November 2, 2009, the Arctic
he journey to Cape Liz took two days, with layovers in Seat-T tle, Anchorage and Kotzebue. In Kotzebue, she chartered a PC-6 operated by Wien Airline. She landed at Liz on the hard-packed snow covering the gravel runway about 9 AM, Nov 2.
Winter had set in early, even for this bleak landscape. The day was sunny. Temperature was minus 25 degrees, according to the copilot who helped her out of the plane with her three pieces of luggage. After assuring him for the third time that she’d be fine, he got back into the plane and per her instructions, the plane took off.
She knew Hardson would notice the landing and takeoff; she counted on it, so she wouldn’t have to look for him. She was sure of her ability to mask her presence from him, and to manipulate him to do whatever she needed, if he were alone. If the entity had already inhabited him, she wasn’t quite as sure. She’d been able to expel it from her own body 45 years earlier. How would she manage against it at full strength, in the body of another? That was an unknown.
She saw him, walking out onto the runway, looking around.
She was 200 yards away, in plain sight, but he didn’t see her. She planted instructions, and he walked back toward the buildings near the runway. He was alone. So far, so good.
She opened her luggage and outfitted herself with the heaviest of her cold weather gear. She was fit, but even a fit 65-year-old woman would need every advantage she could give herself just to stay alive where she was headed. She filled a small backpack with things she thought she’d need and looped it over one shoulder.
She heard the throb of Hardson’s bush plane when it started up.
She had 15 minutes. That’s how long he would let the engine warm up before he began taxiing. She made the call to Art Revel.
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“I need a hole in the permanent ice cap in the Arctic Ocean. A six-foot diameter would be nice, but no less than four.”
“What? How am I supposed to do that?”
“Your friend in Heaven?”
“Ah… I don’t even know if that’s possible.”
“A nineteen-inch laser delivering hundreds of megawatts of electricity should be hot enough. It has to work. I’m counting on it.”
“Even if it could Bell, the enormous diversion from standard ops would be impossible to hide from management and government oversight. Even my best friend in Heaven wouldn’t do that for me.”
“Keep in mind I saved your life. You believe that, right?”
“Yes, I do Bell, but…”
“Then just listen to me, Art. I’ll only tell you once. What you do then is up to you. In a dozen hours, I’ll be two or three hundred miles north of Barrow, on permanent ice. It will be with me by then, in the mind and body of a killer named Hardson. I gave you a sense of it before I left you. Not enough to give you nightmares, but enough. I think I can keep it confused enough to trap it. I’m not asking this for myself. There’ll be no way for me to get back, anyway. I’m going out, and I want to take it with me. If I don’t, it’ll be loose on Earth. For how long, I don’t know. What it will do here, I don’t know. It won’t be nice. But that’s not even the worst. When it finishes here, it will go on and on and on, infesting wherever it wants to infest. I need you to pull in every favor you’re owed, promise whatever you must promise, convince your friend that lives hang in the balance.
“I’m sending you approximate coordinates now. I know your friend will have to reposition assets, and I know that’ll take time.
So, you have to make the call now. Ten to twelve hours from now, I’ll zip you my exact coordinates. Then I’ll need that hole, as vertical as possible, all the way through the sea ice. It’s between fifteen and twenty feet thick there. If he’s watching for feedback, he should know when he breaks through the bottom. Any questions?”
“Jesus, Bell. Ok, I’ll try. I’ll try hard. This guy will have to put 291
his job on the line. I don’t know if the IOU I can call in will be worth that to him. But I’ll try.”
“That’s all I can ask, Art. Good luck.”
Ten minutes after she ended the call, she heard the bush plane’s engine rev higher. She picked up her luggage and stashed it behind some large rocks near the runway, then ducked down behind one.
The six-passenger, DHC-2 Beaver, fitted with skees, taxied to a spot just past her location, and stopped. Hardson left the engine idling, got out, left the door open and walked fifty yards away. He kept his back to the Beaver and stared out to sea.
If the entity arrived while they were still flying, she thought it would see only what Hardson saw. If Hardson had never seen her, he’d have no stored image of her in his mind. She hoped the entity would only see the limited view Hardson had, looking forward from the pilot’s seat. If the entity sensed her anyway, then all was lost.
She didn’t think she could overpower it while in the mind of a fully functioning human. Best case then: they struggle, the Beaver crashes, kills her and Hardson. The entity would be marooned, unless someone came close enough for it to transfer. Which would happen, eventually.
