Chapter 2

Ayanna was easy to spot. First, she was the only woman on the A Concourse of the Anchorage International Airport. Second, she was only one of the three at the end of the concourse at all. It made spotting her even easier.

Approaching the police tape was a lot more difficult than spotting Ayanna. It was summer time and the Anchorage International Airport was packed with tourists. While Anchorage is a small city by American standards – it has all of about 300,000 people depending on whether you count the two military bases and the bedroom communities – it will see one million tourists in the three summer months. There are not a lot of tourists in the other months. Lots of ice and snow but very few tourists. There is an old saying in Alaska; every year has nine months of snow and three months of relatives.

True to human nature, the moment the police tape went up there was a crowd of lookie-loos. Everyone wanted to know what was going on. But nothing was going on. All anyone could see were three figures at the far end of concourse just standing around. There was no body, no hustle of men-and-women in blue with their guns drawn to hint of a hijacking. Hijacking a plane in Alaska?! Where would you demand to go? There were already scheduled flights to Russia and Cuba was a l-o-n-g way from the land of ice and snow.

Noonan fought his way through the crowd like a defensive lineman until he came to the tape. He was stopped momentarily by a very tired Anchorage Airport security guard who looked about as old as Noonan’s son Otto. He was old enough to be carrying a revolver, which, Noonan was pleased to see, was buttoned down in a nylon holster. Noonan liked guns in holsters. He liked them even more when the holster was buttoned down.

There was a moment of confusion before the guard let Noonan under the tape. Noonan showed him a badge from the Sandersonville Police Department and the guard grunted something sounding like “OK.” His facial expression read he didn’t know why he was on duty anyway. He had been told it was crowd control except for some guy with a badge who would be coming. Then some old guy with a badge showed up so what’s a minimum wage security guard to do? So he let the old man through.

Noonan ducked under the police tape, to the titter of the crowd. They couldn’t go to the crime scene but he could. (What a shame, Martha!) But then again, the crowd was only going to stand around for a moment or two. No body, no blood, no reason to waste any time at the airport when they could be spending their afternoon fishing for salmon or sucking up suds at any one of half-hundred places in town which catered to the three-months-and-then-gone crush of humanity.

Noonan proceeded down the empty carpet toward the far end of Concourse A. The only other individuals at the far end of the terminal were a pair of Alaska State Troopers who appeared more as bookends than officers of the law. Both stood well over six feet tall, carried a good 250 pounds apiece, and looked like weight lifters. Both also had small toothbrush mustaches making them look a bit like Adolf Hitler on steroids. Why anyone would want to look like Adolf Hitler was beyond Noonan but clearly here were two men who did. The uniforms enhanced the image. They fit as if they were tailor-made, odd because police uniforms were supposed to be loose enough to chase felons. These two were obviously for show not sweat. Noonan could tell because both men had shoes so shiny they reflected the overhead lights like strobes on the runway.

Noonan could smell politics in a hurricane. Even before closing the two dozen yards between himself and the trio the stench of bureaucracy and incompetence was overpowering. Just what he needed on vacation, more of what he was escaping in North Carolina.

In the real world there are two pillars in the chain of command. One is of sweat and the other for show. Those of the sweat did the work; those of show took the credit. They were like oil and water, always together but never combining. Show people are like spiders: they come in pairs. Whenever you found show people in the singular they are looking for a telephone. They were members of the penultimate mutual admiration society, party animals in the sense they needed a litter of their own to feel comfortable. They passed around the blessings of the credit they did not earn to make sure every one of the good old boys – and, this day and age, good old girls – received the blessings of playing politics the right way.

You will always find people of sweat alone. They did not work alone because they so prefer. They work alone because it is the only way to get anything done. People of sweat do not come in gaggles; they work best when not hindered by the people of show. People of show leave people of sweat alone because, without them, there would be no credit. So the people of show let people of sweat work alone. People of show are never far away. They circle like vultures waiting for the right instant to snatch the victory they could never earn by themselves. The two Alaska State Troopers reeked of the stench of people of show.

The troopers dwarfed Noonan, not a tall man by any definition. He still stood a good head above Ayanna. She was slight and weighed in the range of 110 pounds, small enough to make her attaché appear to be a suitcase. She wore a rumpled uniform looking as though she had slept in it, which she clearly had, and her boots were a cross between hiking gear and combat footwear. Un-shined they showed the scuffmarks and scratches of years in the field. The toes were solid, probably steel-toed, which was par for the course for a person of sweat. You never knew when you were going to have to crawl over luggage or around machinery.

Ayanna’s jet black hair hung straight and limp, the conditioner sheen it probably had possessed the previous day had been replaced with a dull greasy look. A fleck of white, possibly a strand of the cottonwood which filled the late summer sky, clung to a strand at the nape of her neck. If either of the troopers noticed it, they had clearly not mentioned it. The only thing on Ayanna which shined, was a yellow gold necklace chain with a small medallion. Noonan could see it was not religious but appeared more of an antique, something a woman of class would have worn proudly a century earlier.

