Darkness(4)

Gina shuddered. The memories that trailing plume brought back made her dizzy.

Get over it, she ordered herself fiercely, shaking her head to clear it. You’re not in that plane. What happened is in the past. You’re a different person now.

Now she was twenty-eight years old, a respected ornithologist whose specialty was the environmental impact of pollution on birds, and at that moment she was out alone in the frigid Bering Sea, doing her job. This plane had nothing to do with her. Whatever happened, she was present merely as a bystander, a witness. There was no reason for her heart to pound, or her stomach to twist.

Her heart pounded and her stomach twisted anyway.

Lifting her binoculars to her eyes, she tracked the plane until it plunged into the outermost edge of the deep gray blanket of clouds that formed an ominously low ceiling above her head. The clouds swallowed it completely. Only the snarl of its engines told her that it was still racing toward her through the sky.

Her concentration was so complete that when the radio clipped to her pocket crackled, it made her jump.

“Gina. Are you there?”

The voice belonged to Arvid Kleir, a fellow scientist. The faint Swedish accent he retained even after years in the States was unmistakable. Along with the rest of the twelve-strong party culled from various top universities, he had chosen to forgo his Thanksgiving break to join the expedition. They had all arrived on Attu two days prior, eight of them, including Gina, dropped off by a chartered boat that would return for them in a week and the rest delivered by the aforementioned Reever. Their purpose was to observe and record the hazards posed by the island’s unique pollution to resident and migratory bird species. Arvid came from Yale. Gina herself was an assistant professor of environmental studies at Stanford.

Yesterday afternoon, having been alerted that something was amiss by the abnormal signals emitted by the female eagle’s microchip, she and Arvid had set out from camp in the Zodiac, located the bird, and rescued it from the pool of degrading oil in which it had become trapped. Attu was littered with a ton of debris from World War II, and the intermittent leakage of decades-old oil, the source of the pool, was a serious problem. Partly full oil and fuel drums, forgotten weapons, unexploded artillery, heavy equipment left to rust on hillsides and in the ocean, overturned shipping containers, and crumbling small structures abandoned by the military were everywhere. As the site of the only World War II battle on American soil, the place once had been home to more than fifteen thousand American troops as well as, on the opposite end of the island, two thousand enemy Japanese. When the war had ended, everything had been left right where it stood. Now the place was both a birder’s paradise and an ecological nightmare. She and Arvid had set up a temporary camp, then spent last night and this morning painstakingly cleaning up the bedraggled eagle and making sure it was fit enough to be returned to the wild. At about one in the afternoon they’d released the bird. Arvid had then headed back to the party’s main camp at the erstwhile Coast Guard station on foot while she’d followed the bird in the Zodiac.

Snatching up the radio, Gina pressed the reply button even as she craned her neck in a useless effort to locate the plane through her binoculars.

“I’m here,” she said urgently into the radio. “Arvid, listen. There’s a plane out here that looks like it’s about to crash into the sea. You need to call the Coast Guard right now.”

Gina and her eleven compatriots were the only people on the island. With cell signals nonexistent, their only means of communication with the outside world was the satellite phone they’d brought with them, which was back at the main camp.

Letting go of the button, she listened in growing dismay as Arvid responded. “. . . understand me? Gina? Are you there?”

It was clear from his tone that he hadn’t heard her transmission. Interference from the oncoming storm, probably. Gina let the binoculars drop to concentrate on the radio.

“Arvid? Call the Coast Guard.” Gina only realized that she was shouting into the radio when her voice echoed back at her.

Static crackled through Arvid’s next words. “. . . back to camp. This storm’s a doozy. You—”

Gina stared down at the radio as his voice was swallowed up by more static. Clearly, her message was not getting through. A rattling roar almost directly overhead had her thrusting the radio between her knees for safekeeping, then snatching up the binoculars and searching the churning gray ceiling for some sign of the plane.

The clouds were too thick. She couldn’t see it.

Tilting her head back to the point where her neck hurt, bracing her feet against the rocking deck for balance, she was gazing almost directly up when she saw a bright flash that looked like a horizontal lightning bolt light up the sky through the obscuring clouds. Then a deafening boom hit her, along with an invisible tsunami of a force field fronted by heat. A strange, high-pitched whistling sound split the air.

Oh, my God, the plane’s blown up.

Her heart lurched. She was still staring up desperately as chunks of metal and other debris started pouring out of the sky like deadly rain.

Practically immobilized by shock, all she could do was lower the binoculars and watch wide-eyed as objects started splashing into the water around her with the fast rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire: splat splat splat splat splat.

A large chunk of metal slammed into the water inches from the starboard prow. The breeze of its passage fanned her cheeks. A shower of droplets splattered across her waterproof pants and boots. That’s what it took to make her suddenly, acutely aware of the danger she was in.