Authors: Patrick Lee
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.
R
ow 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.
He’d already slipped his head and one shoulder out of the plane by the time his mind processed what he’d just seen in the hallway.
He shut his eyes hard, though not because of the glare from the snowfield. For maybe ten seconds he hesitated, willing his body to keep moving, to put the corpses and the plane and the whole fucking valley behind him. One quick drop to the snow would seal the decision. His legs would take over from there.
Instead he withdrew his head into the plane again, and turned to face the corridor.
A punctuated blood trail, nearly invisible on the black floor of the equipment room, led onto the beige hallway carpet and stretched fifty feet farther to a doorway on the right, where it turned in. Bloody handprints flanked a heavier trail in the middle. Not drag marks. Crawl marks.
Travis went to the threshold of the corridor. Four doors opened off the right wall, facing the Plexiglas-covered windows on the other side. The blood trail went in at the third. A fifth door capped the far end of the hall, probably leading to the stairwell, then the upper deck and the cockpit.
The bloodstains in the carpet were brown, long since dried; the pooled blood in the room behind him had only remained viscous because there were gallons of it. If the attack had followed on the heels of the crash, then the wounded survivor had been dying in that room up the hall for three long days. No chance of survival.
But it would take only a minute to be sure. Travis stepped into the corridor.
The first doorway was haloed by a constellation of bullet holes, which seemed to have been made from both inside and outside the room, at chest and head level.
Travis came abreast of the open doorway. Two dead men lay against the far wall, downed behind an executive desk they’d upended for cover. Wearing crew cuts, black suits and ties, they looked like Secret Service agents—or, Travis thought, just about any high-level security personnel. They’d been dropped with shots to the chest and neck, then executed for good measure like the victims in the aft section.
Unlike the aft victims, however, these two had been armed. And still were.
It’d been a very long time since Travis had held a gun, and he’d been well out of the loop on modern firearms during his extended stay with the Minnesota Corrections Department, but he easily recognized the M16 variants that lay beside the dead men.
He crossed to the nearest of the weapons and lifted it. The translucent magazine still held about half of what Travis guessed was a thirty-round capacity. Leaning the rifle against the desk, he inspected the second weapon’s clip, found it nearly full, and ejected it. In the coat pockets of the two dead men he found another full magazine each. They had nothing else on them, including identification. Pocketing the ammunition, he took the rifle in hand and proceeded to the next room along the hall.
What he found there gave him a longer pause than the bodies had.
Centered in the space was a three-foot-wide cube of solid steel, cut in half across its waist and hinged. At the moment it lay open; two heavy-duty chainfalls hanging from I-beam rails on the ceiling had been needed to get it that way. Carved into the exposed inner face of each half of the cube, right in the middle, was a square depression perhaps four by four inches across and two deep. If the cube were closed, those twin spaces would form a single cavity at its core, large enough to hold a softball, and surrounded in every direction by more than a foot of steel.
Whatever had required this much protection was gone.
On the side of the cube was a metal plate with simple black lettering:
BREACH ENTITY 0247—“WHISPER”
CLASS-A PROTOCOLS APPLY
SPECIAL INSTRUCTION FOR THIS ENTITY—NO PERSON SHALL
REMAIN WITHIN FIVE (5) FEET
OF EXPOSED ENTITY FOR LONGER THAN
TWO (2) CONSECUTIVE MINUTES.
Something about the steel around the core space of the cube caught Travis’s eye. He stepped in for a closer look, but almost immediately wished he hadn’t. In both halves of the cube, the metal directly around the central cavity was discolored to a dirty blue. The grain of the steel itself had been warped there, pushed outward as if by some unimaginably powerful and patient force.
His mind suddenly full of the frantic rattle of a Geiger counter in the red, Travis retreated from the room. He realized only once he reached the hall that he’d been holding his breath.
He turned in the corridor—not toward the third room but back the way he’d come from. The bright crack in the fuselage wall was just twenty paces away. If he stared at it much longer, he’d find himself slipping through it.
Then, angry at himself, he pivoted and made for the third doorway. This was going to be simple:
He’d find the victim dead and cold.
He’d wipe his prints from the M16.
He’d leave the plane and put three mountains between it and himself, and then he’d brew his goddamned coffee like he’d set out to do.
He was certain of all that until he walked through the third doorway, and then he was certain of nothing.
The victim was dead and cold. But this was not going to be simple.