Expect the Sunrise (5 page)

The plane’s engine droned in his ears, a hum that pushed into his brain, turning it numb. Below, he saw the pipeline, a metal snake winding through the lush forest. Fifty feet to the west of the pipeline, the gravel Dalton Highway furrowed the forest north, some four hundred plus miles. To the west, through the cockpit window, he saw the jagged spires of the Brooks Range, a gateway to the Arctic looming closer. Hovering like smoke, wispy gray clouds bulging with rain shrouded the peaks to the north. Taiga swathed the valleys, a boggy, half-frozen carpet that never fully thawed.

“We’re climbing to four thousand feet,” came the voice over the loudspeaker. “I want to get over these clouds, so we’ll have to go through them. It might get a little bumpy, so prepare for turbulence.”

Mac held on to his seat, wishing he’d driven his half-ton Chevy. Still, air travel, even in a small plane, made better sense than driving in the iffy weather of northern Alaska in late September without a town for two hundred miles.

He cut his gaze to the pilot. Dressed in a leather jacket, jeans, a scarf, and gloves, she wore her curly dark hair behind her ears. He’d been taken for a moment by her dark eyes. Emma. Interesting. Scottish vernacular for “lady.” He’d heard his father use the name occasionally when referring to his mother.
“Aye, she’s a real Emma, that one.”
He smiled as his father’s brogue laced through his mind. Although Mac considered himself an American first, having become a citizen when he was in his teens, his father made sure Mac knew and appreciated his heritage.

Emma seemed confident enough. He noticed she hadn’t had a problem telling Ishbane to not smoke during the trip or lifting the bags into the belly pod. She probably had to be in shape to run flights all summer long, loading and unloading cargo. But she seemed so small, even breakable. Maybe it was the way she had hugged her friend. Mac had watched out the round Plexiglas window, and as they embraced, he’d felt a pain so intense slice through him that he had to clench his jaw. He even pushed against his chest as if to massage it away.

He’d had a friendship like that with Brody. And his death left a hole inside that still took Mac’s breath away sometimes.

“You need to come home, Stirling. Get a wife, start a family.” Brody had sat by the fire, his legs crossed at the ankles, drinking Cragganmore.

Mac looked out the window, remembering his answer. “I don’t have time for a wife. A woman would have to crash-land at my feet to get my attention.”

Brody had stared into his glass, swirling the liquid, his voice dropping. “Maybe you just haven’t found one worth paying attention to yet.”

“No,” Mac had wanted to say. “I’ve seen the destruction of too many marriages, the debris from trying to balance a family with a dangerous and demanding career.” Besides, he just wasn’t the roses, birthday-remembering, poetry-quoting, romance-hero type that a woman dreamed about.

Sleet pelleted the wings, and a flash of lightning crackled through the sky. Mac grabbed his armrest as the plane jittered in the air.

“Turbulence?” Ishbane snapped from behind him. “
This
is turbulence?”

Mac hadn’t liked the skinny man from the start, and now his tone only made Mac bristle. Like they needed reminders? Mac watched the pilot. Her posture betrayed no emotion as she held the plane’s yoke.

Mac had flown using his instruments only a few times, but here in Alaska, approaching the Brooks Range, it couldn’t be more dangerous to fly in zero visibility. More than that, he saw a film starting to form on the wings.

Ice.

Turn around.
The feeling clutched his gut as the plane’s engine began to labor. The high-pitched whine sounded like a scream.

Next to Mac, Phillips closed his eyes.

The plane jerked and dropped altitude. Mac’s stomach hit his ribs, and he sucked a breath.

The woman behind him screamed.

Emma didn’t flinch, just levered the plane into a steeper climb.

Mac gripped his armrests, eyes on the wings.
Climb. Climb
. If they could get above the clouds, find the sunshine and better weather …

The plane slowed, time turning to syrup as Mac watched the ice layer the wings. Then through the whine of the engine Mac heard it. The sound that cut through his soul and stole his breath.

Stall warning.

The plane stopped climbing, and for a white-hot second of silence, simply gave up life as Mac and everyone else in the cabin sucked in a horrified gasp.

And then they were falling.

Chapter 2

THE SUNLIGHT FOUND Gerard MacLeod’s neck, heating the layers of flannel and wool as he loaded his arms full of the last of his firewood and turned toward the cabin. The smell of autumn hung in the air—pine and dying deciduous leaves, the breath of winter just above the darkening clouds to the south. He stood for a moment, reading the sky. Days like today that hinted at trouble despite the seeming calm made him anxious when he knew that Andee was up there.

Please let me have taught her well.
He let the thought calm him. Of course Andee would be fine. She had turned out to be a better pilot than he—he should have expected that since she’d lived most of her life with her overachieving mother. Mary MacLeod knew how to instill determination into her daughter, and he’d done his part by making Andee face those moments of crisis and helping her breathe through them to think clearly.

At least he
hoped
that’s what he’d given her. Something to temper the legacy of abandonment in Andee’s mind. He could still see lingering fragments of hurt in her eyes, especially during this time of the year when her upcoming departure to her mother’s in Iowa loomed like a death sentence over them, turning his past decisions into blinding moments of pain, reminding him anew of all he’d sacrificed.

Then again it had only been in the last few years that he’d let himself feel anything. After Andee and her mother had left, he’d made himself go numb. It seemed like the only way to get through each day.

