She looked at Sasha. “We’re our own team. And I am going to get you up that mountain, and back. No matter what happens.”
CHAPTER THREE
THEY SHOULD GET OFF the mountain before it killed them.
Although maybe that was just the doom and gloom that had burrowed inside Orion after two-plus weeks of being trapped inside a snow cave on the side of a glacier while the world turned to white around him.
It only made it worse that this was the second blizzard to sock them in.
Of course, the second blizzard, a nine-day stretch of white, gave him plenty of time to consider their mistakes on their failed attempt up Mount Huntington the first time around.
Why Ham had picked the almost-insurmountable north face, Orion couldn’t guess. And they couldn’t climb it expedition style, with fixed ropes connecting to forward camps. No, they had to attack the mountain alpine style, with belay ropes. A fast-moving yet dangerous approach that required them to camp somewhere on the face once they started the 5,700-foot ascent from the base of the glacier.
The fact they could fly in and park on the Ruth Glacier at the base of the mountain seemed like a reasonable trade-off—at least they didn’t have to hike the sixty miles of tundra to get to their base camp.
Barry Kingston, their ride from KingAir, had managed to land his Cessna skis on the massive west arm of the glacier. They’d unpacked, set up camp, took a good gander at the mountain, and that night, the first storm rolled in.
Terrifying, freezing, and relentlessly mind-numbing, the blizzard trapped them in a tiny three-man wind-blown tent. Orion, Ham, or Jake climbed out every few hours to clear snow from around the domed dwelling. Between the noise of the blizzard and the crashes and explosions of seracs—icy fingers jutting from the mountain—loosening from peaks above and booming into the glacier fields around them, Orion slept fitfully.
Ham called it the voice of the mountain.
If so, it felt like it might be warning them off, practically waving semaphores.
The first storm had finally blown out after five days, and the next morning, Orion had awoken to such a deep silence he thought the world had inhaled, holding its breath, waiting for disaster.
But the sky arched blue, crisp, and glorious, and staring at the peak looming above them, even Orion felt the stirring of adrenaline. A guy couldn’t live in the shadow of these mountains and not be spurred by the desire to stand at the top and reach for the heavens. “The mountains are calling, and I must go.”
Orion’s words made Ham turn, frown.
“John Muir, the father of our national parks, once said that. My own father liked to quote him. He was a ranger and worked the 1967 mega-storm disaster. Twelve men went up the mountain, only five made it back down. My father worked on the recovery team. It gave me a healthy respect for the mountain.”
“Let’s get up there,” Jake said, stirring up eggs on the propane cook stove.
They’d packed their gear and took time to assess their route up the massive, jagged tooth of the north face called the Rooster Comb.
At the top, a hanging glacier formed a sort of roof, buttressed with a line of ruthless seracs, like a parapet along the ridge. They’d have to come up under it and climb to the left of the ridge.
The sight of the icy cornice put a fist in Orion’s gut, and he’d thrown out a friendly “Who thought this was a good idea?”
Ham, of course, had to turn it into a spiritual moment. “I lift up my eyes to the mountains—where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”
Jake, standing nearby, propped his pack onto a snowbank, about to strap on. The mountain reflected in the glare of his Vuarnets. “Yeah, well, I hope he’s on our side, because—”
A shotgun crack shook the mountain. Orion froze as a section of the parapet broke from the line. Boulders of ice and a devastating cloud of debris avalanched directly down the face of their climbing route.
Jake sat hard on the snowbank.
Ham stood, staring dumbly.
“I think God just said no,” Orion said.
It took the wind out of Ham’s sails, for sure. They’d spent the night re-tasking the climb.
The next day, weather rolled in again.
Orion endured two more days listening to the wind rattle the nylon tent like machine-gun fire until he finally decided to shovel out a snow cave. The first day it housed only him, but after a week, he’d tunneled deep enough to create Hotel Starr, with separate sleeping rooms and a central kitchen.
The cave was warmer than a tent, too, the only problem being having to clear out the entrance regularly to keep from being snowed in and suffocating.
That, and the fact that Ham and Jake were starting to drive him bat crazy—Ham with his snoring, and Jake with his not-so-clever cooking. Orion had never considered Spam a food group.
Spam and Ramen noodles.
Spam and eggs.
Spam and macaroni, with peas.
Spam fried rice.
He should have maybe raised his hand when they loaded the blue cargo box of Spam onto the Cessna. The supply had even raised an eyebrow from Ham, but as long as they didn’t have to trek it up the mountain along with the climbing gear, Orion didn’t care.
After two weeks at base camp, he’d started to care.
Hunger, and listening to the wind trying to rip them off the mountain, had driven Jacie back into Orion’s brain.
Not that she’d ever left.
But he knew without a doubt that those blue eyes had belonged to Jacie, the girl he’d loved in Afghanistan.
By the way she’d looked at him, an almost haunted look, she recognized him, too.
He couldn’t pry himself away from the fact that she was on Denali, right now, maybe holed up by the same storm.
He’d let his worry out of the bag one night to Ham and Jake, more in a mutter than actual conversation. “I hope Kit is smart and followed my advice to go up West Butt. Which meant that the group probably made it up Heartbreak Hill from Base Camp, went around Mount Francis, and might have camped at Ski Hill for the storm.”
Jake had put down his journal. “If they’re climbing expedition style, they probably have sleds and snowshoes.”
Orion hadn’t taken the guy for a journaler, but perhaps being trapped in a smelly, freezing tent brought out a creative desperation.
“If they pressed hard, they might have even passed Kahiltna Glacier,” Orion added.
He hoped Jacie had listened to him about not roping up with the men. The glacier was riddled with crevasses that widened with the summer thaw. “If they pressed through the whiteout, they could have even gotten past Kahiltna Pass all the way to Motorcycle Hill at eleven thousand.”
“Isn’t that where the Basin Camp is?” Jake said.
“No. That’s past Windy Corner, on a large plateau at fourteen-two,” said Ham, who turned the pages of a Don Mann SEAL Team Six paperback. “Doesn’t the NPS have a camp there staffed with rangers during the climbing season?”
“Yes. I worked it a couple summers as a volunteer rescuer before I joined the military,” Orion said. “It’s a good place for climbers to take a few days to acclimate and get ready for the next push.”
“Kit and her crew had a head start on us, so, given the window of weather, they might have reached Basin Camp,” Jake said.