CHAPTER 7


   It was somewhat disturbing to see the face that showed up on the video monitor. Barbara leaned back in the chair for a moment as the girl, on the screen, rattled on in her usual manner. Before Barbara said anything, she looked around the room that everyone here routinely called “the tower.” Some seventeen year old boy was sweeping up but, past that, no one else was in here at the moment.
Barbara had no idea why they called this place a tower since it was really just one more building on the property. It did actually have windows that looked out on the main runway, and computer screens that handled the air traffic control for the airspace around Valley Point. After that, the place shared no resemblance to anything that could be remotely described as a tower. If Barbara had ever been forced to describe this place, the word tower would not be it. Too her, it looked more like a cheap building on the set of an old western movie.
The look was just skin deep. The tower did have a more than adequate electronics suite and that was why she was here. There was no wireless cell communications on the continent. If you wanted to talk to someone you needed either a hard wired line, or a very expensive dish that could connect you to an even more expensive satellite relay. Since no hard wired lines ran to the arch, Barbara was stuck going the satellite route to place this call.
“April,” Barbara said for about the third time, “this call is expensive, please!” That really confused the girl and she, thankfully, stopped talking. Barbara took the pause and said, “who is supposed to be up there?” Then the thought crossed Barbara’s mind, “why was April in Ops, in the first place?”
Fortunately, April never got a chance to explain. Amy’s face showed up on the screen and it was obvious that she did not realize how much of a picture was being transmitted. Barbara watched Amy push April out of the way and sit down in the vacated chair. Amy looked flustered and told Barbara in her meek tone, “sorry, had to go…” Her eyes drifted to the side of the room, and Barbara guessed that Amy was looking at the bathroom door.
It was irrelevant so Barbara stopped the girl and just asked, “just fill me in Amy.”
Amy looked confused, “on what?”
“Um,” Barbara dropped her head and shook it, “on anything? It’s my station you know. I do like to keep up with what’s going on.”
Amy just looked around the room on her end, like she might actually see something. Then she shrugged at the screen, “everything’s fine?”
Barbara vowed that when she made her next call she would time it for when Calvin was supposed to be up there. She was not just wasting time now, she was wasting money in her budget that she could ill afford. She signed off and got up out of the chair. As Barbara was walking for the back door, a certain object instantly registered in her brain. She stopped, reached down on the console, and picked up the phone with the pink cover and little flower stickers all over the back.
Barbara held the phone up for the boy to see and then asked him, “did you see who left this here?”
The boy stopped sweeping and just shrugged, “what is it?”
Barbara damn well knew what it was. The boy probably did too but, no matter what useful information he might know, it was obvious to Barbara that he was going to keep it to himself. That made Barbara more than a little antsy. There was also very little she could do about it and, in the back recesses of her mind, she wondered if she even should. For the moment, Barbara simply pocketed the phone and left the building. She walked over to the admin building where she had to sign one form after another so these people could get paid and she could get her avgas. There were also the usual field fees and other assorted charges that came with an operation like this. What was not a normal thing was what Barbara saw across the tarmac.
Why was it that Barbara had a sneaking suspicion that the guys and the bird, parked on the other side of the field, were not going to be paying anything to use this place? The aircraft was of a type that Barbara had seen parked out at Riggins Field, back home. It had huge wings with imbedded turbo fans. It was painted in a grayish blue camouflage scheme and had a small cockpit and fat belly that looked less than aerodynamic. It also had an iron cross painted on the tailfin and probably in a few other places that Barbara could not see.
Lucy Rayne came walking out of the admin building when she noticed that Barbara had not come in. Lucy could guess why. She stopped next to Barbara and joined her in looking across the field, “yeah they came in last night while you guys was sleeping.”
Barbara was a little bit concerned so she asked, “is this normal Lucy?”
Lucy just shrugged, “well we can’t stop ’em if they do. They’ve been here before but, normally, they just kind of ignore us up here at Valley. Only good thing I can say is at least they don’t use none of our gas cause they sure as hell don‘t pay for nothing else they take. What do those things run off of anyway? Never heard tell of nothing like that.”
What could Barbara say to that? She knew it was a military vehicle and they had their own power sources that worked kind of like batteries. Barbara knew those power plants eventually wore out and had to be replaced. She watched the German’s take one out, down at Riggins one day, after they first arrived. It literally looked like a giant panel with a few pipes running around it and it slid right out on a standard fork lift. Why they should make it so easy to replace was beyond Barbara since she had seen them change out more seats in those things than power plants. She had been told that a single cell could last for years and, most of the time, the vehicle wore out long before it’s power.
Barbara had to ask, “they didn’t say why they’re here?”
Lucy just shrugged, “they never tell us anything. I don’t even speak German.”
When Barbara reached the bunk houses she found her daughter sitting at one of the outside tables, eating from a plate of food that was piled unusually high. That was normal around these parts and it was considered impolite to not feed your guest to the point of their bellies exploding. It was so ingrained here that people made jokes about inviting armed robbers to dinner and then rolling them to jail afterwards. Barbara had come to suspect, years ago, that the custom was really just a disguise for the fact that everyone up here liked to eat their own body weight, in food, at every meal.
