Flying to Pieces

by Dean Ing

When Lovett taxied back after his half-hour jaunt in the Varieze, he saw Chip waiting with wheel chocks and a grin that stretched as wide as the hangar doors. Normally it is deliberate foolishness, alias a "Mr.

  Fumducker," to taxi smartly all the way into a hangar; brake failures are not unknown. But under the circumstances, this pilot felt he had no better option. The youth was talking before Lovett's canopy had fully raised. "I didn't tumble to your little plot 'til Mom had hung up. You were right, Pop; I didn't have to tell any lies, I thought you'd really lit out for Oregon."

  Together, they secured the big doors again. Feeling guilty for his little deception, Lovett said, "I suppose you're in thick yogurt with Roxy."

  I A shrug. "Aw-not exactly. Would you believe, she thought I should've gone with you? Said from now on I must stick close to you in, swear. to God, I quote, 'your time of need.' " An earnest frown accompanied his,

  "She really is worried about you, Pop. She isn't after your money."

  "It'd go to you anyhow," Lovett told him. "My willbeing of sound mind, and all that, as if anybody believed it MOM now-puts it in trust 'til you're older. You and only you. Roxy doesn't know that," he added.

  "Then Alex the Wart doesn't know it, either," Chip pointed out. "If he did, all this might not be happening."

  "Screw von Wart, and screw the cockroach he rode in on," said his grandfather. He threw an arm over the youth's shoulder'as they returned to his office, now in evening gloom. "We've got some lists and motel reservations to make, hair to wash, maybe some faxes to send, before tomorrow. As I said before, you'll have to be my welcome wagon because one thing I don't need right now is a high profile."

  The little gathering of B.O.F.s, fewer than a dozen, trickled together over a period of hours during the following afternoon, not overly charmed by the conspicuous absence of booze. Each member demanded proof of Chip's claim, a proof obtained by wandering over to the sturdy coveralled and grease-smeared mechanic with unruly blond hair who worked on the Varieze in one comer of the hangar near a handy exit. It was Wade Lovett, all right, pulling that oil change. And to all, Lovett warned that they should simply forget him until they locked the doors for their scheduled meeting. "This open-door policy should convince some people I'm not here, and to anybody trying to serve me papers, I'm not. I'm in Oregon. That's why the peroxide job. Go swap lies with somebody else and tell my grandson the instant you spot a stranger." Naturally, Lovett's high crimes and misdemeanors became the hottest batch of guesswork among them.

  Of all the members who collected there, Coop Gunther, a windbumt, scar-faced senior citizen with the proportions of a fireplug, was the only one who offered to limp away for a set of coveralls to help with the maintenance. Lovett admired the old boy, who would tackle any task, as Coop would say, "irregardless." That's the sort of work ethic you expected from old-time Alaskans.

  Back in 1924, Gunther's mother had gone into labor on Kupreanof Island off the Alaskan coast while with his father, hunting moose for the larder as most Alaskans did; as many still do. Mitkof Island and the fishing village of Petersburg lay only two miles distant, but even today, every twelve hours the tide-swamped creek on Kupreanof goes dry as a bedouin's bathtub. With no bridge, no plane, and no way to launch their boat, Coop's dad delivered the squalling mite and named him Kupreanof, which nobody outside Russia and Alaska could pronounce in fewer than fifty tries; hence "Coop."

  Everyone in the B.O.F.s knew why Coop would no longer fly; to get from his little outboard-and-snowmobile shop on Petersburg, old Coop had reached Wichita by seagoing ferry to Bellingham, then via Greyhound bus.

  He limped for the same reason that he lacked the last joints of two fingers: Coop's usual one-word explanation was, "Alaska." The longer explanation had taken him on a lecture tour, and it was a skin-crawler.

  Already a bush pilot in '42, Coop had joined the service he knew best, the Coast Guard, a beardless youth flying Grummans and PBY "Catalinas"

  during the war. He dodged a lot of flak when the Japanese invaded our Aleutians. Lucky as a hangnail and lasted Coop Gunther suffered not so much the next twenty years flying in what he called the brown-water navy. Newly retired from the Coast Guard, he rebuilt a dead man Is Noordyne Norseman, an enormous single-engined slab of an airplane that some still affectionately liken to Paul Bunyan's Piper Cub. Then he contracted to fly high-grade gold ore out of a mine in Alaska's vast interior. Superstitious miners preferred to fly with lucky Coop. They did, at least, for nearly ten years.

