The sight of the sabre-toothed cat eyeing me from overhead sent my depression into recession. Once in the comfort of my apartment, sitting in the easy chair looking out at the Montana wilderness, the fear recedes and my depression returns.
When I again become aware of my surroundings the tops of the trees are a blaze of yellow. Pain is returning to my face. It’s almost six o’clock. I can’t believe I slept that long. I rock forward and get a whiff of my earlier fear caked on my body. I need a shower, and my pain medication.
I find a salmon in the refrigerator. No lobster. What time did Ulla come in? Why didn’t she wake me? She has already prepared it to go into the oven. It’s sitting in a shallow pan, in a bed of white rice, lentils and water. I turn on the oven and stir the sauce. The instructions she left says to spread it over the fish at twenty minutes.
My last supper. I’m famished. I take the extra strong pain medication because I want to enjoy my last meal. When the oven is ready I put the salmon in, set the timer, and head for the shower.
How is he going to do it? Another accident? Maybe I’ll get lost and freeze to death for real this time. There are always the cats but how would he explain another such death? If he transfers Tanya from the hospital to here, we could again do something stupid together. How would he answer to Tanya’s mother and sister?
As I start to undress, I hear a helicopter coming in. I put my shirt back on and go up to the roof. The Huey’s blades are slowing to a stop but no one is getting out. I watch through the window in the door for several minutes before the pilot finally exits. I expect to see Randolph Spriggs but it is not. It’s the other guy, the one they call Ace. I saw him the day security escorted me off the roof. He leaves the bird and disappears in the direction of the hanger, which is just out of my view. I go back down to the apartment.
I check the timer on the salmon and go shower. I think well in the shower, sometimes able to solve complex problems. This time it’s not so much a problem I have to solve, or can solve just by thinking. I have to talk myself into the action I’ve been planning. It isn’t just a matter of dialing up to my Dallas provider and setting up the email account so that I can send my journal to the Seattle Times editor. I’ll go through with that, or at least get as far as I can before being shut down. No matter what happens there, I keep seeing a vision of the truck smashing through the gate. What if the gate is too strong? What if it wrecks the truck and I can’t go any farther? Can I destroy it enough that I can get through on foot and continue with the original plan the three of us attempted?
If you can get through, so can the sabres. They will follow you. You’ll never make it.
Then the truck will just have to do the job, won’t it.
But what if?
I hate what ifs.
What if you used the helicopter instead of the truck?
I freeze at that thought, the soap bar in my hand, water beating down on my back. Can I remember how to fly it? It’s been a lot of years and it’s not like a fixed wing. It takes a completely different thought pattern, a different way of looking at aerodynamics. “You’re a natural,” Joel told me. He tried talking me into applying for helo training at Bell Helicopter. It was fun to fly but I never saw it as a career. It was only a year later that I flipped the Cherokee and quit flying altogether.
I drop the soap bar into the tray, rinse and get out. I can hear the buzzer going off on the oven. I was in the shower too long. With the towel wrapped around me I go into the kitchen, spread the sauce over the salmon, put it back in and set the timer again. I don’t move from the kitchen. I stare at the oven door and envision sitting in the pilot’s seat with my hands on the controls. I can almost feel the lift of the bird, the tilt, the yaw, the acceleration, the trees sliding past below me. And then I see the city of Kalispell and imagine setting down in a park and looking for a sheriff or city police car.
What if both helicopters are up there and they follow you in the other? What if they get you before the cops do? What if they have already bought the cops?
Damn what ifs! Great men must have ignored them.
By the time the buzzer goes off the second time I’m sitting at the counter, still in my towel, the map of Montana open before me. I retrieve the salmon, dish up a large plate and return to the map. I can’t go to Kalispell. For all I know, Vandermill owns the city.
Great men found ways around the what ifs. Where is the nearest military installation?
I find Maelstrom Air Force base in Great Falls. Can I get there? Is there enough fuel? The mountains between here and there don’t look friendly on the map. Night flying is not easy in mountains when you have no idea where you’re going. I was never instrument certified, although I was close to it when I crashed. I could hit bad weather.
