Skyhammer

by Richard Hilton

  The sun was breaking through in places. Stretches of the mountainside ahead of her would go suddenly bright, and then dim again. She went for several more miles, the road alternately hugging the edge of the benchland and moving away, and then she knew she had to be getting close. Each time she crested a ridge, she slowed almost to a halt and scanned the vista below. Maybe it was still a little farther upriver, where the pine forest on the northern exposures was denser. It wasn’t here. Nor was it at the next ridge top.

  Then suddenly, there was an old schoolhouse on the left, and she remembered that, and then the road forked again, one way going down steeply on the right, and she remembered that, too, and backed up and turned off. This road was narrower, much less traveled, but she did not have to go very far. There was a place to pull off. It was just as she remembered it.

  She got out of the car and stood for a minute. The quiet was like a deafness. The air was chilly but clean, crisp, full of that early spring smell that nevertheless reminded her of Lapwai’s backyard root cellars—the smell of damp humus, of leaves decaying. She zipped up her jacket and leaned into the car and drew to her the plastic box that held his ashes. Then she stepped carefully through the dry teasel to the fence. That time he’d brought her here, Emil had held down the top wire with his strong brown hands and laughed along with her when she almost tripped anyway, catching the cuff of her jeans and hopping on one foot. It had been in May, everything green, the slope beyond the fence a carpet of green spattered with thousands of yellow flowers, whose name she couldn’t remember. Emil had given them a Nez Perce name.

  She set the box over first, then pressed the rusty wire down and stepped over. It was fifty yards to the outcrop of basalt, through more teasel and sumac. She came out onto the promontory just as the sun broke through again and struck the river down below, silvering its surface. There were weathered fragments of rock here, big as bushel baskets—emerald green moss like brocade in the seams—and she sat down on one and gazed out at the other side of the canyon, still shrouded in mist. The sadness inside her was like a blade of ice, hollowing her out, and she cried for a few minutes, holding the box close, remembering the white burst of EmiPs teeth when he laughed, the quick, powerful way he had of moving, even when he was gentle. That certainty—the grace of it—had been the thing that attracted her most. She wiped her face and smiled down at the box, shaking her head, feeling his presence now, remembering how in the stories of the Nez Perce, Coyote was always dying and coming back to life.

  The dry grass around her was flattened suddenly by a gust of wind. It was time. She stood up. If there had been someone else with her, maybe then there would have been something to say aloud, but there wasn’t anyone else, so there was nothing more to be said or even thought. There was only to do it.

  The granules, fine as sand, spilled down over the steep slope. But the lighter ashes were like smoke. The wind blew them down river, at an angle away from her, and within seconds the air was clear again.

  “A SLEDGEHAMMER THAT POUNDS WITH THE

  REALITY OF WHAT CAN HAPPEN AND DEFIES

  THE READER TO PUT IT DOWN.”

  —Richard Herman, Jr., author of Firebreak

  An ex-Vietnam jet fighter jockey and one of New World Airlines’s best pilots, Emil Pate is a man with a grievance. When ruthless corporate raider Jack Farraday seized the airline, he not only crushed his competition, but also destroyed every pilot who dared oppose his terms. For years, Pate seethed helplessly while Farraday got away with murder. But now Pate aims to salvage his pride. His weapon: the Boeing MD-80 he files. he will hurl his Flight 555 into Farraday’s headquarters. And Farraday will pay for his viciousness. As the plane plunges toward its fatal rendezvous, FBI hostage negotiator Brian L’Hommedieu hunts desperately for a way to stop Pate. But what are his choices? To call Pate’s bluff and risk a ten-city-block inferno? Or save the city—by doing the unthinkable? Fasten your seat belts. Say your prayers. And get ready for ...

  SKYHAMMER

  * * *

  “SKYHAMMER has the kind of reality intelligent

  thriller readers demand.

  It opens new horizons for the airborne thriller.”

  —Jack Merek, author of Battle of Britain