Hunt the Wolf (8 page)

Even though he was wearing only a light down jacket, it didn’t feel terribly cold yet. But that could change quickly.

Chasing away an impulse to panic, he looked for a way out.

The icy bridge he rested on was barely four feet wide, and slick. Carefully holding on to a crease in the wall, he climbed to his feet and, using the light on his helmet, surveyed the crevasse above.

It glittered back like an ice jewel, with dozens of various-sized stalactites and columns sticking out at different angles.

As amazing as it looked, there appeared to be no chance of climbing out without crampons and an ice axe. The former were back in the tent, and he had lost the latter in the fall.

So he slid the backpack under him and curled up in a ball, calculating that he had five hours at most until the others awoke, hoping he could survive that long in the clothing he was wearing. At least he was protected from the wind.

Thinking:
How ironic that I abandoned my mother when she was dying, and now that I’m in danger it feels like she’s with me.
Warm and loving. Nothing had mattered more to her than her husband and children.

Crocker bit his lip and willed himself to think of something else.

He tried to recall the names and faces of all the people he’d grown up with. Kids he’d played baseball with, boys he’d gone fishing with, first grade, second, third. The names of his teachers. Miss Moore. Mrs. Murray. Miss Hastings, who told him he’d never amount to anything.

He remembered them more vividly than he had in years. Incidents, facial features, jokes, shards of stories. Like the time he and his cousin Jake had buried a dead crow in his backyard. Marked the place carefully. When they dug up the grave two days later, the bird was gone.

Crocker felt the cold creeping into his body and fought off the urge to close his eyes and sleep.

Not now!

He remembered running with his biker friends. The names of girlfriends. The first girl he kissed and the color of the sweater she was wearing: pink with white piping around the neck.

He was furiously going back through names. Making a list of his favorite people. His father, his mother, Holly, his daughter…

His favorite songs: “My Way” sung by Frank Sinatra and Sid Vicious, “Gimme Shelter” and “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Stones, “Sky Pilot” by the Animals, AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.”

That’s when he thought he heard a voice. “Tom!” It sounded like a woman’s.

“Mom? Is that you?”

She had told him once that she believed in spirits and ghosts.

“Mom, I’m down here!”

No response. Maybe the wind was playing tricks on him. Maybe it had been his imagination.

Favorite movies:
Pulp Fiction, The Deer Hunter, Dances with Wolves, Apocalypse Now, Platoon. The Godfather
at the top of the list.

Minutes passed before he heard the voice again, faintly: “Tom. Tom. Where are you?”

“I’m down here!
Down here!
”

A column of cold wind found its way into the crevasse and spun in a circle, chasing itself. A chill rattled up his spine.

Crocker thought:
The worst thing that could happen is that I start to lose my mind.

Extreme conditions could do that. He knew from experience. He had hallucinated several times during multiday nonstop treks. Like once, in the Iraqi desert after almost a week of sleep deprivation, he thought he saw strange objects flying overhead.

Crocker hugged himself into a tighter ball. His mom felt close.

Feelings of mortality started to creep into his head, along with a numbness that moved through his feet, up into his ankles.

He shivered three times in succession. His teeth started to rattle.

Fuck…

His muscles were frozen, and there was no room to move. Not that he wanted to risk slipping off the narrow ice bridge and falling deeper.

So he focused on the sun. And understood why ancient people had gotten on their knees to worship it each morning. Without the sun, there would be no trees, no birds, no life. Modern man paid homage by going on vacation and lying on the beach. He preferred a soft sand run or a swim. He’d done so all over the world: Panama, Vietnam, Florida, Maine, Virginia, the south of France.

Suddenly Crocker felt the slightest warmth, and smiled to himself. The power of suggestion.

He heard something stir. “Mom?”

Looking up, he saw a light at the top of the crevasse, then heard a familiar voice.

“Crocker! Are you down there?”

There definitely was a light.

“Akil!”

“Boss!”

“What the hell took you so long? I’m fucking freezing.”

“I had better things to do.”

No doubt. The testosterone-loaded SEAL and the East European climber had been going at it practically nonstop since they’d met two and a half days ago.

“What are you doing down there, boss?”

“I was looking for a quiet place to take a shit.”

