Melt (31 page)

“I will, but by the time they get here…”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Jordan rapidly loaded equipment into Curly and took off across the rough terrain, paralleling the edge of the ice river, driving as fast as she dared, her nerves raw.

When she arrived at the team’s location, she leapt out of the vehicle as it rolled to a stop and ran to the edge of the glacier.

Malik lay on his stomach, his head over a deep, narrow crevasse, his dog standing beside him. The glacier had cracked open, the down side pulling away from the other. The technical term for this feature was
bergschrund,
a German word meaning “mountain cleft.” She recited the definition silently to herself. There was a dictionary of geology terms in her head, but as often happened when faced with a real-world example, the definition became superfluous, almost meaningless. It was just a word:
bergschrund
. This thing before her was too big and too awe-inspiring to capture in a word.

She hesitantly peered into the eerie blue depths. Sonja sat looking small and frightened on a shelf of ice four feet wide, huddled over her knees. On her left was a sheer vertical wall. On her right was a menacing chasm that descended steeply, narrowing as it went. Jordan felt dizzy just looking and had to jerk away.

“Did you call for a rescue team?” she asked.

“We did,” Julie assured her. “But it’s hard to say how long it will take them. She’s too cold to stay there much longer.”

“Malik tried tossing down his jacket,” Brian said, “but it missed.”

“How did this happen?” Jordan asked.

“She was trying to rescue one of the cameras,” Brian explained. “The quake knocked it into the ice, so she went out to get it. She reminded us, you know, about how you said one of those cameras was worth more than all of us put together.”

“We know that was a joke,” Julie intervened, frowning at Brian.

“There must have been an aftershock,” he said. “This whole section just split off. It knocked her off her feet and she slipped over. The camera fell in too. It’s way down there somewhere. Long gone.”

Jordan took a deep breath. “I’ll go down and get her,” she said, steeling herself against the fear she already felt creeping into her throat.

“Jordan,” Julie objected, “you can’t go down there. Just while we’ve been waiting for you, it’s been shifting and calving.”

“What do you suggest?” Jordan asked.

“We should wait for the rescue team. They’ve got all the right equipment for this situation.”

“You just said yourself she can’t stay there much longer. Between the cold and the instability of the ice, waiting isn’t an option if there’s something we can do.”

Brian intervened. “Now that we’ve got the ropes, we can lower one down to her.”

Jordan shook her head. “That’s too dangerous. If she were directly below us, maybe, but it’s not possible to just drop a rope on her. If she has to move around to get to it, the ledge could fail. We can’t have her moving until she’s got a safety line. Somebody has to go down there and put the rope in her hand.”

Malik stepped up to them. “I’ll go. I’ve been climbing ice all my life. I’m the most experienced.”

Jordan gazed into his dark eyes, grateful for the offer. Though she knew how to use the equipment and had both experience and training in climbing, she had regularly avoided climbing situations where her fear of heights would kick in. This was one of those situations. She couldn’t even look down into that crevasse without getting dizzy. How could she hang over it at the end of a cable? For a second, she considered letting Malik go down. But she knew she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t let any of them go. It had to be her. If Sonja fell to her death during a rescue attempt, she had to be the one to shoulder that burden.

“No,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I appreciate the offer, but I’ll be going.”

“Another aftershock and the whole thing could come apart,” Brian cautioned. “Or maybe even worse, crash back together. There’s no point risking your life too…for her.”

Malik stepped in front of Brian. “What the hell does that mean?” he hissed. “Her life is not important? Why? Because she is gay? Is that your point, you bigot?”

Brian shoved him away. “It’s nothing to do with that! What do I care about that, you asshole?” He shoved him again, harder, causing Atka to growl menacingly. Brian was unfazed. He took a step closer to Malik, scowling into his face. “My problem with you has nothing to do with that. After all, Jordan’s gay too, and she’s the one whose life I’m worried about.” Brian shook his head in disgust. “God! Is there no end to the ways you think of yourself as special!”

Suddenly Jordan realized what had brought Malik and Sonja together. She was stunned that she hadn’t seen it before. Malik tensed, looking like he was about to spring at Brian. She stepped between them.

