Please, God, get us down and let someone find us.
She was close enough to see the roadbed. Gray rubble—but was the Dalton Highway that wide? The swath was as broad as a ten-lane highway.
Wait, that was no road. Could it be a riverbed? Oh, sweet Jesus, a glacier!
No choice, she couldn’t fly through ash. She had to get the plane down.
Power back, ease down.
Touch. Bump, bump. Bouncing over gravel-strewn ice. Her feet worked the rudders, trying to steer away from the steep banks of moraine that lined the glacier.
Skidding, sliding. Down, down the hill of ice. Slipping sideways. Rudders no good now, nothing to do but trust to God and Cessna.
Bang. A bad bounce. The left wing dug into the gravel. The plane’s tail slewed forward. Screeching of tortured metal mixed with women’s screams.
Screech. A wheel strut collapsed, the plane canted sickeningly as the metal stub dug into ice.
Thumps and crunches, cracks and groans.
Skidding, skidding. Another bump.
Hard stop.
The plane was tilted but, thank the blessed saints, still right-side up.
Estelle switched off the engine and ripped off her headphones. The silence after the drone of the engine was dizzying.
Her heart was racing, but the sobs from the back seat reassured her that Sera, at least, had survived.
“Sera? Are you hurt?”
“I’m all right.” Her voice was shaky. “Are you okay?”
Estelle took a deep breath, wiggling digits. Chest sore from the shoulder belt and her head had banged on the side window, but her spine appeared to be intact and there was no obvious bleeding. “I’m good.”
She steeled herself to look at Annie.
Bright eyes blinked back from a pale, lined face.
Estelle gently removed Annie’s headphones. “Are you hurt?”
“Have I told you, dear?” Annie asked. “I really don’t care for flying.”
Luis hurried to shove his pack into the tent. A volcano? Damn it, could anything else go wrong? If Luis had believed in God, he’d think She was having some inscrutable joke on him.
“Don’t breathe that shit,” Kanut said as they ducked under the flaps. “It’s hell on your lungs.”
Luis hurriedly zipped, sealing the tent as much as he could. He hoped the mammoths’ long noses might provide some filtering for the air they breathed.
In the dimness, the two men stared at one another.
“You ever been near an eruption before?” Luis asked.
“Mount Spurr, when I was a kid. Rained ash on Anchorage for days.”
“Days?” Shit, holed up in a tent for days with a hostile cop? They’d be tearing each other to bits in no time. “How close is this volcano?” Luis hadn’t noticed anything on the topo maps warning Here be active volcanos.
Kanut shook his head. “None near here that I know of. Something new, maybe.” He tried his satphone.
“Forget it,” Luis said. “It’s no good under heavy cloud cover.” He unrolled his sleeping pad for a softer place to sit. “We might as well get comfortable.”
“Ah,” Kanut sighed as he eased onto the pad. “That’s better. I guess the government treats you good, eh? First-class equipment and all.”
“We do all right.” Luis rooted in his pack and fished out a couple of nutrition bars. “We’ve got food, of a sort.” There were freeze-dried packets in the food cache—plenty of them, now that Brandon was gone—but getting them meant going outside the tent to fetch them and to boil water. “How much water do you have?”
Kanut shook his canteen. “Two cups, maybe.”
“I’ve got about the same. That’ll do us till morning, anyway.” Once the ash lightened up, he could filter more from the stream.
Kanut dug into the pockets of his body armor and turned on a penlight.
“Save your battery for when we need it,” Luis advised. The light flicked off.
In the dimness of the tent, they crunched the protein bars. Ash pattered like rain on the fly over their heads.
Kanut pulled a plastic bag from his backpack, extracted a swatch of oiled cloth, and began to clean his rifle. “Why’d you make that elephant attack me?”
“I didn’t.” Luis spoke through clenched teeth. “If you’ll recall, I stood in front of you and stopped her. And she’s a mammoth, not an elephant. Her name is Ruby.” God, how long was he going to be imprisoned with this bastard?
“Excuse me all to hell. Why did Ruby attack me?”
Luis shrugged. “I trained the mammoths to recognize danger. The biggest danger they’ll ever face is a rifle in the hands of some yahoo who wants to bag an ivory trophy.”
Kanut looked up. “You mean you actually trained those monsters to attack anyone with a weapon?”
“Of course not,” Luis snapped. “If she’d gone after you, there’d be nothing left but a bloody puddle. I trained them to attack the firearm. Specifically, rifles. It’s simple self-protection.”
Kanut stared. “You’re a madman. Why not just train them to run away?”
Luis clucked his tongue impatiently. “A running target is still a target—even a mammoth can’t outrun a bullet. Take out the rifle, and the danger is gone.”
“Mother Mary,” Kanut muttered. “The army’s right. Those animals are a menace.”
“Not if people leave them alone.”
The tent was beginning to sag under the weight of ash. Luis pushed up on the dome to clear it. Kanut did the same on his side, using the butt of his rifle.
“So, why mammoths?” Kanut asked. “Why’d the army want to bring them back?”
“You a Native Alaskan? Born here?”
Kanut nodded. “Inupiaq. Lived here all my life, except my time in the army.”
“Then maybe you’ll