You’re talking yourself out of it.
And that’s as it should be. It’s a stupid idea. I’ll try the truck.
Where’re you going with the truck?
Kalispell.
You can get there with the Huey. That can’t be all that hard. Vandermill can’t have bought the sheriff. That’s movie stuff. Hell, set it down on the highway and catch a ride with the first car heading east. Just get across the sabre moat. If you drive through the fence you’ll be letting the cats out. Not the best thing to do with these man-eaters.
Okay! Okay! I’ll take the Huey.
Good decision. It’s what you wanted anyway.
The salmon is delicious. I consume a second helping and then get dressed. I’m so nervous I can’t relax. I bring up Vandermill’s book to keep busy. I’m unable to write anything but at least I’m acting normal. At 9:00 I start over with chapter one and start reading everything I wrote. At 9:45 I start over again. At 10:10 I put the computer aside and visit the bathroom. When I return I give up on Vandermill’s book and browse through the novel I’ve been working on for the better part of a year. It’s stuck in the middle. The plot faded away into a nondescript character. I close that and wander through my working short stories folder and understand suddenly that it is all a waste of time, that if I die tonight no one is going to care about the hours, days . . . years . . . over a decade of my rambling words. Even stories I have published are nothing more than dust collections on someone’s bookshelf, or are waiting their turn at the next garage sale. I shut down the computer and go to bed.
I don’t go to sleep. I undress with the light on, get a towel and cover the camera, turn off the light and then put my clothes back on. I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling.
I try not to look at the glowing numerals on the bedside clock. Instead I pass the time thinking of when I met Tanya. I got hooked up on a blind date with her sister, but her sister came down with the flu.
“I’ll go out with you,” Tanya said without shyness to this older man standing just inside her front door. She was three years younger than her sister and had just graduated from high school. I was twenty-four. She was beautiful and naïve. It was a miserable date. A year later I ran into her again at the airstrip where I took lessons. I was sitting in the pilot’s lounge paging through a magazine. Suddenly there was a pair of Nikes in front of me, pointed my way.
“Hi!” she said.
“Hi, ahhh . . .”
“I’m Tanya. We dated once.”
I really remembered her but was tongue-tied. She wore a jumpsuit that curved in all the right places. She told me she was taking gliding lessons and pointed out the window to the glider sitting on the tarmac. It was as beautifully curved as she was. We talked about our failed date the year before and then agreed to meet later for coffee. And so it began.
My mind drifts to Rebecca who was kicking at the walls inside her mother during Tanya’s college graduation. She was born a week later, six days early. Reba! I smile in the dark at the name that Rebecca, my Becky, has decided to call herself.
By the time Christi came along Tanya was working part time scraping people’s teeth and advising on the best ways to floss. My income as a copywriter just made ends meet
. Her income insured the ends did meet and supplied the extras, like ballet classes and soccer. I wrote on the side and occasionally sold something. And then one year I sold a lot. None of it was headline making but it did add to the family coffer. Over the next couple of years, things began clicking. My name entered the rolodexes of editors of a half dozen magazines, including National Geographic. I was writing a column for a small bi-weekly newspaper and I was picking up some writing assignments for the Dallas Journal. I was working on a deal to move into a small syndication.
Then one day, stupidity set in. It just hit me out of the blue during one of my moments of job dissatisfaction with Blushneck Advertising Agency, moments that were starting to come more and more frequently. I told Tanya I wanted to go full-time freelance, that I was tired of Blushneck and my boss, Joseph Manski, who was never satisfied with anything I wrote. She argued with me and I knocked down every argument. I convinced her that as a stay-at-home dad I could free her up to stretch her work into full time, that I would set up a strict work schedule for myself, that although we didn’t have a room to dedicate as an office, one corner of the living room would work great. With some reluctance she agreed.
