The River of Bones v5 (7 page)

“Won’t happen,” said Simon.  “Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage can’t even see a fabric airplane twenty feet off the deck, let alone the Russians.”

“We need to paint our fake licenses on the Cubs regardless, so I hope it warms enough so the paint sticks.  Otherwise, we’ll have to find a way to heat the fabric.”

“No problem.  We’ll put heaters in the fuselages, then both will warm up like tents.”

Simon was always the perfect partner, and he’d just suggested a way to overcome the bitter cold.  Now the time had come to leave Alaska.  “Are you ready?” asked Jake, looking into the empty black of the Bering Sea.

“Yes, I’ll be right behind you,” answered Simon.

Now both knew there was no turning back.  They walked to their airplanes, started them, and warmed the engines at idle.  The low sound cut into the ghostly darkness.

Jake pulled on the night goggles they’d ordered from a spy equipment distributor on the internet.  Ironically, they were Russian made, but first-class, nevertheless, he thought.  Lithium batteries for freezing temperatures, shared aperture filters for flight use, and automatic brightness controls made up only part of the excellent vision the glasses provided at night.  Simon and he’d found the magical devices ideal for flying in small airplanes and helicopters.

He throttled up, kicked the rudders back and forth, broke the Super Cub’s skis free of the frozen snow, and sledded forward.  When he saw the airplane’s nose swing along the open pack ice, he eased on full power, felt the landing gear start bouncing, then break away from the surface.  The airplane shot ahead into an ungodly, gray world of night vision and propeller buzz and smells of cabin heat, motor oil, and aviation fuel.  They were on their way.  The weeks of careful preparation had lasted too long.  He smiled and flew his airplane five feet above the ice.  Let the Russians try finding me down here.  Snowmobiles couldn’t run much closer to the snow.

An hour later he pulled off his goggles, blinked to clear his eyes, and looked around.  He saw Simon out his right window, flying formation one hundred feet back, and he watched him give the thumbsup signal that all was well.  Looking farther back, he saw the color of the coming morning, or yesterday, as Simon would say.  Soon, they would pass to a new time and place.  Pressing his airplane nearer the ice, he skipped over the pressure ridges, missing by a foot or two.  Stay low and keep out of sight . . .

He saw St. Lawrence Island on the skyline just ahead of his left wing, a massive, gray mound sitting on a white seascape.  Quickly, he searched for Siberia.  Where was it?  It must be off his right wing somewhere. . . .  He felt his hair stand up on the back of his neck.  What would the forbidden land look like?  Moments later, he watched a sooty smudge on the far horizon turn blacker, then to a dark headland in the distance.  Cape Tschukotski, south of Provideniya . . . and now they’d indisputably crossed to the Russian side.

He had cautiously gotten a friend to shoptalk about the little town of Provideniya before Simon and he’d left Anchorage.  The woman had flown there on a sightseeing trip with three passengers in the past summer, using a Cessna on amphibious seaplane floats.  She had described the place as ramshackle and desolate, with mostly native residents.  A small military detachment had guarded the town, such as it was in its forsaken state.  She’d also said the army, wearing ragged old uniforms and carrying AK-47 rifles with live ammunition clips, had stared angrily at her, seemingly furious about her owning her own airplane.  Her customers had been happy to leave.

Another friend, who sold Siberian hunting and fishing trips for Russian partners, had described Siberia as actually three regions—the Far East, which included Provideniya, the Maritime Province with Vladivostok being its principal city, and Siberia proper, the great expanse lying north of Mongolia and east of the Urals.  He had also said the land was like Alaska and Canada—rugged, wooded with tamarack, and filled with animals common to the Arctic, such as the moose, brown bear, wolf, and reindeer.  Wilderness tracts were leased by the government to market hunters who harvested the wildlife for meat and furs, in turn selling their raw products to the nearest town, supplying the local population with much needed food and clothing.  Subsist or starve was the choice for most Siberians.

The man had also said Russia commonly used turbine helicopters for travel in the bush, and little regular gasoline was available for reciprocating engines.  All gas was strictly rationed for snow tractors and motorboats, which meant Simon and he would have to raid hunting camps and isolated airports if they wanted to reach Lake Baikal.

