But today he felt the warmth of renewed relationship with his only child as he thumped into his tiny cabin, let the wood fall into the bin, and bent to stoke his stove. Andee would be here by tonight, and he had dinner planned—a tall stack of buttermilk pancakes with chocolate chips. He wished her mother would join them. Mary hadn’t been to see him in years—a fact that still felt like a hole inside him, even though they corresponded regularly. But maybe time would heal that wound also.
Time and forgiveness.
He still remembered the first time Andee had shown up in Disaster—right after her sophomore year in college, toting a blonde-haired friend with a New York accent. Those were the days when he still looked over his shoulder, spooked at every creak in the forest, and didn’t leave the cabin without his gun. Andee had appeared on the four-wheeler, stacked with supplies, clearly intent on spending time with him.
It had felt like living water to his parched soul. He drank in her company, her smile, and her laughter and ignored the waves of regret that threatened to pull him under.
A stronger and wiser man might have made her leave. Instead, he hoped and prayed that the danger had passed. After twenty years, certainly the Rubinov family had forgotten or at least moved on to bigger acts of vengeance. Certainly his daughter and wife were no longer targets. He’d started to hope that they might be a family again. Despite Mary’s fears, Gerard had broken his own rules and let Andee stay. Not only that, he looked forward to her visits. Now he prayed for Mary to join her. And from her recent letters . . . well, a man had reason to hope.
He closed the door to the stove and rose, walking to the cold storage to retrieve his breakfast. Usually he lived like a lonely hermit, evident in the scarce canned goods, the absence of curtains and pictures. But since Andee’s appearance, the place had lost its grease and fish odors. She’d cleaned, added the purple blossoms of Jacob’s ladder to the vase on the table, embedded the smells of oat bread and porridge into the pine walls, and displayed new photos of her and Sarah and her other Team Hope pals.
Pictures that he’d hidden with nearly rabid paranoia years before.
But those days had passed. Certainly, they’d passed. He’d even begun to consider Andee’s pleas to move to Disaster proper. He knew she’d feel better with him closer to town.
He opened the cool-storage door, grabbed a slab of bacon, and turned. He froze, staring at the man in the doorway, the one holding a gun.
He didn’t see the one behind him until a split second before the man’s blow sent him to the floor in an explosion of pain.
Andee blocked out the screams that could be heard through her headset and above the noise of wind as the Cessna plummeted. Her entire body felt weighted, as if it too had gathered the ice that was forcing the aircraft to the ground. The plane fell like dead-weight, the stall warning still sounding, scraping her nerves. If she could get the plane below this cloud with enough air left, she could level it out and land . . . maybe.
Andee tried to pull back on the yoke. Judging from the way her controls responded, sluggish at best, the ice had the final say on their rate of descent. Currently, they were plunging at 100 knots per second, banking west toward the mountains.
And she couldn’t seem to pull them out of the dive. In a moment, they’d start to spin.
Exhaling hard, she pulled back on the controls, struggling to even the artificial horizon. Her ailerons must be frozen into place, along with the rudder. Her foot pedals didn’t respond.
Why had she climbed into the clouds? She’d collected ice over Murphy’s Dome on more than one occasion, but she’d always been able to fly through and cut out into the warming, lifesaving sunshine.
Why hadn’t she listened to her instincts and simply stayed on the ground?
Not now. She wouldn’t listen to the voices of guilt until later. When they were on the ground. Alive.
“Mayday, Mayday. This is November-one-three-seven-four-Lima. We’ve been hit by lightning and are going down. Over.”
Nothing but static. Had her radio been iced over too? The weight on the antenna may have broken it off. She turned on the Emergency Locator Transmitter and the responder to 7700 MHz. Please, please let the ELT be working. Had she remembered to check the batteries? If they crashed, any plane flying overhead would hear their distress call.
Andee glanced at Sarah. Her friend stared straight ahead, clasping the door grip.
They cleared the buffer of clouds, and the rugged landscape below threatened to cut off her air. Calm down.
The plane began to spin. Andee ordered herself to slow her breathing and mentally catalog her responses.
