Skyhook

by John J. Nance

  Arlie’s jaw was set and his fists clenched as he stepped forward, but he was unprepared to see the man’s left hand pull a silenced Glock 9mm from his coat in one unbroken motion. He raised the gun to Arlie’s chest, and just as quickly jerked it to the right and pulled the trigger. A surprisingly loud, muffled noise caused Arlie to jump and whirl to his left in time to see shattered glass falling from his side-mounted rearview mirror, which now featured a bullet hole in the very center.

  “What the hell …” he yelped.

  The man shoved the gun back in his pocket. “Don’t delude yourself into thinking this isn’t just as serious as I said.”

  “Jesus Christ, man!” Arlie was backing up, his eyes wide with alarm as the man turned and walked past him to the blue van, turning at the rear bumper.

  “We’re not kidding, Rosen. Don’t risk it.”

  ABOARD WIDGEON N8771B OVER THE GULF OF ALASKA, SOUTHEAST OF ANCHORAGE

  The voice in their headsets came from nowhere.

  “Unidentified aircraft flying at two thousand feet five-zero miles east of Seward, come up on guard frequency, one-twenty-one-point-five, immediately.”

  “Who’s that?” April demanded.

  Scott looked to the left, then back to the panel, confirming that one of the radios was, indeed, tuned to the emergency “guard” frequency. He flipped a switch and pressed his microphone button.

  “Who’s this?”

  “This is a U.S. Air Force fighter, Husky Eighteen. You have violated restricted military airspace and we are intercepting you. You are directed to comply with our orders and follow us back to Elmendorf Air Force Base to land.”

  “I haven’t violated any airspace, Husky Eighteen. I’ve got two GPSs and they both confirm I’ve never been over the line.”

  “State your call sign.”

  “That’s a negative. You don’t need to know my call sign, and I will not follow you.”

  “State your call sign, unidentified aircraft. We are proceeding with the approved rules of interception. If you do not comply, you will be shot down.”

  “Scott? What does he mean?” April asked in alarm. The shock she’d seen on his face moments before was turning to anger, and she could see his jaw set.

  “Hang on, April.”

  Scott reduced power and kicked the Widgeon into a sudden, tight right, descending turn, as he spotted the lights of the two fighters coming in from behind with a closing speed of several hundred knots.

  “Scott! I do not want to get blown out of the sky.”

  “Those clowns are not going to get a firing solution on me … not to mention the fact that they don’t have authorization to fire. It’s a standard bluff.”

  The nose of the Widgeon was pointed down at a twenty-degree angle and April felt herself grasping the edges of her seat. Scott pulled the throttles all the way back to idle and extended the flaps as he continued the spiral to the right. The water was coming up, the land mass in partial shadow on her right, then her left, as she began calling out the altitude.

  “Six hundred … five hundred … four hundred.”

  “I’m leveling. We’re going up one of those fjords.”

  “Scott … two hundred … one-fifty … one hundred.”

  He worked the controls to level the wings and bring the nose up, flattening their trajectory just above wave height. There were more strident calls from Husky Eighteen.

  “Unidentified amphibian, this is Husky Eighteen. We say again, you must obey the rules of interception and follow us, or you will be shot down.”

  “Sure I will,” Scott snorted to April. “He’s getting frustrated.”

  “Unidentified amphibian, be advised you can’t get away from us even down in the weeds!”

  Scott brought the Widgeon toward the northern bank of a fjord leading inward and began hugging the cliff, less than a hundred yards from the passing trees.

  “Scott? Couldn’t they get your license for evading them?”

  “Prove I’m out here. They don’t have my registration number and they’re not going to get it.”

  “I really don’t think this is a good idea,” April said, trying to catch his eye, but worried about distracting him with the cliff mere yards away to the right. The daylight was fading fast as the jagged coastline they were shadowing wound its way toward a glacier she could see looming a mile or so ahead.

  Scott craned his neck above the dash panel to spot the fighters.

  “There! Hah!”