  Then one April night in the early '70s, Coop's Norseman began to collect ice in flight the way a shoplifter collects coats, layer after layer.

  The only real estate void of huge trees within two hundred miles was a frozen river surface and the Norseman was on humongous big skis, but skis do not have brakes and Coop's perfect landing ended in a perfectly godawful pileup at the river's bend. It was like Coop to thank Providence that nobody else had been in the plane because it was trashed to hell. No repairing his old Viking this time.

  Coop couldn't see too well with only his flashlight and the flap of forehead that was hanging over his eyes, and all the blood that went with it. But he knew his leg was broken and, while splinting the leg with loosened He-downs and a broken piece of aircraft tubing, he figured some ribs were cracked, too. No point in moaning about it, nobody to hear him anyway if you discounted the occasional gigantic Brownie lurch i ing out of hibernation early, lean and mean and hungry as well, bears are always hungry, and Coop had blood all over him. Why make more noise than he absolutely had to?

  Coop passed out a few times that night and stopped trying to get out of the cockpit, pulling a hand-me-down Alaskan Brownie pelt around him. If it had helped a thousand-pound bear survive Alaskan winters, maybe it would work for lucky Coop.

  Whenever he waked during the night, he could hear the mutter and groan of ice moving beneath the Norseman, grinding it, eating it by inches.

  The region had been unseasonably warm in previous days; the traditional sweepstakes among Alaskans, betting on the spring breakup of river ice, had already begun. And every year since God made Alaska, on the i hour that river ice begins to break up, everything on the river and much that adjoins it becomes a churning, horrendous maelstrom of white and blue and green and gray, with a thunder that can be heard for miles and which annually delivers house-sized boulders and eight-foot-diameter trees hundreds Of miles to the sea. First-time viewers, reflecting that the Lord God promised He would not create a second flood, often fear i that He has reconsidered.

  The next morning Coop ' saw that the shore was only yards away. He thought he was too stiff to move until the river convinced him it was straining at its leash. He roped together what items he could reach and heaved them onto the ice, crawled out, and slid his goods to the forest's edge, while all around him the ice popped and strained. He needed most of that day to crawl high enough to build a shelter and a signal fire, and tossed his rope over a fir limb to haul his edibles beyond the reach of bears while the river waited.

  It waited through much of the next day but, when it let go, the ear-splitting, cataclysmic flow carved away the prominence where he tended his fire. It took the tree where his goods were cached while Coop Gunther scrabbled backward on his elbows, watching the edge crumble toward him. Coop was convinced the river, and all that bad luck he'd always avoided, were coming after him.

  The Norseman had disappeared down river like crumpled tissue. Coop was left with a tarp and blanket, the.44 caliber pistol in his belt which just might just possibly stop a small Brownie at point-blank range, and what remained in his pockets. The warming rain collected in his tarp, but it denied him dry under as well, and Coop existed on his own fat and fiddlehead ferns for a week. The air search had been called off before he got another fire started and, suffering more from exposure than hunger, turned his belt into sixteen yards of leather fishing line with a hook pounded from the tang on its buckle. For bait he used a few of the grubs he had dug to eat from rotted stumps and with t
hat bum leg he nearly drowned

  landing the first fish he caught.

  A month later, Kupreanof Gunther bobbed down river on a raft made by lashing two tree trunks together, carrying a smoked elk haunch for vittles, and was pulled off unconscious by two Tlingit kids with an outboard. He lost his leg below the knee and attained a brief fame, swapping his hollow prosthesis for, a hand carved peg leg during his lecture tour, and made enough money for a down payment on a smaller cargo plane. Coop didn't insure the plane for its full value and, when it burned after a botched landing, a couple of his fingertips became crispy critters. Some Alaskans agreed that Coop's luck had turned on him. Others weren't so sure; losing a leg could be chalked up to bad luck, but when he started missing fingers too, they thought it began to smack of plain damn carelessness.

