Jesus what a figure: twenty-eight isn't that old:
"Mike's one of my best," Dan said.
"Glad to hear it," Larsson senior said.
Everyone bustled around, signing forms and collecting coats. Havel helped with the baggage-there wasn't all that much-buttoning his coat but glad to be out in the clean chill. Then he did a walk-around of the Piper Chieftain. The ground crew was good, but they weren't going to be taking a twin-engine puddle jumper over the biggest wilderness in the lower forty-eight.
Larsson's eyebrows went up when Mike loaded his own baggage; a waterproof oblong of high-impact synthetics with straps that made it a backpack too, and the unmistakable shape of a rifle case.
"Something I should know about?" he said.
"Nope, Mr. Larsson," Mike said. "Just routine; I'm a cautious man."
Larsson nodded. "What's the gun?"
"Remington 700," he said. That was a civilianized version of the Marine sniper rifle. "I used its first cousin in the Corps, and it makes a good deer rifle, too."
Signe Larsson sniffed and turned away ostentatiously; possibly because he was an ex-Marine, or a hunter.
Oh, well, he thought. I'm dropping them off in a couple of hours, anyway.
Eric Larsson grinned at his sister with brotherly maliciousness. "Hey, maybe he could shoot you a tofu-lope, sis, now you're back on the vegetarian wagon. Nothing like a rare tofu-lope steak, charred outside and all white and bleeding goo on the inside-"
She snorted and climbed the rear-mounted stairs into the Chieftain.
Havel admired the view that presented, waited for everyone else to get in, and followed. He made discreetly sure that everyone was buckled up-it was amazing how many people thought money could buy them exemption from the laws of nature. Then he slid into his own position at the controls and put the headphones on, while he went through the checklist and cleared things with the tower and got his mind around the flight plan.
That had the bonus effect of keeping out the Larssons' bickering, which was quiet but had an undertone like knives. It died away a little as the two piston engines roared; he taxied out and hit the throttles. There was the usual heavy feeling at the first surge of acceleration, and the ground fell away below. His feet and hands moved on the pedals and yoke; Boise spread out below him, mostly on the north side of the river and mostly hidden in trees, except for the dome of the state capitol and the scattering of tall buildings downtown.
Suburbs stretched northwest for a ways, and there was farmland to the west and south, a checkerboard between irrigation canals and ditches that glinted in quick flashes of brilliance as they threw back the setting sun.
He turned the Chieftain's nose northeast. The ground humped itself up in billowing curves, rising a couple of thousand feet in a few minutes. Then it was as if they were flying over a mouth-a tiger's mouth, reaching for the sky with serrated fangs of saw-toothed granite. Steep ridges, one after another, rising to the great white peaks of the Bitterroots on the northeastern horizon, turned ruddy pink with sunset.
Some snow still lay on the crests below and under the shade of the dense forest that covered the slopes-Douglas fir, hemlock, western cedar-great trees two hundred feet tall and spiky green. Further north and they passed the Salmon River, then the Selway, tortuous shapes far below in graven clefts that rivaled the Grand Canyon. A thousand tributaries wound through steep gorges, the beginnings of snowmelt sending them brawling and tossing around boulders; a few quiet stretches were flat and glittering with ice. The updrafts kept the air rough, and he read the turbulence through hands and feet and body as it fed back through the controls.
Larsson stuck his head through into the pilot's area.
"Mind if I come up?"
The big man wormed his way forward and collapsed into the copilot's seat.
"Pretty country," he said, waving ahead and down.
Pretty but savage, Havel thought.
He liked that; one of the perks of this job was that he got to go out in it himself, hunting or fishing or just backpacking: and you could get some of the hairiest hang gliding on earth here.
"None prettier," the pilot replied aloud.
Poor bastard, Havel thought to himself. Good-looking wife, three healthy kids, big house in Portland, vineyard in the Eola Hills, ranch up in Montana – he knows he should be happy and can't quite figure out why he isn't anymore.
He concealed any offensive stranger's sympathy, and switched the other set of headphones to a commercial station.
"Damnedest thing!" the big man said after a while, his face animated again.
"Yes?" Havel said.
"Odd news from back East," Larsson said. "Some sort of electrical storm off Cape Cod-not just lightning, a great big dome of lights over Nantucket, half a dozen different colors. The weather people say they've never seen anything like it."
Mary Larsson brightened up; she was Massachusetts-born herself.
"That is strange," she said. "We used to summer on Nantucket when I was a girl-"
Mike Havel grinned to himself and filtered out her running reminiscences and Larsson's occasional attempts to get a bit in edgewise; instead he turned to the news channel himself. The story had gotten her out of her mood, which would make the trip a lot less tense. Behind her the three Larsson children were rolling their eyes but keeping silent, which was a relief.
The voice of the on-the-spot reporter cruising over Nantucket Sound started to range up from awestruck to hysterical.
They're really sounding sort of worried, there, he thought. I wonder what's going -
White light flashed, stronger than lightning, lances of pain into his eyes, like red-hot spikes of ice. Havel tasted acid at the back of his throat as he jerked up his hands with a strangled shout. Vision vanished in a universe of shattered light, then returned. Returned without even afterimages, as if something had been switched off with a click. The pain was gone too, instantly.
Voices screamed behind him. He could hear them welclass="underline"
Because the engines are out, he realized. Every fucking thing is out! She's dead. And I'm a smear on a mountain unless I get this thing flying again.
That brought complete calm.
"Shut up!" he snapped, working the yoke and pedals, seizing control from the threatening dive and spin. "Keep quiet and let me work!"
Sound died to somebody's low whimper and the cat's muted yowls of terror. Over that he could hear the cloven air whistling by. They had six thousand feet above ground level, and the surface below was as unforgiving as any on earth. He gave a quick glance to either side, but the ridgetops nearby were impossible, far too steep and none of them bare of trees. It was a good thing he knew where all the controls were, because the cabin lights were dead, and the nav lights too; not a single circuit working.
Not good, he thought. Not good. Not: fucking: good.
He ran through the starting procedure, one step and another and hit the button:
Nothing, he cursed silently, as he went through the emergency restart three times and got three identical meaningless click sounds.
The engines are fucked. What the hell could knock everything out like this? What was that white flash?
It could have been an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse; that would account for all the electrical systems being out. He sincerely hoped not, because about the only way to produce an EMP that powerful was to set off a nuke in the upper atmosphere.
The props were spinning as they feathered automatically. She still responded to the yoke- Thank God! -but even the instrument panel was mostly inert, everything electrical gone. The artificial horizon and altimeter were old-fashioned hydraulics and still working, and that was about it. The radio was completely dead, not even a flip of static as he worked the switches.
With a full load, the Chieftain wasn't a very good glider. They could clear the ridge ahead comfortably, but probably not the one beyond-they got higher as you went northeast. Better to put her down in this valley, with a little reserve of height to play around with.