Killing a Cold One (24 page)

39

Thursday, December 18

BEWILDER CREEK CUT, HOUGHTON COUNTY

Friday said over the telephone, “A pilot spotted emergency-signal panels in Bewilder Creek Cut. Any idea where that is?”

“Houghton County, somewhere east of Pori.”

“Bad terrain?”

“If you like things populated, or flat.”

“The Baraga County sheriff called Ranse Nodnol. He'll scarf you up at the Baraga airport to be his spotter. Denninger and Celt are already in the area with Grinda, Simon del Olmo, and Junco Kragie.”

“Why so many DNR?”

“Too many old-timers on the Houghton County rescue outfit, and Sulla Kakabeeke and your game wardens are closer and know the terrain better.”

Service didn't know Nodnol. “Fixed-wing or chopper?”

“Chopper—Huey. USFS leases it for fires.”

“Get to Allerdyce on the 800 channel, tell him to dump Krelle at the Baraga office and get over to the airport to join Tree and Noonan. They're already over that way somewhere. Any radio traffic indicating an aircraft down?”

“Not yet. The FAA is involved and working their checklists and systems.”

“You sure the pilot saw emergency-signal panels?”

“VS-17s is what I was told.”

“What about signal mirrors, strobes, lasers, GPS beacons—anything else?”

“Just two panels made into an X.”

Translation: Medical assistance required.

“Is there wreckage?”

“No. Grady, get to the airport and help out.”

 

•••

 

Jesus, it was cold.

Ranse Nodnol was sixtyish, gray, and handled the bird with confidence. “Get lower?” Service asked.

The pilot nursed the cyclical, easing the Huey downward. “Get in back on the interphone and strap into the safety harness. I'm gonna sweep starboard, lift us, spin her one-eighty, and come down the other side. Hang on back there.”

The gorge pines were above them. “We got enough altitude?” Service asked the pilot.

“Keep your eyes on the ground and let me worry about the sky,” Nodnol said.

“The sighting was just above Greasy Grass Falls, and we're just beyond that.”

“I caught a flash of color,” the pilot said calmly. “Circling.”

Service hung on to a strap as the rising machine pressed him downward. He stared out the open hatch.
How does somebody crash in this terrain and survive?

Nodnol gave the rudder a tap and Service felt the machine drop into the steep ravine, where it immediately got darker. They stopped descending a hundred feet or so above the river, and Service looked out and saw the color.
Fuchsia, in an X.
“Got the signal. No doubt,” he told the pilot. “Can clearly see the panels. Where's the wreckage?”

“We're too low to hover and play,” Nodnol radioed. “I'll climb up so we can make several passes to see what we can identify.”

They made six low runs, and Service marked the areas with his handheld GPS while the pilot did the same. They compared coordinates and they matched. Service took digital photographs before climbing back up beside the pilot. “This a USFS chopper?”

“Belongs to a Vietnam vet named Magnusson. Summers he leases it to the USFS for fire suppression. Winters he takes whatever work comes along. Sheriff Kakabeeke got the initital report and called me. I called Magnusson, and here we are.”

Baraga County Sheriff Sulla Kakabeeke was a retired Trooper who had replaced the previous sheriff after a very messy situation. She was solid. “Bet she didn't even ask how much?”

“Nope, all she said was go fly.”

“You related to Magnusson?”

“Brother-in-law. We crewed together in 'Nam, '70 to '72.”

Grady Service understood such bonds.

They were back on the ground in fifteen minutes. Allerdyce was waiting with Treebone and Noonan, and an EMT from the Baraga County SAR team. The group had bags of equipment. Treebone handed him a list of weights of people and bags and Service handed it to the pilot.

“Our weight good to go?”

Nodnol quickly calculated, said, “Saddle up,” and tapped gauges with a gloved fingertip.

They wore extreme cold-weather gear now, and the pilot went right down into the canyon, descending so low and close that Service felt like he could reach out and pluck fresh needles off the white pine and hemlock trees.
Not the best feeling.

