Protecting the Flame Read online

  “That’s brutal. Rachel was married to him.”

  “I can’t help that his being an asswipe also happens to be true. He was like all bullies. They’re all bluster and no bite if you’re their equal.” If you weren’t, they squashed you under a combat boot, threatened your family, and killed your husband to show they meant it.

  “Except,” Will said, “he is the father of Rachel’s child. There must have been something in him she once loved and probably still does.”

  She had nothing to say to that. Her mistake hadn’t been one made because of love. Hers had been one of loss. Vulnerability. She’d trusted the wrong person. Some great judge of character she was.

  “What if it was you?” Will asked.

  “What if it was you what?”

  “Out there.” He inclined his head toward the woods. “What if the situation had been reversed? If you were the one stuck out there alone and afraid, hurt, maybe dying?”

  “Is that a trick question?”

  “Something’s really bothering you.”

  “You think?”

  “Stop that.” He scrubbed the air with his good hand. “You don’t have to play tough with me. As a general rule, I don’t like bad people. I think you’re a much better person than you’re letting yourself be right now.”

  “Oh?” She heard the tremble and wanted to slap herself silly. She’d be damned if he made her cry. “So, you’re a shrink now?”

  The air was so cold, the words seemed to turn to ice the instant they left her mouth.

  “No. I already told you. I know a lot about death.” Something shifted beneath his face, and his gaze fell to her wrists and their scars, hidden by sleeves and gloves. “And I know grief when I’ve touched it.”

  Chapter 3

  “You know what this reminds me of?” Will said, suddenly.

  “What?” she asked, grateful he’d broken the silence. Neither had spoken in the last ten minutes as they’d followed the trail left by the cockpit. She hadn’t known what was safe to say, though she wasn’t stupid. He’d invited her trust in him—and she couldn’t. God, there were days when she wondered who that fool in the mirror was.

  “Those kids in the Andes. Look at this and then look at the fuselage.” They turned back to face the way they’d come. Through the trees, she could make out the bright orange flicker of their signal fire; the wind was with them and laced with a scent of resin and burning wood. “Their cockpit ended up some distance away, too, as I recall. I think that’s what happened here. Burke kept turning us in a square, remember, to keep us clear of the peaks? But then the engine caught and he started pulling up. I remember him yanking back on the yoke. So he came in from the north.” He pointed at a faraway saddle between mountains. “He threaded us through that. We might have made it, too, if he’d only been able to pull us up faster and higher.”

  Which Burke obviously hadn’t. Judging from a series of broken, splintered trunks thrusting up from the snowpack behind the fuselage, the plane had smashed into tall spruces, which had caught them by the wings, shearing those away and sending them spinning before the plane had slammed down in a hard belly flop and then slalomed down an incline. The impact fractured the plane and their portion, which wasn’t as streamlined, had plowed to a halt, while the cockpit had bulleted into the forest.

  “But how does that remind you of the Andes crash?”

  “The slope. It’s a natural chute, maybe even a sometime waterway, you know, when there’s spring melt? I can feel the incline. With the momentum the plane had built up, once it got going on this, it would be like bombing down a ski run. Same thing happened in the…”

  He stopped as a small, static-filled fart blatted from a pocket of his parka. Pulling out a small yellow walkie-talkie, Will depressed a button. “You okay, Mattie? Is there a problem? Over.”

  “No. I’m checking in to make sure you guys are all right.” There was a long pause. “Oh. Over.”

  Will grinned. “Well, we still see you. In fact, I’m waving, even if you can’t see it. Is your mom still asleep? Over.”

  “Yes. How long are you going to be? What if she wakes up while you’re gone? Over.”

  “If she wakes up, you get on the horn, and I’ll hustle back. You know, you’d probably feel better if you got outside into the sunshine. Over.”

  A pause and then Mattie came back. “If she wakes up and I’m outside… Over.”

  “Set up a schedule. Thirty minutes out, fifteen in, something like that. Keep an eye on the fire and don’t forget to keep drinking. Over.”

  “Okay. Will you be back in time for lunch?”

