Chapter 15 Fire on the Point

They did not get until first light. The storm broke at midnight, not into calm, into that brief and treacherous clarity that comes in the north when the wind has blown itself out and the cold settles like a lid. The sky cleared. The stars came out hard and close. And on the black water to the east, Nessa saw the running lights of two boats, coming south around the shoulder of the next island, and she knew the clarity had not saved them. It had only lit them up. She was already moving. "Get the case. Get your coat. Nothing else." She ran to the plane and pulled the covers and untied two of the lines. "They cannot land here. There is no beach and no dock. They will come ashore on the ice at the south end of the island and walk up, and if they walk up we are two people in a cave with one flare and a hand saw." "Then we fly." "Then we fly." She leaned into the prop and pulled it through, and the cold engine argued and then caught, and the rock under the plane shook. "Anything you cannot carry in one arm, leave it." He was back in thirty seconds with the case and the papers and the dive bag, and he climbed in and put the case on the seat behind her and did not buckle it, because if they went into the water the case was going to have to be able to come out. She noted it, the way she noted everything about him now, and then she stopped noting him and flew. The takeoff was a gamble. The strip of rock that had been clear the day before was drifted now, and the wind had turned, and there was not enough length to get the Merganser up the usual way. She ran the engine to full and held the brakes and let the plane squat and shiver and then released, and the old floatplane rolled down the island's one flat and did not want to climb, and the cliff came at them, and she cleared it by an arm's width with the stall horn crying and the whole aircraft trembling on the edge of the air. Behind them, on the black water, the lead boat turned toward the sound. They came up over the western shore and she banked hard along the island and kept low, reading the swells by the starlight, and behind her Isaak watched the boats through the side glass and gave her what a pilot needs when she cannot afford to look. "Lead boat is turning. Second boat is holding." A pause. "They are launching something. A small boat." "A shore party," she said. "They will land on the ice and find the cave and find the fire and know how recently we left." She brought the plane around the point and set a course east, back along the Bellamys, into the open lake. "It does not matter now. We are gone." It mattered. They were ten minutes out when the fire started, and it started on the point behind them, at the south end of the fathom island where they had hidden the spare fuel and the old net hammock in the lee. A column of orange light climbed out of the dark and stood up against the stars, and Nessa looked at it once and understood that Varek had not gone ashore to search a cave. He had gone ashore to send a message. "He is burning the island," Isaak said quietly. "So that we will see it. So that we will know that whatever we leave behind, wherever we go, he will find it and burn it." "No." She corrected the course and fixed her eyes on the horizon. "He is burning it because he thinks we will turn around to save it. That is what people like him believe about people like us. That we cannot bear to lose the thing we love." She pushed the throttle in and the engine took the fuel and the plane surged forward into the dark. "They are wrong. I already lost the thing I love on that water. The rest of it is only rock." She had a rule for nights like this, learned from Sten and never once broken: pick the safe altitude and do not vary it, count the seconds between flashes, and trust the instruments over the eyes, because in the dark the eyes want to see land where there is only water. She flew with her hand light on the yoke and her breathing steady, and she talked to the aircraft in a low voice the way her brother had done, telling it what they were going to do next, as if a machine could be soothed. She flew east, low over the black lake, with the fire on the point behind her and two boats on the water at her back, and she did not turn around. There is a thing that happens to a pilot in the first hour of a long night flight over cold water, which is that the aircraft stops being a machine and becomes a negotiation. Nessa had felt it every winter of her career and had learned to name it and set it aside. Tonight she could not set it aside, because there was a fire behind her and two boats at her back and a needle sliding toward the empty mark, and every gauge on the panel seemed to be keeping a secret. The engine coughed. It was a small cough, one cylinder missing for half a beat and then catching, and Isaak heard it and said nothing and so did she, because there was nothing yet to say. But she had noticed, and she reached down and tapped the fuel gauge and read it in the starlight, and the needle sat lower than it had any right to sit, and she did the arithmetic of fuel and distance and wind in her head and did not like the answer. "Where do we go now?" Isaak asked. She thought of the map in her head, the whole lake laid out like a held breath, and one place on it that a plane could set down at night in winter and a person could disappear with a case and a story that would bring down a company. "There is a fishing village on the western shore," she said. "Empty since the fall. Ice shanties and a frozen harbor and no one for thirty kilometers. We can put down on the harbor ice if it is thick, and we can be inside before dawn, and we can find a land line or a road or a radio that someone forgot to remove." "A village on the western shore. Can the plane reach it?" The needle said no. "Not the way I would like," she said. "But the way I would like stopped being available about two years ago." ---