"I'm not sure she's coming down. She knows I know
down."
her, along with about two hundred thousand square miles of Yukon
Territory. She gets that far, we'll never find her."
"Be careful," Bobby said. "Be awful goddam careful, Kate."
"I'm always careful, Bobby. Sometimes I'm not very smart, but I'm always
careful."
Mutt was on her feet, tail curled tightly over her rump. The noise of
the approaching helicopter increased as the door opened. Through it the
two men could see a Llama touching lightly down in the center of the
clearing, Dan O'Brian in a headset on the stick. Kate ducked her head
and ran toward it.
Jack said, "So which way is she going?"
Bobby, an unaccustomed expression of worry on his broad face, said, "Up
the Valley of Death."
"And just what the fuck is the Valley of Death?" "It's a glacial valley
leading up the southwest face of Angqaq Peak." Bobby saw Jack's
expression and elaborated. "It's a chronic avalanche trap. Hence the
name. Climbers hate it, but it's the best approach for the Bump."
"Great." Jack started for the door, barefooted. Bobby's voice halted him
before he'd gone one step. "Do you know how to climb mountains?"
Jack turned, and Bobby said, "Kate does. You'd just get in her way."
Jack stared at him, impotent and enraged. He didn't have any real qualms
about slugging a guy in a wheel chair, but Bobby was a friend. He swung
around and, lacking a better target, put his fist through the wall next
to the door.
"It's hell when us macho hero types have to let the heroine rescue
herself, ain't it?" Bobby said sympathetically. He turned his chair and
said over his shoulder, "There's tools and some Sheetrock in the
workshop, when you get around to fixing that wall."
She came up over the lip of Kantishna Caldera, the
hollowed-out cone of an extinct volcano, and was
reminded of the old Thunderbird myth, the giant birds
who caught up whales in their claws and carried them off
to the young waiting in their volcanic nests. No beat of
giant wings stirred the cold, still air this afternoon, which burned
into her lungs with every inhalation. Mutt paced next to her, her big
pads leaving clear prints in the new
powder. Mutt had been reluctant to get on the chopper,
glum in getting off it, and less than enthusiastic about
the whole idea. She looked up at Kate. Are we having
fun yet?
"Sure," Kate told her, and Mutt's gloomy expression
said that she was glad one of them thought so.
Above them the Quilak Mountains clawed at the sur
face of the pale blue dome of the sky, and on
side they were confronted by the rough and tumble
detritus left by the last remaining scions of the Ice Age.
Talons of glaciers tore at the bosom of the earth, raking furrows of
discontent in their attempt to deny their own
recession, leaving behind jagged peaks covered with ice, narrow valleys
filled with snow, and mounds of terminal
moraine a thousand feet high.
There was nothing benevolent or welcoming about the
Quilak Mountains. Kate felt that they were daring her in,
that the temerity of her very presence in their midst was her acceptance
of that dare. Puffing, she paused to check
the southern horizon. She saw not even a hint of a trace
of a wisp of a cloud, for which she devoutly thanked
the weather gods. She faced forward again, the snow
crunching beneath her feet, and reached the lip of the
caldera in another ten strides.
Before her stretched the Valley of Death, a long narrow valley that from
a distance looked like an enormous
playground slide, cutting through surrounding ridges and
cliffs to spill out over the foothills to the valley
Close up, she could see the overhanging snow cornices topping the
vertical walls of rock and ice on either side, the smooth floor carved
into crevasses a thousand feet long and forty feet wide, lying in wait
for the unwary climber beneath masking drifts of deep snow. There were
icy pillars of seracs, graveled, ridged eskers of glacial moraine, and
erratics, huge boulders carried along and dropped haphazardly by
glaciers long since melted and gone. It was a rough, dangerous path
stretching up the south face of the mountain.
The mountain. Angqaq Peak. In Aleut, Big Peak. To mountaineers the world
over, the Big Bump. Kate,
saw a wedge of land rearing up nineteen thousand feet and change, its
pointed peak testing the boundaries of the sky. Its sides swept down,
unbroken on the right, broken by one secondary peak on the left, similar
in shape but two thousand feet less in height. The smaller peak sat at
the right hand of Angqaq as if Angqaq was hand-rearing its own successor
to take over the climber-killing business when Angqaq itself had
retired. In fact climbers called the secondary peak "Child" and the
primary peak "Mother," and, not infrequently, "you mother" and similar
less than affectionate nicknames.
