Buried Alive! (3 page)

“If I told you, I'd have to kill you.”

Ashley caught her breath, but Nicky just laughed. “Come on guys, that was a joke. I'm trying to lighten the mood here.”

“I don't think you're funny,” Jack told him.

Nicky's voice turned suddenly grave. “Yeah. Nothing much about my life has been funny. It actually sucks. But it's going to get better. My dad—he promised me that.” He looked out into the trees, his dark eyes staring at something Jack couldn't see.

It was Ashley who finally broke the silence. “Can you tell us?” she asked softly. When she spoke, her breath made a tiny cloud.

Nicky shifted on the bench. “I'm not supposed to. But then again, you went and heard, so maybe I can tell you some. I'm from Philadelphia—maybe you already know that. It was just me and my dad and then about a week ago…about a week ago he had to leave, and I had to find a place to land and that's how I ended up with you. But don't feel sorry for me or nothin',” he rushed on. “We're going to get back together soon, me and my dad, and then I'll be outta here. It's all good.”

Jack scowled. Hadn't his parents said there was danger? Hadn't they talked about hiding from who-knew-what up in the frozen north? He wanted to reach out and shake Nicky, but Ashley kept talking in her calm voice, as if they were having a conversation about oatmeal. What was it like living in a big city? Crowded, Nicky answered, but with really good restaurants that served dishes with names he couldn't pronounce and spices that made his tongue burn and streets that were lit up like noon all night long and stayed bustling until the crack of dawn. What was his favorite class? Science, because you got to dissect real frogs. After that maybe math. For ten long minutes the conversation droned on, Nicky's dark eyes locked on Ashley's, his mouth seeming disconnected because of the ski mask, as if it belonged to a ventriloquist's dummy.

“…so I'm a city kid who ended up in the frozen north. Man, who'd a thought?” Nicky shook his head. “I can't believe they would send me all the way here. But that Ms. Lopez lady was right; I do feel OK about it. Except for maybe the wolves and bears.” The whole time he'd been talking Nicky had been working on a tiny eight-inch snowman, and now he stuck two spruce needle arms on it as well as a spruce needle nose. “You like this thing?” he asked Ashley.

Jack's annoyance deepened. If his sister wanted to chatter like nothing was wrong, that was fine, but he was sick of pretending the three of them were rambling through a regular conversation. Whatever Nicky's secret was, Jack wanted to know and he wanted to know now. “What are you running away from?” he demanded.

The smile faded from Nicky's face.

“You heard what my parents said—that no one would think to look at a wildlife veterinarian and all of that. So who's looking?”

No answer.

“If you're not going to tell us, then why'd you bring us over to this table?”

No answer.

“I mean, why all the secrets? Why don't you just tell us and then we can go into the house and have some hot chocolate and forget about it. This is just dumb.”

Nicky held up his right hand. “No, it's all right,” he said to Ashley when she began to argue that Nicky should be able to tell things the way he wanted to. “Jack's right. See, that's the part I need you guys to understand.” His voice became suddenly slow, deliberate, and in an odd way everything around them seemed to hush. Even a black-billed magpie that had been fluttering at the top of a spruce stopped its strident cawing. “There are…things…about me…you need to leave alone. Not that I don't want to tell you, but it's not safe for you to know.”

Snorting, Jack said, “Oh, come on, get real. You're in Alaska. Nobody's going to find you up here. Mom and Dad said so.”

“I'm not talking about me.” He cocked his fingers as if he were holding a gun, and pointed at the snowman. He pretended to shoot, then blew at the tip of his finger as if clearing smoke from a gun barrel. “I'm talking about you two.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jack scoffed. “Somebody's gonna come all the way up here to shoot us. Who? A terrorist?”

Nicky's eyes narrowed, and he breathed quickly once or twice, sending vapor into the cold air. Jack could almost see the wheels turning inside his head as he thought things over. Suddenly he said, “I can't really break my oath of secrecy, but we'll play a guessing game. About my dad, right? I'll give you a clue, and you have to figure it out.” His eyes were still narrowed, but now they had a glint in them.

“A game,” Jack said. “OK. Go.”

“Here's the clue,” Nicky announced. “Charlie is alive.”

“Who's Charlie?” Ashley asked.

“That's the clue. You have to guess.” Nicky set the little snowman in the center of the table and pretended to shoot it, using his finger as a gun.

“Is the snowman Charlie?” Jack wanted to know.

