Chapter 7
Declan
The wind on the knife-edge cornice tore at Declan’s parka with forty-knot fury.
He knelt in the hard-packed snow ten feet back from the sheer edge, his heavy
leather gloves working with rapid, practiced precision as he crimped a
non-electric delay blasting cap into the center well of a two-pound orange
Pentolite booster. He tied forty feet of high-tensile orange detonation cord
around the booster body, checked the safety pin on the mechanical spring
striker, and stepped toward the drop point.
Sawyer stood fifteen feet behind him on the rock crest, anchored to a solid
granite boulder, holding the safety belay line wrapped firmly around his hip and
uninjured right arm.
"Hold that brake line tight, Brand!" Declan shouted over the gale. "I am placing
the first shot ten yards out on the convex rollover!"
Declan stepped onto the lip of the ridge to spot the target zone.
Without warning, the five-foot snow cornice beneath his right boot fractured
with a hollow, muffled thud. A twenty-foot block of consolidated hard-pack
sheared off into empty space.
The ground vanished beneath Declan’s feet. Gravity seized his
two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame, dragging him over the vertical cliff edge
into a thousand-foot abyss.
The yellow safety line snapped taut with a violent crack.
Sawyer reacted in a fraction of a second. Instead of fighting the load with his
healing left shoulder, Sawyer dropped flat onto his back, drove the steel heels
of his mountaineering boots into a frozen granite fissure, and locked the rope
across his hips in a classic seated friction arrest. The heavy nylon line bit
deep into Sawyer’s canvas trousers, the immense downward kinetic force pulling
him three feet through the surface powder before his boots locked immovable
against the bedrock.
Sawyer held the full load of Declan’s weight suspended over the sheer drop.
Declan swung against the granite cliff face fifteen feet below the rim. He
slammed his left foot into a narrow rock ledge, raised his titanium ice axe with
his right arm, and drove the curved steel pick deep into a frozen quartz seam.
"I have purchase!" Declan roared upward into the wind. "Lock the line!"
"Line is locked!" Sawyer yelled back, his voice strained with fierce, grinding
effort. "Heave on three, Ross! One, two, three!"
Declan pulled with his massive upper body while Sawyer hauled the line over the
rim with powerful, rhythmic surges of his legs and back. Declan kicked hard
against the stone, cleared the broken cornice edge, and rolled onto the solid
granite spine of the ridge.
Declan lay on his chest in the snow for two seconds, his lungs burning from the
cold air, before pushing himself up onto his knees. Sawyer sat braced against
the boulder, breathing hard through his teeth, his face flushed red beneath his
snow goggles, his right hand still locked around the safety rope in an iron
grip.
Declan scrambled over to him, grabbing Sawyer by both shoulders in a fierce,
crushing hold. The raw adrenaline vibrating through Sawyer’s frame was hot and
alive under Declan’s heavy gloves.
"You held that fall on a single hip belay," Declan said, his voice rough and
ragged with deep shock.
"Told you I don't break contracts, Ross," Sawyer rasped, a fierce, triumphant
grin breaking across his face. "Now throw the damn bomb before this whole ridge
collapses."
Declan pulled the safety pin on the Pentolite booster, struck the mechanical
primer, and hurled the two-pound charge fifty yards out onto the convex crown
face.
Twenty seconds later, a brilliant orange flash lit up the grey sky, followed by
a deafening, thunderous detonation that shook the mountain to its roots.
A four-foot fracture line shot across the entire south bowl. The massive hanging
slab sheared off cleanly, collapsing into a colossal wall of moving snow that
thundered down the couloir into the empty lower containment basin, leaving
Highway 75 completely safe and clear below.
Declan looked at Sawyer, his hands tightening on the younger man’s shoulders
with possessive, unyielding intensity. "Good work, Sawyer. Outstanding work."