Ice Angel

by Matthew Hart

  Tommy stuck out his hand. “Tommy Cleary,” he said.

  Pete tried to ignore it, but he wasn’t that kind of guy, and reluctantly he shook hands.

  “Got a laptop in there?” Tommy said.

  Pete reached into the cargo deck and unzipped a bag and took out a grimy case. He opened it, and the screen flickered to life. Tommy tapped his screen and airdropped a feed from the command post at the airport. He unmuted the audio. The staccato exchange of military communications crackled into the cold air. Pete stared at the screen.

  The map showed a square of a hundred miles a side. Scores of lakes, their rugged shorelines traced out in bright green against the dark background. In the center was Lac de Gras. Swarming like fireflies over the black expanse were winking dots of light, some in clusters, others blinking out over the Barrens on their own solitary paths.

  “Some of these planes are carrying stakers,” I said. “You probably know most of them. But one is carrying Fan and Lily. And they are not a staking crew. They’re a hunting party. Lily is a hostage, if she’s alive. Fan thinks she can help him find the person he is hunting, or come in handy when he finds her. See if you can think who that might be.”

  The priest hauled his hockey bag out of the van and lugged it to the plane.

  “This is not some guy who took a flutter in diamonds and will lick his wounds and go away. This is the Chinese government playing for a foothold in the Arctic. They don’t lick their wounds. They give you the wounds to lick.”

  Pete scowled at the screen and bit his lip.

  “Jimmy salted the Clip Bay target, Pete. Mitzi knew. Don’t pretend you were out of the loop. That’s why we went up that night and hiked over from the container camp. She wondered what Fan was up to because she knew the pipe was a duster. When she saw that he was taking out a bulk sample to get an actual diamond count, I’m guessing she advanced her plans, because that count was going to be zero. So whatever she’s got going, probably with Lily’s help, got pushed up fast, and that’s why she’s disappeared.”

  Tommy had the sat phone pressed to his ear. “Guys,” he said, “let me add something to the discussion.” He slid the volume up.

  “Base, Silver Bird One,” a voice crackled from the phone. “First target has no foxtrot alpha mike. Repeat, no FAM present.”

  “FAM means fighting age males,” I said to Pete. “It’s military code for people they will probably have to engage. That’s an elite force, and they’re looking for Fan. You don’t want Mitzi to be standing too close when they find him.”

  The screen cut to a satellite shot of the Black Hawk hovering in a storm of dirt. The site looked abandoned. The military dispatchers began to reel off the next coordinates. They had a list of Jimmy Angel’s main exploration targets, places where Fan might go in his search for Mitzi. We watched as the screen reverted to the map, and the two Black Hawks left the camp and made their way into the dense clump of other blinking lights on their way to the second target.

  “Fan is using all this activity as cover. His goal is to reach Mitzi before we can intercept him. He’ll force her to give up the location of the pipe.”

  “He’ll never find her.”

  “Pete. Wherever she is, you brought her there. The Chinese know about you. They might have tracked your flight.”

  He shook his head. “There’s no transponder on this plane.”

  “They don’t need to follow a transponder. We’re not the only ones with satellites. Take a good look at that screen. There are people in Beijing watching one just like it, while we stand here buying them time.”

  “If they know where I flew from, why doesn’t Fan just go straight there?”

  “There’s a Reaper drone above the Barrens. It took off from Yellowknife, so I don’t think it’s a secret. Fan won’t go until he has some cover.”

  “I think he’s getting it now,” Tommy said. He zoomed the picture to the eastern sector of Lac de Gras. Two blips were leaving the main area of activity and heading east along the north coast of the lake.

  “She’s at the far end of the lake, isn’t she,” I said. “You have to take us there.”

  “Is that Fan?” Pete said, his eyes on the screen as the dots advanced across the eastern end of the lake.

  “Probably not yet. He’ll build up activity in the area first by ordering staking. When there’s enough cover, then he’ll go.”

