Under the Alaskan Ice (Alaska Wild #2) - Karen Harper Page 0,1

with his decision to fly home in that weather. How she wished Chip had a father and she had a husband... These long nights were so lonely, even as busy as she kept and—

“Mom, it’s going to land too hard!”

The plane was tilting, listing—the pilot had lost control. She’d seen enough landings, been in enough Cessnas and Piper Cubs, floatplanes and even ones with ice runners, to know what was coming. She prayed that—

Even though the crash was at least thirty yards out on the ice, she grabbed Chip, threw him down and shielded him with her body as the plane slammed into the frozen lake, breaking the ice with a blast that sounded like dynamite. The loudest cracking she’d ever heard made her head hurt, a crunching nightmare.

“Mom, we got to save the pilot!” came muffled from beneath her puffy, down-filled parka.

Afraid to look, she did anyway. The unmarked small Piper Cherokee was tilted on its side, already being devoured by massive jaws of jagged ice into the belly of the lake. Its upward wing seemed to summon help as it sank. With the sun off the windows, she could not tell if more were onboard than a pilot.

“We’ve got to help!” Chip shouted as they scrambled up, trying to get to their feet with the awkward snowshoes still strapped to their boots. He was trying to take his snowshoes off, no doubt to run out on the ice.

She dove at him, pulled him back onto his knees and hugged him hard.

“We cannot go out on broken ice, Chip! It might crack more, and we’d go in. I’ll call for help, get first responders here from the town or even Anchorage.”

“They’re gonna die!”

“We cannot run out on that ice! Maybe the plane will float or snag.”

She kept one hand on her son’s wrist and dug her cell phone out of her deep pocket with the other. At least they were in range of the fairly new cell tower that had brought the outside world to Falls Lake.

With her teeth, she yanked off one thermal glove and was instantly bitten by the cold as she awkwardly punched in 9-1-1. The plane was sinking fast and, as Chip feared, going under. Terrible to be helpless like this. At least Ryan’s death had been fast, into a rocky cliff in foul weather, not this sucking, freezing death under the ice.

“What is your emergency?” The woman’s calm voice came so quietly that Meg could barely hear it over the crackling of the ice and the horrid gurgling noise.

“A small plane has just crashed through the ice on Falls Lake—the other end from the falls. Its engine sounded bad. It’s sinking, pilot still on board, don’t know about passengers. There is no direct access road but the one that goes past the lodge. This is Megan Metzler. My son and I are here but we can’t go out on the shattered ice. Send help, maybe another plane! First responders on the road will have a hard time...”

She stayed on the line with the emergency operator and then with a rep at the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board, in Washington, DC, so far away.

The plane sank so quickly she almost couldn’t believe it had been there. The two of them stared at the jagged hole in the ice, hugging each other, propping each other up.

“Ma’am—Mrs. Metzler.” A new voice came on the line, a man’s. “Anchorage first responders are on the way, but it could be over an hour, and we’d appreciate it if you can stay there to guide them in.”

“Yes, okay, but the hole in the ice—it stands out.”

“Good. Because we have been able to contact one of our NTSB pilots who was in the area, and he is going to land shortly on the lake.”

“Tell him to be careful!”

“Yes, yes, of course. He’s a veteran pilot and diver—”

“Scuba diver?”

“This time of year, a dry suit diver for cold water. He tells us his ETA is about fifteen minutes. He’s in his personal white Cessna 185 with red markings.”

“A Skywagon,” she blurted out, surprised she’d said that. “My—my husband was a pilot.”

The man read off the number that would be on the plane’s fuselage, as if she’d have to pick out the right aircraft landing on frozen Falls Lake today. A Skywagon was the plane Ryan would have loved to own, but it cost over a hundred thousand dollars, way beyond their means.

The man went on, “It is pontoon-and ski-equipped. The pilot