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Scot turned to Nick for confirmation, who nodded his head in agreement.
Fifty feet below them, Scot could see the shelf of snow and ice from which the avalanche had broken off. It wasn’t hard to distinguish, as the levels of snow above and below were so dramatically different. Vance saw what Scot was looking at and immediately spoke. “Lemme guess.”
“Yeah, I need to take a closer look.”
Knowing he would be outvoted no matter what he said, Nick unshouldered his pack and began laying out the coils of rope they had brought along, leaving Vance to, hopefully, talk some sense into Agent Harvath as they untied their safety line.
“Scot, we have no idea how stable or unstable that shelf is down there.”
“All the more reason I have to get down to it now.”
“Can you explain to me what you hope to find down there?”
“I can’t go into great detail, Vance, but I don’t think that avalanche started on its own. I think somebody helped it.”
“What? You think somebody triggered that avalanche on purpose? Why would somebody do that?”
“I don’t have all the answers, but I’m starting to put together a picture. See that?” Scot gestured toward where Nick had wisely chosen a new location in the rock crevice in which to drive a piton, so as not to disturb the area Harvath had pointed out earlier. “I think somebody was up here, not too long ago, who hammered in one or several pitons, depending on how much support they needed, and belayed down the face.”
“But that’s nuts. No amateur backcountry climber would have done that.”
“Who said anything about amateurs? These people were extremely professional.”
“Even so, how do you know that their climbing caused the avalanche?”
“I don’t think the climbing caused it. As a matter of fact, I think whoever was responsible for the avalanche was long gone from here by the time it started. Are we ready up there, Nick?”
Nick gave the thumbs-up. He had placed a couple of extra pitons just to be sure and threw Harvath a new length of rope on which he would be belayed.
“Take this,” said Harvath, throwing Nick an orange wax crayon he had removed from the command center. “I want you to draw an X next to each one of the pitons you’ve placed, so that the investigative team can tell the difference between your work and what was here before we got here. Nick nodded and began marking off his piton locations.
Scot looped the rope through the metal ring in his harness and threw the coil of rope in his right hand over the ridge and down the face of Squaw Peak. Vance tied off a safety line to the harness and began giving Scot instructions.
“You look like you know what you’re doing, so I am going to assume you’ve rappelled before.”
“More times and from more different objects than you can possibly imagine.” Scot gri
“Well, this is going to be a little bit different. Because we have no idea how stable the snow is, you can’t bounce down; you’ve got to walk back very slowly. Place your feet with extreme caution and listen very carefully for any cracking sounds that might indicate the shelf is moving or might be ready to break away. You got it?”
“Yeah, I got it,” said Scot as he turned his back to the ridge and the valley far below. Looking over at Nick he asked, “On belay?”
“Belay on,” Nick replied.
“Climbing,” said Scot.
Which was followed by the mountaineer’s response from Nick, “Climb on.”
Ever so slowly, Scot leaned back into his harness and allowed himself to take baby steps over the lip of the ridge until he was standing on the icy face itself. He gave each of his balled fists a couple of quick squeezes to try and warm up his fingers before slowly letting out the slack in his rope.
As Scot moved backward down the face, choosing each step with care, Nick released the necessary amounts of slack from the line.
Harvath noticed divot-like depressions in the snow that could have been footprints or merely small, windblown craters. It was hard to tell.
The descent seemed to take forever as he moved step by step, always stopping to listen before lightly putting his weight on the next foot behind him. Scot’s aching body was cooperating so far, but just barely. A small smile crossed his lips as he thought of what Dr. Trawick would have said had Scot asked permission to go climb a mountain. He probably would have certified him insane right there.
Throughout the climb, Scot paid close attention to the strange pockmarks he was seeing in the snow about three feet off to his left. He realized they were too uniform to be a naturally occurring phenomenon. What prevented him from believing they could be footprints was their small size. Then it hit him.
Scot looked up at his own marks made scaling down the face. His prints were about half the size of regular prints, and for good reason. When they had gotten out of the helicopter, Vance had handed him a pair of crampons. The sharp metal teeth strapped to his boots were the same devices that would have been worn by any climber, even a half-wit amateur, when trying to tackle a surface covered with snow and ice. Whoever left the tracks off to Scot’s left did so knowing that by the time they were discovered, the person who made them would be hundreds, if not thousands of miles away.
Scot was nearing the edge of the shelf where the avalanche had broken away. He glanced again at the tracks left by the previous phantom climber and noticed they had begun to veer away from him. He steadied himself on the rope and carefully lifted his right hand to depress the talk button on the Deer Valley radio strapped to his chest.
“Vance, do you read me? Over.”
“Yeah, I got ya. What’s up?”
“We were right. Making my way down, I can see there’s been somebody here recently with crampons.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure enough. Listen, the trail diverges off to my left and then over the lip. I’m going to need to push off and swing over to where the tracks end. I’ll need some slack. Give me about twenty more feet.”
“We’ll let out the slack; just be careful you don’t touch off another slide, okay?”
“I am being careful, and believe me, if you’ve got another way to do this, I’m all ears. At some point I have to swing out over the lip, so I’d rather get it over with. Out.”
Scot waited until he saw a sufficient amount of the line slide down the face and dangle beneath him. He calculated how much thrust he would need to push himself off the snow to reach his target and hoped that using that much force wouldn’t crack the shelf beneath him and send it tumbling into the valley below. There were a lot of rescue perso
Testing the strength in his legs, Scot bent painfully at the knees several times to get the momentum going to launch him in the right direction. Above on the ridge, Vance and Nick could only hope Scot knew what he was doing, because they were operating completely blind.
On the count of three, Scot once again told himself. One…two…three!
The push sent him backward into the air, away from the steep peak face and hurling toward the area beneath the shelf where the crampon tracks disappeared.
Knees bent, ready to absorb the impact, Scot’s body came back hard and fast toward its target. Judging by his speed, he thought that he had pushed off with a little too much force and consequently was coming back in too fast. He braced himself for the impact.
When the shark-teeth-like crampons dug into the ice, the jolt raced up his legs, past where it should have been absorbed by his knees. Scot had misjudged his own strength. His knees had not yet fully forgiven him for the punishment they had suffered over the past twenty-four hours, and they failed to take the brunt of the shock. His legs buckled, and his whole upper body slammed into the sheer face. Scot didn’t dare take either of his hands from the rope.