Wisdom Spring (22 page)

Meanwhile, the helicopter, whose crew probably thought they were bringing Scott’s plane down, suddenly pulled back, now obvious that Scott was going to land safely. Scott figured they were discussing their options.

Despite the chopper being less than a hundred feet behind him, and his plane coming in a little faster than was advised, his landing was surprisingly smooth. He applied the flaps and brakes and came to a stop with twenty feet to spare. He looked over at Joe, who was clutching the sides of his seat.

“Piece of cake,” said Scott, grinning.

“I think I wet your seat,” croaked Joe.

As Scott taxied the plane around, he saw the chopper at the top of the runway sitting on the ground. Two men with what looked like M-16s had stepped out of the chopper and were motioning for Scott to approach. The pilot was still at the controls, keeping the blades turning, ready for a quick getaway. Unbeknownst to the men from the chopper, but in plain sight to Scott and Joe, three men with rifles were sneaking up from the rear, taking care to stay behind cover the whole time.

Scott and Joe cocked their pistols at almost the same moment and Scott worked the throttle so they were slowly creeping back up the runway toward the chopper. He saw one of the men from the chopper quickly turn his head toward a shed. Then they both turned in the other direction. Scott could see one of Ollie’s men—it might have been Ollie himself—hiding behind a knoll at the edge of the runway, a shotgun pointed at the two men.

Scott stopped the plane. It was obvious a yelling match was going on, and the two from the chopper weren’t looking very confident. Suddenly, one raised his M-16, and got off one burst before dropping to the ground, his gun flying from his hands. The second man also raised his gun, but Scott wasn’t so sure it was the beginning of putting his hands up to surrender. It didn’t matter. He, too, went down.

Scott gunned the motor and headed up the runway, stopping just short of the two bodies. He turned off the engines—thankful for the sudden quiet—and he and Joe got out, guns drawn.

The others had gathered around the two downed men. Both had leg wounds, but were very much alive.

Pete sidled up to Scott. “That was some flying.”

“I appreciate the help,” answered Scott.

“Mind telling us what this is all about?”

“A very large and complicated conspiracy of some major terrorists”—he used the word for effect—“to take over the government. A lot of people have died—some probably at the hands of these two—and a lot more will die unless we can stop it. You think you’ve got no freedoms now, wait ‘til these people take over.”

“Hey,” said Pete, “I may not like the assholes in Washington, but I served in Iraq, and I don’t take kindly to terrorists.”

Scott knew that as much as these backwoods guys derided the government, most had fought for it. They didn’t mind talking about taking over the government. They just wanted to be the ones to do it. A little terrorist talk would get their blood boiling.

Suddenly he heard a shout, followed by two gunshots, and felt a bullet whiz past his ear. He looked up to see the pilot, who everyone had forgotten about, pointing a large handgun out his window. He pulled in the gun and revved the motor. At that moment though, two of Ollie’s men blasted the cockpit with buckshot and the pilot slumped forward, the engine cycling down. One of the men jumped into the cockpit and turned off the engine.

The two on the ground were crying out in pain. Both had major wounds and blood was pooling up on the runway around them.

“What’ll we do with them?” asked Ollie. “You’re a paramedic, right? Should you try to save them?”

“Yeah, I guess I don’t have much choice,” Scott said, and headed to his plane for his medical kit.

A lone shot rang out from behind him. He turned quickly to see Joe point his gun at the second man’s head and pull the trigger. A second shot reverberated off the surrounding mountains.

“Shit!” he exclaimed. Nobody else said anything.

Joe looked up at the shocked faces around him. “It was the only option,” he said. “If we had let these guys live, you’d all be dead by tomorrow, and we wouldn’t be far behind. You have no idea how powerful the people behind this are. They have tentacles everywhere. You call the Alaska State Police and within an hour these people know about it. The only way that seems to work—your brother discovered that,” he said to Scott—“is to make the hirelings disappear altogether. Make the ones at the top wonder what became of their men. I suggest what happened here stays here. You talk about it and somehow it’s going to get back to them. Scott can let you know when it’s all over and okay to talk about.”