“Tallyho,” Nodnol said tersely. “Ten o'clock, east side. Check LZ cold.”

Service said, “We're not in Vietnam, Ranse.”

“Roger, LZ cold,” the pilot said. “For a change. Saw me a flat spot back there to put down this erector set, but I need eyes.”

Treebone leaned out the cargo door. “Five, six feet right, eight to ten vertical.”

The Huey slid right. Snow formed a cloud around the fuselage and filled the crew compartment with swirling angry snowflakes.

“Everybody hang tight,” the pilot said with a clipped voice over interphone. The ship hit with a solid but not hard thump. The rotors continued to turn, the turbines screaming. Service and Treebone knew to wait until the pilot cleared them to move. First, he'd let the engines cool. Noonan and Allerdyce looked not just calm, but disinterested. The EMT looked ready to rocket into action. The good ones always did.

The engines began to unwind. Nodnol said over the interphone, “You're five hundred clicks north of your target—closest spot I could find in this light. At least it's on this side of the river. I'll sit here and await orders.”

“Dismount!” Tree yelled.

Service and the others stepped down to the metal skid, then to the ground. Service reached in for packs and equipment bags and jerked them out. They put on packs and head lamps. The EMT's name was Sironi. “Your search,” Service said.

“They call me Late Night,” she said. “You see the panels?”

“Affirmative.”

“How high?”

“Above river level . . . twenty feet?”

“Two teams,” she said. “Two of you up the shoreline, three of us cross forty feet up. We should catch the panels between us. No wreckage, right?”

“None seen,” Service said.

“We'll assume rescue, until evidence dictates recovery,” Sironi said, opening a bag and handing each man a survival radio. “PRC One-Twelves,” she said. “I doubt cells or your 800s will be worth shit down here.” She pronounced PRC, “Prick.”

They moved out as dark was settling, hiking slowly north for more than an hour, all of them sweating profusely and adjusting clothing layers to compensate as they went. They also had to work hard to not slip on the ice and rocks. Noonan and Treebone worked low, along the riverside; Sironi, Service, and Allerdyce walked the high route.

Limpy spotted the signal panels and immediately slid down to them on his behind, Sironi right behind him, yelling, “We've got a body under the panels—” and then a split second later, “
Shit!
She's still breathing.”

Service joined them and looked.
Jesus, it was Anne Campau! How the hell did she get all the way over here?
Her uniform was torn and bloody. Sironi asked for help to pull Campau into the clear and wrap her in two extra large space blankets.

Noonan and Treebone saw the congregation of lights and clambered up. “Our path here was dicey,” Service told them. “Yours?”

“Flat enough if you don't count ice.”

Service toggled his PRC 112, called Nodnol. “Ranse, we've got one survivor, female, alive. We're coming south along the river with the litter. Call for emergency medical support at the airport.”

Sironi assembled a foldable litter and knelt by Campau, examining her as quickly as she could. “No bleeding or obvious external injury I can see,” she told the men. “Arm fracture, cheekbone, probably concussion; vitals are there, but real weak. She's hurting. I'll immobilize her head with a cervical collar,” she said, ripping the foam brace out of plastic packaging. “Unconscious, breathing labored, skin cold, blood pressure low. We need to move quickly, boys, quickly but carefully. Our girl's on the edge. Do everything together. Steady trumps fast today.”

Service nodded in the dark, sensing Sironi's competence and confidence. “You call all,” Tree said.

“Lift on my lift,” she said, “Two, one,
lift.
”

Nodnol radioed, “I won't start engines until all pax secure.”

It did not go as quickly as they would have liked, but the transfer got made, and Campau and Sironi got strapped in back. “You coming?” the EMT asked Service as the turbines screeched up rpms.

“No. Send food and coffee. Good luck, great job; thanks.”

Sironi and Service bumped fists.

They all lay down behind cover as the lifting chopper pounded them with snow and ice chunks.

Treebone said, “Less than fifty-fifty.” The chopper was quickly out of the gorge and beyond earshot, though Service could still feel some vibration in his bones. He had always felt helicopters long before and after others.