Ayanna may have been exhausted but there was no way to tell from her posture or body language. The troopers were like all people of show, always on stage. Noonan introduced himself and there was a round of perfunctory hand-shaking. Ayanna indicated they should move toward the walkway to the plane and one of the troopers raised a section of police tape stretching across the end of the concourse. Why this tape was at the end of the concourse where they were no people was beyond Noonan. The crowd was already being contained behind the first tape he had ducked under. He smelled bureaucratic incompetence, again a stench he was well used to avoiding in North Carolina.

From the terminal window at the Anchorage International Airport, Unicorn 739 looked just like every other airliner waiting for passengers. The cigar-shaped 737 filled Gate 17 at the far end of the A Concourse and other than the fact Gates 14 through 17 were closed it looked just like any other plane about to receive passengers. Noonan did not know much about aviation but he did know a 737 when he saw one. It was not hard to spot a 737 since it was the workhorse of the aviation passenger business.

The most visual product of the Boeing assembly line, it had been around since the 1960s. Over the years it had morphed into variants, from the 737-100 to the 737-800 with a 737-900 probably on the design boards. And why not? It was the most commercially successful civilian aircraft since the Second World War. At any one moment there could be as many as 1,000 of them in the air. They didn’t crash. They needed little maintenance and, most important of all, passengers had complete faith in them. If you were on a 737 the only problem you were going to have would be a broken coffee machine. There was not a single design flaw of common knowledge. The 737 was such a dependable aircraft that after American airline companies flew the planes into obsolescence they were sold to Third World countries who flew them into oblivion. A century from now, Noonan mused, there would probably be some pilot somewhere flying a 737 over a remote landscape and the plane would be just as dependable then as it was the day it came off the assembly line.

Looking out of the terminal window–and considering the two police tapes–Noonan expected to see a flurry of activity around the plane.

He was in error.

The only visual indication something was amiss was a squad of airport security people sitting in parked cars strategically scattered around the plane. The cars were just there in the sense they were not moving. The personnel inside those cars were not moving either. It did not look like a crime scene with people scurrying hither and yon. It looked like a used car lot around an airplane at the end of the concourse. The plane wasn’t going anywhere and neither were the security people. Everyone was just sitting, waiting for the curtain to rise in the next act of this drama.

One of the vehicles, a heavy van, was parked directly behind one of the massive back wheels of the 737, clearly to block the plane if it tried to back-out of the gate. Noonan gave a soft snicker and said to himself, “a bit late, eh?”

“Sorry?” said Ayanna as she scanned the scene below to see what Noonan was referring to.

Noonan indicated the van with a tilt of his head. “The security van behind the back wheel of the plane. It’s a bit late, don’t you think?”

Ayanna smiled and now she looked tired. “Well, yes, I guess so. You have to understand we have procedures here at the airport we have to follow even if they seem stupid. We do everything by the book. When there is a problem involving a plane, we block the plane. It’s in our rule book.”

Noonan gave a slight grunt. “True. But as we get into this case keep in mind the bad boys and girls know your procedures and there are going to use them against you. I’m not saying to stop doing what you are supposed to do. What I am suggesting is you force yourself to start thinking outside of the box. We are up against some very clever people.”

“Well,” replied Ayanna tiredly, “at this point we don’t know what is going on so we are not going to take any chances.” Then she backtracked a bit and said, “If you have any suggestions. . .”

“Oh, no. All I was saying was we are a long from over on this case and every detail has been planned in advance. We, rather, you, are only going to get through this successfully if you become just as clever as your adversaries. Yes, if I have a suggestion I will let you know. For the moment, follow your procedures. Just do not let them get in your way of making a quick, creative decision.”

“I’m not sure what you mean but I’ll keep it in mind.”

“That’s the first step to being a creative thinker.”

Noonan turned from the terminal window and looked back down the concourse. Other than it was old and clearly in desperate need of repair, upgrade or, probably, total demolition, it looked pretty much like any other terminal in any other small city in America. The carpet wasn’t threadbare yet but it has hardly new. It was a facsimile of the galaxy with a brightened constellation of stars making up the Alaska Flag every dozen or so feet. The carpet must have been stunning when it was new – and during the decade it had been installed. Now it was old. Visibly old. Threadbare with a footpath right down its center where millions of passenger shoes and boots had trod their way to waiting aircraft.

There were alcoves of seating on both sides of the terminal carpet, which extended three deep all the way to the windows except where the gate entrances were located. The front wall was glass to capture whatever sunshine there was during the summer. There was an ocean of surface of industrial ceiling squares stretching down the concourse, all of them old and loaded with asbestos. A lot of Alaskans were going to be very happy when the concourse was upgraded because, from experience, Noonan knew every one of those ceiling tiles was going to end up as insulation in cabins and hunting lodges from Katmai to Talkeetna. Waste not want not was the Alaska way of life.

