Skibird, page 6
She turned to scan the horizon.
The Russian Helix helicopter had approached earlier from the southeast, the direction of their Progress Station. Now a plane was coming from that same direction.
Holly followed the direction of her gaze and then slid into action.
“What is this, Romanoff? Did you call for troops?” Holly had a knife up against his throat in one of those moves that Miranda could never follow.
The Helix’s pilots, who’d been eating breakfast while sitting on the edge of the cargo bay in the open side door, twisted to reach into the shadows of the cargo bay behind them.
Andi had a sidearm aimed at the pilot’s face before he could set down his sandwich. “Keep eating. Slowly. You know that it’s bad to eat your food too quickly.” Her voice was pleasant but her gun didn’t waver for an instant.
“Nyet. I did no such thing. It is me coming here. Only me.” Romanoff spoke quickly.
Bridgette was the last to react with a quick, “What the hell, mate?”
Miranda unzipped her parka enough to select a high-power monocular from her crash-site investigation vest. The black dot on the horizon resolved into, “It’s a Basler BT-67, but painted red above and white below.”
“Chinese,” Romanoff spoke in a high thin voice. “They call it a Snow Eagle 601. They must come from Zhongshan Station. It is but a few kilometers from Progress.”
“If you’re so close, why didn’t they tagalong with you?” Holly slid her knife back into its wrist sheath and yanked Romanoff’s parka closed over his throat, which might be her form of an apology.
“We tell no one. It is our plane that is missing and our business alone.”
“Until it crashed on Australian turf. But why is everyone so interested?”
Miranda was the only one facing Romanoff as Holly asked this, everyone else was facing the approaching plane. Many expressions crossed his features faster than she could catalog them. The way he looked from one person to the next reminded her of when one of the island’s deer had slipped into her fenced vegetable garden after she’d accidentally left the gate open.
She hadn’t spotted it until it had eaten its way well down a line of spinach plants. When she’d shouted Hey! it had looked at her in surprise. Then the deer searched all around as if helping her find whoever had eaten half her spinach crop, while its teeth continued to quietly grind up the most recent mouthful. She’d been laughing by the time she’d managed to shoo it out. The deer gave her a look as if she was being unfair.
Romanoff’s wandering attention had fixed on her and she looked away quickly. Human faces were far more uncomfortable to look at than a deer’s. But his last look had included the narrowed eyes, grimly straight mouth, and furrowed brow of the suspicion emoji.
She joined the others in watching the Chinese plane circle and come in for a landing. During breakfast, the Australian Basler had departed to return to Casey, so the airfield was no more than a stretch of ice, a tool shed, and the eight people clustered around the helicopter.
The Hagglunds and helo were all out at the icebreaker and their sounds were drowned out by the steady roar of the Chinese Basler’s five-bladed Hartzell propellers. It lined up on the runway marked by a line of empty steel fuel drums, blackened from the rare times they’d had to have fires lit in them for nighttime operations. The pilot was good and settled neatly on the front wheels, keeping the snow skis retracted on the hard ice runway, letting the speed drop before lowering the tail. The small rear wheel contacted the surface.
They taxied over and shut down close by the group at the helicopter.
8
It was only then that Miranda noticed Holly was missing from their group.
Miranda finally spotted her as she climbed into the Helix helicopter’s cargo bay from the far side behind the pilots. Moving in the shadows, she’d acquired a pair of AK-47 rifles and had squatted to watch and wait. The Russian pilots didn’t notice her in the cargo bay, armed with their own weapons.
Holly was focused on the Chinese Basler, which had been clearly painted in English characters CHINARE for the China Arctic and Antarctic Administration. Once its engine cycled down, the rear stairs folded out and a lone individual descended.
Miranda could see no other heads in the windows down the side of the plane except for the pilots in the cockpit.
Miranda checked on Holly, who quietly set the AK-47s down on the deck before she slipped out the far side of the cargo bay with no one the wiser. She circled around the tail of the Helix helicopter and came up on the lone figure from behind.
