The Arctic Event

He took a fast inventory of his physical condition. He was bruised and battered, but everything seemed to work. He must have ridden the outer edge of the fall, and the natural elasticity of the nylon climbing rope had absorbed some of the shock of the drop. However, both cold and weakness were settling in fast.

Unfortunately his direct-action options appeared to be limited to a hand-over-hand ascent up the safety line, and he lacked a pair of prusik rope climbers.

And what about the others? Had Val and Smyslov been caught in the avalanche? Squinting upward through the snow, he could make out a ruddy smudge of light outlining the edge of the shelf above him. The first flare they’d dropped to the ledge had gone out. Somebody must have ignited a second one up there. Somebody must have survived. Fighting the constriction of the climbing harness, he tried to inflate his lungs to yell.

Then something entered his sphere of illumination, sliding down the rigid length of his safety line. Another rope, a loop bent onto its end, had been shackled to the safety line by a carabiner. The foot loop for a Z-pulley rescue rig.

Smith caught the new rope. Unshackling it, he hooked the loop over one boot. Pulling himself upright on the safety line, he stood in the loop and gave the rescue line a haul-away tug. The rescue rig went taut, and someone on the ledge began to heave him up in incremental pulls, the slack in the safety rope being taken in as well.

As he was lifted to the ledge, Smith had plenty of time to wonder what he was going to find. One thing was certain: Valentina Metrace didn’t have the mountaineering expertise to set up a Z-pulley like this one.

He reached the ledge ceiling and was distracted by having to fend himself off the cliff face. Accordingly the lip of the shelf took him by surprise. Suddenly hands were reaching down and gripping his harness, helping to heave him up and over the edge.

The feeling of rock under him was one of the grandest sensations he had felt for a long time. For a few moments he knelt on his hands and knees, luxuriating in its solidity. He allowed the trembling to take over then but fought off the recurrent surge of blackness that threatened to break over him. He shook his head like a wounded bear and looked around the ledge. By the sputtering red light of the half-consumed flare, he could make out the multiple anchors and interlacing rope loops of the Z-rig, and the sprawled bodies of Valentina and Smyslov, the two looking fully as totaled as he felt.

Smith inhaled a pull of icy air. “Hydration and energy bars,” he said hoarsely. “Now!”

They huddled together on the ledge, gulping down alternating mouthfuls of body-warmed water and vitamin-augmented chocolate, their metabolic furnaces catching up with the crisis load thrown on them.

Smith noted the black bloodstains on the sleeve of Smyslov’s snow smock. “How bad’s the arm?”

The Russian shook his head. “Not bad. I have a first aid pack on it.”

“Hurt in the icefall?”

Smyslov shot a wry look at Valentina. “Not exactly. It is complicated. I’ll tell you later.”

“If you say so,” Smith replied. “Now that the rush is over, I suppose I should ask just who is whose prisoner at the moment.”

Smyslov shook his head, that self-derisive grin still on his cold-reddened face. “It beats the shit out of me.”

“I’m a little vague on the question myself,” Val interjected, “but may I propose that, for now, we just get down off this damn mountain. We can sort out the fiddly bits in the morning.”

“That sounds like a sensible notion to me, Major. What do you say?”

“I agree, Colonel, eminently sensible.”

“Then let’s move, people. This mountain isn’t getting any shorter.”

Wincing against the objections of bruised and stiffening muscles, Smith pulled himself to his feet. Val helped him up and paused for a moment, mittened hands resting on his chest. “It appears there might be something to this scruples business after all,” she said.

“Every once in a while you can be pleasantly surprised.”

Chapter Forty-three

The North Face, Wednesday Island

Randi Russell was on her feet and moving again before she regained true consciousness. Nor was there any clarity to that consciousness. She had no memory of how she had freed herself from the snowslide. Nor did she have any idea where she was or where she was going. It was all dying-animal reflex now.

She no longer felt particularly uncomfortable or fearful. The false warmth of hypothermia was on her, and point by point, she was detaching from the world. The imperative to keep moving was still present, but even that was fading. The next time she fell would be the last.

There were no destinations left in the cold, black emptiness surrounding her. She moved downward toward the shoreline simply because that was the easiest direction to go, the terrain working in her favor.

Randi did not realize the meaning of the jumbled piles of ice blocks she’d started to encounter. It was the broken rim of sea ice building up along the northern coast of Wednesday Island. She was only dimly aware that the searing, deadening wind was being blocked, and she turned parallel to the ghostly stacked rubble, stumbling along the snow-jacketed gravel of the beach.

The ghosts were dominating her now-sounds, voices, visions out of her past, pleasant and not, replaying in random fragments. Santa Barbara, Carmel, UCLA, Iraq, China, Russia, the lesser places in between. People known. Things experienced.

She tried to cling to the pleasant memories: playing on the beach below her parents’ home, conspiring in happy sisterhood with Sophia, Mike undressing her and lowering her to the soft grass on that first sweet, trembling time.

But the blackness and the cold kept bringing in the other occasions: standing at Sophia’s side, scattering their parent’s ashes. The awful pain of the open grave at Arlington, hearing taps played for the bold, smiling other half of herself. The anger and the need to strike out at something, anything, that had changed her from a CIA linguist-analyst to a wet-work field agent. The face of the first person she’d ever been forced to kill. Standing at the edge of that second grave at Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria, with the last person she had to love in the world leaving her behind.

Randi’s boot twisted on a frozen stone. She made no effort to catch herself as she fell. A faint voice in the back of her mind raged at her to get up, but it was too much bother to listen. She crawled a few feet into the lee of an ice mass and curled up, husbanding the last fading remnants of body warmth as the snow sifted over her.

This would be where she would die. Randi would fight it no further. There was no sense to it. She gave herself to the phantoms, reliving the dimming, fragmented kaleidoscope of memory.

The recall of Sophia became especially strong, and Randi was pleased. She was with her sister again.

But Sophie kept taking her to the wrong places. Back to Mike’s death. Back to stand before that other tall, sober soldier in a black beret. Back to the one truly serious argument she’d ever had with her sister. Back to the one unforgivable thing Sophia had ever done to her.

“I’m going to marry Jon, Randi,” Sophie said again.

No!

“Jon is sorry for what he’s done to you, Randi. More sorry than you will ever know or be willing to understand.”

“I don’t want for him to be sorry! I want for him to have saved you!” Randi cried back, their argument flaring, as raw and as painful as ever.

“No one could have saved me, Randi. Not Jon, nor even you.”

“There must have been a way!”

Sophia’s eyes filled her universe now. “If there had been a way, Jon would have found it. Just as you would have found it.”