4. Banks #2
She weighs nothing. A hundred twenty pounds of useless designer fabric and blind trust and hammering pulse.
Behind us, through the earpiece, the radio crackles.
"Reaper Two, status."
Silence.
"Reaper Two, report."
The clock just started. Four minutes, maybe five, before they send the next team. And the next team won't send a scout first.
I dig my boots into the drift and push harder.
The timber swallows us. Spruce trunks packed tight enough that the canopy overhead catches the horizontal snow and funnels it into spiraling eddies instead of the flat scour of the open ridge. The wind drops from a scream to a roar. The roar is still loud enough to mask our movement. I'll take it.
Hadley's arms are locked around my neck.
Her face is buried in the hollow of my throat and her breath comes in hot, rapid bursts against my skin.
Each exhale fogs and freezes instantly on the collar, building a thin crust of ice.
Her legs have a death grip on my waist but I can feel the muscles trembling, the strength leaking out of them with every degree her core temperature drops.
I shift her weight higher on my hip and keep pushing.
Dead reckoning. No GPS. I powered down the dead man's unit and I won't risk the light signature of checking my own.
Everything runs on the map in my head. The one I built during the twelve-hour briefing before the helo dropped me on the insertion point, studying topo lines until they burned permanent into memory.
Contour intervals. Drainage patterns. The specific way this mountain sheds water and ice into two major ravine systems that cut the western face like surgical scars.
The Kaltag Ravine sits three hundred meters southwest of our current position.
Eighty feet deep. Sheer walls of blue glacial ice that haven't seen sunlight since the Pleistocene.
It runs north-south for nearly two miles, splitting the ridge like a wound that never healed. Nothing crosses it except in one place.
I angle toward that place now.
Every fourth step I glance back through the night vision monocle.
Green chaos. Swirling particulate and black tree trunks repeating in infinite columns.
No lights. No movement that isn't wind-driven.
The snow we're pushing through is filling in behind us almost as fast as I break trail, the drifts collapsing back into our tracks within minutes.
The blizzard is erasing us. The blizzard is keeping us alive.
But it won't last. The earpiece has been silent for ninety seconds since the second unanswered status call.
Standard tactical protocol gives them another sixty to ninety before they escalate.
Then they'll send a team on our last known position.
They'll find the cave. They'll find Reaper Two.
And they'll find the tracks I couldn't avoid cutting into the frozen gravel near the cave mouth before the snow covered them.
Ninety seconds.
I push faster.
The terrain drops. I feel it in my quads before I see it through the monocle.
The ground tilting away under the snowpack, the angle steepening from gradual to aggressive in the space of twenty yards.
My boots find rock beneath the powder and I dig my heels in, leaning back against the grade, adjusting Hadley's weight on me so our combined center of gravity stays uphill.
"Banks, I can walk."
"No."
"I'm too heavy. The slope?—"
"You weigh nothing. Be quiet."
She goes quiet. But her arms tighten and one frozen hand finds the back of my neck, her fingers gliding over the bare skin between my helmet strap and my collar.
The contact jolts through me like a static shock.
Her fingertips are ice. The nerve endings underneath them are not.
Something fires deep in the primitive architecture of my brain, something that has nothing to do with survival protocols or tactical movement, and I crush it flat before it can form a full thought.
Not now. Not here.
The ravine announces itself by sound first. A low, hollow moan that lives underneath the wind, like the mountain itself is exhaling through a wound.
The air temperature drops three degrees in two steps.
Then five. The trees thin abruptly, giving way to a boulder field glazed in blue-black ice, and the ground simply ends.
I stop. Plant my feet wide. Look down.
Eighty feet of nothing. The walls of the Kaltag Ravine drop straight into a darkness that the night vision can't fully penetrate.
I catch glimpses of ice formations, hanging columns and shattered shelves, before the depth swallows the ambient light.
The bottom is a jumble of rock and frozen meltwater that would turn a human body into component parts.
The wind funnels through the gap and screams upward in a column of frozen air that hits us like a open freezer door. Hadley flinches against me. Her eyelashes blink against my neck.
"What is that sound?"
"Ravine. Eighty feet deep. We need to cross."
Her head lifts. She looks. The information registers in the green glow of the monocle's spill. Her eyes go wide. Her jaw sets.
"How?"
I scan left. Then right. And there it is.
Forty meters north, spanning the gap where the ravine narrows to maybe fifteen feet across.
An ice bridge. Natural formation, built up over decades of freeze-thaw cycles layering snow and meltwater into a compacted arch.
It's three feet wide at its broadest point.
Maybe eighteen inches where the wind has carved it down to a translucent spine.
I've crossed worse. But I've never crossed worse carrying someone.
"Stay here. Hold the rock." I peel her off me and set her behind a waist-high boulder on the ravine.
Her fingers scramble for the stone and grip it white-knuckled.
I unsling the rifle and use the monocle to scan the bridge.
Stress fractures in the ice surface, hairline and radiating from the center span.
Load-bearing capacity unknown. The wind shear across the gap is strong enough to push a standing man sideways.
The earpiece crackles.
"All units, Reaper Two is down. Cave position compromised. Full sweep, western quadrant. Find them."
Three people acknowledge in rapid succession. Professional. Calm. The sound of men who kill for money shifting gears.
I turn back toward the timber and my stomach drops.
Lights. Three of them. Bobbing through the trees four hundred meters back, moving in a spread formation that covers maximum ground.
Headlamps. Tactical headlamps cutting bright white holes in the green chaos of the storm, bouncing off every snowflake and turning the forest behind us into a constellation of approaching death.
Four hundred meters. In this snow, at their pace, that gives us six minutes. Maybe five.
I look at the bridge. I look at the lights.
Then I look at Hadley, crouched with ice in her hair and terror in her eyes and that wire still holding, still pulled taut, still refusing to snap.
"We cross now."