“Good, ’cause she ain’t at her house,” Clarence said over the phone. “I’ll check at the store. Maybe she’s over there.”
“Pick her up when you find her,” Quinn said. “Just hold her at your office. Lock her up if you have to. We’ll get another Trooper plane out here to bring her to Anchorage.”
Clarence groused about it, but agreed.
Trooper Evans grimaced. “I don’t envy him,” he said, helping Beaudine get Volodin buckled into the rearmost seat on the right side of the airplane. “His office is just a broken desk in a leaky warehouse and his lockup is a folding chair beside that desk. And Polina’s not the easiest woman to deal with.” He shrugged. “You work with what you got out here in the village.”
“Okay, ladies and gentleman,” Captain Munjares said five minutes later from the left seat of the C-21. The twin turbofan engines whined as she back-taxied the airplane down the rough gravel to the far north end of the strip getting every inch of usable runway she could. “We’re going to take off to the south. We got a little headwind so that helps. Thankfully, I burned off some fuel getting here, but full disclosure, if it looks like we’re using the road at the end of the runway to get airborne, it’s because we’re actually using the road at the end of the runway.”
Quinn took one of the seats facing aft so he could keep an eye on Volodin, but in truth he was going to have a difficult time keeping his eyes on anything. He sank into the soft leather and felt his worn-out muscles begin to relax one by one. He imagined them looking like the frayed strands of horsehair on his daughter’s violin bow. The wounds in his thigh ached as if they were on fire, but the pain pushed back his fatigue and helped him focus on what he needed to do when they landed in Anchorage. Volodin sat mutely, staring out the window. The picture of a broken man, he seemed to have no idea where his daughter had gone, only that she was in possession of twelve canisters of New Archangel — which according to him, was enough to kill all the inhabitants of several city blocks.
Captain Munjares spooled up the twin turbofan engines once she reached the end of the runway, causing the little jet to rumble and shake in place. Facing aft, Quinn put on a headset and turned in his seat to watch the two pilots get ready to take off. They had their intercom isolated, so he couldn’t hear them talk but watching them work together made him think they might actually get out of this alive. After going over a series of checklists and systems, Munjares craned her head to look out the front windows at the short runway one last time. She took a deep breath and gave her co-pilot a thumbs up. He nodded and returned the gesture. A moment later Quinn was thrown forward against his harness as the airplane rocketed down the gravel strip at full power.
There comes a moment of commitment in every takeoff when the pilot has gone too far to abort without crashing beyond the end of the runway. Munjares got her bird going so fast so quickly that she was committed from the moment she started her roll. Pedal to the proverbial firewall, Munjares yanked her airplane off the runway seconds before she reached the tree line, taking them up at such an extreme angle that for a few seconds Quinn found himself suspended against his seatbelt, looking down from above Volodin and the Trooper. Beaudine was in a similar position beside him but she kept her eyes clenched shut.
Swagger notwithstanding, the relief was evident in the young captain’s face when she turned around and gave a thumbs-up to Quinn.
“That was some impressive flying, Captain,” Quinn said into his microphone, meaning it.
“Thank you, sir,” Munjares shrugged off the compliment.
“Don’t sir me,” Quinn said. “I’m a captain just like you.”
“No, sir,” Munjares said. “You’re a captain who knows the President. He called my boss personally to get me to make this flight.”
“It’s the mission,” Quinn said. “Not me personally.”
“Whatever you say, sir,” Munjares said. “I’ve been told to floor it. We should touch down in Anchorage in forty-one minutes. Forgive me for saying so, but you look like you could use a nap.”
Quinn would have laughed if it hadn’t been so true. He peeled off the headset and looked across at Beaudine. “Do you know the Special Agent in Charge of the Anchorage office?” he asked, watching the agent’s eyes flutter and flinch with exhaustion and the pain that had been unmasked by the relative comfort of the airplane.
“Michele Pond,” Beaudine said. “She taught a couple of classes at Quantico when I was there. Nice enough for a bosslady, I guess.”
“Let’s give her a call,” Quinn said. “According to Palmer she’s running the show in Anchorage. We need to make sure we’re all on the same page when we hit the ground.”
Beaudine took her phone out of her pocket and shook her head. “My battery is about toast,” she said.
Trooper Evans worked his way up the narrow aisle carrying an orange plastic box marked “Trauma Kit” and knelt on the floor in front of their seats. “You’re pretty dehydrated. How about I start a couple of IVs and get some fluids going while you make your calls,” he said. “You both look like you’re the type of people to keel over dead before you’d quit.”
The Trooper was quick and proficient at starting IVs and had good dextrose drips going on both Quinn and Beaudine in a matter of minutes. Beaudine borrowed his phone, punched in the number for the Special Agent in Charge of the Anchorage office of the FBI, introduced herself, and then put the phone on speaker. She leaned back in her seat while she talked, allowing Trooper Evans to clean and dress the wound on her face.
Inside the sterile interior of the airplane, Quinn was able to catch a whiff of his own odor. He gave kudos to Trooper Evans for not gagging when he started the IVs.
A secretary answered the call, but Michele Pond picked up immediately afterward, sounding gracious and accommodating — two characteristics Quinn had not found common to high-level bosses at many federal agencies, much less the FBI. It was apparent that Palmer had told the Special Agent in Charge to bring Quinn up to speed since a person in her position would not normally brief a junior agent and the representative of another agency. It was impossible to tell from her voice, but Pond sounded professional and more “mission” than “ego” oriented.
“Kaija Merculief’s plane landed a half hour before we got your call,” Pond said. “She’s in the wind but hasn’t boarded any planes out so we think she’s still in Alaska. We’ve distributed a copy of her passport photo to everyone under the sun. APD has set up an incident command post. My office has committed all thirty-six field agents. We’re coordinating with Troopers, DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals, and the Forest Service. All in all, I’d say we have nearly six hundred boots on the ground.”
“What about Zolner?” Quinn asked.
“Your Worst of the Moon is cagey,” Pond said. “We have a record of his charter from Ambler to Fairbanks. After that he disappeared.”
“There are dozens of small planes coming and going out of Fairbanks,” Quinn said, thinking out loud.
“And we’ll eventually find which one he took — if he’s not holed up in a Fairbanks motel with a hooker.”
“I don’t think so, boss,” Beaudine said. “From what we’ve seen of Zolner, he’s not the type to abort a mission until he has what he came for.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” Pond said. “We have enough to worry about without some ghost sniper. DIA has heard of a shooter named Feliks Zolner but no known photos exist. We have a BOLO out on a six-foot-eight guy with blue eyes. So far it’s only netted us a federal judge who got pretty angry when APD put him face down on the sidewalk. Anyway, that’s where we are on Zolner. Our first priority is to lock down a target.”