Ice Hunt (5 page)

Matt held his arm over his mouth and nose. He tried the door. It was jammed and twisted tight. He stretched up and poked his head in the side window. The plane was not empty.

The pilot was strapped into his seat, but from the angle of his neck and the spar piercing his chest, he was clearly dead. The seat next to the pilot was empty. Matt began to crane around to check the backseats—then a shock passed through him as he recognized the pilot. The mop of black hair, the scraggly beard, the blue eyes…now glazed and lifeless.

“Brent…” he mumbled. Brent Cumming. They had played poker regularly back when Matt and Jenny were still together. Jenny was a sheriff for the Nunamiut and Inupiat native tribes, and because of the vast distances under her jurisdiction, she was of necessity a skilled pilot. As such, she knew the other pilots who serviced the region, including Brent Cumming. Their two families had spent a summer camping, their kids romping and playing together. How was he going to tell Cheryl, Brent’s wife?

He shook himself out of his shock and poked his head into the back window, numbly checking the rear seats. He found a man sprawled on his back, faceup. He wasn’t moving either. Matt started to sigh when suddenly the man’s arms shot up, a gun clutched between his hands.

“Don’t move!”

Matt startled, more at the sudden shout than the threat of the gun.

“I mean it! Don’t move!” The man sat up. He was pale, his green eyes wide, his blond hair caked with blood on his left side. His head must have struck the window frame. Still his aim did not waver. “I’ll shoot!”

“Then shoot,” Matt said calmly, leaning a bit against the plane’s fuselage.

This response clearly baffled the stranger. His brow pinched together. From the man’s brand-new Eddie Bauer Arctic parka, he was clearly a stranger to these parts. Nonetheless, there was a hard edge to him. Though having just crashed, he clearly had kept his wits about him. Matt had to give him credit there.

“If you’ll put that
flare
gun down,” Matt said, “maybe I’ll even think about finishing this rescue mission.”

The man waited a full breath, then lowered his arms, sagging backward. “I…I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. You just fell out of the sky. In such rare cases, I have the tendency to forgive a lack of gracious hospitality.”

This earned a tired grin from the man.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“Head took a good crack. And my leg’s caught.”

Matt leaned through the window, having to stretch up on his toes. The front section of the plane had crimped back, trapping the man’s right leg between the copilot’s seat and his own. So much for just having the man crawl through the window.

“The pilot…” the man began. “Is he…”

“Dead,” Matt finished. “Nothing we can do for him at the moment.” He tugged again at the door. He wouldn’t be able to free it with brute strength alone. He tapped one knuckle on the fuselage, thinking. “Hang on a sec.”

He crossed back to Mariah, grabbed the horse’s reins, and walked her closer to the wreckage. She protested with a toss of her head. It was bad enough being pulled away from the pasture of milk vetch, but the burning engine smell spooked her, too. “Easy there, gal,” Matt soothed.

His dogs simply remained where they lay sprawled. Bane sat up, ears perked, but Matt waved the wolf down.

Once close enough, Matt ran a rope from the saddle to the frame of the plane’s door. He didn’t trust the handle to be secure enough. He then crossed back to the mare and urged her to follow. She did so willingly, glad to leave the vicinity of the foul-smelling wreckage, but once she reached the length of her tether, she stopped.

Matt coaxed her with tugs on her reins, but she still refused. He slid behind her, biting back a curse, then grabbed her tail and pulled it up over her hind end. He hated tailing her like this, but he had to get her to pull. She whinnied at the pain and kicked a hoof at him. He tumbled away, letting go of the tail and landing on his backside. He shook his head. He and the female species never did know how to communicate.

Then Bane was there, barking, snapping at the horse’s heels. Mariah might not respect Matt, but a half wolf was another thing. Old instincts ran deep. The mare leaped ahead, yanking on the tether.

A groan of metal erupted behind him. Matt rolled around. The entire tilted fuselage of the Cessna canted to the side. A shout of alarm arose from inside. Then, with the popping sound of an opening soda can, the crumpled door broke away.

