Snowblind (6 page)

The DC-3 was losing altitude fast. Jake was close to panic. "Got a monkey on my back, Donny! Raisin' hell with the airfoil."

"Take it easy, Jake." Donny peered back anxiously at the white layer of ice building on the wing. He looked down. Snow obliterated the view. Then, a glimpse of something dark. Trees? "We can't go down, Jake. Not here."

"We don't got any goddamn choice!" The plane suddenly hopped upward, buffeted by powerful winds. "We're in a goddamn williwaw!" Jake said.

"Might be able to ride the warm air up and out of this mess," Donny said. "Just gotta drop some payload."

Jake glanced at his copilot's overflowing belly. "You gonna volunteer?" he asked.

Donny glared at him and unhooked his seat harness.

"You better hurry," Jake said.

Donny took off his headset, and headed unsteadily back toward the cargo hold.

Jake grabbed the radio mike. "Fairbanks Tower, this is Whiskey 403, do you read me, over?"

The radio coughed with ragged static.

"Fairbanks Tower do you read me, over?"

*  *  *

Adashek and Katukan had stopped their conversation mid-stream the moment they heard the radio sputter. Jake's voice came through sporadic and faint. All they heard was "... 403..."

Dean Stanton leaned toward his microphone. "Whiskey 403, this is Fairbanks Tower, do you copy, over?"

The three men listened to the static. Then Stanton spoke again. "Whiskey 403, do you copy, over?"

A hiss of static, then, "... losing altitude..." More static, then: "... cargo..."

"Whiskey 403, please give us your coordinates, over."

Static.

"Whiskey 403, give us your coordinates, over."

Static.

Stanton glanced at the two men standing behind him. "Something wrong with his reception. He's not hearing us at all." He looked at the radar screen. A large pattern of green light spread itself along the top half of the glass. "They must be right in the middle of it."

Dr. Katukan exchanged an anxious look with Chief Adashek. Then he nodded toward the radar screen. "If they go down in that, what are their chances?"

"Depends," Stanton said. "If they find a straight run of river, or a lake, they might land all right."

"And if they don't?

"If they don't what?"

"If they don't find a river or a lake."

Stanton didn't answer. Katukan persisted. "Will they all be
killed
, Mr. Stanton?"

Stanton turned, looked at the doctor a moment. He decided he really didn't like the man.

"Yeah," he said. "They'll be killed."

The lights had gone out in the cargo hold.

Donny felt his way blindly through the piles of baggage, stumbling toward the red emergency light that glowed faintly at the far end of the long compartment. He climbed up a mountain of plastic garbage bags stuffed with sharp-cornered boxes, and onto a pile of rickety wooden crates. The plane pitched suddenly and sent him crashing through a cardboard box filled with four-foot-long florescent light bulbs. He gingerly picked himself up, shook off the flakes of broken glass, and hurried on. He made his way back over the crates onto a broad, irregular surface of timbers. Scrambling over this, his foot slipped deeply through a gap, and for a moment, he was stuck.

"What the hell is this?" he grumbled, struggling to free his leg in the dark. His foot kicked something soft below. When he realized what it was, he froze.

"Oh... fuck," he whispered, his heart palpitating.

Slowly, he turned, sat softly on his hip. He gently twisted his leg around, trying not to bump the sleeping prisoner with his foot. Then, carefully, he shimmied his leg back up, gradually sliding it out through the tight sapling bars.

At last the foot broke free. He dropped down onto a pile of stuffed mail bags and — glancing over his shoulder — quickly moved away from the cage. He pushed his way through another stack of crates, squeezed between two large flat-screen TV boxes, and finally found the cargo bay doors.

The double doors were set into the floor at the sloping tail of the plane. He located the metal clamp-lock handle, pulled it back and turned it counter-clockwise, then braced himself and kicked open the doors.

A blast of freezing wind whipped into the compartment, lashing Donny's face with needles of snow. He covered his eyes with the back of his arm, then leaned forward and squinted into the whirlwind, a white barrage of swirling flakes and fog. Far below, he saw a blurry hint of dark trees. He pulled back into the compartment and started for the cargo.

