The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

rim at a sprint.
    How could it be here?
    How could it be here without choppers hovering over it, and a hundred rescue specialists armed with acetylene torches and schematics cutting carefully into the fuselage in a dozen places?
    How could it be here alone?
    The valley wall below his campsite had been too steep to descend, but half a mile northwest he could see a concavity where it shallowed to something like a forty-degree incline. Still steep as hell. He’d have to be careful to avoid going ass over pack all the way down, breaking every limb in the process. A lot of help he’d be to survivors then, if there were any.
    As for help, he was it, at least for now. He had no means to call anyone. The cell phone in his pack had become useless forty miles out of Fairbanks, and his CB—the preferred mode of communication on the Dalton Highway—was thirty-six miles away, in the parking lot of the Brooks Lodge and Fuel Depot.
    As he made his way along the precipice, his eyes hardly strayed from the impossible vision below.
    The pilots had tried to land—that much was clear. The wreck lay pointing down the length of the valley as if it were a runway. Behind where it had come to rest, deep furrows were gouged into the earth for more than three hundred yards. Halfway along this scarred path lay the starboard wing, sheared from the plane by a stony pillar that had weathered the impact just fine. At the torn wing stub jutting from the fuselage, where fuel and scraping metal must have converged, only blind luck had prevented an inferno: the remainder of the plane’s long skid had taken place across a snowfield that covered the valley floor.
    The rest of the craft was intact, more or less. The tail fin had snapped and lay draped on the port-side stabilizer like a broken limb held on by skin alone. The fuselage had buckled in three places, wiring and insulation curling from foot-wide vertical ruptures. Through these openings Travis could see only darkness inside the plane, though at this distance even a brightly lit interior would have shown him nothing.
    He saw no movement in or around the wreck, and no sign that there’d been any. Nobody had dragged supplies out of the plane and set up shelter in the open. Had they simply sheltered in the fuselage? Were they too injured to move at all?
    Distance and perspective made it pointless to look for footprints. The snowfield, glazed by the temperature drop, was almost blinding to look at, and from six hundred feet above it offered no contrast. There was no way to tell if anyone had left the wreck to hike out in search of help.
    Help. That notion brought him back to the situation’s most confusing aspect. How did a 747 crash without anyone coming to its aid for—how long? Jesus, how long had this thing been here?
    Three days. The metal shriek in the thunderstorm came back to him with clarity. He’d heard the damn thing crash.
    Three days, and nobody had found the wreckage. Nobody had even come looking—at no point during his hike had he heard the drone of a search plane or the rattle of helicopter rotors. He couldn’t square it. This wasn’t a single-prop Cessna that had taken off without a flight plan and disappeared. Airliners had redundant communication systems: high-powered radio, two-way satellite, and probably a couple other kinds he didn’t even know about. Even if all of those instruments had failed, the tower at Fairbanks International would have logged the plane’s last known position. There should have been an army looking for it within the hour.
    Travis reached the inlet in the valley wall, a grassy funnel that extended to the flat bottom below. The slope was more severe than he’d supposed, but there was nothing kinder for miles in either direction. Tackling it in a straight line to the bottom would be suicide, even here, but a sidelong transit looked feasible. He stepped onto the grade and found its surface to be as obliging as he could have hoped for: soft enough to allow traction without yielding in a muddy slide. He found that if he leaned into the hillside and braced a hand on the grass, he could make good progress without risking his balance.
    Fifteen minutes later, sprinting hell-bent alongside one of the gouges in the valley floor—up close, the torn furrow was deep and wide enough for a Humvee to drive in—he passed the starboard wing, flung like a broken piece of a toy against the formation that had severed it.
    He crossed onto the snowfield and was