As they continued talking, Akil lowered a rope. Crocker didn’t take his eyes off it as it snaked down the icy blue wall.

When the yellow line reached him, he grabbed it.

Using a small cord he had in his pocket, he tied two emergency Prusik knots on the line and started to pull himself out.

The ice wall made foot placements almost impossible, but the farther he climbed, the better he got. Yard by yard. His heart pounding.

The pressure on his arms and shoulders was so intense that his muscles started to spasm as he reached the top.

“Another couple of yards!” Akil shouted, offering a gloved hand.

Crocker tightened his grip on the rope, his right foot clinging to a little ridge in the ice. He took a moment to reach down deep, through all his experience and training, to the ball of fire that burned inside him.

With a last burst of energy, he got to the top and held on. Akil’s sure hands helped him out.

“Thanks!”

“You must have antifreeze in your blood.”

“I won’t forget this, buddy.”

Then, acknowledging his mother, Crocker looked up to the stars spinning in the neon blue sky and passed out.

C
rocker dreamt
he was a boy looking at a birthday cake, waiting for his opportunity to blow out the candles. The electric lights were off. Familiar voices were singing in a range of octaves. Most beautifully, one slightly off-key. He turned to look for the face it belonged to. Saw a cascade of beautiful strawberry blond hair, then awoke.

Who does that hair belong to? Not my sister.

His tent was suffused with a warm reddish light. He lay zipped into a sleeping bag, a woolen hat pulled over his head. When he sat up, his right side barked, from his shoulder to his knee.

Which made him remember the ice crevasse of the night before. The eerie blue light.

No more wandering out at night alone.

Pulling on his boots, he returned to the warm image of the cascade of strawberry blond hair and wondered where he’d seen it before. Didn’t it belong to the missing Norwegian girl Mikael Klausen had shown him on his laptop, back at the camp in Urdukas?

No, hers was lighter.

Could be he had her confused with another fresh-faced Scandinavian girl. He’d seen hundreds in his travels to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Admired their beauty, especially their delicate, perfect skin and smooth features. Like pale pink roses, he thought. Magnificent at the moment of bloom.

“Beauty is unbearable,” Camus wrote, “…offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”

Men wanted to possess things, for the power they thought it gave them. But there were boundaries of right and wrong that had to be maintained.

Beautiful young women disappeared all the time. He’d heard stories. Like the FBI friend of his who had helped rescue an American girl of South Korean descent named Suzie. The sixteen-year-old was snatched right in front of her house in Washington DC by some slick dude in a Jaguar.

After being beaten, gang-raped, and locked in a small room for three weeks, Suzie was forced to be an escort to wealthy businessmen and lobbyists in her hometown. Five hours with her went for $15,000. Often she was sold three times a day to different clients.

After months of serving as a sexual plaything, she was informed that she was being sold to a Japanese businessman in Tokyo for $2.2 million. On the way to the airport, she and her female captor stopped at a diner to get something to eat. Realizing this was her last chance, Suzie wrote, “Help! Call Mom!” and her mother’s cell-phone number on a napkin while her captor wasn’t looking. Then she dropped it on the floor.

A waitress picked up the napkin and called the number. Suzie was rescued—what was left of her.

The general public didn’t understand the scope of the problem. Trafficking in young women didn’t just happen in Third World countries. It took place in Japan, France, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Germany, even the United States.

They were kidnapped while shopping at upscale malls, traveling with their parents, walking down the street to school. The kids who managed to escape had to overcome enormous physical and psychological problems. Those who didn’t get away were used up, then murdered.

It pissed Crocker off.

He thought of his own teenage daughter shopping, walking home from school, going to the movies—unaware of how vulnerable she was to predators.

Sheep and wolves.

Animals who kidnapped, then abused and sold young women, had to be stopped, thrown in jail to rot, or, better yet, made to die a slow and painful death.

Crocker carried his anger out into the brilliant sun, then into a nearby tent, where he found the Germans packing their gear.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“How are you feeling?” one of the German men asked back, as he reached for a kettle to pour the American a cup of green tea.

“Like I was tossed out of a speeding car and fell off a bridge onto a bed of nails, then run over by a steamroller.”

The German laughed. “You’re a lucky man.”

As he sipped the tea and looked around the tent, Crocker willed himself to focus on the present. “Where’s Akil?”