Speeding over the pack ice, he began laughing at the arctic foxes and seals that lay in front of him, resting themselves in the morning sunshine.  They seemed mesmerized by the oncoming airplanes, flying so low.  At the last moment, the bug-eyed seals flipped down their blow holes and the little foxes streaked for cover, corkscrewing their white tails in terror.  Had their mortal enemy, the polar bear, gone through metamorphosis?  Hadn’t Mother Nature made their archenemy dangerous enough, without letting him fly?

Suddenly, he saw a
real
polar bear ahead, stalking along a narrow open lead in the pack ice, which always shifted with the winds and tides.  He buzzed past, straight-on, watching the bear stand, more curious than afraid.

He had first learned about polar bears along Hudson Bay in his bright-eyed days as a professional bush pilot.  One could count over one hundred white bears wandering up and down its lonely, windswept seashore at any given time, greatly endangering any human who happened to run into one.  The villagers in Churchill, a frontier settlement halfway up the west side of the bay, had often warned him, watch out or you’ll be eaten alive.

They had told him polar bears didn’t fear humans and preferred fresh kills, and that everyone should remember they stalked their prey with deadly precision.  They could swim under the ice long distances, holding their breath, and burst through its frozen surface and grab their victims like crocodiles coming out of swampy water.  They could belly-crawl over the snow, blending in, and snatch seals off their beds like leopards jumping out of tall grass.  They could lay motionless all day, let the snow drift over them, and cunningly wait for their quarry to walk by, just like   lions waiting at a waterhole.  The Churchill villagers had insisted no other animal was so fearsome, and like all big carnivores the devil bears started eating their kill before death even had the chance to end the horror of the attack.

  At last Cape Nawarin loomed in the distance, black cliffs beaten back by the sea and darkened by time.  Again, he looked out his righthand window at Simon, then waggled his wings, signaling he wanted to land on the first smooth ice he saw.  He found a flat place, throttled back, pulled on full flaps, and felt the skis bounce along the snow.  Slowing up, he taxied behind a pressure ridge, stopped the engine, and watched Simon park nearby.  The sun had warmed the air and a light wind blew back and forth, promising more good weather to come.

He waited for Simon, then said, “We’ll wait here for awhile, watch for search planes, then paint on our phony licenses if no one comes out.  We’re still on international waters so the Russians can’t really arrest us, but I suppose they would try.”

Simon gazed at the rugged cape ahead.  “I don’t think there’s a soul within a thousand miles.  There’s nothing’s more lonely than the frozen ocean, and we won’t see or hear a thing, except maybe for some pressure ridges building on the tide.”

“I hope you’re right, because otherwise we’ll have to make run for it.  Let’s eat, get some rest, then keep going this afternoon.”

They ate dried salmon they’d carried along for the trip, taking advantage of Native Alaskan survival skills.  A person could live for weeks on the nourishment found in salmon strips dried in the sun, and Athabaskans and Inuits were known to have walked hundreds of miles on just a pocket full.

Afterward, they pulled the baggage out of their airplanes, stacked it on the ice, and crawled inside the back of their Cubs to sleep for an hour or two.  They hadn’t gotten enough rest in the past night, and the midday sun was now warm enough to let them sleep comfortably.

Jake catnapped with his cap pulled over his face, blocking out the sunlight.  Even in March the sun was strong enough to burn things on the pack ice, and one had to guard against snow blindness.  Sparkling cross-lights glanced off every snowflake on the surface, leaving the surroundings glittering with a brilliance that scorched eyes in minutes.  Without sunglasses, a person’s eyes started itching and oozing, then reddening and swelling until he or she went blind.  He slowly fell asleep.

Crunch. Rip.
  He quickly woke from his nap and saw something white flash by his eyes.
 
What in hell was happening?  The airplane bounced and he heard its fabric rip again, then the back window break, two feet from his face.  He sat up and looked.  White hair all around—then black claws swiped at him and shredded his parka.  He screamed and hurled himself forward over the pilot’s seat.  Why had he forgotten his rifle on the wing strut?  Where in hell was his Uzi?  Then he remembered it was in the baggage on the ice, left there to make room for him.  The paw slapped at him again, and this time he felt his whole back sting.  He screamed once more.  His only chance was in starting the airplane.

