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Her smile was sweet. “I don’t do fish.”
“Bourbon Street it is,” he said, and kissed her again before swaggering back down into the yard. “Get a move on, you lazy little shits, before I boot your behinds up around your ears! We’ve got form to do before lunch!”
Nenevok Creek, September 3
They were on a short final into Nenevok Creek to scratch Liam’s itch when the throttle cable on the Cessna broke.
They’d had to go around at the last moment, about ten feet off the deck and fifty feet off the end of the airstrip, when a bull moose wandered out of the trees. He looked up at them, startled, and then lunged across the strip and into the brush on the opposite side, at the same time Wy grabbed for the throttle and shoved it all the way in.
Liam, sitting in the right seat and cursing steadily and colorfully, didn’t notice anything else wrong at first. It helped that he had his eyes screwed shut. He opened them when he heard her voice over the headset.
“Oh, shit.”
Of all the words in the world that someone who is deathly afraid of flying can hear in the air, “Oh, shit” are the two you least want to hear, and the two most productive of sheer terror. “What!”
“Shut up!” she yelled back. “I’m busy!”
Of all the words in the world that someone who is deathly afraid of flying can hear in the air, “Shut up, I’m busy” are the four you least want to hear, ranking right down there one notch above “Oh shit.” He didn’t shut up, although he did try to remain calm. He gulped, trying to get his heart out of his throat and back down in his chest where it belonged. “Wy, what’s wrong?”
“The throttle cable broke when I put on power to go around,” she said. She seemed very calm, lips pressed together in a prim line, face set. She was wearing sunglasses, so he couldn’t see her eyes.
It had finally happened, his worst fear: the plane had broken while they were in the air. “I love you, Wy,” he said, and bravely prepared to meet his death.
“Give it a rest, Campbell,” she said, irritated. “All I have to do is fly the plane. We’ll be fine.” She glanced at him and saw the fear writ large upon his countenance for all to see, but it was only her in the cockpit with him, and only she could get him down in one piece. He needed reassurance, but she didn’t have time to give him any.
Maybe she could talk him down.
She began to speak, keeping her voice steady, her tone casual. “I felt the cable go when I went full ahead to get altitude for the go-around. It’s stuck in the full-throttle position, all the juice, full-ahead go. We need low power to land, not full power.”
The plane’s engine seemed louder and fiercer at this moment than any Liam had heard before. The Cessna was at a hundred feet and in a shallow right turn, Nenevok Creek, the tops of the spruce and birch and a small but rugged outcropping of rock passing in rapid succession beneath the right wheel. The single wheel of the landing gear visible to him was shuddering beneath the vibrations of the RPMs, and to Liam’s fascinated eye looked as if it were ready to launch out on its own.
Over the headset Wy’s voice came, unruffled, no hint of panic, a throttle cable could have broken in flight every day of her flying career for all the emotion she put into the words. “I’m going to pull the carb heat, that will slow us down some.” Her hands moved to another control. “Now I’m going to trim the nose down, to keep from climbing. That will slow us down some more.”
It did seem like they were slowing down. It took a long time to get on the other side of that rock outcropping, which seemed more threatening the longer Liam looked at it. “I love you, Wy,” he repeated.
“Now I’m going to lean the mixture. That cuts the gas going into the engine, slows it down even more.”
What if the engine quit completely? It took everything in him not to ask the question out loud. He could no longer watch the ground rush up at them and lowered his gaze to the control panel. The first thing to meet his appalled eyes was the altimeter. Fifty feet. Thirty. The tail of the Cessna came up. Twenty.
“Okay,” Wy said serenely, “we’re looking good. Now I’m going to pull the mixture all the way out. That means that the engine will be getting all air and no fuel, and that means that-” Wy’s hands went to a knob and pulled it all the way out.
The engine died.
There was no sound but the rush of air past the plane. The prop slowed and then came to a stop, the blades straight up and down in front of the windshield.
They touched down easily, smoothly, co
The plane rolled to a stop well before the end of the strip, plenty of room to spare.
The two in it sat for a moment, silent, staring forward.
Wy moved first, removing her headset and tossing it on top of the dash. She took a deep breath and turned to smile at Liam. “That’s what we call a deadstick landing. No power. All up to lift and gravity.”
His mouth was so dry he couldn’t speak, could only nod to let her know he had heard.
They got out of the plane, moving with exaggerated care, as if the return to terra firma was still a tentative thing.
A loud squawking caw came from the top of a nearby spruce tree, and Liam squinted up to see the raven sitting in its very top. It squawked again and launched suddenly, sailing over their heads on shiny black wings. It swooped and dived, climbed and banked, did snap rolls and Immelma
Liam watched with a kind of numb incomprehension, Wy with envy. “God, to fly like that,” she said. “It’s all we want when we take to the air, to master it, to make it our own. And we never even come close.”
She looked at Liam, still mute. She looked at the Cessna, planted placidly on its gear. “We were never in that much danger, Liam,” she said gently. “Yeah, the throttle cable broke, but there’s a way to handle it. There’s a way to handle pretty much everything in the air, as long as you don’t get excited. Bob DeCreft used to say, no matter what happens, don’t panic, just fly the airplane.” She took another deep, careful breath. “He was a good teacher, old Bob.”
Finally Liam found his voice. “Yeah. He sure was. Wy?”
“What?”
“I love you.”
It was her turn to look shaken.
“I love you, Wy,” he said again.
“Liam,” she said with obvious difficulty, “we have to talk.”
THIRTEEN
Newenham, September 3
Diana Prince had never wanted to be anything but what she was: an Alaska state trooper. Her great-grandfather had been with the New York City police, her grandfather had worked for J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, and both parents were thirty-year detectives with the Anchorage Police Department who shared three citations for valor. Her brother and only sibling had disgraced the family twice over, first by becoming an attorney and second by going to work for the ACLU, so upon Diana’s shoulders rested the honor of the present generation of Princes, and her parents and grandparents had made sure she knew it.
Her father, a gruff man with eyes that could bore holes right through you, had sat her down at the kitchen table her senior year in high school and had interrogated her as to her reasons for becoming a trooper. “It’s in the blood,” she’d said, but he hadn’t let her get away with that. It might have been partly family tradition, but it was also the reading ofThe Klondike Rush, which in part recounted the activities of Samuel Benton Steele, the Canadian Mountie whose forces had kept the peace during the Klondike Gold Rush.