked like the edge of the world. He ran toward it, and slid to a halt, inches from the edge of a vertical rock face that dropped hundreds of feet into a fog that concealed whatever lay below. The bitter wind lashed his face as he looked out into a steel gray sky, still obesely pregnant with snow. Out here, beyond the windbreak of the forest, the air seemed twenty degrees colder.

  The propeller buzz seemed farther away now, completely concealed by clouds. Then the engine grew loud again. This made no sense. Maybe it was just an acoustical trick on a cloudy day; clouds did that sometimes. How many times had he heard a jet engine right overhead, only to find that it belonged to a spec way up in the sky?

  He only needed one good glimpse of the airplane; good enough that they’d be able to see a flare if he fired it. Correction: the flare, his only one. “One shot only, Mr. O’Toole,” Scott said to himself in his best Sean Connery from The Hunt for Red October. Assuming the flare worked, and that the pilots were watching, and they’d know what it meant when they saw it—hell, assuming Scott knew how to fire the damn thing—then this nightmare could end. He could already feel the flannel sheets against his skin. The food in his belly. Three days of nonstop sleep.

  So, where was the plane?

  The sound shifted to his right, and he turned his head to follow it. The aircraft refused to show itself through the fog, choosing instead to tease him from someplace just beyond his sight.

  Then he saw it. Just a flicker, really; a shutter-flash peek at a black silhouette just visible through a hole in the overcast, gone as quickly as it appeared. But it seemed so far away. It might as well have been on the other side of the world. And now it was gone completely.

  Shit.

  He waited another two minutes before his next snapshot of the faraway craft, and then three more for the next one after that. It was orbiting a pattern that was every bit of five miles away. Maybe even more.

  Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

  Then he got it. In a burst of clear vision, he knew exactly what had happened, and the realization took his breath away. Dropping back a few yards to get himself out of the wind, Scott dug through his coat pocket for the topographical map, which he spread out on the snow, anchoring the edges with snowballs.

  “SkyTop,” he whispered. “SkyTop, SkyTop. Where the hell are you?” There, he found it, nearly in the middle of the map, where someone had circled it with a yellow highlighter. Cody, he supposed. His hands trembled in his gloves as he traced a line across the map from the ski resort to Salt Lake City.

  Wherever he was, he figured he had to be somewhere near that line. No! That’s where the plane would think he was. In reality, he should be a couple of miles to the east of that. But where? Reading the contour lines, he saw countless peaks and valleys along the eighty-mile route, but nothing that matched the gorge that he’d just seen with his eyes. With a twenty-foot contour interval—one rust-colored line on the map for every twenty-foot change in elevation—the gorge should register as a solid brown ribbon on the map, but nothing he saw even came close.

  “Look for a river,” he told himself. This kind of canyon could only be carved by a river.

  But there was no river. What was he doing wrong? It shouldn’t be this difficult. You had green for land, blue for water, and a smattering of other colors for everything else. Where the hell was the river?

  Then, he saw it. “Oh, shit,” he breathed. “Oh, no, no, no, it can’t be…”

  He snatched the map up into his fist and crawled back, until his head and shoulders cleared the ridge and he could see down into the gorge again. He found the spot on the map where the blue line of the river was flanked by his heavy contour line, and then traced that to the small section of the ribbon that ran north and south, just as this gorge did.

  Scott tilted his head up and squinted through the haze. According to the map, the opposite side of the gorge should be flanked by two big peaks, the one on the right significantly taller than the one on the left. It seemed like five minutes passed before the wind cleared away enough of the fog for him to see, but when it did, and he saw that he was right, an icy fist twisted a handful of guts.

  He ducked quickly back down to look at the map one more time, and then again to verify his findings with his eyes.

  “Oh, my God, we’re thirty miles off course.” Thirty miles! Jesus.

  Think, Scott, think. There had to be a way. The day never dawned when there wasn’t hope. He could do this. He had to do this.

  Otherwise, he was sure to die.

  11

  SCOTT STAYED THERE on the slope longer than he should have, triple-checking his calculations, praying that he’d screwed them up. But dammit, he never screwed up in math. How could they have wandered so far?

