Dies the Fire (2 page)

The kid was unusual as well, all huge silver-blue eyes and long white-blond hair, dressed in some sort of medieval-looking suede leather outfit, her nose in a book—an illustrated Tolkien with a tooled-leather cover. She had an honest-to-god
bow
in a case leaning against her chair, and a quiver of arrows.

She kept her face turned to the print, ignoring him. He'd been raised to consider that sort of behavior rude, but then, she was probably used to ignoring the chauffeur, and his family hadn't had many employees.

Havel grinned at the thought. His dad had worked the Iron Range mines from the day he got back from Vietnam and got over a case of shrapnel acne picked up at Khe Sanh;
his
father had done the same after getting back from a tour of Pacific beauty spots like Iwo Jima, in 1945;
his
father had done the Belleau Wood Tour de France in 1918 before settling down to feed the steel mills; and
his
father had gone straight into the mines after arriving from Finland in 1895. When the mines weren't hiring, the Havel men cut timber and worked the little farm the family had acquired around the turn of the century and did any sort of honest labor that fell their way.

Kenneth Larsson matched the grin and stood, extending a hand. It was soft but strong; the man behind it was in his fifties, which made him twice Mike Havel's age; graying blond ponytail, shoulders still massive but the beer gut straining at his expensive leather jacket, square ruddy face smiling.

“Ken Larsson,” he said.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Larsson. Havel's the name—Mike Havel.”

“Sorry to drag you out so late in the day; Dan tells me you were on vacation.”

Havel shrugged. “It's no trouble. I wouldn't be bush-flying out of Boise for a living if I didn't like it.”

That brought a chuckle.
You can see he's the type who likes to smile,
Havel thought.
But he hasn't been doing a lot of it just lately, and that one's a fake.

“Midwest?” Larsson said shrewdly. That was a lot to pick up from a few words. “Minnesota? Got some Svenska in there? We're Swedes ourselves, on my side of the family.”

Not much of a surprise, with a moniker like that
, Havel thought. Aloud he went on: “Not too far off, both times. Michigan—Upper Peninsula, the Iron Range. Finn, mostly, on my father's side. Lot of Swede in Mom's father's family—and her mother was Ojibwa, so I'm one-quarter.”

He ran a hand over his jet-black hair. “Purebred American mongrel!”

“Havel's an odd name for a Finn,” Larsson said. “Czech, isn't it?”

“Yeah. When my great-grandfather got to the Iron Range about a hundred years ago, the mine's Bohunk pay-clerk heard ‘Myllyharju' and said right then and there: ‘From now on, your name is Havel!' ”

That got a real laugh; Signe Larsson looked charming when she smiled.

“My wife, Mary,” Larsson went on, and did the introductions.

Her
handshake was brief and dry. Mary Larsson was about forty, champagne-colored hair probably still natural, so slim she was almost gaunt. She had the same wide-eyed look as her younger daughter, except that it came across as less like an elf and more like an overbred collie, and
her
voice was pure Back Bay Boston, so achingly genteel that she didn't unclench her teeth even for the vowels.

That accent reminds me of Captain Stoddard
, Havel thought; the New Englander had led his Force Recon unit across the Iraqi berm back in '91.
He had that thin build, too
.

The son and eldest daughter were twins; both blue-eyed with yellow-blond hair, tall—the boy was already his father's six-two, which put him three inches up on Michael Havel, and built like a running back. Eighteen, the same age as Mike had been when he'd left the Upper Peninsula for the Corps, but looking younger, and vaguely discontented. His sister . . .

Down boy!
Havel thought.
Jesus, though, I envy those hip-hugger jeans.

An inch or three below his own five-eleven, short straight nose, dusting of freckles, and . . .

Jesus what a figure . . . twenty-eight isn't
that
old. . . .

“Mike's one of my best,” Dan said.

“Glad to hear it,” Larsson senior said.