Sironi seemed to know her business. People up here valued space and privacy, but if you needed help, you could count on Yoopers to act without urging. This was the sort of rare place where people who had moved away fifty years ago still warranted a full-column obituary in the local weekly newspaper.
Once a Yooper, always a Yooper.

He felt himself surging with powerful emotions. Gratitude, pride, a sense of being connected to others, the weight of duty and resolve—the kind of shit that made you glad for what you and others like you did for others.

“Okay,” he said. “Let's go see if we can find out what the hell this is all about.”

He forced himself to put Anne Campau out of his mind.
Nothing you can do for her at this point. Your part's done; it's up to others now.

40

Friday, December 19

BEWILDER CREEK CUT

Ranse Nodnol returned five hours later with Sheriff Sulla Kakabeeke, CO Dani Denninger, a large camp tent, and enough soup and sandwiches to feed a small regiment. The sheriff jumped out and all of them unloaded before sending Nodnol back to Baraga to stand by.

“Ranse took Campau on to Marquette,” Kakabeeke told them when the chopper was gone. “She was still alive when they unloaded her there.”

“Why's Sironi called Late Night?” Service asked.

The sheriff said, “She was a medic in Iraq, got her sleep all screwed up. Almost all ops there were after dark, so she worked nights and slept days, her world inverted: Night is day and day is night. The name stuck. What do we have here?”

“No idea yet,” he said. “We never saw any aircraft debris from above. My recommendation is that we get the tent up, eat and sleep, and hit this thing hard in the morning when we can see.”
Campau had been missing for more than two weeks. How the hell had she stayed alive down here? Had she been somewhere else most of that time?

“Makes sense to me,” Kakabeeke said. “We're sixty miles crowfly from where she was last seen. Somebody want to enlighten me on how the hell she got all the way over here from WoJu?”

Service said, “Or survived for eighteen days?”

Silence all around. Service said, “Let's get the tent up, eat, sleep.”

 

•••

 

The next morning at dawn was spent carefully examining the area for evidence, a wasted effort. Nothing was found. Service and Denninger focused their attention on how Campau might have gotten into the gorge to end up where she had been found. Her being alive seemed to buck all odds.

“Maybe somebody thought she was dead and dumped her over,” Denninger suggested. “Even if she wasn't dead, she should have died pretty fast from exposure.”

“We need to climb up and see,” Service said. They were under the north rim. “How the hell did she get in from the north?” he asked.

“Same way we would,” Denninger said. “Four-wheeler.”

“You know this country?”

“Some. You can get fairly close to here on the old rail bed.”

“The Escanaba and Lake Superior Railroad is still active?”

“Not really, but the infrastructure's still there. Rumor has it that ownership will make a formal abandonment request so the line can become a state recreation trail.” Railroads all around the U.P. were dying, and it was good the old rail beds still found some purpose.

“Who climbs first?” he asked, staring up the iced rock wall.

“Hey, I can see you catching me, but not vice versa. If you climb first, we'll both end up crippled or dead. I'll take the lead on this, big guy.”

She ascended with no further comment.

Two hours later she called him on the PRC 112. “I've got an abandoned Honda up here, very old model.”

“Traceable?”

“We can try,” she said. “But I'm gonna have to find an easier way down. The climb up got sort of freaky.”

“Was the ORV hidden or just abandoned?” Service asked over the radio.

“Hidden pretty well. I smelled gas, which is the only reason I found it. I'm guessing it's stolen.”

“Which means Campau was brought in on it with a one-way, the machine hidden, and the perp hiked out. Where to? You get the VIN?”

“I did, but this is an ancient sucker. I'm guessing it hasn't been registered in a very long time, and was probably reserved for private land use only.”

Meaning it very well might never have been registered with the state.

“Do what you can,” he told Denninger as they waited for Nodnol to arrive, to fly them back to the Baraga airfield.

Sulla Kakabeeke looked at Service. “This is the fricking black hole of Calcutta down here.”