“I’ll have to visit sometime. I’d like to meet your father.”
He watched now as the mountain rose before him.
“He just . . . slid off the mountain.”
Their conversation now felt painfully prophetic. The thought of her huddled against the wind, injured, maybe even becoming hypothermic put a fist in his gut.
Maybe he’d given away his heart too quickly to a woman who’d made him no promises. But he’d definitely given it away.
I’ll find you, Jenny.
The wind buffeted the chopper, bouncing as snow gusted off the peaks. Snow dusted the gray-blue granite spires that rose around them, the nose of the chopper forcing its way higher. Mount Frances seemed so close he could reach out and touch it, and the surface of the main Kahiltna Glacier was so smooth, it resembled a thick layer of frosting he’d like to drag a finger through.
Orion’s stomach dropped as Clancy used the high wall of Motorcycle Hill to protect them as they rose to eleven thousand.
“Hang on!” The wind off West Buttress’s plateau nearly sent them spiraling back into a snowy wall, but Clancy fought it and they cleared Windy Corner.
Orion looked down upon the creamy snow, a pristine, lethal landscape that hid crevasses and fissures in the ice.
Suddenly, Basin Camp appeared. The most populated site on the mountain. He spotted a clutter of tents, rippling and waving in the winds, some protected by a wall of ice blocks. Others simply staked down.
They sneaked in just below a ring of clouds. Orion located the large orange tent inhabited by the NPS rangers protected in a wide, snow-berthed area. Beyond Basin Camp, the Headwall rose two thousand feet to an icy ridge that led them to High Camp.
A climber would be crazy to attempt the Headwall in this wind, but for a second, he found himself wondering.
If they started now, by midnight they’d be at High Camp.
Or, of course, flung from the mountain by the ruthless wind.
Orion held his breath as Clancy hovered over the snowpack, not eager to land in the soft, blowing snow. “Get out!”
Ham opened his door and tossed his pack out, some ten feet down. It landed in the snow, half-buried.
This would be fun.
Orion opened the door, and he and Jake pushed the sled out onto the snow. It sank into frosting. His pack followed, and then he pushed himself onto the skid, closed the door, and leapt.
The snow was deep, soft, and an easy landing. He worked up a sweat climbing out, however, found his pack, and by the time he’d strapped on his skis, Ham was skiing up with the sled.
The chopper had peeled off, leaving them on the plateau. But the sound of it shook the mountain and Orion listened for avalanches.
Nothing boomed in the distance.
Ham stood in the snow, watching the chopper vanish beyond the peak.
Then, all went quiet, save for the train rumble of the wind.
Jake came up. Looked toward the camp, then the peak. Shivered. “I’m already cold.”
Orion stared at the gusts of snow, the foreboding peak, and wished the mountain would stop calling him.
There was crazy, and then there was crazy.
Jake had always been game for living on the edge, soaring above the jagged peaks, staring down at life from above, and fighting fate to survive. It was how he’d learned to live with himself. Seeking the adrenaline. Living above the clutter of his life, his mistakes. His wounds.
Tempting fate, really.
But even he could recognize crazy.
“How high is this thing?” He shouted the question into the wind, but it carried his voice away into the rest of the blowing snow. The temperature had dropped into the negative thirties, his fingers were starting to numb, and, save for the exertion of climbing up a fifty-degree pitched ice wall, he might be shivering so hard his teeth could rattle out of his head.
Staring up at the mountain from the safety of Basin Camp, Jake put their chances of reaching High Camp in the negative. The snow was drifting off the ridge of the West Buttress, down along the icy Headwall, and through the plateau that made up Basin Camp—the sky bullet gray, clouds obscuring the peak.
“Two thousand feet to the next camp!” Orion yelled. So apparently Orion, in the lead, had heard him, despite the howl of the wind and Orion’s being some thirty feet above him. And that was only because the wind had died enough, the skies clearing enough for them to see each other.
Orion and Ham had huddled inside the orange FOB tent at Basin Camp for over an hour, trying to get a fix on what had happened to the climbers.
It wasn’t hard to figure out.
Given the booms still sounding in the distance, the way the mountain seemed to tremble, the two teams had been swept away in a massive avalanche that dislodged the snowcap on either side of Denali Pass.
The searchers needed a chopper, something like a Pave to search the backside of the mountain. But no one was going any higher with these winds, which meant they’d have to wait.
Or go it on foot.
That’s where the crazy came in.
Ham and Orion had emerged from the tent, Orion’s expression set. Jake didn’t know the guy well, but Ham said he’d been a Pararescue Jumper. Which meant he charged into battle, tracers flying, to save the already injured.
He wasn’t going to be stopped by a little wind.
Besides, Jake had seen Orion’s skills on Mount Huntington. If anyone knew his way around snow and ice, it was Orion Starr.
Ham, too, looked annoyed enough to take on crazy, but then again Ham took rescues personally. That’s what happened when you lost the woman you loved during a rescue op. And he’d had a kid sister who’d been seriously injured when he was serving overseas. It had taken him ten agonizing days to get to her.
Ham and Orion had rescue in their DNA.
Jake possessed enough crazy to want to follow them.
Except, well, he really did understand their grim expressions. He wasn’t the only one who couldn’t get the idea out of his head that three women they knew could be freezing to death on the mountain.
Which was why he’d helped unload the sled, divided the gear between them, and clipped his ascender onto the fixed rope.
“We’re going up to High Camp,” Orion said, just as Jake expected, as they started their hike to the Headwall. “I have the GPS. I’ve been up the mountain a dozen times. Stay on my tail.”
So yes, it was crazy, but he was all in. Because try as he might, he couldn’t get Aria out of his head. Couldn’t peel from his memory the sound of her laughter as he spun her on the packed-earth dance floor under the midnight sun. Maybe it was the long solitude of sitting in their snowy ice hotel on Mount Huntington, trying to think of anything but his next Spam recipe, but he’d let their short conversation play out in his memory way too much.
“So, you’re off to climb the mountain?” He gestured at Denali, off in the distance.
He’d seen her from a distance and had chased her red Solo cup down when the wind took it off a nearby table. He’d returned it to her with a “You dropped this.”
She’d smiled at him, and the first thing he noticed was her dark brown eyes, the color of rich black coffee, something stirring in them. Curiosity, maybe.
It only sparked in him the same.
“That little bump?” She winked and lifted her shoulder. “No, we really just showed up for the ribs.” She finished wiping her fingers with a wet wipe, wadded the wipe up, picked up the basket, and threw it away. “Totally worth the six-hour flight, two-hour drive, and five bucks.”