Ice Angel

by Matthew Hart

  “He’s a bird guy. Has a four-hundred-millimeter lens. He could see, all right.” He reached in front of me and tweaked a few settings.

  “Did he see the rifles?”

  “He did. He doesn’t hunt, but he’s a Dogrib. He knows what a hunting rifle looks like. They weren’t hunting rifles.”

  “So if they’re not in Yellowknife, they have a spotter in the city who lets them know when you’re leaving.”

  “Must have. I couldn’t shake them last time. There’s some hills where I thought I could peel them off, but they stayed high and stuck to me like flypaper.”

  “Could they have followed Jimmy?”

  “No. He’d left before they arrived.”

  The tree cover thinned as we flew north. The film of haze from the distant fire melted into a clear blue sky. The last road wound through some lakes and stopped. The forest gave way to a cover of scrub and stunted spruce. And after that, the vast, lake-speckled sheet of rock that stretched to the Arctic Ocean.

  The sun was higher now. It poured an amber light onto the granite surfaces below. In the Barrens, the basement rock of North America tilts up into the light of day, polished smooth by the glaciers that slid across it ten thousand years ago.

  We made another slow turn to the left to check the tail. The black plane was still there.

  “If you couldn’t lose them last time,” I said, “why would you have better luck today?”

  Pete busied himself with the instruments, making minute adjustments.

  “That smudge on the horizon,” he said at last. “That’s cloud. There’s a thick layer sitting over most of the Barrens. It should last for the next few hours before it breaks up. I’m going to lose the tail in there.”

  The dense layer of cloud took shape as we flew toward it. Gray wisps were already sliding beneath the plane, like veils pulled across the land. As we flew straight at it, the cloud transformed into towering white cliffs that loomed above us, cutting off the sun. And then we were in.

  The plane shuddered as it passed into the cover. The cloud wrapped us tight. Water droplets streaked the windshield. In the suddenly dim cockpit the dials on the instrument panel glowed orange and green. The drone of the engines seemed muted.

  “I’m going to stay on this course for another minute,” Pete said. “Then I’ll make a sharp turn to the left and begin a descent. You guys all squared away back there?”

  Mitzi clicked her mike in acknowledgment.

  Pete unfolded a chart and clipped it to the yoke. It showed a large lake. The scale revealed it to be about fifty miles long—a ragged shape with bays and inlets and a bulge in the middle maybe twenty miles across. Between the inlets ran penciled lines with figures neatly inscribed along them.

  “Turning now and starting down.”

  The plane tilted sharply. We nosed into a steep descent. The needle on the altimeter began a rapid counterclockwise sweep around the dial as it counted off the altitude.

  “OK. Turning in five,” Pete said. “I’m flying blind, so I’ll keep my eye on the attitude indicator.” He tapped the dial that showed the artificial horizon, with the silhouette of a plane with wings level. “It will help if you keep an eye on the altimeter. Call out every five hundred feet.”

  He made another hard turn, again to the left. The silhouette tilted to forty-five degrees. The plane shuddered as we went around. I watched the compass needle swing. We came out of the turn at a heading south southwest. The two turns had taken us around 180 degrees.

  The Otter bounced hard. The altimeter needle spun.

  “Two thousand feet,” I said.

  “We’re cutting across a ridge,” he said. “This time of year, the rock is still warmer than the water, so there’s thermals and downdrafts where they meet. Expect a thump when we go over.”

  “Fifteen hundred,” I said. “How low before we can see where we are?”

  “You mean, where’s the ceiling? That’s the million-dollar question. It’s not like flying down south, where there’s data wherever you are. Here, there are only a few monitoring stations, mostly at the diamond mines. Out here”—he reached up and tweaked a dial—“you’d better know the terrain.”

  “And you’re betting the plane behind us can’t follow you.”

  “I disabled the transponder and changed course twice once we were in cover. He’s blind to my position.”

  “Can’t he track you on radar?”

  “Small planes don’t have that kind of radar.”

  “One thousand.”

  The plane jumped. I heard Mitzi suck in her breath.