Next, he heard a loud roar.  Was it the bear?  Couldn’t be.  He looked to his left and saw Simon coming head-on with
his Cub going full blast.  My God, why hadn’t his friend simply      grabbed his rifle and shot the bear?  Then his mind pictured the awful danger of that tactic.  What if his friend missed or the bullet blew through the bear
?
  The gunshot might have killed him.

But two airplanes and a polar bear crashing together was no less dangerous, and he had to start his Cub and get out of the way.  His hands flew around the cockpit—mixture control, master switch, throttle, and starter button.  At least the bear had stopped clawing at him.  He glimpsed the monster dropping onto all fours and gaping at the oncoming airplane as well.  No wonder Simon had chosen to let the bear live.  It had a tracking collar around its neck.  They would be found out if they killed it because the Russians had tagged it for research.

Vrroooom.
  Suddenly, the Cub’s engine caught.  He shoved the throttle wide open and shot forward, leaving Simon’s airplane and the polar bear behind.  Circling on the open ice, he looked back, then shook his head in disbelief.  Now the bear was chasing Simon.  He stomped the right rudder, skidded the airplane around, and took off after the bear, taxiing up on its rear end with his prop.  The bear looked back, jumped off to one side, and came at him again.  Adding power, he circled once more on the ice and laughed despite his bleeding back.  He easily left the bear behind, then watched Simon, blowing snow like a whirlwind, come after the polar bear a second time.  Finally, the bear got scared and ran for the nearby pressure ridge.

Simon and he chased after the bear, side by side, roaring along in their airplanes.  After a short distance they turned back, taxied to their baggage piles, and shut down, both still laughing despite their close call.  One never knew what to expect in the Arctic.

After climbing out of his airplane, Simon yelled, “You were screaming like bloody murder, and I thought you were a goner.”

“Look at my back before you laugh at me much more, because you may have to suture the claw marks the bear left on me.  Damn, that was close, and how did you know I’d get my airplane started in time?”

“I saw you dive over the seat and guessed you’d get out of the way at the last second, and I meant to miss you the best I could anyway.  It looked like the bear would back off when he heard me coming.  God, you should’ve seen the look on
your face.”  Again, Simon laughed, though he also stepped over and whistled.  “Jeez Maria, did your parka ever get messed up and I see some blood.  Now everyone will wonder what happened to you when they see you without a shirt.  Better let me bandage you up.”

Moments later, shivering without his shirt, he waited while Simon daubed on antiseptic salve and taped gauze over the wounds.  Finally, he pulled his clothes back on and said, “Let’s fix my airplane with some duct tape, get out of here, and find someplace to camp.  My back hurts like hell and I don’t want to stand guard for the rest of the day.  I should’ve known every polar bear within miles smelled our fish when I opened the package.  That stuff stinks like the rear end of a camel.”

Simon laughed.  “Sorry that I think everything’s so funny, but I can’t help it.  I’ll give you penicillin to kill any infection and you’ll be fine in a few days.  It’s my fault as much as yours, and we knew this country doesn’t take any prisoners when we started this trip.”

They patched the Super Cub, then reloaded their baggage and started their engines.  After takeoff, they climbed over the headland just ahead but still stayed low as they flew across the barren ground running west.  The land was empty and trackless.  A flat stretch came into view and they landed once again and stopped behind a windswept hill.

They began the long task of repairing the damage done by the bear, using acetone to strip off the old paint and butyrate dope to fasten new fabric over the rips and broken back window.  Simon carefully shrank the new covering as tight as a drum with propane heat and painted it, leaving the airplane almost as good as new again.  He covered the U.S. registration numbers on both ships with spray paint and added black alphabetic letters copied from pictures of Russian aircraft they’d found on the internet.   Then they pitched a tent, made soup, and drank the steaming liquid as darkness fell over them.  Hunting wolves howled far back in the wintertime, and they heard the sky whispering again.

“Get some sleep,” said Simon quietly, “and I’ll watch the heaters until everything dries.  Tomorrow will be a better day.”

Exhausted, Jake nodded and crawled inside his sleeping bag, wearing his clothing and a stocking cap to stop the loss of heat off the top of his head.  The settling dark would soon drop the temperature dangerously low . . . though Simon would watch over him, and they were too far inland for any marauding bears.  He fell asleep and dreamed about Sasha.