Holding On: A Colorado High Country Novel

by Pamela Clare

  “When is the last time you got into a firefight with outlaws?”

  Well, the last time was … “Never. But I grew up hunting. I can shoot.”

  “I know you can, but you don’t want to force this guy into using Kenzie as a hostage—or get shot and killed when you find them. That won’t help her.”

  “I can’t just sit here!”

  “I’m off duty, but I’ll volunteer to be part of the search and go up with them to be your eyes and ears,” Taylor had offered.

  The Hastings mine was located on county land, and Taylor, a ranger, was county law enforcement. He had a right to be there, while Conrad did not.

  Conrad hated feeling helpless. “You would do that?”

  “If it keeps your ass out of trouble, hell, yes, I’ll do it. I care about Kenzie, too, you know. We all do.”

  Taylor was now sending Conrad texts periodically to keep him updated.

  It was something.

  Wind strong. Temps dropping. Flakes starting to fall.

  Conrad glanced outside, where street lights had come on, the sky darkened by storm clouds. If they didn’t hurry up and rescue her, Kenzie and Gizmo were going to be trapped on a mountainside in a blizzard.

  Out of breath and cold to the bone, Kenzie leaned into the frigid wind, fighting her way up the steep slope, icy snowflakes blowing into her face, snow making each step treacherous. Gizmo had found the scent trail and was leading them upward, doing what he asked her to do even though he must be cold and tired.

  She glanced down, saw that he was favoring his left front paw.

  “We have to stop!” She had to shout to be heard above the wind.

  She slipped out of her backpack, opened up the center side pocket, and took out the packet that held Gizmo’s protective booties. Close to tears, she slipped a warm bootie onto that sore front paw first. “I’m sorry, buddy. I’m so sorry.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Don bent down, shouting in her face. “We have to keep going!”

  “He can’t! The snow and rock are hurting his paws!”

  Don threw up his hands. “Fuck! Fuck!”

  Kenzie finished covering Gizmo’s paws then poured a drink of water into a collapsible dog bowl. He lapped thirstily, then took a few treats from her hand.

  She petted him, praised him, swallowing the lump in her throat. “You’re such a good boy, Gizmo. I love you.”

  No matter how this ended, he had always been the best dog. He would follow her anywhere, even if it killed him. But she couldn’t let that happen.

  “Come on! Move it!”

  Kenzie put the treats and collapsible bowl back into her pack, slipped it onto her shoulders, and stood on tired legs. “We need to find shelter, ride out the storm! We’ll freeze to death out here!”

  In the past few minutes, the storm had gotten worse, making it hard to see.

  “No! You want to keep warm? Keep moving!”

  Kenzie had no choice but to urge Gizmo onward.

  Up they went, but soon the snow was falling so hard that she could barely see Don just a few feet ahead of her.

  White-out conditions. A true blizzard.

  She could turn and run downhill. If she could get far enough away, he wouldn’t be able to see to shoot her. But if she didn’t—if she slipped and broke her ankle—he would probably kill her outright.

  She needed to get him to stop before they went much higher. There was no shelter above timberline and no dried wood for a fire. “We have to stop! We could walk off a cliff! Gizmo can’t track in this anyway!”

  Don turned on her, gun drawn, his face pinched from cold. “If you stop again, I’ll kill you and take the dog!”

  “You’re going to get us all killed anyway!”

  Kenzie trudged after him, the trees thinning, the storm getting worse.

  Conrad stood in the kitchen at The Cave, wolfing down a microwaved burrito that Sasha had brought for him when she’d heard he hadn’t eaten lunch. Most everyone was here now, listening in on the radio, waiting this out.

  Everyone loved Kenzie, but no one loved her the way he did.

  A collective groan went up from the group in the Ops Room.

  Hawke’s voice rose above the rest. “That’s bullshit!”

  “What the hell?” That was Herrera.

  Conrad ran back to the Ops Room, the last bite of burrito sticking in his throat. “What’s going on?”

  Megs stood, turned to face him. “SWAT is calling off the search until the snow lets up. They say they’ve got whiteout conditions up there. They’re just not equipped to handle it.”