“Stop it!” she commanded. “We don’t have time for this. I’m going down there and you guys need to work as a team. I’m counting on that.” She motioned to the group. “Everybody stay off the ice! Brian, you’re on the winch. Malik, you stay on the rim and relay instructions to him. Julie, you’re in charge of equipment. I’m going to take a safety line down and get that around her first, then we’ll get her into a harness and pull her up.”

While Jordan got harnessed, she tried not to think about the horrible possibility that Sonja wouldn’t make it. That won’t happen, she assured herself, remembering what she had recently told Dr. Lund about Pippa’s dream.
Sometimes believing is sufficient to make it true.
Jordan had never been good at believing anything that wasn’t a proven fact, but this was one of those situations where there was so much at stake she found it nearly impossible not to fall back on a different kind of belief. She closed her eyes and repeated silently:
She’ll make it
.

As her harness was cinched tight, she scanned the sky for a sign of a helicopter, but there was nothing. No cavalry coming over the hill.

Malik continued to speak to Sonja in a soothing voice. “Jordan is coming in,” he told her. “She is coming to get you. Stay still. Stay quiet.”

Jordan was lowered over the edge and slowly began to descend, using an ice ax and the crampons on her boots to stabilize herself. At the sound of creaking in the upper wall, she froze and momentarily held her breath, waiting for the entire thing to collapse. Now inside the glacier, she noticed the air had become noticeably colder and each of her breaths created a small cloud of steam in front of her face. It was like dropping into a freezer. The ice groaned and creaked, each tiny sound rumbling through the fissure.

She looked up at her worried students. She wished Kelly were there among them because Kelly’s face would be full of confidence and encouragement and love. Kelly would believe in Jordan and she would be able to see something that none of the others could see, that Jordan was terrified. Because of that, her belief would mean more than anyone else’s.

She didn’t know if she could keep herself from being overwhelmed by panic. The main thing was not to look down. She would pretend she was climbing down just a few feet, that there was a solid bottom directly below her. She could believe that, she hoped, if she didn’t look.

As she descended deeper into the chasm, a part of her, the cool scientific part, took in the blue frozen beauty of the glacier with a sense of wonder. For years she had studied ice, but this was the first time she had been in the heart of a glacier. Experiencing its power and immensity with such immediacy, she felt a deep sense of awe.

It was only a few minutes, but it was a long, tense few minutes, before she reached Sonja. She slipped the ax into a loop on the harness and let herself hang free a few feet above Sonja. She willed herself not to look past Sonja’s perch into the depths of the crevasse below, but to fix her gaze on Sonja, who knelt in a ball, bent over her knees, her teeth visibly chattering.

“Don’t stand up,” Jordan said quietly. “Don’t move anything you don’t have to. Any movement could cause a fracture. I’m going to hand you a rope. Put it over your head and around your waist before we go any further.”

Jordan gently lifted the looped end of the rope from her shoulder. Just then a section of the wall opposite broke off with a sharp crack and plunged down, crashing and shattering into glassy shards on its way. Taken off guard, Jordan’s eyes followed it and she found herself staring down into the black, bottomless depths beyond her feet. She kicked involuntarily, hitting nothing, and her stomach lurched as she imagined herself falling all the way down, hundreds of feet, to the bedrock, her body shattered by the impact and entombed in the ice for all time. Panic tightened her throat. She was unable to look away from the void below. It was like a yawning mouth with ferocious ice teeth waiting to swallow her, its strange, echoing voice, deep and menacing, rising up all around her. Beads of sweat broke out on her forehead as her skin went cold. She thought she heard her name. The chasm was calling to her. “Jordan,” it whispered. “Jordan.”

“Jordan, are you okay?”

She wrenched her eyes from the pit to see Sonja watching her with concern.

“Take the rope,” Jordan instructed. “Don’t look down and try to stay calm.” She knew she was talking to herself as much as anybody.

Sonja reached one arm above her head and Jordan aimed carefully, tossing the rope into her waiting hand. She slowly slipped it over her body, then cinched it around her waist, all the while keeping her legs and feet still.