  “Define ‘hah’ please.”

  “They had to go halfway to Anchorage to turn around, and now they’re trying to get in behind and lock us with their tactical radar down here in the so-called weeds. They’ve got ‘look-down, shoot-down’ capability, April, but they’ve got to have a stable target, and we’re going to deny them the pleasure. I know a place to hide.”

  “You mean, they could shoot us with guns?”

  “Missiles. Technically yeah. It’s really hard to do … but not impossible.”

  “Oh, that’s a comfort!”

  There was a gentle upslope over the top of the cliff leading to a clearing on the right and they saw it simultaneously. Scott banked right and brought the Widgeon less than thirty feet over the top of the ridgeline, flying between the trees as he flew up the meadow and turned with the meandering terrain. He added power to climb with the slope as he extended the flaps to the fully deployed position.

  “This’ll keep us as slow as possible. The air farce up there can’t get much below two hundred and we can fly at seventy.”

  “Scott?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why, exactly, are we doing this?” she asked.

  “No time to explain. I have a plan.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Care to share it?”

  “No. Whoa!” He pulled up and over a row of trees that hadn’t appeared to be as high as they were, and followed a small draw to the left where the terrain ended at the edge of a thousand-foot-high promontory. April watched spruce and lodge-pole pines zip by on either side, their tops soaring considerably above the small aircraft’s altitude.

  The vertical face of a giant valley glacier lay beyond, its base sitting in an inlet of milky blue-green water filled with newly carved icebergs.

  “What are you planning, Scott?” April asked, tensing as he descended the Widgeon to less than ten feet over the meadow leading to the drop-off. The terrain and alpine grasses were flashing by at a dizzying speed, and a startled pair of Dall sheep jerked their heads up in alarm and took off to the right. The edge of the drop-off leading to the glacier and the inlet was coming up quickly, the illusion of speed intensified by the low altitude as they traversed the last thirty feet before the cliff.

  And suddenly the feeling of speed disappeared in an instant as the rushing ground gave way to a thousand feet of air over the choppy, frozen waters below. April felt as if she were hanging motionless over the glacial waters, the illusion of instant deceleration a physical shock, the sheer rock face disappearing unseen behind them.

  “Wow!” she said, involuntarily.

  “I love this stuff! Although I don’t usually get chased into it by fighters.”

  The F-15 lead pilot was back on the radio, his voice betraying a touch of upset. “Unidentified amphibian, we observe your progress and have you locked up on radar. You will immediately climb and pick up a heading of one-nine-zero degrees, or we will fire. This is your last warning.”

  “You’re sure they’re bluffing, Scott?” April asked.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

  She looked at him wide-eyed. “Pretty sure? What do you mean, ‘pretty sure’? We need to be absolutely sure!”

  He pointed to the right, to a gap in the glacial ice field at least a hundred yards wide. It was a giant crevasse, or valley, slicing the glacier in half and leading inland and upward, and she realized in a flash of fear that he intended to fly into it.

  “No, Scott!”

&n
bsp; “Yeah.”

  “No, really! Let’s not do that, please?”

  He turned and grinned. “I know where this leads.”

  “Yeah, so do I, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not die with you until I get to know you better.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “If it’ll get you to stop this, yes!”

  He chuckled as he worked the throttles and controls to slide the Widgeon around a sudden turn to the right.

  “Well, if I was sure I could take you to dinner sometime …”

  “That’s blackmail!” she said almost absently.

  He nodded as the towering ice walls enfolded them on either side and the Widgeon entered the ice canyon, the unique deep blue of glacial ice soaring above them for at least a hundred feet.

  A shuddering explosion suddenly burst somewhere to their left, and the image of an orange fireball reflected off the icy canyon walls. April jerked her head around in time to see the leading edge of a massive cascade of fragmented glacial ice barely missing them.

  “What was that?” she gasped.

  “Oh, shit!” Scott muttered.

  “What? WHAT?”

  “I didn’t expect that!” He looked at her, real apprehension reflected in his eyes. “The bastard actually fired a missile at us!”