“This is a pretty old terminal for an international airport.”

Ayanna smiled. “Alaska’s a bit different than the rest of country. Before there was oil we didn’t have much of a tourist industry other than along the coastline. Now we get about a million tourists coming through this terminal during the three months of the summer. We are so packed during the summer we can’t do any repair or upgrade work. We have to do all the upgrade in the off-season.”

“Doesn’t look like a lot of work has been done on this concourse.” Noonan pointed to some loose ceiling tiles and the buckling of some of the wainscot panels along the wall below the windows.

“This is the last concourse to be upgraded. We started the renovation three years ago on Concourse C,” she pointed down the hallway, “at the other end of the airport. Where the dignitaries land. We’re been progressing this way year-by-year.”

“So this is the last concourse to be worked on?”

“Yes. It should be finished before next summer.” She stalled for a moment. “Is it important?”

Noonan smiled.

Ayanna was learning.

“Until we know what is going on, everything is important. Was this the actual gate where the plane arrived?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Because it’s at the end of the concourse – and the oldest concourse. Odd.”

“It was where Unicorn 739 was scheduled to arrive. Being at the end of the concourse was just the luck of the draw. Gates are assigned weeks ahead of the arrival but lots of things happen which move planes around. Planes are late, it takes longer than expected to off-load cargo or emergencies come up, the usual. So planes get moved around. Gate 17 was where Unicorn 739 was supposed to dock.”

“You might check just to be sure.”

“The luck of the draw?”

“I’m guessing there was a reason the bad boys and girls wanted the plane to be here. Why don’t you check to make sure it was the luck of draw and not something which was somehow engineered into the system? It might also give you a clue as to who might be in the inside person.”

“You think there was an inside person?”

“Had to be. Even if there was no inside person it’s the place to start. Planes do not land without pilots, passengers do not vanish into thin air and crimes like this usually have a cash motive. Cash means an inside job.”

“What cash are we talking about?”

Noonan gave Ayanna a fatherly tap on the shoulders. “This case is very young. Believe me, before it is over there will be a cash motive. No one goes to this kind of trouble for a prank.”

Noonan scuffed the carpet while Ayanna dug around in her attaché for a pad. The carpet here was even more discolored than the concourse walkway. The traffic was clearly more concentrated where people boarded the planes.

Noonan turned back from looking out the window at the 737. “OK,” he said to Ayanna almost excitedly, “Let’s take a look inside the plane.” This was clearly better than spending the day listening to his mother-in-law prattle on and on and on.

One of troopers raised the crime scene tape while Ayanna and Noonan went under. Three steps later one of the trooper bookends posted himself beside the check-in carrel like an oak and immediately picked up a phone to report his location. The other escorted Noonan and Ayanna as far as the entrance to the ramp. There he stationed himself and started scanning the empty concourse cul-de-sac as if there was a crowd and he, a Secret Service agent, was looking for assassins.

Noonan and Ayanna proceeded down the elevated ramp as if they were going to enter the plane from the walkway. At the bend in the walkway, Ayanna stopped and opened a door in a side wall. From there they descended to the ground on a rolling walkway and walked to a ramp at the rear of the plane.

“Why are we entering the plane from the rear?” Noonan asked as he blinked in the bright Alaska summer sunshine.

“Sorry for all the Security, Captain, but. . .”

“Call me Heinz. I’m on vacation, remember.”

“Uh, OK,” she paused, clearly at a loss to call a captain by his first name, “Heinz.”

Noonan smiled. “Relax, you’ll get used to it.”

Ayanna smiled nervously for a moment and then relaxed. “There’s a bulkhead at the front of the airplane dividing the cockpit from the passenger compartment. Are you familiar with cargo hauling in Alaska?”

“Not really.”

“A lot of flights from the Lower 48, or within Alaska, carry cargo as well as passengers, often together. Because the cargo is heavier, it is put to the front of the wings. It’s loaded first. When all of the cargo to be taken is loaded onboard, a bulkhead is slid into place. The bulkhead separates the cargo from the passengers. The more cargo there is, the less room for the passengers.”

“What you are saying is the area in the plane between the pilot and the passengers is chock full of boxes and crates and bags and whatever else is being transported as cargo?”

“We say carried. Carried as cargo. Yeah but it’s more complicated than how you expressed it. You are thinking of cargo as boxes and crates like you were filling a U-Haul. Air cargo can be sheets of plywood, pianos, hospital beds, thousands of feet of steel pipe, whatever. I’ve seen elephants.”

“Elephants?”

“Two, actually. They were small but they were elephants and they were alive.”

“For the zoo?”

“No. They were part of an educational project funded by a federal grant. Someone came up with the idea of flying elephants around in the bush so Natives children could see there really were such things as elephants.”

Noonan chuckled, “If you can’t go to the zoo then the zoo comes to you.”