Center the rudders. She fought the controls; her hands whitened as she forced her head to stay clear. The plane spun once, then leveled out. Thank You, God.
What was her checklist for a forced landing? Turn fuel selector off. Throttle, closed. Mixture—idle cutoff. Mags, off.
Land . . . ASAP.
She pulled back on the yoke. The elevator responded and pulled the nose up slightly. She nudged her flaps down, slowing the plane.
Land.
The plummet and spin had driven her course northwest over the foothills and rising horizon of the Brooks Range, glistening peaks of doom. Crippled, she would descend until they splotched nose first onto some jagged spire. She glanced at her falling altimeter. With this much ice, even the engine running at full power couldn’t keep the plane in the air. They’d never keep the height—even over Foggytop Mountain. She had to find a place to land, one that wouldn’t rip them apart piece by piece. She felt sweat bead underneath her cap, but inside her leather coat a shiver ran up her spine.
“Sarah, get on the horn and keep calling Mayday.” She handed Sarah the mike.
The stall warning continued to blare.
Andee evened the flaps, praying for response. The plane nosed up slightly, but at this speed, they’d be nothing but bear bait.
The plush carpet of tundra beckoned below, but the Cessna refused to respond in time. They passed a canyon dissected by a stream of glacier flow, and she willed them above a sawtooth ridge and past the furrows of a glacier field at the mouth of a high-altitude basin.
“Mayday, Mayday.” Andee heard the reined-in panic in Sarah’s voice.
The scenery hurtled by, and the yoke shook in Andee’s grip. She adjusted the throttle to get a better mixture for more power, but to her dismay, it didn’t cut their descent.
Praise the Lord, the flaps miraculously responded. She barely missed clipping the wing on a snowy boulder outcropping.
The screaming in the passenger area stilled. She tasted their fear.
She needed to find another carpeted basin to set them down in before they crashed so high they’d never be able to hike out, let alone survive the landing.
Ripping off her headset, she glanced at Sarah. “Find me a meadow or a gravel bar to land on.”
Sarah’s eyes widened.
Andee heard moaning. A furtive glance behind her showed ashen faces. All except for McRae, who wore a grim, dark look, as if he might hold her personally responsible for the storm clouds that drove them from the sky.
Then again she did too.
“Prepare for crash landing.” Andee knew she didn’t have to yell to get her message across. She throttled back to an airspeed of 100 knots, then released the lock on the door.
Nothing more than the roar of the motor filled the cabin.
“There!” Sarah pointed to a swath of reddened tundra surrounded by cut granite spears and falls of gray scree splotched with white snow.
Andee nodded and descended hard into the high meadow. Short approach, here we come. She cut her speed to 71 knots, thankful she now had flaps, and nosed the Cessna down, barely clearing the greedy claws of a sharpened peak.
The plane hummed as she angled down. Andee was painfully aware that she’d probably lose her left wing at this angle. Please, Lord, straighten her up!
The ground rose to meet the plane, and an eerie silence
filled her ears as she cut the engine. The plane bumped hard on the tundra, skipped, bumped again, then bounced as the wheels hit a boulder. She heard ripping and guessed they’d lost at least one wheel. Then the wing caught and the world upended.
Rolled.
Sparks littered her knees; heat rushed her body.
Andee held on to the straps and for the first time let herself scream.
Darkness and the smell of avgas, hot and pungent, filled his nose and mouth. Mac’s head throbbed with the sting of fresh blood, and his arm burned. He opened his eyes and clawed through the layers of confusion.
He hung upside down, his arms over his head. He heard groaning and moved his head. Beside him and slightly higher, Phillips hung unconscious, his thick arms obscuring Mac’s view. Behind Mac—or rather above him—Ishbane and the hunter and Nina hung from their seats. Blood dripped off Nina’s face.
He did a mental check, touched the gash on his head, moved his arms and legs, and found that right behind the adrenaline rush of relief the only thing that really ached was his stupidity muscle. Why had he stepped inside an airplane? Obviously he needed a good head slap . . . if they got out of here alive. He reached to unlatch his seat belt, then grunted as he landed with a whump on the ceiling of the Cessna.
