Protecting the Flame Read online

  The guy was really such a dick. “Soup’s on, Rachel,” she said. “Get it while it’s hot.”

  Rachel held up a finger: one second. “I’ve got to go, Scott. See you tomorrow. Let me talk to Will one more time, okay?” When Will came on, Rachel said, “Can I please take this thing off my neck?” Inserting a finger over the top of the SAM still wrapped around her throat, Rachel gave the splint a little tug. “My neck is fine, and it’s really kind of itchy.”

  “Sure. You don’t know how relieved I am you’re awake. See you tomorrow,” Will said and cut the connection.

  “Makes at least three of us,” Emma said, and then thought she was being mean. Scott might not be one of those expansive type of guys, the kind who showered a woman with little things like, oh, I love you and I was so worried. She held out a mug of broth. “Trade you for the handset. Mattie, you want to get some crackers and peanut butter for your mom?” Bending, she scooped up the pocket watch and chain with its fob and keys where Mattie had left them, dropped them into a pocket then held up her empty water bottle. “I’m going to go out and fill this up with some snow.”

  Once she was outside, she moved away from the entrance, took out the handset, and touched off their prearranged signal: break-break-break. A few moments later, Will was back. “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  A lot of things, actually, and some were contradictory. She could feel the war inside herself between wanting to believe that the drone meant something good versus a darker suspicion that it was not. “If we stay, I have a couple ideas about getting food. One is that I leave and go find game and bring it back.”

  “I hate that idea, and we shouldn’t split up. Next.” He listened and then said exactly what she’d thought he would. “You can’t be serious. Are you nuts?”

  “No, I’m being practical. Will, we have to do something. Mattie’s right. That drone is just too damned weird and, I swear to God, I think Hunter knows something he’s not saying or is too scared to say. I don’t know which it is, and it doesn’t matter. Plus, we will have no food at all by the day after tomorrow unless you want to try your luck shooting a wolf.” She’d actually not thought about that until this second.

  “Well, Liam Neeson did it.”

  “In a movie.” As she recalled, the characters complained that wolf tasted terrible. “But calories are calories.”

  “Uh-huh. And for bait, you would use…?”

  “I’m thinking…” She pulled in a long breath. “It’s something you’re not going to like.”

  “Hit me.” She did, and he said, “You’re right. I don’t like it.”

  “But it would work, Will.” Boy, what did it say about her that she’d thought of it in the first place? This was like something out of the Ukrainian famine way back in the thirties when parents roasted their children or one of those apocalyptic survivalist novels, the ones where the power grids crash, and people start thinking about which juicy little kid they’ll barbecue next. This wouldn’t be quite so bad. Would it? “Besides, I’m not suggesting we use him. We use his clothes. They’re in tatters to begin with, they’re soaked in blood, and it’s not as if we have any use for them.”

  “You do realize Hunter’s trapped, right?”

  “What does that have to do with this?”

  “Everything. You’d be drawing in wolves using human scent and blood as bait. Fine, they’re only Burke’s bloody clothes, but the wolves won’t differentiate. If we do this, someone has to be with Hunter all the time, which means that person gets the gun. But the fuselage isn’t that far away. All those wolves have to do is follow their noses.”

  “You’ve been reading too much Jack London. Wolves don’t operate like that.”

  “Mountain lions do.”

  She hadn’t considered that. “Well, look, do you have a better idea? If we don’t bring the game to us, that means we have to go get it and if someone has to do that, that means that person will need a weapon, and we only have one. Since you don’t want to split up, that means we starve. If we stay, a wolf’s all we’ve got.”

  “Unless a rescue team comes.”

  “We’re still talking about that? Listen to me. Hunter would be a sitting duck, no matter what. How close are you guys to getting him out?” She got only the crackle of dead air and thought, Shit. “Are you serious, Will? You can’t?”

  “I’m not done trying yet.”

  That didn’t sound hopeful. “Did you ever see that James Franco movie?”

