Page 68 of Protecting the Flame

YEHI ’OR

Chapter 1

On the morning of the sixth day…

“You’re shitting me,”Will said. He and Emma were crouched around Hunter, still trapped in his copilot’s seat. Emma had hustled down at first light and sent Scott back, ostensibly to be with Rachel and Mattie, but mostly to get him out of the way. Not that Emma thought letting an ex-addict anywhere near a whole lot of heroin and who knew how many bricks of banded twenties and tens was all that safe, but she’d not told Mattie what she’d found, only locked the panel back up again and kept the key.

“Are you serious, Hunter?” Will’s gloved hands balled, and Emma was pretty sure that if Hunter wasn’t a literal sitting duck, Will would’ve beat him silly. He might anyway, on general principle. “A smuggler?”

“No, a mule.” Cocooned by his parka’s hood, Hunter’s head was skull-like. His pallor gave him a spectral look, something the hectic glitter of fever in his sunken eyes did not dispel. Over the course of the past twenty-four hours, his skin had drawn down so tightly over his cheekbones, it was a wonder his face hadn’t split in two. “He gets paid for the delivery, that’s it. He doesn’t get a cut of the sales.”

“Yeah, I suppose that makes it all better. The hell you guys thinking? Drugs and money and booze, and you guys took on passengers?”

“That’s why they hired him. It was part of the deal. Passengers make the flights look less suspicious. No one checks, and if you don’t file a flight plan—” When Will interrupted with a curse, Hunter held up his gloved hands in surrender. “It’s not mandatory if you’re VFR, which we were.”

“Until we got socked in, which your dad had to know about because he knew where we’d be flying. Did he happen to tell you where he was really going?”

“Yeah.” Hunter slicked pearls of sweat from an upper lip. “South. After he dropped you all off.”

“South where?”

“Not far. Wyoming. Yellowstone.”

“Oh, for God’s…” Will aimed that comment at the sky, which was overcast today. “So, you’re saying that if anyone is looking for the plane, where it was supposed to end up at the very end of the day, they’re looking for us hundreds of miles from here.”

“But there are the radar pings.” With the cloud cover, the air was not as cold and held a scent of a chilled beer can. More snow, Emma thought, and soon. “Will, there won’t be any south of us. They’ll still be looking in this general area.”

“Yes, but with no help from an ELT. No one’s going to think about trying another frequency.” Will looked back down at Hunter. “That’s what the drone was about, wasn’t it? If anything happened to the plane, your employers would know where to look, right?”

“Look, they’re not my employers, okay? That’s what we were arguing about when you guys got there. Dad said he was getting out of the business. I honestly thought he was serious about that, too. It made sense when he outfitted the plane with a new belly tank and all because he was talking about doing more winter runs into Canada. I swear to God, I didn’t have a clue until I saw those avgas bladders, and then I knew. He was going to fill that third one up, but I talked him out of it.”

That explained the empty bladder. Hot water for a bath, my eye. “That’s why you were worried about weight,” she said.

“Shit, yeah. I’d seen the weather. I knew we weren’t going to get a lot of miles fighting that headwind.”

“But, Hunter, why did the engines stop? It wasn’t because of the weight.”

He shook his head. “I think…my dad…when he got the new belly tank, he replaced the wing tanks, too. If you put the selector in backward, the thing that controls which tank you’re drawing fuel from…”

“I know what a selector is,” Will interrupted. “You’re saying your dad switched to an empty tank when he thought he was switching to a full one.” At Hunter’s nod, Will closed his eyes. “Well, that does explain it.”

“Who are these guys?” Emma asked Hunter.

Hunter let his head fall back. “I told you, I don’t know their names or even where they come from. But if they’re the ones operating that drone, they know where we are, and they’ve got two alternatives. You need me to draw a map?”

“Yeah, actually, if that would get us the hell out of here,” she sniped.

“Cut it out,” Will rapped. “The choice is obvious. Whether we die or leave, they’re not going to care. All they’ll want is the cargo.”

And they’d helpfully told them how many people to expect. Well, they had the advantage there because whoever was coming didn’t know they knew why. “I haven’t heard any more drones,” she said.

“Which would suggest they’re on their way.” Will gnawed skin on a lower lip split and chapped by cold and wind. “You have to wonder, too. That drone wasn’t, you know, something you buy at Walmart. It had to have some range, but it’s also easier to overlook because people are looking for us. These guys can’t chance an airplane or helicopter because that might get them the wrong kind of attention. So that means they’ve got to be coming on foot or, more likely, snowmobile, and then they have to climb, unless there’s a way up opposite where we are that we don’t know about because we haven’t gone far in that direction. We’ve been focused on the cockpit.”

“You think they’re close.”

“Now? Absolutely, but not at first. They’ve had all of yesterday afternoon and evening and this morning.” He checked his watch. “It’s half past nine. If they were close, I bet they could have walked here on their knuckles by now. That suggests…a little distance? A fair amount in terms of resources? Where do people get good long-range drones?”

“Military.”

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