by Scott Conrad
TRACK DOWN ALASKA
A Brad Jacobs Thriller
Book 2
Scott Conrad
PUBLISHED BY:
Curt Reves
Copyright © 2015
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any format, by any means, electronic or otherwise, without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.
Check out the other books in the Brad Jacobs Thriller Series from Scott Conrad:
TRACK DOWN AFRICA – Book 1
TRACK DOWN – Book 3 coming February 2016
Scott Conrad’s “A Brad Jacobs Thriller” Series takes retired Force Recon Marine Brad Jacobs and his fellow veterans on dangerous and thrilling international search and rescue missions. Their missions are to “Track Down” and retrieve innocent victims by facing off against fierce, powerful enemies and extremely challenging conditions. Enjoy the non-stop action, adventure and mystery with the entire team as they never fail to lose their sense of humor even during the riskiest of operations. Each book is a complete story on its own.
Visit the author at: ScottConradBooks.blogspot.com
Thriller, adventure, action, mystery, suspense, military short novel or novella.
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"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world. But, the Marines don't have that problem."
Ronald Reagan, President of the United States; 1985
CHAPTER ONE
THE CRASH
18 April 1600 hours AKDT
The Piper PA-18-180 Super Cub banked hard to the right as the engine sputtered and quit. The altimeter indicator needle was spinning wildly, with no place in sight to set the plane down.
Pete Sabrowski, a former Naval Aviator in the Marine Corps, glanced nervously down at the Alaskan forest below. It was going to be a tree landing, and that didn’t bode well for the passengers or the lightweight fabric and aluminum tube aircraft fuselage. The Piper is the perfect choice for flying in the Alaskan bush. The Super Cub is well known for its ability to take off and land in incredibly short distances.
First generation Cubs were remarkable enough, but the modification that made it the current airplane of choice in the bush was the use of the Lycoming O-360 power plant. A high-lift wing placement design and the powerful one hundred and eighty horsepower engine made the Super Cub especially adaptable to either floatplane or ski plane. This aircraft could take off in as little as two hundred feet.
“Mayday, Mayday!” Sam Henderson, the charter pilot, spoke calmly into the microphone. “I say again, this is Snow Gopher. Overshot my destination. Red Piper Super Cub. Engine failure, we’re going down. Visibility poor, best guess is we’re just east of Mount Watana. Mayday, Mayday!” There was no response.
In this part of Alaska, there are no air traffic controllers. He checked to see if the transponder light was blinking. He thumped the switch once and the red light started flashing. There’s an FAA monitoring station in Talkeetna, but if they were responding Henderson couldn’t hear them. There was no other response.
Normally bush pilots listen out for distress calls and respond or retransmit if they’re near enough to pick up the SOS. Sam Henderson mentally berated himself for his poor choice in not turning back to Talkeetna when the weather went bad so quickly. He knew better than to chance it, but the Stephan Lake Lodge flight was a short one and he had flown it a thousand times.
It had seemed to him at the time, no more risky to continue on to the Lodge, than to try and return to Talkeetna. Besides, there was a sweet little redhead at the Lodge who usually made room in her bed for him when he landed there.
Visibility had gotten progressively worse and his chronometer told him he had missed Stephan Lake. They had been flying too long. He explained to Pete Sabrowski that he had overshot their destination and began a slow turn back to the southeast, dropping to the lowest level he dared, looking for a familiar landmark. That’s when the carburetor iced over and the engine sputtered to a stop.
“Shit, we’re going in!” he barked. It was then that Sam initiated the Mayday call. He didn’t bother to tell Pete to prepare for a hard landing. From their conversation earlier he had learned that Pete was an experienced pilot himself, though his experience in the Arctic seemed limited. He left it up to Pete to warn the other passenger, who sat in the cramped rear seat behind them.
From the small makeshift third seat in the cargo area Charlie Dawkins began to sweat as he watched the trees getting closer at an alarming rate. At under a thousand feet, he could clearly see the snow and ice everywhere. And the trees, weird, thin trees and tall. There was no place below them to land the plane.
The only thing that looked remotely feasible was the frozen surface of a river, and it looked as if the pilot was trying to glide towards that. Charlie thought it unlikely that they would reach it based on their current glide path. He was partly right.
“This is it!” Sam called out just before all of them were slammed forward in the cockpit.
The plane clipped the tops of several of the thin fir trees and then skidded sideways as it hit the frozen surface of the river with great force. The ice held, and the aircraft seemed to slide forever on the ice. They hit hard, and the landing gear collapsed on the left side. The wing broke off on that side when they slid into the river bank and the wing tank ruptured, exploding in an enormous fireball.
Charlie kept his head tucked down between his knees, and he didn’t see the billowing black smoke until it was all over. The aircraft finally came to rest on the right bank of the river.
Pete could smell the burning aviation fuel and knew instinctively that there was no time to lose. They needed to get out of the craft as quickly as possible.