It worked okay, until the summer came and the girls were home all day long. I learned why kids have things like swim lessons and Bible camp and dance camp. It’s to get them out of mom’s hair for awhile. The activities were costly, and so was the laptop computer I purchased so that I could write wherever I was. Travel time is wasted time so instead of dropping them off somewhere and going home, I stayed and did my work. I began to wonder if I could deduct part of my car as an office.
And then I made one bad mistake. I turned down a writing assignment with a major newspaper. They wanted to send me to Brazil. As the stay-at-home dad I didn’t think I could leave. What I was doing was bringing in enough, so without consulting with Tanya—later finding out we could have worked it out—I said no. I never heard from that newspaper again. My deal for syndication fell through and the small newspaper decided to drop the column in favor of more ad space. I talked to other small newspapers but there was no interest in adding a new column. I sent queries to National Geographic on several story ideas but only received polite declines. Other sources of article sales started drying up. My short stories were beginning to be the only thing bringing in money, and it wasn’t much. Competition was getting stiffer and the market even more unpredictable.
When I heard that there was a scarcity of good news reporters and journalists in the Seattle area, I made another stupid decision and this time it turned into a fight. I thought I had won until I was on the flight to Montana, talking to my flight companion, Karen and her little girl, Melissa. Did I make the choice to head for the beach or did Tanya shove me onto the sand and tell me not to come back until I had it figured out, if ever? I think in a sense she kicked me out the door and threw my baggage out behind me.
You certainly have paved the road to where you are now.
It’s not my fault.
Oh! Whose fault is it then?
I think of Joseph Manski, and Tanya, and then Rebecca and Christi, Seattle, Lance Evans and Victor Vandermill, and Aileen.
Whose fault is it?
Mine.
Bingo!
Mine, all mine. But I feel as though I was cornered into making the decisions I made, just as I am now. I’m cornered and there are only two–very risky–ways out. Steal a truck and ram it through a fence or steal a helicopter which I may or may not remember how to fly.
I get off the bed and walk to the window. There’s only a partial moon. I don’t know if that’s enough light to keep from running into a mountain. Can I get up high enough to see Kalispell city lights? What’s between here and there? I didn’t pay much attention to land elevations on the way in and the map doesn’t do much to help that. I also didn’t pay close attention to the direction. I remember seeing Flathead Lake off to my left and having the sense that it fell away behind us. From that my best guess is that Kalispell lies at one hundred and ten degrees on the compass.
At 1:50 I’m so nervous I can’t stand myself. The computer is on the desk, just outside my bedroom door. As stealthily as possible, I grab it and the phone cord. The disk is in my pocket. The cord is long enough that I can sit on the floor just inside my bedroom door. I wait impatiently for the computer to come up. When it finally does, I double click on the dialup icon. The familiar box appears. I punch, “Connect.” Instead of a dial tone and then the sounds of dialing, I get an error box telling me a modem cannot be detected and to check that it’s turned on and functioning.
What the hell?
I go to my system resources and find that there is no modem listed. It’s gone.
I shut down the computer and lean my head against the wall. I remember the network administrator, his nervousness, his rush to get out, his odd aura and my being too upset to pay attention to it. He did more than give me a high speed Internet connection. He disabled my modem. He deleted files so that the system couldn’t see it. Even if I knew what he did and how to repair it, I couldn’t without the correct software, which I don’t have.
If I use the network connection to do what I was going to do, they’ll be able to trace it and Charles Fleming will be in danger. Anyone I send the file to will be in danger. What if I send it to CNN or the Washington Post? I can’t imagine Victor being able to stop it. But why would the big news agencies take me seriously, a relatively unknown going on about prehistoric animal cloning and a baby factory. It’ll be round-filed as sure as I’m sitting here on the floor with a dead modem.
If you don’t at least try. . .
“The only true failure is he who doesn’t try at all.” My father’s words. It might be that philosophy that pushed me to Seattle to begin with and started this whole mess.
What’s the worst that could happen?
It’s those words from somewhere inside my head that make me decide to crawl around the corner and retrieve the network cable. I push it into the back of the computer and power back up.
