He wiped away the blood that had trailed into one eye and took stock. Most of the aircraft was stitched with over a hundred holes, but the control systems and surfaces were undamaged and the big 450 Wasp engine was still pounding away on every one of its cylinders.
Now what to do?
The first plan that ran through his mind was to make an attempt at ramming the helicopter. The old take 'em with you routine, Pitt mused. But that's all it could have been, an attempt. The Defender was far more nimble in the air than the lumbering Beaver with its massive pontoons. He'd stand as much chance as a cobra against a mongoose, a fight the mongoose never failed to win against the slower cobra. Only when it came up against a rattlesnake did the mongoose go down to defeat. The crazy thought running through Pitt's mind became divine inspiration as he sighted a low ridge of rocks about half a kilometer ahead and slightly to his right.
There was a path toward the rocks through a stand of tall Douglas fir trees. He dove between the trees, his wingtips brushing the needles of the upper branches. To anyone else it would have seemed like a desperate act of suicidal madness. The gambit misled the Defender's pilot, who broke off the third attack and followed slightly above and behind the floatplane, waiting to observe what looked like a certain crash.
Pitt kept the throttle full against its stop and gripped the control wheel with both hands, eyes focused on the wall of rocks that loomed ahead. The airstream blasted through the shattered windshield, and he was forced to turn his head sideways in order to see. Fortunately, the gale swept away the trickling blood and the tears that it pried from his squinting eyes.
He flew on between the trees. There could be no misjudgment, no miscalculation. He had to make the right move at the exact moment in time. A tenth of a second either way would spell certain death. The rocks were rushing toward the plane as if driven from behind. Pitt could clearly see them now, gray-and-brown jagged boulders with black streaks. He didn't have to look to see the needle on the altimeter registering on zero or the needle on the tachometer wavering far into the red The old girl was hurtling toward destruction just as fast as she could fly.
"Low!" he shouted into the wind rushing through the smashed windshield. "Two meters low!"
He barely had time to compensate before the rocks were on him. He gave the control column a precisely measured jerk, just enough to raise the plane's nose, just enough so the tips of the propeller whipped over the ridge, missing the crest by centimeters. He heard the sudden crunch of metal as the aluminum floats smashed into the rocks and tore free of the fuselage. The Beaver shot into the air, as graceful as a soaring hawk released from its tether. Unburdened by the weight of the bulky floats, which lay smashed against the rocks, and with the drag on the aircraft decreased by nearly half, the ancient plane became more maneuverable and gained another thirty knots in airspeed. She responded to Pitt's commands instantly, without a trace of sluggishness as she chewed the air, fighting for altitude.
Now, he thought, a satanic grin on his lips, I'll show you an Immelmann. He threw the aircraft into a half loop and then snapped it over in a half roll, heading on a direct course toward the helicopter. "Write your will, sucker!" he shouted, his voice drowned out by the rush of wind and the roar of the engine's exhaust. "Here comes the Red Baron."
Too late the chopper's pilot read Pitt's intentions. There was nowhere to dodge, nowhere to hide. The last thing he expected was an assault by the battered old floatplane. But here it was closing on a collision course at almost two hundred knots. It came roaring at him at a speed he didn't believe possible. He made a series of violent maneuvers, but the pilot of the old floatplane anticipated his moves and kept coming on. He angled the helicopter's nose toward his opponent in a wild attempt to blast the punctured Beaver out of the sky before the imminent crash.
Pitt saw the helicopter turn head-on, saw the flash from the guns in the pods, heard the shells punching into the big radial engine. Oil suddenly spurted from under the cowling, streaming onto the exhaust stacks and causing a dense trail of blue smoke to streak behind the plane. Pitt held up a hand to shield his eyes from the hot oil splattering against his face in stinging torrents from the airstream.
The sight that froze in his memory a microsecond before the impact was the expression of grim acceptance on the face of the helicopter's pilot.
