Page 77 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

Icing your bruises was supposed to make them feel better. Holly had been icing her ass with an entire glacier for three days and it didn’t feel one bit better.

She hadn’t come prepared to sit high on Mt.

Elbrus through a big storm. Yet more of her training that had slipped away unnoticed.

When selecting her gear at The Bunker, she’d opted for fast-and-light mission profile, with no secondary prep if it ended up being a stay-low-and-slow.

Worse, she’d apportioned the bulk of what she did bring into Mike’s gear, expecting him and Inessa to be the ones to get into trouble if anyone did.

For three days the storm raged outside the slit of her snow cave.

When it covered over, she let it. She started her snow vigil with a dead battery in her radio.

By Day Two, her phone followed in its discharged footsteps.

Now she no longer knew the time because who wore a watch in the age of smartphones besides the fashion conscious like Mike? Not her.

So she tracked time by whether she could see the walls of her dim Holly-sized hole-in-the-snow: daylight, or could not see the walls of her ice-bound Hobbit hole: night. A bare nine hours of daylight in mid-January meant she spent a whole lot of time in a world darker than a dingo’s butthole.

Day Two saw the end of her energy bars, even rationed into single bites. She didn’t mind being hungry, but running out of chocolate on Day Three had seriously hurt. Mostly she dozed to conserve energy and stayed hydrated with melted snow.

Day Four, it was the quiet that woke her. Either she was finally buried deep enough to no longer hear the storm’s howl or the damn storm had finally abated. She could almost make out the vague outline of her gloved hand, so she waited.

The cave’s brightness eventually rose to normalish levels, which meant that if she was buried, it wasn’t avalanche deep.

Then she heard it: the heavy thud of helicopter rotors, muffled by the snow. She could feel the pulse of the deep bass notes. The weather had cleared, but the skies hadn’t. Until now, it had only been nature trying to kill her. Now it would be the Russians.

If the crash had gone according to plan, the plane should have impacted on the northwestern face of the peak at five thousand meters.

Her best estimate placed her on the south side at four thousand.

Even though she’d retained her white coverall from the jump, the passage of the helicopter overhead told quite how big the rescue operation must be.

Probably not the best time to go out for a stroll, even wearing white on a snowfield.

Three more helo passes confirmed the wisdom of her decision. But, dozing in and out, she couldn’t tell when they stopped until the cave darkened. All of the overflights had been in the morning. At least half a day since the last one.

She punched a hole—or rather tried to. The snow cover extended beyond the length of her arm.

Hard decision: wait through another long night or start to burrow?

The first would leave her that much weaker and perhaps trap her for another day if they resumed patrols this far afield in the morning.

The latter had only one problem, her snow cave had no spare room.

If she started to burrow out, much of the extra snow would have to be backfilled into the cave.

That meant no retreat once she’d started.

Well, it wasn’t the biggest risk she’d taken on this mountain. And she actually wanted to see Mike—the bastard. One lousy I love you had changed nothing and everything. But she wasn’t going to see him anytime soon if she stayed perched up here all winter. Burrow out it was.

After three meters, she stopped to check the feel of downness to make sure that she was still moving horizontally.

At five meters, she wondered if she was digging in circles; she’d set out moving directly away from her protecting rock.

It was now dark enough outside that any attempt to look behind her didn’t reveal a thing.

Besides, the tunnel was exactly the size of her body.

At eight meters, by which time her entire body was encased in impacted snow, the powder working its way in through every crevice in her gear, her fist broke through into free air.

Was it mountain free air or had she circled back into her snow cave, in which case she just might cry some icicle tears.

The shivers were setting in from all the snow melting inside her clothes. A very bad sign.

Packing the snow to the sides as much as possible, Holly dragged herself forward until she could see out the hole.

Not the cave. High, horsetail cirrus clouds blurred the half-moon.

It didn’t take many seconds to note that the direction of the clouds ran west to east—fast. Another weather front moving in.

So it was a good thing she hadn’t waited until morning.

She froze with her body half out of her tunnel. She was looking down…a long way down. A glance behind her showed why. The big outcropping she’d built her cave against had caused a massive snow drift. Had she exited her cave and turned right or left, she’d have punched clear in the first few meters.

Here, she’d tunneled straight out through the long-axis of a snow drift that reached to a towering cliff’s edge. Or…was she lying on only more snow suspended over the abyss. Fit to crumble at any second.

Holly tried to retreat, but she’d plugged the hole behind her as she’d wormed along.

Going to the right wasn’t an option either because of the cliff not having a top there either, though that was the direction of her escape route.

Out of choices, she edged to the left out of the drift and did her best to disturb nothing until she was well back on firm ground. Or at least firm snow.

After moving once again close to the massive outcropping and away from the vertiginous drop, she faced the massive snowdrift across her route.

She unzipped her coverall and parka to shake out what snow hadn’t already melted.

The bitter wind took the opportunity to make her wet inner gear several degrees cooler.

Ordering herself to think wasn’t helping matters.

“Damn it, Sarge! We ever get to that warm, cozy pub, you’re buying! Not this girl.”

Sealing up everything as well as she could, she plunged through the drift.

The passage from east side of the drift to the west side was both disgustingly easy and brutally cold.

All the snow that she’d cleared out of the gear was replaced by a fresh load of snow looking for somewhere to perform its spring-melt magic act—transforming from lovely glittery stuff that caught the moonlight to freezing cold water running down her back, arms, and legs.

But she was through.

A kilometer more at altitude, then descend in a straight line. She doublechecked her GPS. Except nothing happened. She looked at it again through one eye. And then the other. Still nothing.

Oh, right. It was on her phone. And its battery was dead. No backup battery. No dedicated unit. No nothing.

Well, she still had the moon. Except not for long. Those clouds were moving in faster than she was moving out. She eyed the drift behind her. So far she’d made good about four meters from her cave.

She leaned back into ritual. Drain the water bottle. Pack with snow. Inside pocket. No colder than the rest of her.

Screw the one-more-sideways-kilometer plan, she needed to get down.

Except there was a reason not to. Oh yeah, the abyss at the end of the snow drift.

One kilometer. In deep snow, that was about two thousand steps.

Somewhere in her escape from her icy-Hobbit-hole-of-doom, she’d lost one of the hiking poles.

It required a very careful concentration to get the strap around her wrist. It turned out the trick was to remove the heavy outer glove first. But when she set it on the snow to focus on the strap, the wind took the glove over the cliff.

“Well, isn’t that just dandy.” Holly finally decided to remove her other glove and put it on the hiking pole hand. She jammed the half-bared hand in her pocket.

Then she poked the pole into the snow in front of her. When she found no crevasse, she took a step.

One.

Poke. Two.

Three.