“A nice way of putting it. Carrying live animals is not unusual. Large animals are carried in the cargo area while cats and small dogs go onboard with the passengers as carry-ons. I’ve seen a lot of chickens going into the villages and a number of years ago a Japanese Airlines jumbo jet broke open on the runway. It was loaded with cattle and when the plane finally came to rest the cattle still alive were running all over the runway. We didn’t have a fence between us and the park,” Ayanna said as she pointed the south across the runway, “to Kincaid Park. I’m sure there are a few cattle still out there, roaming around and wondering how they ended up in the land of ice and snow.”

“There’s a fence there now?”

“To keep the moose off the runway.”

“Does it work?”

“Must. No plane has hit a moose since I’ve been here.”

“So the cargo between the pilot and the passengers could be anything of any size of any configuration?”

“Welcome to Alaska. You can see for yourself when we get onboard.”

Noonan thought for a moment, “Can the pilot get from the cockpit to the passengers?”

“Sure. It’s dark because the cargo has covered the windows and not all of the cargo stacks perfectly so you might catch a knee or a shin if you’re not careful. So passengers load from the back of the plane. Insurance reasons. Only here in Anchorage. It’s a whole different matter in the bush. The further you are from the FAA the less you do things by the book. I’ve taken flights in the Aleutians where I was sitting on cargo. Didn’t even have a seat. Cargo pays more than passengers and there’s an old Alaska aviation expression ‘cargo doesn’t talk back.’”

Noonan chuckled. “The Alaskan expression I like is ‘there old pilots and bold pilots but no old bold pilots.’”

“You’ve got that right. In the aviation business you can’t make too many mistakes and live. Which is a very good reason to do things by the book.”

The runway apron was dry as a bone. There was not a speck of dust on the pavement. Noonan stopped Ayanna for a moment and went over to look at the airplane’s tires. Ayanna waited while Noonan did some poking.

“Looking for anything in particular,” she asked when he got back.

“Not really. Planes have to land. Tires are old, not new. If the tires had been new it might have been a lead.”

“What would new tires have meant?”

“I don’t know if they would have meant anything at all. Clues are where you find them. If something is out of the ordinary, it’s worth investigating.”

Ayanna said something which sounded like “hu” or “um.”

“Was it usual for this kind of a plane to be taking cargo? I mean, this is a 737. It’s a passenger plane. It has windows. Cargo 737s don’t have windows.”

“Yes and no,” Ayanna said stopping at the foot of the stairway to the back of the plane. “There is more money in passengers than cargo so the larger companies want to take as many passengers as possible. After the summer, the tourist traffic drops to zero. So the larger companies cut their service to Alaska and consolidate their flights. They are in the business for the passengers. Companies like this one, Unicorn,” she pointing at the plane, “are here year-round. To keep good will with the cargo companies they carry cargo year round even if they could make more money with passengers. They don’t lose money with cargo; they just don’t make as much as they could. They are low in cargo in June, July and August. Unicorn then makes up for the loss by hauling cargo the rest of the year.”

Noonan nodded his head as they climbed the tail staircase. The staircase bounced gently as he ascended. He asked Ayanna if this was unusual.

“There is another yes and no answer when it comes to boarding from the rear. In most cases planes do not use the tail staircase. It’s too cumbersome and most of the time passengers deplane from the front only. Now if passengers have to enter from the rear they go up a mobile staircase we drive out to the plane. It’s more efficient and more stable.”

“When I went to Bethel last year we entered the plane through the back. It was up a staircase with a truck attached but we didn’t go through the tail. We went in what was basically the side of the aircraft.”

Ayanna pointed to the outer side of the 737. “You were basically going in through an emergency exit. It’s unusual these days in large airports. Even in the bush the tail staircase is rarely used. We had to force this staircase open because the front door was locked from the inside. For this trip all of the passengers in Seattle had to enter from the rear because of the bulk head. They entered through a mobile staircase, not these stairs. We had to break the front hatch door open from the inside. Now it’s a crime scene so the hatch is closed off until the forensic people get here.”

The pair went up the tail staircase and into the aisle of the airliner, empty seats disappearing toward the bulkhead at the front. The plane had a flown-in look, as if it had just been cleared of passengers. There were blankets tossed about willy-nilly on the seats, magazines were half in/half out of seat pockets, and the floor was littered with plastic wrapping, paper prayers from the meal trays, as well as some salt and pepper containers along with bits and pieces of paper. Noonan popped one of the overhead compartments and discovered it was full of carry-on luggage.

“It’s almost as if everybody was sucked out of the plane leaving only their luggage and carry-ons,” noted Ayanna as she popped open another overhead compartment to reveal it was full as well.

“Well, wherever they were sucked off to, they went with the clothes they were wearing,” said Noonan slyly, “and they didn’t take their carry-on luggage.”

“Or their make-up,” said Ayanna as she opened a cosmetic case on one of the seats and examined its contents.

Noonan walked down the aisle, stopping occasionally and probing a seat pocket here and an overhead bin there. He pulled the curtain back from the kitchen and looked at the counter. Then he popped open what passed for a refrigerator onboard.

