Cherry Adair - T-flac 06 (17 page)

Fifty yards later the path doubled back; he and the sled were almost lying on their sides. The muscles in Derek's arms and back pulled and bunched as he fought to control the downward momentum of dogs and sled. His heart pumped, and his vision and hearing blurred, then sharpened.

At the bottom was a flat area. It seemed like a hell of a long way away right now. But he kept that in mind as they crept along at a snail's pace.

"At the bottom yet?" Lily asked ten minutes later.

"Did you hear my sigh of relief?" Derek asked with amusement as he brought the team to a stop so they could all gather themselves for the next switchback. There was still a long way to go before hitting the safety of the bottom of the ridge. But saying a "thank you, Jesus" and taking time to wipe the sweat from his brow were in order.

"Make that a prayer." She sounded out of breath herself as she started the same downward climb several minutes behind him. "And don't look down!" she warned unnecessarily. The drop to the gorge on his right was fifty feet. Straight down.

"Stop worrying about me and
concentrate
, damn it," Derek said more harshly than he intended. He was scared spitless. Lily was sixty pounds lighter than he was, and as strong as she was for her job, as much practice as she'd had over the years, this bit of the trail was a ball buster.

He realized he was holding his breath, reliving each step of the descent, every bit of protruding underbrush, each bend, each—"Watch for a broken branch as you come across the top edge," he remembered. "See it?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

"Stay in my ruts."

"Believe me. I am."

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He imagined her gloved hands tight on the handlebars. A fierce look of concentration on her face. Until he saw the whites of her eyes and the pink of her cheeks, he wasn't budging.

"I'm. Coming. Down. Very. Slowly," Lily assured him, amusement lacing her words.

Derek glanced up and behind him, waiting for her to come round the bend so he could breathe again.

There was no sign of her yet, but the clouds were now low enough to touch, a dirty white, heavy and ominous. It was about to snow. And snow big. Damn.

Hey, God, Derek mentally prayed. Can you just hold off until Lily is on flat ground and safe? Amen.

"I'd kill for a cup of c—What the heck!" She was cut off by an ear-splitting
screeeech
.

Sounded like something enormous tearing.

One of the giant pines ripping from its moorings?

The earth shook. Derek's dogs started barking crazily.

The thought flashed into his mind even as he listened—Jesus.
No way
—A split second before the roar—
another
sound. A detonation. A small one, but a detonation nevertheless.

And up here, that was all kinds of dangerous.

He released the brake so the dogs could run for it if necessary, then jumped off the back of the sled and raced up the switchback.

"Lily? Where are you?"

What he saw as he tore around the upper bend stopped his heart in his chest and caused an icy sweat to film his entire body.

Half the hillside was breaking away from the mountain and tumbling to the gorge below in a giant plume of fast-moving snow and rock.

Avalanche.

Eight

"
Lil-eeeeee
!"

Heart in his throat, Derek rounded the curve at a dead run, just as a rumbling wall of white hit the back of Lily's sled with the thundering force of a bullet train.

Jesus.

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Running flat out, he ripped off his restrictive coat one-handed, not feeling the icy bite of the cold as he tossed it to the frozen ground and lunged for the center line between the heads of her lead dogs. Made up of thick rope, and reinforced with steel, it ran the length from the leaders to the sled. And Lily.

His hands closed around cold steel; his fingers immediately turned white with the strain of the downward drag. The muscles in his arms and back bunched as he focused everything he had on keeping hold of Lily's team.

Her dogs barked and howled, frantic, answered by his own team down the path behind him. The cacophony of sound jolted the air and filled every crevasse of space across the narrow canyon.

In the flash of a second before everything went to hell, Derek's gaze collided with Lily's, and he saw shock and fear in her terror-wide eyes.

Then in a heart-stopping fall, Lily and the wheel dogs closest to the sled went backward over the edge of the mountain, followed by an enveloping blanket of white and brown.

Derek's breath staggered and his heart lurched as he watched the terrifying now-you-see-me, now-you-don't disappearing act.

Jesus
—Prayer, not a curse.

"Hang on," Derek shouted into the rising wind. "For Christ's sake. Hang on!"

He didn't know if she could hear him through the mic. He prayed she could. And prayed she was alive and conscious enough to know he'd find her.

Barking manically now, aware of their peril, the thirteen tethered sled dogs slid backward. Feet struggling for purchase in the relentless and inexorable pull of the backward slide of the snow-enveloped sled.

Putting their shoulders into it, the lead dogs, Arrow and Finn, battled to keep the rest of the team from plummeting to the gorge below under the onslaught of the debris bombarding them from the hillside above.