Mariah reared up, but Matt returned to calm her. He undid the saddle hitch and walked her away, waving Bane off. He settled her at the edge of the clearing, then patted her flank. “Good girl. You’ve earned yourself an extra handful of grain tonight.”

He strode back to the wreckage. The stranger was almost out of the plane. He was able to slide his trapped leg along the edge of the two crammed seats until he reached the open door. Then he was free.

Matt helped him down. “How’s the leg?”

The man tested it gingerly. “Bruised, and the worst damned charley horse, but nothing feels broken.” Now that the man was free, Matt realized he was younger than he first appeared. Probably no more than his late twenties.

As they hobbled away from the wreckage, Matt held out a hand. “Name’s Matthew Pike.”

“Craig…Craig Teague.”

After they were well away from the plane, Matt settled the man to a log, then shoved away his dogs when they came up to nose the stranger. Matt straightened a kink from his back and glanced back to the plane and his dead friend. “So what happened?”

The man remained silent for a long moment. When he spoke, it was in a whisper. “I don’t know. We were heading to Deadhorse—”

“Over in Prudhoe?”

“Prudhoe Bay, yes.” The man nodded, gingerly fingering his lacerated scalp. Deadhorse was the name of the airport that serviced the oilfields and township of Prudhoe Bay. It was located at the northernmost edge of Alaska, where the North Slope’s oil fields met the Arctic Ocean. “We were about two hours out of Fairbanks when the pilot reported something wrong with the engine. It seemed he was losing fuel or something. Which seemed impossible since we had just tanked up in Fairbanks.”

Matt could smell the fuel still in the air. They had not run out of juice, that’s for sure. And Brent Cumming always kept his plane’s engine in tiptop shape. A mechanic before becoming a bush pilot, Brent knew his way around the Cessna’s three-hundred-horsepower engine. With two kids and a wife, he depended on that craft for both his livelihood and his lifeline, so Brent maintained his machinery like a finely tuned Rolex.

“When the engine began to sputter, we tried to find a place to land, but by that time we were among these damn mountains. The pilot…he…he tried to radio for help, but even the radio seemed to be malfunctioning.”

Matt understood. There had been storms of solar flares this past week. They messed with all sorts of communication in the northern regions. He glanced back to the wreckage. He could only imagine the terror of those last moments: the panic, the desperation, the disbelief.

The man’s voice cracked slightly. He had to swallow to continue speaking. “We had no choice but to try to land here. And then…and then…”

Matt reached over and patted the man’s shoulder. The rest of the story was plainly evident. “It’s okay. We’ll get you out of here. But I should see about that head wound of yours first.”

He crossed over to Mariah and retrieved the first-aid kit. It was really a full med kit. Matt had assembled it himself, utilizing his experience in the Green Berets. Besides the usual gauze rolls, Band-Aids, and aspirin, he had a small pharmacy of antibiotics, antihistamines, antiprotozoals, and antidiarrhetics. The kit also contained suture material, local anesthetic, syringes, splinting material, even a stethoscope. He pulled out a bottle of peroxide and cleaned the man’s wound.

Matt talked as he worked. “So, Craig, what was your business up in Prudhoe?” he asked, studying the other. The fellow certainly didn’t have the look of an oil rigger. Among such hard men, black oil and grease were indelibly tattooed into the creases and folds of their hands. Contrarily, this man’s palms were free of calluses, his nails unbroken and neatly trimmed. Matt supposed he was an engineer or geologist. In fact, the man had a studious look to his countenance, keenly assessing his surroundings, glancing to Matt’s horse, his dogs, the meadow, and the surrounding mountains. The only place he avoided looking was back to the wreckage.

“Prudhoe Bay wasn’t my destination. We were to refuel there, then hop out to a research base on the ice cap. Omega Drift Station, a part of the SCICEX research group.”