“Nothing looks as though it has been touched,” he said. Then he gingerly pulled the trash can box out from underneath the counter. It was partially full. “Here,” he said as he handed the plastic container to Ayanna. “Have your lab take a look at this.”

“The garbage? Why?”

“To see if you can match any fingerprints. If you can match the flight attendants fingerprints to the trash, you will know they were on board. If you get a strange fingerprint, or even only one set on everything, we’ll know this was a set-up.”

“The matching is going to take some time.”

“Naw, maybe forty minutes. You know the flight attendants’ names and they had to have flight passes to get into secure areas. All those passes required fingerprints. Just get the names of the flight attendants, email their names to SEATAC and you’ll have their prints on line within an hour. By then a good print man will have the prints off those bottles,” Noonan indicated the contents of the garbage container. “All you have to do is confirm a match. If you get one, bingo, it confirms the flight attendants who were supposed to be on board were. If not, you’ve got another problem on your hands.”

“Like terrorists?”

“You won’t be that lucky.” Noonan smiled sadly.

“You mean this is some kind of a scam? Are we back to a ransom you were talking about?”

“It has to be. Unless you believe in space aliens, little green men transubstantiate into airliners and they suck everyone out. . .”

“. . .with their clothes on. Right, Heinz, I’m afraid to say I’m not a believer.”

Noonan leaned back against one of the chairs. “Bring me up to speed on everything you know at this time.”

Ayanna shook her head slowly, her hair slopping about more than bouncing. The very motion gave every indication that in spite of her high spirits, it had been a l-o-n-g night. Noonan knew the feeling.

He had been there before.

Many, many nights.

He called them Naugahyde Nights, the hours spent kind-of/sort-of napping on the Naugahyde furniture in his office waiting.

Waiting for lab results.

Waiting for a fingerprint match out of Washington D. C.

Waiting for a judge’s signature.

Waiting for an interrogation to come to a close.

Waiting for a hunch to play out.

It was waiting for whatever was supposed to happen and hoping it would happen soon. So he didn’t have to go home, get two hours of sleep only to be dragged back to the office.

Just as bad, every Naugahyde Night inevitable came with caveat. No matter how long the wait or how important the matter, there were always a few items to work out. Things that did not fit. Loose ends and holes in the sequence of logic. The Devil was certainly in the details.

Noonan could tell Ayanna was tired. Well, in this business you had to get used to it. If she thought she had problems now, she was in for a real surprise. Things were not going to be getting any better any time soon. Noonan gave Ayanna time to collect her thoughts. She was young; she’d learn how to go days without deep sleep and still be professional, competent and composed.

Ayanna settled back against an arm rest. “Well, there’s not much to tell. The plane took off from SEATAC a bit late, about half an hour. Everything was routine until it approached the Juneau area when the plane requested permission to land for a medical emergency. According to the pilot, a woman, one of the passengers was having what she said was described by the flight attendants as ‘mild convulsions.’ Unicorn 739 descended to an altitude below the radar’s horizon as if it were going to land in Juneau and then came back on radar about five minutes later. The pilot stated the passenger had recovered to the extent the trip could continue uninterrupted.”

“I know this is a foolish question,” Noonan said as he rubbed his forehead with the tips of the fingers of his left hand, “but are you sure there wasn’t a plane switch there, as in one plane rising above the radar horizon as another falls beneath it?”

“Again, another yes and no answer.” Ayanna shifted on the airplane seat. “Yes, we looked into the possibility but we discounted it. The plane, which landed in Anchorage, was the same plane, which took off from Seattle. The serial numbers of the aircraft matched. The luggage onboard was loaded in Seattle and the passengers were listed as having boarded in Seattle. The passengers were on the plane when it pulled out of the gate in SEATAC. Considering the time involved, it would not have been possible for the plane to have landed, dropped off the passengers, and taken off again.”

“Improbable but not impossible.”

“Correct. Not impossible. However, there are a number of other problems. First, the plane never landed at the Juneau airport and it could not have landed anywhere nearby. Have you been to Juneau?”

“Actually, no.”

“Well, there are only three things in whole area: steep mountains dropping right to the water’s edge, very small cities and lots of rough water. We’re checking every landing strip within a 30-minute flying radius of Juneau, regardless of its condition. We’re still only talking about three places a plane this size could land – maybe.”

“No help from the Air Force?”

“We don’t know yet. We’ve asked Elmendorf Air Force Base to check with their AWACS. . .”

“AWACS?”

“Airborne Warning and Control System. Those are the big planes you see with the large saucers on top. The saucers are actually downward-looking radars. They can spot and track all aircraft and anything on the ground composed of metal.”

“If they are downward looking then they could tell you if the plane actually landed.”

“Right. If they want to tell us. If their command structure will tell us. See, we civilians are not even supposed to know AWACS exist. So when we called and asked for the AWACS to check its tapes we were asked what AWACS was.”

“Nice.”

