“Nicely done,” Charles drawled over the headphones.
“Thank you, Colonel,” Wy said.
“Charles, please.” He smiled at her. Liam, watching from the backseat, noticed that while she inclined her head in acknowledgment she didn’t smile back. Maybe that was why he loved her, the one woman left in the world Charles Bradley Campbell had yet to charm.
Give him time.
They hiked up the trail to the glacier, encountering fresh bear scat and a gray-muzzled cow moose, who gave them an incurious stare before moving placidly into a stand of diamond willow. It was overcast today, and colder. Their breath made little clouds that hung in the air, only to swirl, disperse and vanish as the line of people walked through them.
“It’s going to snow,” Wy said, looking at the horizon.
“How much and how long?”
She measured the clouds with narrow eyes. “A couple of feet by morning.” She saw Liam’s face. “I’m kidding.”
All the same, he kept an uneasy eye on the horizon after that. The last thing he wanted to do was take off into a snowstorm. They’d had to land in one the month before. He wasn’t enthusiastic at the possibility of repeating the experience.
They emerged from the trees into the clearing at the foot of the glacier.
“Where is it?” Charles said. Behind him, Mason was staring upward, openmouthed.
“There,” Liam said, and pointed.
Charles looked. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said, but it was more prayer than curse.
The face of the glacier looked to the southwest, and even in late October one day of sun had done enough melting to throw the outline of the plane into even starker relief, most of the fuselage, what was left of the right wing. The glacial backdrop was stunning, too. The cloudy day brought out the colors hiding in the ice, green, purple, a little red, a hundred different shades of blue, from powder to navy. Some trick of the light made it seem as if the tail of the craft were protruding, and at the same time made the whole thing look semitransparent, almost phantasmic. And why not? Liam thought. It was indeed an apparition, the specter of a time gone by and a war long since won. Only the spirits of the men who had been her last crew had the right to walk here.
Charles took an involuntary step forward.
“Hold it,” Wy said, barring his way with one hand. “That glacier calves. The whole thing could come down on top of you at any moment.”
“We’ve got to get up there.”
“You can’t.”
“How’d you find the wreckage, then?”
“It’s falling off the face of the glacier a little bit at a time,” Liam said. “A couple of hunters were passing by, and stumbled over some… pieces.”
“We’ve got to recover the bodies.” Charles seemed shaken out of his usual sangfroid.
“They’re dead, Dad.”
There was a spark of anger in Charles’ eyes when he turned to look at his son. “There are three of our own up there, Liam.”
Parts of them might be, Liam thought. “Who were they?”
Charles seemed to pull himself together. “Capt. Terrance Roepke of Minot, South Dakota. First Officer Aloysius”-all three of the men winced-“March of Pasadena, California. Flight Engineer Obadiah Etheridge of Birmingham, Alabama. All U.S. Army Air Corps.”
“What were they doing over the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta in a C-47 on December twentieth, 1941?”
“You ever hear of Lend-Lease?”
“Yes. Sure. Of course. Okay, refresh my memory.”
“It was Roosevelt’s way of funneling equipment and supplies to the Allies before we actually got into the war. The C-47 was a standard piece of Lend-Lease equipment.”
Liam nodded at the wreck. “Where was this one going?”
“Russia.”
Wy’s brow creased. “Weren’t most of those planes ferried through Nome by way of Fairbanks by way of the Alcan?”
“Yes.”
“What was this one doing so far south?”
“I don’t know. Bad weather, instrument failure, extreme cold, any of those things. We’re talking 1941, real seat-of-your-pants flying, especially up here.” Charles looked and sounded a little wistful. “These guys had to be good, or good guessers.”
Liam looked up at the glacier. This crew hadn’t been that good.
Mason, finally having gotten his mouth closed, grabbed Liam’s arm and pointed involuntarily. “Look!”
As they watched, a section of the glacier shuddered and split from the main body of ice. It was so large it seemed to take a long, long time to fall. At about the time the first piece of ice hit the ground, the firstboom! hit their eardrums, followed by a loud, continuous thundering crunch of ice striking bottom and breaking up.
The ghost of the C-47 seemed to ripple. They held their breath, watching, but the plane stayed where it was. “We’ve got to get up there,” Charles said. “We’ve got to get those men out.”
“Sooner or later they’ll come to us, Colonel,” Wy said. At his look she added, “You can’t climb up the face of the glacier for the same reason. You can’t rappel down from the top for the same reason. The whole thing is just too unstable. Really the only thing you can do is wait.” She paused, and then, because she too was a pilot, repeated gently, “They’ll come to us.”
There was a brief silence. “How long?”
Wy shrugged. “It’s a glacier. It’s also October. It’s going to get colder very soon, and it’s going to snow a lot. I’d leave any recovery attempt until next year. Check it out in the spring, see what kind of a snowfall there has been, see how long it will take to melt off. Try to get in sometime between then and when the glacier goes into full calving mode. No guarantees it won’t have, and no guarantees the whole thing won’t slide off the face of the glacier the moment we fly out of here, but at least nobody else gets killed.”
They stood staring at the glacier. After a moment, Wy touched Liam’s arm. “Liam? Do you hear it?”
“Hear what?” Liam became aware of a faint buzzing noise, increasing in volume. It got louder and louder, until he looked over his shoulder at where the trail ended at the edge of the trees to see five four-wheelers burst into the clearing. Their drivers saw the little group and the man in the lead shouted out a warning but it was too late.
“Look out!” Liam said, and picked up Wy around the waist and leaped left. Charles and Mason both jumped right. The vehicles skidded to a halt.
Paul Urbano looked at Liam picking himself out of the blueberry bushes, his uniform smeared with blue stains, and said, “Oh, shit.”
Teddy Engebretsen, John Kvichak, and Kelley MacCormick looked as if they were trying to will themselves into invisibility.
The fifth man, Evan Gray, laughed out loud.
Peering around him, her short cap of blond curls ruffled and adorned with the odd desiccated birch leaf, so did Jo Dunaway.
December 10, 1941
That plane that went in four days ago? They found two of the guys! Both pilots were kilt in the crash but there were two other guys on board and although they were hurt they fixed up some kind of wooden slats they call skis (they use these skis to travel over the snow in Norway, I hear) and strapped them to their knees and feet and crawled out. They only made it three miles but that was enough for them to be seen from the highway and be picked up. The story is it was fifty-eight below. I cant believe they’re alive. Nobody can.
I wonder if Ill ever be abel to tell my son what I did in the war. I cant even tell them at home where I am. Its this big secret that were giving planes to Russia and China. Like March said the other day, theres hundreds of planes going through Nome every day, do the brass think the Germans and the Japs havent notised? He was taking a talley on a tablet and saw I was watching is why he said it. He said if I can keep cownt anybody can.