“No. The snowman is dead. Charlie is the clue. Charlie. Is. Alive.” As Nicky bit off each word, Ashley looked toward Jack and shrugged.

Jack swept his gaze around the snowy landscape. “I got it,” he said. “Charlie is the magpie up there in the tree. It's still alive.”

Nicky shook his head. “You guys are so dense. Charlie's no one. Charlie is just a word. OK, I'll give you another clue. Can icicles attack?”

“Huh?” What kind of clue was that? Jack strained his imagination to come up with some solution to the puzzle, because he couldn't let Nicky beat him in this little brain game. He no longer cared whether it would reveal anything about Nicky's father; it was just that he needed to win, to silence that superior tone in Nicky's voice. Two clues, he told himself. Charlie is alive. Can icicles attack? “Well,” he muttered, “each sentence has three words.”

Ashley grew excited and added, “And the three words start with the same letters.”

“C-I-A!” Jack yelled. “Your dad's with the CIA.”

Nicky leaped forward, slamming his hand over Jack's mouth. “Keep it quiet,” he hissed. “Keep it quiet.”

J
ack looked out the window of the plane and let the scenery wash thoughts of Nicky out of his mind. Beneath him was the frozen Toklat River, a winding, silver-white braid lacing through mountains that looked like sleeping dragons. Having traced the thin spider vein of the Toklat along his map, he knew it would flow out of the Alaska Range to join the Kantishna River, which would eventually flow into the Tanana River then to the mighty Yukon, which emptied into the Bering Sea. But the scene below couldn't be translated by the ink scribbles on his map; this park was too immense, too beautiful, too vast. At six million acres, Denali National Park and Preserve covered three times the area of Yellowstone, and here there were no highways threaded with bumper-to-bumper traffic; no miles of walkway crisscrossing the forest like scattered pick-up sticks.

The wilderness beneath him was an untouched pattern of tundra and kettle ponds and spruce forests. His mother had told him that parts of this landscape had never felt the tread of a human foot, and that knowledge made Jack glad. In a way it took the edge off the uneasiness he'd been feeling about Nicky.

Ever since Nicky had pointed his finger to pretend-shoot the snowman, Jack's distrust of him had grown. Saying that he couldn't tell Jack and Ashley about his life or they'd be in danger—how phony it all sounded! Of course the version Nicky told did tie in a little bit with what Jack's parents had said—that up in Alaska they were “thousands of miles away from any kind of danger.” And yet he had to be faking it. Vows of silence? That stuff about the CIA? What was that all about? Jack wished his folks would just tell the whole story straight up so he could figure out what was going on. Instead, he was forced to make sense from whatever scraps of information he could stitch together, a line here and a bit there, like tiny patches on a quilt.

Pressing his forehead against the small window, he felt the plane's vibration run straight through his skull and into his jaw. In an odd way it felt good because something else was bothering him. He wasn't quite sure how to put words onto it. Maybe if the throb of the engine filled his head, he wouldn't have to think.

He watched the mountains unroll below in a rhythm of peaks and valleys, the tops of them treeless and bare, the valleys empty sugar bowls of snow. From his books he knew that the summer would bring wildflower carpets and willow thickets that hid 37 species of mammals. Concentrate on those, he commanded his brain. Instead, his mind kept flashing back to Nicky, and he realized what else was gnawing at him. It was Ashley. When they'd sat at the picnic table, her wide-set eyes had watched Nicky's every move in a way he'd never seen before. Jack didn't like it. He didn't like the way her face lit up when Nicky talked about his life. He especially didn't like the way she swallowed Nicky's every word, gulping down his story like a baby bird. Yeah, exactly like a baby bird. In his mind he hatched a picture of her with a beak-mouth opened wide as Nicky fed her one fantasy after another.

Nicky had finished up by saying, “Remember, keep all this a secret. I'm trusting you guys. Spies are everywhere. I mean the bad guys.”

“You can count on us,” Ashley had breathed. “You have our promise. We will not tell a word to Mom or Dad or anyone. No one will ever know that we know. Right, Jack? Right, Jack?”

Jack had stood there, brushing the snow off his pajama bottoms, muttering, “Sure, right.”

He hadn't believed a word of it. But he was curious. How could he tease the truth from his parents, or from Nicky?

“Gorgeous enough for you?” Olivia asked loudly. She'd been busy chatting about wolverines with the ranger directly across from her while Jack had drifted inside his own thoughts. Now his mother's voice snapped him back.

