Fatal Thaw (23 page)

Everywhere she looked the features of the Quilaks had changed, and changed radically. The southeast face of Mount Kanuyaq had been swept clean of snow and ice, scoured down to bare rock. The mouth of Sisik Glacier was filled from wall to wall with a flow of snow that reached out a mile and a half into the Valley of Death.

The only way Kate recognized the Barnes Wall, a five thousand-foot drop from Angqaq Peak to Sleighter Glacier, was by its location. Every feature, every fissure on it had been altered, shifted, broken. Carlson Icefall's once tiered, stairstep surface had been polished smooth by a gigantic hand and now gleamed in the twilight like a marble flagstone.

The Valley of Death itself had been ripped open in every direction.

There wasn't a cornice left intact on top of a glacier wall as far as the eye could see. Everywhere, the fresh blue of newly exposed glacier ice gleamed coldly in the setting sun's refracted glow.

As Kate watched, the sun slipped behind the Alaska Range, leaving only a band of misty mauve on the western horizon. One after another, stars found their way through the firmament to appear overhead. The air itself seemed to glitter with a thousand diamonds, the glint of starlight. off spindrift. The mountains stood still and serene.

It was beauty. It was innocence. It was peace. It was a lie. Kate turned her back on it, repacked the tent and went in search.

But there was no sign of Lottie. There was no sign of Lottie's rifle.

There was no sign of Lottie's pack, or of Lottie's tent, or of any of the rest of her gear. There was no sign of Lottie's tracks.

There should have been something-a mitten, a boot, a half-empty bag of trail mix. Kate raised her head from contemplation of the bland stretch of snow at her feet and stared up the long valley, her eyes narrowed, trying to see through the deepening twilight, around the jumbled remains of the Avalanche.

There was nothing, no movement, only the calm after the storm. Kate shoved her hands in her pockets and cocked an eye at Mutt. "For that matter, there was no sign of our tracks, either. That tidal wave of frozen water pretty much obliterated everything that got in its way.".

Mutt, sitting with her tail curled around her paws, looked the picture of patience as she waited for Kate to give her the signal to start tracking.

"Well?" Kate asked her. "Who's to say Big Bump didn't eat her alive? It could have been us. It damn near was us. Why not Lottie?"

The more she thought about it, the better it sounded. Resettling the pack on her shoulders, she turned and began retracing her steps in the direction of the base camp. Surprised but pleased to be going in a direction of declining altitude, Mutt rose to her feet and followed.

As always, the journey down seemed half as long as the journey up. The Koreans were alive, which surprised Kate, and touchingly glad to see her, which did not. Their radio, recovered from the bottom of a brand-new twelve-foot ravine not three feet from the front of their tent, was crusted with ice and battered from the fall. She switched it on without much hope and rejoiced when by a minor miracle it came to life. The volume knob was turned all the way to the right and Dan O'Brian's voice blared out over the still arctic night.

"Kanuyuq Base, Kanuyuq Base, this is Ranger 1, Ranger 1, come in.

Goddammit, you guys! Where the hell are you! Answer up! Say something, even if it's in Korean!"

The Koreans cried out at the sound of his voice and fell sobbing into each other's arms. Kate lunged for the volume knob and turned it down.

Keying the mike, she said, "Danny boy, you got yourself a mouth on you could wake up a wooly mammoth."

A brief silence. "Kate? Kate, is that you?"

"That's me. I'm about five thousand feet above your base camp, around the southern mouth of what used to be the Valley of Death. George's two Koreans are here, too, and they're okay."

"Never mind them, what about you?" "I'm fine. We just have an earthquake.

"No shit we just had an earthquake, about six-point-two's worth on the Richter scale. For a while there I thought the whole Park was going to slide into the Gulf of Alaska. I'll never make fun of your 64 quake stories again, Kate. What's the mountain look like?"

Kate gave a short laugh and settled for "You won't believe it."

Even over the radio's static she could hear the change in his voice.

"What's the base camp look like?"