I’m running out of time. I wanted to be out the door at 2:02. I only have seven minutes left. While I wait for the computer to finish powering up, I drag the laptop bag into the bedroom. It’s the only thing I’m taking. When Windows finishes loading I double click on the Internet Explorer icon. After a long wait the “can’t find requested page” appears. I type in www.cnn.com and then punch Enter. I get the same thing. I minimize the window and double click on the Network Neighborhood icon. There is nothing in it. There is no network. Of course there wouldn’t be if they shut down the server at night. Why would they want it on when they can’t easily monitor it and keep an eye on me?
I shut down the computer, pack it into the bag and then pack myself into the coat. I move the disk into the coat’s inside pocket, zip up and button up and then sling the bag over my shoulder. My hands go into my fake leather and fake rabbit fur gloves and I’m ready. At 2:02 I step from the bedroom and go straight out the door.
Chapter 40
I don’t use the elevator. I go halfway up the stairs, stop and listen and then continue to the top. Despite my attempt at quietly closing the door from the stairwell, it slips at the last second and slams against the jamb. I hold my breath and listen. The elevator remains quiet. I look out the door and see that the helicopter is still where Ace left it, not in the hanger as I had feared.
This time as I open and close the door onto the roof, I maintain better control. I head for the Huey and glance into the hanger. It is empty. They won’t be able to fly after me. As I expected, the Huey is not locked. I release the bag to the copilot’s seat and then watch out the window for movement. When I’m certain there is no one around I turn on a light and analyze the controls. It comes back to me in short order, or at least what the controls do comes back. I don’t know how the handling will return. I’m throwing myself into the fire so I hope I relearn quickly.
I make a mental note of which way I must go once airborne and then place
my hand on the start button. Just then I spot a light flash through the glass in the door. I flip off my light and try to meld into the darkness of the Huey’s cockpit. One of the security guards opens the door and steps out onto the roof. He scans all about with his flashlight, walks into and out of the hanger and then returns to the door. The beam of the light passes below me several times. If he had thought to bring it up to the cockpit, he would have had me. He doesn’t and finally disappears through the door. Did he come up here as part of his rounds or did the slamming of the door get his attention? I wait five minutes, during which time I remember to buckle up. I also buckle the laptop in place as best I can.
I wait an extra two minutes and then place my hand on the start button again. I see no one at the door and wonder how long after I start winding her up before I can be airborne. If the security guard isn’t far away, I’m not going to have much time. I press the button and listen to the starter chug–chug–chug and then grab hold. No turning back now.
I love the feel of power under my control, the adrenalin rush. My eye shifts between the RPM indicator and the door, back and forth until the vibration smoothes out. Oil pressure looks good, hydraulics are at normal. I glance at the door once more and then give her lift and then set her back down just to get the feel. Suddenly I hear a crack. I look up to see a spider-webbed hole in the glass on the copilot’s side and the security officer and Ace just outside the door. The officer is in a shooter’s stance.
Without thinking I lift the Huey twenty feet and turn her tail toward the man with the gun. I don’t know if he shoots again but my reaction is as though there is a dozen of him with AK47s. I tilt forward against the straps and shove her toward full power, hoping I don’t overdo it and put her nose into the trees. I kick the headlights on and watch the first dome building pass underneath. I’m moving forward instead of up so I adjust a bit, come back in my seat and then feel a shudder. When you’re flying a craft such as this, a sudden shudder is cause for instant alarm. It eases off for a few seconds and then returns even worse. I can’t hold the altitude. I clear the end of the dome and fear I’m going to crash into the barn roof. Instead I clip the far edge with the wheels and the bird shutters even more. The guard must have hit something and now the bird in the process of shaking herself apart. I try to overcome loss of altitude with more power but there is no more to give. She’s screaming and vibrating as I watch the saber-tooth cattle guard pass underneath. I have to give it up and bring her down. Better now when I may be able to still control it. But control it I don’t do so well. She goes in nose first and the last thing I remember seeing are my arms coming up over my face, and the faces of my children. Metal hits metal, blades snap and glass shatters and the world spins in all directions.
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 35