Chapter 17
Declan
Declan braced his boots against the icy granite lip of the lookout spur, raising
his Leica laser rangefinder to his eye. Through the crosshairs, the entire
vertical bowl of Miller Creek lay exposed twelve hundred feet below. A massive,
five-foot-thick wind slab hung suspended over the canyon neck like a loaded
guillotine, directly above the only access road where Caleb’s tracked Sno-Cat
was idling behind a rock bluff.
Declan keyed his tactical radio mic. "SPSR Ground Lead, this is Declan. We are
commencing avalanche mitigation on the upper crown face. Keep your vehicles
behind the blast shelter until I give the all-clear."
"Copy that, Declan," Caleb’s deep voice crackled back from the canyon floor.
"Jude and Silas have the trauma sleds staged. We have sixteen minutes on our
survival window for the buried riders. Clear the slope."
Declan locked his rangefinder onto the yellow blur descending the
forty-five-degree north chute.
Sawyer skied the technical terrain with absolute, terrifying mastery. He moved
with fluid, calculated speed, cutting wide, sweeping turns through knee-deep
powder, keeping his center of gravity perfectly balanced over his ski edges to
avoid driving dynamic shockwaves into the weak depth hoar layer below. The wind
tore at his jacket, but his upper body remained locked and stable as he reached
the upper boundary of the slab.
"Target Alpha in twenty yards, Sawyer!" Declan called out over the frequency,
his voice sharp with military precision. "Drop the first two-pound booster on
the upper convex rollover!"
Sawyer pulled the first orange Pentolite booster from his chest rig, jerked the
mechanical pull-ring igniter with his teeth, and shoved the live charge three
feet deep into the snowpack at the apex of the curve. White smoke plumed from
the sixty-second delay fuse.
"Alpha is hot!" Sawyer shouted through his microphone, already accelerating
across the face. "Moving to Bravo!"
Sawyer crossed the central couloir in three massive, high-speed carving turns,
traversing the sheer sixty-degree face where a single mistake meant a
thousand-foot free fall onto the rocks. He pulled the second charge, struck the
primer, and slammed it into the central fracture point without breaking stride.
"Bravo is hot!"
"Final target on the western rock rib, Sawyer!" Declan roared into his mic, his
knuckles white around the rangefinder. "Deploy Charlie and break hard right for
the granite safety bench! You have thirty seconds on the primary fuse!"
Sawyer reached the far rib at sixty miles per hour. He planted the third booster
into the snow, ignited the fuse, and threw his skis sideways into a violent
hockey stop that threw a thirty-foot rooster tail of snow into the air. He
tucked his poles under his arms, pointed his ski tips directly down the fall
line, and straight-lined out of the avalanche path toward the safety spur.
"Charlie is hot!" Sawyer yelled. "I am clear of the track!"
Declan started the live countdown over the base frequency. "Ten seconds to
detonation. Five, four, three, two, one!"
Three massive orange fireballs erupted simultaneously across the
four-hundred-yard crown face, rattling the granite beneath Declan’s boots with a
deafening, unified concussion.
The entire hanging slab shattered instantly along a five-foot fracture line.
Forty thousand tons of snow broke loose from the granite bedrock, roaring down
the canyon couloir in a massive, controlled tidal wave of white powder,
thundering through the containment zone and expending all kinetic force
harmlessly into the lower creek basin.
The blast corridor was completely clear.
Declan keyed his mic, his voice shaking with fierce, triumphant pride. "Caleb!
The hanging slab is mitigated! The canyon road is open! Move your rescue team in
right now!"