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The man standing in back of him made a discreet noise.
“Why, I’m forgetting my ma
“Special agent?” Liam said.
James G. Mason’s smile was slow and a little shy. “Of the FBI.”
“FBI?” Jo said. “What’s the Feebs doing in Newenham?”
“Good-bye, Jo,” Liam said.
“Come on, Liam-”
“Allow me to introduce you around. Jo Dunaway, reporter for theAnchorage News, ” he said to his father, who was too smooth to show alarm. The FBI man looked confused, but that may have been cosmetic. “Good-bye, Jo,” he repeated. At his look, Prince went to the door and held it for her, not without some small feeling of triumph at being the woman left behind with Col. Charles Bradley Campbell.
Liam waited for the disgruntled footsteps to fade well out of hearing. “Special Agent Mason.”
“Sergeant Campbell.”
“How can I help you?”
The agent looked at Charles, who shrugged. His glasses slipped farther down his nose and he pushed them back up again, a nervous habit. “Well, we heard you had found the wreckage from a plane crash.”
“And this merits attention from the FBI?” And the air force, he thought, looking at his father, who looked blandly back.
“Well”-Mason flushed slightly-“er, yes, we think it does. Um, we think it might be the wreckage of a plane that crashed into Carryall Mountain the night of December twentieth, 1941. It was a C-47, a Lend-Lease aircraft meant for Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces in China.”
“And the FBI is interested in this crash-why? Is there some indication that this was other than an accident?”
If possible, Mason looked even more apologetic. “The special agent in charge in Anchorage sent me down as an observer, just in case.”
Liam looked at Charles. “There were three people on board, a pilot, a copilot, and a navigator. We bring our boys back.”
It was simply said, and Liam had no doubt that Charles, a career man to whom the United States Air Force was life and breath, meant every word. Nevertheless, he couldn’t escape the feeling that something had been left unsaid. “I imagine you want to go up there.”
Charles nodded. “Can you take us?”
Prince looked chagrined. “Our plane is still on floats.”
Charles looked at Liam and smiled a slow, knowing smile. “Know an air taxi we can charter?”
Liam, expecting a Fury when he called, found Wy vague and distracted. Well, if she couldn’t be bothered to ask where he’d spent the night, he sure as hell couldn’t be bothered to offer the information. He explained the situation in crisp and businesslike tones. “Can you get the Cessna in there with everyone on board?” There was a long silence. “Wy?”
“You want to fly back to the C-47 wreck?”
“Yes,” he said. “I just said that. Didn’t I just say that?”
“I don’t know. I… yes, I guess so.” She seemed to pull herself together. “All right. How much do they weigh?”
“A hundred eighty,” Charles said.
“One forty-five,” Mason said.
Liam heard pencil scratching on paper. “We’ll make it.”
Liam remembered the tiny dirt strip carved out of the snow, no bigger in his fevered memory than a Band-Aid, and carefully kept anything he might be feeling from showing on his face. “She says it’s a go,” he said, hanging up. “Need a ride?”
“Thanks, the commander out at Chinook was kind enough to loan us a vehicle.”
“You flew into Chinook?” Chinook Air Force Base was forty miles south of Newenham. It was a small base, fully ma
It certainly offered Liam’s father far too easy access to Newenham, and to Liam.
“Of course.”
“You fly in with him?” This to Mason.
“Yes,” Mason said.
“What did you fly in on?”
Charles gri
“Thanks anyway,” Liam said. One of the sorest spots between father and son was the son’s complete inability to appreciate the magic of flight.
“You coming with us?”
Liam couldn’t have put his finger on how he knew Charles didn’t want him at the crash site, but he did. He looked down at the list of names belonging to Lydia’s book club. He looked up at his father, into the blue eyes so like his own, so determinedly clear of guile.
He handed the list to Prince. “Talk to them all, see if she was worried about something, fighting with someone; you know the drill.”
“Yes, sir,” Prince said, very glum.
“See you later,” Charles told her.
She brightened visibly.
Liam followed Charles and Mason in the Blazer, out the gravel road to the airport, ten miles from Newenham, complete with hangar and tie-downs and Gift Shoppe. Wy was waiting for them, 68 Kilo fueled and ready. They climbed in and took off.
It was a much shorter ride this time, and a much louder landing. Liam was certain they were going to end up in the trees, a place they had already been in a plane once this year, thank you very much, when a hard kick to the rudder swung the tail around and they rolled mercifully to a stop.
“Nicely done,” Charles drawled over the headphones.
“Thank you, Colonel,” Wy said.
“Charles, please.” He smiled at her. Liam, watching from the backseat, noticed that while she inclined her head in acknowledgment she didn’t smile back. Maybe that was why he loved her, the one woman left in the world Charles Bradley Campbell had yet to charm.
Give him time.
They hiked up the trail to the glacier, encountering fresh bear scat and a gray-muzzled cow moose, who gave them an incurious stare before moving placidly into a stand of diamond willow. It was overcast today, and colder. Their breath made little clouds that hung in the air, only to swirl, disperse and vanish as the line of people walked through them.
“It’s going to snow,” Wy said, looking at the horizon.
“How much and how long?”
She measured the clouds with narrow eyes. “A couple of feet by morning.” She saw Liam’s face. “I’m kidding.”
All the same, he kept an uneasy eye on the horizon after that. The last thing he wanted to do was take off into a snowstorm. They’d had to land in one the month before. He wasn’t enthusiastic at the possibility of repeating the experience.
They emerged from the trees into the clearing at the foot of the glacier.
“Where is it?” Charles said. Behind him, Mason was staring upward, openmouthed.
“There,” Liam said, and pointed.
Charles looked. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said, but it was more prayer than curse.
The face of the glacier looked to the southwest, and even in late October one day of sun had done enough melting to throw the outline of the plane into even starker relief, most of the fuselage, what was left of the right wing. The glacial backdrop was stu
Charles took an involuntary step forward.
“Hold it,” Wy said, barring his way with one hand. “That glacier calves. The whole thing could come down on top of you at any moment.”
“We’ve got to get up there.”
“You can’t.”
“How’d you find the wreckage, then?”
“It’s falling off the face of the glacier a little bit at a time,” Liam said. “A couple of hunters were passing by, and stumbled over some… pieces.”