Kate, having already sighted in on where the base camp used to be with Bobby's set of Bushnell field glasses, replied, "What base camp?"

Valuable airtime was wasted with a string of words for which the using of over the public airwaves the FCC fines heavily. Kate stood it patiently for as long as she was able, but she was tired and hungry and her patience didn't last long.

She clicked the transmitter key, interrupting the circuit, until he shut up. "Fire up the Llama and come get these two nitwits before I shove them into a crevasse."

THE Lama showed up less than an hour later and took on the Koreans.

Behind them Kate shoved in as much of their gear as had been salvaged and stood back. Dan looked around. "Come on, Kate, quit screwing around!

Get aboard!"

"Go!" she yelled over the sound of the engine. "Quit screwing around!"

"Go on!" she yelled. "I'm heading up to the summit! I've never been!"

Dan doffed the headset and slipped out of the chopper. He ducked around to stand next to her. "What's the matter with you?"

"I've never been to the summit," Kate repeated.

He looked at her, one eyebrow raised. "You're the last person I ever expected to get summit fever."

"The climbers always want to do the last leg on their own. The weather's good. There'll never be a better day to see what all the shouting's about. Plus, I can take a look at what the quake did to the route." He squinted up the valley. "Can you do ten thousand feet in a day?"

"It's only five thousand up."

"And five thousand back," he pointed out, "and you know as well as I do coming down's always more dangerous than going up."

She shrugged and spread her hands. He swore at her.

"You gonna keep on after Lottie, is that what this is about?"

"Lottie's dead," she said flatly.

He gave her a sharp look. "Lottie's better at wilderness than just about anyone I know, including you. You find her body?"

"Nope." Kate shook her head. "But she's dead. Avalanche got her. Buried her without a trace."

He looked from Kate's expressionless face to the pass below the East Buttress of Angqaq Peak and back again.

"How tidy."

"I thought so."

"No point in looking for the body, I guess." "No point at all," Kate agreed.

"But you want to go mountain climbing anyway." Yup. He threw up his hands. "Okay, fine, all right. Weather's about near perfect, forecast is for more of the same. Take the radio with you, and call me from Carlson Icefall.

I'll pick you up there."

"Okay. See you tomorrow noon at the latest?"

He drew himself up, affronted. "You hitting the Park Service up for a totally unauthorized ride in a department vehicle?"

He grinned. "You got it. See you then. You he yelled at Mutt.

Mutt looked longingly at the helicopter, pleadingly up at Kate, and barked a resigned negative. Dan shrugged.

"You're both nuts. See you later."

She labored up the slope, panting in the oxygen-thin air. She climbed ten steps in the powdery, shifting snow, rested ten, climbed ten, rested ten. Mutt walked when she did, stopped when she did. It was the first time Kate had ever seen Mutt look even remotely tired.

Every thousand feet or so she forced food and water down both of them, marveling all the while at their luck. Angqaq Peak was not a technically difficult climb, so long as you stuck to the route up Nicolo Glacier, between Carlson Icefall and the East Buttress. But it was high and the air was thin and the weather was usually for shit, with winds that had broken a 110-mph anemometer just a month before, and temperatures that combined with those winds to result in chill factors routinely registering at minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit and lower.

But not that night. That night was a night out of a fairy tale. A full moon had risen two hours after sundown, and moonlight reflected off the snow and ice, lighting the landscape so that it was almost impossible for the two climbers to stumble or lose their way. There wasn't a hint of wind, and where the light of the moon did not obliterate them, stars shone like holes burnt into the fabric of the night. It was cold, clear and absolutely still, and the journey up was turning into more of a hike than a climb.

A continuous ripple of rock, rifts of ice and high folds of drifted snow had hidden the summit from them almost all the way up, which was why when they attained it Kate had almost started down the other side before she realized it. She halted, breathing hard, one mittened hand on Mutt's head. They stood together at the top of the world. Mikiluni Peak on their right, Mount Kanuyaq on their left, the Child at their feet, the rest of the jagged summits gathered at a respectful distance before Angqaq's proud and disdainful zenith. Challenging from below, from above the mountains seemed almost deferential. Kate looked from them to the moon and the stars hanging far above, and for the first time, she understood the true allure of mountain climbing.