“Military intelligence in action. So we just asked if they would ‘look around’ to see if there was anything like downward looking radar and if there was any information we could have. Then we asked the FAA to ask the Air Force. I’m afraid the Air Force won’t tell us diddly. They’ll tell the Pentagon who might tell the FAA who might tell us. Do you know how stupid you feel when you call the FAA and say ‘Hey, we’ve just lost 95 people and can’t find them?’” Ayanna rested the plastic garbage can down on the leading edge of the seat.

Noonan thought for a moment. “What did the FAA say, I mean about the AWACS tape?”

“They said they’d check with the Pentagon but the FAA said it was unlikely AWACS would have any record of the flight. In Southeast Alaska there are so many steep mountains if a plane drops below the mountain level, the downward looking radar can’t track it.”

“You mean if the plane went below the tops of the mountains, the AWACS can’t track it?”

“Probably. I don’t know the specifics on AWACS but I’ll bet they can’t follow a car on the road in the mountains. Too much ground clutter. The mountains probably scramble the image. For a plane, if is moving fast and flying low it will, quite literally, disappear into the ground clutter. It doesn’t mean it crashed; it just disappeared off the scope. So we’re stuck with the time difference. We’d have to calculate how long the plane was off the scope to determine if it could have landed, dropped off passengers and then taken off again.”

“What do you think?” Noonan asked almost uninterestedly as he looked back toward the bulkhead which blocked off the back of the airplane.

“I think anything’s possible.”

“I agree with you.” Noonan began walking down the aisle toward the front the plane. Ayanna watched him for a moment and then followed, the garbage can in tow.

When Noonan got to the front of the seat section he took a close look at the bulkhead. The bulkhead itself was nothing more than a sheet of particle board covered with carpet identical to carpet on the floor of the plane. It had two massive unicorns, one on either side of a doorway, which now stood open. Noonan stuck his head inside the doorway and looked at the back of the bulkhead particle board. It was sturdier on the inside. There were a handful of metal bars forming a webbing pattern on either side of the doorway which ran to the side of the fuselage where the beams were bolted to the aircraft chassis.

As Noonan leaned inside the bulk head area and extended his right hand to test the stability of the metal arms, he heard Ayanna say “Those metal bars are to keep the cargo from coming through the bulk head if the plane hits rough weather.”

“Seem solid enough,” said Noonan as he pulled his hand away. He stepped into the bulkhead area and gave the particle board plug a push. It was solid from plane ceiling to floor making the first bank of seats in the airplane Row 15. “Kind of cuts down First Class seating doesn’t it?”

“There is no First Class seating on Unicorn, Heinz. It’s the economy airline.”

“Good point.”

When Ayanna had said the bulkhead was crammed with cargo, she had not been kidding. The carpeted floor of the passenger section of the aircraft had been removed leaving the brackets and beams of the aircraft fuselage bracing exposed so ropes and wires could be attached to hooks to secure the cargo. The area was dark because all of the window shades had been pulled down. The only light came from behind him and the faint glow of the cockpit windows somewhere, 15 rows ahead of him.

There were a half dozen igloos stacked strategically on both sides of the plane for balance and a pile of plywood sheets was wedged on one side of the craft. Boxes, canvas bags, cartons, and every other description of cargo was neatly and efficiently stacked and roped securely around the cargo containers. Noonan picked his way around the cargo until he found where the door to the walkway was located. While the pilot and cockpit crew could easily get out of the main hatch, the rest of the forward section was filled with cargo, primarily boxes stacked as high as Noonan could reach. There was also a hospital bed strapped to one side of the bulkhead and a motorcycle, complete with full-face helmet padlocked to the crossbar running parallel to the handlebars.

“There’s an odd collection of cargo here. Is it always like this?”

“Not always,” replied Ayanna, her voice muted behind him. After she entered the bulkhead area and came toward him, her voice got clearer. “Every plane coming from Seattle takes a certain amount of cargo. During the winter when the tourist traffic goes way down Unicorn runs almost exclusively cargo. Sometimes the bulkhead is pushed all the way back to the center of the plane. Unicorn is a small airline so it can’t afford to run exclusively on passengers. It runs just enough cargo during the summer to keep its winter customers happy.”

Noonan pointed to the hospital bed. “This doesn’t look like something an industrial client would want transported by airplane. Wouldn’t a barge be cheaper? Or a truck?”

Ayanna tapped the bed. “Sure, if you didn’t need it tomorrow. Any airline which has cargo space is not too picky about what it carries as long as the customer pays. In the case of the bed,” she reached over and grasped the cargo tag with her left hand, “it’s going to Lime Village. It’s out on the Stony River. If whoever wanted the bed in Lime Village didn’t make arrangements for it to be on the barge this spring, it had to come in by air. There’s no other way in. Except dog sled and I don’t see dogs pulling this puppy,” she tapped the bed, “across the frozen tundra – even if it were taken apart.”

“Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to buy a hospital bed in Anchorage?”

