There was a picture, too, black-and-white, the aircraft gray with the barred white star on the fuselage just before the tail, and the tail numbers small and white on the vertical tail above and behind it. It was a shock to see what the wreck on Bear Glacier had looked like whole and proud.
Twenty-four thousand feet. And according to Colonel Campbell, they were on their way to Russia, to Krasnoyarsk, so already they were way the hell and gone off course. She wondered what the weather had been like that night. She did another search and raised the National Weather Service’s site, which was excellent but was more focused on forecasts than on history.
Well, hell. You could see Carryall Mountain from Newenham, couldn’t you? She tried to picture the horizon in that direction. She thought so. If you could, and if it had been clear that night, someone might actually have seen the plane auger in. There were a lot of Alaskan old farts in Newenham, a lot of people who’d been around from well before war had broken out. The plane must have made one hell of a bang when it went in, and that wasn’t something you forgot.
She’d make a few calls tomorrow, she promised herself. She shut down the computer and resumed pacing away the minutes until Liam got home.
FOURTEEN
Charles was already at Bill’s, vamping every female in sight. Tasha Anayuk, Natalie Gosuk’s roommate, was leaning up against the booth, gazing into his face as if he was the answer to all her prayers. Bill made sure his glass never ran dry. And Jo Dunaway was sitting across from him.
“Liam,” Charles said, catching sight of his son and breaking into a warm and well-practiced smile.
“Dad.” He nodded at Jo.
Special Agent James Mason was sitting next to Charles, and nodded to Liam, his round-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose again.
Liam wondered about those glasses. They looked like plain glass, and the brown eyes behind the glass seemed to be very shrewd. During an interrogation, a perp might find those glasses less alarming than the eyes.
Jo had a notebook out, he noticed, and several pages were already filled with her cramped scribble. A curl fell over her eye and she flipped it back with an impatient gesture. “You giving an interview?” Liam said to Charles, careless of the incredulity in his voice.
“The air force brings back its own,” Charles said, smile gone. “No matter how long they’ve been gone. I think that’s a damn good story, and one the public has a right to know.”
“Their families are all likely dead by now. Why not leave them where they are, declare the area a graveyard?”
Jo and Liam both waited for Charles’ answer. He made a show of thinking it over, and when the silence had drawn out long enough to be anticipatory, said simply, “They’re ours. They were members of the force when they took off from Nome that evening. They were members of the force when they went off course. They were members of the force when they slammed into that glacier. Just because they’re dead doesn’t make them any less ours. We don’t leave anyone behind. We defend the nation and we protect our own.”
Liam could see that Jo, hard-nosed seeker of truth that she was, was nonetheless impressed by this speech, and Tasha was either in love or getting ready to enlist, or maybe both. Liam ordered a beer.
Jo flipped through her notes. “I think that’s all for now, Charles. If I have any further questions, may I call you?”
The smile was back and full-bore. “Of course. But why don’t you stay and have dinner with us?”
Her gaze rested for a speculative moment on Liam’s face. “Sure. Why not?”
“I can’t stay long,” Liam said.
Mason took a gulp of beer.
They ordered, ribeye for Charles, filet mignon for Jo, New York for Liam, steak sandwich for Mason. All the fishermen whose boats were still in the water had taken one look at the horizon and had stayed inside the breakwater that morning, so there was no fish or shellfish on the menu that night. Charles ordered a bottle of wine, and Liam, recognizing the signs, wondered if he ought to give Jo some kind of alert. He decided not to. He didn’t like her job, but he liked her just fine, and in spite of the crap she’d dumped all over him on Wy’s behalf he was glad Wy had such a staunch friend. But she was a grown woman who made her own choices.
He winced away from the prospect of Wy’s best friend and his father in the sack together, but then he’d winced at the reality of Diana Prince and his father in the sack together and it hadn’t killed him. His father was a rounder. If a woman was even halfway presentable and even a tenth of her was willing, it was as inevitable as the sun rising in the east that Charles would hit on her. Liam still thought the impulse to nail everything in sight came from Liam’s mother’s abandoning the both of them for a German nightclub owner when Liam was barely six months old, but that was his father’s problem to work out, not his. He didn’t do therapy. He kept his nose buried in his beer and spoke only when spoken to.
The bar was about half-full, mostly of drinkers. Moses was at his usual table, playing chess with Clarence Saguyuk, another old geezer who looked twice Moses’ age and had maybe half as many teeth. Neither factor seemed to affect his playing ability, if the forest of pawns, knights, rooks and one queen at his elbow was any indication. Eric Mollberg sat a little behind Clarence, a glass in one hand. He looked almost sober. Maybe he was finally coming out the other end of the tunnel. Liam had been down that same tunnel and he knew just how long it was.
Moccasin Man was holding forth in his usual booth, too, and Liam saw him make at least two sales. Gray was getting bolder with every day that passed without an arrest. Fine by Liam. Pretty soon Evan Gray would have enough rope to hang himself, and Liam would be there, ready to haul on the other end of it.
He wished with all his heart that the politicians in Juneau and Washington, D.C., would get a clue and legalize and tax all drugs, from dope to crack to ecstasy. If people wanted to go to hell in a pile of white dust or at the end of a needle, let them, instead of overworking law enforcement and overcrowding the jails to the point that every third bust was a drug bust and that the U.S. had more people in jail today than the Soviet Union ever did in all their gulags combined.
The result was the Evan Grays of this world, with a marijuana grow stashed somewhere in or near Newenham and a profitable and growing retail business. Admit him to the ranks of businessmen and be done with it, and while we’re at it, tax the hell out of him, Liam thought, watching Tasha Anayuk slide out of the booth opposite Gray, tucking something into her pocket. She saw Liam watching, and instead of flushing and scurrying away like the lawbreaker she was, she flashed him a brilliant smile and a little wave.
“Don’t you think, Liam?”
“Sorry?” he said, turning back to his father. “I didn’t hear you.”
“There ought to be a museum dedicated to Alaska’s World War II effort.”
Liam cut a piece of steak. “Why not?”
“Really,” Charles insisted. “The Alcan was built to support Lend-Lease planes to Russia and China. The war in the Aleutians drew enough Japanese strength north to make the victory at Midway possible.” He was at his most winning and it was all directed straight at Jo Dunaway, who was looking, in spite of herself, a little dazzled. Although that could have been the face Jo always put on when she got ready to seduce more information out of a source than they had previously known they had. According to Wy, such sources were legion, and Jo left them all lamenting their failure to recognize this fact.
“Maybe you could get in touch with the air museum in Anchorage,” Jo said. “They’re underfunded and going out of business every other week. If you could find a sponsor, they’d probably greet you with open arms.”