The rest of the Quilaks fell back before such terrible grandeur, their
puny twelve- and fourteen- and sixteen-thousand-foot peaks as nothing
next to the mountain. Taken collectively, their thrusting bulk was a
challenge, a taunt, a provocation. Kate had been born next to the
Quilaks and raised in the shadow of Angqaq, and still she was awed, and
afraid.
Mutt uttered an impatient bark. Kate, startled back into her body,
looked down. Mutt, blessed with no imagination and intimidated by
nothing on the known planet, was all brisk business. We've done this
before, she reminded Kate.
"Yes, we have," Kate said, sighing.
Well, then. Mutt broke into a trot and headed up the
Valley of Death. Kate peered ahead, eyes narrowed
against the glare of sun on snow even behind Bobby's
Ray-Bans. She thought she saw a small, dark moving speck about halfway
up the valley, but she couldn't be sure.
Only one way to find out. She adjusted the straps of
her pack and fell in.
She toiled onward, up the long valley. Lost in the vast expanse of snow
and ice, she trudged one step at a time, Mutt in the lead, which
reminded her of the old
joke about the view always being the same if you're not lead dog. She
smiled, and the thought kept her going until she stumbled onto the
remains of a campsite. A
raven flew up, scolding her
"Ha, Trickster," she said, amused. "Caught you in
the act."
She waved Mutt back and approached the camp cautiously. By the holes,
she could see where they'd pitched their tent. A frozen round in the
snow indicated the place someone had put down a hot pot. Going a little
way from
the site, she found a patch of yellow snow and evidence that Lottie's
climbers had been eating too much, and she grimaced. They hadn't even
buried their refuse, and if
Kate hadn't been convinced of Lottie's state of mind before, she was
now. The raven had ripped the remains of the camp apart. Kate sighed and
>
shrugged out of her pack. Producing a collapsible shovel, she scooped
the outdoor toilet into one of the empty food bags she found
at the campsite.
"Pretty soon you're not going to be able to melt
drinkable pot of snow on this whole friggin' mountain," she muttered,
and Mutt, nose wrinkled, gave an assenting sneeze. "At least you don't
have to scoop it up," Kate told her.
She picked up the rest of the area, buried the trash against the
Trickster's return and flagged the area for
later recovery. She paused, wondering if she were hungry. At thirteen
thousand feet she had no desire for food or drink but knew it would be
wise to force herself to have both. She choked down a chocolate bar and
a couple of handfuls of more, managed to swallow half a quart of water,
and marched on.
The higher she got, the worse her wound hurt. The sun beat down on her
head, and she had to stop to remove her parka and gloves. Retaining
glove liners, vest and knit hat, she stuffed everything else into her
pack, hoisted it to her back and slogged on. On either side the walls of
the valley rose a thousand feet straight up in a vertical wave of ice.
The sun picked out the lines of the overhanging cornices, elaborately
carved with an artisan's attention to detail by decades of wind blowing
at gale force. Beyond the walls of the valley, the peaks of the Quilaks
seemed to be closing in for the kill. After a while Kate tired of
looking up and focused her attention strictly on the ground before her,
which was a wise decision, since the floor of the Valley of Death was
riddled with a thousand thousand crevasses, yawning chasms twelve and
more feet deep where the glacial ice below had shifted and ruptured the
surface. Some were hidden by deep snow, discovered only as she poked
Bobby's broom handle in front of her. She was forced to double back half
a dozen times. Progress was slow, and it was late afternoon when
something out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. She looked
up, and less than a mile in front of her three tiny figures leapt out
from the vast expanse of whiteness. Two stood together, looking after a
third who was double-timing up the valley at a gait perilously close to
a trot.
Kate's heart pumped and she stepped out, rapidly closing the distance
between herself and the two nearer figures. As she came up, they
resolved into two young Oriental gentlemen, both of whom were dressed in
top-of-the-line Everest chic and in spite of it looked very
cold. One of them rattled off a string of words at her, gesticulating
excitedly and pointing after the retreating third figure.
"Do you speak English?" she asked them.