“Maybe. If you could wait a year. Even then the cost would not be a lot less. Lime Village would still be paying the same transportation costs from Seattle to Anchorage–plus the overhead and storage and profit charged locally. It can be expensive. Once they get the bed to Anchorage it goes postal rates, not cargo rates. It saves the village money.”

“Postage?”

“Right. In Alaska you can send anything to anywhere in Alaska through the Post Office, bricks, beds, motorcycles.”

“You mean just like mail?”

“Right. It is mail. It’s got a special name: bypass mail. This bed is coming north from Seattle as cargo. Once it gets to Anchorage someone picks it up in a truck, drives it over to the Post Office where it’s mailed.”

“Then the Post Office flies it out to Lime Village?”

“No, then the Post Office puts it on a truck and drives it right back to the airport where it’s put on a plane flying out to Lime Village as mail. Sometimes it’s the same plane.”

“Why not just send it as cargo? It seems as though there is a lot of shuffling around here.”

Ayanna gave a smile indicating Welcome to Alaska, the land where we do things differently. “Air cargo rates are twice postage rates. It’s cheaper to put the bed on a truck and drive it to the Post Office than to pay cargo rates.”

“Wait a minute,” Noonan scratched his head in amazement. “Hum, if the bed only costs the hospital in Lime Village $300 if it’s sent through the Postal Service, so I am guessing the air cargo company is not carrying the bed for $300? They would be losing money at $300.”

“Believe me, Captain, er, Heinz. No air carrier loses a dime in Alaska on mail. No, the air cargo carrier charges the Postal Service $600, its usual rate.”

“If the hospital only pays $300 and the air cargo company charges $600, who makes up the difference?”

Ayanna looked at Noonan with the same amused expression. “Do you want my answer or the Post Office’s?”

“I know your answer: the taxpayer. What’s the Post Office say?”

“It says on the average it all works out. While it costs $600 to send the bed out, in essence the rest of the mail is so light it flies for free.”

“Yeah,” said Noonan. “I can see some Postal public affairs person making that statement. It sounds logical but is not. The epitome of the bureaucracy for you.” He swept his index finger side-to-side. “Is all of these stuff going to remote villages?”

“Could be.” Ayanna started looking a number of cargo tags. “This motorcycle is going to be picked up here at the airport; these skis are going to Talkeetna so they are cargo transfers.” She tapped some of the smaller boxes in one of the cargo nets. “Some of these are going to be delivered here in Anchorage and others are on their way to the Mat-Su Valley for distribution.”

“Mat-Su as in Matanuska-Susitna Valley?”

“You know your Alaska geography well.”

“No. I know the Mat-Su has some of the largest king salmon runs in the world. That’s where my kids are today.”

“Then they are going to have fishing stories for the rest of their lives. Do you have salmon in North Carolina?”

“Only in the supermarket.”

Ayanna laughed. “Where my father does his fishing. Comes home with a fish every time he goes out.”

“Smart man.”

“And successful.”

They both chuckled and Noonan gestured with his left hand to indicate the stacks of cargo. “I see, so you’ve got a big collection of a lot of little deliveries.”

“Except for those large crates.” Ayanna pointed to a mountain of crates, all the same size. They were strapped together and all had the same logo printed on all sides of the cartons. “They go to the Alyeska Pipeline. Probably tools or technical equipment too delicate to travel by barge. Or too important. I don’t think any of the cargo has anything to do with the passengers. It was loaded long before the passengers were brought on board. And it’s here. They’re not.”

Noonan gave a hum indicating he had heard what she said. Then he stepped back through the particle board bulkhead and surveyed the interior of the airplane. Ayanna followed him and shut the panel door behind her.

Noonan wandered down the corridor not sure what he was looking for. About halfway to the tail staircase he turned around. “Can one person fly an airplane this big?”

“Sure. It’s not safe and quite complicated. One person could do it. Flying itself is not difficult; it’s the takeoff and landing. Landing and takeoffs are where all the busy work happens.”

“Would Seattle have known there was only one person in the cockpit?”

“Probably not. The Control Tower doesn’t talk to everyone in the cockpit, just the pilot. There would be no reason to talk with anyone else. And the Control Tower can’t see inside the cockpit so there would have been no way to visually confirm there was only one person in the cockpit.”

Noonan looked down the aisle and nudged a pillow with the toe of his right shoe. “Once the plane got aloft,” he paused for a moment. “Aloft, the right term?”

“It’ll do. We just say ‘up.’”

“OK, when the plane got up could the pilot have put the plane on automatic long enough to come back here and spread out this trash? I mean the blankets, magazines and napkins?”

“Modern automatic pilots don’t really work so easily. It’s not like you hit a switch and the plane flies with no one in charge for hours. It has to be updated and re-entered every ten or fifteen minutes – just to make sure some external force like a storm or wind isn’t affecting the route of the plane. But, the answer to your question is yes; someone could have come back here and messed up the cabin. They’d just have to be back in the pilot’s chair before the automatic pilot shut off.”