Jordan swallowed hard. “Good. You’re doing great.” She looked up at Malik on the rim. “Take up the slack on her line,” she said. “Not too taut.”

The situation had just gotten significantly more hopeful, Jordan told herself. As long as there were no aftershocks and no ice came down on their heads, at least the danger of falling had been averted.

“Harness,” Jordan called up to the rim.

Julie slipped a second harness over the side and lowered it smoothly down to Jordan’s waiting hand.

“Now stand up,” she said to Sonja, keeping her voice soft and unruffled. “Keep hold of the safety line with both hands. If anything goes wrong, you’ll want to keep control.”

Sonja hesitantly got to her feet. When she stood fully upright, she reached one hand out to take hold of the harness, her arm trembling. The harness was just out of her reach.

“You’ll have to take a step closer,” Jordan urged.

Sonja was clearly afraid to move and Jordan didn’t blame her. She took a moment to work up the nerve, then took one tentative step forward. She reached for the harness again, straining to reach it. Her fingers wrapped around one of the straps. As she shifted her weight, the shelf of ice she was standing on split with a loud thunderclap, giving way beneath her. She screamed, the harness tearing from her grasp. Swinging at the end of the safety line, she banged into the wall while ice rained down into the darkness below. Jordan’s heart beat wildly, but somehow she managed not to look down.

She quickly anchored her crampons into the wall while Sonja dangled beneath her, gripping the rope to stabilize herself.

“Lower me so I can reach her!” Jordan ordered. She heard the alarm in her voice.

Brian quickly obeyed. As soon as Jordan was parallel with Sonja, she reached out and grabbed her with one arm, pulling her close up against her. Sonja clamped both arms around her in desperation, pulling her off the wall. The cable dug into the ice above them and dropped them several inches with a jerk.

Julie pulled up the useless second harness.

Sonja wrapped herself around Jordan as they twirled slowly in circles.

“I’m so sorry,” Sonja cried, her eyes filling with tears. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

“Shhh,” Jordan said gently, touching their foreheads lightly together. “It’s okay. You’ll be okay. Now listen to me. I’m going to need my arms for this, so you have to get on my back. Can you do that?”

Sonja nodded tensely, one glistening tear dropping to her cheek.

The maneuver was awkward, but soon accomplished. With Sonja clinging to her from behind, Jordan was able to anchor herself to the ice with ax and crampons.

“Pull us up,” she called to Malik.

They ascended smoothly at the end of the cable and when at last they reached the lip of the fissure, Malik grabbed Sonja from Jordan’s back and lifted her over the edge to safety. She immediately sat down and started sobbing. Malik knelt beside her and tried to comfort her, wrapping her in a blanket. Brian and Julie each took hold of one of Jordan’s arms and helped her out. All of them moved away from the ice onto solid ground.

Jordan lowered herself to a boulder and looked up at the sky, happy just to breathe.

Julie knelt beside her. “Do you want me to help you out of that?” she asked, indicating the harness.

“In a minute.”

“You were awesome, Jordan.” Julie’s expression was full of admiration.

Jordan smiled, then felt tears welling up in her eyes. As the tears fell to her cheeks, all she could do was laugh because Julie’s expression was one of complete horror, like,
Jordan’s crying!
What should I do?
This thought made her laugh even more. Julie patted her shoulder awkwardly, obviously concluding that Jordan, crying and laughing at the same time, had gone berserk.

“Jordan, what’s wrong? Are you in shock?”

“No,” Jordan managed, wiping her cheeks. “I’m just overwhelmed by the absurdity of life.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is the closest I’ve ever been to looking death in the face,” said Jordan. “I was terrified in there. But why should I be afraid of death when I’ve been afraid of life for so long?”

“Jordan, I don’t understand. I think we need to get you back to camp and pour some whiskey in you.” Julie unclipped the winch cable from the harness as Jordan sat mutely on her boulder, shaking her head in self-derision.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Pippa sat cross-legged on Kelly’s bed, looking more chipper than she had earlier this afternoon, but still not her cheerful self. Kelly hoped she could fix that.