He paused, but April was too stunned to reply.
“I know you think I’m just a little worm, Ms. Rosen. But the truth is, your father’s a dangerous drunk.”
“You go to hell!” she snapped, slamming the phone back in the receiver and feeling her entire body quake. She lifted the receiver to call Gracie, then replaced it again, a cancerous doubt creeping into her mind. Why would he buy that much liquor? Why would a recovering alcoholic buy any liquor? She felt the growing need to find him, talk to him, and reassure herself, but he was nowhere to be found in the house. A light showed through the window of the detached, barn-like garage, and she pushed through the back door to find him on a stool in his woodworking shed.
“Dad?”
Arlie Rosen looked around at her, trying to smile through an expression of utter despair. There was an object on the workbench in front of him, and April realized with a twinge of fear that it was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, blessedly unopened.
“Dad, what are you doing out here?”
He sighed, a long, ragged sigh, and tapped the workbench. “Looking my old enemy in the eye, April.”
“Dad, you’re not thinking…”
“Of drinking?” he finished, chuckling at the rhyme. He shook his head and picked up the bottle with his left hand, turning it slowly. “No, honey. I’m just wondering why that little FAA bastard hates me so. Because I had a bout with the bottle ten years ago? Or was I right about his being a rejected airline applicant with a vendetta?”
“He called, Dad.”
“Who?”
“Harrison.” She related the conversation, watching her father’s expression harden.
“That isn’t true, Dad, is it? You… weren’t in any liquor store, were you?”
He looked away, nearly a minute passing before she heard an answer. “Yes, dammit.” He snapped his eyes back to her. “Your mother is witness to this, April. The liquor was not for me. We entertained on the airplane often when we were moored someplace, and I was planning to see some friends in Sitka on arrival.”
“This doesn’t help us, Dad.”
“I wasn’t drinking!”
“It’s okay, Dad.”
“No, it’s not. Forget the stupid liquor charge, what matters is, my reputation’s just been assassinated, my plane is gone, I could have killed us, and even your trust has been shaken, and…” His right hand flailed the air as he fought the emotion.
“It’s okay, Dad,” April prompted.
“April, I’m a senior airman. I should have turned around immediately. I should have climbed. I should have seen that fog bank, gotten a better weather briefing… something, goddammit! I’m in command, and I do not have the luxury of making mistakes!”
“Dad, you’re human.”
“No!” he said, raising his index finger, his eyes flaring. “No, I can’t hide behind being human. I’m an airline captain. I’m required to be perfect, or at the very least to keep my own stupidity from… from…” Arlie hurled the unopened bottle of bourbon at the concrete wall of the shop where it shattered loudly as he finished the sentence. “… crashing my aircraft!”
She tried to move to him, but he was already off the stool and out the door, striding across the manicured lawn toward a grove of trees on a high embankment overlooking the strait.
April watched him go, utterly unsure what to do, her mind maliciously replaying teenage memories of finding empty bottles of vodka in strange parts of their house before he enrolled himself in the airline’s alcohol program. She had never smelled liquor on his breath back then. True alcoholics could be very difficult to detect.
And the Anchorage purchase had included vodka.
NINETEEN
THURSDAY, DAY 4 ELMENDORF AFB, ALASKA 8:40 A.M.
“There. What’s that?” General MacAdams orbited the shadowy radar return on the screen with the red dot from his tiny laser pen.
“Not sure, sir,” a sergeant replied. “This is from one of our air-defense sites.”
“Looks like a fast-moving target to me,” Mac added.
Sergeant Jacobs, an AWACS air-traffic control specialist normally charged with keeping fighters and tankers headed in the right direction, approached the screen, scratching his chin before turning back to the man operating the liquid crystal projector.
“Run it again, Jim.”
Once more the picture came to life, and once again the shadowy target appeared, disappeared, and reappeared on subsequent sweeps of the radar beam.
Jacobs turned to the general. “Well, sir, of seven tapes, that’s the only hint I see of an unidentified fast-mover where your guy descended below two thousand feet. All the tapes show the skin paint return of the jet until… here.” He used his own laser pointer to highlight a spot considerably west and on the left margin of the screen. “But this is the only tape I’ve seen that was getting hits on him while he was within a hundred feet of the water.”
“And we’re all in agreement that there’s no other conflicting traffic visible?”
Everyone in the room nodded except for Lieutenant Colonel Anderson. “Ah, General, there’s still the Coast Guard tape we haven’t seen.”
“Sir,” the sergeant interjected. “There is one other target on this tape that’s of interest. It’s intermittent and running north, where your jet is running east. We had him intermittently on the AWACS tapes, too. While our Gulfstream is coming in from the left side of the scope, this fellow’s coming in from the bottom… the south. He first appears down here, and the radar is picking up his transponder squawking twelve hundred, the visual flight code, and his altitude is coming through as two hundred feet. Now that’s, as I say, at the bottom of the screen — remember the top is oriented to north — and at this point it’s about twenty miles south of the estimated position of the Albatross crash site. I’m assuming this is the Albatross, right here where you see this smudge. That’s the faint radar return, and it’s northbound.”
“Could that be that ship we talked about?” Mac asked, then winced and corrected himself. “Of course not. Sorry. Dumb question. The tanker was southbound.”
“Yes, sir, and this northbound VFR hit is probably going at least a hundred knots, so it sure as heck isn’t a ship.”
“But, the two don’t intersect, do they?” Mac asked with some alarm. “The track of our Gulfstream coming in from the left crosses or will eventually cross the northbound track of the target you believe is the Albatross, but will they be there at the same time?” Mac was sitting forward now, his concern rising until the sergeant shook his head.
“No, sir. I projected their respective tracks, and with the time-line information we have on the Gulfstream from the flight data recorder, they come close, but miss by several miles.”
“Good.”
“Provided, sir, that the Albatross doesn’t change his heading.”
“But, you’d see a change, right?”
Jacobs was shaking his head no. “Well, he probably didn’t change course, but we only have a good track on him until about ten miles south of the estimated crash site, and then he apparently dropped too low, or something happened to his transponder, because we have no hits on him after that. That means we can only project his subsequent flight path, but when I do, it misses your Gulfstream by miles.”
“Do we have that Coast Guard radar tape?” Mac asked.
“Yes, sir. Racking it up now,” the sergeant answered.
Once again a series of computer-generated images filled the screen, this time of surface vessels in the form of large targets crawling along sea lanes into and out of Prince William Sound. Jacobs consulted a briefing sheet sent with the tape and studied the screen for a few seconds before highlighting an area south of Valdez.