“How did your father attempt to deal with her?”
“By blackmailing her, of course. She has deep ties with a New York crime syndicate. My dad was a powerful, cunning man. Years earlier, he had assisted with the appointment of the New York District Attorney. The man owed him big time. My dad had him keep tabs on her illegal connection to organized crime, without ever arresting her for it.”
“Your dad wanted full control.”
“Right. So when he saw the note you brought up about Stanford stealing the Meskwaki Gold Spring, my father saw it as a threat that she was going to try and take over his business. He headed to New York to set things in motion, but she must have had him killed first.”
Sam recalled the young, vivacious Senator who had replaced Senator Arthur Perry. She looked stunning. It was hard to imagine her being a brutal killer. “You know that Rachel Murphy was the Gubnatorial appointee to replace your father at the Minnesotan Senate?”
David took a deep breath. His face hardened, his eyes filled with defiance. “She’s won everything — but won’t stop there. As Senator, she now has the power to destroy me. I have to find that gold, before more lives are ruined.”
Chapter Fifty-One
The six-seat, high-performance, single-engine, Cessna Centurion 210, took off on runway 30.
At the controls, Sam angled the aircraft for its maximum rate of climb, leveling out at five thousand feet, and setting a course due east. Despite being summer, the air was cold and dense, making the controls sharp and responsive. Next to him, Tom made notes and inserted coordinates into the search grid. In the rear two seats, Virginia and David stared out the windows, maintaining a visual vigil in case they happened to pass directly over the top of the remains of the Confederate ironclad.
The familiar hum of the aircraft’s Continental engine and the low level sibilant whine of the breeze on the fuselage of the small plane filled Sam with the feeling of happiness and home that only three things could give him. Flying, sailing, and diving. He thought of David Perry and considered how perhaps they weren’t so different in their tastes.
He looked over his shoulder, back at Tom and Virginia and felt grateful for his time in the military, and for all he had learned before he left the marines. He could see their toughness, mental calm, and physical agility and was glad to have them as his friends. He knew that the experiences and challenges they had faced together had shaped him as a person and was sure it was the same for them.
He could just as easily have lived in his father’s shadow in the business world and had an easy life. David Perry did, and Sam considered how David seemed to hate his father for it, never having a good relationship. Sam Reilly was always his own man. For that, his father had admired and respected him.
“Where did you get this plane again?” Tom asked, leaning over.
“A friend of mine owns it,” Sam answered as casually as he would if someone lent him their car to go to the local store.
“Really?” David asked, betraying a hint of incredulity. “And I thought my dad had rich connections. You just borrowed a friend’s plane?”
“Ira runs an aerial survey business up here in North Dakota now,” Sam said, as though that answered everything.
Virginia said, “You really don’t have to play by the same rules as the rest of us, do you?” Her eyes turned toward David. “You don’t count either, your family ran an organized crime syndicate for close to nine decades and everyone owes your father something.”
David shrugged. It was a reasonable point, and there was no need to argue against it.
Sam set the trim, so that the aircraft naturally remained straight and level. It was the same way you set the sails on a yacht. His eyes glanced at Virginia over his shoulder. She had a mischievous grin on her face and shook her head at him.
“I met Ira down South after Katrina. He was flying sorties mapping hurricane damage for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and I was running logistics for Homeland. We had a few beers together, found stuff in common. He said if I was ever up North to look him up.”
“And this is his Cessna?” she asked.
“It’s a Cessna Centurion, modified for survey. From here, I can scroll through the monitor to view digital video, LIDAR, infrared and gamma electromagnetic remote sensing and readouts for electromagnetic and gravity.”
“It’s already all systems go.” Tom said, having already switched the machine on, recording both digital video and LIDAR.
“What’s LIDAR?” Virginia asked Tom.
Tom leaned over his shoulder to talk to her. “It’s like radar only it uses pulses of light instead. Radar uses radio waves, sonar uses sound waves, LIDAR uses light. It’s used in cars with assisted braking and lane keeping tech, and for surveys. It’s good for us because the structure of a boat in this environment will stand out on the light spectrum compared to the wilderness.”
“Holman had to divert south around here for a squall for two hours, which was when he noted seeing the wreck of the ironclad,” Sam said. “Elise has done the numbers, isolating an area of 500 square miles of uninhabited National Park, and there’s not much there for anyone to visit. There are little estuaries that run off the river all over the place throughout, so there’s plenty of places the ship could have ended up high and dry. Those river boats hardly drew anything, so it could be anywhere depending on the rainfall that year.”
“Wouldn’t someone have noticed it from the air since then?” Virginia asked. “Surely planes have been over here since the 1920s.”
“I’m guessing it must not be visible from the air anymore, but the LIDAR will penetrate the foliage of trees and give us a better chance of finding anything,” Sam answered.
“I’m setting a standard north-south grid trawl plan for us on the GPS,” Tom said.
“Got it,” said Sam, finding and switching on the display unit. He dialed up the brightness.
Tom said, “Its gyro mounted to adjust for speed, pitch, and yaw so just stick on the yellow line.”
“Understood,” said Sam.
Tom scrolled through the specifications screen on the monitor in front of him. “It’s got an inertial measurement unit built in, which will talk to the data recorder and give us exact latitude and longitude of anything we find. Your friend’s old Cessna has a few tricks up its sleeve!”
“Like I said, Ira’s a good guy. And I figure if Homeland Security contracts this little plane, I’m sure it will be good enough to find a lost boat in the woods.”
After three hours, they had covered the designated search area. The LIDAR had produced a couple of log cabins, and a disused ranger’s station that looked to have been mostly burned down in a forest fire at some point, but no boat.
“We’ve got about an hour’s fuel left Tom, what do you think?” Sam asked
“I think Elise had to be wrong about something eventually, who knew?” Tom answered with a broad smile, unperturbed as always.
“I think we can short-cut back from here if we take a north-east heading around that knot of hills down there.”
“Copy that,” Tom nodded. “I’ll look back over the footage and make sure I didn’t miss anything.”
Sam rolled the Cessna in a wide turn and set a new course on a bearing just outside of the designated search zone. The four rode in silence, wondering what they would do next.
It was at that exact moment the LIDAR sensor blipped.