William Krueger - Heaven's keep

“I never have.”

“You do okay on roller coasters?”

“Heck, yes.”

“Then you’ll be fine. We’d best be off. Got a lot of territory to cover.” He addressed Quinn. “Any word from the others?”

“Nothing new.”

“Okay, then. Stephen, you want to ride shotgun?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll need eagle eyes.”

“I got ’em.”

“Hop aboard and let’s see what we can see.”

Day Four, Missing 76 Hours

That’s my place down there,” Rude said. He banked the chopper in order for Cork and Stephen to have a better view.

They were flying low over a flat valley that was threaded down the middle by a stream lined with cottonwoods. The floor of the valley was covered with irrigated fields, mostly alfalfa. Rude’s place consisted of a small ranch house, a barn, a corral, and a few outbuildings. From the air, it looked nice and neat. The nearest neighbor was a good half mile distant.

“I call her the Chopping R.” Rude grinned.

“Do you ranch?” Cork spoke into the microphone attached to the flight helmet he wore. Rude had given flight helmets to both him and Stephen. Without them, the noise inside the cabin would have made verbal communication almost impossible.

“Yeah, but I can’t make a living at it. Truth is, around here it’s hard to make a decent living at much of anything, so I do just about everything. In winter, I fly skiers who like the

extreme stuff up to remote slopes. In fall, I fly hunters. In summer, I do some crop dusting. Most of the rest of the time I contract out my services to BHPC.”

“BHPC?”

“Big Horn Power Co-op. I fly their power lines doing inspection or giving a hand with repairs when they need me. My wife’s taking classes down in Riverton to be a teacher. Soon as she’s finished and gets herself a position at a school, things’ll ease up a lot. I’ll be able to spend more time with the ranch.”

“Kids?” Cork asked.

“One. Gorgeous girl. Anna Marie. Six.”

They left the valley, and the land rapidly turned harsh, almost desertlike. The grass was replaced by sand and rock and low-growing cactus and sage. The dusting of snow gave the place the alkaline look of an area where nothing could live. Wide, empty flats lay between ridges of barren stone, and as far as Cork could see in every direction there was no sign of human habitation.

“North section of the Owl Creek Reservation,” Rude said. “Big place, not an acre of it worth shit. Maybe gas or oil underneath, nobody knows. We won’t let anybody go looking.”

“We? Are you Arapaho?”

“On my mother’s side. German on my father’s. Fifty-fifty.”

The mountains loomed ahead, great, hoary giants whose crowns touched the sky. This close they were absolutely forbidding, and Cork felt his hopes take a bitter slide.

The chopper began to bounce and to be shoved right and left.

“Lot of downdrafts and crosscurrents as we head into the mountains,” Rude said. “Can be tricky. You guys okay?”

“Yeah,” Stephen said.

Over his shoulder Rude said something to Cork, but all Cork picked up on the headgear inside his flight helmet was static. He said, “I’m not reading you, Jon.”

Rude made a sign for Cork to whack the side of his flight helmet. When Cork did, he could hear Rude again.

“Sorry,” Rude said. “I’ve been meaning to get that looked at. In the meantime, if you can’t hear, just give her a good smack.” He pointed toward a massive formation in the distance, three peaks joined by a ridge that created a wall across the wilderness. “Up there, that’s Heaven’s Keep. Found a plane in that area yesterday. We thought at first maybe it was the one your wife was on. Turned out to be an old crash site.”

Stephen said, “Why do they call it Heaven’s Keep?”

“Know what a keep is?”

“No.”

“The strongest part of a castle, the part that’s hardest for an enemy to take. Looks pretty formidable, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. But what about the heaven part?”

“I always figured it’s because it’s so high that it feels connected to heaven. That’s my explanation anyway. Now the Arapaho take a whole different approach. They call it Honoocooniinit. Basically means they consider it the devil.”

Below them the land was covered with evergreens and seemed to have become a turbulent sea full of deep plunges and sudden rises that crested in knife-edged ridges of rock. They flew over meadows too small for a plane to land safely where the snow lay drifted deep enough to bury a house. They followed canyons whose rugged walls would smash a plane into small pieces. Over it all loomed Heaven’s Keep, casting a long, dark shadow across the ice-white landscape.

“I’m heading toward the high plateaus just east of Heaven’s Keep,” Rude explained. “There are a few flat crowns up there above the tree line. It’s the most likely place for a plane with engine trouble to attempt a landing. It’s been gone over before, but I’m thinking that something buried in snow might be easy to miss. I’m taking my chopper in for a closer look.”

“What about the black box?” Stephen said.

“The flight recorder? Small charter planes aren’t required to carry them. Or a cockpit voice recorder either. And even if they had one, it wouldn’t be much help in the search, Stephen. What we’ve been trying to get is a signal from the ELT. That’s an emergency locator transmitter. In the event of a plane crash, the ELT is designed to send a signal that satellites can pick up and can be used to triangulate a position.”

“Have you got a signal?” Stephen asked eagerly.

“No. And there are two main possibilities, one good, one not so good.”

“Good news, bad news?” Cork said. “How about the bad news first.”

“That would be that the ELT was destroyed by impact forces.”

“The good news?”

“The plane landed softly enough that the ELT was never activated. That would mean there’s an excellent chance of survivors. That’s what we’re counting on, right?” He gave Stephen a thumbs-up and got one in return.

They climbed rapidly, and Cork’s stomach rolled at the chopper’s pitch. Then Rude leveled out and they were flying over a treeless snowfield.

“If the pilot had any knowledge of the area, he might’ve tried an emergency landing here,” Rude said. “It’s not ideal, but it’s better than most of the other options.”

They flew a hundred feet above the snow, crisscrossing the field, which was several hundred yards wide and nearly a mile long. There were mounds here and there that stood out above the level of the rest of the snow.

“Boulders,” Rude said. “But they’re easier to avoid than a forest full of trees.”

After half an hour, they’d found no sign of the plane and Rude banked north and east, heading toward the next plateau. He spoke over his shoulder again, and again Cork didn’t pick up a clear transmission. He thumped the side of his helmet without effect, then took the helmet off to bang it harder. The cockpit noise was deafening. He gave the helmet another whack, put it back on, and heard Rude clearly this time.

“Ham sandwiches in the basket back there, if you’re hungry,” Rude said. “My wife made them. Plenty to go around. Lemonade, too.”

Cork and Stephen hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Cork found the basket and distributed the sandwiches. There was only the one thermos cup for the lemonade, but Rude said hell, he didn’t mind drinking from the same trough.

They spent the afternoon flying over half a dozen sites, all above the tree line, all possibilities for an emergency landing though none was ideal, and all without a sign of the plane. When he realized fully the enormous difficulty of the situation, the lift of spirit Cork had felt at being involved in the search was replaced by disappointment. He saw the same dismal look gradually filling Stephen’s face.