“Yeah.” Liam glanced surreptitiously at his watch. It was past ten. Where was Prince?
Firm footsteps sounded on the stairs, and the door opened to admit Prince. “Charles!”
“Diana,” Charles said, a wealth of information in that single word.
Prince recovered fast; Liam had to give her that. “How nice to see you again,” she said, eyes cast demurely down.
“How very nice indeed,” Charles said.
More footsteps. Already the morning was not turning out well, and when he saw who it was, he groaned inside.
“Liam,” Jo said, “I need to talk to you about this crash site. How do I get to it, and-”
At that moment Col. Charles Bradley Campbell sprang into her dazzled view. Liam, while not a vain man, knew that he was good-looking, and knew that he looked like his father, but although he’d had his share of women there was something about the elder Campbell that made them go down like ninepins in his presence. Jo, the hardest of hard-nosed reporters, all but went over flat on suddenly very round heels.
Charles was a tall man, as tall as Liam, and the similarities didn’t stop there. His eyes were as blue, if less warm, his dark red hair, if shorter in style, as thick and as yet not gray even at the temples. His jaw was as firm, his shoulders as broad, his waist and hips as trim, his legs as long, and he looked just as good in the snug jacket and slacks of his dark blue air force uniform as Liam did in his trooper blue and gold.
Liam, looking at Charles through Jo’s eyes, remembered his state of deshabille and snugged up and straightened his tie. It was pretty much all he could do without a dry cleaner.
For her part, Jo, not a woman easily impressed, for the first time received an inkling of what was itching at her friend, Wy. What she didn’t see in Liam was manifestly obvious in Liam’s father. “Jesus,” she said, looking from one man to the other and pleased that her voice was light and steady. “The apple sure didn’t fall far from this tree.”
Charles Bradley Campbell grinned, a quick, lethal grin with razor-sharp edges. “Why, thank you, ma’am.”
Liam, Jo was interested to note, looked less than thrilled. “What are you doing in town, Dad?”
Charles looked wounded. “What, I can’t drop in once in a while to visit my son?”
“Drop in all the way from Washington, D.C.?”
Charles smiled with all the warmth and charm at his command, both of which were considerable. “Newenham’s just like everywhere else, son. A plane ride away.”
The man standing in back of him made a discreet noise.
“Why, I’m forgetting my manners,” Charles said. “Special Agent James G. Mason, trooper Sgt. Liam Campbell.”
“Special agent?” Liam said.
James G. Mason’s smile was slow and a little shy. “Of the FBI.”
“FBI?” Jo said. “What’s the Feebs doing in Newenham?”
“Good-bye, Jo,” Liam said.
“Come on, Liam-”
“Allow me to introduce you around. Jo Dunaway, reporter for theAnchorage News, ” he said to his father, who was too smooth to show alarm. The FBI man looked confused, but that may have been cosmetic. “Good-bye, Jo,” he repeated. At his look, Prince went to the door and held it for her, not without some small feeling of triumph at being the woman left behind with Col. Charles Bradley Campbell.
Liam waited for the disgruntled footsteps to fade well out of hearing. “Special Agent Mason.”
“Sergeant Campbell.”
“How can I help you?”
The agent looked at Charles, who shrugged. His glasses slipped farther down his nose and he pushed them back up again, a nervous habit. “Well, we heard you had found the wreckage from a plane crash.”
“And this merits attention from the FBI?” And the air force, he thought, looking at his father, who looked blandly back.
“Well”-Mason flushed slightly-“er, yes, we think it does. Um, we think it might be the wreckage of a plane that crashed into Carryall Mountain the night of December twentieth, 1941. It was a C-47, a Lend-Lease aircraft meant for Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces in China.”
“And the FBI is interested in this crash-why? Is there some indication that this was other than an accident?”
If possible, Mason looked even more apologetic. “The special agent in charge in Anchorage sent me down as an observer, just in case.”
Liam looked at Charles. “There were three people on board, a pilot, a copilot, and a navigator. We bring our boys back.”
It was simply said, and Liam had no doubt that Charles, a career man to whom the United States Air Force was life and breath, meant every word. Nevertheless, he couldn’t escape the feeling that something had been left unsaid. “I imagine you want to go up there.”
Charles nodded. “Can you take us?”
Prince looked chagrined. “Our plane is still on floats.”
Charles looked at Liam and smiled a slow, knowing smile. “Know an air taxi we can charter?”
Liam, expecting a Fury when he called, found Wy vague and distracted. Well, if she couldn’t be bothered to ask where he’d spent the night, he sure as hell couldn’t be bothered to offer the information. He explained the situation in crisp and businesslike tones. “Can you get the Cessna in there with everyone on board?” There was a long silence. “Wy?”
“You want to fly back to the C-47 wreck?”
“Yes,” he said. “I just said that. Didn’t I just say that?”
“I don’t know. I… yes, I guess so.” She seemed to pull herself together. “All right. How much do they weigh?”
“A hundred eighty,” Charles said.
“One forty-five,” Mason said.
Liam heard pencil scratching on paper. “We’ll make it.”
Liam remembered the tiny dirt strip carved out of the snow, no bigger in his fevered memory than a Band-Aid, and carefully kept anything he might be feeling from showing on his face. “She says it’s a go,” he said, hanging up. “Need a ride?”
“Thanks, the commander out at Chinook was kind enough to loan us a vehicle.”
“You flew into Chinook?” Chinook Air Force Base was forty miles south of Newenham. It was a small base, fully manned only during the height of the Cold War, and would have been closed years earlier if the senior senator from the state of Alaska hadn’t had enough seniority to head up the military appropriations committee.
It certainly offered Liam’s father far too easy access to Newenham, and to Liam.
“Of course.”
“You fly in with him?” This to Mason.
“Yes,” Mason said.
“What did you fly in on?”
Charles grinned. “Nothing like an F-15 to shrink the spaces between places, Liam. You ought to let me show you what mach speed looks like from the inside.”
“Thanks anyway,” Liam said. One of the sorest spots between father and son was the son’s complete inability to appreciate the magic of flight.
“You coming with us?”
Liam couldn’t have put his finger on how he knew Charles didn’t want him at the crash site, but he did. He looked down at the list of names belonging to Lydia’s book club. He looked up at his father, into the blue eyes so like his own, so determinedly clear of guile.
He handed the list to Prince. “Talk to them all, see if she was worried about something, fighting with someone; you know the drill.”
“Yes, sir,” Prince said, very glum.
“See you later,” Charles told her.
She brightened visibly.
Liam followed Charles and Mason in the Blazer, out the gravel road to the airport, ten miles from Newenham, complete with hangar and tie-downs and Gift Shoppe. Wy was waiting for them, 68 Kilo fueled and ready. They climbed in and took off.
It was a much shorter ride this time, and a much louder landing. Liam was certain they were going to end up in the trees, a place they had already been in a plane once this year, thank you very much, when a hard kick to the rudder swung the tail around and they rolled mercifully to a stop.