Jesus Christ, what have I got myself into? Morag wondered.
Alex punched a large button on the wall, and the rear and side doors whined open. Morag immediately threw her hand up as a hurricane of wind and snow particles were flung in at them like stinging white shrapnel — this is what Alex had meant by protecting their vision on the way down. Without eye cover, they’d be blinded.
She turned again to look up at Alex’s face. She could just make it out behind the visor and saw that the granite-hard jawline looked to carry a small smile. Where she was shitting herself, she bet he was looking forward to it. She saw him speak softly behind his visor, possibly to the pilot one last time. He held up a hand and slowly lowered the fingers one by one.
Morag’s heart smashed in her chest as he went from three down to one, and then he was running for the ramp, taking her with him. His HAWCs followed. She screamed as Alex leaped into space.
Morag shut off her scream and snapped her mouth shut as the cold stung her teeth and hard bits of ice and snow hurt her mouth. She was blinded and deafened by the screaming wind — and this was supposed to be the sheltered side of the mountain. The combined weight of each HAWC and passenger was probably between 400 and 450 pounds but still the wind tossed them around like corks.
She felt Alex twisting and trying to maintain his position as they dropped rapidly toward what she expected was the rock ledge. But they surely had no hope of seeing it among the flying snow. Every now and then the helicopter would jerk them, like a fly fisherman trying to sink the hook in a trout, and they’d swing wildly one way then the next.
She didn’t know how far they’d dropped or how long they’d been dropping, as her fear made every atom of her being become tunnel-focused on their landing. In another second, the huge face of the cliff loomed right in front of them and she saw the ledge, but horrifyingly, they were nowhere near where they needed to be and were fast coming to the end of their rope.
Alex locked off their drop line to stop their descent, and she wondered whether he was in communication with the pilot, trying to get him to swing them closer. She could dimly make out other bodies hanging like fruit from slender threads waiting for the right time to cut loose.
Then it came, the chopper yawed toward the cliff face as the wind slowed by a few dozen miles per hour. They swung at the ledge and Alex got ready to release them — fifty feet, forty, thirty, twenty. Momentum was with them when suddenly the chopper started to pull back. But it was too late now; they were committed.
‘Fly free, girl,’ she heard her mom whisper. It gave her strength.
Alex punched the release on his tether and let gravity and momentum do the rest. They flew the last twenty feet toward the rock ledge, but way too fast. She knew at this speed, she’d be obliterated against the stone. Unlike the soldiers, she wasn’t built like a tank or wearing an armored suit.
Fuck, she screamed in her own head, bracing herself, as Alex’s left arm tightened around her. Morag raised an arm, knowing it would be the first thing smashed, and also knowing that a broken arm, ten thousand feet up a freezing mountain could probably be a death sentence.
I’ll leave you behind, she remembered the HAWC leader saying.
She gritted her teeth as they hurtled toward the rock wall and ledge. Alex raised his free arm in front of her, and suddenly a three-foot disc of air swirled before them. They struck hard and Alex rolled them both, the shield taking most of the hard impact instead of their bodies. They continued to roll, and then Alex used the momentum to spring back to his feet and run hard at the cliff wall to move out of the way of the other soldiers who were coming in fast.
Every single one of them made it, using their shields, hitting hard, rolling and coming back upright. Morag still wore a grimace of fear and her heart was hammering. She exhaled in disbelief. She didn’t even feel like she was the same species as these super humans.
Alex disengaged his shield, unhooked Morag and then retracted his hood. “All right?”
She grinned up at him, still shaking. “That was intense.”
“This party has only just started.” He turned away to look to his team, probably counting them off. He then walked back a few steps to edge of the ledge and craned his neck to look up at the peak still a few hundred feet above them. To Morag it looked a sheer face of dark granite, but after a few seconds, Alex nodded.
“No problem.” He called his HAWCs in. “Erikson, Dunsen, Knight, you’re up. Let’s go, people.”
Morag noticed that the three HAWCs had somehow retained their drop lines, and like gymnasts, each ran at the wall, leaped, and clung on. Like spider monkeys, the three Special Forces soldiers started to climb and fast.
“Whoa.” Morag shook her head in awe. When she said she’d climbed before, she didn’t mean anything like this.
The HAWCs stuck carabiners in crevices, and hammered in pitons where they had to, and then threaded their rope through them as they went. In no time they were a hundred feet up, and Alex turned and shouted over the wind.
“Next up! Let’s go! Let’s go!” He turned to stare up into the swirling snow.
Morag followed his gaze, but could see nothing. But she suspected he was looking for their chopper which was waiting somewhere up in that mad blizzard. She didn’t envy the pilot for a second.
It was her turn next and she started up. The cold had already caused a thin layer of ice to form on the rope, making the soft elastic fibers slippery, and she had to concentrate every inch to stop from sliding back down.
Behind her on the rope, Alex was last in line and coming quickly, scaling easily, as if he was just climbing a ladder to change a light bulb. The wind still buffeted them, but at least in close to the cliff face it was less ferocious. She glanced up. Above her, she guessed, the lead climbers must be near or at the summit by now, and she turned back to the wall, focusing on the rope, on each grip-release-grip over and over again, edging upwards a few feet each time.
Morag didn’t want to look behind or down. Even though she had climbed peaks before and didn’t regard herself as having a problem with heights, if she saw even for a second the dizzying void below her, she might lock up. She simply could not let that happen while Alex Hunter was right behind her — she didn’t want his help. She was no damsel in distress — never was, never would be. She gripped, hard, cursed under her breath, and yanked herself up another few feet.
Minutes later, a hand grabbed the back of her jacket and roughly dragged her up and over the rim. She skidded forward on her belly, and then rolled over to suck in air. Her fingers were curled into painful claws and she blinked several times to make the flaring stars of exhaustion go away.
Steve Knight crouched beside her. “Okay?”
Morag sat up, still dizzy. “Yeah, yeah.”
The young HAWC slapped her shoulder. “You did well.”
He headed back to his group, where they stood on the peak’s edge, helping the last few climbers, while some stared down over the other side. She watched as Alex Hunter came up and over the rim, his face mask still up, and not even breathing hard. She looked around and saw that the only ones sitting or lying flat were the NASA team and Calvin Renner.
She struggled to her feet, and wobbled for a moment. All the HAWCs stood ready, and a few had strange-looking weapons drawn — odd, why? She joined them at the edge and stared down into the massive formation created by three mountains that had collided together in some distant primordial past to create a massive crater basin many miles across.