“Yeah. Pretty amazing,” he answered.

Since they were flying to Kantishna airstrip in a bush plane, the engine's roar drowned out anything said in a normal voice. Jack, Olivia, a ranger named Blake Van Horn, and the pilot, Eric, were in this plane, while Nicky, Ashley, Steven, and another ranger/pilot flew behind them in a second plane.

“They call Alaska the last frontier, and it certainly is that. Look!” Olivia's arm brushed against Jack as she pointed out the small window. “Not a single person as far as the eye can see.” Her arm flew back as she clutched her seat and said, “Whoa—the air's getting rough. I hope Ashley's OK in the other plane. You know how queasy she gets from turbulence.”

Jack bet Ashley's skin would be blanched as white as the snow beneath them—white with a green tinge, since she really hated being bumped around in small planes. Well, if she got sick, at least Jack wouldn't be there to see it. Maybe she could throw up on Nicky.

The thought made him smile. He reached out to steady himself as the plane bounced even harder.

“Sorry! These little planes can be a bit of a rollercoaster ride,” Blake told them.

Leaning forward so he could see Blake better, Jack said, “Mom told me you were the one who found the last two wolverine bodies.”

“Yep. I was the first ranger on the scene, although the actual call came from Chaz Green from the Wolverine Rescue Program. He had his dogsled out by Kantishna when he discovered the bodies, and he called us immediately. When I mushed out I found two dead male wolverines only a few feet apart. So weird. You talked to Chaz, didn't you, Olivia?”

“Yes. He called me in Jackson Hole and told me what he knew. He was really helpful—and very passionate about the wolverines. I went to his Web site and was truly impressed.”

“He sure wants to protect those critters,” Blake agreed. “I wish there were more people like him.”

Blake was tall and muscular, with deep-set eyes the same flinty gray as his hair, which curled over his collar like a baby's fingers. He had a well-trimmed beard, something Jack wasn't used to in park rangers. Most of the ones Jack had met were clean-shaven.

The skin on Blake's face and hands had been burned a leathery brown-red, and deep lines ran from the corners of his eyes all the way to his ears, like tiny curtain pleats. He was the type of ranger who looked as tough as the land he patrolled.

“Chaz is the guy taking us mushing, right?” Jack asked.

“That's right.” Olivia nodded. “He volunteered to take you kids on a sled dog expedition while I'm examining the wolverine bodies.”

“You ever been mushing, Jack?” Blake asked.

Jack shook his head. “This'll be my first time.”

“Oh, you'll love it.” Reaching beneath his seat, Blake pulled out a small water bottle, snapped the plastic ring with a quick motion, then raised it to his lips. After a few swallows he added, “The dogs love it, too—they're bred for the job. You glide over that glassy tundra so fast you'll swear you're flying. I used to run the sled dog team at Denali kennels, and I've mushed the area to Wonder Lake many a time, just me and the dogs and nature. Nothing's better.”

“I have a question,” Jack began. He'd been around enough park rangers to know that most came in two types: the quiet ones, and the ones who were natural-born teachers. Blake was in the second category, hands down.

“OK,” Blake grinned. “I'm ready. Shoot.”

“How come the park still uses dogsleds instead of snowmobiles? I mean, Mom said there were snowmobile tracks by the wolverine bodies, so it must be OK to use them in Denali, right?”

“Yes and no,” Blake answered. “It's complicated. There's Denali Wilderness, the additions to the National Park that we got in 1980, and the National Preserve. Snow machining is allowed in the park additions, where the dead wolverines were found.”

“But you rangers just use the dogsleds—”

“—and that seems an archaic way to get around the park,” Blake finished for him. “Well, let's think about it a minute. First of all, snow machines depend on gasoline to power them. Our dogs need a few fat bars and a couple bites of snow when we're out on patrol, and then of course dog kibble and more water at night. Which do you think is gentler on the environment?”

Jack smiled. That was easy—the fat bars and mouthfuls of snow. Very biodegradable.

“A second reason is that our dogs don't bark when they're running, which means there's no noise pollution with our dog teams. Snow machines make an unholy racket. That's why they're outlawed in the wilderness area. Did you know,” he asked, training his steel gray eyes on Jack, “that Denali is the only national park with a working sled dog team?”

“No. That's really cool.”