  ABOARD CROWN

  “Husky Eighteen, Crown. What’s your status?” Mac MacAdams asked as he watched the maneuvering F-15s on the computer-generated scope chase a target now too low to be visible to the AWACS’s radar.

  “He’s hugging the terrain, Crown, and literally flying up a glacier. We’ve launched fox one unsuccessfully and are maneuvering for another shot.”

  “You WHAT? Cease fire! You were ordered to proceed without deadly force.”

  There was a prolonged silence.

  “Crown, we heard the order as ‘Force him to land at Elmendorf. If compliance is refused, destruction authorized.’”

  “Unauthorized, dammit! The order was destruction UN-authorized.”

  There was a long pause before the F-15 lead pilot pressed his transmit button again. Mac could imagine him thinking fast to use the right words.

  “Sorry, Crown. We did not copy the ‘un’ part.”

  Mac shook his head and sighed as he punched the transmit button. “Well, thank God you didn’t hit him, Husky.”

  ABOARD WIDGEON N8771B

  “Scott, this canyon has to end somewhere,” April said through gritted teeth, her eyes riveted on the unfolding chasm of ice. “Now would be a very good time to climb!”

  “In a minute.”

  “I don’t think we have a minute.”

  “See the cloud cover ahead?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I’m aiming for.”

  “You want to go on instruments playing Star Wars down the middle of a giant crevasse? Are all Navy pilots insane and suicidal, or did I just luck out with you?”

  “You’re just a lucky gal, I guess. Stand by to climb. We’ve got to get under that layer of clouds ahead.”

  There was another sharp bend in the ice canyon some thirty degrees to the left and Scott guided the Widgeon around the turn as April realized that the vanishing point she was seeing ahead was actually the end of the canyon.

  “CLIMB! NOW, SCOTT!”

  “I see it,” he said, firewalling the throttles and pulling back sharply on the yoke, trading his small surplus of airspeed for altitude as they slid beneath the cloud cover overhead. The Widgeon popped above the top of the walls on each side and Scott guided them to the right, over the broken and deeply crevassed surface of the glacier beneath an overcast hanging no more than two hundred feet above them.

  “See?” He grinned.

  “See what? Aren’t there cliffs in these clouds?”

  “Yeah … but there’s a little place I know over to the right …”

  “Not another one?”

  “Hang on.”

  “I really hate it when you say that!” April replied, her hands still in a death grip on the armrests of her copilot’s seat.

  ABOARD HUSKY 18 LEAD

  The Air Force F-15 pilot pulled his ship around sharply to the right, racking up nearly eight Gs in the turn to get another look at the amphibian. His wingman was working hard against the G forces to hang in position on his left wing and barely succeeded as they rolled out of the turn together.

  “You have him, Two?” Lead asked.

  “Negative. I think he ducked under that cloud cover.”

  “He’s crazy if he did.”

  “Well, I rest my case,” the wingman said. “What now?”

  “Let’s orbit and see if he comes back out,” Lead replied, his concentration still divided by the fact that they’d apparently misunderstood a rules-of-engagement order and almost succeeded in accidentally destroying a civilian aircraft. The prospect had made him queasy, something no amount of G force or maneuvering had ever done.

  “I’m ten minutes to bingo fuel, Lead,” his wingman announced.

  “Yeah?” Lead replied, looking at his own fuel gauges and feeling further embarrassed that his wingman had to be the one to remind him. “Roger. Crown, Husky Eighteen. Thanks to the dash in burner and the maneuvering, we’re almost at bingo fuel and we’ve lost him now beneath cloud cover over the glacier.”

  The voice from the AWACS belonged to a general officer, the lead pilot knew, which made the previous mistake all the more worrisome. He could hear the general key his microphone now and give a subdued sigh before he spoke.

  “Very well, Husky. Head back. We’ll try to track him from here. Where do you think he’s headed?”

