Breaking the Ice (2 page)

Bryson glanced once more to the northwest, to assess the thick wall of charcoal clouds streaming rapidly in their direction. “Yeah, I’m headed up past Gunsight Mountain to get that photographer. He’s not equipped for a long-haul deep freeze.”

Grizz followed her gaze. “Gonna be cuttin’ it awful close to get there and back ’fore we’re socked in.”

“What else is new?” She unhooked the fuel hose and tightened the cap on the Piper’s wing. “No worries, Grizz,” she said, smiling at him reassuringly. “Probably won’t be able to get home tonight, though, so save me a bed, huh?”

“Will do.” He laid a beefy hand on her shoulder as she opened the door of the Cub. “Watch yourself up there.”

“Always.”

The photographer’s objective was Dall sheep, which kept to the higher alpine elevations, so Bryson had dropped him off at the edge of a glacier three thousand feet up the side of an unnamed mountain. As she circled above it, she cranked down her skis and checked the glacier for the subtle color changes that pinpointed the hidden crevasses that dotted its surface. The ancient ice inside the crevasses was a deep blue that often shone through the thin, fragile snow bridges that covered them. The overcast sky was a blessing, for it helped her delineate the landscape and calculate her approach. The glare off the snow on a sunny day often made it impossible to adequately judge depth of field, let alone any crevasses or other hazards.

After three passes, she chose her spot, a four-hundred-foot-long expanse of solid white near a moraine at one side of the glacier. Landing uphill, she braced herself for the impact of her skis against the uneven ice beneath the snow and set the Piper down, reducing her speed to thirty-five miles an hour. When the plane had nearly stopped, she tweaked the throttle and turned the Cub around, readying for an immediate downhill departure.

A blast of icy air flash-cooled every exposed inch of flesh and insinuated itself deep into the open collar of her jacket as soon as she opened her door. Muttering a string of curses, she zipped up and pulled on a woolen cap and extra pair of gloves before leaning out to assess the snow depth. A fine powder completely covered her skis and half her oversized tires, so she strapped her snowshoes to her boots before she exited the plane.

The photographer was nowhere in sight, but Bryson wasn’t worried. She’d seen his campsite from the air not far away, and the man had been instructed to hoof it back there, pack it up, and return immediately to their rendezvous point if he heard her plane approach before his scheduled pickup. Unless the wind was fierce and constant, the acoustics in the mountains were exceptional—you could hear the buzz of a small plane long before you could see it approaching.

While Bryson waited, she tramped out a runway with her snowshoes and inspected the exterior of the plane as thoroughly as she had just ninety minutes earlier. By the time the photographer appeared with his pack, she was done with her preflight checklist and had turned her attention to the rapidly deteriorating weather closing in on them. Dark clouds obliterated all the highest peaks in every direction, the wind was a steady twenty-five miles an hour, and the temperature had dropped to a degree or two above freezing.

“I take it there’s a problem?” her client shouted over the wind as he neared. A fiftysomething freelancer for
Big Game Hunter
magazine, the man wore a ski mask, thermal gloves, and brand-new Carhart insulated coveralls bulging from several layers beneath. He was so horribly out of shape he was gasping for air by the time he reached the Cub.

The plane was idling, and Bryson was standing by the open door to the cargo space behind the seats. “Big storm coming in.” She gestured impatiently for his pack.

He frowned and stood his ground. “I’m not done. I need to—”

“No chance,” she replied curtly and yanked the pack roughly from his shoulders. “Climb in, we gotta get moving.” When he still hadn’t moved by the time she’d stowed his gear, she fixed him with a glare and added, “
Now,
’less you want to be stuck inside your tent freezing your ass off for a couple weeks.”

Normally, she was nothing but polite with clients, most of whom were middle-aged businessmen from the lower forty-eight. She was used to the looks of apprehension that crossed their faces when they realized their bush pilot was a trim and taciturn five-foot-seven brunette who appeared ten years younger than her forty years, and not what they’d envisioned: some larger-than-life Harrison Ford look-alike who oozed machismo and bragged about his exploits in the air.