Barbara stopped at the table and laid her child’s phone down in front the plate she was eating from. With a smile that glossed over her stern tone, Barbara told Shannon, “we’ll talk about this when we get home.” After that, Barbara went to the nearby cook house, that seemed to run from before sun up to after sun down, and got her meal. As usual, they were burning a cow over a spit, out back of the little shack, and they had a pot boiling, next to the serving line, that was full of the sticky substance they called grits. It was hot, steaming in the chilly morning air, and it stuck to your ribs. Barbara though it tasted kind of bland but, it did warm you up.
After chatting with a few people, on the way back to the table, Barbara finally sat down and told Kent about the Germans. He seemed to think very little of it but, this did not really surprise Barbara. Kent never acted like anything was a big deal. She dropped the subject and then noticed with some alarm, “where are they?”
Once again, Kent acted like nothing mattered at all, “where are who?”
“Don’t start Kent,” Barbara told him, “you know damn well who I mean.” If anything, it was a bad sign that he picked just now to play ignorant.
“Mister Tippet,” Kent said with an optimistic tone, “was up early this morning sticking our tanks.” He made eye contact with Barbara and added, “which I might say was a very good idea. At any rate, one thing led to another and it would seem that Killian is having some problems with their fuel lines, so, we will have to delay our departure for a little while longer.”
Barbara sneered, “and that didn’t answer the question.”
“They went to town Barbara,” Kent relented. “It sounded harmless enough.”
She pointed with her big thick spoon. It was the only kind that could handle the grits without breaking, “you were the one who warned me, remember.”
Shannon rolled her eyes at her mother, “Jesus Mom, Danni’s always had the hots for Tony. How blind can you be?”
Now the spoon pointed in the teenagers direction and Barbara, once again told her child, “we’ll discuss how you know that, later.” She then shifted her attention back to Kent.
He jumped to his own defense before Barbara could get going, “and how was I suppose to stop them? I did mention that they might check with you first.”
Shannon then jumped on her mother with, “relax Mom. Tony just needed some stuff for the emergency kit. We had to dump a lot of that before we left. You know? To make room for Maxine? They’re not going to be flying the hump at Sadley’s Hardware.”
“Shannon!” Barbara commanded with flared nostrils. She then made a command decision, “all right fine.” She pointed her spoon back at Kent, “only Danni stays with you today.”
“I am fully aware,” Kent replied, “that I suggested it Barbara. After sleeping on it, and knowing what we know now, I have changed my opinion on the matter.”
“Danni can bitch about it all she wants,” Barbara let it be known and, her tone, made it very clear that she did not care about anything else.
“It’s not that,” Kent told her. He took a print out from his jacket and put it on the table for Barbara to see, “I really do think we need to check out that transponder contact. We can’t send Mister Tippet up there alone and Miss Nguyen is hardly qualified to do my job. So I can’t go.”
“Fine,” Barbara mumbled as she began reading the paper. She continued in between reading words, “I’ll do it and…”
“What?” Kent told her. “I certainly don’t think that Mister Tippet should be the one up at the station. You’re the only one who knows where everything is. Not to mention, do you really want to drag Shannon out to the west slopes?”
Barbara was reaching the bottom of the page when she replied, “no I was thinking about taking Danni with me. Shannon knows where everything is up at the station.”
That got Shannon’s inflamed, “you’re putting this on me now?”
“Like it or not Barbara,” Kent remained calm enough, “Mister Tippet is the best qualified to fly a search mission. He is most certainly the best candidate for this particular job. I talked with him this morning and, after hearing the details, I’m not certain any other pilot would have even noticed that pinger.”
Barbara thought about the paper she just read and then wondered what that had to do with what Kent just said. She was cautious, she was slightly paranoid, and she wanted to know, “why is that exactly?”
“It was on a frequency that doesn’t get used by bush pilots,” Kent told her. “Even on it’s primary it was sporadic and weak. If anyone else had heard it, they would have just written it off as a static burst, a solar flare, or something like that.” In Barbara’s mind that translated in to one thing. Tony was looking for an excuse to spend more time flying around and showing Danni all of the sights. Kent could see those thoughts in her eyes so he put it to her bluntly, “you can’t go because we can’t have both of our pilots in one vehicle and we need you at the station. I can’t go because I’m needed here. That leaves you with the options of either Mister Tippet flying alone out there.”
“Out of the question,” Barbara injected since they both knew the answer to that. Flying around the island was one thing. There was plenty of communications, infrastructure, and if you had problems then you were never more than a few minutes from help. Out on the slopes it was an entirely different matter.
“There you have it,” Kent told her. Then he mentioned, “or you can let Mister Tippet fly around with your daughter all day.”
Barbara smiled and slapped her hand on the table, “Danni it is!”