“Where do you think? Up into you-know-who’s business.”

The taller of the two Germans glanced at his watch. “He and Edyta left about two hours ago to set some ropes.”

“They think they’re climbing farther?”

“Ja.”

“What about Davis?”

“He’s outside somewhere, waiting for you.”

He handed back the cup. “Thanks.”

The taller of the two Germans announced, “The conditions are too perilous to climb farther, so we’ve decided to return to the Concordia. We’re leaving in an hour.”

“Oh.”

“You’re welcome to join us.”

“I might take you up on that.”

Mention of returning to the Concordia brought back memories of Holly and Jenny. He wondered how they were getting along without him and what new challenges lay ahead.

The two Americans stood shoulder to shoulder, looking up at the slope. What had once been swatches of ice and snow interrupted by rocky cliffs was now a soft, undulating sheet of white. The wind blew over it with a gentle hiss and slapped the sides of the tents behind them.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Davis asked.

“It’s so pure and pristine, it’s almost unreal,” Crocker answered.

Again he thought of Malie, Jenny, and other young girls and boys.

It’s our job to protect them…

A whistle in front of them announced a larger gust of wind that twisted the new snow into curlicues of spinning powder as it passed. They started to climb slowly. Postholing, following the trail in the powder created by Edyta and Akil.

The mountain turned quiet. Crocker stopped to check that the loops of the gaiters on his snowpants were connected to the laces of his boots. It was important to keep your feet and ankles dry because frostbite was a constant danger.

“This reminds me of a story,” Davis said, the sun glinting off his orange-tinted goggles.

“What’s that?”

“There was an Indian chief out west named Two Eagles who was being interviewed by a U.S. government official.”

“Yeah.”

“And the government official asked him: ‘You’ve been observing the white man for ninety years. You’ve seen his technological advances, the progress he’s made and the damage he’s done. What do you make of it?’

“The chief stared at the official a long time. Then said: ‘When white men find this land, Indians were running it. No taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water, women did all the work, medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing, all night having sex.’

“Then the chief leaned back and smiled. He said: ‘Only white man dumb enough to think he could improve a system like that.’ ”

Crocker laughed. “What made you think of that?”

“The beauty of this, I guess.”

“You feeling guilty for being a white man?”

“No. But sometimes I get the feeling that we’re not supposed to be here.”

“My dad said: Only a fool forgets to live in awe of nature.”

“He was right.”

Crocker started to climb again.

Sometimes he felt that all the reading Davis did made him a little morose. Crocker wasn’t a student of history to the extent that the young SEAL was, but he knew enough to understand that mankind had a tremendous capacity for destruction and a frustrating tendency to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Pausing, he turned to Davis and said, “We should be able to see them from the top of that ridge.”

He pointed his trekking pole to a crest in the snow two hundred yards ahead. It tapered gently to the right, then ended abruptly in a phantasmagoria of deep blue sky painted with wisps of white.

“When’s your wife expecting?”

“In about three weeks.”

“Does she know what it’s going to be?”

“No, but I’m hoping for a boy. Little girls are so delicate. They kind of scare me.”

“It’s exciting, either way,” Crocker said.

Since the air was dramatically thinner, they had to stop to catch their breath every fourth or fifth step.

As they continued climbing, Crocker thought about how his concern for his daughter and his efforts to protect her had sometimes gone too far. Like the night last summer when he sat up past two waiting for her to return home. His little angel had promised to be back by ten, and Crocker was getting sicker with worry with every minute that passed. Unable to stay still anymore, he climbed into his car and started driving all over town looking for her.

After an hour of increasing anxiety and frustration, he spotted an old Ford Mustang weaving down a local road. He saw the driver, a teenage boy, leaning across the seat with Jenny beside him.

Crocker turned off his headlights and tailed the Mustang into his neighborhood. When the old Mustang stopped in front of his own house, Crocker made a hard right and came within inches of crashing into the driver’s side of the car. Then he jumped out and pulled the boy from his car.

The kid was obviously drunk or on drugs, screaming, “You crazy old man! Get your hands off me before I call the police!”

Crocker held him up by the collar, slapped the hat off his head, and said, “If you say another word, I’ll kill you right here!”

The kid shut his mouth.