  “The one about Ralston?” Another pause. “Yeah, and I heard him speak at a conference. That was a much different situation.”

  “How? Hunter’s legs are already starting to rot. I could smell it. So it’s not different.”

  “No, it is, actually, because of two things. First off, the bones Ralston had to break were in his forearm not his leg. The ulna and radius aren’t as thick; they’re easier to break. But you have to stand on your legs and walk around. By definition, those bones must be thicker and stronger. Second, the mechanics were on Ralston’s side. Because he was literally trapped between a rock and a hard place, it was as if his arm was in a vise. He was able to use torque to break it, but to do that, he had to be able to move the rest of his body. Hunter can’t do that at all. See what I’m saying? I would have to figure a way to break both his legs and then amputate, but I…Jesus, Emma, I’m not a surgeon. I used to push drugs to kill cancers, not cut them out.”

  “You think Ralston was a surgeon?” It was brutal, but it wasn’t like they had a ton of options here. “He broke the bones, he put on a tourniquet, he cut off his arm, and he got out. We’re not talking neurosurgery, Will. We’re talking giving Hunter a fighting chance and getting the hell out of here. He wouldn’t be able to walk even if you could get him out, right? So we’re going to be carrying him out, no matter what. How much longer can Hunter last if we don’t get him out?”

  “Another couple of days, maybe three. It’s the hypothermia that’s going to kill him before the sepsis can. I can warm him up a little but not enough. Even if we get him out now, I’m not sure he’ll make it. He needs antibiotics, debridement.” Will gave a bleak laugh. “The guy needs an entire trauma team. Where the hell are the planes, the rescue? I don’t get it, I don’t get it!”

  “I’m telling you, that drone was weird. It might not be related to a rescue or even the crash at all. What if it was…I don’t know…some guy somewhere?”

  “Who wouldn’t notify anyone?”

  “If his drone is illegal, maybe he wouldn’t.” That hadn’t occurred to her either until this second.

  “But how did it find us?”

  “The ELT?” Then she thought, Uh-oh. “Will, if that’s true…”

  “Yeah, I know. If that drone homed in on the transponder, why hasn’t anyone else?”

  “So it could be a true, true unrelated. Yeah, we crashed. Yeah, there’s a drone.”

  “And neither has anything to do with the other.” A pause. “If we could only get to the thing and see if it’s working.”

  “But we need a—” She stopped talking.

  “Emma?”

  Oh, my God. “Hang on a second, Will.” She didn’t want to jinx anything by saying what she was thinking out loud. Following her flashlight, she made her way around to rear of the plane and fanned her light over the tail.

  The antenna was as she’d found it days ago: a slim white stalk with a bulbous end protruding from the plane about a foot away from the tail and rudder assembly. Below the antenna and along the left hand side of this section was a panel one find might covering a wall safe but instead of a combination, the panel was secured via lock and key. It can’t be that simple. Dipping a hand into a pocket, she came out with the watch chain to which was attached that fob, the watch key… And you.

  “Emma?”

  “Hang on,” she said again. The steel key winked a dull silver. Why hadn’t she thought of this earlier? Maybe being half-starving and dealing with a guy in pieces had something to do wit
h it. But I’m here now. She eyed the panel lock. There was no way to tell by looking. Sliding the key home, listening to the slight chatter of metal teeth against metal, she thought, You watch, it won’t work.

  But the key turned.

  “Emma, what is it?”

  “I found a key.” Her voice sounded very far away or maybe it was that her pulse was beating a timpani in her temples. That odd smell she’d noticed that very first day fumed around her face and up her nostrils, and her mind conjured not only of smoke and late-night bars but of earthy peat and fire-blackened logs and expensive decanters and nice cut-crystal tumblers. “It fits. I got it open.”

  “Oh, my God. Is there a unit? Is it on?”

  “Yeah, there’s a unit. There are two, actually.” Only one looked familiar. But there was other stuff crammed in here that also looked familiar—and made both no sense and all the sense in the world.

  “What? Two? Well,” Will amended, “unless he decided to mount a second unit that could transmit GPS. Those are pretty new, though.”