  “That was at the shoreline. Now we’re back over Lac de Gras. It’s fifty miles long. I’ll come up into the wind, and even if this cloud is lying right on the lake, we’re good. Give me the altitude in hundreds now.”

  The altitude peeled off. At five hundred feet he pulled gently back on the yoke, his right hand raised above his head to grip the throttle levers.

  “Four hundred,” I said.

  The engines changed pitch as he eased the power back and pulled up the nose.

  At two hundred feet we broke through the cloud. The dull gray surface of the lake leapt into view. An enormous sheet of waves and breaking crests streamed toward us. The ceiling seemed to press us down onto the tossing water. A gust banged against the plane, and the left wing dipped. Pete jammed the throttles forward and stamped on the rudder pedal. The plane leveled out as bursts of spray licked at the pontoons.

  “What are we at?” said Mitzi.

  “Two hundred feet,” Pete said. “We’re about forty miles east of Clip Bay. Should be on the beach in twenty minutes.”

  And then the Caravan dropped out of the cloud.

  A hundred yards to our right.

  A gleaming black airplane hurtling across the water.

  Rifleman kneeling in the open cargo door.

  7

  Turn to the left!” I yelled, tearing off my headset.

  “What?” Pete said, and then he looked across me and saw the plane, just as the first round struck the fuselage: tap. A second later four quick rounds—tap tap tap tap. Lily screamed in pain. I flung off the seat belt and threw myself out of the cockpit.

  The four bright holes with daylight shining through were grouped tightly together. A marksman. But he should have led by a foot. Then he would have killed me with a head shot instead of gouging a crease across Lily’s cheek.

  She sat staring at the blood-spattered seat, blinking blood out of her eyes.

  “Flesh wound!” I yelled at her over the engine noise. “It’s clean!” I reached for the white first aid kit on the bulkhead. We were turning away from the Caravan, but not fast enough. Tap tap tap tap tap. The cockpit window where I’d been sitting exploded. Shards of Plexiglas sprayed the cockpit.

  “Pete, crank it!” I yelled. This time the Otter stood on its wingtip as he carved a tight turn away from the attacking plane. I flailed for a handhold and slammed into Mitzi’s seat, sprawling on top of her. We tumbled into a heap against the windows. The first aid kit went cartwheeling through the air, spewing its contents through the hold.

  “Climbing!” Pete shouted. The deck tilted steeply again. The engines screamed at full power. Shaking and rattling, the Otter clawed its way up from the lake. The posts shifted dangerously.

  Lily was staring at me across the cabin, still dazed by the violence. Blood smeared her chin and neck.

  “Tear off your shirt! Hold it against your face!”

  Then the cabin dimmed. We were back in the cloud.

  The plane leveled. Mitzi looked shaken. Shards of Plexi glittered in her hair, and a trickle of blood crawled down her forehead.

  “Mitzi,” I said. “You OK to check the straps? I think they loosened.”

  “Shit,” she said, looking stunned. But she shook her head and pulled herself together. She stumbled to the ratchet and tightened the strap.

  I scrambled to the back and found my bag. I put the SIG to one side and took out the medic�
��s kit. I ripped open a pressure bandage. Lily was holding a piece of torn shirt to her cheek. I took her hand away and sprayed the wound with antiseptic and pressed the bandage over the gash. “Hold it there.” I wound a strip of surgical tape around her head a couple of times to hold the dressing in place. Her skin looked chalky, but she wasn’t shaking.

  “Are you OK?” said Mitzi, sitting in the seat beside Lily and putting her hand on Lily’s knee. Lily plucked at the bloody strip of cloth she’d torn from her shirt.

  “Alexander McQueen,” she said. “Seven hundred dollars. That was the sale price.”

  The two women stared at each other, their lips pressed very tight. Mitzi raised a knuckle and wiped a speck of blood from Lily’s cheek. “Men,” she said.

  Wind was howling through the smashed window as I struggled into the right-hand seat and clamped on the headset. Pete’s face was speckled with blood from the storm of shattered Plexi. He turned to me, his face dark with anger.

  “Who are these guys?”

  “I don’t know. The shooter has a sniper gun. Where can we go?”

  He twisted the radio dial to a new frequency.

