Scott Free (13 page)

Morris sighed again, this time a deep groan that might have been a growl. “Oh, God, Mr. O'Toole…”

“Call me Brandon, please.” There, he'd seen it. The first crack in Morris's resolve. The argument had made a dent. “You see it, don't you? You see that I'm right.”

“What I see is a father who's desperate to be a part of the effort to find his son. But there are other factors.”

“Let's talk about them,” Brandon said, sounding like the very essence of reasonableness. “Let's talk about the main priorities here. Certainly, I'm not a risk to your crew's safety, and I'm hardly a lawsuit risk. Besides, if you think about it—”

“Shut up,” Morris barked. Brandon recoiled. “Just shut up and let me think for a second, will you? Jesus, it's too early for this.”

Interesting transition, Brandon thought. Just like that, Morris had gone from off guard to back-in-control. It was time for Brandon to show that he could follow orders.

Morris returned to his desk and placed his hand on the computer mouse, moving a black eight over to a red nine and freeing up the ace of spades, which crawled its way to its spot above the rest of the animated cards. Brandon didn't know what to make of this. Surely Colonel Morris wasn't ignoring him. But it was annoying as hell to watch him lose himself in a game of cards. A good two minutes passed in silence as Morris worked to expose yet another ace, and then, without any fanfare, he swiveled back around to face Brandon.

“Where'd you come in from to be here?” he asked.

“Virginia. Just outside Washington, D.C.”

“In the snow?”

“Yes, sir. A friend offered me a plane and a pilot. Good wings and brass balls.”

Morris nodded, weighing things in his mind. “Please do your best not to make me regret this,” he said, finally.

Brandon nodded once. “I promise.”

S
COTT AWOKE WITH A START
, unaware that he'd fallen asleep, and overwhelmed with the need to vomit. He barely made it from his butt to his knees before his insides cramped up hard, doubling him over till his nose nearly touched the frozen floor. He retched and his stomach heaved, producing only a thin line of yellow gunk that quickly spread as a stain on the shelter's floor. Two more in quick succession produced only more of the same, and by the time his guts settled down, Scott found that he was crying, and feeling stupid for it. He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his parka.

You got nothing in you to puke up,
his mind told him, and right at this moment, he wasn't sure whether the thought of food was attractive or repulsive.

As he stared at the mess he'd made, it dawned on him that he could see without a flashlight; that morning had finally arrived, ending the longest night of his life. Well, thank God for that.

The wolves' feeding frenzy had lasted for hours, producing sounds unlike anything he'd ever heard: a nightmarish cacophony of growls and barks and whimpers, punctuated with that grotesque tearing sound as meat was pulled from bone.

But they never again attempted to enter the shelter.

He crawled outside. The sun had climbed high, casting crisp black shadows against the sparkling snow cover. Marring what could have been a beautiful sight were the horrid remains of last night's feast. The unbroken blanket of snow had been churned savagely, what once was white now stained crimson. Straight ahead of the shelter's opening, great tufts of torn fur rose from the center of the largest stain—what could only be the remains of the alpha dog that he'd stunned or killed with the flare gun.

“Jesus,” Scott breathed as he took in the carnage.

But the real horror, he knew, lay behind him, over at the base of the tree near the shattered cockpit. His mind screamed for him not to look, but he couldn't help himself. His head pivoted without his instruction, his eyes half-closed in anticipation of what they might see.

Cody Jamieson was gone. Like the area around Alpha, the snow had been churned and chewed, but unlike that other horrific scene, this one was still white, except for the few spots where tree bark and other debris had been tossed about.

“Thank you, God,” Scott whispered, daring a glance upward. The thought flashed through his mind that he should likewise ask God for some blessing for Cody, but he couldn't think of the right words. Truth be told, he didn't want to think about it at all.

Overhead, where the sky dared to peek through the towering pines, Scott saw a welcome blue that he hoped would dull the edge of the razor-sharp cold. Last night had been a bad one, even colder than the one before, and as the morning breezes sheared the topmost dusting of flakes away from the snowpack, the ice crystals seemed to bite harder against the exposed flesh of his face.