  “Unless he’s delayed,” Pete said. “There’s a low coming down from the Arctic. The weather’s getting dirty.”

  “You know that won’t stop him,” I said.

  He looked like a trapped man. But on the dock that morning, who wasn’t? I was trapped by Lily. By what formed between us on nights when our only certainty was each other. Tommy was trapped too. I could see it when he wasn’t guarding his face. Anguish that Minnie had betrayed him. I think that even now he hoped to save her from what would happen to her when we no longer needed her help with the twins. I don’t know what trapped the priest—God or the awful weight of his past. Unless that was the same thing.

  We cast off and taxied into the rough channel. We took off to the northeast, into a dirty sky.

  46

  B lack cloud slid down from the north and clamped a package of evil weather onto the Barrens. We could see it ahead of us as we approached. Pete put the old bush plane into a slow descent. We were at eight hundred feet when he leveled off. Then we were under. The temperature dropped fast.

  We reached Lac de Gras and flew east along the southern coast. Powerful gusts lathered the surface of the water. A dark funnel spiraled up out of the lake a mile to the left. The ceiling dropped again. We descended to six hundred feet. The inky water thrashed in the wind. The cabin got colder. The heater made a fitful effort and gave up. Icy fingers of wind pried their way into the plane and picked at our clothes. The sleet arrived with a hiss.

  I sat beside Pete, watching the view ahead slowly disappear behind a film of ice. On the pilot’s side, the defroster managed to gasp out enough tepid air to keep a patch of windshield clear. After about ten minutes, the altimeter needle began to inch around the dial as we lost altitude and sank closer to the tossing lake.

  “Wings are icing up,” Pete said. He pulled back gently on the yoke. The engine groaned, and the plane climbed slowly. “She’s getting sluggish.”

  “Can we make it?”

  He tapped the altimeter. “Normally I’d climb above the cloud to get out of the sleet. But then I’d have to come down blind. Where we’re going—it’s too risky. We’ll have to stay under all the way and see how it goes.”

  I looked back into the cabin. “What’s the action at the east end of the lake?”

  Tommy shook his head. He had the device held to his ear. “Phone packed up. I lost the video feed. I can only hear scraps of the audio.”

  “What was happening before you lost the feed?”

  “Two aircraft were heading to the east end of the lake.”

  “Any ID on them?”

  “No. The Black Hawks were just finishing with the second target.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No one there.” He swiped his finger across the screen a few times. “I think they were going to check the third target.” He frowned at the phone. “I’ll try rebooting.”

  Jimmy’s map had identified four main exploration targets. Clip Bay was the first. The next two were on the same side of the lake—the north side. If the Chinese had satellite surveillance of the lake, which I assumed they did, then they might know not only where Pete’s plane had taken off from but also where the Black Hawks were. If our own satellite feed was breaking up because of extreme weather over the Barrens, probably theirs was too. But Fan didn’t have to wait passively for reports. He could create his own cover by dispatching stakers to the east end of the lake. He could then cross the lake himself, a blip among other blips, and fly straight to the fourth of Jimmy Angel’s targets. The one we were heading to now.

  We droned along the shore. The side win
dow was striped with threads of ice, but otherwise clear. Ice glistened on the rocks. Waves lashed a rocky beach. We lost another hundred feet.

  “We’re icing up fast,” Pete said. He reached out to touch the defroster vent. “This is quitting.” The little patch of clear glass on the windshield was filling in with ice. “If I have to come in hard, at least it’s a good beach.”

  “We can’t land at the camp. There’s a chance Fan is already there. We need to get down where they can’t see us.”

  Now the windshield was completely sealed by ice. Only the side windows were still clear.

  “OK,” Pete said. “I know a beach.”

  We entered a wide bay flanked by low hills. Waves rolled against a steep shore. Columns of white spray leapt into the air. At four hundred feet we turned slowly to the right and flew across the heaving bay. I looked down at the pontoons and the black water streaming by. Pete had his eyes locked on the instruments.