  Ever since then, Coop Gunther sold and repaired equipment in Petersburg for the owners of snowmobiles, boats, chainsaws, and a few weirdos with lawnrnowers. He knew that his luck was out to get even, and would talk about it when he had soaked up enough alcohol to put two, ordinary men into suspended animation. But Coop still enjoyed the company of other pilots, and for reasons of his own, seemed ready to listen to a business proposition that might, take him to the South Pacific. He had to look as well as listen, for Coop heard as much b y reading lips as he did with his ears.

  "Ever been out there," Lovett asked him as Coop passed quarts of oil to him.

  "Nope. But there's a first time for ever'thin" Coop replied. "Plenty of boats go there, I hear."

  "Not where we're headed, if Mel Benteen is ri@ht. It'd cost a few thou if you could, and going by air is free the way we're going. Only way to get there, Coop," Lovett rejoined. He watched Gunther's face fall at the news, knowing the old fellow's superstitious dread.

  Coop Gunther leaned on an exhaust stack and stared at nothing for a full minute, then pushed himself erect and squared his shoulders. "Well, hell, nobody lives forever. I don't wanta die as -chickenshit as I've lived,"

  he said at last. This was the only hint Coop was to offer for a motive and Lovett shook his head in wonder. Not one'man in a thousand had displayed Coop's fortitude during the first fifty, years of his life.

  As advertised, Lovett ended his charade at 6 P.m., and Chip scurried about, locking up. By drawing a few benches to the drinks-and-munchies table they found enough seating room for everyone. Most of the men gave plenty of room to Melanie Benteen. They were plainly nonplussed to learn that this proud-bosomed late arrival wearing slacks and heels and, like a badge of authenticity, an old Breitling chronometer on her wrist, was Elmo's kid, Mel. She managed to ignore the murmurs, chiefly along the lines of, "A bit beamy in the fuselage," and, "Yeah, but get a load of those nacelles.

  It was Crispin Reventlo who called them to order. Since this isn't a plenary session, lads, and we have no time to waste, let's get about it. The steak and kidney pie, I am assured, is on the way. Very well then, you Philistines, he's laying on some pizza," he amended to those who were already gagging for effect.

  Quinn had his doubts. "So who was the delivery boy you and the kid shooed off a few minutes ago?"

  Reventlo: "Thirty-year-old delivery boys with five o'clock shadow don't belong here. That one intended his delivery for Wade Lovett. What he hoped to deliver, we think, was a legal sun=ons.

  "Class will tell," Quinn chuckled.

  "All Wade did was turn most of his assets into cash for what we're proposing tonight," Reventlo cautioned. "That doesn't make him crazy."

  "We give up, then," said Victor Myles. "What did?"

  Foolish questions," Reventio replied.

  One elderly churl piped up, "Bring on Lovett. I never 1. heard a Brit who didn't need all night to say hello."

  Reventlo gave a pained look to his accuser. "You might keep 4 civil tongue in your head to the man who's arranged free air travel for you."

  This was more like it. "I might. Drone on," said the man; so Reventlo filled them in on the last hours of Elmo Benteen. This was the first time that these men realized exactly what Elmo's treasure consisted, and the news, was greeted with slack-jawed awe by most of them. He finished with, "You'll be glad Melanie Benteen is part of the operation;'most of what we know about the island, she dug up."

  By now, Lovett stood nearby, shucking. his coverall to someone's quavery rendition of, "Take It Off." He raised a hand for silence and got it.

  "You may as well know from square one: I'm committed to this thing," he began, and explained how he, Reventlo, and Mel Benteen had pooled every cent they could. It probably wouldn't be enough, he said, to transport a half-dozen Japanese warplanes undamaged to some repair facility.

  From exactly which island, someone asked; and here, Lovett shook his head. "We've agreed not to talk about that until we're enroute," he said. To the spluttered responses he said, "Look, it's 'obvious this is the crucial item, and'somebody had to make some command decisions about it."

  "So it's Commander Lovett, huh?" Vic Myles had never been one to pull a verbal punch.

  "We all agreed," Mel Benteen spoke up. "So far, we're the only ones who've pooled our resources, done the legwork, brought you in on it. If you can't go along or help foot the bills, this is the time to bow out."