Phillips was just rousing.
“Hey, wake up,” Mac said.
Phillips opened his eyes, frowned, and stared at Mac. Aye, me too, pal. “We crashed,” Mac said. “You okay?”
Phillips stared at him as if he were speaking Swahili.
“You okay? Anything broken?”
Behind Phillips, Ishbane came to with a few choice words.
“I think I’m intact,” Phillips mumbled, then reached for his seat belt.
Mac leaned out of the way as the man kerthumped beside him. “How’s the pilot?”
They’d landed roof down, leaning on the right wing side, the left side up at an angle. He heard sparks, probably what was left of the instrument panel. Chemistry 101 told him that sparks plus leaking fuel equaled a big bang. They needed to exit this craft— and now. From his two-second evaluation inside the darkened cabin, he surmised the only way out was through the pilot’s door.
Mac hustled to the front to check on Emma. Her pulse at the base of her jaw bumped under his two fingers. Relief blew through him in a hot breath. Her eyes were closed, and a nasty bruise swelled in the center of her head, probably where she’d hit the yoke. But at his touch, she roused, moaned.
“Shh. Don’t move. You could be hurt.” He’d like to snap a C-collar on her, his days in first-responder training kicking in. But for now, getting out of the plane seemed top priority.
He’d let the fact they’d made it alive sink in later.
“Sarah. How’s Sarah?” Emma turned her head, searching for her friend.
Mac turned and barely concealed a groan. Sarah’s seat had sustained the brunt of the landing. Although still strapped in, Sarah lay crumpled against the crushed aluminum of the plane, her face white, blood trickling from her nose.
He reached around her head and felt for injury. Wetness dampened his fingers, and he felt softness and raw flesh. His hand came back bloody.
He glanced at Emma. Her face was white, her dark eyes laced with horror. “Oh no.” She reached for her buckle and landed hard in a crumple, nearly kicking him as she righted herself.
So much for rescuing her.
“We need to get out of here and get Sarah onto a backboard.” Emma looked back into the cabin at the other passengers. “Anyone else hurt?”
“No thanks to you,” Ishbane snapped. He undid his buckle and filled the cabin with expletives as he untangled himself and crouched on the ceiling.
“Enough. Just be glad we’re alive,” Mac said quietly. Not that he particularly felt like reserving judgment against Emma— he had his own choice words of frustration brewing in his gut— but blame wouldn’t get them to the nearest hospital any faster.
“Help me get her out of here,” Emma said, apparently ignoring Ishbane.
“The passenger door is wedged,” Phillips said. He gave it another good bang with his shoulder, and Mac made a face.
“We’ll have to go out the pilot-side door.” Emma unlatched it, then pushed it open with her feet. It groaned on its hinges, then cracked. Emma startled, as if reliving their harrowing descent.
They all startled really. Mac felt his nerves buzz right below his skin, and adrenaline made him light-headed.
“Let’s see what we can find to get your friend out,” Mac said, trying to keep them focused. He sucked in his breath as he squeezed out between the rock face and the door.
Emma climbed out of the wreckage and stumbled away from the plane, rubbing her shoulder.
They’d wedged against a fall of Volkswagen-sized boulders. It had probably stopped all of them from becoming flapjacks by bracing up the tail section, which lay nearly severed from the plane somewhere on the other side of the boulders. They must have cartwheeled, although Mac didn’t remember much—lots of blurring and screaming, heat and fear.
Mac surveyed the debris trail that littered the wake of their crash. The belly pod had ripped off, most likely at the same time as the struts. Baggage had ripped open, strewing socks, shirts, backpacks, papers, books, and shoes in the churned-up tundra. The air smelled of gasoline, and the cloud cover that had taken them down moved in to finish them off. Mac tasted snow in the air, and the wind whipped his jacket against his body. They seemed to have landed in a high bowl. Jagged peaks framed his view from every direction, spires of ice and cold and death that ringed them in and would obstruct any attempt at communication.