The TV’s went first. He slid the boxes across the floor and, without a thought, tumbled them out the yawning gap. Then he tore at the pile of loaded pine crates, flinging them through the doors with abandon. He dragged bags of mail out of the dark and fed them into the hole. He found a snowmobile engine and rolled it out. A pile of bear and moose hides and a twisted bundle of antlers. A stack of bundled firewood. Office supplies, canned food, washing detergent, Christmas presents.

Then he saw the wooden cage.

"Donny!" Jake screamed from the cockpit. "We're going down!"

Donny's heart banged at his ribs. He grabbed hold of the cage, peered in through the crooked bars. In the murky darkness of the hold, he could just make out the heaving mass of skins.

It was moving. "Son of a bitch!" he cried.

He clambered behind the cage, braced his back against the wall and pushed the sapling bars with his legs. The cage slid a couple of feet. Then he put his shoulder to it, and with a holler, heaved with all his might.

The cage moved toward the doors.

*  *  *

"Mayday! This is Whiskey 403!" Jake yelled into the mike.

A rising slope of trees suddenly appeared through the windshield. Jake dropped the mike and hauled on the stick, but the ailerons were jammed with ice. He rocked the stick to crack them loose, and at the last moment the plane abruptly banked to the right, sweeping past the tree-covered bluffs into the gap of a plunging ravine.

Jake could just make out the frozen white curves of the Kanuti River snaking through the valley below. But there wasn't a straight patch to land on for as far as he could see.

And the plane was dropping fast.

Jake glanced at the control panel and grabbed the mike. "Mayday! Mayday! This is Whiskey 403. Co-ordinates sixty-three-nine north, one-fifty-two-zero west. We are going down! Repeat, we are going down!"

He threw the mike aside and shouted back into the cargo hold. "Donny!"

Donny shoved the heavy cage farther and farther out of the darkness toward the gaping doorway. The hold raged with whirling snow, the plane wobbled and shook in the wind. Losing his footing, he crashed to his knees. He got up, painfully, and hobbled around the cage to the other side. He grabbed the sapling bars, tried pulling the great mass toward the hole. It wouldn't budge.

He looked around and realized he was pulling the cage uphill — the plane's angle of descent had steepened.

He ran to the open cargo doors, peered down into the blizzard. Five-hundred feet below, the twisting turns of the frozen river were fast approaching.

If he didn't jettison the load, they'd crash!

Donny raced back behind the cage. He grabbed hold of the branch bars solidly with both hands. Planting his feet squarely on the ground, he raised his head and readied to push.

His eyes filled with horror.

Donny's scream was cut off before it left his throat.

*  *  *

"Donny!" Jake hollered. "There's a fucking lake goddammit!" A quarter-mile ahead, the Kanuti broadened out into the frozen expanse of a snow-laden reservoir. Jake screamed at the top of his lungs. "Mo-ther-fu-cker!"

The landing skis brushed the pointed tops of the fir trees.

"Hold-on-goddammit!" He hauled the control yoke with all his might.

"MOTHERRR-FUCKERRRRRRRRRRRRR!"

The right ski caught the tip of a towering spruce and tore loose from the plane with a sickening screech of scraping metal. Jake tried to straighten out as the DC-3 came over the lake, but it fell fast and hit the snow, caught the left ski and careened across a fifty-yard arc before it flipped.

It flipped three times. The first cracked the left wing in half. The second crushed the tail. The last split open the fuselage, crumpled the nose, and shattered the windshield in a thousand pieces.

The wreck finally settled upside down in the middle of the silent lake.

*  *  *

"Whiskey 403 come in!"

Stanton took his finger off the button; the three men in the tower listened. Nothing but a clean hum of static.

"Whiskey 403 come in. 403 do you read me?"

More static. The radio was dead. Nothing since the last frantic calls from Jake. The DC-3 had gone down.

"You got the coordinates, didn't you?" the Chief asked. He had shed his jacket and tie.