“Greetings. I have come to offer the People’s Republic of China’s assistance in the loss of an aircraft.” The woman was several inches taller than herself or Andi and spoke unaccented English. Her hood was back, revealing her Asian features and her black hair cut in a neat bob.
“Fly back where you came from,” Romanoff spoke quickly. “You are not wanted here either. And take away these Americans and Australians with you. It is Russian plane. Ours. No one else.”
Miranda had attempted to correlate rapidity of speech with emotion but had minimal luck with that avenue of research. Excitement, fear, and anger all prompted faster delivery. Perhaps it was the intensity of the emotion that altered the speed of speech? But that didn’t work either. She’d observed that when Holly was most dangerous was when she spoke slowly. Miranda pulled out her personal notebook and crossed out the pages of data she’d collected on this hypothesis, then made a note at the bottom: Insufficient consistency to postulate reliable correlations.
“Well, it’s a regular bash here, isn’t it? Should I fire up the barbie and break out a slab of tinnys?” Bridgette looked from the fast-spoken Russian to the Chinese woman who showed no signs of going back to where she’d come from. “We’ve already got the Americans and Russians. I should have sent invitations. France and Italy are only a quick fifteen hundred kilometers away. Oh, and what about the Japanese? No ride-sharing though as they’re fifteen hundred in the opposite direction. Even under the normal Antarctic cooperation this is quite the gathering.”
“The Americans?” The Chinese woman turned to look at Miranda, Andi, and Mike. She hadn’t spotted Holly standing close behind her. But then she noticed where Miranda was looking and turned to look over her shoulder.
Holly rolled her eyes and Miranda mouthed a Sorry.
“A plane crash. And four Americans,” she turned away from Holly as if she was no threat. “Does that make you Miranda Chase?”
Several things happened at once. Mike shifted to stand partly in front of Miranda. Andi, who had earlier pocketed her sidearm, withdrew it once more. Holly’s knife reappeared in her hand.
“Technically, no. I’ve always been Miranda Chase. I wasn’t made so at this moment.”
“Ah, a real pleasure. I have heard so much about you. It was you who finally, ah, incapacitated my husband, Zhang Ru. I am Wang Daiyu. I am deeply in your debt.” She offered a deep bow of respect.
“I didn’t do that. Andi did,” Miranda rested a hand on Andi’s sleeve.
“You are married to…that?” Andi’s tone was purest disgust.
Daiyu bowed deeply to Andi as well. “I was married to that. He suffered a further, shall we say, accident after his encounter with you and did not survive. The marriage was a purely tactical choice as we needed someone embedded in his household and I was best positioned at the time. It was only for a year but it is not an experience I would care to repeat.”
“He was a very bad man,” Miranda had said so before. While she didn’t like to repeat herself, it felt appropriate under the circumstances. He had sabotaged numerous aircraft and killed numerous people in his climb to power within China’s Central Military Commission.
“He was,” Daiyu agreed. “The world is a safer place without him in it. I was told that there was a significant crash here at Davis, an assessment reinforced by your presence, yet I don’t see an aircraft.”
“It’s at Whoop Whoop,” Holly had moved up so close behind the woman before speaking that Daiyu should have jumped—Miranda would have—but she didn’t.
“Ah, the skiway,” and she turned unerringly to look up at the plateau. “Are we waiting for something before proceeding?”
Andi indicated the Helix pilots who hadn’t finished their breakfast as they’d watched the goings on.
“No! No! No!” Romanoff protested. “Russians only. It is our plane and only we may—”
Mike rested a hand on his shoulder. “Romanoff, old buddy. You should have listened more carefully when Holly was warning you. This is an Australian crash investigation, which we were called in to investigate. You are our guest. Don’t become confused on that point or my lovely Holly will remind you in ways that you’ll find to be exceedingly unpleasant.”
Romanoff yelled at the pilots in Russian, “Strelyat’! Shoot them! Now!”
Several things happened at once.