“Did anyone hear the Mayday?” he asked Emma.
“I don’t know,” she said, picking her way through the debris. “We need to evacuate the passengers right now. I don’t know how much fuel spilled, and the engine’s still hot. Help me find something to put Sarah on.”
Emma stepped around the remnant of the left wing, which Mac guessed had been sheared off during the spectacular landing, and as he watched, she lifted it and tugged out a backpack. Pulling it free, Emma took out a knife from her belt—where had she gotten that?—and cut off the straps holding the external metal frame to the canvas.
A backboard.
“Good thinking,” he said as she worked.
She didn’t respond, her movements tight, nearly robotic. Then again, her friend had a serious head injury. Apparently that drove Emma’s thoughts for now. That and the smell of gas and a few sparks still jumping from the instrument panel.
Yes, get the passengers out—fast.
He noticed that the bump in the center of her forehead had swelled and turned purple. “Your head looks bad. Are you feeling dizzy?”
She looked at him. In her dark brown eyes, he saw the inklings of fear, despite her seeming calm. What he didn’t want was for the fear to take over and invade everything else. He needed her calm until he figured out where they were.
“It’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.” Only, even to him, his words sounded empty. Especially with the wind swooping down the sides of the bowl, carrying winter in its breath, flattening their clothes to their bodies, stinging their ears.
She nodded. “I know.” And just like that, the emotion vanished, her eyes became flat, her mouth set in a grim line.
Phillips emerged from the plane, groaning and holding his chest. A big man, he’d probably have bruises from the seat belt.
Ishbane had already exited and sat not far away, shaking. He held his hand to his bloody nose. Mac guessed it might be broken.
“What about Nina and Flint?” Emma asked as they maneuvered the makeshift backboard close to the plane.
As if on command, Flint emerged. He held his knee, gritting his teeth.
“Are you okay?” Emma pulled his arm over her shoulder and assisted him as he limped out.
He settled with a moan. “I think so. It’s an old injury. Probably just twisted it.” But by the grimace on his face
, Mac had his doubts.
“See if you can find a towel or a piece of foam,” Emma said, turning to Mac.
“Foam?”
“For a C-collar.”
Aye. He had to admit, she might look rattled, but she thought in a linear, controlled pattern that spoke of experience. How many times had she crashed an airplane? He shook that thought loose and focused on her request while she climbed back inside the plane.
Maybe he could find a sleeping pad in one of the passenger’s camping gear. He scanned the litter as he jogged over to the pink backpack. His own duffel had broken open, spilling his clothing and the pictures of him and Brody. He nearly stepped on one of Brody hauling in a chinook salmon out of Prospect Creek. He snatched it and shoved it into his back pocket.
Mac grabbed the remains of Nina’s pink pack. A couple of the pockets flapped in the breeze, shredded. Inside the pack he found clothing, a stuffed orca, two wrapped gifts, and a foam pad at the bottom next to her sleeping bag. Jackpot. Mac snatched it and ran to the plane.
Nina had pulled herself out of the plane and slumped against the rock, a hand over a gash behind her ear. She looked dazed.
He poked his head inside the wreckage. Emma was leaning over the seat, assessing Sarah’s injuries. Somehow she’d dug out the first-aid kit from the rear cargo area. He hoped that she also had a survival kit somewhere in her bag of tricks.
“Did you find foam?” Emma asked.
He nodded and passed it in to her. Producing the knife again, she made quick work of ripping it into a long, wide strip. Then she wrapped the foam around Sarah’s neck, securing it with medical tape. “I’d rather have a miniboard, but this will have to do.” Emma looked at him, her eyes dark and tense. “We need a sleeping bag or something.”
“Phillips!” Mac yelled. “Grab a sleeping bag!” He glanced again at Emma. She touched her friend’s cheek, then found her arm and took a pulse. Her tender movements made him wish he’d had someone this calm around when Brody had been shot. Mac had unraveled on the spot. If it hadn’t been for his brother’s thinking, Mac would have remained frozen in shock.
Expect the Sunrise Page 4