  “I don’t think that’s it.” ELTs were of a type: thick, bulky orange rectangles bolted into place from which there were normally two wires. One was for the antenna, the other fed through the body of the plane to an audio alert and remote switch on the pilot’s side of the cockpit. “Will, do you remember checking the remote switch?”

  “For the ELT? On Burke’s side? Yes, I told you it’s on. Why?”

  “Because the unit’s off.”

  “What?” The word was flat. “The unit is…”

  “Off, Will. As in it’s not on. The main rocker switch is set to off, and there’s no readout on the display.”

  “But that…he would’ve had to…”

  She waited for him to finish and, when he didn’t, she did it for him. “He turned it off, Will. Burke turned off the ELT before takeoff. But this other unit?” She studied the digital readout. “It’s active.”

  “What’s the frequency?” After she read out the numbers, he said, “That’s not right. Standard for search and rescue is four-oh-six megahertz.”

  “Well, that’s not this.” She had an idea why, too. “Will, remember when we were talking to Scott about how they’d find us, and you mentioned a flight plan? Well, I don’t think Burke filed one.”

  She waited while he absorbed that. “Because he thought he would be VFR, not flying by instruments,” he said.

  “No. I don’t think he wanted a record of his exact route.” That also explained why he’d turned off the main ELT but left this secondary unit, set to an entirely different frequency no one would think to monitor, active.

  “But that makes no sense.”

  “Yeah, it does.” Reaching in, she pulled out a very large, very heavy block wrapped in opaque plastic and secured with industrial-strength duct tape. When she did, she heard a tiny slosh of liquid and a slight chik of glass. Liquid dripped from the block. Of course, this wouldn’t have completely frozen. The really good Scotches, the ones designed for a celebration, were about seventy percent alcohol. Turning her light into the cavity, she remembered what Burke said about installing that new belly tank so he’d had plenty of fuel, which she’d found odd. Why bother with bladders of extra gas if they had all this extra fuel?

  Because. Who said a tank could carry only fuel?

  “Emma? Why does it make sense?”

  “Because.” In the light, the blocks were brighter than snow…and those bricks of bills looked awfully, awfully green. “It depends on who you’re flying to meet.”

  YEHI ’OR

  Chapter 1

  On the morning of the sixth day…

  “You’re shitting me,” Will said. He and Emma were crouched around Hunter, still trapped in his copilot’s seat. Emma had hustled down at first light and sent Scott back, ostensibly to be with Rachel and Mattie, but mostly to get him out of the way. Not that Emma thought letting an ex-addict anywhere near a whole lot of heroin and who knew how many bricks of banded twenties and tens was all that safe, but she’d not told Mattie what she’d found, only locked the panel back up again and kept the key.

  “Are you serious, Hunter?” Will’s gloved hands balled, and Emma was pretty sure that if Hunter wasn’t a literal sitting duck, Will would’ve beat him silly. He might anyway, on general principle. “A smuggler?”

  “No, a mule.” Cocooned by his parka’s hood, Hunter’s head was skull-like. His pallor gave him a spectral look, something the hectic glitter of fever in his sunken eyes did not dispel. Over the course of the past twenty-four hours, his skin had drawn down so tightly over his cheekbones, it was a wonder his face hadn’t split in two. “He gets paid for the delivery, that’s it. He doesn’t get a cut of the sales.”

  “Yeah, I suppose that makes it all better. The hell you guys thinking? Drugs and money and booze, and you guys took on passengers?”

  “That’s why they hired him. It was part of the deal. Passengers make the flights look less suspicious. No one checks, and if you don’t file a flight plan—” When Will interrupted with a curse, Hunter held up his gloved hands in surrender. “It’s not mandatory if you’re VFR, which we were.”

  “Until we got socked in, which your dad had to know about because he knew where we’d be flying. Did he happen to tell you where he was really going?”

  “Yeah.” Hunter slicked pearls of sweat from an upper lip. “South. After he dropped you all off.”

