Patrick Lee: The Breach

All of that would end, the hour he set foot in his old world again.

For that reason, if for no other, he thought he knew which way he was leaning.

He unzipped his bag, pulled on his pants and boots, and swung his feet out onto the ground. The grass, soft the night before, now crunched beneath his treads. He stood and stretched, then knelt and took from his backpack his propane burner and metal cup. A moment later the blue flame was hissing beneath the water for his coffee. Waiting for it, he wandered to the drop-off overlooking the valley, its depths now revealed in the crystal air.

He stopped.

For a moment he could only stare, too disoriented even to blink.

On the valley floor lay the wreck of a Boeing 747.

Travis packed everything within ninety seconds, including the tent. He set off along the valley's rim at a sprint.

How could it be here?

How could it be here without choppers hovering over it, and a hundred rescue specialists armed with acetylene torches and schematics cutting carefully into the fuselage in a dozen places?

How could it be here alone?

The valley wall below his campsite had been too steep to descend, but half a mile northwest he could see a concavity where it shallowed to something like a forty-degree incline. Still steep as hell. He'd have to be careful to avoid going ass over pack all the way down, breaking every limb in the process. A lot of help he'd be to survivors then, if there were any.

As for help, he was it, at least for now. He had no means to call anyone. The cell phone in his pack had become useless forty miles out of Fairbanks, and his CB-the preferred mode of communication on the Dalton Highway-was thirty-six miles away, in the parking lot of the Brooks Lodge and Fuel Depot.

As he made his way along the precipice, his eyes hardly strayed from the impossible vision below.

The pilots had tried to land-that much was clear. The wreck lay pointing down the length of the valley as if it were a runway. Behind where it had come to rest, deep furrows were gouged into the earth for more than three hundred yards. Halfway along this scarred path lay the starboard wing, sheared from the plane by a stony pillar that had weathered the impact just fine. At the torn wing stub jutting from the fuselage, where fuel and scraping metal must have converged, only blind luck had prevented an inferno: the remainder of the plane's long skid had taken place across a snowfield that covered the valley floor.

The rest of the craft was intact, more or less. The tail fin had snapped and lay draped on the port-side stabilizer like a broken limb held on by skin alone. The fuselage had buckled in three places, wiring and insulation curling from foot-wide vertical ruptures. Through these openings Travis could see only darkness inside the plane, though at this distance even a brightly lit interior would have shown him nothing.

He saw no movement in or around the wreck, and no sign that there'd been any. Nobody had dragged supplies out of the plane and set up shelter in the open. Had they simply sheltered in the fuselage? Were they too injured to move at all?

Distance and perspective made it pointless to look for footprints. The snowfield, glazed by the temperature drop, was almost blinding to look at, and from six hundred feet above it offered no contrast. There was no way to tell if anyone had left the wreck to hike out in search of help.

Help. That notion brought him back to the situation's most confusing aspect. How did a 747 crash without anyone coming to its aid for-how long? Jesus, how long had this thing been here?

Three days. The metal shriek in the thunderstorm came back to him with clarity. He'd heard the damn thing crash.

Three days, and nobody had found the wreckage. Nobody had even come looking-at no point during his hike had he heard the drone of a search plane or the rattle of helicopter rotors. He couldn't square it. This wasn't a single-prop Cessna that had taken off without a flight plan and disappeared. Airliners had redundant communication systems: high-powered radio, two-way satellite, and probably a couple other kinds he didn't even know about. Even if all of those instruments had failed, the tower at Fairbanks International would have logged the plane's last known position. There should have been an army looking for it within the hour.

Travis reached the inlet in the valley wall, a grassy funnel that extended to the flat bottom below. The slope was more severe than he'd supposed, but there was nothing kinder for miles in either direction. Tackling it in a straight line to the bottom would be suicide, even here, but a sidelong transit looked feasible. He stepped onto the grade and found its surface to be as obliging as he could have hoped for: soft enough to allow traction without yielding in a muddy slide. He found that if he leaned into the hillside and braced a hand on the grass, he could make good progress without risking his balance.

Fifteen minutes later, sprinting hell-bent alongside one of the gouges in the valley floor-up close, the torn furrow was deep and wide enough for a Humvee to drive in-he passed the starboard wing, flung like a broken piece of a toy against the formation that had severed it.

He crossed onto the snowfield and was immediately enveloped by the smell of jet fuel. The snow was saturated with it. Every depression his boots made in the surface instantly pooled with the pink liquid.

The airliner was less than a football field ahead now, pointed away down the valley and rotated a few degrees counterclockwise, so that its left side-with the wing intact-was more visible than the right.

So far, no tracks in the snow.

Ahead, the tail loomed over the valley floor, four stories above Travis's head, even with its fin broken. The aircraft lay canted to the left by the weight of the port-side wing, both engines of which were submerged in the deep snow. He passed the tail and stopped ten yards shy of the wing, between the twin ruts carved by the engines' passing.

All three of the fuselage ruptures he'd seen from his campsite were on this side of the plane. The nearest, just steps away, was wide enough to admit him. Even from here, the darkness beyond the tear was featureless. The windows were even less help: tilted downward, they offered only a reflection of the snow.

Travis inhaled deeply and shouted, "Is anyone there?"

His echo came back in distinct bounces. There was no other reply.

He went to the opening, tested the strength of the metal on both sides of it, and pulled himself into the plane.

It wasn't an airliner.

Row upon row of instrument stations filled the space Travis had entered, a claustrophobic version of NASA's mission control that extended from the tail of the plane to a bulkhead thirty feet forward of his position. Swivel chairs were bolted to the floor at each terminal; everything else in the room lay in ruins, heaped against the left wall, the low end of the tilt.

The smell of fuel, still intense, gave way to something fresher. Familiar, too. In the close darkness, speared by shafts of window glare that only made seeing harder, he identified the scent just a breath before he saw its source.

Blood. Pooled beneath the tumble of debris. Pooled beneath his feet.

His stomach constricted; he turned to the rupture in the wall, thrust his head outside for fresh air and got a lungful of fuel vapor. It helped. Forcing control, his breathing shallow, he pulled back inside.

He held up a hand against the glare and scrutinized the disarray for what he knew must be there.

He saw them immediately.

A dozen bodies lay among the debris.

Atop the debris, actually. Which was strange.

He moved closer, saw the reason for it, and felt ice in his stomach where the nausea had just been. They hadn't died in the crash. Each victim had taken two bullets to the temple, tightly clustered.