The pilots grabbed the AK-47s that Holly had set back on the cargo deck earlier.
Bridgette the station manager dropped to the ice.
Mike pulled Romanoff backward a stumbling step so that the man was directly between the two pilots on one side with Mike and herself on the other.
Andi and Daiyu both pulled out handguns and aimed them at Romanoff’s head.
Everyone froze and was so silent that Bridgette shifting to look up from where she sprawled was the loudest noise.
Holly strolled up to Romanoff, completely ignoring the pair of rifles tracking her every step.
“You are not a smart man, comrade. There is only one person in charge here and it isn’t you or me. It’s her,” Holly nodded toward Miranda.
Miranda smiled back. She’d forgotten that in the flurry of harsh words and emotions that had been going on since the moment they’d landed. She also noted that Holly had been speaking very slowly.
Holly returned the smile before facing Romanoff once more. “You might want to remember that, comrade.” Then she reached into the pocket of her big parka and pulled out two curved AK-47 magazines.
Miranda looked at the pilots. In the momentary fray, neither had noticed there were no magazines in their rifles.
Holly tapped them lightly on Romanoff’s chest, then offered a hand to help Bridgette back to her feet. She handed over the two magazines. “Next time your find a nice hole in the ice, feel free to drop these in it.”
“With pleasure,” Bridgette took them and walked away—she didn’t look very steady on her feet to Miranda.
Mike patted Romanoff’s shoulder again as if nothing had happened. “I did mention that you were our guest, didn’t I, Romanoff?”
Wang Daiyu and Andi were the last ones to lower and pocket their weapons.
The pilots put away their empty rifles and began preflighting the helo. Holly waved the rest of them aboard as if she was the hostess before she and Mike trotted over to the storage shed to retrieve their packs.
After speaking with Bridgette, Daiyu told her own plane’s pilots that they could wait in the station. Then she climbed aboard the Russian helicopter as if it was the most normal event of the day.
9
Miranda wasn’t sure what she expected as she watched out the window of the Helix helicopter as it climbed from Davis Station up to the Whoop Whoop Skiway, but it wasn’t what she saw.
The first twenty kilometers they passed above were rugged rocky terrain. The bedrock of Antarctica hadn’t been scraped smooth by millions of years of ice, instead it looked as if it had been broken. It was mostly devoid of snow or ice. The patches of white were few and scattered at this time of the summer. There were also several lakes—some frozen over, some not.
When they reached the edge of the ice sheet, it was as abrupt as a slap. A wall of jumbled white, the shattered leading edge, climbed five hundred meters in the space of ten kilometers. The top of the ice sheet wasn’t a smooth surface either. It was an undulating plain of stark white that climbed forever, empty, into the distance.
She knew this wasn’t true. Fourteen hundred kilometers away lay the Russian Vostok Station at an altitude of thirty-five hundred meters, above eleven thousand feet.
And it was all ice.
Often dubbed The Pole of Cold, it was the consistently coldest place on Earth. The ice there was thicker than most mountains. The land itself was thousands of feet below sea level, covered with miles-thick ice.
She felt a shiver from thinking about it. If Antarctica and Greenland melted, practically nothing of her island home would remain except for her house. The lower two hundred and thirty feet would disappear below the waters of Puget Sound. The runway would be too short to land her planes. Also, the island would no longer be able to support all of the animals that now lived there. That would be very sad.
The Davis Plateau Skiway was marked by three small sheds, in colors as bright as the station buildings they’d left behind. The compacted and groomed skiway itself was nearly invisible, a white line that looked little different from the rest of the ice plateau. It was a shade closer to pure white than the blue-white of the surrounding ice and snow. If not for dark markers along each side of the runway, she might not have seen it at all.
The east-west surface of the runway was bisected by an intermittent white line running roughly southeast to northwest. It looked as if someone had skipped a giant stone over the surface, creating shadowed divots in the snow. Then the perspective shifted. Something large had been bounced several times across the surface—a Russian cargo jet.
