Page 72 of Air Force One
No such thing as that. A SASR warrior can always make it the extra mile.
“Sure thing, Sarge.” It would be easier to argue with him if a) he wasn’t so damn decorated for achieving the impossible, b) he was here, or c) both of them were tucked in a nice warm pub arguing over who owed who the next pint.
Since scenario c) wasn’t going to happen as long as she sat here cooling her ass on the side of Mount Elbrus and it was her favorite of the three choices, she struggled to her feet and began to walk level on the level. It turned out to be much easier than going straight upslope—until she fell into another hole.
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Holly waited in the sunrise until she saw the top of the highest lift start spinning. That meant that some operator or ski patrol would soon be riding up. It was a battered old chair lift. Every third or fourth chair needed some serious repair, but it was moving.
She’d run out of Russian names, so she freed Big Bird from his nylon cocoon and propped him up against the top stanchion. Then, finally back on plan, just sixteen hours late, she stuffed the parachute into its bag and retreated upslope into the brushy trees to watch.
The chairlift stopped two or three times before finally delivering someone. Not a big guy, except for the heavy coat he was swaddled in to survive a day at the top of the lift.
“Really can’t get good help these days.” The man literally tripped over Kermit’s outstretched legs.
A lot of shouting, a couple rounds of shaking, and a bit of cheek slapping woke Elmo from his torpor to start the conversation.
Holly didn’t bother sticking around to see more, she’d had enough of the guy.
She had to continue another twenty to thirty degrees around the mountain before heading downslope unless she wanted to walk back into Russia. Covering two kilometers at this elevation before heading down would get her where she needed to go for her rendezvous. Heading down to the base first would slam her into twenty kilometers of exceedingly rough country to cross to the rendezvous with Tad.
She covered the first of those two kilometers, then looked up to gauge the position of the sun. Some survival instinct was beginning to worry about things. So much of it had been worried for so long that she hadn’t been paying it much mind.
But its sense of alarm finally busted through all the aches she’d picked up since slamming back-first in Air Force One and the impressive lack of sleep, even by SASR standards as she’d been whipsawed from the ocean to Georgia to Russia.
Not the time, she’d kept an eye on that when she remembered. Nor her GPS track—she’d only gone astray twice more in the night, but only by a hundred meters one time and seventy-five the other. Not the sunrise, she’d delivered the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man—or was he the Michelin Tire Man?—to the head of the lift by sunrise.
Sunrise?
It had gotten brighter, but there’d been no sunrise.
Holly tipped her head back to look aloft again and fell over backward because she didn’t have the burden of Viktor’s harness steadying her. It would have been okay to fall back, except she once more traversed through deep powder. The walls caved in, covering her in a soft, cool world of white.
So pretty.
Don’t you dare stop moving, soldier.
“Yes, Sarge.” She beat a hole in the snow and gazed at the sky. The gray sky. The dark, like evil-dark, gray sky.
Hadn’t she jumped out of the plane during a beautiful, clear-sky sunset?
She had.
Hadn’t she done stellar navigation last night?
Oh, that’s what had gotten her in trouble. She’d started that way. Until a high layer of cirrus clouds had hidden random parts of the sky in a sliding pattern—before finally closing down hard and forcing her back to her GPS that insisted on telling her she was stupid.
Some snowflakes landed on her face, and she raised an arm to block another collapse of the powdery wall onto her face. Except the wall didn’t collapse.
She opened one eye, which got pithed by a snowflake for its trouble.
Holly sat up and surveyed the situation. The snowfield continued for thousands of meters downslope. She was still on the wrong section of the mountain to start her descent by a good kilometer.
Once more she inspected that sky. The peak was already hidden, and features were disappearing fast around her. She’d blundered through a night without killing herself, but hiking through a whiteout was just asking to have her ass kicked in a very permanent fashion.
Holly found a big outcropping, big like divert-an-avalanche big. Then she began digging and packing at its base. When she uncovered large rocks, she incorporated them into the walls until she had a respectable snow cave—okay, a smallish snow bivouac—but it was enough. Her view of the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, which had looked so close she felt she could reach out and touch them, had disappeared while she’d been building. She built the entrance smaller and smaller, until it was little more than a slit. Maybe she’d retain more of her body warmth that way—Australia forces, even SASR, wasn’t exactly big on ice-and-snow survival training.
She did another round of water and snow-in-the-bottle, then sat with her back against the rock wall at the back of her tiny cave and thought. The first thing she thought of was Mike—which sounded kinda pitiful but it beat thinking about whether or not she’d killed Francisco while towing him all over the mountain.
