EXCERPT

Chapter One

Somewhere over the snow-covered Yukon Mountains, a small, single engine plane was losing altitude. As it flew within a blizzard of snow, a giant hand of ice was pushing its weight down upon the plane's wings. Farther away went the sky; closer came the ground.

Inside the cockpit, was novice pilot, Joe Bussil. Fear had deleted all color from his face which was now as white as the falling snow. Joe tried in vain to keep his plane one with the sky. But the counter-clockwise rotation of the altimeter silently sang the plane's swan song.

Hoping to gain more air speed and climb back to the safety of the sky, Joe pushed the throttle as far forward as it would go. "Come on, come on. Climb, climb." Joe pleaded. It was as if the plane was a living entity capable of responding to Joe's begging call. But the plane could not rescue Joe from the dangerous situation that he was in. The ice build-up was too heavy. A crash landing was inevitable.

With shaking hands, Joe set the transmitter to 121.5, the 911 channel for aircraft. Pressing the red transmission button, and trying to speak in a calm voice, he declared an emergency situation. "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Two Niner, Sierra Juliet. Iced up and going down. Yukon Mountains, Northwest Territory." Joe repeated his distress call, but it was all in vain. Unknown to him, the corpulent weight of the ice had snapped off the plane’s antenna. The distress call bounced off the mountain walls, and became an unheard echo. If his cry for help was received, it would sound more like a secret code, than a distress call; static, mixed in with pieces of words, spoken in an unknown language.

In his anxiety, coupled with his lack of flying experience, Joe had forgotten to transmit crucial information. He did not give his latitude and longitude. He only gave a part of the plane’s ID number. He had filed no flight plan, nor did he tell anyone where he was going. And he was flying below radar. There would be no blip that suddenly disappeared from a Tower Control screen. No one would know he was gone.

Like one in R.E.M. sleep, Joe's eyes scanned the mountain below him. He was searching for that one special piece of Earth that he could safely land upon. His thoughts became vocal, as he cried aloud, "My God, there's nothing down there but snow." Joe was flying a plane with fixed landing gear; its wheels were always down. He knew that if the snow was soft, the landing gear may cause the plane to topple tail over nose. This would most likely crush the cockpit. It would be a fatal crash.

The mountainside now towered high above the falling aircraft; Joe braced himself for the rough landing. As he pushed back into the pilot's seat, he tried to reassure himself. "If I don't hit one of the mountains, and she don't tip over, I may just survive the crash." But the weight of the ice on the wings, along with the Earth' s gravity, was bringing the plane down at a speed of over one hundred miles per hour.

"I'm coming in too fast!" exclaimed Joe. "She'll break apart as soon as she hits. I have to slow down my descent."

In an effort to reduce the speed of his plunge, Joe made a grave mistake; he shut down the engine. This, and the vast amount of ice pushing down on the plane, caused it to lose all forward momentum. Instead of gliding downward, the plane fell like a rock. To Joe, it felt like the first drop of a roller coaster ride. It pushed him farther back in his seat, causing him to expel the air in his lungs. An unfocused white blur was all Joe saw before touchdown.

With the crashing sound of a breaking tidal wave, the plane became one with the mountain. Both wings ripped off on impact and were thrown into the sky like clay shoot pigeons. With the force of an exploding bomb, the cockpit window blew out of the plane. The shattered pieces of glass became like missiles as they traveled through the sky. The fuselage, which remained intact, began to bobsled down the mountain. Traveling at an intense rate of speed, the nose of the plane began digging into the snow. This forced an avalanche of the white crystals through the window opening and into the cockpit. In the blink of an eye, the snow had become a white grave.

Throughout the entire crash, he had remained silent. The plane tunneled beneath the snow...and stopped. The crash was over, but a more terrifying ordeal was about to begin.

Joe was buried from the neck down. In a state of shock, he stared into the whiteness of his tomb. His right hand was welded to the throttle, which he involuntarily pushed forward. His mind had not yet comprehended reality, and he kept repeating; "Climb, climb." His left hand had pulled the yoke back so far that it snapped free of the control panel. Joe was still hoping to gain airspeed to climb and avoid a crash that had already occurred. Like the snow around him, Joe's sense of time was frozen.

It was his sense of smell which would restore time, bringing him back to the reality of his situation. Joe moved the only part of his body not buried under snow - his head - and sniffed the air. "What is that smell?" he thought to himself as his eyes noticed the whiteness of the snow begin to turn black. Like iodine upon an open wound, the air he inhaled had begun to burn his lungs. He answered his own question as his mind spelled out the word, "smoke."