Protecting the Flame Read online

  Yeah, what was with Burke and his obsession with keeping things locked up? “What if we did find a key?”

  Will scratched the back of his head. “If we can get the panel open, and the unit’s not working, I don’t know how to fix it.”

  “What about you, Hunter?”

  Hunter shook his head. “I don’t know much about electronics. I wouldn’t even know how to tell if it’s working or not.”

  “There’s got to be an off-on switch.”

  “I guess? It’s got its own battery, I know that, but…” Hunter shrugged.

  “Well, is there anything else? What about the flight plan? How come no one’s searching along that?”

  Hunter hesitated then said, his gaze slipping from hers, “I dunno. Bad luck?”

  “Bad luck?” she echoed.

  At the same moment, Will broke in. “Emma, we already went over this. We’re probably off course. It’ll take rescue time to backtrack, look at the weather patterns, figure out where we might have ended up. In a pinch, they could rely on our radar pings, but that presupposes the ELT’s not working and no flight plan which wouldn’t happen because if you fly IFR, you’re required by law to file a flight plan.”

  But what if Burke hadn’t originally thought he would be flying via instruments? Were the rules the same?

  Scott scowled. “What are pings?”

  “Every air traffic control at every airport tracks planes via primary radar,” she said. “It happens automatically. The reflected waves give air traffic control a way of knowing, roughly, where a plane is, whether the pilot wants to be tracked or not.” The only way around that would be to fly low, beneath the radar. She recalled Burke’s boast about doing precisely that in Vietnam. So he could have done so if he wanted, but the conditions had forced him higher. Why would he even need to fly below the radar? She could think of only a handful of reasons, all of them both bad and nonsense. Burke had been carrying passengers, for God’s sake. “Even if an ELT stopped working, it should be possible to extrapolate a bearing on the basis of the last ping. It all depends on how far back the last ping happened and how radically we changed course after that.”

  “Oh.” Scott digested this. “How often does that work? The pings thing?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Will said. “You remember that Malaysian airliner that went down somewhere over the ocean? Everyone knew where the plane was because of primary and secondary radar until it got over the ocean where’s there no radar. Air traffic control then has to rely on high-frequency radio and GPS, if it’s available. Even knowing a projected course, even pulling up satellite data later on, even though the plane regularly sent out pings…they’ve never found that plane.”

  Scott pulled at his lower lip. “So, you’re saying that if they’re going by these pings…they might never find us.”

  Will nodded. “It’s a possibility. We have to hope for the best.”

  “Hunh,” Scott grunted. “Or plan for the worst.”

  Chapter 2

  “Ah, fuck me.” Backing up a step, Scott put a hand to his mouth as his shoulders heaved. “That’s fucking…I can’t…” Rounding swiftly, he stumbled a few steps away and then bent from the waist and retched.

  She looked away, not from any sense of wanting not to embarrass the jerk but to keep herself from doing the same. Lucky for her, she was upwind, so she didn’t have to smell it.

  Not that looking at what was left of Burke was any better. While seeing this had been bad enough last night, daylight and the cold only sharpened the horror, cutting the tableau from the icy air the way a diamond scored glass. Haloed by chunked red and pink snow, the man was simply in pieces: frozen hunks of half-gnawed flesh, jagged and splintered twigs of bones sticking from shredded clothing. A slop of dusky bowel spooled on top of a spaghetti coil of blued intestines mantled with a frozen curtain of yellow fat. These lay in a mound next to the blackish crater of Burke’s abdomen, from which the edible organs—liver, spleen, kidneys—had been hollowed out. Once into Burke’s belly, the wolves had burrowed up into his chest, tearing out the diaphragm to get at the heart and lungs, which were also gone. The crotch of his jeans were in tatters, the wolves having ripped through denim to get at the soft genitals, and she could see the curds of fat where they’d dug out his buttocks. The body was intact, though, from the knees down, and Burke’s boots were still laced to his feet.