This had to be the day. Today, he would be rescued or he would die. He'd worried about such things yesterday, yes, but he'd known that he still had time. Today, that time had expired. Today's priority had to be food. He had to find something nutritious enough to keep his stomach from heaving out what little remained to fuel his day.

But how? He had no idea. Today
had
to be the day.

Yeah, well yesterday had to be the day, too. And tomorrow, when he tried telling himself the same thing yet again, maybe he wouldn't have the strength to stand.

Stop it!

Stop what? Recognizing the truth when he saw it? Recognizing the obvious fact that the rescuers he kept fantasizing about had no idea where he was? Should he stop wondering exactly what it felt like to die, when he knew that come tomorrow morning, or the next one, or the one after that, he was just flat-out not going to wake up at all?

Scott felt the old panic returning, and this time it rushed him like a flood, moving faster than he could react and washing away his ridiculous pretense of hope. His heart rate doubled and then doubled again as he paced a ragged circle around the crash site.
I'm going to die here!
his mind screamed.
I'm going to starve, or be eaten or just slowly freeze to death.

“Goddammit!” His shriek echoed off the trees, and the effort of it made his voice crack. This wasn't right; this wasn't the way it was supposed to be. He was sixteen years old, for Christ's sake. He was supposed to be in school today, in the warmth of history class, or English or geometry. He wasn't supposed to be out in the middle of the damn woods, wondering when his death would arrive.

How does shit like this happen in the first place? How, in the days of global positioning satellites and Internets and all that high technology, could they not be able to find a crashed airplane?

The flare! The fusee! Oh, God, he'd left the second one behind when he'd dashed for cover in the shelter! Was it still there?
Oh, please God, please God let it still be there!

Scott scrambled through the snow, back toward the grisly stain that once was Alpha, and he fell to his knees, his hands outstretched as he clawed through the snow to find it.

It has to be here. Has to be here…

And there it was. The wolves had kicked it aside and partially buried it as they shredded their former boss, but the waxy red stick remained right where Scott had tossed it. Grabbing it up into his gloved hand, Scott examined it. It looked healthy enough; no obvious signs of damage.

He inhaled deeply and released a long sigh that completely enveloped his head in vapor. One thing had gone right. One in a row, the first of the day. Maybe it was the start of a trend.

Still on his knees, staring up at the sky, he started to pray silently, but then decided that maybe God needed to hear him. “I'm sorry for everything,” he said softly, a part of him aware of just how stupid he must sound. “I don't know what you want to hear, but if you're angry, then I'm really sorry. But you've got to help me out of this one. I don't mean to tell you how to do your job, but—”

Above the gentle silence of the forest, just barely louder than the soft rush of the breeze, Scott could almost make out the sound of an approaching aircraft.

 

G
IVEN
M
ORRIS'S ARMY FLIGHT SUIT
and the insignia on the epaulets, Brandon had expected the search aircraft to be more…military. He'd expected polished silver or olive drab; maybe something in camouflage, with muted American flags stenciled on the tail and the fuselage. Instead, he found himself the third man in a single-engine four-seater, confined to the impossibly small back bench, while Colonel Morris flew from the left front seat, and a seventeen-year-old cheerleader-type named Stacey took up space in the right seat. The high wing, supported by struts that extended from either side of the fuselage, afforded a sweeping view of the sugar-white forest, from horizon to horizon.

Brandon's neck hurt from the strain of staring at the ground through the scratched 24 x 24-inch Plexiglas window. For hours now, he'd listened silently through his headset as the flight crew chatted about the weather and about their homes and their families. Brandon had learned that Stacey was nearly certain that some young buck named Jerry was going to ask her out soon, and much to his surprise, Colonel Morris did a convincing impression of someone who cared. To Brandon, it seemed as if they purposely talked about everything but Scott—everything but the job at hand.

Today's search efforts involved four planes instead of just one, and each of the four had been assigned a segment of the same ground that had been searched the day before. According to the experts—what few of them there were—Cody Jamieson's Cessna had no business being beyond these confines, and their best chances of finding and rescuing Scott was to concentrate the search in the prescribed areas.

