Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

He tossed his hat behind his seat, grabbed with his left hand for the handhold on the interior fuselage above Wy's head and twisted around to extend his left foot between the edge of the fuselage and Wy's seat, over the side, feeling for the tiny, treaded step bolted to the strut. He couldn't find it at first, and the bottom dropped out of his stomach. He forced himself to look down, spot the step and guide his toe to it.

A quick look at Wy showed him a pulse thudding at the side of her neck, her lips pulled into a snarl. Her hands were clenched on the yoke, and her eyes glanced from the dials on the control panel to the terrain below like someone watching a tennis match. His body weight hanging off the left side of the plane threw the trim out of kilter, and the muscles of her wrists stood out in an effort to hold the Cub to its slow turn.

She glanced in his direction and saw him looking at her. She unclamped her jaw long enough to shout over the sound of the wind roaring through the cabin, “If the fall doesn't kill you, Campbell, I will! Lake coming up! I'll count down from five! Jump on my mark!”

He nodded, all the response he was capable of, and settled his right foot on the edge of the fuselage where the door folded down. His left hand gripped the handhold like grim death and his right, awkwardly because of the pistol taped to it, grasped the edge of the door opening.

“When you jump, don't just fall, push yourself away! I'll bank right! Do you understand?”

He nodded.

She trimmed the plane, adjusted the throttle, checked their airspeed, ran a swift calculation for drift. “All right! Five!”

His fingers tightened.

“Four!”

The plane hit a bump and his right hand jerked free. The right side of his body swayed away from the fuselage, his hand flailing wildly for a grip, his body throwing the aircraft even further out of trim because of the wind resistance. Wy cursed and banked a short, hard right, and Liam fell forward, grasping at the doorframe. He'd just gotten hold of it again when his right foot slid off the edge. The entire weight of his body was supported between his left hand on the handhold and his left foot on the strut step.

The plane, mercifully, leveled out. “Three!”

The four-wheeler passed beneath them, the driver a transitory impression of black hair and faded blue plaid, hunched over the handlebars, driving desperately toward an escape that just wasn't in the cards.

“Two!”

Liam looked over his shoulder and wished he hadn't. They were skimming maybe twenty feet above the surface now. A clump of white spruce jumped out in front of them and Wy swore, and the Cub hopped up and over like a startled rabbit. Even at their reduced pace their airspeed felt entirely too fast for comfort, and like warp nine for someone about to jump.

“One!”

Liam summoned up every ounce of courage he had and tightened muscles he didn't even know existed. A flash of silver glinted ahead.

“MARK!”

He closed his eyes and pushed, the hand with the gun in it knocking awkwardly against the side of the plane. The Cub fell away from him as if slapped aside by his thrust alone, and he had just enough time to hear the roar of the engine as Wy shoved the throttle all the way in.

She'd brought the Cub so low he didn't have time to curl into a protective ball, and his back hit the water with a loudsmack!He froze, more at the shock of impact than at the temperature of the water, which seemed almost lukewarm compared to his imagining. The reason became clear when he brought his legs down and touched bottom almost immediately. Shallow waters, even shallow waters in Alaska, had warmed up by the third week of July.

He stood up and his head broke water. The lake came to his chest. An explosion of sound he momentarily mistook for the Cub crashing came from the opposite end of the lake, and he turned to see a terror-stricken moose crash through the brush and vanish into the undergrowth.

His hearing was a little watery. He slapped the sides of his head to clear his ears, and was rewarded by the irritated buzzing of the Cub. He looked around and found it making a tight circle in the air just over a knoll to his right. He waved reassurance, and the Cub waggled its wings and pulled out of the circle to head back in the direction from which they had come, an arrow pointing his way.

Liam took a step forward and found the bottom of the little lake, barely a hundred feet across, rich with mud and rotting vegetation that clung lovingly to his feet. He slogged out eventually. The edge of the lake was not an improvement, a soggy marsh interspersed with pools of water and grassy hillocks.

He plodded grimly on until he reached the top of the knoll Wy had buzzed, where the ground was comparatively drier. The sound of the plane was nearer now, as was the sound of the fourwheeler, and his head cleared the top of the fifty-foot summit to see the Cub make a very low pass over the four-wheeler, only missing the driver's head with the gear by inches. The fourwheeler swerved and almost overturned and then straightened at the last possible moment.

The Cub came back for another pass, and this time, by god, she clipped him, the gear catching one of the handlebars with a thump. This time it was the Cub that wobbled off.

“Wy!” Liam roared, angry and terrified. “Goddamn it, be careful!”

Wy steadied the Cub, banked right and came back for a third pass. The driver of the four-wheeler pressed his chest to the gas tank and opened the throttle up as far as it would go. It hurtled up the slope of the knoll Liam was standing on and directly at him.

“Christ!” Liam yelped, and leapt to one side.

The man at the controls opened his eyes, saw Liam, let out a terrified yell and tried to swerve, but it was too late. Man and machine missed Liam with a foot to spare, and flew over the top of the knoll. They parted company about halfway down and crashed separately into the other side. Liam regained his feet and took the hill back down in giant steps, reaching the man as he got to all fours, shaking his head.

“Halt!” Liam said, and pointed his nine-millimeter.

The pistol was still in its Ziploc bag, still duct-taped to his hand. The man, revealed to be young and Yupik, looked at the gun, looked at Liam and got to his feet to run.

Liam had had just about enough of jumping out of planes and out of the way of oncoming four-wheelers, and he wasn't about to go haring after someone through the Alaskan Bush, especially in July. The mosquitoes had already formed a fierce cloud around his head. He felt for the trigger and fired a round skyward through the plastic. The resulting boom echoed for miles. “You run, by god, I'll shoot your ass off,” he said, and he meant it.

The young man surrendered.

It was a full fifty-two minutes before the four-wheeler rumbled up the slope and onto the surface of the Tulukaruk bluff. Liam was driving. The previous driver was sitting behind, cuffed to the freight rack over the rear wheels. He was a chunky man who looked like he was in his early thirties, with golden skin scarred with acne, shoulder-length black hair that would have been beautiful if it had been washed anytime in the past month, and black button eyes that seemed unable to focus properly. He had a wispy mustache that made him look like a youthful, Yupik version of Wyatt Earp.

Liam was carrying a rifle in the crook of one arm, steering with the other. His brand-new uniform was damp and mud-streaked, there were strands of goose grass adorning his person and he had at least a dozen welts on his face and neck from mosquito bites, but he was at peace with his world.

That lasted as long as it took for him to pull the four-wheeler to a halt in front of the service tent. He dismounted, and Wy took three steps forward, made a fist and hit him in the gut with all the not inconsiderable force in her five-foot-eight-inch, 135-pound frame.