There was elation, there was triumph, there was pride in achieving the summit, yes, but most of all there was a shift in perspective. From below, the view was of the mountains and the heavens, equally unattainable. From here, it was the mountains below and the heavens above and herself in between, herself, an insignificant, puny little mortal between immortals. A glint caught the of her eye, and she turned her head quickly, to catch the last glimpse of a meteor streaking across the sky in thin smear of astral dust. The heavens were alive, too, as alive as the earth below. So frost was right after all, she thought. The best thing we're put here for's to see.

Another part of her protested, Is that all? Not to do?

Only to see?

"It's enough," she said out loud. "More than enough. If your eyes are open it's a full-time job.

Slender tendrils of feathered aurora felt their way down from the north, shedding their cold glow over the broken arctic landscape, ephemeral ribbons of confectioner's sugar spun into pastel strands of pale green and red and blue and white.

Closer they crept, and closer, until they were directly overhead and Kate could hear them talking among themselves, a muted, electric hum of gossipy comment over the broken scene below.

Instinctively, Kate fumbled beneath her parka and around her waist. The old Eskimos thought that the Northern Lights reached down and snatched people away, but that you could protect yourself against them with your knife. It was one of Ekaterina's favorite stories, and she had told it over and over and over again to the small granddaughter perched on her knee. It was only a story; still, the hilt of the knife felt solid and comforting in Kate's hand. She looked up again, marveling in the light and color, at the sound. After a while those sounds began to work together, to take on a rhythm, and without conscious thought Kate began to move with them.

She half crouched over legs bent at the knees and her feet stamped lightly against the hard-packed snow, in time with the aurora. red band arced down and she lunged forward to meet it, daring it to snatch her up. A tendril of green shifted and swirled above her, and she flung up a hand and sketched her homage against it.

One white finger tickled the surface of the snow at her feet, and she danced with it, step for step. Agudar, master spirit, keeper of the game, loomed white and round far above and shed a steady glow over them all, and in the light of that steady glow the spirits of the dead gathered round to bear witness, but Lottie was not among them.

Lighthearted, joyous, Kate matched steps with a band of red that swirled and wrapped back upon itself above her head.

The light increased in the east, and the aurora slipped away in search of other dancing partners. Kate's feet slowed, and stopped, her breath coming hard in the thin air. Mutt came to stand next to her, and together they faced into the rising sun, watching as the pale gold of morning slipped over the knife-edged peaks, spilled into the valleys, sparked against the distant blue of Prince William Sound. The sky bleached from dark to light, and the first seeking rays of sunlight felt their way over the horizon to crown the new day with cold fire.

And the sun rose full up into the sky, and the night fled into the west and all magic with it, and Kate was abandoned at the top of a white world stripped clean and polished by the clear, honest, merciless light of morning. She felt stripped and polished herself, refined down to her essential elements. It was as if she had been roused from a long sleep filled with dreams to satiate desires both subtle and gross, only to be greeted by a new world with more promise than any dream. Or perhaps it was only that she looked at it through new eyes.

She smiled at this unaccustomed flight of fancy. "I do believe romance is getting the better of me this morning," she told Mutt. "Sorry about that."

Mutt's expression indicated that, romance not with standing, they had pressed their luck far enough and it was more than time to get the hell off Big Bump and back to where a reasonable person, four-footed or otherwise, might expect to find food and shelter when a storm blew up unexpectedly, as storms were prone to do, and especially here.

Mutt was right. Kate took a last, pensive look down the eastern sweep of the Quilaks, appreciating as never before how vast was the interior of the North American continent, and how high nineteen thousand feet was. A thought occurred that made her groan beneath her breath. "You know what this means, don't you?" she told Mutt.

Mutt looked puzzled, and Kate said sadly, "God help us, it looks like Middle Finger for two, babe."

She shrugged into her pack and, Mutt at her side, began the long trek down.