  “Goddamn it!” Conrad set out for the bays where the Team’s gear was stored and began throwing together a backpack.

  He wasn’t going to let Kenzie freeze to death out there.

  Crampons. Snowshoes. Ice axes. Two fifty-foot lengths of rope. Rack of climbing gear. Advanced first-aid kit. Hand-warmers. Fire starters. Emergency blankets. Two sleeping bags. Propane stove kit. Summit pants.

  Megs followed him. “If you go up there, you could end up in trouble, too.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” He’d done his share of climbing in bad conditions, but usually, he hunkered down and rode out the storm. “She’ll die if someone doesn’t get to her.”

  Megs nodded. “If I can’t stop you…”

  “You can’t.”

  Hawke strode in from the Ops Room. “Are you heading out in this blizzard on some insane rescue mission? Because if you are, I’m going with you. You’ll need a paramedic.”

  “Count me in.” Moretti hurried out the bay doors toward his vehicle, calling to them over his shoulder. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to grab my rifle and ammo and winter gear. You’re going to need someone who can shoot.”

  Conrad started to say that he was a good shot—but he wasn’t a combat veteran. He’d be grateful to have Moretti with him

  “I’m going.” Belcourt, too? “Everyone needs an engineer.”

  “Well, if you’re all going, then I’m going, too.” Megs took a backpack down from the wall. “Someone has to make sure you know what you’re doing.”

  It seemed to take an eternity to gear up. In the process, they came up with a plan. They would park behind Kenzie’s vehicle and go in hard and fast, double-timing it up the mountain. Ahearn would stay in touch via sat phone to let them know the GPS coordinates of Kenzie’s phone. If they encountered live fire, Moretti would take control of the operation until the threat was neutralized. When Kenzie was freed, they would get her down and off the mountain—alive.

  There were a thousand things that could go wrong, but, damn, it felt good to be taking action and not just sitting around.

  When everyone was geared up, they stowed their packs in Rescue 1, Belcourt sliding behind the wheel.

  “Good luck, everyone.” For once, Sasha wasn’t smiling. “We’ll be listening in.”

  Herrera pushed the button that opened the big bay door, snow swirling in. “We’ll have a backup team ready if you need us.”

  Ahearn drew Megs into a hug. “Be careful up there.”

  A wool hat on her head, Megs kissed him. “You know I will be.”

  Belcourt nosed the vehicle out the bay door and into the blizzard.

  Conrad had only one thought in his mind.

  I’m coming for you, honey. Stay alive.

  Exhausted, out of breath, and colder than she’d ever been, Kenzie struggled for every step, the wind threatening to blow her onto her face. Gizmo had led them far above timberline now, nothing around them but swirling white. There was no shelter here, nowhere to get out of the frigid wind or biting snow.

  Don, the evil bastard, had taken her spare pair of gloves, her extra hat, and her hand warmers, leaving her nothing. He’d eaten most of the food and drunk her water, too, sparing only the dog treats.

  You’re going to die out here. He’s going to kill you—or let you die.

  No. No, she would find a way.

  Fighting despair
, she put one foot in front of the other, sliding on snow and talus. Her toes ached, her fingers, too. But she had no choice to keep going. She thought of Harrison coming to while hanging upside down in that crevasse, thought of how hard it had been for him to climb out. If only she had his strength…

  The minutes dragged on in misery, her mind growing dull.

  Then, abruptly, Gizmo stopped, lay down, barked.

  Kenzie sank to her knees beside him. “Did you find him, boy?”

  She looked into the snow, expecting to see a corpse. Then a gust of wind blew the snow aside for a moment, knocking her onto her belly, and she saw.

  They stood on the brink of an abyss, ground giving away to nothingness, the air divided by a thin razor’s edge of rock.

  She shrieked, scooted backward, pulling Gizmo with her. If Gizmo hadn’t stopped her, she would have gone right over that edge.

  She looked over her shoulder at Don, speaking through chattering teeth. “I-I th-think he’s d-down there.”

  Another gust of wind came, knocking her to the ground.