“Jon pegged you as a mild-mannered type,” said Scott.

“Yeah, well, your brother isn’t aware of my past.” He left it at that.

Ollie said to his two men, “You guys okay hauling some trash?”

“Not a problem,” said one.

“Take my pickup down the old logging trail to bear hollow. Take ‘em as far in as you can. Watch out for the bears. Strip ‘em naked. Any cash in their wallets is yours. We’ll burn their clothes, credit cards, and I.D.’s when you get back.” He turned to Scott. “What’ll we do about their chopper?”

“You want to strip it and sell the parts?”

“Hell, yeah. I can make a fortune off this. I’ll tow it over to the big shed. It’ll fit. We can dismantle it in there. Pete, when they leave with the bodies, can you wash the blood off the runway?” He turned to Joe. “So these are some serious bad guys? Think they contacted anyone before they set down?”

“I doubt it,” responded Joe. “These are hired guns. As such, they want to get full credit for their kills. They’re not going to have told anyone where they are until they have proof that they’ve done their job. No, I think you’re all pretty safe.”

An hour later, after repeatedly thanking Pete, Ollie, and the other two for their help, Scott and Joe were back on their way.

Scott radioed Fister to let him know that “everything was taken care of” and to thank him again for his assistance. He promised to tell him the whole story at a later date.

“You think Ollie and his friends are going to be okay?” asked Joe.

“Yeah. Like I said, they’re survivalists. They all have military backgrounds—most with extensive combat experience—and they’re used to skirting the law. They don’t see something like this out here, so down the line when they can talk about it, they’ll go to town with it. I think your actions shocked them a little bit, but they’re not virgins. If they think something needs to be done, they’ll do it. Uh, but Joe, when we tell Jon and Jess about it, let’s leave out that last part.”

Joe smiled. “Yeah, no problem.”

Chapter 24

Scott had just left to pick up Joe, and Jess and I sat at the kitchen table trying to make sense of the phone call a few hours earlier. I mentioned it to Scott before he left, but asked him not to say anything to Joe until he got here.

It had taken us over an hour to get back to sleep, as we debated the odds that it was actually Mill. Here we were again, this time more awake, but coming to the same conclusion: we still had no idea.

“Okay,” began Jess. “Let’s assume for a moment that it was Mill, how did he get your number? If you remember, when you gave it to Joe, he said he was going to be the only person who had it, that we were to go through him for everything.”

“That’s why it’ll be good to talk to Joe about this. If Mill is in hiding,” I continued, “couldn’t he contact one of his press buddies and tell them about Hillstrom? At least get the word out?”

“He probably doesn’t know who to trust anymore. I’m sure he’s scared out of his mind. If he shows himself, they’ll find a way to kill him.”

“You’re right. I guess we really can’t do anything else until, or if, he calls again.”

“So where does that leave us?” asked Jess. “Scott won’t be back with Joe for hours.”

“Let’s look into the ghost town theory. If it’s true that he was brought up in a town now abandoned, is there some significance to it? I mean, did he leave because the town was going under, or was he somehow responsible for it becoming a ghost town?”

We cleaned up the breakfast dishes and were about to move to the computer when we heard a yelping outside. We rushed to the door, only to see Max and Slob wrestling in the dirt. They would roll over, then hop up and take turns chasing each other. They were having the time of their lives.

“Remember how Max looked at Slob with disdain when Slob greeted us?” I asked. “It was all an act.”

At that moment, Max caught sight of us standing in the doorway and suddenly stopped and looked at us as if to say,
“You’re not going to tell Scott you saw me doing this, right?”

“Don’t worry, Max,” I said aloud. “Your secret is safe with us.”

Satisfied, Max nipped Slob, and the games continued.

We went back in and sat at the computer. We started the search just by typing “ghost towns Alaska” into Google. I figured we could narrow it down as needed.

The information was fascinating, and we found ourselves getting caught up in the romance of Alaska during the gold rush days and forgetting our real purpose. There were numerous websites that brought the history to life. While many of the towns were former gold camps or mining towns started in the late 1890s, some didn’t lose their last residents until the 1940s and 1950s. What kept the people there all that time?