“What happens when the automatic pilot shuts off?”

“Don’t know. Never heard of it happening. I’m assuming some kind of an alarm goes off in the cockpit. Maybe some lights flash. I don’t think the plane goes into a power dive or anything so severe. I’ll bet some kind of alarm flashes in some control tower somewhere.”

“You might want to check and see if something similar happened for this plane,” Noonan said as he poked around inside of one of the overhead lockers. “I don’t see any laptops up here and I didn’t see any on the seats. Some of the passengers probably had laptops. If they are on the ground you might be able to get an email through. There have got to be relatives waiting in the terminal,” he angled his head toward the terminal. “You might also ask for cell phone numbers. Some of the passengers probably had cell phones.”

“We’ve got a passel of relatives in the terminal and they are not happy campers.”

“I imagine not,” Noonan took another long look up the aisle. “When you finally got into the plane it was empty. Just like this?”

“Yup. We haven’t touched anything. It’s a crime scene right now.”

“Well, I guess I’ve seen all I want to see here. Will you make sure you get your print people to work on the trash can?”

“Not a problem.”

“OK. Let’s go to your office and quack. I still need some information.”

“Quack?”

“When you live in duck country, you quack.”

Ayanna was silent for a moment. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t want to live in North Carolina.”

“If I lived in Alaska,” Noonan said quickly, “I wouldn’t want to live in North Carolina either.”

Ayanna found it funny and laughed. It was a light laugh, at first kind of nervous and then with a bit of relief. “I needed a laugh,” she said. “It’s been so tense lately, the passengers missing and all.”

“Well, don’t relax yet,” Noonan said darkly. “Those passengers aren’t the only mystery here.”

“You still think they’re being held hostage? Why? How?”

“Why? For lots of money. How? Another matter altogether.” Noonan extended his arm out toward the rear door of the airplane indicating she should lead the two of them out of the plane.

Ayanna preceded him down the back stairway. As they crossed the tarmac she nodded to the security teams who were on alert around the aircraft. Well, they were supposed to on alert but to Noonan they looked to be snoozing. No one was actually asleep, as in sawing logs, but it was clear to Noonan no one was expecting anything to happen soon. Most of the men were bleary eyed as if they had just been rudely shaken awake, not as if they had been up all night. They had probably been on the clock all night but, as Noonan knew from sad experience, it was not the same as being wide awake for the same period of time.

Noonan stood for a moment in the bright sunshine and took in the entire operations area, from the terminal building across the apron and then across the runway to where the trees to the far south indicated vacant land or a park. He saw absolutely nothing out of place. He didn’t know what kind of activity an airport was supposed to have on the apron side of the terminal but there wasn’t a lot of activity here. Anchorage was certainly not SEATAC or LAX but he would have expected more movement. There was none. Maybe it got busy when a plane came in? Actually, he knew this probably wasn’t true. Whenever he had landed in Anchorage all he saw through the window was the usual crew of six or seven taking luggage off the plane and maybe two or three more inside the plane cleaning it out for the next load of passengers. There were 17 gates and even though he could see the tails of six or seven Alaska Airlines jets, the face of the Eskimo proudly on each one, he saw no flurry of trucks and people on the apron. Odd, he thought.

Then again, this was Alaska.

Noonan followed Ayanna across the tarmac to the edge of the apron. Ayanna used a pass key to open an outer door and they mounted the same stairway they had used to get onto the tarmac earlier. When the door slammed shut behind them, it was pitch dark. No reason to have windows here.

At the top of the stairs Ayanna handed the trash can to one of the gorilla-like Alaska State Troopers watching the docking bay. “Please have this taken over to the crime lab,” she said to him. “Have them check for any fingerprints on anything. Then get a copy of the fingerprints of the flight attendants and crew from SEATAC. See if we can make a match.”

The trooper gave her a look of annoyance, the way people of show do when they have to deal with the people of sweat. Annoyance because work is what people of sweat do. Work is not what people of show do. Then again, Noonan was standing next to Ayanna and one of the unspoken rules of being a person of show is to never upset someone you don’t know. They could be important, you know.

The state trooper grunted rather than said anything. He wrapped his fingers around the lip of the garbage can and held it away from his body as if it had some odious smell emanating from within. Noonan had seen the look too many time to mistake it. It was the don’t-let-anything-stain-my-uniform-because-I-look-so-good-in-it expression. With the trash can at arm’s length he was off, striding down the concourse with seven league boots.

The other trooper still stood oak-like overlooking the check-in desk. He had a phone in one hand and was waving Ayanna toward him with the other. “For you,” he said as he passed her the phone.

“Driscoll.” She listened for a moment and then her face went pale. When she put the phone down, her face had the pallor of a corpse.

Noonan looked at her with a sad smile as if to silently say he knew what was coming next.

“They want $25 million in diamonds and other precious stones.” She took a deep breath. “They want it within 48 hours.”