  “South where?”

  “Not far. Wyoming. Yellowstone.”

  “Oh, for God’s…” Will aimed that comment at the sky, which was overcast today. “So, you’re saying that if anyone is looking for the plane, where it was supposed to end up at the very end of the day, they’re looking for us hundreds of miles from here.”

  “But there are the radar pings.” With the cloud cover, the air was not as cold and held a scent of a chilled beer can. More snow, Emma thought, and soon. “Will, there won’t be any south of us. They’ll still be looking in this general area.”

  “Yes, but with no help from an ELT. No one’s going to think about trying another frequency.” Will looked back down at Hunter. “That’s what the drone was about, wasn’t it? If anything happened to the plane, your employers would know where to look, right?”

  “Look, they’re not my employers, okay? That’s what we were arguing about when you guys got there. Dad said he was getting out of the business. I honestly thought he was serious about that, too. It made sense when he outfitted the plane with a new belly tank and all because he was talking about doing more winter runs into Canada. I swear to God, I didn’t have a clue until I saw those avgas bladders, and then I knew. He was going to fill that third one up, but I talked him out of it.”

  That explained the empty bladder. Hot water for a bath, my eye. “That’s why you were worried about weight,” she said.

  “Shit, yeah. I’d seen the weather. I knew we weren’t going to get a lot of miles fighting that headwind.”

  “But, Hunter, why did the engines stop? It wasn’t because of the weight.”

  He shook his head. “I think…my dad…when he got the new belly tank, he replaced the wing tanks, too. If you put the selector in backward, the thing that controls which tank you’re drawing fuel from…”

  “I know what a selector is,” Will interrupted. “You’re saying your dad switched to an empty tank when he thought he was switching to a full one.” At Hunter’s nod, Will closed his eyes. “Well, that does explain it.”

  “Who are these guys?” Emma asked Hunter.

  Hunter let his head fall back. “I told you, I don’t know their names or even where they come from. But if they’re the ones operating that drone, they know where we are, and they’ve got two alternatives. You need me to draw a map?”

  “Yeah, actually, if that would get us the hell out of here,” she sniped.

  “Cut it out,” Will rapped. “The choice is obvious. Whether we die or leave, they’re not going to care. All they’ll want is the cargo.”


  And they’d helpfully told them how many people to expect. Well, they had the advantage there because whoever was coming didn’t know they knew why. “I haven’t heard any more drones,” she said.

  “Which would suggest they’re on their way.” Will gnawed skin on a lower lip split and chapped by cold and wind. “You have to wonder, too. That drone wasn’t, you know, something you buy at Walmart. It had to have some range, but it’s also easier to overlook because people are looking for us. These guys can’t chance an airplane or helicopter because that might get them the wrong kind of attention. So that means they’ve got to be coming on foot or, more likely, snowmobile, and then they have to climb, unless there’s a way up opposite where we are that we don’t know about because we haven’t gone far in that direction. We’ve been focused on the cockpit.”

  “You think they’re close.”

  “Now? Absolutely, but not at first. They’ve had all of yesterday afternoon and evening and this morning.” He checked his watch. “It’s half past nine. If they were close, I bet they could have walked here on their knuckles by now. That suggests…a little distance? A fair amount in terms of resources? Where do people get good long-range drones?”

  “Military.”

  “Or border patrol. On either side. Yeah. Wouldn’t be the first dirty agents in history.”

  She could tell him a thing or two about that. “So, what do we do, Will?”

  “I don’t know, Emma. I am coming up empty here.” His bruises had gone a sickly yellow-green as the blood decayed and was reabsorbed, but Will had worked harder and longer than even she, and the elements, fatigue, and hunger were starting to show. Small fissures scored his cheeks, and there was a quarter-sized spot near his left ear that was fish-belly white with the beginning stages of frostbite. For the first time since this whole nightmare began, he’d not bothered to shave. “We have one weapon. Hunter is still trapped. I have to check her out, but I’m assuming Rachel can walk—”