But most of her passengers refrained from anything more than the seemingly casual question about how long she’d been flying. This guy’s grilling on the way up had bordered on rude and chauvinistic, and she’d had to force herself to rise above it and remain professional.

They were airborne in two minutes and only fifty feet from the surface of the glacier when they got their first hint of the turbulence to come. The tiny plane shook like it was caught in a high-speed Mixmaster, then dropped twenty feet without warning, the ground rushing up at them with alarming speed.

“What the…is this normal?” the photographer shouted from his seat behind hers. Bryson could picture his expression. Even the most arrogant, macho guys went lily-white at a time like this, but she didn’t have time to confirm her suspicions in her mirror. She was too busy trying to keep the Cub in the air.

“We’ll be fine, just hold tight. It’ll be over before you know it.” She fought the downdraft, pulling hard on the controls, but the plane plummeted another fifteen feet as she curved away from the glacier and over the steep, rocky face of the mountain. They were so close to it she could see the pale hint of a trail etched by decades of goat hooves.

“Fuck!” the client yelled, just before losing his breakfast in a splash of pink-speckled yellow against the right-side window.

“Not helping.” Bryson gritted her teeth against the stench as her own stomach roiled, but she kept her focus on trying to regain control of the aircraft. The wind fought back with a vengeance, however, straining the muscles of her biceps. For every few feet of hard-won altitude she gained, the wind reclaimed half of it again, in bone-jarring lurches that threatened to shake the plane apart.

Finally they reached a bit of calmer air in a wide valley between two mountains, but the low, dense cloud cover kept her flying near the treetops, which did nothing to ease the unyielding grip her passenger maintained on the strap above his head. And the reprieve didn’t last. Soon they were back in the Mixmaster, and thick, heavy sleet began to hammer the windshield.

It was now a race to get back before ice coated the wings and cowling, but the steady headwind limited Bryson’s speed and forward progress. Among the myriad of matters demanding her attention she added one more: to constantly scout for places she could safely put down in a hurry, if it came to that.

Her radio crackled to life. “BTT to A2024B Piper. Bryson, you copy?” The voice, a raspy baritone, belonged to Mike “Skeeter” Sweeney, a fellow bush pilot who worked part-time manning the minuscule FAA station at the village airstrip.

“A2024B Piper,” she replied, relaying the identification tag emblazoned in large black text on the side of the Cub. “’Sup, Skeeter? Kinda busy here.”

“Grizz asked me to give you a shout. Really squirrelly here. Ceiling’s down below two hundred feet, sustained winds thirty and better, and it’s startin’ to ice up like a sonofabitch.”

A glance at her GPS told Bryson she still had eight miles between her and the airstrip. It didn’t sound like much, but it was an eternity in conditions like this, so she kept checking the terrain below for suitable places to land. “Should be okay. Dicey, but seen worse.”

“Roger that. I’ve got the strip lights up full, and I’ll watch you on radar until you get in. Bettles out.”

She spotted another narrow canyon ahead, so she gripped the controls and risked a quick glance in the mirror at her passenger. “’Nother roller coaster coming up. Barf bag’s under your seat.” She hoped the warning would prevent any further splatters on her windows. Visibility was tough enough already, without another dose of half-digested powdered eggs and Spam.

As the man fumbled for her stash of bags, she added, “If you keep from messing up my plane again, I’ll give you a discount on future flights.” It was an easy promise, because the greenish tinge on his face made it clear this was the last time he’d set foot in any kind of bush plane.

Just as she expected, the downdraft in the narrow canyon was fierce, but she’d gained as much altitude as possible before it hit them, so when the bottom dropped out again she was able to keep the Cub from plunging into the river below. More worrisome now were the cliffs on either side of her wingtips. The wind buffeted the plane from side to side with alarming unpredictability, twice putting them within arm’s reach of the rocky façades.

