by Levi, Steve;
“Believe me, Captain, er, Heinz. No air carrier loses a dime in Alaska on mail. No, the air cargo carrier charges the Postal Service $600, its usual rate.”
“If the hospital only pays $300 and the air cargo company charges $600, who makes up the difference?”
Ayanna looked at Noonan with the same amused expression. “Do you want my answer or the Post Office’s?”
“I know your answer: the taxpayer. What’s the Post Office say?”
“It says on the average it all works out. While it costs $600 to send the bed out, in essence the rest of the mail is so light it flies for free.”
“Yeah,” said Noonan. “I can see some Postal public affairs person making that statement. It sounds logical but is not. The epitome of the bureaucracy for you.” He swept his index finger side-to-side. “Is all of these stuff going to remote villages?”
“Could be.” Ayanna started looking a number of cargo tags. “This motorcycle is going to be picked up here at the airport; these skis are going to Talkeetna so they are cargo transfers.” She tapped some of the smaller boxes in one of the cargo nets. “Some of these are going to be delivered here in Anchorage and others are on their way to the Mat-Su Valley for distribution.”
“Mat-Su as in Matanuska-Susitna Valley?”
“You know your Alaska geography well.”
“No. I know the Mat-Su has some of the largest king salmon runs in the world. That’s where my kids are today.”
“Then they are going to have fishing stories for the rest of their lives. Do you have salmon in North Carolina?”
“Only in the supermarket.”
Ayanna laughed. “Where my father does his fishing. Comes home with a fish every time he goes out.”
“Smart man.”
“And successful.”
They both chuckled and Noonan gestured with his left hand to indicate the stacks of cargo. “I see, so you’ve got a big collection of a lot of little deliveries.”
“Except for those large crates.” Ayanna pointed to a mountain of crates, all the same size. They were strapped together and all had the same logo printed on all sides of the cartons. “They go to the Alyeska Pipeline. Probably tools or technical equipment too delicate to travel by barge. Or too important. I don’t think any of the cargo has anything to do with the passengers. It was loaded long before the passengers were brought on board. And it’s here. They’re not.”
Noonan gave a hum indicating he had heard what she said. Then he stepped back through the particle board bulkhead and surveyed the interior of the airplane. Ayanna followed him and shut the panel door behind her.
Noonan wandered down the corridor not sure what he was looking for. About halfway to the tail staircase he turned around. “Can one person fly an airplane this big?”
“Sure. It’s not safe and quite complicated. One person could do it. Flying itself is not difficult; it’s the takeoff and landing. Landing and takeoffs are where all the busy work happens.”
“Would Seattle have known there was only one person in the cockpit?”
“Probably not. The Control Tower doesn’t talk to everyone in the cockpit, just the pilot. There would be no reason to talk with anyone else. And the Control Tower can’t see inside the cockpit so there would have been no way to visually confirm there was only one person in the cockpit.”
Noonan looked down the aisle and nudged a pillow with the toe of his right shoe. “Once the plane got aloft,” he paused for a moment. “Aloft, the right term?”
“It’ll do. We just say ‘up.’”
“OK, when the plane got up could the pilot have put the plane on automatic long enough to come back here and spread out this trash? I mean the blankets, magazines and napkins?”
“Modern automatic pilots don’t really work so easily. It’s not like you hit a switch and the plane flies with no one in charge for hours. It has to be updated and re-entered every ten or fifteen minutes – just to make sure some external force like a storm or wind isn’t affecting the route of the plane. But, the answer to your question is yes; someone could have come back here and messed up the cabin. They’d just have to be back in the pilot’s chair before the automatic pilot shut off.”
“What happens when the automatic pilot shuts off?”
“Don’t know. Never heard of it happening. I’m assuming some kind of an alarm goes off in the cockpit. Maybe some lights flash. I don’t think the plane goes into a power dive or anything so severe. I’ll bet some kind of alarm flashes in some control tower somewhere.”
“You might want to check and see if something similar happened for this plane,” Noonan said as he poked around inside of one of the overhead lockers. “I don’t see any laptops up here and I didn’t see any on the seats. Some of the passengers probably had laptops. If they are on the ground you might be able to get an email through. There have got to be relatives waiting in the terminal,” he angled his head toward the terminal. “You might also ask for cell phone numbers. Some of the passengers probably had cell phones.”
“We’ve got a passel of relatives in the terminal and they are not happy campers.”
“I imagine not,” Noonan took another long look up the aisle. “When you finally got into the plane it was empty. Just like this?”
“Yup. We haven’t touched anything. It’s a crime scene right now.”
“Well, I guess I’ve seen all I want to see here. Will you make sure you get your print people to work on the trash can?”
“Not a problem.”
“OK. Let’s go to your office and quack. I still need some information.”
“Quack?”
“When you live in duck country, you quack.”
Ayanna was silent for a moment. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t want to live in North Carolina.”
“If I lived in Alaska,” Noonan said quickly, “I wouldn’t want to live in North Carolina either.”
Ayanna found it funny and laughed. It was a light laugh, at first kind of nervous and then with a bit of relief. “I needed a laugh,” she said. “It’s been so tense lately, the passengers missing and all.”
