The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

  THE BREACH

  Patrick Lee

  Part I - BLACKBIRD

  CHAPTER ONE

  On the first anniversary of his release from prison, Travis Chase woke at four in the morning to bright sunlight framing his window blinds. He put his backpack in his Explorer, left Fairbanks on State Route 2, and an hour later was on the hard-packed gravel of the Dalton Highway, running north toward the Arctic Circle and the Brooks Range beyond. From the crests of the highest hills, he could see the road and the pipeline snaking ahead for miles, over lesser ridges and through valleys blazing with pink fireweed.

  The trip was not a celebration. Far from it. It was a deliberation on everything that mattered: where he stood, and where he would go from here.

  The console showed an outside temperature of fifty-nine degrees. Travis lowered the windows and let the moist air rush through the vehicle. The height of summer here smelled like springtime back in Minneapolis, the scent of damp grass just freed from snow cover.

  He reached Coldfoot at ten o’clock and stopped for lunch. The town, with a few buildings and a population of less than twenty, survived entirely on commerce from travelers on the Dalton. Mostly truckers bound for the oil field at Prudhoe Bay, 250 miles north. Coldfoot was the last glimpse of humanity along the highway, before the elevation divide and the long, downslope run to the sea.

  Travis wouldn’t be going that far. The mountains he’d come for were right here. To the west of town, Gates of the Arctic National Park followed the range in a two-hundred-mile arc to the southwest. There were no roads leading in—no foot trails, even. All hiking in the Brooks Range was back-country, though various websites and published guides detailed the most trusted and trafficked routes. Travis had studied them all, then plotted his own course to avoid them.

  He left the Explorer at the depot, filled his water pouches, strapped on his pack and was on his way before eleven. By the time he stopped for dinner—a freeze-dried packet of brown rice he cooked over his tiny propane burner—he’d reached the top of the first ridge, two thousand feet above town. To the south, the last seventy miles of the morning’s journey receded toward infinity—back toward the world, and the places between which he had to choose.

  Alaska or Minnesota?

  There was pressure to go back home, of course. Pressure from everyone he knew there. He’d only been out of prison a month when he’d bought his one-way ticket to Fairbanks; some of his relatives hadn’t even gotten the chance to see him. What future did he see for himself up north, two thousand miles from his family?

  What future did he see among them? Even to the few who could understand and forgive what he’d done, he would always be the brother who’d spent half of his twenties and all of his thirties in prison. Twenty years from now, in the eyes of the next generation, he would still be that guy. That uncle. You could only get so free.

  He pushed on to the next ridge before making camp for the night. What passed for night, anyway: a few hours of cooling twilight as the sun dipped through the haze toward, but not quite to, the northern horizon. He staked his tent into the soft earth beside a snowfield that planed away for miles across the upper face of the ridge, and sat outside for an hour waiting for sleep to settle over him.

  Maybe five miles to the west—distance was tricky up here—a stony ridge rose higher than the foothills he’d crossed so far. In the long light he thought he saw shadows flitting on the face of the rock. He took out his binoculars, steadied them on his knees, and scanned the ridge for over a minute before he saw them: Dall sheep, twenty or more, moving with spooky ease across a nearly vertical granite face. Lambs no more than two months old followed their mothers with sure-footed skill. Travis watched until they vanished behind a fold of the cliff wall.

  At last feeling a calming heaviness in his limbs, he climbed into his tent and sleeping bag, and faded away to the rustle of wind over the short grass.

  He woke with a quickened pulse, aware that something had startled him, but unable to tell what, exactly.

  The sunlight through the tent fabric was stronger. His watch showed that it was just past three in the morning. He blinked, trying to fully wake up, and then the treble range of a thunderclap crashed across the ridgeline. Seconds later the bass wave shook the ground, seeming to radiate directly from the mountain beneath him.

  Relaxing, he sank into his bag again, and rubbed his eyes. Silent lightning flashed, brighter on the west face of the tent than elsewhere. He measured the seconds on his watch and counted thirty-five before the accompanying thunder reached him; the storm was seven miles away.

  Sleep began to draw him down again, even as the storm intensified. He found a strange comfort in the sound of it, a lullaby suited to this hard and unforgiving place. Within minutes the lightning and thunder were much closer, and almost continuous.

  Just before he slipped over the edge of consciousness, he heard something in the storm that made him open his eyes again. He turned an ear to the west. What had it been? It really hadn’t sounded like thunder at all. It’d been more like a scream, though not human or even animal. More than anything, it’d reminded him of the rending of sheet metal in the prison drill shop. Well, that was it, then. Just his own ghosts troubling him at the brink of sleep. They were persistent, but he’d learned to ignore them.

  He closed his eyes again and drifted off.

  Three nights later, Travis set up camp thirty-six miles from Coldfoot, though the wandering route he’d taken, displayed on his GPS unit, added up to just over forty-nine. He ate his heated pouch of enchilada soup—all these freeze-dried meals tasted more like the pouches they came in than what was written on them—on the rim of a steep-walled valley some six hundred feet deep. Its floor, broad and flat, extended relatively straight toward the northwest for what had to be three miles.