So, she really needed plan A to work. It depended on timing. It had to arrive within ten or fifteen minutes of the time it was supposed to arrive. She didn’t know where the information came from, how it got into her head. She only hoped it was accurate. Timing had never been quite so critical, not since Dallas.
Bell walked to the Beaver, tossed in her backpack and climbed aboard. The middle two seats had been removed to make room for the extra 55-gallon fuel tank that extended the Beaver’s range to 1,200 miles. She didn’t like riding so close to the tank, but she climbed over it anyway, and laid down on the last two seats.
She took a deep, calming breath, and gave Hardson a mental nudge. He climbed aboard and took off, heading 40 degrees northeast. Depending on wind, they should be somewhere over the deepest part of the Arctic Ocean, the Canada Basin, by the time they ran 292
Ten hours later they were still flying. She hadn’t been able to risk falling asleep, for fear Hardson would do the same thing. She was tired and had to pee.
They’d had to climb to 15,000 feet to get above a storm. From this vantage point, she still saw the anemic sun, but it was already dark on the planet’s surface below. It was a balmy twenty below zero outside the plane. She expected to face 30 to 40 below zero once they landed, and dropping through the storm to do that would be tricky. Hardson was calculating they had maybe thirty minutes of fuel left. When that number hit fifteen, she gave the order and braced for a rough landing.
The wind was over thirty knots, and visibility zero. Hardson was instrument rated, but even though he knew when the surface was coming up, the landing was rough. The Beaver hit once and bounced high, hit and bounced a second time, and on the third try he maintained contact with the frozen surface. Fitted with skees, the plane had no brakes. Hardson pulled the power all the way back and slid over the rough, but manageable surface, steering with the rudder to avoid the worst of the pressure ridges. He did well until their ground speed was down to twenty knots. Then the right ski encountered an ice outcropping too tall to slide over. It stopped dead, broke off and spun the plane ninety degrees to the right, tipping the Beaver forward onto its nose. The propeller bit into the ice half a dozen times before the engine stalled.
Except for the howl of the wind, the ticking of the hot engine, and liquid leaking from somewhere, the world was silent. The seat belt had restrained Bell. Her ribs were a little sore on the right side, but she was ok otherwise.
Hardson’s forehead and nose had impacted the steering yoke, and both were bleeding. Without being prompted, he popped the door open, crawled out and dropped three feet to the frozen ocean surface. His parka was unzipped and his head was bare. He seemed dazed, unconcerned. He turned his back to the wind and walked a 293
few yards away. He relieved himself as Bell threw her backpack over the empty fuel tank and crawled over it, landing in the pilot’s seat. From there, she hopped to the Arctic ice. She zipped, buttoned and tied every piece of her protective gear she could find, then activated the battery-operated warmers in her boots and gloves. They were rated for six hours, long beyond her needs.
With phone in hand, she walked ten yards, ninety degrees to the right from Hardson’s position, extra cautious to walk straight and steady in the whiteout. She punched the button that would send her coordinates to Art Revel, and held the phone inside the hollow of her hood cowl until she was sure it had been sent. Then she switched it off and dropped it into an exterior pocket.
The wind abated a bit as she carefully turned around and walked back to the Beaver. Squatting in the slight protection from the wind offered by the engine frozen to the ice, she made the manipulations necessary to relieve herself. After putting each part of her gear back in its proper place, she climbed back into the relative protection of the cockpit.
It had been 12 or 13 minutes since they’d landed, Bell thought.
Time didn’t matter though. She had done everything she could do.
She had to await developments now.
Hardson was easy to control. She’d given him orders to remove the unzipped parka. He was kneeling beside it now. She could see glimpses of him through the lessening blizzard. She thought the entity was a creature of habit, that it would come for Hardson wherever he was, and would inhabit his mind if he were still breathing.
It would be tricky, because she also needed Hardson near death, immobile, for her plan to work. Another timing issue she no longer controlled. If the entity sensed him already dead, it would withdraw while it still had the energy to do so, reenergize and reacquire Earthly form in another place, or another time. Or not. Perhaps it would let Earth be, prey on another species. Good for Earth. Not for her. She’d have bet the bank and failed. She didn’t like to fail. Never had. She wanted the entity. She would have it. But for now, she waited. She worried. Like that time in Dallas.
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