  Some of the men simply sat quietly, as if shell-shocked, and thought it over; but a few were suddenly full of questions. Which country owned the territory? It was autonomous, said Lovett. Had anyone contacted the place officially? To this, Mel shook her head. When and how would the free air travel happen? The following Friday, said Reventlo, from Portland in a reliable, old C-47 he would ferry. "This doesn't give us bags of time but," Reventlo added, with a wry smile toward Lovett,

  "absent Wade Lovett's peculiar luck, I'd have needed to leave even sooner."

  No one turned the offer down without reluctance, but most had some compelling reason for a turndown. -Lovett wasn't surprised that the few who kept their seats were chiefly men without close family ties. Bert Campbell was different. A freckled, balding redhead who favored big cigars and solid investments, Campbell owned a chain of airport restaurants and spent more time bragging on his grandkids than on his Korean War exploits. Whoever. put the most money into the kitty, Campbell said, he would match that amount. But only after Lovett's little nucleus group satisfied him on a few questions of a business nature.

  "I hope it's enough for you to know that I've already zeroed out my savings and dumped a hundred and forty kay into this," Lovett told him.

  "It's not," Campbell rapped, no longer the affable hell raiser. "Are we just supposed to descend on some island like so many locusts and sneak off with a bunch of possibly mythical aircraft that haven't been flown in fifty years?"

  Mel Benteen: "We hope to get a contract signed before we show our hand.

  There's an airstrip to land on-or was. I would expect we'd pay a modest fee."

  A snort from Cairnpbell. "And which bunch of headhunters is so goddamn stupid they'd sign such a contract, assuming they can make an X, without knowing what we're after?"

  "It's done all the time," Lovett said calmly, "and Mel says some English is spoken there, though we're not counting on anything at this point.

  We're going to suggest a mining venture. We'd ask for rights to anything under the surface: ores, metals..." His smile grew, recalling his claim to his broker. "If it's in a cave, Bert, it's subsurface."

  Though these two had yarned, laughed, and caroused through thirty years of reunions, Bert Campbell took a deep breath and eyed Lovett the way gunslingers did it in Westerns. "Islander views on mining?"

  "To be detem-dned," Lovett replied with a shrug. Cauipbell fired again.

  "Condition of that airstrip?" Lovett, choosing a different kind of shrug: "Hard to say." Campbell loosed a volley now, his brow rumpled with concern. "Active loading dock? Fuel and electric power? Roads?

  Native labor? Local taboos?"

  This time Lovett made his shrug so exaggerated his head nearly disappeared into his shoulders, and amusement i
n the group was audible.

  It was well known to most of them that Campbell's outlook on risk capital was purest Scot.

  "I don't like all these loose ends worth a damn," Campbell snarled to no one in particular. "What kind of iffy business is this?"

  "The loose-end business," Lovett said, "and we don't dare go public with it yet to get those answers."

  Mel Benteen stood up to face the increasingly irate Catnpbell. Lovett, prepared to cringe at her broadside, found that she could be even-tempered on occasion. "These are all good questions, Mr. Campbell.

  Most of them can be answered when we arrive on the island, before we're too heavily committed. But asking questions like these to the people who know-and that means contacting the island's leaders somehow-are exactly the questions that would kite their price out of sight. Be reasonable."

  "I am reasonable. I'm so reasonable I'm not going to throw money away on a bunch of junketeering gumshoes taking a vacation in a South Seas paradise at my expense," said Campbell, getting up to leave, striding near Mel Benteen. Too near, because he could not resist 'a parting shot, staring at Benteen's cleavage. "Most likely this was all Reventlo's idea after he thought of you, lady, stripped for the tropics."

  Most women throw a punch like a baseball. Mel Benteen's came in straight and fast with her shoulder behind it, a short left that caught Campbell in the solar plexus, and she was poised to deliver more. He doubled over and sat down hard on a chair. It happened to be already occupied, and Vic Myles grinned as Campbell plopped onto his lap, gasping.

  "Watch your mouth, Jasper," Mel said evenly, one hand out and patting the air to ward off help or interference. "And if you get up swinging, better park your dentures first."' Still staring at Campbell, who was getting his breath back, she went on, "The same goes for anybody else that Wassles me about my gender. Clear?"

  No one broke the silence until Campbell, rocking on Myles's lap, managed to nod and wheeze, "I guess I was out of line."

  "Getting guys back in line is something I had to learn early. It seemed like a point worth making. If you're satisfied, I am," she said, and thrust out a hand.