  A cloud bank churned through the valley like a smoky river, swirling around outcroppings of rock and pooling in the deepest places. Directly beneath Travis, the valley floor was completely obscured, though for a few moments when the sun’s lateral rays shone straight along its length, he saw the sparkle of something underneath the fog. Water, or maybe ice.

  He slept easily, waking only twice, not to thunder but to the howling of wolves. He had no idea how far away they might be, though at times they seemed no more distant than a quarter of a mile. He’d read that wolf packs randomized the volume of their howling in order to confuse prey—and other wolves—as to their distance. It worked on humans, too.

  At six in the morning he woke, opened the tent flap and sat up into crisp air, colder than it’d been the night before. The visible horizon extended farther than it had at any time during the trip.

  Alaska or Minnesota?

  He’d come here to answer that question. He’d failed, so far.

  The pros and cons of each place cycled through his mind of their own accord. Home was family, friends. For all the judgment they could never hide, they would always be more accepting of his past than strangers would. Home was his brother, Jeff, offering to let him in on the software business he was starting out of his house, and show him the ropes from the beginning.

  Home was also a place full of ghosts, every street in the old neighborhood sagging under the weight of troubled memories.

  Alaska was this. This perfect emptiness that made no claim to understand his character one way or the other, and no effort to push him back into old grooves. In his move to Fairbanks he’d brought along nothing. Not even himself, it sometimes seemed. He wouldn’t have believed it even a year before, in his first days of freedom, but up here he sometimes went a whole day without thinking about prison, or what he’d done to put himself there. Up here, sometimes, he ju
st wasn’t that guy anymore. And damned if that sensation wasn’t getting stronger by the month.

  All of that would end, the hour he set foot in his old world again.

  For that reason, if for no other, he thought he knew which way he was leaning.

  He unzipped his bag, pulled on his pants and boots, and swung his feet out onto the ground. The grass, soft the night before, now crunched beneath his treads. He stood and stretched, then knelt and took from his backpack his propane burner and metal cup. A moment later the blue flame was hissing beneath the water for his coffee. Waiting for it, he wandered to the drop-off overlooking the valley, its depths now revealed in the crystal air.

  He stopped.

  For a moment he could only stare, too disoriented even to blink.

  On the valley floor lay the wreck of a Boeing 747.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Travis packed everything within ninety seconds, including the tent. He set off along the valley’s rim at a sprint.

  How could it be here?

  How could it be here without choppers hovering over it, and a hundred rescue specialists armed with acetylene torches and schematics cutting carefully into the fuselage in a dozen places?

  How could it be here alone?

  The valley wall below his campsite had been too steep to descend, but half a mile northwest he could see a concavity where it shallowed to something like a forty-degree incline. Still steep as hell. He’d have to be careful to avoid going ass over pack all the way down, breaking every limb in the process. A lot of help he’d be to survivors then, if there were any.

  As for help, he was it, at least for now. He had no means to call anyone. The cell phone in his pack had become useless forty miles out of Fairbanks, and his CB—the preferred mode of communication on the Dalton Highway—was thirty-six miles away, in the parking lot of the Brooks Lodge and Fuel Depot.

  As he made his way along the precipice, his eyes hardly strayed from the impossible vision below.

  The pilots had tried to land—that much was clear. The wreck lay pointing down the length of the valley as if it were a runway. Behind where it had come to rest, deep furrows were gouged into the earth for more than three hundred yards. Halfway along this scarred path lay the starboard wing, sheared from the plane by a stony pillar that had weathered the impact just fine. At the torn wing stub jutting from the fuselage, where fuel and scraping metal must have converged, only blind luck had prevented an inferno: the remainder of the plane’s long skid had taken place across a snowfield that covered the valley floor.

  The rest of the craft was intact, more or less. The tail fin had snapped and lay draped on the port-side stabilizer like a broken limb held on by skin alone. The fuselage had buckled in three places, wiring and insulation curling from foot-wide vertical ruptures. Through these openings Travis could see only darkness inside the plane, though at this distance even a brightly lit interior would have shown him nothing.

  He saw no movement in or around the wreck, and no sign that there’d been any. Nobody had dragged supplies out of the plane and set up shelter in the open. Had they simply sheltered in the fuselage? Were they too injured to move at all?

  Distance and perspective made it pointless to look for footprints. The snowfield, glazed by the temperature drop, was almost blinding to look at, and from six hundred feet above it offered no contrast. There was no way to tell if anyone had left the wreck to hike out in search of help.

  Help. That notion brought him back to the situation’s most confusing aspect. How did a 747 crash without anyone coming to its aid for—how long? Jesus, how long had this thing been here?

  Three days. The metal shriek in the thunderstorm came back to him with clarity. He’d heard the damn thing crash.

  Three days, and nobody had found the wreckage. Nobody had even come looking—at no point during his hike had he heard the drone of a search plane or the rattle of helicopter rotors. He couldn’t square it. This wasn’t a single-prop Cessna that had taken off without a flight plan and disappeared. Airliners had redundant communication systems: high-powered radio, two-way satellite, and probably a couple other kinds he didn’t even know about. Even if all of those instruments had failed, the tower at Fairbanks International would have logged the plane’s last known position. There should have been an army looking for it within the hour.