The prop and engine of the floatplane smashed squarely into the helicopter just behind the cockpit in an explosion of metal and debris that sheared off the tail rotor boom. Deprived of its torque compensation, the main body of the helicopter was thrown into a violent lateral drift. It spun around crazily for several revolutions before plummeting like a stone, five hundred meters to the ground. Unlike special-effects crashes in motion pictures, it didn't immediately burst into flames after crumpling into an unrecognizable mass of smoldering wreckage. Nearly two minutes passed before flames flickered from the debris and a blinding sheet of flame enveloped it.
Pieces of the Beaver's shattered propeller spun into the sky like a fireworks pinwheel. The cowling seemed to burst off the engine and fluttered like a wounded bird into the trees. The engine froze and stopped as quickly as if Pitt had turned off the ignition switch. He wiped the oil from his eyes, and all he could see over the exposed cylinder heads was a carpet of treetops. The Beaver's airspeed fell off, and she stalled as he braced himself for the crash. The controls were still functioning, and he tried to float the plane down into the upper tree limbs.
He almost made it. But the outer edge of the right wing collided with a seventy-meter-tall red cedar, throwing the aircraft into an abrupt ninety-degree turn. Now totally out of control and dead in what little sky was left, the plane plunged into a solid mass of trees. The left wing wrapped itself around another towering cedar and was torn away. Green pine needles closed over the red plane, blotting it out from any view from above. The trunk of a fir tree, half a meter wide, rose in front of the battered aircraft. The propeller hub struck the tree head-on and punched right through it. The engine was pulled from its mountings as the upper half of the tree fell across the careening aircraft and knocked off the tail section What remained of the wreckage plowed into the moist compost earth of the forest floor before finally coming to a dead stop.
For the next few minutes the ground below the trees was as silent as a cemetery. Pitt sat there, too stunned to move. He stared dazedly through the opening that was once the windshield. He noticed for the first time that the entire engine was gone and wondered vaguely where it went. At last his mind began to come level again, and he reached over and examined Stokes.
The Mountie shuddered in a fit of coughing, then shook his head feebly and regained a small measure of consciousness. He stared dumbly over the instrument panel at the pine branches that hung into the cockpit. "How did we come down in the forest?" he mumbled.
"You slept through the best part," Pitt muttered, as he tenderly massaged a gang of bruises.
Pitt didn't require eight years of medical school to know Stokes would surely die if he didn't get to a hospital. Quickly, he unzipped the old flying suit, ripped opened the Mountie's shirt and searched for the wound. He found it to the left of the breastbone, below the shoulder. There was so little blood and the hole was so small, he almost missed it. This wasn't made by a bullet, was Pitt's first reaction. He gently probed the hole and touched a sharp piece of metal. Puzzled, he looked up at the frame that once held the windshield. It was smashed beyond recognition. The impact of a bullet had driven a splinter from the aluminum frame into Stokes' chest, penetrating the left lung. Another centimeter and it would have entered the heart.
Stokes coughed up a wad of blood and spit it out the open window. "Funny," he murmured, "I always thought I'd get shot in a highway chase or in a back alley."
"No such luck."
"How bad does it look?"
"A metal splinter in your lung," Pitt explained. "Are you in pain?"
"More of a throbbing ache than anything else."
Pitt stiffly ros
e out of his seat and came around behind Stokes. "Hang on, I'll get you out of here."
Within ten minutes, Pitt had kicked open the crumpled entry door and carefully manhandled Stokes'
deadweight outside, where he gently laid him on the soft ground. It took no small effort, and he was panting heavily by the time he sat next to the Mountie to catch his breath. Stokes' face tightened in agony more than once, but he never uttered so much as a low moan. On the verge of slipping into unconsciousness, he closed his eyes.
Pitt slapped him awake. "Don't black out on me, pal. I need you to point the way to Mason Broadmoor's village."
Stokes' eyes fluttered open, and he looked at Pitt questioningly, as if recalling something. "The Dorsett helicopter," he said between coughs. "What happened to those bastards who were shooting at us?"