  “I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t crash, Crown. He’s under cloud cover over a glacier in a high mountain valley. The guy’s nuts. I’d recommend you launch a search-and-rescue op immediately. But I think you’re only going to find spare parts.”

  THIRTY ONE

  FRIDAY EVENING, DAY 5 ABOARD WIDGEON N8771B OVER THE GULF OF ALASKA, SOUTHEAST OF ANCHORAGE

  Once again the terrain was rushing by mere feet beneath the thin metallic skin of the Widgeon’s fuselage. This time, however, a lethal mixture of ice and boulders replaced the meadow, their jagged surfaces clawing toward the small amphibian.

  Scott McDermott was working to keep the aircraft just above stall speed, the engines straining at full power to keep up with the rising terrain as the ceiling above hung lower and lower toward the surface of the glacier. There had been nothing but murky gray ahead of them, but a hint of something else began to emerge where the overcast melded with the ice.

  April’s knowledge as a pilot was fully engaged as she monitored Scott’s physical flying of the airplane. Airspeed, altitude, power, rate of climb, and the constant movements of the controls were familiar and almost comforting as they somehow remained airborne, but the alien landscape below them was simply too bizarre to register. She expected impact at any moment, followed by a blinding and painful plunge into snow and ice, accompanied by the sound of ripping metal.

  But for some reason, in defiance of logic, it wasn’t happening. They were still aloft, still flying.

  She thought several times of grabbing the controls and taking over, but they were committed. It was too late to turn back. There was no room to turn the aircraft around and no place to land safely. The only choice was continued flight over the vast upslope of a massive valley glacier to an uncertain destination.

  “There!” Scott said in more of a shout than a statement.

  April peered ahead, seeing nothing new.

  “What?” she managed, her voice little more than a high-pitched squeak. She quickly cleared her throat and tried it again. “What do you see?”

  “What I’ve been aiming for. Right where I figured. Stand by …”

  There was something ahead now. She could almost make it out. It was a horizon line of some sort. Not well defined, but definitely a darker line between sky and ice than an illusion would be. They were still airborne, and
Scott was actually throttling back now as the ice field below them flattened.

  “There’s a lake up there,” Scott said, nodding in the direction of the nose.

  The line ahead was coalescing steadily, and it became a small ridge now with a hanging mountain lake beyond, the surface of the water just a shade darker than the gray clouds almost enfolding their wings. April knew there had to be sheer rock walls of the mountain on the far side, but she couldn’t make them out. The ridge bordering the lake’s downsloped shoreline was drawing closer by the second, the lake beyond anything but a welcoming sight. It was a small body of water filled with huge chunks of floating ice, each of them jagged white ships afloat in a sea of milky blue-green water.

  “You’re not planning …” she began, noticing in her peripheral vision that he was already nodding. She stole just a quick glance at him, as if her looking away would destabilize their flight path.

  The sight of Scott McDermott grinning maniacally profoundly scared her.

  “Stand by, April!”

  “Those are icebergs!”

  “Yep.”

  “We can’t land in that! There’s no room!”

  He chopped the power to idle just as they topped the ridge, shoving the yoke forward to drop the Widgeon toward the surface, then throttled up and flared as he walked the rudder to the right, clearing the largest ice floe and looking for enough clear water to allow a landing.

  There were huge icebergs everywhere.

  “Damn,” he said. “More than I figured for this time of year.”

  She felt the Widgeon respond again as he shoved in more power and slipped safely over the back of an iceberg as big as a two-story house, then banked sharply left, right around another equally huge one, holding the fragile amphibian five to six feet above the icy surface at sixty knots.

  Another large line of ice floes was just ahead, coming fast, and he popped up a few feet to see over the top. With the opposite end of the glacial lake approaching less than a quarter of a mile away and no room to turn around, Scott chopped the power once again and pushed the Widgeon over the top of another large chunk of ice, dropping the hull into the lake. He yanked back on the yoke, creating an impressive flare of water on both sides as the aircraft decelerated toward another large iceberg that sat just ahead and much too close.