“Which means?” Janelle asked.

“Which means they can’t see us on radar. Radars can’t see through mountains. So, for all they know, we could be landing anywhere in about a three-hundred-mile radius. And if they have a blinding flash of the obvious and realize that their target is an amphibian floatplane, then they’ll realize that there are at least a dozen lakes where we could land, not to mention umpteen little airfields. To them, we are now a proverbial needle in a haystack.”

Jake reached across and gave Rob a high five.

Their descent to Sigutlat Lake was uneventful but stressful, considering that they were making the descent on instruments, and the moon had now set.

“Now, this is where we take a chill pill and just trust the accuracy of the Garmin TAWS,” Rob said.

Jake was transfixed, watching the display, which in three dimensions showed Rob’s banking turn and descent over the lake. It was like watching a video game or a computer flight simulator. This was a true instruments-only landing, with hardly any outside reference. The only light that he could see was the glow from the engine’s exhaust below his window, and just a faint white reflection from the snowy peaks above. As he paralleled the centerline of the lake, Rob had already dropped the flaps and had throttled back.

“Our sink rate is about fifteen feet per second,” Rob reported. Closely watching his instruments, he pulled back on the yoke to flare at the last moment and they touched down on the lake in a very smooth landing. After feeling that, he pulled back the throttle. Once they had slowed to twenty miles an hour, Rob pushed the left rudder pedal to turn and taxi to the center of the lake. Then he shut down the engine. “The gauges show one hundred forty-five pounds of fuel. That will be plenty to get me over to the Dean Channel. As for now . . . It’s too dark to pull up to the shore safely.”

“What about GPS?” Rhiannon asked.

“That won’t tell us where a boat or other obstruction might be. Nor do we know the current condition of the dock. It’s almost pitch dark out there. “

He popped his head out the door for a moment to sniff the air and look around. He was just barely able to discern the shoreline in the distance. The lake was quiet.

Rob closed his door. “The lake is dead calm, and there is no wind. We might drift a bit, but we should be fine. Wake me up at first light.”

With that, he turned off the avionics, took off his headset, reclined his seat, and closed his eyes.

“Cool as a cucumber,” Peter whispered.

“That’s why we hired a professional pilot with thousands of hours of flying time,” Jake replied. “Now, let’s take turns getting some rest, too.”

•   •   •

That same night, Phil was cuddled in bed alongside Malorie. Tree frogs were peeping in the distance. Phil turned slightly, shifted his arm under his pillow, and let out a soft sigh.

“You awake?” Malorie whispered.

“Yeah.” He reached his hand up to gently stroke the side of her head.

After a minute, she turned to face him. “What was that sighing about?”

“I was just praying some more. I’m worried about the lack of progress in booting out the Chinese. I think that we’re going to run out of resistance fighters before they run out of PLA soldiers and vehicles. We’re down to our last four blasting caps. Without force multipliers, we can’t gain the initiative. And if we can’t gain the initiative, then we need to seriously consider cutting our losses and—”

Malorie interrupted. “Is this Phil Adams, the eternal optimist, that I’m talking to, or did some strange man sneak into my bed?”

Phil chuckled.

She kissed him and then said, “We just have to keep up the fight and trust in the Lord. Ultimately, he’s the one who is in control. Not General Zhou, not you, and not me.”

“Amen to that.”

•   •   •

As dawn broke over Sigutlat Lake, Rhiannon could see that they were just three hundred feet from shore. Rob started the plane’s engine. A flock of bufflehead ducks was startled by the noise and took flight. Rob maneuvered the plane to the tiny, deserted fishing village at the southeast corner of the lake. There were still two cabins standing, but what had been the larger lodge was a blackened ruin. A woodstove and a rusty Servel refrigerator body were still standing near the middle of the ruin.

The wooden dock was a T-shape with its shorter leg paralleling the shore. It was weathered to gray but appeared to be in serviceable condition. Rob handed Jake a length of rope and had him step out on the pontoon. After Rob had expertly maneuvered to the side of the dock, Jake was easily able to hop over and tie up the plane to a cleat. After shutting down the engine Rob jumped out and added another mooring line. Surprisingly, there were still some floating plastic buffers, and they were able to shift the plane down the dock to them, to protect the starboard pontoon from any damage. Once the plane was alongside the buffers, they snugged up both lines.

They were almost immediately attacked by mosquitoes. They wore mosquito repellent almost continuously, henceforth. Unloading the plane took a half hour, and then shifting the cargo to the woods behind the village took another two hours. All that they left on board was the one hundred pounds of ammunition and batteries that had been promised to the resistance fighters who would be refueling the Cessna at the mouth of the Dean River.

Rob shook their hands and said, “I’ll be praying for y’all. Before I fly out at sunset tonight, I plan to take a long nap and then do some catch-and-release fishing for rainbow trout with a hand line. I hope that I catch at least one big one. But even if I don’t, I’ll still have bragging rights.”

Rhiannon gave him a questioning look.

Rob clarified. “I mean bragging rights to say that I flew seven hundred miles into occupied Chinese territory while being painted by PLA air defense radars and dropped off a team of scrappy resistance fighters along with their fully automatic weapons, rocket launchers, explosives, and night vision gear. Then I did some fishing before I flew out. What a great story to tell my grandkids, someday.”

Rob grinned and gave them a stylized parade float royalty wave. Then he turned to walk back to the dock whistling “Dixie.”

Janelle readied her pack, filling her canteen with filtered water from the lake, and headed out with a GPS. (Since she was the most confident on a horse in the bush, it was decided that she would be the best one to hike out and lead back the horses.) While she was gone, the others planned to gradually shift the cargo and packsaddles to an agreed location six hundred meters away to a place even deeper in the timber. There, they would make a cold camp, set up thermal camouflage, and wait.

It took Janelle three and a half days to hike thirty-three miles east to the Andy Cahoose Meadow Indian Reserve. The trail was in worse shape than she had remembered it, with a lot of newly downed timber. By prior arrangement, there was a resistance team summer grazing a herd of cattle and a string of packhorses and mules. When she arrived, Janelle met the First Nations husband and wife team, who were camped in a yurt. They saw her walking in and asked, “Are you Janelle?”

“That’s me!”

They wasted no time and soon had two horses saddled, and halters and leads on the rest of the string. While the husband stayed to watch the cattle, his wife, Maggie, would accompany Janelle back to the lake. In addition to their sleeping bags, they each carried an axe and a bow saw to deal with the worst of the downed timber.

With the each horse’s lead tied to the tail of the horse ahead, the pack string looked like a herd of elephants. It took them five grueling days to get back to the cold camp. While they could detour around a lot of the fallen trees, some of them were on steep, rocky, or brushy slopes and had to be cleared. By the time that they reached the camp, Janelle and Maggie were exhausted and ravenous, since they had packed only four days’ worth of food.