  He tried telling himself that none of that mattered now, but the sentiment seemed hollow. Seeing that airplane so far away served to emphasize the hopelessness. And as far away as it was, its pilots probably thought they were buzzing the outermost reaches of their search area. So much for ending it all with a flare.

  Scott sat there in the snow long beyond the time when his butt had grown numb from the cold. With the map put away, he turned the flare gun over in his hands. He’d been stupid to think it would be so simple.

  Maybe he should shoot anyway. Shoot now and take a chance. What did he have to lose? For all he knew, this was the closest he’d ever be to rescue. What the hell? He had no food, no reasonable prospects to find any, certainly not in this weather. If he didn’t take his shot now, how did he know he’d even be alive to try again tomorrow?

  He had to try. Now.

  But where was the plane? Where was the constant hum of its engines? Where the hell did they go?

  “Scott, you’re an idiot,” he moaned. He’d hesitated and now he’d lost. Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply. The freezing air hurt his sinuses.

  The wave of despair blindsided him. He’d never felt so insignificant. So what if he died? Who would even know? Who would care? Oh, sure, his dad would mourn him, and his closest friends, but after a few days, what difference would it make? What difference did Scott make?

  These thoughts terrified him. When the time came, he wanted his death to be a momentous event—the stuff of headlines all around the world. Rock Star Scott O’Toole Dies in Plane Crash. Rock stars always died in plane crashes. Well, at least he got that part right.

  A crippling sadness overtook him without warning, taking his breath along with it—a great puff of white vapor lost in a white world. Who did he think he was kidding? How did he ever allow himself to believe that he could make it through this thing? Christ, he didn’t even belong on the trip that stranded him here in the first place.

  He never should have accepted her invitation, her gigantic up yours to his father. Skiing was a Team Bachelor thing; Mom had nothing to do with it. Looking back on it, Scott wondered how he could have been such a shit to a man who always treated him like a prince. If this was God’s way of paying him back for hurting his dad, then the Big Guy won big time. Score it 21-zip at the half with things looking bad for the O’Toole team.

  Recognizing the dark thoughts for what they were—the leading edge of panic—Scott swiped the crystallized tears from his eyes and struggled back to his feet. It was time to go back. He’d already wasted too much daylight. Night was coming and he dreaded it more profoundly than death itself. The night would bring endless hours of frigid darkness where his mind would occupy itself with terrifying thoughts of God only knew what, too numb to stay awake, but too frightened to go to sleep.

  The blazes,
it turned out, were a wasted effort. His outbound journey had cut a deep trench through the snow. A blind man could have found the way back. He rationalized that the way his luck was running, if he hadn’t carved the blazes, then sure as hell, there’d have been some huge tornado of wind to obliterate his tracks.

  Nothing had changed at the crash site. As the light began to fade, all that remained for today was to build a fire. For that, he turned to the wreckage itself. If he couldn’t start a fire with gasoline, then shame on him. He could drain fuel from the tanks into a container of some sort and then light it with a fusee at just the right moment, and the column of greasy black smoke would be visible for miles.

  But the timing would be important. With darkness approaching, it would be stupid to light it tonight. And having seen and smelled gasoline fires before, he knew that the smoke that made it such a great signaling device would make it impractical for any other use—like, say, keeping warm. No, he’d have to wait till he heard the approach of the engines and light it then. In a perfect world, the search planes would be attracted to the smoke, and then when they were directly overhead, he could fire his flare. Call it a plan.

  His dad used to tell him that God never closes a door without opening a window. Yeah, well, the windows were a hell of a lot smaller than the doors.

  Still, at the end of the millionth mood change of the day, Scott once again felt that he possessed some measure of control over his future. But he had to move quickly. Dusk approached, and he wanted to be ready the instant he heard the first sound of engines in the morning.

  With just a little luck, come noon tomorrow, he’d be out of here, tucked under an electric blanket with the thermostat set to nuclear. After that, his face would be all over Good Morning America and People magazine. Maybe they’d even give him a chance to play one of his songs on the air. Would that be cool, or what? The beginning of his real career. Maybe God’s window was bigger than he’d thought. All he had to do was make it through one more night.