“I haven’t violated any airspace, Husky Eighteen. I’ve got two GPSs and they both confirm I’ve never been over the line.”
“State your call sign.”
“That’s a negative. You don’t need to know my call sign, and I will not follow you.”
“State your call sign, unidentified aircraft. We are proceeding with the approved rules of interception. If you do not comply, you will be shot down.”
“Scott? What does he mean?” April asked in alarm. The shock she’d seen on his face moments before was turning to anger, and she could see his jaw set.
“Hang on, April.”
Scott reduced power and kicked the Widgeon into a sudden, tight right, descending turn, as he spotted the lights of the two fighters coming in from behind with a closing speed of several hundred knots.
“Scott! I do not want to get blown out of the sky.”
“Those clowns are not going to get a firing solution on me… not to mention the fact that they don’t have authorization to fire. It’s a standard bluff.”
The nose of the Widgeon was pointed down at a twenty-degree angle and April felt herself grasping the edges of her seat. Scott pulled the throttles all the way back to idle and extended the flaps as he continued the spiral to the right. The water was coming up, the land mass in partial shadow on her right, then her left, as she began calling out the altitude.
“Six hundred… five hundred… four hundred.”
“I’m leveling. We’re going up one of those fjords.”
“Scott… two hundred… one-fifty… one hundred.”
He worked the controls to level the wings and bring the nose up, flattening their trajectory just above wave height. There were more strident calls from Husky Eighteen.
“Unidentified amphibian, this is Husky Eighteen. We say again, you must obey the rules of interception and follow us, or you will be shot down.”
“Sure I will,” Scott snorted to April. “He’s getting frustrated.”
“Unidentified amphibian, be advised you can’t get away from us even down in the weeds!”
Scott brought the Widgeon toward the northern bank of a fjord leading inward and began hugging the cliff, less than a hundred yards from the passing trees.
“Scott? Couldn’t they get your license for evading them?”
“Prove I’m out here. They don’t have my registration number and they’re not going to get it.”
“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” April said, trying to catch his eye, but worried about distracting him with the cliff mere yards away to the right. The daylight was fading fast as the jagged coastline they were shadowing wound its way toward a glacier she could see looming a mile or so ahead.
Scott craned his neck above the dash panel to spot the fighters.
“There! Hah!”
“Define ‘hah’ please.”
“They had to go halfway to Anchorage to turn around, and now they’re trying to get in behind and lock us with their tactical radar down here in the so-called weeds. They’ve got ‘look-down, shoot-down’ capability, April, but they’ve got to have a stable target, and we’re going to deny them the pleasure. I know a place to hide.”
“You mean, they could shoot us with guns?”
“Missiles. Technically yeah. It’s really hard to do… but not impossible.”
“Oh, that’s a comfort!”
There was a gentle upslope over the top of the cliff leading to a clearing on the right and they saw it simultaneously. Scott banked right and brought the Widgeon less than thirty feet over the top of the ridgeline, flying between the trees as he flew up the meadow and turned with the meandering terrain. He added power to climb with the slope as he extended the flaps to the fully deployed position.
“This’ll keep us as slow as possible. The air farce up there can’t get much below two hundred and we can fly at seventy.”
“Scott?”
“Yeah.”
“Why, exactly, are we doing this?” she asked.
“No time to explain. I have a plan.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Care to share it?”
“No. Whoa!” He pulled up and over a row of trees that hadn’t appeared to be as high as they were, and followed a small draw to the left where the terrain ended at the edge of a thousand-foot-high promontory. April watched spruce and lodge-pole pines zip by on either side, their tops soaring considerably above the small aircraft’s altitude.
The vertical face of a giant valley glacier lay beyond, its base sitting in an inlet of milky blue-green water filled with newly carved icebergs.
“What are you planning, Scott?” April asked, tensing as he descended the Widgeon to less than ten feet over the meadow leading to the drop-off. The terrain and alpine grasses were flashing by at a dizzying speed, and a startled pair of Dall sheep jerked their heads up in alarm and took off to the right. The edge of the drop-off leading to the glacier and the inlet was coming up quickly, the illusion of speed intensified by the low altitude as they traversed the last thirty feet before the cliff.
And suddenly the feeling of speed disappeared in an instant as the rushing ground gave way to a thousand feet of air over the choppy, frozen waters below. April felt as if she were hanging motionless over the glacial waters, the illusion of instant deceleration a physical shock, the sheer rock face disappearing unseen behind them.
“Wow!” she said, involuntarily.
“I love this stuff! Although I don’t usually get chased into it by fighters.”
The F-15 lead pilot was back on the radio, his voice betraying a touch of upset. “Unidentified amphibian, we observe your progress and have you locked up on radar. You will immediately climb and pick up a heading of one-nine-zero degrees, or we will fire. This is your last warning.”
“You’re sure they’re bluffing, Scott?” April asked.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
She looked at him wide-eyed. “Pretty sure? What do you mean, ‘pretty sure’? We need to be absolutely sure!”
He pointed to the right, to a gap in the glacial ice field at least a hundred yards wide. It was a giant crevasse, or valley, slicing the glacier in half and leading inland and upward, and she realized in a flash of fear that he intended to fly into it.
“No, Scott!”
“Yeah.”
“No, really! Let’s not do that, please?”
He turned and grinned. “I know where this leads.”
“Yeah, so do I, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not die with you until I get to know you better.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“If it’ll get you to stop this, yes!”
He chuckled as he worked the throttles and controls to slide the Widgeon around a sudden turn to the right.
“Well, if I was sure I could take you to dinner sometime…”
“That’s blackmail!” she said almost absently.
He nodded as the towering ice walls enfolded them on either side and the Widgeon entered the ice canyon, the unique deep blue of glacial ice soaring above them for at least a hundred feet.
A shuddering explosion suddenly burst somewhere to their left, and the image of an orange fireball reflected off the icy canyon walls. April jerked her head around in time to see the leading edge of a massive cascade of fragmented glacial ice barely missing them.
“What was that?” she gasped.
“Oh, shit!” Scott muttered.
“What? WHAT?”
“I didn’t expect that!” He looked at her, real apprehension reflected in his eyes. “The bastard actually fired a missile at us!”
“Husky Eighteen, Crown. What’s your status?” Mac MacAdams asked as he watched the maneuvering F-15s on the computer-generated scope chase a target now too low to be visible to the AWACS’s radar.