Everyone bustled around, signing forms and collecting coats. Havel helped with the baggage—there wasn't all that much—buttoning his coat but glad to be out in the clean chill. Then he did a walk-around of the Piper Chieftain. The ground crew was good, but
they
weren't going to be taking a twin-engine puddle jumper over the biggest wilderness in the lower forty-eight.

Larsson's eyebrows went up when Mike loaded his own baggage; a waterproof oblong of high-impact synthetics with straps that made it a backpack too, and the unmistakable shape of a rifle case.

“Something I should know about?” he said.

“Nope, Mr. Larsson,” Mike said. “Just routine; I'm a cautious man.”

Larsson nodded. “What's the gun?”

“Remington 700,” he said. That was a civilianized version of the Marine sniper rifle. “I used its first cousin in the Corps, and it makes a good deer rifle, too.”

Signe Larsson sniffed and turned away ostentatiously; possibly because he was an ex-Marine, or a hunter.

Oh, well
, he thought.
I'm dropping them off in a couple of hours, anyway.

Eric Larsson grinned at his sister with brotherly maliciousness. “Hey, maybe he could shoot you a tofu-lope, sis, now you're back on the vegetarian wagon. Nothing like a rare tofu-lope steak, charred outside and all white and bleeding goo on the inside—”

She snorted and climbed the rear-mounted stairs into the Chieftain.

Havel admired the view that presented, waited for everyone else to get in, and followed. He made discreetly sure that everyone was buckled up—it was amazing how many people thought money could buy them exemption from the laws of nature. Then he slid into his own position at the controls and put the headphones on, while he went through the checklist and cleared things with the tower and got his mind around the flight plan.

That had the bonus effect of keeping out the Larssons' bickering, which was quiet but had an undertone like knives. It died away a little as the two piston engines roared; he taxied out and hit the throttles. There was the usual heavy feeling at the first surge of acceleration, and the ground fell away below. His feet and hands moved on the pedals and yoke; Boise spread out below him, mostly on the north side of the river and mostly hidden in trees, except for the dome of the state capitol and the scattering of tall buildings downtown.

Suburbs stretched northwest for a ways, and there was farmland to the west and south, a checkerboard between irrigation canals and ditches that glinted in quick flashes of brilliance as they threw back the setting sun.

He turned the Chieftain's nose northeast. The ground humped itself up in billowing curves, rising a couple of thousand feet in a few minutes. Then it was as if they were flying over a mouth—a tiger's mouth, reaching for the sky with serrated fangs of saw-toothed granite. Steep ridges, one after another, rising to the great white peaks of the Bitterroots on the northeastern horizon, turned ruddy pink with sunset.

Some snow still lay on the crests below and under the shade of the dense forest that covered the slopes—Douglas fir, hemlock, western cedar—great trees two hundred feet tall and spiky green. Further north and they passed the Salmon River, then the Selway, tortuous shapes far below in graven clefts that rivaled the Grand Canyon. A thousand tributaries wound through steep gorges, the beginnings of snowmelt sending them brawling and tossing around boulders; a few quiet stretches were flat and glittering with ice. The updrafts kept the air rough, and he read the turbulence through hands and feet and body as it fed back through the controls.

Larsson stuck his head through into the pilot's area.

“Mind if I come up?”

The big man wormed his way forward and collapsed into the copilot's seat.

“Pretty country,” he said, waving ahead and down.

Pretty but savage,
Havel thought.

He liked that; one of the perks of this job was that he got to go out in it himself, hunting or fishing or just backpacking . . . and you could get some of the hairiest hang gliding on earth here.

“None prettier,” the pilot replied aloud.

Poor bastard,
Havel thought to himself.
Good-looking wife, three healthy kids, big house in Portland, vineyard in the Eola Hills, ranch up in Montana—he knows he should be happy and can't quite figure out why he isn't anymore.