“SCICEX?” Matt smeared antibiotic cream on the wound, then covered it with a Teflon-coated gauze sponge, wrapping it in place.

“ ‘Scientific Ice Expeditions,’ ” Craig explained, wincing as Matt secured the wrap. “It’s a five-year collaborative effort between the U.S. Navy and civilian scientists.”

Matt nodded. “I think I remember hearing about that.” The group was using Navy subs to collect data from over a hundred thousand miles of ship track in the Arctic, delving into regions never before visited. Matt’s brow crinkled. “But I thought that ended back in 1999.”

His words drew the man’s full attention, his eyes widening slightly in surprise as he turned to Matt.

“Despite appearances,” Matt explained, “I’m Fish and Game. So I’m generally familiar with many of the larger Arctic research projects.”

Craig studied him with cautious, calculating eyes, then bobbed his head. “Well, you’re right. Officially SCICEX ended, but one station—Omega—had drifted into the ice cap’s Zone of Comparative Inaccessibility.”

No-man’s-land,
Matt thought. The ZCI was the most remote part of the polar ice cap, hardest to reach and most isolated.

“For a chance to study such an inaccessible region, funding was extended to this one SCICEX station.”

“So you’re a scientist?” Matt said, fastening up his med kit.

The man laughed, but there was no real humor behind it. “No, not a scientist. I was on assignment from my newspaper. The
Seattle Times
. I’m a political reporter.”

“A political reporter?”

The man shrugged.

“Why would—” Matt was cut off by the buzzing sound of a plane’s engine. He craned his neck. The lowering sky was thick with heavy clouds. Off to the side, Bane growled deep in his throat as the noise grew in volume.

Craig climbed to his feet. “Another plane. Maybe someone heard the pilot’s distress call.”

From the clouds, a small plane appeared, dropping over the valley but still keeping high. Matt watched it pass. It was another Cessna, only a larger version than Brent’s. It appeared to be a 206 or 207 Skywagon, an eight-seater.

Matt whistled Mariah closer to him, then plucked his binoculars from the saddlebag. Lifting the scopes, he searched a moment for the plane, then focused on it. It appeared brand-new…or freshly painted. Rare for these parts. The terrain was hard on aircraft.

“Have they spotted us?” Craig asked.

The plane tilted on a wing and began a slow circle over the valley. “With the trail of engine smoke, it’d be hard to miss us.”

Still, Matt felt a tingle of unease. He had not spotted a single plane in the past week, and now two in one day. And this plane was too clean, too white. As he watched, the rear cargo door craned open. That was the nice thing about that size of Skywagon. Such planes were used around these parts to shuttle the injured to various outlying hospitals. The rear cargo hatch was perfect for loading and unloading stretchers, or, in worst cases, coffins. But there was another useful and common application for the Skywagon’s large rear hatch.

From the cargo bay, a shape flew free, and a second quickly followed. Sky divers. Matt had a hard time following them with his binoculars. They were plummeting fast. Then chutes ballooned out, slowing them, making them easier to focus upon. Parawing airfoils, Matt recognized, used in precision parachuting for landing in tight places. The pair swung around in tandem, aiming for the meadow.

Matt focused on the divers themselves. Like the plane and chutes, they were outfitted in white, no insignia. Rifles were strapped to their backs, but he was unable to discern make and type.

As he spied on them, cold dread settled in the pit of his stomach. It was not the presence of the guns that trickled ice into Matt’s blood. Instead, it was what was
under
each sky diver. Each man was strapped into the seat of a motorcycle. The tires were studded with metal spikes. Snow choppers. They were muscular vehicles, capable of tearing up terrain, chasing anything down in these mountains.

Matt lowered the binoculars. He stared over at the reporter, then cleared his throat. “I hope you’re good at riding a horse.”

2

Cat and Mouse

APRIL 6, 5:36 P.M.
ZCI REGION OF THE POLAR ICE CAP
OMEGA DRIFT STATION

Will I ever be warm again…?