Ice Hunt
Page 8A groan of metal erupted behind him. Matt rolled around. The entire tilted fuselage of the Cessna canted to the side. A shout of alarm arose from inside. Then, with the popping sound of an opening soda can, the crumpled door broke away.
Mariah reared up, but Matt returned to calm her. He undid the saddle hitch and walked her away, waving Bane off. He settled her at the edge of the clearing, then patted her flank. “Good girl. You’ve earned yourself an extra handful of grain tonight.”
He strode back to the wreckage. The stranger was almost out of the plane. He was able to slide his trapped leg along the edge of the two crammed seats until he reached the open door. Then he was free.
Matt helped him down. “How’s the leg?”
The man tested it gingerly. “Bruised, and the worst damned charley horse, but nothing feels broken.” Now that the man was free, Matt realized he was younger than he first appeared. Probably no more than his late twenties.
As they hobbled away from the wreckage, Matt held out a hand. “Name’s Matthew Pike.”
“Craig…Craig Teague.”
After they were well away from the plane, Matt settled the man to a log, then shoved away his dogs when they came up to nose the stranger. Matt straightened a kink from his back and glanced back to the plane and his dead friend. “So what happened?”
The man remained silent for a long moment. When he spoke, it was in a whisper. “I don’t know. We were heading to Deadhorse—”
“Prudhoe Bay, yes.” The man nodded, gingerly fingering his lacerated scalp. Deadhorse was the name of the airport that serviced the oilfields and township of Prudhoe Bay. It was located at the northernmost edge of Alaska, where the North Slope’s oil fields met the Arctic Ocean. “We were about two hours out of Fairbanks when the pilot reported something wrong with the engine. It seemed he was losing fuel or something. Which seemed impossible since we had just tanked up in Fairbanks.”
Matt could smell the fuel still in the air. They had not run out of juice, that’s for sure. And Brent Cumming always kept his plane’s engine in tiptop shape. A mechanic before becoming a bush pilot, Brent knew his way around the Cessna’s three-hundred-horsepower engine. With two kids and a wife, he depended on that craft for both his livelihood and his lifeline, so Brent maintained his machinery like a finely tuned Rolex.
“When the engine began to sputter, we tried to find a place to land, but by that time we were among these damn mountains. The pilot…he…he tried to radio for help, but even the radio seemed to be malfunctioning.”
Matt understood. There had been storms of solar flares this past week. They messed with all sorts of communication in the northern regions. He glanced back to the wreckage. He could only imagine the terror of those last moments: the panic, the desperation, the disbelief.
The man’s voice cracked slightly. He had to swallow to continue speaking. “We had no choice but to try to land here. And then…and then…”
Matt reached over and patted the man’s shoulder. The rest of the story was plainly evident. “It’s okay. We’ll get you out of here. But I should see about that head wound of yours first.”
He crossed over to Mariah and retrieved the first-aid kit. It was really a full med kit. Matt had assembled it himself, utilizing his experience in the Green Berets. Besides the usual gauze rolls, Band-Aids, and aspirin, he had a small pharmacy of antibiotics, antihistamines, antiprotozoals, and antidiarrhetics. The kit also contained suture material, local anesthetic, syringes, splinting material, even a stethoscope. He pulled out a bottle of peroxide and cleaned the man’s wound.
Matt talked as he worked. “So, Craig, what was your business up in Prudhoe?” he asked, studying the other. The fellow certainly didn’t have the look of an oil rigger. Among such hard men, black oil and grease were indelibly tattooed into the creases and folds of their hands. Contrarily, this man’s palms were free of calluses, his nails unbroken and neatly trimmed. Matt supposed he was an engineer or geologist. In fact, the man had a studious look to his countenance, keenly assessing his surroundings, glancing to Matt’s horse, his dogs, the meadow, and the surrounding mountains. The only place he avoided looking was back to the wreckage.
“SCICEX?” Matt smeared antibiotic cream on the wound, then covered it with a Teflon-coated gauze sponge, wrapping it in place.
“ ‘Scientific Ice Expeditions,’ ” Craig explained, wincing as Matt secured the wrap. “It’s a five-year collaborative effort between the U.S. Navy and civilian scientists.”
Matt nodded. “I think I remember hearing about that.” The group was using Navy subs to collect data from over a hundred thousand miles of ship track in the Arctic, delving into regions never before visited. Matt’s brow crinkled. “But I thought that ended back in 1999.”
His words drew the man’s full attention, his eyes widening slightly in surprise as he turned to Matt.
“Despite appearances,” Matt explained, “I’m Fish and Game. So I’m generally familiar with many of the larger Arctic research projects.”
Craig studied him with cautious, calculating eyes, then bobbed his head. “Well, you’re right. Officially SCICEX ended, but one station—Omega—had drifted into the ice cap’s Zone of Comparative Inaccessibility.”
No-man’s-land, Matt thought. The ZCI was the most remote part of the polar ice cap, hardest to reach and most isolated.
“For a chance to study such an inaccessible region, funding was extended to this one SCICEX station.”
The man laughed, but there was no real humor behind it. “No, not a scientist. I was on assignment from my newspaper. The Seattle Times. I’m a political reporter.”
“A political reporter?”
The man shrugged.
“Why would—” Matt was cut off by the buzzing sound of a plane’s engine. He craned his neck. The lowering sky was thick with heavy clouds. Off to the side, Bane growled deep in his throat as the noise grew in volume.
Craig climbed to his feet. “Another plane. Maybe someone heard the pilot’s distress call.”
From the clouds, a small plane appeared, dropping over the valley but still keeping high. Matt watched it pass. It was another Cessna, only a larger version than Brent’s. It appeared to be a 206 or 207 Skywagon, an eight-seater.