The Piper was outfitted for search and rescue with thirty-gallon tanks in each wing and bubble windows that gave Quinn a better view than he really wanted out of each side of the airplane.
Saint Mary’s lay along the Yukon, nearly due east of Mountain Village, so Lovita took them north at first, avoiding the oncoming Cessna full of contract killers. Twenty miles up, she cut back to the east, crossing the squirming oxbows of the upper Andreafsky River. Low clouds pressed her down, just a few hundred feet off the deck. She had the heater cranked up to full, keeping the interior of the little plane relatively warm, but Quinn’s knees pressed against the outer walls, drawing in the moist chill through the thin skin of the airplane, and bringing back unpleasant memories of his recent swim in the Yukon.
His forehead against the bubble side window, Quinn was subjected to the dizzying view of thick willows and green swamps dotted with pairs of starkly white swans that had come north to breed. They were close enough he felt as if he could count their feathers. The plane passed over the occasional moose, lone bulls or cows with tawny twin calves. Traversing over the wider, meandering waters of the Chuilnak River, a monstrous brown bear that looked to be the size of a Volkswagen peered up from his fishing hole with a scolding, pig-eyed stare, reminding Quinn that he would not be at the top of the food chain should they have to set down out here.
Lovita’s voice crackled over Quinn’s headset, rough, like a mile of gravel road.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Quinn said, happy to take his mind off crashing in the wilderness.
“Are you some kind of secret government spy?”
Quinn chuckled, in spite of the situation. “No.”
“What’s it like?” Lovita asked.
“I said I wasn’t one.”
“Okay,” she said. “But that’s exactly what a spy would say.” Though a rich purr, her voice bordered on a monotone and with nothing to judge by but the back of her head, it was difficult to read her emotions. “You came to us looking like you’d been mauled by a brown bear. I know you were in the military. You look at things different from other people, and nobody else I know would have been able to fight their way through all those guys like you did.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” Quinn said. “Spies are all about gathering information and reporting it back up the chain.”
“But you are something else.” Lovita banked the plane gently to the right, drifting between two low hills that rose up through the fog. “Some sort of secret government operative?”
“How do you know so much about government operatives?” Quinn mused, half to himself.
“I watch movies,” Lovita said. “I told you, we got the Internet out here, and satellite TV, and books, and the mail, and everything.”
Quinn didn’t answer.
“My uncle said you’re worried about guys like the ones that came to our village going after your daughter,” Lovita said. “I thought government operatives were all single with no family ties.”
“Some are,” Quinn sighed. “But there are more with wives, husbands, and even big families.”
“Looks like people with no ties would have less to worry about,” Lovita said. The back of her head bobbed in time with her words.
“Or fight for,” Quinn said, thinking of Mattie and Ronnie and Kim and his brother and parents and a dozen other people he held dear. “It’s pretty difficult to go through life with no ties.”
“Maybe,” Lovita said. “Maybe so.” She dropped another hundred feet, close enough that Quinn could see individual rivulets in the small streams and ponds that crossed and dotted the soggy tundra below. She checked the clear tubing that displayed the fuel level on each wall over her window. “We’re golden on gas all the way to Anchortown,” she said, using the slang for Alaska’s largest city. “As long as we don’t have to do too much pokin’ around in these clouds. ’Course, I gotta warn you. I got five-hour fuel tanks and a three-hour bladder so we’ll have to make a stop somewhere.”
Two hours into the flight it became impossible to see the ground and, more important, the terrain ahead of the airplane, forcing Lovita to drop even lower. Quinn couldn’t help but think they’d be driving across the tundra if she went much lower.
“I was trying for Ptarmigan Pass,” she said, “but the weather looks bum up that way. I’m gonna cut south and take Lake Clark through the mountains. Lotsa glaciers so it might be a little bumpy.” Lovita shimmied forward in her seat, her attention darting from the gray mass of nothingness in her windshield to the bracket-mounted GPS at the corner of her console. Quinn knew enough about the geography of western Alaska to know they were flying through the northern remnants of the Kilbuck Mountains. The terrain would flatten again somewhat after that, before the sharp, glacier-filled teeth of the Alaska Range rose up to block their way to Anchorage.
Quinn leaned forward, focused on the small blue triangle that signified their position on the GPS. “Everything okay?”
“For now,” Lovita said, rolling her shoulders in a movement that reminded Quinn of a boxer preparing to step into the ring. “Those other guys are around here close,” she said. “I can feel ’em. I’ve hid out below the clouds as long as I can, but we got some big hunks of rock coming up. I’m gonna have to punch through the tops to keep from drillin’ a hole in some mountain. GPS says this is a good place.”
She added throttle and pulled back on the stick, pitching the nose of the little plane upward so it began a gradual climb. The cockpit sounded like the inside of a tin barn during a hailstorm. The clouds darkened at first, and Quinn found himself calculating the odds of flying headlong into the other plane, or even a bird. He was so disoriented in the foggy gloom, he wouldn’t have known otherwise until they augered into the tundra. Lovita appeared to be an excellent instrument pilot, but the Super Cub had no radar. No matter how skilled a pilot she was, not hitting something other than the mountains shown on the GPS was one hundred percent luck.
Quinn watched the hands on the altimeter climb through eight and then nine thousand feet before the clouds began to thin. Patches of hazy blue made more frequent appearances. Turbulence tossed the plane like a toy as it skidded through the top layer of weather at ten thousand feet.
When they finally popped through the clouds Quinn felt like a diver coming up for air.
Lovita kept climbing for a long moment, before diving back down into level flight. “This day is Super-Cubable,” she said, the ear-to-ear grin audible in her voice.
A sea of clouds stretched for miles in all directions, silver white under a brilliant sun. Craggy black peaks rose like islands around them and made Quinn wonder how Lovita had managed to avoid smashing into one during their time down in the muck. Far to the east, the Alaska Range loomed in a hazy line. Below, hidden under a blanket of clouds, was a maze of passes and peaks that made up the Kilbuck Mountains — but above, the Cessna was nowhere in sight.
“Hear that?” Lovita said, an hour later. The GPS said they were flying over the foothills leading into the western entrance to Lake Clark Pass.
Quinn strained his ears. “Hear what?”
“There’s nothing like flying a little airplane over mountains or ocean to make you hear all sorts of rattles and clangs in the—”
Her voice cut out. Quinn, who’d been scanning behind them, turned to see a blue-and-white Cessna Caravan cross their path from north to south, five hundred feet above and maybe a mile away.
A much larger and faster airplane than the Super Cub, the Caravan cruised the skies like a hunting shark, just waiting for the little Piper to show itself. It banked toward them immediately.