“Appreciate that.” Franco’s labored breath and hoarse chuckle filled the headset.
“Hey, Franco? Thanks for saving my ass.”
“Roger that, Brick. You’ve done the same for me.”
And he had. Not that they kept score. Wade recognized the chitchat for what it really was—Franco checking to make sure he wasn’t suffering from altitude sickness due to their fifteen thousand foot perch. They worked overtime to acclimate themselves, but the lurking beast could still strike even the most seasoned climber without warning. They’d already lost one of their team members last month to HACE—high altitude cerebral edema.
He shook his head to clear it. Damn it, his mind was wandering. Not good. He eyed the ledge a mere twenty feet up. Felt like a mile. He slammed an ice ax in with his left hand, pulled, hauled, strained, then slapped the right one in a few inches higher. Crampons—ice cleats—gained traction on the sleek side of the narrow ravine as he inched his way upward.
Slow. Steady. Patient. Mountain rescue couldn’t be rushed. At least April gave them a few more daylight hours. Not that he could see much anyway, with eighty-mile-per-hour wind creating whiteout conditions. Below, his climbing partner was a barely discernible blur.
Hand over hand. Spike. Haul. Spike. Haul. He clipped his safety rope into a spike they had anchored in the rock on the way down. Scaled one step at a time. Forgot about the biting wind. The ball-numbing cold.
The ever-present risk of avalanche.
His arms bulged, the burden strapped to his harness growing heavier. Remember the mission. Bring up an unconscious female climber. Strapped to a litter. Compound fracture in her leg.
His job as a pararescueman in the United States Air Force included medic training. Land, sea, or mountain, military missions or civilian rescue. With his brothers in arms, he walked, talked, and breathed their motto, “That Others May Live.”
That people like his mother might live.
Muscles burning, he focused upward into the growl of the storm and the hovering military helicopter. A few more feet and he could hook the litter to the MH-60. Rotors chop, chop, chopped through the sheets of snow like a blender.
The crevasse was too narrow to risk lowering a swaying cable. Just one swipe against the narrow walls of ice could collapse the chasm into itself. On top of the injured climber and Franco.
On top of him.
So it was up to him—and his climbing partner—to pull the wounded woman out. Once clear, the helicopter would land if conditions permitted. And if not, they could use the cable then to raise her into the waiting chopper.
Wind slammed him again like a frozen Mack truck. He fought back the cold-induced mental fog. At least when Hermes went subterranean to rescue Persephone from the underworld, he had some flames to toast his toes.
Wade keyed his microphone again to talk to the helicopter orbiting overhead. “Fever”—he called the mission code name—“we’re about five minutes from the top.”
Five minutes when anything could happen.
“Copy, the wind is really howling. We will hold until you are away from the crevasse.”
“Copy, Fever.”
The rest of his team waited in the chopper. They’d spent most of the day getting a lock on the locale. The climber’s personal locator beacon had malfunctioned off and on. Wade believed in his job, in the motto. He came from five generations of military.
But sometimes on days like this, saving some reckless thrill seeker didn’t sit well when thoughts of people like his mother—wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq, needing his help—hammered him harder than the ice-covered rocks pummeling his shoulder. How damned frustrating that there hadn’t been a pararescue team near enough—he hadn’t been near enough—to give her medical aid. Now because of her traumatic brain injury, she would live out the rest of her life in a rehab center, staring off into space.
He couldn’t change the past, but by God, he would do everything he could to be there to help someone else’s mother or father, sister or brother, in combat. That could only happen if he finished up his tour in this frozen corner of the world.
As they neared the top, a moan wafted from the litter suspended below him. Stabilizing the rescue basket was dicey. Even so, the groans still caught him by surprise.
The growling chopper overhead competed with the increasing howls of pain from their patient in the basket. God forbid their passenger should decide to give them a real workout by thrashing around.
“Franco, we better get her to the top soon before the echoes cause an avalanche.”
“Picking up the pace.”
Wade anchored the last… swing… of his ax… Ice crumbled away. The edge shaved away in larger and larger chunks. Crap, move faster. Pulse slugging, he dug deeper.
And cleared the edge.
Franco’s exhale echoed in his ears. Or maybe it was his own. Resisting the urge to sprawl out and take five right here on the snow-packed ledge, he went on autopilot, working in tandem with Franco.