“’Zo, talk to me.”
Still no response.
Then she smelled it… smoke.
She felt the rush of yet another adrenaline surge and sprinted down the short hall to the cockpit.
Thin tendrils of white curled up from the closed cockpit door. She wrenched the door open. Smoke hung in the air, expanding the hazy glow of the multicolored control lights.
“’Zo! You okay?”
“Where the hell have you been?” Alonzo kept his hands on the yoke, not bothering to look back at her. “The radio is out. As soon as I tried to transmit I heard a pop. I tried calling you, but whatever it was also took out the intercom. I put out the fire. We’re okay, but we’re deaf and mute until I can get in there and fix it.”
A pop… as soon as he tried to use the radio.
“Oh, fuck,” she said quietly.
She tried to remember where she’d seen Magnus. She looked at the comm station, under the observer’s seat, all over the cockpit. Nothing.
Alonzo turned in his chair to look back. “Sara, what are you doing? What the fuck… you’re covered in blood!”
“Not worried about that now,” she said, then ran out the door. She ran into the bunk room, looked under the metal bunks, ripped mattresses off and threw them. Nothing. She tried the head, in the small supply cabinets, under the tiny washbasin… still nothing.
Please, please, please, let me be wrong.
She moved to the game room. Her eyes instantly fell on the flat-panel TV. She felt a tingling on her scalp as she ran to it, angled her body to look behind it.
There, wedged between the TV and the hull wall, was more plastic explosive than she’d ever seen in her life.
NOVEMBER 30, 9:03 P.M.
SARA STARED AT the bomb. So many wires, connected to the hull, to the back of the TV, to the floor. She knelt, careful not to jostle anything, eyes scanning until she found it—a small, LCD timer that read 9:01… 9:00… 8:59… 8:58.
Calm down calm down keep it cool if you don’t think clear you die.
Colding and Magnus weren’t sending the C-5 to Manitoba; they were sending it to the bottom of Lake Superior. By the time the storm blew over, there would be no trace of the C-5 or anything in it. A thousand feet of water would cover the wreckage forever.
They couldn’t even bail out: in this storm their parachutes would foul and they’d drop. If hitting at terminal velocity didn’t kill them instantly, drowning in ice-cold water would follow shortly. Even if they managed to get into a raft, they’d be up against twenty-foot swells and seventy-knot winds. SOS or no SOS, no one would reach them in time.
She took a deep breath. Think. Stay rational, think. There had to be a way out. Sara synchronized her watch with the bomb—at 9:12 P.M., the plastique would rip the C-5 to shreds. She didn’t know anything about defusing a bomb. Neither did her crew. All those extra wires… if they moved the bomb, she had no doubt it would blow instantly. She could start pulling wires, but only as a desperate final option. She sprinted to the cockpit where she grabbed a flight map and threw it down on the small table in the navigator’s section. Her hands smoothed the map, accidentally smearing blood across the paper.
“’Zo, where are we?”
“Halfway through our circle around the storm. We’re only a hundred miles from Houghton-Hancock.”
She traced the path on the map. “We’re not going to make it to Houghton-Hancock. There’s a bomb onboard, we’ve got nine minutes to live.”
Alonzo quickly set the autopilot and scrambled out of his seat to join Sara. “Nine minutes? Who planted a bomb?”
“Had to be Magnus. I saw him in here a few hours before takeoff.” She checked her watch: 9:04 P.M. Eight minutes. They couldn’t reach Houghton-Hancock. Magnus’s crazy circular flight path had them dead smack in the middle of Lake Superior—they couldn’t reach anything.
Almost anything… there was one place they could reach.
“Take us back into the storm,” she said. “Gun it, full throttle. We’re going back to the island.”
“Back to the island? Where Magnus is? No fucking way!”
Sara’s composure disintegrated. She reached out with her blood-smeared right hand and grabbed the collar of Alonzo’s parka. “We don’t have a choice! Look at the goddamn map. We can’t get anywhere else before the bomb blows up.”
“But he’s trying to kill us—”
Sara’s left hand joined her right. She shook his collar with each word, jerking the slick, down-filled fabric.
“I… know… that! They only turn on the radar for scheduled takeoffs or landings, remember? It’s off, they won’t know we’re coming, so take us back into the storm!”
She released his collar. He blinked a few times, then he scrambled back to the copilot’s chair. The engines whined. She held the table while the C-5 banked.
“Heading back into the storm,” Alonzo said. “But they don’t need radar to know we’re there. Even with this shit visibility, they’ll see us land on the airstrip.”
There had to be a way, something. Her eyes scanned the map… then she remembered Clayton’s words. There. That would work, would have to, or they would all die. She carried the map to Alonzo. “We’re not landing on the strip.” Before he could ask where, her finger jabbed out their destination. He took one look at the map, then looked up, a shocked expression on his face.
“Rapleje Bay? No way.”
“It’s a mile long and frozen over.”
“We’re landing on ice, ice we won’t see until we’re less than a hundred feet from it, and we don’t know how thick it is. I’m taking us to the landing strip, we’ll have to shoot it out with Magnus.”
“He’s got a fucking Stinger missile! The strip is only a half mile from the mansion; if he hears us coming in, all he needs is thirty seconds to blow us out of the sky. ’Zo, if you want to live, you’ve got five minutes to put us on that bay! Land it, then help Miller get Cappy the fuck out fast.”
She ran out of the cockpit, tossing the map back on the table as she left. If they reached the bay in five minutes, that would give them two minutes to get off and get clear. She ran down the hall, back into the bloody infirmary. Miller was still working on the unconscious Cappy.
“I stopped the bleeding,” Miller said. “Get Doc Rhumkorrf up here already, like now.”
“No time,” Sara said. “Listen carefully. There’s a bomb onboard. Strap Cappy down, we’re going back into the blizzard, back to Black Manitou. Emergency landing on a frozen bay. Our chances are shitty, but it’s the only option we have. Do you understand?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Good. When we hit the deck, ’Zo will help you get Cappy out. Move fast or all of you die.”
She took off through the upper-deck lab and scrambled down the aft ladder. Rhumkorrf and the unconscious Tim were still in stall number three. Rhumkorrf had found some surgical thread and was finishing up stitches on Tim’s forehead. Even done in crappy flying conditions, the stitches looked tight and tiny.
Rhumkorrf spoke without looking away from his work. “Tim could have internal injuries. We need a hospital immediately, we can’t move him.”
“I don’t care,” Sara said. “We’re making an emergency landing, and I need Tim in a crash chair, right now.”
Rhumkorrf looked up. “Emergency… what’s going on?”
“Magnus canceled the project, and us along with it. There’s a bomb onboard that goes off in six minutes.”