Leaving the loading and preflight to Randi, Smith touched base at the leasing office. There was little for him to do; the invisible but potent presence of Fred Klein had passed through here as well.
“The paperwork’s all taken care of, Colonel,” the grizzled office manager said. “Your bird’s fully fueled and surveyed, and I took the liberty of filing a flight plan through to Kodiak for you. You’ve got CAVU flight conditions all the way, and the weather looks good over Cook’s Inlet and the Entrances for the next twelve hours. The air boss aboard the Haley is expecting you, and you’ll recover directly onto ship. I’ll advise him when you’re in the air.”
Smith knew from his briefing that Pole Star provided aircraft for a number of commercial and government research projects in the Arctic, and possibly for other purposes.
The office manager was obviously ex-army aviation. A large First Air Cavalry shield had been mounted on the flier-cluttered office wall, and the model of an AH-1 Huey Cobra sat on the desk. An ancient Vietnam-era flight jacket also lay draped over the back of the chair. Smith sensed that the older man might have been a member of the Club himself at one time or had worked on the peripheries.
“Thanks for the service,” Smith said, extending his hand to the manager. “We’ll try to bring her back in one piece.”
“Screw it. It’s insured,” the old aviator grinned back, taking Smith’s hand in a strong, calloused grasp. “I don’t know what your tasking orders are, Colonel, but good luck and watch your ass. Men count. Choppers don’t.”
“I’ll make that my beautiful thought for the day.”
Smith stepped from the office and took a long automatic look around. The sky was blue and almost cloudless, the wind a faint cool brush against his face. In a few minutes they’d be airborne.
His team had linked up. Nothing untoward had happened on the flight to Anchorage or at the airport. No one had followed them here. No one was in sight, save for his own people and a couple of flannel-shirted locals tinkering around with a big white Cessna in a hangar across from the leasing agency.
Why was he thinking something had to be wrong?
The island and port of Kodiak lay some 270 miles west-southwest of Anchorage, down the length of Cook’s Inlet and across Shelikof Strait from the Alaskan mainland, a decent haul for a small helicopter.
Randi Russell kept the Long Ranger just off the beach, steering along the densely forested shore of the Kenai Peninsula. Urban civilization fell swiftly behind them, replaced by a string of small villages spaced along the Sterling Coastal Highway like the beads on a necklace.
Randi was grateful for this opportunity to learn her aircraft. Most of her rotor hours had been in the Bell Ranger family, but few had been in the big 206 series. Now she felt her way through the Long Ranger’s handling, exploring how the greater size and weight of the aircraft and the drag of the pontoons were countered by the augmented power of the twin engines. Her eyes soon found and fell into the automatic scan pattern of instrument gauges-horizon-instrument gauges-horizon of the skilled pilot.
Beyond the fishing community of Homer and the mouth of Kachemak Bay, even the coastal villages were left behind, and the Long Ranger headed out across the broad, empty straits of the Kennedy and Stevenson Entrances to Kodiak Island. The occasional distant wake of a fishing boat cutting across the chill blue waters served as the last lingering reminder of humanity.
After the first hour airborne, the steady-state whine of the turbines and the rhythmic thudding of the rotors threatened to become soporific, and Randi found herself having to fight a backlog of transpacific jet lag. Major Smyslov’s occasional interested question from the copilot’s seat about the controls and handling of the Long Ranger provided a welcome stimulus.
In the amidships passenger seats Professor Metrace had succumbed. Curling up in her mink-collared leather jacket, she’d gone to sleep. Glancing up at the rearview cockpit mirror, Randi couldn’t help but note the way her head had drifted companionably onto Jon’s shoulder.
So it hadn’t been Randi’s imagination back in Seattle. Valentina Metrace obviously was not averse to combining business with pleasure, and she was also obviously interested in Smith.
Well, she was more than welcome to the man. But, damn it, did the theoretical “historian” have to be so flagrant about it? And did she always have to go around looking like a James Bond heroine?
Randi glanced down at herself and her comfortably worn jeans and denim jacket and suppressed a soft feminine snort.
As for what Jon felt about it, Randi couldn’t tell. But then, that had always been the problem with the man. Smith was one of the very few people Randi had ever met that she couldn’t read. She could never be quite sure what was really going on behind those handsome, immobile features.
It had been that way even when he had been saying how sorry he was about her fiancé or telling her about Sophia.
One thing she could sense was Smith’s wariness. Even with that pleasantly scented seatmate nestled against him, his head was turning with slow, repetitive deliberation, those intent blue eyes moving constantly in a fighter pilot’s scan.
Did he know something he hadn’t passed on, or was he sensing something? Damn it, what was going on in there?
Maybe it was just the time and environment. If someone wanted to make trouble, now, over the open sea with the Kenai Peninsula and Kodiak Island mere hazy outlines on the horizons fore and aft, would present an excellent opportunity.
Suddenly the turning of Smith’s head stopped, and he fixed on something off the port side, like a gun turret locking on target.
“Randi,” he said quietly into the lip mike of his headset, “we have traffic paralleling us. Eight o’clock high.”
Randi swore at herself for letting her own situational awareness slip. Twisted around in the pilot’s seat, she looked down the bearing. There was something out there. A glint of sunlight heliographing off the windshield of another aircraft. “I’ve got him.”
Everyone in the Long Ranger’s cabin snapped alert, Valentina straightening up, clear-eyed and in a way that made Randi wonder if she’d been asleep at all. The team looked on as the intruder edged closer, a large, high-winged, single-engined monoplane.
“This is the direct flight path between Anchorage and Kodiak Island,” Smyslov commented, playing the devil’s advocate. “It is logical there would be other aeroplanes.”
“Maybe,” Randi replied, “but that looks like a Cessna Turbo Centurion. He has a way higher cruising speed than we do. Why would he be station keeping on us like that?”
“Randi,” Smith said, not taking his eyes off the shadowing aircraft, “angle us off the direct bearing to Kodiak.”
“Right. Doing it.”
She rocked the cyclic, and the Long Ranger paid off onto a slightly divergent course. Half a minute later Smyslov spoke quietly. “He turns with us.”
The Russian tightened his seat belt, a combat aviator’s instinctive ready alert gesture.
“Again, Randi,” Smith’s voice sharpened. “Turn away from him!”
She obeyed without question. She snapped the tail of the helicopter toward the Cessna. Veering away to the northwest, she tried to open the range.
The Cessna fell away astern. For over a full minute the sky around the helicopter remained clear. Then the light plane reappeared, crawling back into view half a mile to their left. Accelerating, it climbed into a dominant position off the Long Ranger’s port bow, a dark silhouette against the piercing blue sky. Once more it began to sidle closer.
“He must like our company,” Valentina Metrace said, removing a small, flat pair of folding sports binoculars from her inside jacket pocket. Popping them open, she focused on their stalker. “The starboard cargo door has been removed,” she reported. “There’s one pilot aboard and what looks like one passenger kneeling in the open doorway. The registration numbers are November…nine…five…three…seven…foxtrot.”