Chapter 39
“We need to go now,” Kurt said.
He was in the captain’s quarters addressing Joe and the Lyra’s captain. Gamay was in the sick bay, having X-rays and MRIs run on her back. Paul was unwilling to leave her side.
“We don’t even know if we’re looking in the right place,” the captain said.
They’d looked over charts and maps and satellite photos, trying to find a body of water called Fish Head Lake.
They’d found nothing in the English language or any form of Norwegian.
Then Kurt had noticed a curving lake that came to a point near the edge of a cliff while widening in a soft curve as it drew farther back.
The lake was symmetrical on the top and bottom.
A small island emerged on one side, appearing vaguely like an eye.
The lake was fed by a number of streams that met up and joined in the rocks behind it.
Because they came in from both sides, they resembled the thin bones of a fish from which the flesh had already been taken.
“If that’s not a fish head, I don’t know what is,” Kurt had suggested.
It turned out the lake had been scanned by a passing satellite twice in the first thirty hours after the EAGL had vanished. The first image was blacked out by thick cloud cover. A foot of snow had fallen in Troms? that night. Another five inches followed the next day.
The second image was taken after the weather had cleared. It showed a surface blanketed with deep snow, which had been heaped up into drifts by the wind. Kurt motioned toward one of the drifts that appeared much larger and regular than the others.
“That’s the plane,” Kurt insisted. He pointed to a rise in the snow near the middle of the lake. It was long and straight and compared roughly with the length of the C-17’s fuselage.
“Where are the wings?” Joe said. “Where’s the tail?”
“Buried under the snow.”
“I hate to argue with you,” the captain said. “But they got twelve inches of snow that night, not twelve feet. Which means, things should be sticking out.”
“Have neither of you guys been to Buffalo in the winter?” Kurt asked. “It’s a lake-effect area. If the town got twelve inches they might get twelve feet.”
“The C-17 has a fifty-foot tail,” Joe countered.
Kurt had no answer to that, but in the end, it was his job to find the plane before anyone else did. And he thought they were looking right at it.
“Look,” he said. “Someone shot Ridley. It wasn’t the Chinese.
It wasn’t us. And it wasn’t the Russians.
It had to be someone else who knew where the plane was and didn’t want Ridley spilling the tea.
My money’s on the pilot who had to land the damn thing.
But whoever took Ridley out, they’re obviously running hot and scared at this point.
They could be making a deal with the Chinese or the Russians at any moment.
We have to go now. If there’s any chance that the EAGL is hiding there under the snow, we have to reach it before anyone else does. ”
Both Joe and the captain seemed to be sobered by that point. Joe said no more, but the captain scratched his head and offered one more bit of bad news. “If you’re right about that, you have another problem. A bigger one. That plane is a full mile over the border. It’s in Russia, after all.”
Kurt knew that. It didn’t matter. “All the more reason for us to go now.”
Joe agreed. “It’s forty miles by road and then another ten across the lake. Do you want to take the helicopter or the Big Orange Rig and drive out onto the ice?”
Kurt grinned. “Both options sound good to me.”