"Part of them," Stanton said. "The last digits were lost in the static. But I got enough to give us a good idea where they went down. They're somewhere in the vicinity of Caribou Mountain."

Dr. Katukan was nervously turning an empty coffee mug in his hands. "How soon can you get a plane out there?" he asked.

"That's the million dollar question," said Stanton. He pointed his pencil toward the weather radar screen. The large pattern of light was spreading over the screen like a virus. "The storm is moving fast and it's heading our way."

He peered out the huge glass window toward the mountains to the north. Enormous clouds were piling up, gray in the middle and black at the bottom, all along the horizon.

"I can tell you one thing," he said, staring into the distance. "Nobody's going to fly out there now."

Dr. Katukan glanced nervously at Adashek. Then he stepped up beside the air traffic controller. "Mr. Stanton, you said... You said if the plane went down the men would be killed. Do you think that has happened? Do you think... Do you think they're all dead?"

"I don't know, Doctor," Stanton answered. "If they're alive, they might get the radio going again, or activate the emergency-locator beacon." He turned and looked squarely at the doctor. "Until we hear from them, there's no way of knowing
what
's going on out there."

Josh woke up on the couch in his studio apartment. The room was dark; the sun had been down at least an hour. He was in his clothes, under his red-and-black Hudson Bay blanket. Two cold pieces of microwave pizza lay at the edge of the table in front of him. The ancient TV with its rabbit ears glowed across the room.

He sat up and pulled the blanket around his shoulders, felt a cold draft across his bare feet. He stared at the TV screen. The sound was off, but he saw the weatherman gesture across a video map of Alaska. A bulging front — a phalanx of brightly shining snow crystals — was marching down from the Arctic Circle.

Josh rose up with the blanket and walked like a monk to the window. Cold air was seeping into the room right through the bathroom towel he'd jammed into the bottom of the sill. The pane of glass had spawned crystals of frost. He rubbed a circle with his palm until a hole cleared he could see through.

Outside, street lamps lit the swirling snow, and a broken beer sign at the corner market swung creaking in the wind. So this was the storm they'd said was going to roll off to the east. Instead it had barreled over the mountains into the Yukon Flats and rolled right to Fairbanks' door. He wondered about his plane at the field, wondered if he'd get snowed in.

Then he remembered Kris. Andrea had planned to drive up the Dalton Highway north through the mountains. Had they heard about the storm? Had they left yet? He might be able to stop them.

He dug out his address book in his overnight bag, still unpacked from Anchorage. In the mountains there would be no reception for her cell, but he found Andrea's Fairbanks listing, along with the number for the condo in Pine Summit. He punched the Fairbanks number and waited.

People can die in a storm like this, he thought.

The phone rang eight rings before he finally hung up.

*  *  *

Listening to the dull drone of the road, Kris remembered the trips she'd taken in her father's truck, heading up for cross-country skiing in the mountains of the Alaska Range in Denali National Park. Her father was one of the park's full-time Rangers. To her it seemed she'd grown up in that truck, making long climbs up rugged mountain roads, her father at the wheel, her little brother bouncing between them. Steel bear traps — confiscated from poachers — clattered noisily in the bed of the truck. Kris would watch for caribou and moose as they drove up the winding road through Sable Pass, then Polychrome Pass, while above them towered the omnipresent peaks of Mt. McKinley, and her favorite, Mt. Silverthrone.

"Does God live up there?" Paul asked his father.

"I don't know," he said. "I guess you'll have to climb up there someday and find out."

"Do you think Bobby will be there?"

This was a girl's voice.

"Probably." This was Andrea. "They said they were going to close on that place last month."

Kris realized she was not in her father's truck, but in Andrea Parks' Jeep Cherokee on the way to Pine Summit. Kris was sitting in the back seat, and Andrea and her daughter Erin were talking up front.

"What do they mean "close?" Erin asked.

"They bought the place. They finished the paperwork."

"Why don't they just say that then?"

"It's a real estate term."

"It's stupid."

"Erin, please don't turn the mirror, I can't see what's behind me."