She ignored the mumbled recitation of the Lord’s Prayer from her passenger but took a few deep breaths herself when a subtle change in the whirr of the propeller told her the blades were accumulating a coat of ice.

It was bare-knuckle flying from then on, a steady battle against the wind and sleet, and those last few miles tested every bit of her considerable experience in the air. By the time she lined up for her approach to Bettles, the ceiling was only thirty feet, so she was grateful for her GPS and intimate knowledge of every mile of terrain in the surrounding area.

She cranked the skis back and peered anxiously through the haze of sleet for the airstrip, holding her breath. Skeeter had supplemented the dual strip of landing lights with four blazing fires in fifty-five-gallon drums, two on each end of the runway, and it was these she saw first.

As she made a mental note to buy him a beer, she descended the final few feet and made a perfect three-point landing. Her passenger exhaled loudly in relief, and she glanced in the mirror in time to see him making the sign of the cross.

“Thank you for flying with Thrillride Airlines,” she said cheekily as the Cub rolled to a stop at the edge of the runway. “You can pick up your complimentary beverage at the Den, since our stewardess was too preoccupied to serve you during your flight.” If the eclectic group of individuals who did what she did had anything in common, it had to be their readiness to daily stare death in the face with a sense of humor.

Still clutching his barf bag, the photographer staggered from the plane and headed directly to the roadhouse without a word, oblivious to his gear or the weather. Bryson chuckled. Grizz would get a few dollars from him tonight, at least the cost of several glasses of good Scotch.

October 21, morning

Atlanta, Georgia

“Karla? I know you’re there. Come
on,
already,
please
pick up. I’m way past worry and halfway to panic.”

During the brief silence, Karla pictured her best friend Stella pacing around the nurses’ station with her cell phone. She was restless, the kind who rarely lit in one spot for more than five minutes, and Karla had given her good reason to be concerned. This call was the latest in a string of messages left since the funeral, none of which Karla had returned.

“Hon, I know you’re hurting and don’t want to see anyone right now. But this just isn’t good. I’m coming by after work, and you’d damn well better open the door this time. At least let me take you out for a bite to eat or something. Love you.”

Karla had no intention of allowing Stella in, for even in her fog of grief and confusion, she knew her friend would be shocked by the state of both her appearance and her apartment. She didn’t have any energy to fend off well-meaning efforts to alleviate her downward spiral.

She’d lost so much weight that her pajamas hung loosely on her five-foot, four-inch frame, and dark circles under her eyes from too many sleepless nights marred her otherwise delicate features. Her collar-length, light brown hair was a shade darker than usual and plastered to her head, and at odd moments even she could detect the stench of her unwashed body.

Her two-bedroom apartment hadn’t fared the turmoil any better. Dirty mugs, most half full of cold, stagnant coffee, littered the living room, some on tables and some on the floor. Here and there were a few plates of crusted foodstuffs, uneaten and unrecognizable. The heavy curtains, drawn tight, blocked the sun so well she barely registered day from night. Only the pale glow of a single floor lamp saved the room from cave-like darkness.

Scattered around where she sat cross-legged on the carpet beneath the lamp were a half-dozen photo albums and several boxes, large and small, their contents in such disarray it looked as though she’d been burglarized.

The boxes that held memories of her four years with Abby had consumed the first days of her current despair. It had been a month since her partner left, but the wound of Abby’s betrayal was as open and raw as it had been the day she’d announced she was leaving Karla to follow her heart, having fallen in love with a coworker at her law firm.

Karla was still having a hard time wrapping her mind around the abrupt, unexpected ending of their calm domesticity. One day they were sitting down to dinner together as usual, chatting about what movie to go see, and the next, Abby was packing her bags. Since then she’d asked herself over and over if Abby’s apparent happiness and devotion had been an illusion. Those boxes, full of ticket stubs and vacation souvenirs, small stuffed animals and other mementos, held no answers, no clues to how she could have been so wrong about their life together.