Pitt stared back at the smoke rising above the forest and grinned. "They went to a barbecue."
Pitt had expected to trudge through snow in January on Kunghit Island, but only a light blanket of the white stuff had fallen on the ground, and much of that had melted since the last storm. He pulled Stokes along behind him on a travois, a device used for hauling burdens by American Plains Indians. He couldn't leave Stokes, and to attempt carrying the Mountie on his back was inviting internal hemorrhaging, so he lashed two dead branch poles together with cargo tiedown straps he scrounged in the wreckage of the aircraft. Rigging a platform between the poles and a harness on one end, he strapped Stokes to the middle of the travois. Then throwing the harness end over his shoulders, Pitt began dragging the injured Mountie through the woods. Hour followed hour, the sun set and night came on as he struggled north through the darkness, setting his course by the compass he'd removed from the aircraft's instrument panel, an expedient he had used several years previously when trekking across the Sahara Desert.
Every ten minutes or so Pitt asked Stokes, "You still with me?"
"Hanging in," the Mountie repeated weakly.
"I'm looking at a shallow stream that runs to the west."
"You've come to Wolf Creek. Cross it and head northwest."
"How much farther to Broadmoor's village?"
Stokes replied in a hoarse murmur. "Two, maybe three kilometers."
"Keep talking to me, you hear?"
"You sound like my wife. . ."
"You married?"
"Ten years, to a great lady who gave me five children."
Pitt readjusted the harness straps, which were cutting into his chest, and pulled Stokes across the stream. After plodding through the underbrush for a kilometer, he came to a faint path that led in the direction he was headed. The path was grown over in places, but it offered relatively free passage, a godsend to Pitt after-having forced his way through woods thick with shrubs growing between the trees.
Twice he thought he'd lost the path, but after continuing on the same course for several meters, he would pick it up again. Despite the freezing temperature, his exertions were making him sweat. He dared not allow himself to stop and rest. If Stokes was to live to see his wife and five children again, Pitt had to keep going. He kept up a one-way conversation with the Mountie, fervently trying to keep him from drifting into a coma from shock. Concentrating on keeping one foot moving ahead of the other, Pitt failed to recognize anything strange.
Stokes whispered something but Pitt couldn't make it out. He turned his head, cocked an ear and paused. "You want me to stop?" Pitt asked.
"Smell it. . .?" Stokes barely whispered.
"Smell what?"
"Smoke."
Then Pitt had it too. He inhaled deeply. The scent of wood smoke was coming from somewhere ahead. He was tired, desperately tired, but he leaned forward against the harness and staggered on.
Soon his ears picked up the sound of a small gas engine, of a chain saw cutting into wood. The wood smell became stronger, and he could see smoke drifting over the tops of the trees in the early light of dawn. His heart was pounding under the strain, but he wasn't about to quit this close to his destination.
The sun rose but remained hidden behind dark gray clouds. A light drizzle was falling when he stumbled into a clearing that touched the sea and opened onto a small harbor. He found himself staring at a small community of log houses with corrugated metal roofs. Smoke was rising out of their stone chimneys. Tall cylindrical totem poles were standing in different parts of the village, carved with the features of stacked animal and human figures. A small fleet of fishing boats rocked gently beside a floating dock, their crews working over engines and repairing nets. Several children, standing under a shed with open sides, were observing a man carving a huge log with a chain saw. Two women chatted as they hung wash on a line. One of them spotted Pitt, pointed and began shouting at the others.
Overcome by exhaustion, Pitt sank to his knees as a crowd of a dozen people rushed toward him.
One man, with long straight black hair and a round face, knelt down beside Pitt and put an arm around his shoulder. "You're all right now," he said with concern. He motioned to three men who gathered around Stokes and gave them an order. "Carry him into the tribal house."
Pitt looked at the man. "You wouldn't by chance be Mason Broadmoor?"
Coalblack eyes stared at him curiously. "Why, yes, I am."
"Boy," said Pitt as he sagged bone weary to the soft ground, "am I ever glad to see you."