  She was not going to hang around and listen to them talk about food. Catching Will’s eye, she mouthed, Going to check something out then, at Will’s nod, turned back to study the cockpit’s trail, thinking Will had something there about water. Approaching the trough from the side, she used the hiking pole as a probe, trying to feel the terrain through her too-large snowshoes, silently cursing when a shoe flopped and threatened to trip her up. She studied the spray of snow from the cockpit’s passage, the way the cockpit had carved a runway for itself. I could swear this is a bank or… She felt the tip of her pole skid and skip. Rock? Kneeling, she swept at snow, swishing the flat of her gloved hand back and forth.

  She heard Will come up behind her. “Find something?”

  “I think so.” She pointed at a sheet of dense white ice that had been hidden by snow. “That’s pretty solid. I think that probably answers why they kept going. Nothing to stop them, really, and it’s wide enough.” The cockpit simply wasn’t that large. Like all aircraft, the Chieftain’s cockpit had been big enough for two men and a central console with enough maneuvering room along the sides left over so neither was constantly was banging an elbow. “With no wings to stop them or get them hung up, they’d have shot down this like a luge.”

  “To wind up where?” Will asked.

  “I guess we follow and find out.” But she already had a suspicion, which also probably meant she really hadn’t heard anything. Because if she was looking at a frozen waterway carved by years of snowmelt or simply a run-off channel, there were only two possibilities. One was that the water emptied into a lake, which might not be a bad thing for them because lakes, unless at very high altitudes, usually meant fish, didn’t they? Whether that lake was also iced over enough to hold the cockpit’s weight…well, that was a separate question.

  The other possibility was, well, gravity.

  After another several minutes, she felt the woods pulling away and the way ahead opening up. Through gaps in the trees, distant peaks thrust toward the sky and, closer in, she glimpsed the snowy tops of tall spruce.

  “Uh-oh,” Will said.

  “Yeah.” The fact that they were looking at treetops meant a drop-off. Hell. Stopping a good distance back from the edge, she gazed down into a very wide, U-shaped valley.

  “So the stream ends in a waterfall,” said Will.

  “Or a cliff.” Which was another way of saying a waterfall without water. There’d been that show years back people had loved about an airplane that had crashed on this wacky island and blah, blah. She and Ben had streamed the entire series. She’d liked the first couple of seasons but finally got pissed when nothing was ever really explained and then the whole thing turned out to be a dream which she’d always suspected because, in the very first episode, when the Matthew Fox character woke up on the beach, she remembered turning to Ben and saying, You watch. It’ll all be a dream.

  The sight of the cliff ahead reminded her of the episode where John Locke found that drug smugglers’ plane—a Beechcraft, as she remembered it—mired in trees over the jungle floor. The smugglers had stuffed heroin into statues of the Virgin Mary and then…well, she couldn’t remember the rest, other than the plane eventually fell out of the trees.

  “Looks like they went over,” Will said.

  “Looks that way.” It also seemed to her that if anyone had survived—a miracle, in and of itse
lf—she couldn’t possibly have heard them. The woods were dense, and they had to be almost a quarter mile from the fuselage. Sure, sound carried in the wilderness, and especially at night, but that far?

  Will must’ve been thinking the same because he reached his good hand to touch her arm. “I’m sorry. About what I was saying before. I was being unfair. This is pretty far from the fuselage and, in a storm, I’m not at all sure the sound would’ve carried.” He didn’t say that the reverse was also true: if there had been someone who survived, they might not have heard her calling.

  “Thanks.” If they could spot the cockpit, though, and somehow reach it… “Will, if it’s down there, I think we have to try and check it out, don’t you? Burke had a map. Maybe it’s still there or he had others.” Maybe there was more—batteries, a radio, something. God, a satellite phone would be a real miracle.

  “Well,” he said, sidestepping carefully to the edge but steering well clear of the ice slick, “I guess that depends on how far down they…” He stopped talking.

  “What?” She forced herself to move slowly to avoid taking a spill, already dreading what she would see.

