Expect the Sunrise (15 page)
Ishbane closed his eyes.
“We’ll rope together about thirty feet apart. Follow in my steps. Mac will go second, Phillips last.” She glanced at Phillips as if to ask his permission.
Mac noticed she didn’t give him the same courtesy. She probably couldn’t look at him without glaring. Oh, well, he didn’t expect to make friends.
“Most of all, if you fall, dig your knees or your heels in to stop yourself, and everyone else sit, with your heels dug into the hillside. It’ll keep us from going down together.”
“I don’t want to be roped up,” Ishbane said. “Not if you all are going to kill me.”
Emma sighed. “You can do this, Mr. Ishbane. I believe in you.”
No one answered her, and for a moment he couldn’t deny, Mac wanted to trust the woman who seemed to only want to keep them alive.
“THANK YOU FOR carrying Sarah, Mac.” Andee sat on the crest of the bowl in the shadow of Foggytop Mountain, four hours into their climb, eating a PowerBar. The sharp arctic wind had chased away clouds that had shadowed their climb for most of the morning, but sitting on top of the mountain, despite the semi-secluded pass, the cold wind scraped away the veneer of perspiration on her forehead. Under her layers, however, sweat ran down her spine.
“Of course,” Mac said, eating his own lunch.
Andee had driven them hard, although slowly, and with Flint leaning on a laboring Nina and Phillips, they’d made good time. She’d even heard Sarah groan more than once, and when Andee checked her pulse and her breathing, both seemed strong.
Thank You, Lord.
Andee glanced at Mac, aware that she’d begun to count on him, especially the few times she’d slipped and nearly went down. He’d finally taken the lead, holding Sarah’s head up, away from the jagged, snow-dusted rocks. Andee watched his steady step, his wide shoulders carrying the burden of her friend, and forgave him for undermining her leadership, forcing them to hike out, and putting Sarah’s life in danger. Basically for being a stubborn, know-it-all Scot with an FBI badge.
Her mother would be shaking her head in disbelief at her willingness to forgive him.
For the first time in twenty-four hours, Andee felt an inkling of hope. From where she sat, she could barely make out the Granite River winding through lush red and orange tundra. Unfortunately, they had to descend a scree fall that had received only a hint of sun to melt the snowfall from last night. Andee hadn’t yet made out a sheep trail they might follow, and visions of them all tumbling over the mountainside took swipes at her confidence.
Still, they’d made it this far.
She inventoried their energy and spirits. Nina seemed set on making it to civilization, and with Phillips to encourage her, they seemed like a team that would survive. Flint was a fighter. Suffering and against the ropes, he’d gritted his teeth and muscled his way up the mountain. He reminded her of her friend Micah when he’d been diagnosed with cancer. Fighting for every step, willing himself to get better.
Ishbane, roped right behind Andee, cursed and moaned. She’d been thrilled to hand him a PowerBar, just to make him focus on something besides his misery. However, she deserved his criticism. If only she hadn’t taken off in that storm …
“Have you been a bush pilot long?” Mac sat on the ground, his back against a boulder, rubbing his sore shoulder.
She nearly advised him not to do that—by working the muscles loose, it would only cause them to ache when they had to tense again to hold Sarah’s weight. But considering the fact he wasn’t snarling at her or bossing her around made her bite back her advice.
“I started flying when I was twelve. My father was a bush pilot.” He’d also been a few other things, but she’d been working at forgiving him for that lie for close to fifteen years. Bringing it up in a snide remark probably wouldn’t help her forgive him.
“So you grew up here in Alaska.”
Andee folded her PowerBar wrapper and put it into her pocket. “Until I was sixteen. Then I moved with my mother to Iowa, where she went to medical school. She’s a family practice doc.”
Mac faced her. He’d put on a wool hat, but his curly brown hair stuck out from the back and around his ears, blowing in the wind. He folded his wrapper into a straight line. She couldn’t help but notice his hands—not wilderness roughened like her father’s, but still dexterous, despite the layer of dirt. They spoke of a man accustomed to thinking through his problems. His initial stubbornness most likely had to do with his shock at being in the middle of a catastrophe. She wondered what he did as an FBI agent. Probably read reports and analyzed terror threats. Something cerebral and calm.
“So, I’m assuming that’s where you got your medical know-how?” Mac asked.
Andee smiled. “No. I wanted to go to medical school, sorta following in my mother’s footsteps. I didn’t do well on my MCATs and decided that it was a sign.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Well, really, I don’t believe in signs, because I’m a Christian, but I do believe in God directing, sometimes through circumstances. I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor, even if I wanted to help people. So I became an EMT. And a bush pilot.”
She felt a blush and ducked her head, realizing she’d told him more than he wanted to know. Usually she kept that kind of information—the kind that probed the mysteries of her heart—for Sarah or Dani.
“You must love flying.” He didn’t smile but seemed to study her. From this angle, she’d call him handsome, with a layer of whiskers on his jaw and a definite scoundrel cast to his features.
And his accent sounded like sweet music to her ears.
She was probably just tired. Didn’t her mother’s tears—or hers—teach her anything about letting a man under her defenses?
“I do love to fly. I love the freedom and maybe the dichotomy of power versus the awe I feel at being up there above the mountains.”
