Sooner or later, it brought everyone home.
She dropped into horse stance, to see if tai chi would give her some peace of mind, but they were working on the four Fair Ladies and she needed Moses to untangle her.
Or Liam.
Screw it.
She went back inside, started her computer and got on-line. She checked her Web site first, to see if anyone had posted a reservation. The Web site was a new innovation and had cost her a lot of money, but contrary to her fear that no one would search the Net for “air taxi-Bristol Bay,” it was already paying off. Four caribou hunters from Anchorage wanted a ride to Mulchatna. Someone else wanted to take his girlfriend and another couple out to a lodge at Outuchiwenat Mountain. A pilot up in Niniltna she had met at the air show in Anchorage the year before had written complimenting her Web site and asking her who maintained it. She sent confirmations to the first two and a name, phone number and e-mail address to the pilot.
She wasn’t sleepy, and the house was very quiet. The crack beneath Tim’s door was dark. Maybe Liam had driven back up to the crash site, although she couldn’t think why. On impulse she keyed into a search engine and looked up DC-3s. The amount of information that came up made her blink.
The Douglas C-47 Skytrain was a redesign of the civilian DC-3 twin-engine commercial airliner, which she already knew. The RAF called them Dakotas, the U.S. Navy the less romantic R4D. The military used it to transport troops and cargo, including carrying paratroopers over enemy territory, especially during the Normandy invasion. She shuddered. Why the hell anyone would want to jump out of an airplane was beyond her. The whole point was to stay in the air, where the Wright brothers had intended you to be, until you were ready to come down with, not without, your aircraft.
This of course led memory back to the previous summer, when none other than Trooper Liam Campbell had jumped out of a Piper Super Cub into a lake in hot pursuit of a felon getting away on a four-wheeler. The Super Cub had been hers and she’d been on the stick at the time, aiding and abetting the aforesaid trooper. Plus the felon hadn’t been quite as felonious as previously thought.
Which, of course, was completely different from parachuting into a war zone. She clicked on the first link in the list and thought she’d made a mistake when a site on Lend-Lease popped up. She knew what Lend-Lease was, sort of: It was the act under which the United States shipped war materials to friendlies in World War II before Pearl Harbor brought them directly into the war themselves. March 11, 1941, was when the site said the act had gone into effect. The Japanese attack had come barely nine months later. She thought of the glacial processes of the Federal Aviation Administration, and nine months didn’t seem long enough to move the federal government into that much action.
They’d called it “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States,” and like all government documents, it went on forever. She waded through thenotwithstanding s and theheretofore s until she got to what seemed to be the relevant clause. It began, of course, with
Notwithstanding the provisions of any other law, the President may, from time to time, when he deems it in the interest of national defense, authorize the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, or the head of any other department or agency of the Government (1) To manufacture in arsenals, factories, and shipyards under their jurisdiction, or otherwise procure, to the extent to which funds are made available therefor[e], or contracts are authorized from time to time by the Congress, or both, any defense article for the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.
Any defense article for the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital.That seemed pretty broad, even for the president of the United States. Someone should have been looking over Roosevelt’s shoulder. Where was Congress? Where was Jesse Helms? She was pretty sure her teacher had mentioned something about checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government in her high school civics class.
And then, after he caused them to be built, the act said the president could sell them, transfer them, lend them, or lease them. The act covered food, machinery, and services. Harry Hopkins, FDR’s good friend and true, started the ball rolling before handing it off to one Edward R. Stettinius Jr., of whom Wy had never heard and probably never would again. Originally intended to benefit China and the British empire back when Churchill was still fighting like hell to keep it one, in November 1941 the act was extended to include the Soviet Union. Yeah, that had worked out well.
The budget for Lend-Lease was a billion three, back when a billion three was serious money. Of course, in the way of government programs everywhere, it wound up costing much more than that, exceeding $50 billion in the end. Nobody ever paid it all back. Most of the countries settled for lesser amounts within fifteen years, although the USSR didn’t get to the table until 1972.
She scrolled down. Well, well.
It turned out that C-47s came under the heading ofdefense article.
She wondered, a little guiltily, if any of this stuff should have been a surprise to her. She held a degree in education, which had included a three-hundred-level class in Alaskan history. Had they studied Lend-Lease? Seemed like they ought to have, but she couldn’t remember doing so. True, she hadn’t been the most dedicated student ever to pass through the doors of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
Wy had gone to college at the behest of her adoptive parents, teachers both. The only classes she’d ever taught had been during her student-teaching internships, as the day after graduation she’d enrolled in flight school. She’d soloed after eight hours and from then on, as much time as possible was spent in the air, filling up her flight log until three years ago when Bob DeCreft, in anticipation of his eminent retirement, offered her the Nushugak Air Taxi Service at a bargain-basement price. The sale brought her a Piper Super Cub, a Cessna 180, two tie-downs at the Mad Trapper Memorial Airport, a shed at same, and a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house on the Nushugak River. It also brought her a lot of goodwill in Bristol Bay. People were willing to take on faith anyone Bob DeCreft recommended.
Professionally, it was what she had been aiming at since she’d earned her pilot’s license; a business small enough to run by herself that kept her in the air most of her working hours. Personally, there had been two benefits, one expected and one not: It got her out of Anchorage and away from Liam, at the time a much-married man and father, and, one day on a flight into Ualik, it had brought her Tim.
So she couldn’t complain, and neither could her parents, retired now and living in Anchorage, with twelve weeks of each winter spent in a condo on a golf course on the Big Island. They couldn’t say she had wasted her education, independent businesswoman that she was now. But the fact of the matter was, she’d never been that good a student. It was probably more rebellion than anything else. She was maintaining an outward show of compliance by studying something her parents wanted her to, while determining inwardly to retain as little of it as possible.
She did another search, and discovered that World War II had been good to the territory of Alaska. During the war, the federal government had spent over a billion dollars on infrastructure, including docks, wharves and breakwaters in harbors up and down the coast. The Alaska Railroad was updated and improved, and roads were constructed, including the AlaskaCanada Highway, the only highway into Alaska. The Alcan had been built by the military during World War II-she knew that much-but she hadn’t realized how much it had to do with Lend-Lease. Lend-Lease aircraft were supposed to be flown through Canada, following the route of the highway, on to Nome and then across the Bering Strait to Russia.