John was back at him fifteen seconds later: CONTACTING RCMP. For Richard had already mentioned to him—and perhaps this had been a mistake—that a winter couldn’t go by in the Pacific Northwest without at least one car skidding off a mountain road somewhere and getting trapped in a snowbank, where the inhabitants, if still alive, had to survive on snowmelt while awaiting a rescue that, in many cases, never materialized. Snow was gone at lower elevations, but if Peter and Zula had decided to take the northern route, across the Okanagans, they could be marooned off the apex of any of a hundred hairpin mountain turns.
Next step: figure where that little fuck Peter lived, and take the sledgehammer to his door.
Too bad Richard couldn’t remember his last name.
NIGHT CAME OVER the jet suddenly, from which Zula guessed that its trajectory had turned decisively eastward, diving over the terminator into the shadow of the world.
During her occasional runs to the lavatory she spied a new chart on the table, covering a vast swath of the earth with Newfoundland in the upper right, Florida in the lower right, the Aleutians in the upper left, and Baja California at the bottom. Both nations’ Pacific approaches were carved up into polygonal swatches labeled in block capitals: ALASKAN DEWIZ and DOMESTIC ADIZ and PACIFIC COASTAL CADIZ and so on.
A line of pen marks, updated every few minutes, was marching northeast, off the east coast of Siberia and then roughly parallel to the Aleutians. It tallied with what Zula could see on the television monitor back in the cabin.
Khalid and Jones were paying close attention to certain details of Yukon and British Columbian geography, which couldn’t have been very rewarding given the extremely small scale of this map.
The Aleutians and mainland Alaska were all encompassed in the region labeled DOMESTIC ADIZ. South of that was a swath of blank ocean labeled ALASKAN DEWIZ, which ran all the way east into what she thought of as the armpit of Alaska, where its southeastern panhandle was joined to its main land mass by a corridor only a few miles wide.
The entirety of southeast Alaska lay exposed to the Pacific, not encompassed in any of these ADIZ or DEWIZ polygons. Zula guessed that “IZ” must stand for something like “Intercept Zone” and that it was a military designation. She had read about the Distant Early Warning line in a Cold War history class, and so guessed that DEWIZ was Distant Early Warning Intercept Zone and ADIZ was Air Defense Intercept Zone and CADIZ was its Canadian equivalent.
The CADIZ didn’t begin until roughly Prince Rupert, which lay just to the south of the southeast Alaska panhandle, and so it seemed that there was a vast gap in the IZ system, at a rough guess maybe five hundred miles wide, between the Canadian and the American zones. Which, from a national defense standpoint, was not such a big deal, since it would only give the Russian bombers access to the upper bit of British Columbia, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. They could use their nukes to melt snow or kill mosquitoes, depending upon the season, but they couldn’t penetrate to the cities of Canada or the United States without passing through IZs farther south. And to reach that gap in the first place, they’d have to fly along an awkward southerly course that would burn a lot of fuel.
The whole northwestern third of British Columbia seemed to lie above the Canadian IZ and below the American, and this was where Abdallah Jones seemed to be focusing all of his attention. At a glance it appeared to be impossibly mountainous and desolate, but since this was an air chart, very few features were labeled, roads didn’t appear, and towns were not marked unless they sported significant runways. So maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked.
Khalid’s attention span did not seem to extend beyond about thirty seconds, and so it was his lot to roll his eyes and sigh hopelessly as Jones devoted hour after hour to his cartographic research. Zula had met any number of men like Khalid and so, even though they’d spent very little time together, she felt she knew the man and his ways. The only thing that could hold the attention of this kind of person for very long was direct interaction with another human being. What kind of interaction didn’t really matter. Since three of the four soldiers had dozed off and the fourth was still fixated on his flight simulator, and since Jones was absorbed in the map and the two pilots were intensely focused on this project of flying in close formation beneath the belly of the 747, there was no one for him to interact with except for Zula. And Zula was spending most of her time in the aft cabin with the door closed. Whenever she opened the door, it was to find Khalid’s burning eyes staring directly at her in a way that seemed to demand some kind of a response. Those eyes tracked her every movement. Khalid couldn’t help but notice when Zula glanced over Jones’s shoulder at the map.