“Hey, boss,” she said as Mason got out.
He zipped his uniform jacket to his neck. The damp weather at this elevation had a way of fingering under one’s clothes. He heard the sound of rushing water.
“Crash site is that way.” She pointed toward dense trees and berry scrub brown with autumn leaves. “It went down the gulley screened by that vegetation over there. I couldn’t really see the wreck from up top, but the hunters said the tail of the floatplane is hanging right in the river, the rest is stuck up on a ledge of slippery rock.”
“Those the guys who found it?” Mason nodded toward the two men hunkered inside the marked 4x4.
“Yeah. I got their statements. I asked them to hang around so you could speak to them, if you want. Left them inside the vehicle where it’s warm.”
“Any signs the wreck has been there long?” Mason asked as he made his way toward the screen of trees that hid the ravine. Hubb followed behind him, boots crunching on stones. The rushing sound of water grew louder. Moisture boiled up in clouds behind the evergreens.
“They said it wasn’t all rusted up and stuff. They figure the crash could be fairly recent. Who knows. I saw in the news the other day that a search party found a wreck that was thirty years old. Near Clearwater—found it while they were looking for some other missing plane from Alberta.”
It was Hubb’s failing. Talking too much. She didn’t stop, and it drove Mason nuts.
He parted a section of foliage that Hubb had flagged with strips of fluorescent-orange tape. He stepped through scrub. Holding on to a hemlock branch, he tried to peer down through the bushes into the gorge. His stomach swooped—the ground dropped clean away just ahead of his boot tips. Water rumbled and thundered about forty feet below, throwing up a cast of tiny droplets that clung to everything. To say he was afraid of heights would be an understatement. It was a flaw Mason had managed to hide. Until maybe now, just when he needed to prove himself capable to this new team, and to the townsfolk who were already wary of his ability to handle this remote wilderness post.
“I’ve already put in a call to Cal,” Hubb said cheerily from behind him.
He glanced over his shoulder. “Cal?”
“Kluhane Search and Rescue. Cal Sutton is the manager. We’re going to need SAR techs with ropes and swift-water experience if we want to haul that wreck up that bank. I also put a call in to the Transportation Safety Board.”
He stared at her.
Her cheeks flushed a deeper red. “I . . . uh, Ray—Sergeant Ted Newman, who was here before you—he usually left the SAR tasking to me, so I, uh—”
“So you took the initiative.”
“Correct, but if you’d rather—”
“It’s fine. We’ll stick with the routine. For now.”
Until I’ve been here long enough to figure out how the hell things function up here.
She swallowed, and her eyes lost their smile. “Yes, sir.”
Mason clearly had big shoes to fill. He’d arrived only two weeks earlier, and it was obvious his predecessor had been both well loved and respected. So much so that the Kluhane Bay residents, in an unusual move, had campaigned to have Sergeant Ted Newman’s tenure extended. But now they had Mason. Who was not in the mood for making friends.
“Did the TSB say if there were any reports about aircraft going down or missing in this area?” he asked.
“Negative, sir. No reports of overdue or missing planes in this region over the last two years. TSB investigators are standing by and will dispatch a team as soon as we have more information.”
Holding tightly to the branch, Mason gingerly tested the matted ground underfoot.
“Careful, sir. It drops right off beneath that moss.”
It felt solid. Slowly, carefully, he transferred weight onto his front foot, edging slightly forward. He leaned over a little farther. He could see part of the fuselage down below, and a pontoon. Upside down. Bright yellow with blue detail. The floatplane lay wrong side up on a ledge of rock. He could just make out part of the registration painted in bold black letters on the fuselage. He inched forward a little more. The left wing was crushed into the side of the ravine, the tail in the river, causing white froth to foam around it. He swore softly and called back to Hubb, “How did they even find it down there?”
“Wounded a bear,” she yelled back over the crashing of the water. “Placed a bad shot on a black male last night. Been tracking the animal since first light. It climbed down into the gorge and they followed it.”
“Down there?”
“Guess the bear wanted to live real bad.”
And the hunters must have wanted to kill him real bad if they tried to climb down these rocks.
“Did they see anyone inside the wreck?” he called, leaning a tiny bit farther over the edge to see if he could make out the cockpit. His arm began to shake. His stomach heaved.
“Negative, sir.”
The branch in his hand cracked with the report of a rifle. Before Mason even registered, it broke free of the tree. He fell fast, bouncing down against rocks. He smashed into a bush growing out of a crevice. It broke his tumble. He grabbed at a handful of twigs, but they sliced out of his grasp. He slid and bumped down rocks and over slick moss, grabbing wildly, blindly at scrub and saplings nestled in the crevices. But he failed to find purchase. He slammed hard onto the ledge that jutted out over the roaring river. He rolled and landed with a thump against the upside-down plane fuselage. He stilled, heart racing, head spinning. The section of the ledge upon which he’d come to rest tilted precariously toward the foaming water, the surface as slippery as wet soap.
The wreck gave a metallic creak, then a groan. He felt it move against his leg. Mason held dead still.
“Sir! You okay, sir? Sergeant?”
“Fine,” he barked up, adrenaline pumping. Slowly—very slowly—he turned his head toward the cockpit window. His heart stopped. Directly in front of his face—close enough for him to touch if he dared move his hands—was a corpse hanging upside down in the pilot seat, held fast by a harness. The face was fish-belly white, bloated. The mouth hung open. Milky eyes stared back at Mason. The corpse’s hair was white blonde, cut very short. He noticed an earring, and it struck him—the dead pilot was female. From his position he could see no one else inside the plane, but it was a bad vantage point. Mason sucked in a deep breath, counted to three, then inched carefully backward up the sloping ledge, away from the fuselage and the water’s edge. The aircraft creaked. Metal grated against rock as it slid a little deeper into the churning water. The current tugged harder at the tail.
He keyed the radio near his shoulder. “Hubb? You read me, Hubb?”
He released the key and swore to himself. The plane moved again. Time elongated. His vision narrowed. A buzz started in his ears. Vertigo. He closed his eyes, trying to tamp down the panic surging into his chest, the dizziness. Sweat broke out over his face.
“Sir?”
He keyed the radio again. “Got someone inside the cockpit. Pilot. Looks female. Deceased. Get on the sat phone. Call the coroner and activate a full SAR response.” He paused and refocused, trying to bring his adrenaline and panic under control.
Silence.
He keyed his radio again. “Hubb?” No response. “Can you hear me, Hubble?” Carefully, he looked skyward. But his movement redistributed his body weight and gave power to gravity. It shot him over the slick moss and back down the rock. His body hit the plane fuselage again with a bump. The plane groaned. Water boiled higher around the tail, tugging more forcibly at the plane.