"Just for a second—"

"You don't need to put on lipstick now. For heaven's sake, we're in the middle of nowhere, I don't think there's any danger of running into Bobby on this road."

They were silent for a moment. The wipers beat a muffled rhythm, and the jeep seemed to ride on air, tires softly kissing the powdery road.

"Is it still snowing hard?" Kris asked.

"Yes," said Andrea emphatically. "Almost from the time we left, and it seems to be getting worse. As a matter of fact..."

Kris felt the car turn off onto the shoulder.

"Why are we stopping?" asked Erin petulantly.

"I'm going to put the chains on," said Andrea. "Want to help?"

"Not really," said Erin.

"Suit yourself," said Andrea. She opened her door and climbed out of the car.

"Well, if you're going to make me feel guilty," said Erin. Kris heard her door open. "I can't find my gloves," she said.

"Look on the floor," said her mother, opening the trunk.

Erin opened Kris's door. "Can I borrow your gloves?"

Kris pulled her mittens out of the pockets of her parka. Erin took them from her without a word.

"Gee, your hands are
huge
," said Erin.

Her mother spoke from down near the rear wheel. "Erin, are you going to help me or not?"

"Coming," said Erin. Then she said to Kris, "How come your hands are so
big?"

"They're not that big," said Kris. She heard her door slam.

Kris sat quietly for a moment, feeling her hands. Not a single car had passed since they stopped. Kris heard the rattle of the chains. She heard Andrea ask Erin to hold something. Then she heard Erin's voice, speaking in a whisper.

"Why did she have to come?"

"Shhh! Don't be rude."

"I'm not coming up here just to baby-sit."

"You don't have to baby-sit anyone. Kris can take care of herself. Just be a little sociable, that's all."

Erin mumbled something. Kris heard Andrea carry the chains to the other rear wheel.

Kris rolled down her window and stuck her head out. "Do you think I could get out of the car for a minute?"

"Sure, honey," said Andrea, apparently on her knees.

Kris opened the door and methodically climbed out. She guessed the temperature was about ten below. She dug her hands deep into her pockets and leaned back against the car. She turned her face up toward the sky, feeling the tickle of snowflakes falling on her cheeks.

"Do I have to hold this?" Erin complained to her mother. "My hands are freezing in these giant mitts."

"Just set it down by the front tire," said Andrea. "I'll be there in a second."

Kris pulled her headpiece out of the front pouch pocket of her coat. She felt for the round sensor at the front of the band, then pulled her hair back, slipped the band over her head, and adjusted the molded plastic over her ears. She turned on the power and adjusted the volume. She could hear the amplified clinks and rattles of Andrea putting chains on the rear tire. She could even hear Erin's breathing on the other side of the Jeep. Facing away from the road, she heard the bass tone repeating steady and low.

"Mrs. Parks?"

"Yes?" She was moving toward the front wheel now.

"Is the tree line about a hundred yards away?"

"Yes. About that. Maybe a little more."

Kris leaned back against the car and smiled to herself.

"Did Josh give you that parka?" asked Andrea.

"Yeah. It's really warm."

"It looks nice. It's a pretty cherry red."

He'd given her the jacket when he'd said goodbye at the school. He said it would be a part of the "experiment" they'd try on Sunday, when he came up to join them. If it worked, it would help him "watch out for her" he said. She didn't ask him what the experiment would be. She wanted to be surprised. She wanted it to be fun.

She pressed her arms close to her body, and rubbed her chin against the soft fur of the ruff. Day after tomorrow, she thought. One day and two nights. She remembered the touch of his fingers, brushing back her hair. She remembered the tiny mole she'd felt at the peak of his cheekbone, and the sandpaper whiskers under his chin. But his voice, that's what she remembered most. It was gentle, and soothing, and clear. It reminded her of her dad.

Kris began reciting a poem.

"Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though.

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow..."

Andrea stopped tying on the chains. "I love that poem," she said.

"Oh, please stop," cried Erin. "We had to study Robert Frost last semester. I got so sick of it."

Kris stood silent for a moment, then opened the back door to the Jeep and climbed inside.