  Her gaze tracked to the ruin of Burke’s face. His head had been almost completely severed from his neck. She could imagine powerful jaws clamping tight, crunching through bone and cartilage. A worm of Burke’s windpipe flopped from what was left his ravaged neck. Most of his face had been eaten away, the scalp torn from its moorings to lie in a frozen flap of matted hair to reveal a dome of naked skull. Instead of a nose, there were two black pits. The wolves had stripped his lips, leaving Burke’s teeth, yellowed and crooked, bared in a skeletal snarl. Only a nubbin of tongue remained. Enough was gone that she could see a glimmer of gold molar on the left.

  They were probably at him for a long time before I woke up. Her gaze sharpened on one of Burke’s eyeballs that was frozen to his left ear and still attached to the brain by a strand of optic nerve. The right eyeball was gone, cored from its socket the way she might hollow out an avocado. They had to be for so much of him to be gone.

  She should be vomiting like Scott. That would be the human thing to do. On the other hand, she’d seen a lot of gore, and she hadn’t really known this man. Maybe this is what happened to combat soldiers. See enough blasted human beings, nothing shocked you anymore.

  “I’m not doing that.” Sticking his hands in the pockets of Earl’s parka, Scott hunched his shoulders around his ears. He’d appropriated both the parka and Earl’s watch cap, arguing that he needed two layers and his own watch cap had vanished. “I moved Earl. I was okay with that. But I’m not touching any of that shit, any of those pieces of that other guy.”

  “You can use the shovel.” Seeing Scott in Earl’s clothes pissed her off to an unreasonable degree. It shouldn’t. It wasn’t as if Earl would mind, and Scott was a thin guy, without a lot of body fat for insulation. That didn’t mean she had to like it. Her mind kept darting back to what Hunter had claimed about Scott’s threats. Although it had been the taking of Earl’s candy, the jellybeans he’d been saving for Mattie, that made her want to blacken Scott’s other eye. “It’s all frozen, Scott. If you do it fast…”

  “You deaf?” A smear of puke glistened on his jaw. Backhanding the slime, he cursed then wiped his glove in snow. “I’m not doing it at all.” Digging into a breast pocket, he pulled out a cigarette, screwed that into the corner of his mouth, lit up, and sucked. “End of story,” he said, smoke jetting from his nose. As if to put the period on that, he jammed the point of the camp shovel into snowpack and headed back toward the low mound of rocks they’d heaped. “You want to move him over here, you do that,” he called over a shoulder. “If it was me, I’d leave him and let the wolves have the rest.”

  The snark—Yeah, of course, you would—teetered on the tip of her tongue before she swallowed it back. Sniping at Scott might be satisfying. She really was spoiling for a fight with the guy, which was crazy. It wasn’t like she was a secret agent or some ninja-assassin. Still, she would love to pound that needle-nose into his skull. Actually, what was crazy was her being out here. Will was right; she needed rest. Except this would never get done if she didn’t do it. Will would pick up the slack, but Hunter was a priority. They had to get him out before night came again. So, tag. There wasn’t anyone else.

  Thirty minutes with the camp shovel was all she needed to scrape all of Burke’s pieces into a mound. It was only when she was socking rocks into place around the body that her gaze fell on a chunky gold band with a faceted, square blue stone around Burke’s right ring finger. Probably a class ring. A wedding band encircled the ring finger on his left.

  Shit. She should’ve thought of this. Unlike Earl, she hadn’t gone through the dead man�
�s pockets or twisted off a ring or a watch. Hunter might want those rings, or his mom would. Certainly, the authorities would need any identification Earl might have in a wallet.

  As luck would have it, she could work off only the bigger, chunkier ring which turned out to be from a high school, Robert E. Peary, she’d never heard of. Try as she might, she couldn’t work the wedding band over Burke’s knuckle and finally left it. There was no way she was cutting off the guy’s finger. His shirt was mostly in ribbons, and though she remembered he’d tucked a pack of cigarettes and a Bic lighter into a breast pocket, they were gone. He apparently had not bothered with a watch, which seemed a little odd for a guy who was a pilot, but whatever. Other than a small brass parrot clasp secured to a belt loop—which was both odd and familiar, as if she ought to know what that was about—his front pockets were empty. This sucked. Ben had never carried a wallet and always kept his cards and money on a clip. Burke had not and probably had a wallet.

