Or maybe it was Orion who jinxed them, trying to find a reply. “You’re not doomed today. Today we save lives.”
What was the poor man supposed to say? And of course, she only made it worse, because nearly everything Orion said to her reminded her of the man he’d been.
The life she’d stolen from him.
So much for escaping her past—it seemed to be plummeting toward her.
The mountain shuddered as the torrent swept past her, massive ice boulders bouncing off seracs around her, tons of ice rolling by her. She heard screaming and realized it was her.
The air turned to a whiteout, burying her in a snowy breath.
Then, deep inside the thunder, a scream lifted. Pain, or perhaps fear—
Orion!
Before she could react, her harness jerked hard, as if he’d been thrown into the flow. She dug in, but in a second the power of the slide yanked her from the mountain.
It dragged her across snow and ice, blinding her, filling her mouth.
She was falling.
The earth dropped out beneath her legs, and she had a moment of clarity before she went over a snowy jagged edge. Enough to slam her feet into an icy wall, enough to jam her axe into the lip.
Still, some invisible force dragged her down and she put her other hand on the axe. Refused to let it loose, kept her ankles down, and fought to stay affixed to the wall.
The ice and snow cascaded down around her, into her jacket, pulling her down.
She couldn’t look.
Then, just like that, the terrible roar died as it hurtled its way down the mountain.
It left her shaking as she clung to the blue ice. Only her heartbeat, her heavy gasps, filled the silence.
Then a terrible roar of agony bounced up around her, filling her ears, ricocheting off the walls around her. She took a breath and wiped her snow-filled goggles on her arm.
She couldn’t let go of her position. But as the air cleared, she made out her predicament.
The slide had ripped open a crevasse, perhaps with one of the icy snowballs on its way down the mountain.
And, maybe out of spite, threw the interlopers into the icy maw.
The sound of agony had died to hard, stiff breaths, an audible moaning.
“Orion?”
She willed her heartbeat to slow. At least now she could see. Through the frozen residue of the sleet on her goggles, she made out a gulf of blue ice, narrow on one end, widening on the other where the ice blocks had hit it.
Darkness swelled from the unknown depths below.
And, on a lip of ice, jutting out maybe two feet, and nearly twenty feet below, Orion clung to a nob, his axe shoved into the icy wall, one foot drilled in, the other . . .
Oh, the other.
Something terrible had happened as he fell, maybe his crampon grabbed into the wall and refused to release, but his leg was twisted into a grotesque angle, his knee clearly dislocated.
No wonder he was moaning.
“I’m coming,” she said. “Hang in there.”
She didn’t want to look down, but she had to know how deep the crevasse went. To her left, the icy wall extended, rough hewn, with jagged edges, narrowing into a tiny, impassable vein.
Icicles hung like torpedoes above her, and over the lip above Orion.
The chill of the icy tomb found her body, and she shivered. She drew in a breath, painfully aware that they might have been wedged in forever if they’d fallen a mere twenty feet farther down the mountain.
Toward Orion’s side the crevasse was connected in bridges, maybe twenty feet down.
“Ham!” She looked up, the blue sky a wide swath of rescue some ten feet above. Somehow she’d managed to stop herself from plummeting by holding on to what looked like a former ice bridge, jutting out at a forty-five-degree angle.
“Ham!” Her voice pinged off the ice, back to her.
Orion’s moans had died.
Nothing from the top. Ham’s rope, however, hung down from above.
Jenny listened, praying. What if Ham was knocked out? Or worse, buried? She heard Orion’s quiet hum of pain and named a decision.
She’d have to climb down to Orion unbelayed. If she was clipped into the line, and she fell, not only would she pull the rope from the top but she’d drag Orion right off his perch into the darkness.
And she couldn’t do that to him again.
She unclipped her biner from the knot, freeing herself.
“I’m coming down!”
Orion said nothing.
She drew in a breath. Held on to her axe.
Released one foot from the ice, stretched down, and slammed it back in.
Then moved the other.
She moved the axe next.
“What are you doing?” The horror in Orion’s voice told her that he’d looked up.
“Climbing down to you.”
“Get back on belay. Right. Now.”
“If I fall, I’ll rip you off the wall.” She kept moving. A word that betrayed his military background ripped through the crevasse.
“C’mon, Jenny. Please. Clip in and climb up.”
“I’m halfway down to you.”
“Climb up!”
“You’re hurt! I’m not leaving you down there. Now stop distracting me!”
He let out another word but then stopped talking.
She moved down, carefully, her heart a fist in her chest. The breath of the crevasse turned frigid the lower she climbed.
As she got closer, she saw that he’d anchored himself into the wall with an ice screw. His harness, with his anchors, still hung around his shoulders. And, when she was close enough, he grabbed her harness and hooked her into his quick clip.
“Are you okay?” she said, coming alongside him.
“Don’t do that again,” he growled, his voice thin.
“What? Fall into a crevasse?”
“Do something stupid to try and save me.”
She looked at him, not even knowing where to start. If she could go back in time, that’s exactly what she would do.
Stop Operation Bulldog, no matter what the cost.
But now, she bit back her words and assessed the situation. “Your leg—”
“I tore out my artificial knee,” he said without elaboration, his words spoken behind clenched teeth.
“Can you climb up?”
He blew out a breath. Swallowed. And she had a sense of what his answer cost him when he shook his head. “I might be able to use my Prusik to climb up if we could fix a rope from the top, but . . . where’s Ham?”
“He hasn’t responded. Let’s get you onto solid ground. There’s a ledge below you that looks secure.”
She helped him anchor in two more ice screws and created a triad belay system. After she secured the rope to the ice screws and attached a descender, she reached for his harness to attach him on to the rope. “You go down. I’ll come after you.”
He stopped her hand. “No. You first. I can’t go down until I know you’re safe.” He unhooked his line from his biner and hooked himself to the wall with his quick-clip line.
He’d removed his goggles, securing them on his hat, and now his gaze pinned to hers.
“You’re hurt—”
“And I’m not going anywhere until you’re off this wall!”
She didn’t know why, but his pained growl found soft soil, dug in.
“Go down the line, Jenny. Now. I’m not leaving you here by yourself.”