She raked her hands through her hair, staring out onto the horizon. “Sometimes when I fly I can see herds of caribou thundering beneath me or a grizzly raise her head in the middle of a stream. I can trace my plane’s shadow on a glacier field and count the Dall sheep that scatter upon these mountains.”
She sighed. Other reasons she flew included wanting to be close to her father and trying to relive something she’d missed for so many years. Maybe even to regain that part of herself she felt had been stolen. Still, at the end of the day she was good at flying.
When she didn’t crash into a mountain.
But being a bush pilot was only half her life. “In the summer I live in Iowa and work for a local hospital. I’m trained as a paramedic.” She glanced at Sarah, lying within arm’s reach. “She was a friend and college roomie, and then we began to work together on our SAR team.”
Mac followed her gaze. “Do you know why she hasn’t woken up?”
Andee shook her head. “I’m worried that she might have had a severe concussion after the crash. She might have woken briefly in the plane. Then with the blood rushing to our heads while we were hanging upside down, it might have increased the pressure in her brain. Moving her and the flux of pressure might have complicated her condition. And the fact that we’re at such a high altitude doesn’t help. You don’t have to be in the death zone to get altitude sickness or pulmonary edema. I’m hoping when we get lower, her body will readjust and she’ll pull out of it.” She touched Sarah’s forehead, found it hot, and closed her eyes.
“What does she do for a living?”
Andee opened her eyes to his soft tone, aware of how it touched her. Amazing what a few hours and some gratitude could do to a relationship. Maybe she’d judged him too harshly. “She’s a paramedic in New York City.”
“Was she there when the towers went down?” Mac asked.
Andee nodded, remembering how Sarah had called her every night for months after that because she needed a voice that wasn’t from New York, a voice that didn’t live in the middle of the grief every day. Andee had flown out twice to help Sarah and the other volunteers dig out the wreckage. She’d been there the day Sarah had said good-bye to seven men from her station house.
“She’ll make it, Emma,” Mac said softly.
Andee looked up at him, his tone blindsiding her. She felt tears burn her eyes and blinked them back. Stress made her cry at stupid moments. She nodded, but the fact that he’d found not only the right words but the right tone, well …
He sounded just like her father—calm, sure.
She clenched her jaw, realizing just how dangerous Stirling McRae could be.
“How much farther?” Ishbane plopped down beside her. “I hurt everywhere.”
“Why don’t we just spend the night here then?” Mac said.
Andee fought a smile.
Ishbane glared at him.
“So, I guess you’re a supporter of the war on terror?” Mac asked Andee.
Andee nodded slowly, not sure what he meant by that. “Let’s just say that I don’t like war, but I like terror even less. And I pray for wisdom for our leaders. Most of all, I believe in God and what He says in Psalm 146. ‘Don’t put your confidence in powerful people; there is no help for you there. When they breathe their last, they return to the earth, and all their plans die with them. But joyful are those who have the God of Israel as their helper, whose hope is in the Lord their God.’”
Mac stared at her a bit longer than she liked, as if he might be probing her words and analyzing them for truth.
She hoped so. She hadn’t exactly stood on top of the mountain and declared her faith in God during this journey. Maybe she should start, because her belief in God gave her hope that He’d get them out of this mess, even though she felt like a failure.
Not that He’d be exactly thrilled that He had to bail her out … again. The story of her life—always letting the people and the God she loved down.
“We should get going,” she said, pushing back despair. “Ready?”
Mac hated the fact that under that gritty, can-do exterior he’d glimpsed a woman who was loyal and honest. And that she’d gotten under his skin.
Even if she did offer a rather vague answer to his even vaguer question about her politics. He’d meant it to give him insight to her beliefs, something to narrow down his suspicions. But she’d either been trained well or she believed her words of faith.
He had to admit that the words from the psalm found a barren, broken place inside him and nestled there, like water on parched soil.
“Joyful are those … whose hope is in the Lord their God.”
“He made heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them.”
He’d heard that verse before. It had been one of those his mother had made him learn, one that he’d successfully avoided for so many years, especially after Brody’s death. He should know better than to hope in God. Yeah, the Almighty might have the power to create the universe, but sometimes it seemed like He left the details of saving it on a daily basis to the fallible creatures who inhabited it. People like Mac who had to flush out a saboteur and stop a terrorist act from within the depths of the Alaskan mountains.
Without letting his emotions get caught in the cross fire.
Get a grip on yourself, Mac.
It wasn’t like he’d ever slowed down long enough for a woman to get her hooks into him.
If he were honest with himself, he could attribute his fear of getting close to a woman as what had kept him dodging and moving full speed ahead into his career over the past decade. It somehow seemed easier to focus on what he could calculate and conquer, instead of love—something that could trap him in a stranglehold when he wasn’t looking. No, love was probably the truest terrorist of all—it blindsided a man, confused him, then drove him to stupid, panic-driven decisions that could cripple him for life.
He’d seen it happen to too many good men and women.
“Do you need a drink?” Emma asked. She rose, found the water bottle, then brought it to him.
“Thanks,” he said as she returned to her spot behind Sarah’s litter. He handed her back the water bottle and watched as she took a drink. Emma had Alaskan bush–style determination, and he couldn’t tell if he respected that or if it raised every hair on the back of his neck. Because if his hunch proved true about the plot to take out the pipeline, she’d stop at nothing to finish the job.
The thought occurred to him that she might be planning on getting them to the valley where travel would be easier … then ditch them.