  Travis reached the inlet in the valley wall, a grassy funnel that extended to the flat bottom below. The slope was more severe than he’d supposed, but there was nothing kinder for miles in either direction. Tackling it in a straight line to the bottom would be suicide, even here, but a sidelong transit looked feasible. He stepped onto the grade and found its surface to be as obliging as he could have hoped for: soft enough to allow traction without yielding in a muddy slide. He found that if he leaned into the hillside and braced a hand on the grass, he could make good progress without risking his balance.

  Fifteen minutes later, sprinting hell-bent alongside one of the gouges in the valley floor—up close, the torn furrow was deep and wide enough for a Humvee to drive in—he passed the starboard wing, flung like a broken piece of a toy against the formation that had severed it.

  He crossed onto the snowfield and was immediately enveloped by the smell of jet fuel. The snow was saturated with it. Every depression his boots made in the surface instantly pooled with the pink liquid.

  The airliner was less than a football field ahead now, pointed away down the valley and rotated a few degrees counterclockwise, so that its left side—with the wing intact—was more visible than the right.

  So far, no tracks in the snow.

  Ahead, the tail loomed over the valley floor, four stories above Travis’s head, even with its fin broken. The aircraft lay canted to the left by the weight of the port-side wing, both engines of which were submerged in the deep snow. He passed the tail and stopped ten yards shy of the wing, between the twin ruts carved by the engines’ passing.

  All three of the fuselage ruptures he’d seen from his campsite were on this side of the plane. The nearest, just steps away, was wide enough to admit him. Even from here, the darkness beyond the tear was featureless. The windows were even less help: tilted downward, they offered only a reflection of the snow.

  Travis inhaled deeply and shouted, “Is anyone there?”

  His echo came back in distinct bounces. There was no other reply.

  He went to the opening, tested the strength of the metal on both sides of it, and pulled himself into the plane.

  It wasn’t an airliner.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Row upon row of instrument stations filled the space Travis had entered, a claustrophobic version of NASA’s mission control that extended from the tail of the plane to a bulkhead thirty feet forward of his position. Swivel chairs were bolted to the floor at each terminal; everything else in the room lay in ruins, heaped against the left wall, the low end of the tilt.

  The smell of fuel, still intense, gave way to something fresher. Familiar, too. In the close darkness, speared by shafts of window glare that only made seeing harder, he identified the scent just a breath before he saw its source.

  Blood. Pooled beneath the tumble of debris. Pooled beneath his feet.

  His stomach constricted; he turned to the rupture in the wall, thrust his head outside for fresh air and got a lungful of fuel vapor. It helped. Forcing control, his breathing shallow, he pulled back inside.

  He held up a hand against the glare and scrutinized the disarray for what he knew must be there.

  He saw them immediately.

  A dozen bodies lay among the debris.

  Atop the debris, actually. Which was strange.

  He moved closer, saw the reason for it, and felt ice in his stomach where the nausea had just been. They hadn’t died in the crash. Each victim had taken two bullets to the temple, tightly clustered.

  Travis went still and listened for movement aboard the wreck. Logic told him the killer, or killers, couldn’t possibly still be aboard. The
plane had been down for three days. The killings had probably happened soon after. There would be no reason for the shooters to stay with the aircraft, and every reason to get away from it.

  He listened for another ten seconds anyway, and heard nothing but wind scouring the valley and moaning in the cracks along the fuselage. A hymn for the dead.

  He returned his eyes to them. They wore uniforms: black pants and crisp blue shirts, not necessarily military, but a long way from casual. The clothing was devoid of insignia or indication of rank. Even their nationality could only be narrowed by degrees: nine of the dead were white, three black. Seven male, five female. Their ages were hard to tell because of the bloating, but Travis guessed they ranged from thirty to fifty.

  Now an obvious aspect of the plane’s exterior occurred to him, one he’d overlooked amid the clamor of more pressing observations: the outside of the aircraft was completely blank. He hadn’t seen even a tail number.

  What was this thing?

  He’d watched enough middle-of-the-night programming on the Discovery Channel to know the government maintained special aircraft for dire situations—flying backups, in case command hubs like the Pentagon were taken out in a first strike. “Doomsday planes,” they were called. Billions of tax dollars, which, God willing, would remain wasted forever.

  But if this was a doomsday plane, wasn’t it that much more improbable that no one had found it?

  Well, someone had found it, hadn’t they?

  Travis rose and swept another gaze across the executed bodies and the machines they’d manned.

  A thousand questions. No answers.

  No need for any, either.

  This was none of his business, and there was no helping these people. That was it, then. Time to go. Time to head back to Coldfoot and tell the good folks at the burger shop he’d had a nice, uneventful hike.

  He returned to the tear in the outer wall, glancing forward as he went, his now adjusted eyes taking in the space beyond the door in the forward bulkhead. A corridor lay there, stretching a hundred feet toward the nose of the plane, windows on one side and doors on the other.