One of the Koreans said something, and it wasn't in English, so Kate
said sternly, "Stay here. Don't move from this spot." She walked over to
the nearest man and with both hands on his shoulders forced him down on
his butt. "Stay here, or I'll ..." She smiled, showing all her teeth,
and drew a line across her throat with one finger. Her shirt collar
parted and they could see her scar. Next to her, Mutt was smiling, too,
and faced with Kate's scar and that gleaming expanse of enamel, the
second Korean thumped down next to his comrade. Both nodded their heads
vigorously, and Kate. nodded back at them, satisfied. They'd been
eating, and food wrappers littered the surrounding area. Kate picked up
one, walked over to their packs-she was pleased to see them both shrink
back as she passed by-and jammed it down the open mouth of the nearest
one. She leveled a finger and said, her ruined voice rawer from the
hike, "You pack it in, you pack it out. Got that?"
She didn't know if they had, but they both nodded in complete
comprehension, nothing moving except their heads. One of them did give a
little scream when she moved her knife around to a more comfortable
place on her belt, but his friend patted him soothingly on the shoulder
and he calmed. They blinked at her like two owls huddled together as she
swung out of camp, following the single set of tracks that led due
north, toward the mountain.
She was smaller than Lottie and she moved faster-she always had-and she
gained on the distant figure rapidly. Soon she was close enough to hear
Lottie breathing. The other woman must have known she was there, but she
never turned, and Kate realized that she was heading steadily for the
pass around the east summit, which
connected up on the Canadian side with the Slide, which was just that,
one long slide east over the border.
Kate quickened her pace. Beneath her feet the ice cracked and the snow
slid. She was panting with the exertion, sweating beneath her layers of
clothes but not daring to take the time to stop and peel off another.
The load shifted, and the pack thumped awkwardly against her spine. She
staggered to one side, trying to regain her balance, but when a patch of
ice exploded a foot in front of her boots she let the pack take her
down, falling heavily on her left side. Mutt barked a warning and
gathered her haunches beneath her. "No!" Kate said. "Stay!"
Flopping over, a flurry of shards from another patch of exploding ice
told her Lottie was picking her shots carefully. She waited until her
heart rate slowed down enough for her to speak. Cursing her ragged voice
for its inability to carry, she squirmed over to a hummock of snow,
wormed her way around it, Mutt squirming and worming beside her, inched
forward toward another hummock and slid next to it in a third shower of
exploding ice. Scared and angry, Kate yelled, "Dammit, Lottie, cut it
out! You want to start an avalanche?"
There was no reply. "Come on, Lottie. You couldn't kill me before and I"
"I sure as hell tried! If you hadn't tripped-"
"If I hadn't tripped you wouldn't have hit me at all!" Silence. "You're
not going to kill me and you know it. Come on out. Come back down with me."
"I'll go to jail."
Kate was silent. It was true.
"Can you see me inside? In a cage? No air to breathe, no hills to walk,
no hunting, no fishing, nothing? I might as well be dead."
"Lottie" "You know it's true, Kate. It's true of you, so you know it's
true of me, too."
Kate's head drooped, until her forehead rested against the snow. Her
hands dug into the ice on either side of her. "Why?" she said. "Why did
you do it, Lottie? You must have known you'd be caught."
There was a pause, and when Lottie spoke again,
Kate recoiled. The undertone of venom in the other woman's voice was a
palpable force, spilling out in
-such an overwhelming wave that even this vast expanse ,of ice would not
be enough to contain it, so fierce that the pain underlying it was
almost Undetectable. Almost.
hated her, Kate. God, how I hated her. I think I hated
her from the day she was born. I saw McAniff shoot that Jesus freak with
a 30.06, and then I came home and saw her with Natty
Kate waited. When Lottie said no more, she called,
"Lottie. I would have done everything I could to
; them from finding out it was you. Hell, the Park was
lousy with people who believed with all their hearts that the world
would be an infinitely better. place if someone would just remove Lisa
from it. I could have
blown enough smoke to keep the cops feeling around
blind until they gave up and went away." She paused,
and then, the words wrung out of her, "Why, Lottie? Why did you have to
kill Max? You might have gotten
away with killing Lisa, but you knew I couldn't let you
get away with killing
. Nothing. When Kate spoke again, her voice was sad. "When you asked me
why he did it, you weren't talking about McAniff, were you? You were
talking about Max. You were asking why he slept with Lisa, weren't you?"
She waited. "Weren't you, Lottie?"
The silence was broken with a long, bestial cry, ripping across the
frozen fabric of that mountain afternoon. Next to her Mutt howled in
unison, and every hair on Kate's body stood straight up. The awful sound
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 02 - A Fatal Thaw Page 22