S. Stirling: Dies The Fire

Boise Municipal Airport, Idaho

Tuesday, March 17th, 1998

6:15 p.m., MST

Change minus one hour

M ichael Havel pulled his battered four-by-four into the employees' parking lot, locked up and swung his just-incase gear out of the back, the strap of the pack over one shoulder and the gun case on the other. It was a raw early-spring Idaho afternoon, with the temperature in the low fifties; the light had a cool, bleakly clear quality, as if you could cut yourself on the blue of the sky.

He walked quickly across to the door marked "Steelhead Air Taxi" and opened it with three fingers and an elbow, whistling a Kevin Welch tune under his breath. Inside he set the gear down on a couple of chairs-the all-up weight was nearly eighty pounds-and opened his heavy sheepskin jacket, stuffing his knit cap into one pocket.

That left his black hair ruffled the way it always did, and he smoothed it down with the palms of both hands. The air here smelled a bit of burned fuel and oil, which couldn't be helped around an airport.

"You said the bossman had something for me, Mellie?" he asked the secretary as he went to the pot on the table in the corner and poured himself a cup.

The coffee was Steelhead Air Taxi standard: oily, bitter and burnt, with iridescent patches of God-knew-what floating on the surface. He poured half-and-half in with a lavish hand until it looked pale brown. This was an informal outfit, family-run: Dan and Gerta Fogarty had flown themselves until a few years ago; there was Mellie Jones, who was Gerta's aunt; and six pilots, one Mike Havel being the youngest at twenty-eight, and the most recent hire.

"Yup," the white-haired woman behind the desk said. "Wants you to hop some passengers to a ranch field in the Bitterroot Valley, north of Victor. The Larssons, they're visiting their holiday place."

Havel 's eyebrows went up; it was a damned odd time of year to be taking a vacation there. Tail end of the season for winter sports, but still plenty cold, and the weather would be lousy. Then he shrugged; if the client wanted to go, it was the firm's job to take him. Steelhead Air did a little of everything: flying tourists, fishermen and Whitewater rafters into wilderness areas in summer, taking supplies to isolated ranchers in the winter with skis on the planes instead of wheels, whatever came to hand. There was a lot of unroaded territory around this neck of the woods. He glanced at the wall clock. It wasn't long to sunset; call it six forty-five, this time of year. Two hundred forty ground miles to the Montana border, a little more to wherever the Larssons had their country place, call it two, three hours:

"They've got landing lights?" he said.

Mellie snorted. "Would Dan be sending you if they didn't?"

He looked over her shoulder at the screen as he sipped the foul sour coffee, reading off the names: Kenneth Larsson, his wife, Mary, son and daughter Eric and Signe, both eighteen, and another named Astrid four years younger.

"Larsson: Larsson: from Portland, businessman?" he said. "Heard the bossman mention the name once, I think."

Mellie made an affirmative sound as she worked on her PC.

"Old money, timber and wheat-then Ken Larsson tripled it in high tech. Used to hire us regular, back before 'ninety-six, but not lately. Hasn't brought the family before."

Havel nodded again; he'd only been flying for Steelhead since the spring of '97. It was nice to know that Dan trusted him; but then, he was damned good if he said so himself, which he didn't. Not aloud, anyway.

He went through into the office. Dan Fogarty was sitting and chatting with the clients while Gerta worked behind piles of paper on the desk. There were wilderness posters and models of old bush planes and books on Idaho and the Northwest on shelves. And a faint meowing:

That was unusual.

The Larssons' youngest had a cat carrier on her lap; the beast's bulging yellow eyes shone through the bars, radiating despair and outrage. It wasn't taking the trip well; cats seldom did, being little furry Republicans with an inbuilt aversion to change. Judging from an ammonia waft, it was-literally-pissed off.

The kid was unusual as well, all huge silver-blue eyes and long white-blond hair, dressed in some sort of medieval-looking suede leather outfit, her nose in a book-an illustrated Tolkien with a tooled-leather cover. She had an honest-to-God bow in a case leaning against her chair, and a quiver of arrows.

She kept her face turned to the print, ignoring him. He'd been raised to consider that sort of behavior rude, but then, she was probably used to ignoring the chauffeur, and his family hadn't had many employees.

Havel grinned at the thought. His dad had worked the Iron Range mines from the day he got back from Vietnam and got over a case of shrapnel acne picked up at Khe Sanh; his father had done the same after getting back from a tour of Pacific beauty spots like Iwo Jima, in 1945; his father had done the Belleau Wood Tour de France in 1918 before settling down to feed the steel mills; and his father had gone straight into the mines after arriving from Finland in 1895. When the mines weren't hiring, the Havel men cut timber and worked the little farm the family had acquired around the turn of the century and did any sort of honest labor that fell their way.

Kenneth Larsson matched the grin and stood, extending a hand. It was soft but strong; the man behind it was in his fifties, which made him twice Mike Havel's age; graying blond ponytail, shoulders still massive but the beer gut straining at his expensive leather jacket, square ruddy face smiling.

"Ken Larsson," he said.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Larsson. Havel 's the name- Mike Havel."

"Sorry to drag you out so late in the day; Dan tells me you were on vacation."

Havel shrugged. "It's no trouble. I wouldn't be bush-flying out of Boise for a living if I didn't like it."

That brought a chuckle. You can see he's the type who likes to smile, Havel thought. But he hasn't been doing a lot of it just lately, and that one's a fake.

" Midwest?" Larsson said shrewdly. That was a lot to pick up from a few words. " Minnesota? Got some Svenska in there? We're Swedes ourselves, on my side of the family."

Not much of a surprise, with a moniker like that, Havel thought. Aloud he went on: "Not too far off, both times. Michigan -Upper Peninsula, the Iron Range. Finn, mostly, on my father's side. Lot of Swede in Mom's father's family- and her mother was Ojibwa, so I'm one-quarter."

He ran a hand over his jet-black hair. "Purebred American mongrel!"

" Havel 's an odd name for a Finn," Larsson said. "Czech, isn't it?"

"Yeah. When my great-grandfather got to the Iron Range about a hundred years ago, the mine's Bohunk payclerk heard 'Myllyharju' and said right then and there: 'From now on, your name is Havel!'"

That got a real laugh; Signe Larsson looked charming when she smiled.

"My wife, Mary," Larsson went on, and did the introductions.

Her handshake was brief and dry. Mary Larsson was about forty, champagne-colored hair probably still natural, so slim she was almost gaunt. She had the same wide-eyed look as her younger daughter, except that it came across as less like an elf and more like an overbred collie, and her voice was pure Back Bay Boston, so achingly genteel that she didn't unclench her teeth even for the vowels.

That accent reminds me of Captain Stoddard, Havel thought; the New Englander had led his Force Recon unit across the Iraqi berm back in '91. He had that thin build, too.

The son and eldest daughter were twins; both blue-eyed with yellow-blond hair, tall-the boy was already his father's six-two, which put him three inches up on Michael Havel, and built like a running back. Eighteen, the same age as Mike had been when he'd left the Upper Peninsula for the Corps, but looking younger, and vaguely discontented. His sister: