John, still in Iowa, seemed to think that Richard would forget the seriousness of the situation without frequent reminders. The cursed invention of text messaging had removed any inhibitions John might ever have felt about what he still denominated “long-distance” telephone calls. On the upside, it enabled Richard to fire off status reports like this one without having to make personal contact.
To John’s credit, though, he had, after a grumpy word or two from Richard, named himself the family’s single point of contact with Seattle. So at least Richard didn’t have to explain his progress, or lack thereof, to
Richard hadn’t checked the page yet—it seemed wrong to be facebooking at a time like this—but he supposed it must contain a lot of detailed information about just what the Seattle Police Department were and were not willing to do in response to a missing persons report. For Richard had made what now seemed like an unrecoverable error by contacting the authorities first and filing same. This had placed him into a mode where all he could really do was nag the officer who was responsible for the case; and said officer had already explained that, unless there was evidence of an actual crime, there was not much they could do in the way of direct, proactive investigation.
He thumbed out a P. S.: Z NEVER CAME BACK HERE AFTER B.C.
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.