  Which meant she had to roll him.

  It wasn’t as bad as it might have been, principally because, without his guts and missing most of his muscle mass, Burke wasn’t that heavy anymore. Shoving him up on his left hip took very little effort, though it freaked her out a little when she dipped a hand into a hip pocket and felt a huge divot where a butt cheek ought to have been but wasn’t because the wolves had eaten that out from the front.

  She found his wallet in his right hip pocket. Sliding it out, she lowered the body back onto the snow. The wallet was a trifold, cracked with age, and curved from years of resting on Burke’s butt. Unfolding the creased leather revealed a fan of pictures in plastic on one side, slots with a few cards. A much-younger Burke stared from a North Dakota driver’s license. He carried only a little cash, two twenties, a ten, and three ragged dollar bills.

  As she stood and tucked the ring and wallet into a pocket, she noticed a glint of yellow on the snow by Burke’s left hip. That clasp. Her gaze darted to the brass parrot’s beak clamped around a belt loop. Burke had carried something on a chain. Not his wallet; she had that. What was this? Kneeling, she spotted a length of linked brass chain that must’ve fallen out of a front pocket then been buried by the wolves as they rummaged. Digging the chain from crusted snow, she pinched links between her fingers and tugged. There was something heavy at the other end.

  Something clicked. She also understood why Burke had no wristwatch.

  The pocket watch was thick and looked old. She knew at a glance it was half-hunter, which meant that only the back was covered by a brass case. The glass over the face was intact, though the second sweep had stilled and the black hands showed the watch had stopped at twenty past eleven.

  Interesting. There was a big round ball of brass at the top with a ring to which the chain link was attached. Old watches had stems you could wind. This wasn’t that. Then how would you set the time? Turning the watch over, she studied the smooth back then held the watch the way she might inspect the white icing layered between two halves of an Oreo. At one end was a tiny hinge, and now she could clearly see there were layers to the watch’s back, like two half-shells from an oyster piled one on top of the other.

  Wait a minute. I know this. Bubbe Sarah’s husband, Chaim, had died young of pneumonia, leaving behind a widow with three children, a few pictures, a fifty-dollar life insurance policy…and an antique wind-up pocket watch from the old country. The watch still worked but had to be wound with a special key Sarah had long since misplaced. But her grandmother had shown her how this kind of watch worked.

  The watch’s face and guts were nestled in two brass cases. Opening the first revealed a hole into which a watch key could be inserted and then turned to wind the watch. Beneath the second sat the watch’s mainspring and barrel. Clicking the two back cases closed again, she turned the watch face up then slid her nails under the brass rim of the glass cover. The cover lifted on a hinge and there, where the hour and minute hands were attached at the center, was a tiny raised square brass peg.

  So, where was the key? Burke’s watch had been torn from its pocket, probably by the wolves. And they pulled pretty hard. She feathered snow from where she’d unearthed the watch. Hard enough to break the chain. A tiny watch might have been flung pretty far, too.

  But it had not—because it had been attached to something heavy enough for it simply to drop into the snow.

  Wow. She cradled the items in her left palm. The watch key didn’t look like a proper key at all but more like the stump of a thick brass toothpick with a square opening at one end and a ring at the other to which it was attached by another smaller ring to a heavy brass airplane-shaped fob. With the fob was another, much larger, more traditional silver key, the kind you might use for a—

  What? She suddenly straightened. Had she heard something? The sound had been odd and out-of-place, one that reminded her of her grandmother’s garden in high summer when there were a lot of—

  Bees. She jerked her head toward the sky. A buzz, she’d heard a buzzing and…she sucked in a sudden gasp of chilled air. “Guys, guys!” She was on her feet now, arms waving above her head in a crazy semaphore. “Here!” she screamed. “Over here, down here!”

  She heard Will, who was over by the cockpit, call her name, his voice rising in a question but then Scott was shouting and pointing. “Look, look, it’s a drone. It’s a fucking drone!”