The only door in the small plane was on the passenger side, and it looked flimsy as hell, mostly shattered Plexiglas. Pete managed to get his seatbelt unfastened and slammed his back against the small access door, tumbling out on his back onto the ice. Charlie scrambled through headfirst and landed on his shoulder, wincing at the pain. It was Charlie’s first trip to the Arctic, and he was surprised at the consistency of the snow on top of the river ice. It felt dry and powdery, and he had the inane thought that making a snowball out of the stuff would be damned near impossible.
Pete didn’t bother to check on Charlie. The pilot was still in the plane, slumped forward and unconscious. He clambered back through the shattered frame of the door and fumbled for the pilot’s seat belt fastener. Smoke billowed from the fire, and Pete was choking, his eyes watering profusely as he dragged Sam Henderson’s inert body out of the cockpit and into the frigid air. Coughing and hacking, he dragged Henderson a safe distance away from the wreckage while Charlie helped as best he could, ignoring the pain in his shoulder.
Sam Henderson is out of it, and Pete is concerned about the nasty red lump on the pilot’s forehead.
“Is he all right?” Charlie asked, his voice hoarse in the chill air.
“Can’t tell,” Pete answered. “He took a hell of a lick on the forehead when we hit. Last I saw of him he was still trying to manhandle the bird over those last trees. I don’t think he had time to brace himself before we hit.” There was respect in his voice. The pilot had put his aircraft and his passengers first, ignoring his own safety in the process. He glanced back at the wreckage, noticing that the fire had gone out… at least for the moment.
“Are you okay Charlie?”
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“Yeah, but I’m gonna be sore as hell for a few days.”
“I don’t want to leave this guy, even for a minute right now. How about you climb back in there and see if you can find his first aid kit, and then toss out any of his survival gear you can locate?”
“Will do,” Charlie said, slowly getting to his feet. His shoulder hurt like hell, but it didn’t feel like anything was broken.
The outer skin of the Super Cub is the heaviest weight Dacron fabric available, and even though it was coated with polyurethane it was highly flammable. There was extensive fire damage on the pilot’s side of the aircraft, but the rest seemed to be intact. It was apparent that the other wing tank had ruptured and the smell of aviation fuel sucked the oxygen out of their lungs. Pete didn’t have to tell him to be careful. It would only take one small spark to turn the wreckage into a funeral pyre for Charlie.
Pete watched Charlie crawl into the wreckage and then turned his attention back to Henderson. The pilot looked bad. His face appeared gray and he had an angry red bump on his forehead. His breath was shallow and rapid. Moving the man as little as possible, Pete began to treat him for shock, but as he loosened the pilot’s clothing the man gave a bubbly, rattling gasp and stopped breathing.
“You can stop looking for the First Aid kit,” he called out. “He’s gone…” Pete sniffed at the frigid air. “You’d better toss out the guns and the survival gear. It smells like the fuel leak is getting worse.”
His rib cage hurt like hell, but something kept him going despite the pain. Pete stood slowly and walked towards the wreckage to take the gun cases Charlie passed through the gaping hole where the door used to be.
“You sure he’s dead?” Charlie asked as he passed a small bag containing ammunition through the opening.
Pete gave the man a strange look. “I’ve seen enough dead people that I can say with relative certainty that, yeah, he’s dead.”
Charlie tossed a duffel bag through the opening onto the ice, and Pete heard a muffled “whooomp!” when a spark struck by the metal grommet on the duffel bag hit the thin film of gas on the ice beneath the wing.
“Get out!” he screamed, reaching through the opening for Charlie’s outstretched arm and dragging him to safety.
“Jesus, that was close,” Charlie panted. “Thanks buddy.”
Pete was busy dragging the gun case and ammunition away from the blaze as the flames licked at what remained of the fabric covering the plane. There was nothing they could do but watch, so he absently busied himself by taking out the specially modified M-14 that had always been his weapon of choice for hunting. He’d done the gunsmithing himself, and he was consistently making refinements to the weapon, which was already the finest hunting rifle he’d ever used. The lightweight composite stock and the bull barrel were the two most obvious modifications, but a closer examination of the weapon revealed a myriad of other modifications.
Charlie unpacked and loaded his own rifle as the two of them watched the flames devour the rest of their gear.
Pete had already reached survival mode, and as he absently fiddled with his rifle his mind focused on their situation. There was no question in his mind they were in deep shit. Henderson had overshot the area he was personally familiar with, and he had very little idea of where they were. He had no map, and he doubted that the aircraft radio would be in functioning condition when the fire finally went out. He didn’t know if anyone had received Henderson’s ‘Mayday’ and he had no idea whether the transponder had actually worked.
Nevertheless, he knew that it would be better to make themselves as comfortable as possible and stay by the wreckage until someone came for them. The guns would be essential to their survival. The predators in this neck of the woods were fearsome, and they were coming off a long cold winter. They would be hungry.