But today he felt the warmth of renewed relationship with his only child as he thumped into his tiny cabin, let the wood fall into the bin, and bent to stoke his stove. Andee would be here by tonight, and he had dinner planned—a tall stack of buttermilk pancakes with chocolate chips. He wished her mother would join them. Mary hadn’t been to see him in years—a fact that still felt like a hole inside him, even though they corresponded regularly. But maybe time would heal that wound also.

Time and forgiveness.

He still remembered the first time Andee had shown up in Disaster—right after her sophomore year in college, toting a blonde-haired friend with a New York accent. Those were the days when he still looked over his shoulder, spooked at every creak in the forest, and didn’t leave the cabin without his gun. Andee had appeared on the four-wheeler, stacked with supplies, clearly intent on spending time with him.

It had felt like living water to his parched soul. He drank in her company, her smile, and her laughter and ignored the waves of regret that threatened to pull him under.

A stronger and wiser man might have made her leave. Instead, he hoped and prayed that the danger had passed. After twenty years, certainly the Rubinov family had forgotten or at least moved on to bigger acts of vengeance. Certainly his daughter and wife were no longer targets. He’d started to hope that they might be a family again. Despite Mary’s fears, Gerard had broken his own rules and let Andee stay. Not only that, he looked forward to her visits. Now he prayed for Mary to join her. And from her recent letters … well, a man had reason to hope.

He closed the door to the stove and rose, walking to the cold storage to retrieve his breakfast. Usually he lived like a lonely hermit, evident in the scarce canned goods, the absence of curtains and pictures. But since Andee’s appearance, the place had lost its grease and fish odors. She’d cleaned, added the purple blossoms of Jacob’s ladder to the vase on the table, embedded the smells of oat bread and porridge into the pine walls, and displayed new photos of her and Sarah and her other Team Hope pals.

Pictures that he’d hidden with nearly rabid paranoia years before.

But those days had passed.
Certainly
, they’d passed. He’d even begun to consider Andee’s pleas to move to Disaster proper. He knew she’d feel better with him closer to town.

He opened the cool-storage door, grabbed a slab of bacon, and turned. He froze, staring at the man in the doorway, the one holding a gun.

He didn’t see the one behind him until a split second before the man’s blow sent him to the floor in an explosion of pain.

Andee blocked out the screams that could be heard through her headset and above the noise of wind as the Cessna plummeted. Her entire body felt weighted, as if it too had gathered the ice that was forcing the aircraft to the ground. The plane fell like dead-weight, the stall warning still sounding, scraping her nerves. If she could get the plane below this cloud with enough air left, she could level it out and land … maybe.

Andee tried to pull back on the yoke. Judging from the way her controls responded, sluggish at best, the ice had the final say on their rate of descent. Currently, they were plunging at 100 knots per second, banking west toward the mountains.

And she couldn’t seem to pull them out of the dive. In a moment, they’d start to spin.

Exhaling hard, she pulled back on the controls, struggling to even the artificial horizon. Her ailerons must be frozen into place, along with the rudder. Her foot pedals didn’t respond.

Why had she climbed into the clouds? She’d collected ice over Murphy’s Dome on more than one occasion, but she’d always been able to fly through and cut out into the warming, lifesaving sunshine.

Why hadn’t she listened to her instincts and simply stayed on the ground?

Not now.
She wouldn’t listen to the voices of guilt until later. When they were on the ground. Alive.

“Mayday, Mayday. This is November-one-three-seven-four-Lima. We’ve been hit by lightning and are going down. Over.”

Nothing but static. Had her radio been iced over too? The weight on the antenna may have broken it off. She turned on the Emergency Locator Transmitter and the responder to 7700 MHz.
Please, please let the ELT be working.
Had she remembered to check the batteries? If they crashed, any plane flying overhead would hear their distress call.

Andee glanced at Sarah. Her friend stared straight ahead, clasping the door grip.

They cleared the buffer of clouds, and the rugged landscape below threatened to cut off her air.
Calm down.

The plane began to spin. Andee ordered herself to slow her breathing and mentally catalog her responses.

Center the rudders.
She fought the controls; her hands whitened as she forced her head to stay clear. The plane spun once, then leveled out.
Thank You, God.

What was her checklist for a forced landing?
Turn fuel selector off. Throttle, closed. Mixture—idle cutoff. Mags, off. Land … ASAP.

She pulled back on the yoke. The elevator responded and pulled the nose up slightly. She nudged her flaps down, slowing the plane.

Land.

The plummet and spin had driven her course northwest over the foothills and rising horizon of the Brooks Range, glistening peaks of doom. Crippled, she would descend until they splotched nose first onto some jagged spire. She glanced at her falling altimeter. With this much ice, even the engine running at full power couldn’t keep the plane in the air. They’d never keep the height—even over Foggytop Mountain. She had to find a place to land, one that wouldn’t rip them apart piece by piece. She felt sweat bead underneath her cap, but inside her leather coat a shiver ran up her spine.

“Sarah, get on the horn and keep calling Mayday.” She handed Sarah the mike.

The stall warning continued to blare.

Andee evened the flaps, praying for response. The plane nosed up slightly, but at this speed, they’d be nothing but bear bait.

The plush carpet of tundra beckoned below, but the Cessna refused to respond in time. They passed a canyon dissected by a stream of glacier flow, and she willed them above a sawtooth ridge and past the furrows of a glacier field at the mouth of a high-altitude basin.