“Well, don’t relax yet,” Noonan said darkly. “Those passengers aren’t the only mystery here.”
“You still think they’re being held hostage? Why? How?”
“Why? For lots of money. How? Another matter altogether.” Noonan extended his arm out toward the rear door of the airplane indicating she should lead the two of them out of the plane.
Ayanna preceded him down the back stairway. As they crossed the tarmac she nodded to the security teams who were on alert around the aircraft. Well, they were supposed to on alert but to Noonan they looked to be snoozing. No one was actually asleep, as in sawing logs, but it was clear to Noonan no one was expecting anything to happen soon. Most of the men were bleary eyed as if they had just been rudely shaken awake, not as if they had been up all night. They had probably been on the clock all night but, as Noonan knew from sad experience, it was not the same as being wide awake for the same period of time.
Noonan stood for a moment in the bright sunshine and took in the entire operations area, from the terminal building across the apron and then across the runway to where the trees to the far south indicated vacant land or a park. He saw absolutely nothing out of place. He didn’t know what kind of activity an airport was supposed to have on the apron side of the terminal but there wasn’t a lot of activity here. Anchorage was certainly not SEATAC or LAX but he would have expected more movement. There was none. Maybe it got busy when a plane came in? Actually, he knew this probably wasn’t true. Whenever he had landed in Anchorage all he saw through the window was the usual crew of six or seven taking luggage off the plane and maybe two or three more inside the plane cleaning it out for the next load of passengers. There were 17 gates and even though he could see the tails of six or seven Alaska Airlines jets, the face of the Eskimo proudly on each one, he saw no flurry of trucks and people on the apron. Odd, he thought.
&n
bsp; Then again, this was Alaska.
Noonan followed Ayanna across the tarmac to the edge of the apron. Ayanna used a pass key to open an outer door and they mounted the same stairway they had used to get onto the tarmac earlier. When the door slammed shut behind them, it was pitch dark. No reason to have windows here.
At the top of the stairs Ayanna handed the trash can to one of the gorilla-like Alaska State Troopers watching the docking bay. “Please have this taken over to the crime lab,” she said to him. “Have them check for any fingerprints on anything. Then get a copy of the fingerprints of the flight attendants and crew from SEATAC. See if we can make a match.”
The trooper gave her a look of annoyance, the way people of show do when they have to deal with the people of sweat. Annoyance because work is what people of sweat do. Work is not what people of show do. Then again, Noonan was standing next to Ayanna and one of the unspoken rules of being a person of show is to never upset someone you don’t know. They could be important, you know.
The state trooper grunted rather than said anything. He wrapped his fingers around the lip of the garbage can and held it away from his body as if it had some odious smell emanating from within. Noonan had seen the look too many time to mistake it. It was the don’t-let-anything-stain-my-uniform-because-I-look-so-good-in-it expression. With the trash can at arm’s length he was off, striding down the concourse with seven league boots.
The other trooper still stood oak-like overlooking the check-in desk. He had a phone in one hand and was waving Ayanna toward him with the other. “For you,” he said as he passed her the phone.
“Driscoll.” She listened for a moment and then her face went pale. When she put the phone down, her face had the pallor of a corpse.
Noonan looked at her with a sad smile as if to silently say he knew what was coming next.
“They want $25 million in diamonds and other precious stones.” She took a deep breath. “They want it within 48 hours.”
Chapter 3
In Alaska, fishing is neither a sport nor a passion; it is a religion. It is a polytheistic creed with the king salmon as the most holy divine and the lesser gods descending from sockeye and coho to halibut and sheefish, grayling and cutthroat and thence to pike, chum, dog, hooligan and finally Irish lords. An Alaskans who does not fish is as rare as a Californian without a car.
Alaska is, quite literally, the land of fish. Fish made the land. In the days before canned salmon the fish of profit was hooligan. These smelt were so rich in fish oil if they were held upright they would burn like a candle. The market for this oil was so great what became known as the Inside Passage, the waterway connecting Juneau with the Seattle, was Grease Alley. Long before the hooligan fishery died the canned salmon industry rose. Beginning in the early years of the 1900s salmon became the cash crop. It supplanted the other two other great industries in Alaska history: fur and gold. Even with the rise of the oil industry, fishing is still the second largest employer in the state.
The solitary fisherman is the symbol of the summer in Alaska. The man, or woman, with the pole and fish net is the royalty of the north. From late May to early September Alaskans plan their weekends based on which fish run is open. King salmon are so plentiful they can be caught in Ship Creek, the stream on which the original town of Anchorage was established. Within the boundaries of the Municipality of Anchorage, depending on the date, the wily fisherman can catch silver and pink salmon, hooligan, Dolly Varden, rainbow trout, grayling or Arctic char.
There are so many fisherman on the open rivers Alaskans refer to the sport as combat fishing. Anglers stand shoulder-to-shoulder-shoulder along the shoreline casting their lures into the water or dip netting the inand out-going tide for their limits. The runs are so strong everyone has a chance of getting at least one fish. With limits being as high as 25 fish per person, a family can stock a winter’s worth of fish in a dedicated weekend of fishing. In the Upper Cook Inlet, a leisurely drive from Anchorage, the total yearly harvest is 25 salmon and 10 flounder for the permit holder and 10 salmon for each additional household member.