The nervous giggle of a little girl roused Pitt from a light sleep. Tired as he was, he'd only slept four hours. He opened his eyes, stared at her a moment, gave her a bright smile and crossed his eyes. She ran out of the room, yelling for her mother.
He was in a cozy room with a small stove radiating wondrous heat, lying in a bed made up of bear and wolf hides. He smiled to himself at the recollection of Broadmoor standing in the middle of an isolated Indian village with few modern conveniences, calling over his satellite phone for an air ambulance to transport Stokes to a hospital on the mainland.
Pitt had borrowed the phone to contact the Mountie office at Shearwater. At the mention of Stokes'
name, he was immediately put through to an Inspector Pendleton, who questioned Pitt in detail about the events commencing the previous morning. Pitt ended the briefing by giving Pendleton directions to the crash site so the Mounties could send in a team to retrieve the cameras inside the pontoons if they had survived the impact.
A seaplane arrived before Pitt had finished a bowl of fish soup that was thrust on him by Broadmoor's wife. Two paramedics and a doctor examined Stokes and assured Pitt the Mountie had every chance of pulling through. Only after the seaplane had lifted off the water on its flight back to the mainland and the nearest hospital had Pitt gratefully accepted the loan of the Broadmoor family bed and fallen dead asleep.
Broadmoor's wife entered from the main living room and kitchen. A woman of grace and poise, stout yet supple, Irma Broadmoor had haunting coffee eyes and a laughing mouth. "How are you feeling, Mr.
Pitt? I didn't expect you to wake up for another three hours at least."
Pitt checked and made sure he still wore his pants and shirt before he threw back the covers and dropped his bare feet to the floor. "I'm sorry to have put you and your husband out of your bed."
She laughed, a light musical laugh. "The time is a little past noon. You've only been asleep since eight o'clock."
"I'm most grateful for your hospitality."
"You must be hungry. That bowl of fish soup wasn't enough for a big man like you. What would you like to eat?"
"A can of beans will be fine."
"People sitting around a campfire eating canned beans in the north woods is a myth. I'll grill some salmon steaks. I hope you like salmon"
"I do indeed."
"While you're waiting, you can talk to Mason. He's working outside."
Pitt pulled on his socks and hiking boots, ran his hands through his hair and faced the world. He found Broadmoor in the open shed, chiseling away on a five-meter-long red cedar log that lay horizontal on four heavy-duty sawhorse
s. Broadmoor was attacking it with a round wooden mallet shaped like a bell and a concave chisel called a fantail gouge. The carving was not far enough along for Pitt to visualize the finished product. The faces of animals were still in the rough stage.
Broadmoor looked up as Pitt approached. "Have a good rest?"
"I didn't know bearskins were so soft."
Broadmoor smiled. "Don't let the word out or they'll be extinct within a year."
"Ed Posey told me you carved totem poles. I've never seen one in the works before."
"My family have been carvers for generations. Totems evolved because the early Indians of the Northwest had no written language. Family histories and legends were preserved by carving symbols, usually animals, on red cedar trees."
"Do they have religious significance?" asked Pitt.
Broadmoor shook his head. "They were never worshiped as icons of gods, but respected more as guardian spirits."
"What are the symbols on this pole?"
"This is a mortuary pole, or what you might call a commemorative column. The pole is in honor of my uncle, who passed away last week. When I finish the carvings, they will illustrate his personal crest, which was an eagle and a bear, along with a traditional Haida figure of the deceased. After completion it will be erected, during a feast, at the corner of his widow's house."
"As a respected master carver, you must be booked up for many months in advance."
Broadmoor shrugged modestly. "Almost two years."
"Do you know why I'm here?" Pitt asked, and the abrupt question caught Broadmoor with the mallet raised to strike the fantail gouge.
The wood-carver laid his tools aside and motioned for Pitt to follow him to the edge of the harbor, where he stopped beside a small boathouse that extended into the water. He opened the doors and stepped inside. Two small craft floated within a U-shaped dock.