“I know that, Liam. I’m not doing this because I want to; I’m doing this because I’ve been ordered to.”

“Is it because the father of the guy who’s going to be your boss was one of the crew members?”

“No,” Charles said. He shook his head. “If only it were that simple.”

Trust builds trust. “Does it have something to do with the fact that the service records of the crew are classified?”

Charles regarded him with exasperation and, if Liam was not mistaken, maybe even some pride. “So you know that, do you?”

“I do.”

Charles looked at the file, and set it to one side. Elbows on his knees, he linked his hands and stared at them. “The copilot’s name was Lt. Aloysius March, and yes, he was General March’s father. But there were two other members on board that flight. One was the pilot, a Capt. Terrance Roepke. The other was a navigator, a Sgt. Obadiah Etheridge.”

“Where were they going?”

“Officially? Krasnoyarsk.”

“And unofficially?”

“Oh, they were going to Krasnoyarsk, all right. After they had refueled, they would have continued on to Attu, and made a big circle back to Anchorage by way of Dutch Harbor.”

“They were hunting.”

Charles nodded. “For the Japanese fleet. It was right after-”

“Pearl Harbor!”

“Who’s telling this story? Buckner and Eareckson and the rest of them were expecting an invasion at any moment. They wanted intelligence. This flight wasn’t the only one of its kind.”

“What makes this one special?”

Charles was silent for a long moment. Liam kept quiet, thinking that if he did so he might actually hear the truth.

“There was reason to believe,” Charles said, very carefully, “that there was a spy on board.”

“What kind of a spy? A Japanese spy?”

“A German.”

This was starting to sound like the script for a movie. “I still don’t get this mad rush to recover the wreckage. Let it lie, Dad, and the story will die with it.”

“Orders. From General March himself.” Charles smiled thinly. “We don’t know which member of the crew was a traitor.”

Understanding came at last. “And General March is afraid it is his father.”

“Yes.”

“Which would not be good for his confirmation hearing.”

“No. And then there’s that damn gold piece.”

“Why does it bother you so much?”

“I’m worried there might be more of it,” Charles said in a level voice. “And if there was more-”

“You’re worried about what it was going to be used for,” Liam said. “Smuggling? Spying? Sabotage?”

Charles nodded. “Any or all of the above.”

“There was more gold, once,” Liam said, and had the satisfaction of seeing his father look surprised.

“How do you know?”

Liam told him, and at the end said, “May I see the file?”

Charles hesitated for only a moment before handing it over.

Only one of the names of the two people who had witnessed the crash surprised him.

December 19, 1941

We go tomorrow. Its cold as hell. Peter showed me a poem by this guy Service which is about another guy named Mcgee who climbs into the furnace of a ship to get warm. Man if there was a ship with a furnace around here Id climb into it too.

We got the briefing on the route this morning. Supposed to be CAVU all the way. The Bering Strait is frozen over so it fucking well better be clear as a bell or were not going to know which way is up. The forecast calls for clear but this weather can turn completely around in twenty minutes or less you just never know. I asked Roepke what our mission was and he put his hands over his ears and looked under his bed. I don’t think Hitler gives a shit where were going. But the emperor of Japan might so maybe hes right. They told us to pack enough for a week so I reckon we won’t be gone long.

No letter from Helen. No letter from Mom. I dont know whats going on but its a real war now and I cant think about that. There might be something I can do though. Ive got to try anyway.

Peter gave me a present of a brown leather valise. Its old but nice and it looks smaller than it is. Ill have to recalculate the fuel load.

NINETEEN

Eric Mollberg’s small, neat house perched on the extreme edge of the bank of the Nushugak River, where it looked as if it was of two minds, either to take flight or to topple down the cliff. It had a yard full of outbuildings, and a power line looped its way down the driveway between poles. A snow machine sat next to Eric’s dirty white pickup, which Liam recognized on sight from having pulled it over half a dozen times since he’d come to Newenham. Next to the pickup was a small drifter on a trailer. The name of the drifter was theMary M.

A red Nissan longbed with a white canopy was parked in back of the boat. “Shit,” Liam said, and parked in back of Eric’s truck.

“It’s open,” he heard Moses yell when he knocked, and he went in.

The kitchen had that thin layer of grime and that faint odor of fried everything associated with many men who live alone. That said, the dishes weren’t piled too high in the sink and Liam wasn’t afraid to take the seat opposite Eric, who sat nursing a mug in his gnarled hands. “Eric,” he said.

“Liam,” Eric Mollberg said without looking up.

Liam nodded to Moses. “What’s up?”

“You still got that gold piece?”

“Turned it over to the air force.”

“There was a bunch more where that came from.”

“I was getting there.”

“I figured. That’s why I came out here.”

They both turned to look at Eric, who seemed to shrink visibly in his chair. “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said, his voice quavering.

Liam stifled a sigh. The annals of criminal investigation were riddled with pleas of “I didn’t mean to do it.” If everyone who hadn’t meant to do it hadn’t actually done it, law-enforcement agencies all over the world could go to half-strength and no one would ever notice the difference. He got out his notebook, in which he rarely wrote a word but which worked remarkably well to fascinate and intimidate suspects. “Can you tell us about it, Eric?”

He was in love with her, with Lydia, madly, passionately, crazily in love. So were most of the junior and senior men at Newenham High School. Might have been because there were five guys for every one girl. Might have been because she was just so damned pretty. Lydia Akiachak was the belle of Newenham High School, and she had picked him. She’d picked him to take her to the Christmas dance at the high school, and after the dance she hadn’t said no when he suggested driving out River Road to watch the northern lights. There was a place where they went to park, and somebody had been out to the end of it that morning and told him that the snow was packed down enough to make it there. He didn’t care if they never made it back.

So there they were, and just about the time things were getting interesting they saw the fireball. They drove back into town and told the first pilot they found, Bob DeCreft, who was two days away from leaving after he’d joined up. Bob went up to take a look, and when he got back told them the wreckage was right on the top of Bear Glacier but that it was about to slide into a crevasse, and that there was nothing they could do. But Lydia, she was that kind of girl, she wanted to check for survivors, even though Bob told her there couldn’t be any out of that wreck. What about parachutes? she said. What if there’s somebody hung up on the edge of the mountain, just waiting for us to come get them?

So they went. Bob said they were nuts and he refused to go with them, but he loaned her his bibs and boots and they drove straight from the airstrip to Icky and then up the trail to the little airstrip the CCCers had put in the summer of ’38, back when they were surveying the refuge. It wasn’t a long hike after that, and what with all the lights it was bright as day out so they couldn’t get lost. The glacier wasn’t that hard to climb, maybe because the snow was piled so high along the sides and it was firm enough not to go through when they walked on it.