Dana Stabenow - Better To Rest

“What was all that about?”

“None of your goddamn business either,” she snarled. “Just so you know, Campbell, that family business doesn’t extend to your friends.”

“Okay,” he said, and refrained from any comments about younger men because it seemed safer. He made a mental note to call Jim back at his earliest opportunity.

“What do we do now?” she said, seeming to master her rage.

“I don’t know about we, ” he said. “I’m going out to the base.”

“Can I come?”

“No.”

The base officer quarters was of a piece with the rest of Chinook Air Force Base, freshly painted and tidy, the sidewalks neatly shoveled and the storm windows fastened down. He found Charles in the same room he had stayed in that summer. The colonel was surprised to see him and, Liam thought, somewhat wary. “Come on in,” he said.

Liam closed the door behind him. “What’s with the crash site, Dad? What do you expect to find?”

“I expect to find the bodies of three men who died serving their country in time of war,” Charles said.

“One of whom fathered the man currently nominated for the air force spot on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Charles looked startled and then rallied. “Who he happens to be related to doesn’t lessen his sacrifice.”

“No,” Liam admitted. “But there’s something else.” He was suddenly sick of the dance they always did. “Ah, hell, Dad. Wild Bill Hickok died in 1876.”

Charles was taken aback. “I- What?”

“The coin we found with the arm was minted in 1921.”

“Oh,” Charles said blankly. A sudden and unexpected grin spread across his face. “I never was a very good liar.”

Liam sat down without invitation in the room’s only chair. “Unless you’re doing something illegal by recovering that plane and the bodies of the crew, and I can’t see how you are, I don’t care why. I just don’t like being bullshitted. I can keep my mouth shut.” After last summer, Charles had to know that was the absolute truth. “Tell me enough so that I’ll want to and I’ll go away. Or I’ll buy you a beer, or take you caribou hunting, or whatever you want.”

They stared at each other in silence. It was hard to tell which of them had been more surprised by Liam’s words.

Finally Charles said, “You’d really take me caribou hunting?”

“Sure.” Liam shrugged. “I’ve never been, but there’s a hell of a herd northwest of here, the Mulchatna herd. Hundreds of thousands of them, the Fish and Game’s practically begging people to go shoot some so they won’t eat themselves out of house and home and wind up starving to death.”

The years of armed truce weren’t easy to shake. “I don’t know, Liam, you might shoot me and bury the body, once you got me out there.”

Liam got to his feet, disgusted.

Charles rose, too. “Don’t go, Liam. It was a joke. A bad joke, I admit, but it was a joke. Sit down.” He hesitated. “Please.”

Liam couldn’t remember his father ever having used that word with him before. He sat down again, partly because he wasn’t sure his legs would carry him to the door.

Charles reached for a plain buff file marked Restricted Access in big red letters and held it up. “The official investigation into the crash.”

“What happened?”

“It was too clear.”

“What?”

Charles smiled. “I know, doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? But it was. Unlimited ceiling, fifty-mile visibility. It was too damn clear, and too cold, and the aurora was out in full force, hanging right down to the ground, if you can believe the eyewitnesses. All the colors they come in and all over the sky. There was no distress call from the crew, no indication that anything was wrong.”

“What were they doing so low? And weren’t they a little off course?”

Charles’ laugh was short and unamused. “A little. Their flight plan was for Krasnoyarsk. Instead, they were on a heading for Dutch Harbor. Either their instrumentation was off or they were, or they were just blinded by the lights. A couple on the ground saw the fireball when they impacted, and then a plume high up on the mountain. They called a pilot who was living in Newenham at the time, some Scots name…” He thumbed through the file.

“DeCreft?” Liam said. “Bob DeCreft?”

Charles looked up. “That’s right. How did you know?”

“One of the original Bush pilots. He’d lived here a long time. Go on.”

“DeCreft was in the air within the hour. Said in his interview that he followed a creek up so he wouldn’t get fuddled-his word-by the lights. Said he saw the impact site at the eleven-thousand-foot level, and then where the remains of the plane had fallen three thousand feet onto a glacier and into a crevasse.”

Liam was silent for a moment. “I don’t understand, Dad. Why are you so hot to pull this particular wreck out? Everything Wy said was true; it’ll be difficult and damn dangerous. Not to mention which the weather around these parts is not at its most reliable at this time of year. Your people could be getting themselves into some serious trouble.”

“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?”