“You
dare
take my fifteen-year-old daughter out in your car when you’re drunk off your ass. Give me one reason I shouldn’t beat the living shit out of you.”

Jenny, meanwhile, was crying, screaming, “Dad, you’re overreacting! He didn’t do anything. Leave him alone!”

Crocker shouted, “Get your butt into the house.”

He threw the little punk to the asphalt, searched him, and had to fight the impulse to wring his neck. Irresponsible little shit. The kid never asked Crocker’s daughter out again.

Now the SEAL team leader stopped to catch his breath.
God,
I love my daughter.

Beside him, Davis readjusted his gaiters.

Crocker remembered holding baby Jenny on his right forearm. She had translucent skin like her mother’s, and light hair. A sweet, gentle sparkle in her eyes.

He turned to Davis and said, “Yeah, daughters are wonderful, but they’re challenging.”

“I bet.”

Long streams of white condensation issued from their mouths when they reached the crest. The snow-covered ground in front of them dipped slightly, then rose in a sharp U to the last peak, which shot up at a seventy-degree angle.

Following the footsteps left by Edyta and Akil, he spotted them approximately two hundred feet ahead, with Edyta leading the way, breaking trail in the fresh snow.

“Where’s she taking him?” Davis asked.

Crocker pointed at a crease in the mountain. “She’s going to start her final ascent there.”

“What about Akil?”

“I assume she’s got him carrying supplies that she’ll leave at the bottom. Unless he’s so damned pussy-whipped that he’s following her up to the summit.”

“Knowing Akil, it’s hard to tell.”

The final ascent looked almost impossible, especially since the entire peak was covered with several feet of fresh snow. Crocker admired Edyta’s courage. But it struck him as extremely foolish to attempt the summit in these conditions.

In the whiteness before him, he saw Edyta turn back and measure how far Akil lagged behind. He felt he could read her thoughts—having to do with men, strength, and her unending appetite for sex. Maybe men related to her easily because she thought like they did.

Spotting Crocker on the ridge, Edyta waved with a yellow mitten that matched her parka.

“Stubborn old bird,” he muttered under his breath.

She seemed to be shouting something. Her eyes widened and brilliant sunlight glinted off her teeth. Then suddenly her expression darkened, and she turned back to face the mountain.

Crocker stood, wondering what was going through her head, when he heard a deep rumble and immediately understood.

“Avalanche!” he shouted at Davis.

“Where?”

Crocker pointed ahead.

The ground beneath them started to tremble, then shake, and the entire peak in front of them shifted, as though the hard granite mountain had decided to shrug off its white coat.

“Jesus!” Davis exclaimed.

Quickly the roar grew louder. A massive, incalculable amount of snow slid off the mountain, picking up speed and funneling into the crease that Edyta had been climbing to. She and Akil were standing a mere hundred feet away from it, directly in its path.

“They’re gonna get hit!”

As Crocker watched, both climbers turned their backs to the mountain and assumed a seated position, with their heads bent forward and arms over their faces.

A horrible chill came over him as he saw the enormous wave of snow bear down and overwhelm them. His mind worked fast, calculating the route the avalanche was going to take and his and Davis’s safety. Its momentum and the configuration of the mountain would push the snow into the U, then off the mountain to their right.

He grabbed Davis by the shoulder. “This way!” he said, pulling him sharply left. Around them rose a huge billow of white. A thunderous crunching, rushing sound. The snow and ice shifted under them.

“Davis, hold on to me!”

There was nothing they could do but try to keep from being swept off their feet—and pray. Somehow, through the enormous whiteness, he saw a red object tumble past.

“It’s Akil!”

“Where?”

His mouth and nostrils filled with fine powder, making it hard to breathe. The two big men shook.

As quickly as the massive surge had started, it settled, and the roar echoed farther down the mountain and faded. Then the eerie silence returned, and the mountain stood still. Defiant. Clouds of fine powder rose and disappeared.

Davis grabbed Crocker’s shoulder. “Jesus, boss. Do you see them?”

“I’m not sure. Hold on.”

“Incredible. Fucking incredible!”

Crocker used the rope in his pack to tie the two of them together. He warned, “Walk carefully. The snow hasn’t settled. Step into an air pocket and you’ll disappear.”