He didn’t know how much of Charlie’s experience was firsthand and how much had come from a book. The hard core of Pete’s character was solidifying. Once a Marine, always a Marine. Semper Fidelis applied to being faithful to oneself as much as it meant being faithful to the Corps and to other Marines. He had work to do. There was firewood to collect, shelter to be built, and by then the wreckage should be cooled off enough they could scrounge through it to see what they could scavenge. He didn’t have time to waste.
It was late in the afternoon and dark was fast approaching. The temperatures would drop by twenty degrees or more in this remote part of Alaska by nightfall. Pete shrugged off the pain and stood up to begin the numerous tasks he knew had to be accomplished.
WITNESS
The man stood on a hillock in the Susitna River valley, on land the U.S. Government claimed as the Nelchina Public Use Area. The Order of Phineas, a splinter group of Aryan Nation who disputed the revisionist policies of the new leadership, refused to acknowledge the ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government) or its claim on the land. There was gold here, and the man and his followers were collecting it by panning for it and by placer mining.
They followed the streams and rivers northward seeking the mother lode that all the nuggets were coming from. They had long since stopped collecting the flakes and grains, and the nuggets were getting larger and more frequent. If no one came snooping around, the man and his followers would soon have accumulated enough gold to carry the war to the enemy, proponents of miscegenation, homosexuality, and desegregation… those who would pervert the natural order of things.
This part of the Nelchina Public Use Area is territory controlled by the Order of Phineas, an Aryan Nations splinter group. They had relocated here after they had been run out of Washington State a couple of years before because of political infighting in the extremist organization. The group was comprised of several hundred men and women, all of them living in the Susitna River valley. They needed to keep their presence and location secret, as well as their purchases of weapons and future plans for nationwide expansion and terrorist attacks.
The man’s followers were tough, experienced people many former military, highly trained in weapons use and military maneuvers. In addition to their work mining gold, they spent several hours a day maintaining their readiness and training. There was no place for slackers here.
As if the heavens had read his thoughts, the man’s reverie was interrupted by a low flying bush plane, a red one, in the skies above him. His eyes narrowed as he focused on the aircraft. It was flying incredibly slow, and seemed to be losing altitude. Anger rose in him at the intrusion. The group could not afford to be spotted, and there were flumes scattered about the streams and rivers, work crews busily collecting gold nuggets from the stream and river beds. He hoped one of the sentries might have sense enough to shoot at the aircraft and chase it away.
As if fate were reading his mind, the man heard the engine sputter and watched the bush plane begin a steep descent. It was going to crash, though it would come down miles away. And far too near to nightfall to mount an expedition, even though the man and his people knew the land well. He shrugged. If the passengers survived, they wouldn’t get very far, and if they did he had nothing to fear. His own people were expert skiers and they could locate any survivors the next day or the day after.
Just as he reached one of his security crews, he caught a distant muffled explosion and looked back over his shoulders to see a large black plume of smoke rising into the air. He smiled. Maybe the crash had done his work for him. It didn’t matter. A good leader leaves nothing to chance.
CHAPTER TWO
BAD NEWS
Dallas, Texas 19 April
Brad awoke from a deep sleep at 0230 Dallas time by the sound of his phone ringing. It was Mason Ving, his best friend and former Force Recon Sergeant.
"What's up?" he asked in a voice sleep laden and groggy.
"I've got some bad news," Ving said hesitantly. "Pete and Charlie never made it to their destination."
Brad knew that Pete Sabrowski, another friend and former Force Recon Marine was supposed to be at Stephan Lake Hunting Lodge in th
e Alaskan wilderness on his annual bear hunting trip, along with his cousin Jessica’s new boyfriend Charlie.
"What do you mean they didn't make it?" Brad asked, suddenly wide awake and more alert.
"They left Talkeetna on schedule and were due to arrive at the lodge at Stephan Lake at 1600 hours yesterday. Their plane never showed."
"Has there been any contact at all?"
"None from what I can tell so far. The lodge manager called me."
"Was Pete flying?"
"No. They had a local pilot, a real hotshot with a helluva reputation as a bush pilot."
Brad remembered Pete talking about how much he enjoyed this trip every year. He’d said it was as far off the map as you could get and still be in the good old US of A. The Talkeetna Mountains and the Susitna River Valley lay approximately halfway between Anchorage to the South and Fairbanks to the North, and nearly halfway between Denali National Park and Wrangell- St Elias National Park to the East and West. If you wanted to get lost, you couldn't find a better place.
"Have they located a position from the transponder?" Brad asked.
“I don’t think so. The manager didn’t have a lot of information yet. There’s no report of anyone locating the wreckage.”
Brad’s mind slipped into overdrive, evaluating what he knew for certain about the area. “What's the weather like?”
"Nasty right now, spring snow storm. That’s one reason the manager was worried. He said it’s possible that the pilot just encountered rough weather and set it down somewhere to wait out the storm. He says those bush pilots know where all the cabins are up there, and it’s not uncommon for them to set down and wait out bad weather… but their last reported position put them over public lands. Nobody lives out that way."