  The cockpit was directly below, shrouded in snow and hung up on a very wide, snow-covered plateau in a tangled cradle of the stout branches of tough, gnarled pine. Because it had smacked onto its belly instead hitting nose-first, there was no way to tell how many bodies were still inside or if anyone had been thrown. She didn’t see anyone lying on the snow nearby, but with the storm, that meant nothing. The drop was at least a hundred feet and probably a lot more, so it was hard to imagine that anyone had survived first the actual impact of the plane careening into trees and then plummeting over a frozen waterfall. The valley itself was odd, though. It was as if there were two valleys, the one the plane had landed in and then, beyond, yet another U-shaped expanse.

  “Hanging valley,” Will said when she pointed that out. “I’ve heard of them. There’s one at Glacier. But I’m not sure of the mechanism. All I know is it has something to do with one part eroding faster than the other. This might help us, though.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Getting down there. This part with the waterfall is a sheer drop-off, but…” He wandered to the right a short ways, studying the snow. “I think if we walk along the edge for a time, we might find a more gradual way down.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “Then, I guess we’re screwed.” He stopped then pointed down at snow that seemed oddly trammeled and bunched. “But if critters can do it, I figure we can, too.”

  “What kind of critters?” she said, but she was already thinking of those odd screams and, when she got a good look, a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the cold shuddered down her spine. “How many do you think there were?”

  “I’m thinking at least three.” He used the tip of his pole to prod at something that looked like a discarded blackened cigar butt. “That spoor’s still soft, too, so it hasn’t been long.” He gestured with his pole. “The prints head back into the woods not far from where we came out.”

  Crap. She turned an alarmed glance back into the trees, though, of course, no self-respecting wolf was going allow itself to be seen. Kneeling alongside Will, she stared at the spoor and spotted tufts of what looked like hair. Probably from whatever…whomever…the wolf had last eaten. Rabbits? Maybe? If that was true, what she’d heard might not have been human at all. She wished that made her feel better. “You think we scared them off?”

  Will shook his head. “I doubt it. Look at these prints.” He used a gloved finger to trace the outline of a much-larger print with four rounded toes and a wide central pad. “No claw marks.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Mountain lion, more than likely. A pretty big one, too. I’m no expert, but see here?” He indicated several yellow splotches melted into the snow. “The wolves got spooked and beat feet. So did the mountain lion, but I’ll bet it left because it heard or smelled us coming.” Rising, he turned to look toward the dense forest to the west. “Might have a den close by or be watching, waiting for us to leave. Could be that’s what you heard that first night and what we heard this morning. It would also explain why no one answered when we shouted back.”

  “Seriously?” Mattie was all by herself in the fuselage with her unconscious mother. My God, what if it came after them?

  As if reading her thoughts, Will said, “The barrier will discourage any predators, and so will the fire. Besides, I don’t think they’ll bother us for a while, not when there’s a buffet down there.”

  “God.” She shivered from fright and the cold. “And I thought I was morbid.” The sooner they got out of here and back to the fuselage, the better. “Can we get the hell out of here now?”

  “Not until we check out the wreck. We’ve come all this way. It would be stupid not to try. I don’t think anything’s going to bother us in broad daylight and, like you said, there could be things down there we can use.”

  “Will, it’s at least a hundred, maybe two hundred feet down. How are we going to do that?” Thanks to Ben, she knew how to rappel in a pinch, but Will didn’t stand a chance with his shoulder. She could probably get back up, so long as one end of the rope was fixed, but she’d really rather not have to prove that, thanks.

  “Well, the animals gathered here for a reason. If they wanted a snack, they needed a way down.” He studied the slope. “How much billy goat blood do you have?”

  “Oh, ha-ha.” But she spotted what he’d seen: the narrow meander of an animal trail through snow. She followed it with her eyes and saw how it wound away before curving back east, toward them—and the wreck. Despite those odd cries, she wondered if any animals had been down there already. Possibly not; the snow over the wreck looked relatively undisturbed.

  “Hello?” She jumped as Will cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted again, “Hello, is there anyone down there?”

  “God, some warning next time, please? You about gave me a heart attack.” She listened to the crash of his words echoing and bouncing off rock before dying. The wind was a hollow moan and from somewhere came a whump as snow tumbled from a bough. It hit Emma she hadn’t heard any birds at all. Maybe they didn’t come up this high?