The preflight briefing had been conducted by a guy named Feldman, who wore the silver eagles of a full colonel on the epaulets of a bus-driver blue uniform that had been purchased a good twenty pounds before. Well into his sixties and bald, Feldman spoke with the forcefulness of one who had conducted many such searches in the past.

“We're looking for any signs of a crash,” Feldman had told the group. “Signs of burned or broken trees, debris, gouges out of the rock face, anything that might have been caused by a crashing airplane. If you find it, or even if you think you found it, get down as low as you can and try to confirm. If, after that, you're still reasonably confident, then give a shout and we'll get a chopper and a search team down there as soon as possible.”

Brandon had been impressed by the seriousness of the assembled searchers, especially given their average age, which to his eye was about sixteen.

Brandon didn't understand the strategy. Covering the same real estate over and over again made no sense to him. Suppose they were looking in the wrong place? How would they ever know? And if not this place, then where? It seemed painfully obvious that Cody Jamieson was clueless from the beginning. No emergency locator, no emergency call for assistance, yet the search commanders' whole strategy assumed that he was marginally on course.

Where was the logic?

Sometimes, in the absence of hard data, you had to just randomly choose a course of action and stick to it, but what if they were flat-out wrong to begin with? What then?

Two hours. That's how long they'd been cruising the same real estate, looking for the invisible. Two additional hours of cold and misery for Scott. Two more hours for him to lie in pain or in fear, waiting for the rescuers who might be in the wrong place altogether.

Brandon liked the range of mountains immediately to the east. Call it intuition. Call it a hunch. Hell, call it sheer boredom from looking out the same window at the same scenery, but he felt they needed to be over there. Not here. There. And the more he thought about it, the more certain he felt.

“Hey, Colonel?” Brandon asked into his headset.

“Yessir?”

“What about those ridges over to the east? We gonna take a look over there?”

“No, sir, I don't believe so. The search plan calls for us to focus right here. They've worked out the likely flight path for the downed craft, and this is where they put it.”

Brandon nodded. Made lots of sense. But the colonel was wrong. “I think we should take a look over there,” he said.

Morris stiffened, glanced as Stacey. “That's really not in the game plan, Mr. O'Toole,” he said, finally.

“How far is that over there?”

Morris looked, calculated in his head. “Maybe eight, ten miles.”

“Is it that outrageous that a plane could wander that far off course in a snowstorm?”

“It's not outrageous, no. In fact, it's not outrageous that it might have wandered just about anywhere, but that's not how we conduct a search.”

Brandon knew not to push too hard. “Seems to me, we're coming up on two days of searching the same area, and we've turned up nothing. Haven't found so much as a dent in the snow. You call that no data. I call it negative data. Maybe it's time to assume that we're looking in the wrong spot.”

“You may be right, Mr. O'Toole, but I'm not in the position to make that call.”

“Suppose you saw someone waving his arms outside of the search area. You'd fly over there to take a look, wouldn't you?”

“Come on, Mr. O'Toole—”

“No, no, I'm not going to tell you I saw someone waving his arms, but I will tell you that I have a very strong feeling that Scott's over there on that ridge. I can't give you anything stronger than intuition, but I'm telling you, I know my son is over there.”

Brandon could hear Morris sigh into his intercom. He looked to Stacey, who shrugged and looked away.

“This is exactly why you shouldn't be here. If every pilot acted on his hunches, the search pattern would become haphazard and meaningless.”

“Please.” That one word just hung there in the air. Brandon could feel the weight of it himself. He could only imagine how it weighed on Morris.

Another sigh.

“Just one pass. As a favor to me.”

In the final sigh, he heard Morris make two decisions at once: that he'd humor his passenger; and that said passenger was hereafter forever grounded.

The pitch of the engine noise deepened as the pilot throttled up and banked hard to the right.

 

S
COTT HAD BEEN WATCHING
the planes all morning as they flew their oblong circles over the wrong spot, white specs against the cobalt sky, occasionally flashing like a nova as they passed through the sun's glare at just the right angles. At one point, about an hour ago, Scott found himself screaming out at the aircraft, and wildly waving his arms, as if there were even the remotest chance that they could see him. He'd cursed, he'd begged, he'd shrieked himself hoarse, but the lazy circles continued on and on.