  Oh my God.. She’d seen plenty of drones in her time, though most had either missiles or cameras. This drone was smaller than she expected, but that might also be an illusion because of altitude; the thing had to be a hundred feet in the air if not more. The drone looked almost military: a jet-black streamlined bullet with a thin proboscis of an antennae, long, narrow wings with upturned tips, and a tail-mounted propeller. Well, why not? Joe Kuntz was ex-military. He or Patterson might have pulled strings. Honey, I will take what I can get. Spotting the camera nestled in a small dome on the drone’s belly, she waved at it. “We’re here. We’re here!”

  By now, they were all yelling. Even Hunter was screaming, his right arm sticking out of his empty window and waving in a frantic semaphore. The drone hovered a moment, seeming to take in the scene, before slowing drifting away, heading for the woods and, probably, the fuselage beyond. God, she hoped Mattie had kept that fire going.

  “Give me your radio,” she said to Will, who’d come up alongside. Depressing the send, she shouted into the mike, “Mattie, Mattie! Are you outside? You got the fire going, right?”

  “Emma?” Mattie sounded alarmed. “What’s wrong? No, I’m inside, with Mom. Are you all—”

  “There’s a drone, there’s a drone! Get outside, right now! Make sure they see you!”

  “Oh!” There was nothing for a few moments, probably because the girl was squirming through their tunnel. Then: “I’m out and…oh, here, here! I’m down here! Emma, should I light my flare, too? So they know?”

  “No need if you’ve got the fire going, Mattie.” Will was close enough that when she turned, they could’ve brushed lips. “But if it’s hovering, write the number six in the snow, okay? They need to know how many of us there are.”

  “Okay.” Ten seconds. “Okay,” Mattie came back. “I did it. I don’t know if it’s looking, but it hasn’t left. It’s spending a lot of time looking at the plane…oh, it’s turning, starting to head back your way.”

  Now that she knew what to listen for, she heard the buzz well before the black arrow of the drone came into view. It was still going slowly, sketching a wide circle in the sky. “We see it. Good work, honey.”

  “Does this… Emma, it means they found us, right?”

  “Yes, it does.” She was grinning like a maniac. “We are saved.”

  Chapter 3

  “Well?” Outside the fuselage, Mattie jumped up from a seat they’d dragged over to the fire. “Where are they? When are we getting rescued?” She looked around Emma in the direction of the forest. “Where’s Will?”

  She answered the last question first. “He�
�ll be here later to check on your mom. He wanted to get in as much time as possible on the cockpit before it got too dark for him to get back in time to see your mom and then hustle back to stay with Hunter.” She was so tired, her eyeballs were going to merge above her nose. It had been all she could do to pull herself up the rock scramble. She supposed it was the tail-off of adrenaline conspiring with lack of sleep and little food that made her want only to curl up in a sleeping bag and sleep until the rescuers arrived with a one-way ticket out of here.

  “Is Scott coming back tonight?” Mattie swallowed. “To stay?”

  The poor kid sounded as if she hoped her stepdad might trip into a black hole and get sucked away to the Delta quadrant. “I don’t think so. It’s the guys’ turn tonight.”

  “Oh. Good.” Mattie’s shoulders relaxed. “I mean, I don’t like that Will has to stay out but… Oooh, careful!” Mattie pointed. “Don’t mess up the six. Why aren’t we getting rescued tonight?”

  “Well, drones have a pretty long range.” Skirting the wobbly numeral Mattie had sketched in the snow, she dropped into the seat the girl had vacated. “So, I guess a rescue team could be a day or so away.”

  “Really?” Mattie’s forehead wrinkled. “But if it’s got a camera, and they know we’re here, why not send a helicopter or something?”

  She’d thought of that. After she’d finished with Burke, she’d asked Will the same question. There was only one thing either of them came up with that made sense. “It’s possible there isn’t a good place for a helicopter to land.” That, she’d pointed out to Will, only sort of made sense unless there was something about the mountain they didn’t know about. We’re not up that high, she’d said. The only other thing that might be a problem is the slope. On a steep incline, a helicopter would have trouble maintaining a stable hover. Most people tended to overlook the fact that a helicopter was never truly stationary but constantly matching its speed to the rotation of the earth beneath it. A steep slope made sticking to a single point extremely difficult.