  “You’re going to have to put your head out the window. Tell me if you see a place with vegetation coming down to the water. Guys,” he called into the cabin, “brace for a heavy landing!”

  I slid the window open and snapped off my seat belt and leaned out. The sleet bit into my face. I held my hand up to shield my eyes. I caught a glimpse of red. The sleet wiped it away. Then it reappeared—a low, red hillside hurtling toward us.

  “Three hundred yards!” I shouted.

  The Beaver mashed down into the stormy water. The pontoons dug into the rollers. The nose dipped, and the sudden drag threw me forward into the instrument panel. We slewed sideways, and the big rollers rocked the ice-covered plane dangerously in the swell. Pete jammed his foot on the rudder pedal and powered the plane around to face the shore. When the pontoons ground against gravel, he gunned up onto a narrow beach.

  It took an hour to crawl over the icy rocks. Tommy’s face was fixed in concentration as he advanced across the frozen ground. We inched on our bellies the last few yards to the top of a rise and over the crest. The camp lay in a bowl of hills. Fan had got there first.

  47

  The tent was stiff with ice. It was pitched against one side of the bowl, its back to the hills. A thread of smoke curled from the tin stovepipe.

  Two Jet Rangers rocked in the storm a hundred yards in front of the tent. Plastic sleeves protected the rotors from the sleet. Tethering lines secured the aircraft and the drooping blades against the wind. No one by the choppers or the tent. Beyond the tent was a structure made of two shipping containers placed side by side, and as I studied it, I caught movement.

  The containers had garage doors installed at the ends. The doors were open. I took out a little sighting scope and looked again. Three men stood inside. Two of them wore flight suits. The third man stood apart. He had a hand resting on an Uzi slung from his shoulder. Even from three hundred yards, I could see the tats curling up his neck and read the sneer. The other two just looked scared. I handed Pete the scope.

  “I know those pilots,” he said as he peered through the lens. “They fly for the company that owns the choppers.” He tracked around the site. “That’s weird. No drill.”

  “Mitzi was drilling?”

  “She said she was going to. The properties the Chinese invested in were all marked on a map. This bowl—Jimmy had marked it carefully. Mitzi thought it might be where he got the garnets.” He checked the tent. “Flap zipped tight,” he said, and handed back the scope.

  A gust rattled the stovepipe. The weather-beaten canvas glistened with ice. The wind picked at the sides of the tent and made the guy ropes moan. Ice tinkled on the rocks. They wouldn’t hear us coming.

  The priest handed Tommy a nylon gun case.

  “What did you give him?” I said as Tommy unzipped it.

  “The Ithaca.”

  “The riot gun you gave Lily?”

  He nodded. I didn’t even ask. The man could find weapons. That was just the kind of flock he had. I helped myself to a Walther PPK from his bag. It looked exactly like the one the biker had aimed at me that night in the taxi. I shoved it in my belt.

  “You’re not shooting?”

  “It’s not my place,” the priest said.

  “What’s in the small black case?”

  “The last sacrament.”

  * * *

  We made our plans. I rubbed the ice from my eyes. The slope provided cover as we circled around behind the camp. I had the MPX inside my jacket, and Pete had his Winchester out. Ice glinted on the barrel.

  We crept down the incline, out of sight of the open ends of the containers. At the back of the tent, I put my ear against the stiff canvas. All I could hear was the rattle of ice and the ropes groaning in the wind.

  I glanced at the priest. He nodded. Pete disappeared around the corner. He would move down the side of the tent away from the containers. I checked around the other corner, and then ran in a crouch across the open ground to the back of the first container. I lost my balance and slid the last few yards, smashing into the container. I scrambled into a kneeling position and aimed the MPX at the front corner. But the only sound was the steady drizzle of the ice. No one appeared.

  I crossed the back and came down the side away from the tent. At the corner I stopped and listened. They were very close, stamping their feet in the cold and slapping their gloved hands together. I stepped into view and put a burst into the rocks, sending a storm of icy chips into the container.