  “Hello?” Will called again. “Can you hear me? Is there anyone there?”

  She wanted him to stop. She wanted to put her hand on his good arm and pull him away from the edge. She wanted to get back to the fire and that damn fuselage and have some hot tea and hunker down until someone found them. “Will, can we—”

  “H-hullo?” The word seemed to float on a whisper of thin air. An agonizing pause and then: “Hello?”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Cupping his hand to his mouth again, Will leaned so dangerously close to the edge, she grabbed a fistful of his parka. “Hello?” Will shouted. “Hello, who’s there?”

  “Help,” the voice said. “Help.”

  God, it figures. Because she recognized that voice.

  Scott.

  Chapter 4

  Five hours later, Will said, “There’s no easy way to say this.”

  No shit. “I know.” She was exhausted, hungry, lightheaded from working nonstop, but there’d been little choice. Time was not their friend. The sun had long since passed overhead and now hovered above peaks to the west, coloring the sky pink and blush orange as it began its slide toward sunset. She checked her watch. The day before the light had lasted about eight hours, before dusk around 5:00 p.m. Two more hours of daylight, and that’s it. The sky, too, had remained quiet, with not even a faraway jetliner sketching a white trail across a blisteringly blue sky.

  Where was everyone? Why were there no planes, no helicopters? The answers were unknowable, even rhetorical.

  She glanced at the bright orange flames of the fire she’d gotten going. She wondered when the animals might come back. Maybe, with the fire, they wouldn’t.

  Their predicament at the moment was a Catch-22 if you were into Heller. Trekkies call
ed it a Kobayashi Maru, that proverbial no-win scenario; Ben always said that the Kobayashi Maru of marriage was if your wife asked whether that dress made her look fat. There was no real right answer for that, was there? If your wife was asking, it was because she thought it did, and if a guy said it didn’t, well, he was a liar, which meant the dress made her look fat and therefore, she was fat…like that.

  Most folks in the military said C-F, but only when there were civilians around and everyone was being politically correct.

  Seriously, their situation right this very moment, given what she and Will had found at this second crash site? Total Kobayashi Maru, no-win cluster-fuck.

  “I’m sorry,” Will said in an undertone. “I really am, but we’re going to have to divide and conquer here. I can’t be in two places at once. I need to get back to check on Rachel, but by the time I make it there with Scott...”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I get it.” There hadn’t been any way to speed things up either. They’d spent the better part of an hour traversing the two hundred-plus feet to the wreck, scrambling over snow-covered rocks and stepping carefully along that narrow, icy animal trail. Since then, they’d worked nonstop, checking out Scott, tending to Hunter and Mattie’s grandfather, building up a fire, stacking rocks in a low wall which Will had covered with a large rectangle of aluminum foil he carried in his pack and buttressed with slabs of metal from the plane to reflect the heat back toward the cockpit while she worked at gathering enough wood to last the night. Will also had checked in with Mattie at intervals, to be on the safe side and make sure he didn’t have to hustle to get back to Rachel. “I get you have to go, but I’d be lying if I said I was overjoyed.”

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can to spell you…wait, why not?” he asked when she shook her head.

  “Are you kidding? I get you’re Mr. Wilderness, but you are not indestructible, and unless I’m missing something, I’m pretty sure you can’t see in the dark. Because that’s what you’ll be doing, trying to get back here at night.” She’d watched him like a hawk as they worked their way down to the wreck. He’d done all right, though he’d had to take that right arm out of its sling or risk being pulled off-balance on the narrow trail, part of which had been more of a rock scramble than anything they could really walk. That meant he had to use the arm. From his expression, she knew that had hurt. “There are too many variables, and most of them are bad. First off, you will never make it down, even with a headlamp and especially with a bum arm. Second, it means that I would have to climb back up in the dark. Again, even with a headlamp, I slip and that’s bad.” She held up a third finger. “And there’s still the little problem of a bunch of really hungry animals out there one of us would have to deal with without a weapon because we have only the one rifle.”