  “Calling Ekati strip. This is Twin Otter Charlie Hotel Bravo inbound with emergency. Request armed security and EMT. Repeat. Twin Otter Charlie Hotel Bravo inbound with emergency. Request security and medical.”

  “What’s Ekati?”

  “Diamond mine. Eighty miles on this heading.” He ran his eye over the instruments. “Maybe half an hour.” He looked at me. “I’d like to go straight in, but I’m thinking maybe not. These guys must have some kind of military-level radar. He came out right on my wingtip. If he did it once, he can do it again. I’m going to fly a zigzag course,” he said, and made a hard turn to the left.

  “Twin Otter Charlie Hotel…” came a faint voice, then a burst of radio noise and then silence. Pete punched a button on the panel.

  “Ekati strip, come in Ekati.” Nothing. “Radio’s gone,” he said. “Must have been hit.” We flew on for another minute, then made another turn.

  “If he comes up beside us again,” I said, “what side do you think he’ll be on?”

  He thought for a second. “The left. He was on my right, and I turned left. Our planes are pretty close in speed. To stay on my right would cost him the time to fly a wider circle. He probably turned inside me. He’s on the left, out there in the cloud.”

  “Is there a door on the right side of the Caravan?”

  “Yes. The passenger door.” He glanced at me. “You want to know if he can shoot from that side.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not as good as he could from the cargo door, but he can shoot from there.”

  “And our door’s on the left. If I set up there, I’ll be facing him if he comes up beside us.”

  I went back and dug out the SIG and the extra mags. I opened the cargo door. Wind shrieked into the cabin. I took up position behind the pile of staking posts.

  “I’ve got a rifle,” Mitzi shouted. She crept back to the luggage. Her topknot thrashed in the wind from the open cargo door. She pulled out a green canvas case and joined me behind the posts. The gun she took out was a Weatherby Mark V with a scope.

  The posts would conceal us from the shooter and give us protection. I clipped the bipod together, fixed it to the barrel of the SIG, and positioned it just off-center to the door. We had two advantages: One, he wouldn’t see us right away; and two, one of our weapons was a submachine gun. A sniper rifle was unbeatable for accuracy, but at that close range I’d take the fourteen rounds per second.

  Then I heard the worst sound you can hear in an airplane.

  An engine coughed, gasped back to life, then stopped. For maybe fifteen seconds we droned along on a single engine. Then that one cut out too.

  Mitzi and I exchanged glances. She grabbed her headset. “Pete?”

  “Mayday, mayday, mayday.” I could just hear his steady voice above the rush of wind.

  “Twin Otter Charlie Hotel Bravo. Mayday, mayday, mayday. Both engines out. Making forced landing. Lac de Gras.” He read out the coordinates and heading. I wondered if anyone had heard.

  Now there was no sound but the wind blowing through the cabin. We were losing altitude fast. I could hear the ignition system whine as Pete made another attempt to start the engines. Then the cabin brightened, and we slid through the bottom of the cloud into the clear air. A red scroll of hills rippled along the shore of the lake. The plane bounced hard as we went through turbulence. The wind had picked up. Gusts were tearing the cloud to shreds. Slashes of silver light pierced the cover. The low ceiling had been chewed into wisps. The Caravan dropped into view.

  “Fuck,” Mitzi said.

  “Stay behind the posts,” I said, and headed for the cockpit.

  Pete was opening the starter switch again when I got in. The left engine coughed into life, and the plane surged as the propeller bit. The familiar, powerful vibrations ran through the frame like returning life. Then the engine sputtered again, caught for an instant, and cut out.

  “Fuel contamination,” he said.

  The airplane jumped and shuddered.

  “If the fuel was contaminated, how did we get this far?”

  “An Otter has three tanks. The first one was fine. The problem came up when I switched to the second tank. I just tried the third tank. It’s contaminated too.”

  He kept his eyes fixed on the array of dials while he made minute adjustments to the trim.

  “How far can we get?”

  “It’s not a great glider. With this turbulence, even worse.”

  As if to drive the point home, the Otter tilted and slipped sideways, losing a hundred feet.

