“If no one has taken a header off Windy Corner in the 100-mph winds, or fallen down Kahiltna Pass, or gotten lost in a whiteout.” Ham picked up his book again.
“That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Where’s the radio? I want a ride home,” Jake said. He wore a stocking cap, his hair twining out from the back and a blond beard thick on his face.
“Calm down. We’re not going to get lost or fall, Silver. Stop your crybabying,” Ham said.
Orion lay on his back. “Kit is pretty savvy. She’ll probably have them run supply caches up from Basin Camp along the Headwall to the High Camp before she bids for the summit.”
No one said anything, all of them probably thinking of their own failed bid for the summit.
“Why are you so worried about them?” Ham finally asked, quietly.
Oops, the jig was up.
“I know that was Jacie I saw in Copper Mountain.”
“Jacie?” He put down his book. “That journalist from Afghanistan?”
Orion sat up. “Yeah. Didn’t that blonde woman look familiar to you?”
“What blonde?”
Right. “At the Midnight Sun. She’s climbing Denali with that group of frat guys?”
Ham lifted a shoulder. “Sorry, bro.”
“I saw her,” Jake said, looking up from his notebook again. “I danced with her friend, Aria. They’re both docs in Minnesota.”
Orion had spent too much desperate time thinking about Jacie.
“I don’t know, Ry. Jacie had short hair, and she was a journalist, not a climber,” Ham said.
No, not a climber. But she had enough guts to be one, considering she’d embedded a special ops group.
Maybe that’s why he noticed her around camp. She was there when he arrived with his PJ crew, but she kept to herself, mostly.
Still, he couldn’t not notice her. She’d caught his attention shortly after he arrived, when she walked into the mess hall, her hijab pulled off her face, her blonde hair short, her face tan. Then she sat down and started reading a book. She closed it with a bookmark when she’d added herself to the line for food, and he took that moment to walk by casually and glance at the cover.
Stephen Ambrose. Undaunted Courage. The Lewis and Clark epic journey.
He didn’t know why that made him like her, but he thought about that, a woman who filled her time trying to understand the motivations and fears of the brave.
He’d searched for her after that, on base, and caught glimpses of her as he worked out, coming in from runs. Asked a few people about her.
Journalist. With the AP wire. Serious. A seeker of truth. He liked that about her.
That, and the way she seemed unafraid amidst a world of chaos.
And she had a decent jump shot.
“C’mon, Starr, you afraid of a little one-on-one with a girl?”
She’d walked by the campfire that night—just a regular night, he and the guys unwinding. He blamed the allure of the bonfire, the fact that he had wanted to break free of the knot of tension, his endless review of the wins and losses of the last mission.
She was on her way, probably, back to her tent where the other journalists bunked under the protection of the military. She wore a pair of black pants and a white T-shirt, the clothes she’d wear under her abaya, and she carried her hijab.
Whatever reporting she did, it meant going out of the FOB into the populace of the nearby city.
Laramie Nickles had called her over. “Hey there, AP, wanna join us?”
She’d looked at Nickles, then over at Orion, and a smile tweaked her lips. As if he might be the reason she’d say yes.
He’d lost his heart right then.
“What kind of trouble are you guys into?” She came into the circle where the team guys and other PJs sat on boxes, camp chairs, and wooden planks. Some of the guys were just finishing a pickup game on their makeshift basketball court.
“Just licking our wounds,” Laramie said and handed her a cold beer from the beat-up cooler. Orion noticed that she barely touched it. And that she crossed the fire and sat down next to him.
“Hopefully nothing serious?”
Orion had finished a lemonade and now tossed it into a nearby box of recyclables. “Not today. Everybody lived.”
“That’s a good day, then,” she said and met his eyes.
He drew in a breath. Not only at the measure of her words, but at her blue eyes, intense, catching his, as if she might be evaluating him.
He nodded, his heart oddly, suddenly wakening.
Maybe that’s what made him pick up the abandoned basketball. Toss it in her direction.
Calm down, Rian. She’s not into you.
To his surprise, she grabbed it and met him on the court.
“Try and keep up, PJ,” she said, waggling her eyebrows.
He made to bat the ball away, but she turned and sent a perfect, arching shot into the netless basket.
“Lucky,” he’d said, catching the rebound.
“Skill,” she shot back.
He turned to face her. She stood in the flicker of the nearby bonfire, her eyes shiny, her face tanned, smiling at him, the stars winking in approval overhead.
No, lucky. So much so that right then he started to believe in happy endings. Crazy thought, but maybe . . .
Orion’s mind traveled over to Denali, wondering if she’d been socked in by the same storm.
Wondering if she might be thinking of him too.
Maybe not. After all, theirs had been a quick, one-month, barely there romance. He hadn’t even kissed her.
And in the end, she’d run from him.
Still, for a time, she was a safe, calming pocket inside all the chaos of the base. He told her things. And he gave away big pieces of his heart he’d never gotten back.
It left him hollow, with her in his head waiting for the storm to die.
This morning, Orion had practically lit a fire under Ham when the storm broke, the skies clear and blue, the peak singing their names.
They bagged the peak today, or never.
He’d filled up with the last of the powdered eggs, coffee, and a leftover blueberry cobbler—a climber’s breakfast—and they’d left just as dawn, or what resembled it, arched over the eastern horizon.
“Climbing!” came Ham’s voice from below Orion’s perch.
Now, Orion sat, his crampons dug into the snow, his harness anchored into an icy slab that jutted out from a granite wall. The belay rope ran through his mittened hands, the silence of their climbing broken only by the creak of snow some fifty feet below as Ham chipped his ice axe and crampons into the crusty wall.
The view could steal Orion’s breath with its glory. Below them, the glacial wall dropped in a series of ice-falls into a football field of rubble. He could make out their tiny blue-domed tent some two thousand feet below, still bright in the high sun.
They’d been climbing for six hours, and the day was young.
In the horizon, as far as he could see, the Denali massif rose, imposing, a jagged spine of granite and ice, the peak spearing through the haze and into the blue. The grandeur of the mountainscape filled Orion’s bones with an awe that turned him a little weak. The crisp air bit at his nose, but sweat ran down his spine, coated his skin with the rising temperature.
The heat of the day set a rock in his gut as they climbed the lower, neighboring peak. Perfect avalanche weather. The melting snowpack could loosen and shudder down around them, take out Ham, picking his way up the face on the route Orion had set. Unseat Jake, clipped into an anchor below.