“All right,” Kate said, getting to her feet. “We’ll be in touch.”
Wednesday, October 26th, by Johnny
Kate was making breakfast in the kitchen by the time I got downstairs. I had my computer and I was writing the previous post. “What are you writing?” she said, so I told her.
“Can I see?” she said.
“No,” I said.
She laughed. “Anything in there that isn’t about Vanessa?”
I could feel my face get red. “There’s lots of stuff that isn’t about Van. I wrote about the caribou count I did with Ruthe up on the Gruening last year. You know, on our second try.” I hesitated. “I wrote about Old Sam.”
She was standing at the stove with her back to me, but she kind of stopped with the spatula in her hand. “You did?”
“Yeah. I don’t want to forget him.”
The spatula started moving again. “Good.”
“And I write about your cases.”
This time she looked over her shoulder. “What?”
“I write about your cases.” I shrugged. “As much as I know about them, anyway.”
One of her eyebrows went up. “You write about yesterday?”
I nodded.
“Huh.” She turned back to the stove and started piling French toast and link sausages on two plates. “Okay, Dr. Watson. What do you think?”
Kinda cool that she asked, so I did a recap while we ate breakfast. When I was done she said, “So? What do we do first?”
“Uh,” I said. “Go to Merrill, talk to the air traffic controllers?”
“What kind of surface did they take off on?”
“Gravel. Oh. Merrill’s paved. Birchwood? Campbell Air strip?”
“What did Totemoff hear when they were stuffing him into the plane?”
“Oh. Jet engines, real close. So, Stevens International.”
She pointed a finger at me. “Ding, ding, ding. Lake Hood airstrip. What do we ask when we get to the tower?”
“About small plane takeoffs that night. It was late, there can’t have been that many.”
“Good. But first we get out a map.”
“Why?”
“Totemoff said he thought it was a 170 or a 172. If I remember right, a 172 cruises at about a hundred and forty miles per hour. He said he thought they’d been in the air about an hour. He’d been drinking and they’d been thumping on him so he isn’t the most reliable witness, but we can at least make a stab at figuring out where they took him within that radius.”
We got the map out.
The thing about Alaska is that there’s a dirt strip pretty much everywhere you look (Atlas Aviation has a good page on aviation facilities in Alaska), over three thousand of them, Jim says, and most of them unmaintained. First thing a gold miner does is hack one out of the scrub spruce so he can get in and out. Somebody’s building a cabin or a lodge, same thing. And then there’s the natural resource companies, they put in airstrips long enough to take a Herc carrying a drilling rig or a commercial gold dredge. When they’re done digging or drilling it’s not like they can roll it up and take it with them, so when the oil or gas company is gone the hunters and the fishermen and the backpackers start using it as a staging area.
That’s good news if you’re in the air and you’ve got trouble and you need to put her down. It’s not so good if you’re trying to figure out where one small plane went late one October night. There are literally hundreds of possibilities. We narrowed it down some, but not much. “If you were going to eliminate a few more of these, how would you go about it?” Kate said.
I didn’t know.
“Where’s Totemoff from?”
“Red Run,” I said.
“Where are his cousins from? The ones he met at the AFN convention?”
“Tatitlek. Oh. Oh! Plus the guys who kidnapped him needed an Eyak speaker to talk to the elder. So, Prince William Sound? But isn’t it too far for a 172?”
She smiled. I guess I did look kind of excited. But it was kind of cool, brainstorming a backtrail that way. “Maybe you’d need a bigger plane to get that far that fast, but remember Totemoff was only guessing. What about Myra?”
“Myra? Oh, you mean when the elder told him to tell Myra he said no?” Kate nodded. “You want us to look for her, too?”
She laughed. “Don’t sound so downhearted. I admit, if we were trying to find somebody from Shaktoolik, we’d have a problem. But if Myra is from Tatitlek, or Chenega, or even Whittier or Seward or Valdez, we’ve got an ace in the hole. Four of them, in fact.”
And then Bobby posted that comment on yesterday’s post, about Auntie Balasha going to Chulyin. I told Kate.
She laughed. “See?”
Wednesday, October 26th, 12 P.M., by Johnny
We went out to Stevens International and talked to the guys in the tower. (Really cool up there, lots going on, planes in the air everywhere you look, passenger 737s and cargo 747s almost nonstop in and out of Stevens