“Darn right it is.” Blake leaned forward eagerly and rested his water bottle on his knee. Now it seemed he was really warming up. “Denali's dogs are absolutely unique,” he said. “Think about it. Snow machines have parts that break down or freeze up. They pollute. They're loud. Sled dogs are none of those things, which makes them a much better choice for our pristine back-country.” Wiggling his shaggy eyebrows, he added, “And in my opinion the dogs are a heck of a lot more fun. You can't cuddle up with a snow machine.”

“How come you call them snow machines instead of snowmobiles?”

Blake shrugged. “Everyone up north calls them ‘snow machines.' Can't tell you why. They're the same things as snowmobiles, though. Hey,” he interrupted himself, “would you two like something to drink? I have a couple extra bottles of water.”

Both Jack and Olivia shook their heads. “We have our own, thanks,” Olivia told him. “Speaking of water, Blake, I had a question, too. How do you keep so many animals hydrated? I was sitting here doing the math, and I can't figure out how you manage it. Four quarts per day per dog times what,” Olivia asked, squinting, “eight dogs? That's a whole lot of water.”

Jack thought he knew the answer to this one. “They eat snow, like Blake said.”

“I wish that was all it took,” Blake replied. He twisted the cap back onto the water bottle and set it onto the floor. Right then they hit another pocket of air, making the bottle tip over and spin to the back of the plane like a top. “Ah, just leave it,” Blake commanded when he saw that Jack was about to retrieve the bottle. He went on to tell them it took ten to fifteen gallons of snow to melt into one gallon of water. In the meantime, he would have to unpack the sled, bring in the harnesses to dry, and check the dogs' feet for cuts before finally feeding his animals. “There's a rule in the north, and that rule is Dogs Eat First. After taking care of all that and attending to a few more tasks, I get to eat.”

Once again Jack thought how hard it was to be a ranger in the Park Service. Their jobs seemed both physically and mentally tough, and yet every ranger he'd ever met loved life in the parks. It almost seemed that being a ranger was a calling, a vocation, like choosing to be a priest or a missionary. Well, in a way, all rangers were missionaries. It was as if the wilderness was their church, the animals their congregation. He turned that thought over as their plane banked sharply to the left. They were about to land at Kantishna.

A low mountain emerged to the north, and at its base he noticed the frozen branch of Moose Creek glinting in the sun. Parallel to the creek ran an airstrip, one of the smallest Jack had ever seen. Brush lined both sides of it. Jack had never been nervous in a plane before, but there was a first time, he supposed, for everything. His stomach clamped as the small plane dipped toward the narrow runway.

When the plane nosed down, Jack squeezed his eyes shut until he felt a thud as the plane's skis touched snow, then settled into a long glide along the strip. It was then Jack opened his eyes and let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. The roar of the engines cut to a whine as they glided to the end of the runway.

“It's a bit primitive,” Blake laughed as he unbuckled his seat belt. “But we haven't lost a ranger yet. You look a bit pale there, Jack. You OK?”

“I'm fine,” Jack lied.

After the pilot, Eric, stopped the plane, Blake jumped out and put down a footstool for the rest of them to step on. After they were all safely on the ground, Eric steered the aircraft off the runway to make room for the second plane. Within five minutes, it landed smoothly and easily on the strip. Then Blake carried the footstool to that plane, getting it in place just before the door banged open.

First Steven emerged, followed by a female ranger Jack didn't know—she must have been the pilot. They quickly joined the knot of rangers and wolverine experts who had gathered around Olivia, shaking hands of introduction as though they were old friends. He heard Blake telling them about a N
ATIONAL
G
EOGRAPHIC
article on wolverines in Finland; it said that one of the animals had built a cave underneath the frozen body of a sheep. “Food and shelter all in one,” Blake joked. Everyone seemed to enjoy the story.

Jack drifted toward the doorway of the second plane, waiting for Ashley to exit. Finally he saw her one shoe hit the stool. The foot wavered a little. Then another foot planted itself right next to Ashley's, this one a size ten extra-wide black snow boot. Nicky was there, an inch from her side, standing so close to Ashley that a beam of light couldn't get between them. Worst of all, Nicky's arm was draped around Ashley's shoulders.

Jack wanted to leap up, grab that arm, and fling the arm and its owner backward inside the plane. And then maybe punch him, too. Punch Nicky Milano's lights right out. He clamped his teeth together to keep from yelling, “Leave my sister alone!”