Beyond the skiway, the intermittent line continued. The helicopter followed the line of dots and dashes—for some were short and others much longer—in the snow for well over a kilometer.
To memorize the pattern, she translated it into Morse Code. She was disappointed when all she was able to spell was THA—dah dit-dit-dit-dit dit-dah—a big hit before the runway, four small skips on the far side, then a slight bounce and a final dah slam down.
THA? Thai Airways short code. An unlikely code to be spelled by a Russian aircraft.
Based on momentum, it should end with a much longer drawn-out final dah as the plane skidded to a stop—and then the wreck itself.
But that final dah was almost short enough to be considered a dit.
The final mark was framed by a single wing and the tail section.
But there was no fuselage or second wing. It was only when the helo had flown over the final truncated dah that she saw what had happened to it. The fuselage, after shedding a wing and its tail, had tumbled into a crevasse two kilometers from the skiway.
She saw the Helix helicopter was settling in to land.
“No! No! Do not land!”
The pilots fed in heavy power and she could see the ice and snow blast against the plane’s wing and tail until it had created a whiteout. The helicopter slowly heaved aloft.
“Why do you say not to land?” Romanoff shouted at her.
“What if we landed in another crevasse, a hidden one?”
He turned pale white, then ordered the pilots to turn back to the skiway and land by the sheds.
It was only as they were landing that Miranda realized she’d shouted her warning in Russian. So much for Holly’s secret. She hoped Holly wouldn’t be too angry about that.
10
“Oi! Who are you lot?”
Holly grinned and looked eager for a replay of this morning at Davis Station.
Miranda didn’t have time for any of that, not with the crash in sight. She stepped forward to address the man and woman who had come out of one of the huts.
“My name is Miranda Chase. I’m the Investigator-in-Charge for the NTSB. I’m here to investigate the crash.”
“Arriving in a Russian helicopter, with a,” the man inspected the emblem on Wang Daiyu’s jacket, “Chinese observer?”
“Yes. This is Wang Daiyu. The Russian is Nikolas Romanoff.”
She spotted him opening his mouth.
“That’s Romanoff like off, not o-v like the czar,” she said quickly to stop him from diverting their attention.
The look that the Australian exchanged with the woman reminded her of Holly preparing for one of her humorous attacks.
Miranda continued her…preemptive strike, barely pausing long enough to acknowledge the metaphor, albeit strictly internally, as highly appropriate.
“First, do you have weather data from before and during the crash? Second, I need a safe passage surveyed to each element of the wreckage.”
“Marla here has the weather data.”
Her tactic had worked. She’d have to remember the power of a preemptive strike. She waved for Holly to accompany Marla to fetch the information, then addressed the man, “Have you mapped a safe route to the crash yet?”
“Aye. It came down quiet, no engine noise, at least not that we heard above the storm. Spotted that broken-off tail section the next morning, and the wing, with no plane attached. Went out there on a snowmobile with ground-penetrating radar to make sure the path was safe.”
“And around to the initial impact point?”
“Aye. If you stay inside the loop of snowmobile tracks we made, you should be safe as houses.”
“How safe are houses in Antarctica? I have no knowledge of such specifics.”
The man looked at her a bit strangely. “Well, a normal house wouldn’t survive a single real storm here. Last night was a baby one, barely crossing sixty knots, summer blizzard. That might strain your council houses more than they’d like.”
“I would therefore prefer to be safer than houses.”
He shook his head as if trying to clear it. “Stay inside the snowmobile tracks. The only crevasse we found is the one the plane fell into. Never had any reason to test the ice sheet so far outside the skiway before. We’ll get ropes and ice gear out to you as quick as we can. You’ll need them to go after the fuselage. We did go down ourselves…well, I did. Better at climbing than Marla. No survivors. I left them in place because, well, shit man. Besides, there’s only the two of us up here prepping the skiway for when the ice runway by the station melts out. No way to retrieve anyone safely with naught but two people.”