  “He’s not down there!” Don shouted, bent low against the gale. “He’s over there.”

  Kenzie squinted and was just able to make out the ghostly shape of a cabin on the other side of the ridge. Well, that was it then. If he was over there, they couldn’t reach him. Even in good weather, they would need technical gear to cross the rock, and she wasn’t a climber.

  “What are you waiting for? Move!”

  Kenzie crawled back from the edge. “We c-can’t cross th-that in this s-storm. We’ll g-get blown off or f-fall. We need t-technical gear, ropes—”

  “I want my goddamn money!”

  “You don’t need us anymore. We’ve f-found him for you.” She saw on his face that she’d made a fatal mistake.

  Still bent low, he drew the gun. “You’re right! I don’t need you.”

  Kenzie knew she was going to die. Up here. In the cold.

  He stood upright, aimed the barrel at her, then pointed the gun at Gizmo.

  “No!” Kenzie threw herself at him.

  The crack of the gun.

  Don shrieking, arms flailing, as he toppled backward into the abyss.

  Stunned, Kenzie lay in the snow, staring in horror at the empty space where Don had stood, no sound now but the wind.

  He was gone. The bastard was gone.

  She had knocked him over the edge.

  Gizmo whined, licked her face.

  Then she noticed it. Blood. Scarlet drops on the snow.

  Frantic, she searched Gizmo to find where he’d been hit. Only when she saw the blood on her jeans did she realize that she, not Gizmo, had been shot.

  “Shit.”

  Then the pain kicked in, knife-sharp, sheering through her left thigh. If the bullet had hit her femoral artery, she was dead.

  Fueled by adrenaline, she crawled farther away from the edge, pulled off of her backpack, and searched with aching fingers for her first-aid kit. Inside, she had Quikclot bandages and a tourniquet. She found the kit, pulled it out, then checked the wound.

  Relief flooded her.

  The wound was low on the outside of her thigh. Though it bled heavily and hurt like hell, it wasn’t an arterial bleed.

  Gizmo whimpered, snuggling against her, cold, exhausted, afraid.

  “It’s g-going to b-be okay.” She packed the clotting bandages inside her jeans and used the tourniquet to bind them into place. She couldn’t do more than that, or she would freeze to death right here.

  She tried to stand, but the pain was too much. Instead, she crawled again. “H-help me find the w-way back, buddy.”

  She tried to follow their tracks, but wind and snow quickly erased them. Soon, there was no trail to follow, nothing but Gizmo’s senses to lead them through the landscape of white.

  Keep going. Keep. Going.

  Soon, it was too much even to crawl. She stopped to check the bandages and saw that they had bled through. She needed to apply more, needed to stop the blood loss.

  But cold enfolded her like a tomb, pinning her down, dulling her mind.

  “I-I’m sorry. I’m s-so sorry. Good … b-boy, Gizmo. Run h-home. G-go.”

  He licked her cheeks, whimpering for her.

  Her last thought as she lapsed into unconsciousness was of Harrison.

  “You’re almost directly downhill from her signal. The blip quit moving a few minutes ago.”

  “Copy that.” Conrad jammed the satellite phone back into his pocket, his sense of dread growing into the fear that they were already too late. “He says we’re just downhill from her signal. He says she isn’t moving.”

  That meant that the phone had been abandoned—or that Kenzie had stopped. In this cold, that would be fatal.

  Hold on, honey. We’re almost there.

  The five of them started up the mountain at a jog again. They practiced for situations like this. Anyone who couldn’t complete a four-mile uphill trail run with a full pack in thirty-five minutes didn’t make the Team. It kept a person warm in the cold, but running on talus at altitude in snow came with risks. One slip, one stone flipping beneath your feet, and you’d have a broken ankle and be in need of a rescue yourself.

  Conrad was faster than the others. He had also climbed at more than twice this altitude. Running up a talus slope in a blizzard at eleven thousand feet was a helluva lot easier than slogging up a snowfield at twenty-eight-thousand feet. But none of this would matter if he didn’t reach Kenzie soon.

  With every step, his last words to her haunted him. He couldn’t let those words be the last thing she’d heard from him. He couldn’t.

