David Dun: Necessary Evil

A distant roaring opened his eyes. It grew and tore across the landscape. He heard it making junk of the trees and covered his ears.

It stopped as quickly as it had come.

Stalking Bear rose and stood motionless, watching. He felt the cool in his lungs and the sweat soaking his shirt in the chill of the howling wind. All around, granite cliffs stood in silent witness to this sudden intrusion into the mountain valley.

Above Stalking Bear, kier, the fish hawk, unfurled its wings and slid through the blowing snow to disappear against the evergreens. In the sudden quiet, a slow shiver of anticipation crept up the old man's spine.

In that instant, he knew. He was being called to a danger he did not understand in a place that had been Tilok forever.

Jessie held on to the back of Kier's coat, maintaining actual physical contact and tolerating this lash-up only because it was the simplest way to be sure that they weren't separated. Endless FBI training exercises had taught her to go from an ordinary state to the edge of an adrenaline high in seconds without the mind-spinning disorientation that ordinarily accompanied the shock of extremes. Being in a howling blizzard and looking for God-knew-what qualified as such a situation. She expected to find spilled jet fuel, with maybe more explosions, and probably people at death's door.

This was not the time or place for a triage operation, Jessie realized. Kier's veterinary medicine would do little for people who needed plasma and blood. It would be agonizing for injured survivors. This was also not the time to allow quibbles with this man to prevent their cooperation in a potential disaster.

Only after Kier turned to take her arm did she realize that she must have been dragging. She tried to concentrate on keeping up with him in the snow, an almost impossible task, for Kier Wintripp was superbly fit.

As she put her head down to gut it out, she glimpsed snow-laden branches low to the ground, probably the firs between the field and Elk Horn Mountain road. The whole area around her sister's home was a jumble in her mind. Grudgingly, she credited Kier with an almost inhuman ability to find his way- and to find people, from the stories Claudie told. Jessie assumed he had a perfect map of this mountainous terrain in his head.

More trees-a wall of them, with heavy brush beneath- slowed their progress. They slid through the dense stuff with a slapping of branches and barely audible crashes in the thickening whiteness. Kier paused. Correcting slightly, he headed off at a new angle-away from the road, she was sure. As they topped a steep rise, thigh deep in snowy windfalls, they spied a giant hole through a thicket of evergreens. It had to be the jet's crash path, if indeed it was a jet.

They were trotting instead of running now, Jessie's bursting lungs filling in short gasps. The brush grabbed at her jeans and jacket. Tough, prickly branches raked her legs and shins.

Kier stopped abruptly. "Through the brush," he said, pointing ahead. "It's big, but it's no 747."

She could see the hole through the forest clearly now. Broken trees lay everywhere along the flight path. A small bunch of evergreens-Jessie thought some sort of fir, each tree about a foot in diameter-had been shattered six feet above the ground. Climbing through the downed trees looked impossible, but Kier scrambled over and under, breaking a trail, pulling and lifting her through the hardest spots.

A silver squirrel with obsidian-bead eyes stood on the remaining stump of a sheared-off evergreen. Apparently his tree had snapped right at the roof of his hollow in the trunk, leaving him miserably exposed, shaking and chattering-the squirrel version of "Oh shit."

They came upon more broken trees, oaks still not completely shed of their leaves. Big pieces of sheet aluminum lay about the ground and among the fractured branches. Everything was frosted with snow. She didn't see the jet engine until she had almost run into it, smoking hot and steaming in the cold. Not more than a few feet away a still-smoldering wing looked like the shredded remains of a popped balloon. They followed the trail of mangled foliage until they saw what looked like the main body of the plane. Squinting in the blinding snow, Jessie saw a blurry scene of shadow and white.

The plane had the sleek look of the private jets used by corporate moguls and Hollywood stars. It was the size of a small commuter jet, perhaps a little shorter than a 737. It lay in a tangle of woody debris and earth, the cockpit partially covered with snow on the windward side, a gaping hole near the tail. The fuselage seemed mostly intact.

Jessie stepped over a shoe containing a foot and a shinbone- nothing more. Trying not to slip on the snow-covered rocks and cluttered debris, she muttered thanks to Kier, who briefly steadied her by her arm. As they drew nearer, they found the body that went with the foot spilling out of the wreckage. Caucasian, maybe in his thirties, dead of multiple, massive injuries.

Jessie whisked snow from his face… and sucked in a lungful of icy air. There, neat and round as a Concord grape, was a bullet hole in his forehead. Little blood stained the snow. He had been shot in the plane before it crashed.

The man wore an empty shoulder holster, reddish-brown, and twisted bizarrely over his chest. Think. Draw your gun. Training took over. Jessie reached under her coat for her 9-mm. semiautomatic, which was housed in its own business-black shoulder holster. Standard issue now was 10-mm., but the recoil was excessive for her light body and she did, after all, spend her time in offices, so carrying a cannon seemed unnecessary. She had never drawn it except to practice.

Breathe deep. Scan. Scan. It was Dunfee shouting in that gravelly, knock-down-a-wall voice she'd never forget. Special Agent Mike Dunfee might as well have been standing behind her. Assuming the stance he'd taught her, adrenaline fluttering her legs and pounding her heart, she pointed her gun directly in front of her and began a 360-degree pivot around Kier. She could see only desolation.

Should she rush into the plane? Better to be careful, she decided as she felt Kier pulling her down into a crouch next to the plane's rear entry. Facing him, she saw calm in his eyes.

"Give me the gun and let me go in there first," he said, nodding at the hulk that had been a jet.

"This is my job."

"Right." He took a deep breath, obviously trying to figure what he should say next.

"Listen. I know you're an FBI agent, but you run computers, don't you?"

"I run computers. You doctor sick animals."

He stared off to the side with his jaw clenched.

"Yeah, well, I hope it doesn't bury you."

"Well, if it does, I died doing my job."

Without saying more, he let his eyes gaze over the landscape, searching, trying, Jessie knew, to devour every inch, to know more than could be known. Kier motioned with his head and they moved just inside the fuselage through the rear hole.

"This is my deal, Kier," she said again, trying to slow him down.

She fought to find the confidence that had gotten her this far in life. She worked with computers because she was good at it, not because she was afraid of the field.

Quickly she surveyed what she could see of the main cabin. In the darkened interior to the left, she could make out a scramble of bodies and debris. Nothing moved. There were papers and blood everywhere. To the right, she found that the tail section contained large plastic pods, most of them broken open and covered with ice. Some were full of documents; others had what looked to be the remains of lab vials. Thousands of small plastic containers were strewn around. Kier was like a shadow standing so close that she could feel his breath as he looked over her shoulder.

"Anybody hear me?" she called.