a grin, "in Kamovs and Swidniks, but none in a little beauty like that one."
"Then, Randi, you've got a copilot. Put him to work."
Randi gave him the briefest of hesitant glances. Smith replied with a single millimeter's nod. All of the brothers were valiant, and all of the sisters virtuous...until proven otherwise. Beyond that, the blond-haired Russian would be riding in that helicopter along with the rest of them, and Smyslov didn't strike Smith as being overtly suicidal.
Leaving the loading and preflight to Randi, Smith touched base at the leasing office. There was little for him to do; the invisible but potent presence of Fred Klein had passed through here as well.
"The paperwork's all taken care of, Colonel," the grizzled office manager said. "Your bird's fully fueled and surveyed, and I took the liberty of filing a flight plan through to Kodiak for you. You've got CAVU flight conditions all the way, and the weather looks good over Cook's Inlet and the Entrances for the next twelve hours. The air boss aboard the Haley is expecting you, and you'll recover directly onto ship. I'll advise him when you're in the air."
Smith knew from his briefing that Pole Star provided aircraft for a number of commercial and government research projects in the Arctic, and possibly for other purposes.
The office manager was obviously ex-army aviation. A large First Air Cavalry shield had been mounted on the flier-cluttered office wall, and the model of an AH-1 Huey Cobra sat on the desk. An ancient Vietnam-era flight jacket also lay draped over the back of the chair. Smith sensed that the older man might have been a member of the Club himself at one time or had worked on the peripheries.
"Thanks for the service," Smith said, extending his hand to the manager. "We'll try to bring her back in one piece."
"Screw it. It's insured," the old aviator grinned back, taking Smith's hand in a strong, calloused grasp. "I don't know what your tasking orders are, Colonel, but good luck and watch your ass. Men count. Choppers don't."
"I'll make that my beautiful thought for the day."
Smith stepped from the office and took a long automatic look around. The sky was blue and almost cloudless, the wind a faint cool brush against his face. In a few minutes they'd be airborne.
His team had linked up. Nothing untoward had happened on the flight to Anchorage or at the airport. No one had followed them here. No one was in sight, save for his own people and a couple of flannel-shirted locals tinkering around with a big white Cessna in a hangar across from the leasing agency.
Why was he thinking something had to be wrong?
The island and port of Kodiak lay some 270 miles west-southwest of Anchorage, down the length of Cook's Inlet and across Shelikof Strait from the Alaskan mainland, a decent haul for a small helicopter.
Randi Russell kept the Long Ranger just off the beach, steering along the densely forested shore of the Kenai Peninsula. Urban civilization fell swiftly behind them, replaced by a string of small villages spaced along the Sterling Coastal Highway like the beads on a necklace.
Randi was grateful for this opportunity to learn her aircraft. Most of her rotor hours had been in the Bell Ranger family, but few had been in the big 206 series. Now she felt her way through the Long Ranger's handling, exploring how the greater size and weight of the aircraft and the drag of the pontoons were countered by the augmented power of the twin engines. Her eyes soon found and fell into the automatic scan pattern of instrument gauges-horizon-instrument gauges-horizon of the skilled pilot.
Beyond the fishing community of Homer and the mouth of Kachemak Bay, even the coastal villages were left behind, and the Long Ranger headed out across the broad, empty straits of the Kennedy and Stevenson Entrances to Kodiak Island. The occasional distant wake of a fishing boat cutting across the chill blue waters served as the last lingering reminder of humanity.
After the first hour airborne, the steady-state whine of the turbines and the rhythmic thudding of the rotors threatened to become soporific, and Randi found herself having to fight a backlog of transpacific jet lag. Major Smyslov's occasional interested question from the copilot's seat about the controls and handling of the Long Ranger provided a welcome stimulus.
In the amidships passenger seats Professor Metrace had succumbed. Curling up in her mink-collared leather jacket, she'd gone to sleep. Glancing up at the rearview cockpit