Salmon runs are so popular most television and radio stations have several minutes during the news hour to report where the fishing is hottest. Newspapers have colored maps of fishing areas and the most popular publication in Alaska during the summer is the State of Alaska Department of Fish and Game tide chart.
For the angler who wants to increase his chance of getting a king salmon, he fishes from a boat rather than along the shoreline. Though boats there are plenty, the ocean is a huge expanse and one can always find a secluded area to drop in a little tiny hook to catch a very big fish. Since the salmon migrate, there are no fishing holes as they are known in the lower states. In Alaska you fish the migration streams. If you time it right, you can catch a king salmon which can weigh upwards of one hundred pounds–and every ounce not skin, guts or bone is very good eating. After you have hooked your monster, all you have to do is get him into the boat. For the smaller fish, an ice chest will do; but you fill ice chest with beer just in case the salmon aren’t biting.
The sun was still high in the sky, which meant nothing in July in Anchorage, as the Fisherman lugged the ice chest onto his boat. He had to make sure it would fit. Perfect planning was the key to success. He didn’t need any last minute surprises. It wasn’t hard to load the ice chest because it was empty. It was supposed to be empty. You didn’t go fishing with a full ice chest. You came back with a full ice chest. He didn’t need any ice now. He was just setting the stage. He’d get the ice tomorrow. Six or seven pounds would be enough. Not a lot of ice. He was not after big fish. He didn’t need much ice.
He would need beer. No Alaskan fisherman would set off after king salmon without a six-pack or two of beer. It would be uncivilized, un-Alaskan. More beer made more friends. Make it three or four six-packs. Fit in with the crowd.
Chapter 4
It took less than 23 minutes for the Anchorage International Airport to go from a contained crisis to Pandemonium. It was bad enough the President of Unicorn Airlines in Seattle was notified of the ransom demand by an anonymous phone call within minutes of Ayanna – on his private line. Worse, both Anchorage newspapers and every radio and television station in town were tipped by the end of the hour – and Ayanna only got the call with 23 minutes left in that hour.
Before she had hung up the phone, every one of the relatives of the passengers knew the ransom call had been made. Those who had not picked it up from the radio saw it blasted across the Internet.
Welcome to the age of electronic communication
They were not happy.
In fact, they were extremely upset.
This was the good news.
The bad news was they were telling everyone about the ransom.
And anyone.
Radio stations as far west as Denver were running live interviews with relatives within the hour and 60 minutes later Los Angeles television stations had live feeds from the airport using Anchorage affiliate commentators. File footage of the 737 and construction experts clogged the airwaves and there was talk of the return of D. B. Cooper, a name so unfamiliar to the average television watcher the entire historical saga of the lone hijacker had to be brought back to life.
It was as if the center of the entire news universe had shifted, west from New York and north from Washington D. C. The President of the United States canceled a news conference because she didn’t think any of the stations would preempt the Anchorage drama and Congress went on an extended vacation because no news of the floor was making the cable channels.
For better or worse, the Alaskans were loving it. Local broadcast feeds were going worldwide and freelance reporters were inundating the airport as if it were a red carpet event. There were so many people descending on the airport there was gridlock in the parking lot, singular, and both the Approach and Departure lanes. Inside the terminal a dozen state troopers were assigned to keep the crowd away from the end Concourse C and back fr
om the windows overlooking the plane. Another dozen were assigned in-terminal duty with two dozen more handling the traffic – foot and vehicular – outside on both sides of the terminal.
Then things really got out of hand. A freelance cameraman was discovered in the chassis of a food van supplying planes on the runway apron. This lead to a search of all vehicles on the landing apron and three more paparazzi were discovered. Two small surveillance cameras were discovered bolted to the backside of the terminal facing the plane and tents began appearing on the far side of the runway from where a bank of telephoto lenses could be seen glinting in the sunshine.
The calls from the extortionists, quite literally, shut the city down. Anchorage, Alaska was not a large city to begin with. During the winter it had a population of about 300,000 making it, at best, a modest but small American city. During the summer, the city was packed. Every hotel was filled to capacity and it was easier to find a walrus with a gold tooth than an open restaurant table. When the paparazzi arrived, the bed-and-breakfasts filled. More rooms were needed so citizens were asked to open their homes to the visiting news teams – at $250 a night breakfast not included.
What made Anchorage unique was its isolation. There was no ‘next town.’ In Los Angeles someone could drive from the Pacific Ocean to the desert, about 50 miles, and pass through a dozen cities the size of Anchorage. But Anchorage had no neighbors of similar size. The nearest large city was Seattle, 2000 miles to the south. The next smallest city was Fairbanks, 300 miles to the north. Other than a limited selection of bedroom communities, Anchorage was as geographically isolated as it had been before the Second World War. The miles between it and the lower 48 states had not changed, only the time it takes to get there.