"Good dogs. Good kids," Derek rasped, gripping the gang line and digging his boot heels into the trembling earth in an attempt to help them. Damn it,
he
needed help to pull this out of the crapper.

"We can do this. Good dogs. Come on. Another step. And another. Yes!" The dogs dug in; brave, strong and willing to fight for life, they made a little progress, then fought the slide backward. "One more.

Good dogs. One more." Opal's and Deny's heads emerged over the lip. Derek grabbed the line between them, hand over hand, straining every muscle as he pulled them up to flat ground. "Good dogs. Good dogs. Lily? Can you hear me?"

He kept up the litany of praise to the dogs as he worked desperately to get them onto stable ground. He couldn't see Lily in the billowing clouds of white. "Please be okay," he muttered between determined, clenched teeth. "Let me hear you, Lily, sweetheart." He reminded himself she was there, roped to the sled, hanging on and doing what she could to help. Which was nothing, save encouraging the team. He had to think of something else to do. Something to halt the slide of the entire team down the mountainside. If that happened they would all die.

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Derek closed off the fear compartment of his brain with a loud clang.

Don't go there, he warned himself, cold with fear. Don't, for Christ's sake, go there.

He put his full body weight into helping the dogs pull. The animals worked with him. They knew help when it presented itself. But they were wide-eyed with fear as their feet slithered and slid and they struggled to find firm footing on the constantly shifting ground.

With his help, they fought for each step as the earth continued to groan and rumble. Spumes of snow and rubble shot out as if the ground itself were trying to shake them loose.

He managed to help/drag them, inch by agonizingly hard-fought inch. His back screamed. The muscles in his arms begged for mercy, but he didn't let up. Couldn't let himself or the dogs surrender. And more by will than strength, he pulled them to the far side of the trail, as close to the left-hand side of the drop-off as he could get them. Protected some from the tumultuous fall of snow and rock, nevertheless they again slid back another three feet.

Four.

Six—

Derek held on for dear life, sliding along with them, skating on the snow as if wearing skis. "No," he shouted, digging his heels in, dragging furrows through the loose snow and rock. "Hike." Like they weren't trying? The dogs were giving it everything they had. Chests heaved, tongues hung out with exertion and their sides expanded and contracted like bellows, their breath mingling with swirling snowflakes.

Failure was
not
an option.

With almost superhuman strength he dragged the dogs forward again, reclaiming lost ground. Rio and Grady scrabbled up onto the path. He wouldn't let them go. Wouldn't lose Lily or the team. Wouldn't stand on the edge of oblivion and stare down at her broken body, by God.

Finn's and Arrow's front feet lifted completely off the ground as Derek pulled with every ounce of his strength. He felt each muscle and tendon do its job, and he thanked God for his physical ability and relentless training. He'd need every gram of strength today.

It took a precious five minutes for the earth to quit dancing enough for the dogs to be able to stand still.

He had them. Safe. No more sliding.

Now Lily.
Please, God, Lily
.

"Extra chow for you guys tonight," he told the dogs grimly, releasing the line and pausing to make sure they weren't still being dragged backward. Satisfied, at least for the moment, he stepped back. "Hang tough. Stay."

There was a mandatory shovel on his sled. But he wasn't going back down the trail to fetch it.

Not a second to waste, he practically threw himself over the path's ragged edge.

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Slithering. Sliding. Hands. Feet.
Keep low to the ground for better balance. Where
—A quick glance to get a bead on the position of the dangling, snow-loaded sled. He lowered himself over the side of the steep cliff. The only reason he did it with more caution than his screaming internal alarm required was that if
he
fell to his death, then so would Lily.

He meticulously maneuvered, crablike, until he neared the lump of snow indicating a sled and its precious human cargo buried in the hillside, a precarious forty feet above the gorge.

Ten feet away, he yelled, "
Lily
. Talk to me!"

On one of his first T-FLAC assignments many years ago, Derek and a small team had been inserted into the stronghold of a small terrorist cell holed up in a high-mountain retreat in the Andes. He'd been suitably scared shitless then, too. But he'd never experienced anything as close to pure terror as he was right now.

Fear for himself wasn't even close to the fear he had for Lily. It would be like comparing a tadpole to a killer shark.

Back then, the avalanche that had covered him and his teammates had killed three of the seven men, incapacitated one with frostbite and a broken leg, and given Derek a healthy and terrifyingly realistic knowledge of just how long Lily could survive covered by tons of snow.

"Lily?"

As he scrambled to her position, he gauged the texture of the snow covering her and the sled. Light and fluffy. She had a higher chance of survival because she'd be able to breathe. Heavy, wet snow, as some of this was, could lead to suffocation. He remembered not being capable of even flexing his fingers when
he'd
been buried. That was the first time he'd realized his own mortality.