As we read the accounts of the Klondike Gold Rush, and the 100,000 people who ventured there to make their fortune, we were both feeling a little embarrassed at our lack of knowledge about this part of America’s history. Neither of us had ever read
The Call of the Wild
, or anything by Jack London, and couldn’t remember learning anything about that fascinating era in history class. Were we just not interested when they taught it, or had it become a footnote, one that was no longer as important as our involvement in wars, and not worth teaching? I could somehow understand Alaskans’ disdain for the rest of the country. Other than the focus on its oil, what did we really know about the state?

Finally we began to focus in on the task at hand and were able to sort our way through the towns, eventually discarding the more famous ghost towns, and those on the official “ghost town tour map.” Even so, nothing seemed to fit our criteria. There were a few towns—not necessarily related to the gold rush—that lost their last residents as recently as the early seventies, but upon further investigation, just didn’t seem “right.” No, we were missing something.

“After all this, do you think Ben was telling Clyde the truth?” asked Jess.

“I think we have to follow it up, just in case. There’s something about that story that makes sense, but maybe we have to go about it another way. Why did Ben grow up in a soon-to-be-abandoned town? Why did he leave when he was twenty-one? Is that significant somehow? Then we go back to why he killed all those people. Is he just homicidal in nature or was he hiding something? What was so important in his past that he needed to wipe out all memory of his existence? If this town exists, what deep dark secret does it hold?”

“Just for the sake of argument,” said Jess, “a young person stuck in a small Alaska town—obviously it must have had a tiny population—people are either lifers in those towns, or they can’t wait to leave. But according to Elmer, he was an adult when he came to Homer, so he couldn’t have been too anxious to get out of there.”

 “Something doesn’t feel right. If you are legally an adult at eighteen, and you are living in a town you hate, or one that stifles you, you leave as quickly as you can. But he didn’t. He waited until he was an ‘accepted’ adult. And while there might be legitimate reasons why he would wait until he was twenty-one, I think the age is somehow significant.”

“Maturity,” blurted out Jess. She gave a half-smile. “Um, that was my father speaking, not me.”

“Right. At the age of eighteen, not only did he probably look too young, he wouldn’t have had the cunning or the life experience to go into a town, set himself up as someone he wasn’t, murder ten people and make it look like he was murdered too, then move across country right into a good job.”

“But if he grew up in a small, remote village, where would the life experience come from?” asked Jess.

“And that’s the question,” I said. “You mentioned at one point that his school records are gone, that the school burned to the ground. Do you remember where that supposedly was?”

“In the mid-west someplace. Ohio, I think.”

“Whoever was vetting him would have then checked into that. Ah, screw it.” I turned back to the computer and typed “Senator Gary Hillstrom” into Google.

“We’re taking a chance Googling him,” Jess said. “Wouldn’t that raise a flag in their system?”

“Maybe. But he’s running for president. You don’t think there are thousands of other people looking him up on the computer? I’ve got to see what it says about his childhood.”

The search took me to Wikipedia. I printed out two copies and we sat back and read about Gary Hillstrom.

Ten minutes later we were convinced that the man who lived in Homer for four years as Ben Fremont was, in fact, Hillstrom. To the average person reading his history it would seem fascinating, or sad, or unique. For us, it just helped confirm everything we had suspected.

According to the posted history, Hillstrom was born in Youngstown, Ohio to Maggie and Peter Baker, who died within days of his birth in a car accident. He was adopted by Ronald and Lisa Hillstrom of Akron. He spent his whole childhood in Akron and went from grade school through high school at the Heavenly Father Church School. His adopted parents died soon after his graduation—no cause of death was listed. Several years ago, the school burned down and all of its records were destroyed. No back-up records existed.

He “bounced around”—his own words—for a while, before getting a job with Exchange Systems and, as we already knew, had risen to vice president. After ten years, he moved to Massachusetts, started his own small high tech company, then ran for office. When he won the state Senate job, he sold his business and went into politics full-time.