He concealed any offensive stranger's sympathy, and switched the other set of headphones to a commercial station.

“Damnedest thing!” the big man said after a while, his face animated again.

“Yes?” Havel said.

“Odd news from back East,” Larsson said. “Some sort of electrical storm off Cape Cod—not just lightning, a great big dome of lights over Nantucket, half a dozen different colors. The weather people say they've never seen anything like it.”

Mary Larsson brightened up; she was Massachusetts-born herself.

“That
is
strange,” she said. “We used to summer on Nantucket when I was a girl—”

Mike Havel grinned to himself and filtered out her running reminiscences and Larsson's occasional attempts to get a bit in edgewise; instead he turned to the news channel himself. The story had gotten her out of her mood, which would make the trip a lot less tense. Behind her the three Larsson children were rolling their eyes but keeping silent, which was a relief.

The voice of the on-the-spot reporter cruising over Nantucket Sound started to range up from awestruck to hysterical.

They're really sounding sort of worried, there,
he thought.
I wonder what's going—

White light flashed, stronger than lightning, lances of pain into his eyes, like red-hot spikes of ice. Havel tasted acid at the back of his throat as he jerked up his hands with a strangled shout. Vision vanished in a universe of shattered light, then returned. Returned without even afterimages, as if something had been switched off with a click. The pain was gone too, instantly.

Voices screamed behind him. He could hear them well . . .

Because the engines are out
, he realized.
Every fucking thing is out! She's
dead.
And I'm a smear on a mountain unless I get this thing flying again.

That brought complete calm.

“Shut up!” he snapped, working the yoke and pedals, seizing control from the threatening dive and spin. “Keep quiet and let me work!”

Sound died to somebody's low whimper and the cat's muted yowls of terror. Over that he could hear the cloven air whistling by. They had six thousand feet above ground level, and the surface below was as unforgiving as any on earth. He gave a quick glance to either side, but the ridgetops nearby were impossible, far too steep and none of them bare of trees. It was a good thing he knew where all the controls were, because the cabin lights were dead, and the nav lights too; not a single circuit working.

Not good,
he thought.
Not good. Not . . . fucking . . . good.

He ran through the starting procedure, one step and another and
hit
the button . . .

Nothing
, he cursed silently, as he went through the emergency restart three times and got three identical meaningless
click
sounds.

It could have been an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse; that would account for all the electrical systems being out. He sincerely hoped not, because about the only way to produce an EMP that powerful was to set off a nuke in the upper atmosphere.

The props were spinning as they feathered automatically. She still responded to the yoke—
Thank God!
—but even the instrument panel was mostly inert, everything electrical gone. The artificial horizon and altimeter were old-fashioned hydraulics and still working, and that was about it. The radio was completely dead, not even a flip of static as he worked the switches.

With a full load, the Chieftain wasn't a very good glider. They could clear the ridge ahead comfortably, but probably not the one beyond—they got higher as you went northeast. Better to put her down in this valley, with a little reserve of height to play around with.

“All right,” he said, loud but calm as the plane silently floated over rocks and spots where the long straw-brown stems of last year's grass poked out through the snow.

“Listen. The engines are out and I can't restart them. I'm taking us down. The only flat surface down there is water. I'm going to pancake her on the creek at the bottom of the valley. It'll be rough, so pull your straps tight and then duck and put your heads in your arms. You, kid”—Eric Larsson was in the last seat, near the rear exit—“when we stop, get that door open and get out. Make for the shore; it's a narrow stream. Everyone else follow him.
Fast.
Now shut up.”

He banked the plane, sideslipping to lose altitude.
Christ Jesus, it's dark down there.

There was still a little light up higher, but below the crest line he had to strain his eyes to catch the course of the water. The looming walls on either side were at forty-five degrees or better, it would have been like flying inside a closet with the light out if the valley hadn't pointed east-west, and the creek was rushing water over rocks fringed with dirty ice.