Chapter 2

Matti took off running towards the camp, stopping momentarily on the steps to the front door to grab his satellite phone. It was his link to the drilling crews, and he always kept it with him, or very close by. He delayed only long enough to clip it to his belt and engage the catch that would keep it there. From there he ran inside to grab his well-stocked first aid kit and his Carhartt jacket. It was only early June, and while he had been able to work up a sweat with his ax, he knew that the spray from the boat, combined with the cool air, would soon have him chilled to the bone.

It was fortunate that he had been out fishing at first light that fateful Saturday morning, or he would have had to lug a fuel tank, and a life jacket, down to the boat. As it was, all he had to do was start the outboard motor and head for the mouth of the bay. He was tempted to call the Ontario Provincial Police, as the OPP had jurisdiction outside of theThunder Baycity limits. His camp was almost two hours drive from the city, about half of it on gravel roads. Until he knew what the situation was, he felt there was not much point in contacting them. Instead, he would find out what had happened to the plane before he decided on what to do. Maybe the pilot had been able to pull it up before he hit the water.

As soon as he cleared the mouth of the bay and turned north, Matti could see that there hadn’t been a miracle. He could easily see the white tail of the plane sticking up from a small stand of spruce and birch trees on the first of the small islands in front of him. At least it hadn’t caught fire when it crashed into the trees, and that meant there was some hope the pilot, and any possible passenger, could still be alive. Matti pushed his dark hair back out of his eyes, and brought up a pair of binoculars to take a quick look at the island in hopes of seeing more, but he wasn’t rewarded with any better information than he already had.

It was only a quarter of a mile to the island, and it seemed like it took him no time at all to get there. Matti was quite familiar with the little island, as when he had been young he would often canoe around the islands, and had explored all of them more than once. He knew there was glacier-smoothed, gently-sloping granite he could land his boat on, right in front of him. He killed the motor and let his momentum bring him close to the rock before he used one of his oars as a paddle to bring him to a bumpy stop against the shore. As he quickly tied his boat to a small tree he was calling loudly, hoping to get an answer back from the pilot. There was no answer, and a couple of small spruce trees prevented him from seeing the plane very clearly at all. It was with some trepidation that he scrambled towards the plane, his first aid kit in his hand.

When Matti came around the second of the small trees, he could see a man lying on the mossy ground about 6 feet from the plane. The man never moved when Matti called to him, and as he got closer he could see that the man’s chest was covered with blood. A careful check of the man’s carotid artery confirmed that he was dead. As Matti looked closer, he could see that there was a large wound in the center of the man’s chest. The cause wasn’t immediately obvious, so Matti got up to check out the plane, and to see if there was a passenger that needed his attention.

The door closest to the dead man on the ground was hanging open, held on by one hinge. The man was quite obviously the pilot, and almost for sure the only occupant, as the passenger seat was empty and the door on the opposite side of the plane seemed to be firmly latched. The windshield in front of both seats was smashed out, and a bloody, broken trunk of a small tree was hanging over the instrument panel of the small plane. It was obvious now what had killed the pilot. Matti couldn’t see into the storage area behind the two seats, but didn’t think there would be any way a passenger could have ended up there. He decided to go around the plane to check the other side.

The float on the left side of the plane had been almost completely torn off and was lying on the ground, extending back past the tail of the plane. As he made his way around the tail of the plane, he could see that the right float was missing completely. Both wings were badly damaged, with the left one folded back over the fuselage, and the right one almost sheared off halfway along its span.

It took Matti a couple of minutes to force his way through the foliage to get to the right side of the plane. The ground here was a little bit more open, and Matti could see that the door into the storage compartment behind the seats was open, and that a medium-sized, black, sports bag and a large, red, plastic fuel can were lying on the ground. A quick look into the compartment showed him that it was almost full, with a number of additional red plastic containers, and another, larger, sports bag lying there in a jumble. A quick glance around showed him that there were no other victims. At that point he relaxed, and made his way back to the dead man on the other side of the plane.

Now that the urgency was over, Matti took a closer look at the dead pilot, wondering if it might be someone that he knew. The man was dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, with an open, black, leather vest. He looked to be about 45 to 50 years old, with a short fringe of greying brown hair surrounding an otherwise bald head. The man’s face was clean-shaven except for a Fu Manchu style of moustache that seemed to be a darker brown than the sparse hair on his head. Both of his arms were almost completely covered with a wide variety of tattoos, none of which looked to be of the modern artistic type. He could see a skull design on one bicep, a stiletto dripping blood on his right forearm, a few smaller designs over both arms, and what appeared to be a snarling wolf on his left forearm. It seemed to Matti that the tattoos were very old, as a lot of them seemed to be of poor quality, almost amateur work by modern standards, and he wondered if some could be considered prison tattoos.

Since there was really nothing else he could do in the way of assistance, Matti decided to call the OPP to report the crash, and the pilot’s death. It wasn’t the first time Matti had been forced to call the OPP, as he had come across traffic accidents on several occasions, and he was glad that their number was now one of the presets on his phone. It didn’t take him long to get through to theThunder Baydetachment of the OPP.

“Hi, my name is Matti McEwen, and I’m up onLakeWatchanabi. There’s been a plane crash on an island at the west end of the lake. The pilot is dead.”

“Thank you for calling, Mr. McEwen. Are you quite certain that the pilot is deceased? If there’s any question, we can get a Medevac helicopter dispatched.”

Matti had already ripped open the man’s T-shirt to check his chest wound, and had rechecked for vital signs, and was quite certain the man never survived the crash.

“There’s no need for a helicopter, or even an ambulance. The man’s chest was severely injured in the crash. It looks like one of the trees he hit broke off and came in through the windshield. It appears to have hit him squarely in the center of his chest, about where his heart would be. I’ve checked carefully twice, and he doesn’t have a pulse.”