  “Outside and face down or I’ll kill you right here,” I said.

  The two pilots gaped at me and then threw themselves onto the ground. The kid’s face twisted with rage. He had a hand on the Uzi and looked like he was remembering a scene from a movie where the bad guy makes a quick move and gets away with it. I knew that scene. I shot the kid in the leg. He screamed and crumpled to the ground, and the Uzi went clattering across the ice.

  Pete jumped out in front of the tent and aimed his rifle at the flap and yelled, “Go!”

  The priest shuffled carefully into view with a hunting knife and went down one side of the tent, slashing ropes. The stiff canvas crumpled under the burden of ice. The stovepipe wobbled: the top broke off, and the rest of it slid inside the tent with a puff of soot.

  Pete shouted at the tent that they were surrounded and ordered them to put their weapons out through the flap. I proned out the pilots and the howling kid and fixed their hands behind their backs with ties. I left them in the sleet and joined Pete. He nodded to the priest, who slashed the ropes on the other side too.

  The tent sagged from its poles. Tendrils of black smoke were leaking from the edges of the flap. The air inside would be full of soot and choking fumes. There wasn’t even a cough. The angular shapes pressed against the drooping canvas didn’t look like people.

  “They’re gone,” Pete said.

  “Where could they go?”

  He looked baffled. “Jimmy kept a tracked vehicle here. They could go anywhere. But why?”

  We dragged the chopper pilots and the kid back into a container. I had a small med kit. I gave the kid a morphine jab, found some torn canvas, and tied off his leg above the wound. I asked him where Fan and the others had gone. He was starting to shake. He babbled something about maps.

  “What’s he talking about?” Pete asked the pilots.

  “Jimmy was using NAD 27, and the Chinese guy found out.”

  Pete frowned. “That’s crazy. Jimmy was a pilot. His GPS would have been NAD 83, or he couldn’t even have navigated properly.”

  “I’m talking about the survey maps that showed his targets.”

  “Pete?” I said.

  “Sorry. I’ll explain. NAD 27 was the old GPS system. NAD means North American Datum. NAD 27 was based on reference points from 1927. By 1983, there was better data. The new system was called NAD 83.”

  I looked at the pilot. “If Jimmy was using an outdated map to disguise the location of his targets, wouldn’t Fan’s people know just by looking at the date?”

  He shook his hea
d. “Jimmy stripped off the version ID.”

  “So where are they now?”

  “Mitzi was gone when we got here. They went after her.”

  “She took the tracked vehicle?” Pete said.

  “I guess so. It wasn’t here. It left a trail. They followed it on foot.”

  “How many?” I said.

  There were six. From their descriptions, Fan and the waif, Tinkerbell, a man who had to be George Wu, and two heavies. Like the tat kid, the heavies had Uzis too.

  “No one else? A prisoner?”

  He shook his head. “They had a wooden box, like a long crate. There was a sled in here. The security guys put it on that and dragged it with them.”

  She had to be alive. Fan must be keeping her as a life to trade if he needed to. I pushed away the image of her lying in the freezing wooden crate.

  The sleet was blowing into the containers. We dragged the pilots and the kid further in, out of the weather. I made sure the wrist ties were secure and tied their ankles too. Pete went to the back of the container and found some crampons. We were strapping them on when he looked around with a frown.

  “The drill’s gone,” he said. “If she’s not using it, this is where it should be.”

  “Could Mitzi have taken it by herself?”

  “It was small. One person could run it. She could have towed it with the little Cat.”

  We looked at each other. “I guess she had an idea where the garnets came from after all,” I said.

  We went back into the sleet and followed the tracks out of the camp.

  48

  The track led uphill. It was easy to follow—tread marks cut into the icy ground. Not far from camp, the track curved and followed a passage between low hills. We made quick time with the crampons. The only sounds were the crunch of metal cleats on ice and the vast clinking of the sleet. In twenty minutes we covered about a mile. Ahead of us the track led over a hump. We were almost at the top when we heard the drill.