  I checked on the Caravan. It flew through a cone of light, its black fuselage gleaming. The windows blazed like mirrors in the sun.

  “Can we get down and beach?”

  “There’s no real beach on this lake. It would be a crash.”

  “OK. Just to be clear. There’s a professional kill team in that plane. If we land out in the lake, they will land far enough away so we can’t threaten them. Then they’ll just take their time and shoot us to pieces.”

  I don’t know what Pete’s parents taught him as a kid, but they should bottle it. Bad news had been arriving fast. Pursuers he thought he’d shaken off dropped from the sky right on his wing. A killer opened fire at point-blank range. He had two wounded passengers. And now he was going to crash his plane. His expression never changed.

  We made a turn to parallel the shore. It streamed by a couple of hundred yards to the right. At this point, bare rock fell steeply to the water. Waves crashed against the slope, erupting into sheets of spray.

  “I need you to keep an eye on the altimeter again,” he said. “There’s a little inlet about a mile ahead. I might get in on a sharp turn. Mitz?”

  “We’re good,” she said. I glanced back. She’d dragged some baggage up and wedged it around Lily and squeezed in beside her.

  We were at six hundred feet. The air was rougher near the shore. Suddenly the plane tipped and skidded toward the rock slope.

  “Four hundred feet.”

  We eased away from the cliff face. I glanced ahead and saw what I guessed was the inlet—a jagged promontory with water boiling at its base and a gap beyond.

  “Three hundred.”

  The plane shook violently.

  “Two fifty.”

  “Now!” Pete shouted.

  I could feel the plane shudder as it banked hard and pointed its wingtip at the rushing water.

  We came around the corner of the cliff. The control cables groaned, the airframe rattled, and the wind slapped sideways at the plane. A scarlet hillside hurtled toward us; at its foot a rocky beach.

  “Fifty feet.”

  “Brace!”

  He pulled up the nose, and we splashed down onto the waves. Seconds later we struck the shore. The plane banged across the stony beach. The impact dislodged a staking post. It pierced the netting and
shot into the cockpit, grazed Pete’s seat, and smashed out through the windshield like a missile. The metal pontoons made a high-pitched screeching noise as they plowed into some boulders. The aircraft lurched violently sideways and stopped.

  8

  A fter the shriek of tortured metal, there was nothing but the murmur of wind in the sheltered bay, the ticking of the engine, and the sound of water breaking on the shore. The plane teetered, then settled with a crunch.

  “Lily?”

  “Alex, Mitzi’s hurt!”

  I snapped off my seat belt and clambered out of the tilting cockpit. Mitzi lay sprawled across two seats. Her skin was ashen and her body shaking. The staking post had ripped open the inside of her thigh. It was a dirty, deep wound, but it wasn’t pulsing, so the artery wasn’t cut.

  I grabbed the medic’s kit, mopped up the blood, and sprayed the wound with antiseptic. Another aerosol contained an agent called Quick Clot. I sprayed it onto the laceration. Then I ripped open a compression bandage and bound it tightly into place with pink elastic tape.

  The operations woman in charge of our field equipment was an Afghan vet who’d suffered battlefield wounds. She was the one who always packed the medical kit. I found a package of Actiq and took one out. Actiq is basically a lollipop made of fentanyl. Mitzi put it in her mouth. In a few minutes, her breathing looked easier. I opened a little case full of morphine patches and applied one to her hip. It would kick in before the fentanyl wore off.

  “Is she OK?” Pete said when I leaned back into the cockpit.

  “For now,” I said. “You all right?”

  The staking post had ripped his jacket, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding.

  “I think my shoulder’s dislocated,” he said. He was leaning to peer through the shattered window, scanning the lake for a sign of the Caravan. The cloud was almost gone, torn into strips and flung away by the wind. Sunlight glinted on the gunmetal water.

  “Better get out of the cockpit,” I said. “If the Caravan lands out there, they can sit on the water and shoot us up inch by inch.”

  He shook his head. “Listen,” he said.

  The rise and fall of engine noise on the wind, faint at first. The sound grew, amplified by the rocky slopes around us. They were coming. We watched the headland. The sound clattered among the rocks, yet no sign of the Caravan.