  From somewhere in the distance, Conrad thought he heard a dog bark.

  He stopped, listened, heard only wind.

  He started forward once more—and he heard it again. He looked around but saw nothing. He whistled. “Gizmo! Gizmo, come here, boy!”

  Hawke stopped beside Conrad, breathing hard. “I don’t see him.”

  “I don’t see him either, but I thought I heard… There!”

  Up above them and a little to their right, Gizmo bounded toward them, snow in his golden fur.

  “Come here, boy! Come here!” Conrad knelt down, took the dog into his arms. There were booties on his feet—proof of Kenzie’s love for him. “God, am I happy to see you. What a good boy you are.”

  Belcourt, Megs, and Moretti caught up with them.

  “I brought some treats.” AR slung over his shoulder, Moretti fished a few pieces of kibble out of his pack and held them out for Gizmo, who gobbled them.

  But where was Kenzie?

  Conrad stood, tried to see through the storm, looking for her dark hair, her blue parka, any color at all.

  Nothing.

  Fear closed around his heart like a fist.

  He knelt down beside Gizmo again, drew the pink bandana he’d taken from Kenzie’s truck out of his pocket, and let the dog sniff it. “Where is Kenzie, buddy? Where is she? Gizmo, go find!”

  Gizmo turned and plodded his way back up the slope, head down against the blowing snow. They’d gone on for about five minutes when Conrad saw a hint of dark hair and blue parka against the white.

  He ran, shouting for her, fear constricting his chest. “Kenzie!”

  She didn’t move.

  Gizmo reached her side and sat.

  Conrad was a few steps behind him. “Good job, Gizmo! You’re my hero.”

  He dropped to the ground beside Kenzie, shed his pack, and lifted her into his arms. “Kenzie, it’s Conrad.”

  She was deathly pale.

  Then he saw the blood on her jeans and her attempt at a tourniquet.

  “Jesus.” She couldn’t be dead. “Kenzie! Can you hear me?”

  Hawke knelt down beside him, spread an emergency blanket on the snow, Megs helping him to hold it in place against the wind. “Put her here.”

  Conrad laid Kenzie gently down on top of it, barely able to breathe.

  Hawke yanked off a glove
, pressed two fingers against her carotid artery. “She has a pulse.”

  Conrad exhaled, relief flooding him with warmth.

  “Thank God!” Megs shared the news with Ops.

  Hawke ran his hands over her injured thigh and checked beneath the make-shift tourniquet. “It looks like she has a single GSW to the thigh. I don’t know how much blood she’s lost, but it doesn’t look like the artery was severed. The bone isn’t broken.”

  “All good news,” Moretti said.

  Hawke wrapped the emergency blanket around her. “I don’t think she’ll make it down the mountain. It’s not the gunshot wound that is going to kill her. It’s the cold. We need to warm her up—and fast.”

  “What other choice do we have?” Megs asked. “No pilot can get a chopper up here. Visibility is zero, and the wind … ”

  Belcourt pointed. “The cabin. We can ride this out there.”

  Conrad had been there once a long damned time ago. “We’d have to cross that knife’s edge in this wind to get there.”

  Belcourt glanced from Kenzie to Conrad to the cabin, probably doing the math in his head. “We can do it.”

  “You’re as crazy as I am.” Conrad took hand warmers out of his pack to put inside the emergency blanket with Kenzie.

  “Get ready for a welcoming committee,” Megs said. “Those bastards are probably holed up in there.”

  Moretti checked his AR. “Oh, I’m ready.”

  They talked through their options and quickly realized they had none. It was at least a two-hour descent to the vehicle with rapidly falling temps, and Kenzie might not have two hours. Even if they bundled her up in a sleeping bag and emergency blankets, she might be dead before they reached Rescue 1. If anything happened to slow them down—if they got lost or someone got hurt—they would lose her.

  They had no choice. They would have to cross the knife’s edge in high winds with Kenzie unconscious on the litter if they wanted to save her life. If they pulled it off, it would be a world-class bit of rescue work. If they didn’t…