I can’t sit here on the boat. She turned and moved back down to the lower deck to fix her hair and get dressed, as fast as possible, calculating the route to the airport. She would call Rachel back on the way, as well as call the corporate terminal to have the plane fueled. April had left the key at their service desk.
Hurricane Ridge!
The name popped into her mind without warning. A road leading south into the Olympic Mountains from Port Angeles wound its way to the top of a windswept promontory called Hurricane Ridge, and the place had fascinated him. What were his words? She recalled them suddenly, and they made the need to find him all the more urgent.
“It’s a launching pad for the soul, Gracie,” she recalled his saying. “It’s windswept and beautiful. If there is a perfect point on this beautiful planet from which one could leave this life and just step into the clouds, that would be it.”
THIRTY SIX
SATURDAY, DAY 6 7:05 A.M. ALASKAN TIME
“Ready, April?”
Scott McDermott’s voice sounded strong and confident, but April had seen his hand vibrating slightly as he held the yoke of the Widgeon and tried to pretend the impending takeoff was no big deal.
She nodded.
“Okay. Call out my airspeed.”
His hand was already on the throttles that protruded from the ceiling of the cockpit, and he pushed them forward now to max power, holding the control yoke full to the right as both engines rose to a roar, and the amphibian began moving forward through the icy waters, a bow wave of water cascading over the nose and the windshield, obscuring everything.
They moved past the massive icebergs Scott had shoved out of the way with the Widgeon’s nose, the effect one of a runway between a row of twenty-story buildings.
Quickly the bow wave diminished and they could see. Scott pulsed the yoke, and April felt the Widgeon jump higher in the water, the hull no longer floating but now planing along the surface “on the step” as they accelerated.
“There’s forty,” she called over the roar.
She could see the other end of the mountain lake coming at them, its lip only eight to ten feet above the water’s surface, but the embankment from water to lip was catastrophically steep. If they weren’t high enough out of the water to clear the berm, the impact would probably kill them.
“Fifty-five!” she said. “Sixty… sixty-five.”
The end of the lake was looming close, and she felt herself mentally tensing.
“Seventy.”
Without warning Scott yanked both throttles to idle and pulled the yoke as far back as it would go, letting the Widgeon sink back into the water in a cascade of spray, the hydrodynamic pressure rapidly slowing them as they floated over the remaining distance to the western end.
He kicked the left rudder at the last second, swinging the nose parallel to the embankment with several yards to spare.
“We can’t make it?” April asked.
Scott nodded. “Not enough room that time.”
“That time?”
He turned to her, his tone matter-of-fact. “Yeah. We need more distance.”
Scott continued the turn to the left, aiming at the spot on the other end from where they’d started the takeoff attempt.
“Okay. How are we going to construct more distance? Avalanche? Earthquake? Tectonic event?”
Scott shook his head. “There’s another method we can use, April. We almost had enough that time, but… I just needed another ten miles per hour.”
“You’re not seriously suggesting we try that again?”
“Yep. I’m not leaving this bird up here on this lake.”
“We wait for more wind, then?” she asked.
“That’s one way, but it’s not likely to come.”
“Then how? Come on, Scott, you’re scaring me.”
“I’ll show you. It’s an old trick.”
“Does it work?”
“Sometimes.”
“I’d rather not crash, you know. I’m allergic to disintegrating airplanes.”
“Me, too. Crashing usually screws up my whole day.”
“Usually? You mean you’ve crashed before?”
“Of course. Goes with the territory.”
“Seriously?”
He grinned. “Been killed up here a bunch of times.”
“Uh-huh.”
She was gripping the sides of her seat again, wanting to be airborne, but rapidly losing faith in the technical possibility. “Well, I can promise that if you kill me trying to take off, I’ll never go out with you.”
He looked at her and laughed. “Then I’ll assume the converse is true.”
“Sorry?”
“If I don’t kill you, you’re committed to going out with me, and that’s one hell of an incentive.” He raised a finger for silence as they approached the end of the lake and swung the Widgeon to the right in an unexpected direction, moving nearly a hundred yards around the backside of one of the icebergs before spinning the amphibian around.
“Okay.”
“Okay, what? We’re aimed across the narrow part of the lake, if you haven’t noticed. We’re heading south. The so-called runway is due east. We can’t take off like this.”
“No, but if we use a sideways run to gain speed, then angle left around that berg to the middle of the channel we created, then head east, we’ll get a better start.”
“Oh.”
“Besides, the Widgeon has a bad habit of trying to dig her left pontoon in the water, and this helps keep that from happening,”
“Okay.”
“It’ll work, April. We’ll get up on the step before the turn.”
“Don’t you dare say ‘trust me’ again.”
Once more Scott gripped the overhead throttles and moved them forward. The Widgeon began plowing through the water, moving past one of the massive icebergs as the aircraft rose on the step. He worked the left rudder, swinging the Widgeon back to the original easterly heading, the airspeed already at twenty-five knots by the time he steadied the course.
“Forty-five,” April announced. She could see the end looming once more, but this time it seemed a bit more distant.
“Fifty-five.”
The engines were roaring and the throttles firewalled.
“Sixty-five… rising slowly to seventy… there’s seventy-five!”
They were at almost the same place as before, but this time the speed was obviously greater. Scott’s hand held the throttles full forward, his left hand on the yoke, but not pulling.
“Scott, pull us up! Eighty. Scott?”
The end of the lake loomed ominously. Suddenly the yoke came back and the nose popped up to a frightening angle as the Widgeon obediently leaped free of the water, rising to what seemed insufficient altitude to make it over the embankment.
The sound of the metal hull brushing the upper crust of snow and ice on the edge of the embankment was unmistakable and gentle, the noise little more than that of a pine branch brushing the plane. A spray of white from the glancing blow showered the air to the right and was gone as the slope ahead dropped out from under them. Scott pulsed the yoke forward, dropping the Widgeon’s nose as the stall warning horn shut off, and the aircraft traded altitude for airspeed and stabilized as a flying machine once again. He banked slightly to the left, following the downslope of the glacier as he built more airspeed, holding them under the overcast layer of clouds and heading for the massive face of the glacier several miles to the east.
When they’d gained more than a hundred feet over the ice, Scott looked at her with what was supposed to be a nonchalant grin, the effect betrayed by the twitching muscle in his jaw and the slight flutter in his right hand.
She smiled shakily and nodded.
When the face of the glacier was behind them, Scott dropped the Widgeon to less than fifty feet above the water and hugged the coastline as they headed northeast, crossing an open channel to stay equally close to another island. He checked his GPS display and wove an unpredictable course to the rendezvous point.