Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

As they approached the bluff and the remains of the tiny settlement, Liam wondered why its inhabitants had left. Had the salmon deserted them, too? Or had they been chased off by another, bigger, stronger clan who wanted the site for their own? Had thegussukbrought annihilation in the form of measles or influenza? He remembered reading in Alaska history class about the great flu epidemic of 1919, as terrible in Alaska as it was worldwide, how it had wiped out entire villages.

He saw Wy's cub, 78 Zulu, on the ground at one end of the bluff, and nearly swallowed his tongue. “We're going to land there?” he managed to croak.

She ignored him. They circled once over the camp and what Liam saw made him forget his fear for the second time. “Hey!”

“I see her!” Wy yelled over the sound of the engine. She banked to line up with the edge of the bluff and throttled back so far Liam thought the engine had died. They touched down lightly and rolled to a halt. Liam was out of the plane the instant it stopped moving and his longs legs ate up the ground between the bluff and the tents in seconds.

He knelt next to Prince, who was lying on her back, half in and half out of one of the tents, her hat a few feet away. “Prince? Diana?” He felt her throat for a pulse, and was infinitely relieved when it thudded against his fingertips.

Wy went past him and bent over the man.

“Is he alive?”

“Yes.”

Prince's eyes opened. “Whozzit?”

“It's Liam Campbell, Diana, and Wy Chouinard. You're at the village site with… ah…” He looked at Wy for help.

“Professor McLynn,” she said, and helped McLynn, groaning, to a sitting position. The left shoulder of his khaki shirt was stained with blood, which did not obscure the neat hole through his sleeve.

Prince sat up on her own. Her hand went to her head and she groaned. “Damn. I have got the worst headache.”

She reached up. Liam caught her hand. “Let me look.”

The hat and her thick hair had cushioned most of the blow, but there was a goose egg, swollen and tender, swelling her scalp. “Somebody clobbered you a good one.” He sat back on his heels. “What happened? Can you remember?” Head injury was frequently associated with short-term memory loss; he hoped that was not the case here.

He watched her struggle to regain some kind of composure. “I don't know. Wait a minute.” She closed her eyes briefly, opened them again. “There was a four-wheeler. When we landed.”

“Where?”

She pointed with a shaking finger, and he got up and walked around the tent. There were fresh tracks, but no four-wheeler. He returned to Prince. “How long ago?”

She looked at the no-nonsense watch with the large round face and the big numbers strapped to her left wrist. “I don't… Fifteen minutes. Thirty. Maybe an hour? We were late getting off from Newenham, I had to preflight the Cub.” Prince sighed, looking suddenly tired, and closed her eyes. “We saw the four-wheeler from the air. He was hiding inside the tent. He clobbered me with something, I don't know what. Felt like a sledgehammer. That's all I remember.”

There wasn't any point in asking her if she recognized the guy; she was too new to the area. McLynn might have, though. “Mr. McLynn?”

The man's voice was faint but definite. “Professor McLynn.”

“Professor McLynn, did you see who shot you?” McLynn muttered something inaudible. “I beg your pardon?”

McLynn opened his eyes and shouted, “Miserable grave robber!”

“Did you see who it was, sir? Did you recognize him?”

Wy pressed him forward to glance down at his back, and he gave an involuntary, pain-filled groan.

“Wy? How's he look?”

She was shaken but her voice was firm. “He's only creased. He can make a fist. He's not bleeding much anymore. His skin is clammy and his pulse is fast but steady.”

“You have a first-aid kit in the plane?” She nodded, and got it. Between them, they patched McLynn's shoulder and Prince's head. Liam closed the kit and stood up. “Wy?”

She looked up from helping McLynn to a seat on a log. “What?”

“Get in the air and start circling the area. Look for a four-wheeler heading away from here. Don't try to stop them, just figure out where they're going.”

Prince got up and moved forward slowly. “It's all right. I can secure the scene. Go with her, sir.”

He gave her a sharp glance. “Are you sure?”

“I'll be all right. I'll secure the scene.”

For the fifth time that day Liam got into an airplane. This time his rage eclipsed his fear of flying, and he waited almost impatiently for Wy to climb into the front seat and start the engine.

Diana Prince was an Alaska state trooper. Nobody, nowhere, nohow assaulted an Alaska state trooper and got away with it. Liam wanted this perp's scalp, and he wanted to be the one personally to take it. “Come on,” he barked. “Let's get the lead out.”

Wy let down the flaps and pushed in the throttle and the Cub shot off the edge of the bluff, dropped a little and then grabbed for air and soared. “Don't get too high,” Liam yelled. “Make a circle close in first. Then move out, a little at a time. I don't want to miss anything.”

She nodded and banked left. Liam set his teeth and held on to his seat and stared out the left window. The area beneath them unfolded like an uneven patchwork quilt made of silver and green. Sections of river, flashes of streams, glints of lakes alternated with stands of cottonwood, poplar, aspen, birch and evergreen. Diamond willow bordered swamp, swamp edged lakes, lakes flowed into streams and rivers, and, “There!” In a move reminiscent of their experiences herring-spotting the previous spring, Liam hit Wy on the shoulder and pointed. “Right there!”

A four-wheeler trundled over the top of a rise in front of them. Wy dropped down to a hundred feet and roared right over the top of it. The driver cast a white-faced look over his shoulder and gunned the motor.

“Do you know him?” Liam yelled. Wy shook her head. “Go around again!”

She nodded to show she'd heard, and banked left to make a wide circle around the man on the fleeing four-wheeler.

Liam unsnapped his holster and pulled his weapon with his right hand. With his left he reached for the fastening on the door, folding the top half up until it latched against the underside of the left wing. Below, brush and trees and ponds and streams slid past at an unhealthy rate of speed.

Wy's head jerked around, even as they regained level flight. “What the hell are you doing, Campbell?”

“Find me a lake in front of him. Drop down as low as you can without landing and throttle back as far as you can without stalling!”

“Liam-”

“Just do it!”

She twisted her head enough to see his weapon, a ninemillimeter automatic, now stuffed into a gallon-size freezer Ziploc bag he'd pulled from the box of essentials she kept in back of the passenger seat, including a roll of duct tape, which he used to tape the bagged pistol to his right hand. With his left hand he folded down the bottom half of the door. Wind and the noise of the engine howled through the plane.

“No!” Wy shouted. “Liam, you can't! Don't-”

“You're working for me, Chouinard! Find me that goddamn lake or I'll jump right here!”

Her hands moved and the Cub took a nosedive, this time the throttle going back so far he thought for a fleeting moment she'd cut fuel entirely. They dropped to fifty feet above the deck, drifting above the ground like a kite.

Liam was terrified and furious and grimly determined. If all they did was follow, either the four-wheeler or the Cub would run out of gas. If it was the four-wheeler, the Cub still had no place to land nearby and the driver could disappear into the brush. If it was the Cub, the four-wheeler could make its escape while they were refueling in Newenham. A man was dead and two people had been assaulted, and Liam simply couldn't take the chance that the man on the four-wheeler, at the very least a material witness and at most the perpetrator himself, would get away.