Grey turned the snowmobile into the forest toward North Finger Ridge and the crash site, ducking low-hanging branches and ignoring the ice slapping his face. For the third time in only four days, Grey found himself repeating his litany of prayers that asked for God’s intervention.
Grace was surprised at how the sight of the plane crash affected her. Memories rose unbidden—the screeching sound of ripping metal, the smell of fuel stinging her nose, the terror of tumbling through chaos, the sudden silence.
And the strange blue glow that had lingered in the air.
She remembered Grey’s arms of steel holding her securely. His gentle breath bringing Baby back to life.
And his passionate kiss.
Grace wiped the moisture away from the window of the snowcat to see better and stared at the silent, abandoned remains of the airplane. It was barely recognizable, completely entombed in ice. She watched as Frank and Tom walked around the wreckage, beams from their flashlights reflecting like gemstones over the ground.
It was completely dark now, late into the bleak and drizzling February night. It had taken them hours of rugged and haphazard travel to make it this far, and Grace was worried that getting over West Shoulder Pass was going to be impossible.
Frank had foolishly endangered them all. And if Grey didn’t come after her soon, it looked as if she’d come full circle to die. She was back on the mountain, and for the second time in just four days, Greylen MacKeage was her only hope for survival.
Apparently unsuccessful in his hunt for the disks, Frank came striding back to the snowcat, opened the driver’s door, and grabbed her roughly by the chin.
“Where are they?” he growled. “Where are the disks?”
Grace pulled her chin free and gave him a negligent shrug. “I don’t know exactly,” she said, too tired to enter a battle of wills. “I remember taking them out of my bag when I was sitting just outside the plane.
They may have slipped under the fuselage.”
Frank plodded back to the plane without bothering to close the door, which caused the interior light of the snowcat to stay on, making it impossible for Grace to see outside anymore. Grace looked over at Wayne sitting beside a defeated and possibly concussed Jonathan. Wayne lifted his gun slightly and gave her a warning glare.
Tom and Frank suddenly came striding back. Tom climbed into the driver’s seat and reached down to connect two exposed wires, which he must have stripped earlier to hot-wire the snowcat.
“Wait,” Frank said, still standing outside, his head turned away. “Listen,” he commanded, waving a hand at Tom.
Tom opened his door and stood on the track, straining his head above the roof of the snowcat. Grace listened, too. All she could hear was the sound of the forest cracking under the strain of the ice.
“That’s a snowmobile,” Tom said. He ducked down and looked through the cab at Frank. “It’s coming this way.”
Frank climbed inside and slammed his door shut. Tom took his seat again and grabbed the wires, but he looked at Frank before he started the engine. Frank stared silently out the windshield.
“We keep going,” Frank said finally. “We just need to get up on West Shoulder. I should be able to get a signal from there to call Greenville. I’ll have our men come in by snowmobile and meet us on the trail.”
Grace lifted her bound hands to her chest, attempting to keep her suddenly racing heart from exploding.
Grey was coming after her on a snowmobile, and he was closing in on them.
“It sounded like only one sled,” Tom said as he touched the wires together and started the engine. “And it was still far away. Sound travels funny in these mountains.” He put the snowcat into gear and sent it rumbling away from the crash site. “If it’s carrying two men, it will be traveling slow,” he added.
Grace saw Frank’s head turn toward Tom. “We’re leaving a trail a blind man could follow,” he growled.
He reached inside his jacket and held up a small black case under the beam of his flashlight. “These your disks?” he asked, turning to see her answer.
Grace nodded. Frank tucked the case back in his jacket, then reached into another pocket and pulled out a small, strange-looking radio. He turned it on and scanned the face for a signal, holding it up and extending the antenna.
The red light suddenly turned green, and Frank immediately depressed the talk button. He spoke into the transmitter and was quickly rewarded with a faint but distinct voice from Greenville.
Frank and the mystery voice conversed for several minutes before Frank shut off the radio and picked up his map again.
“What about the snowmobile?” Tom asked. “You want to drop Wayne off and let him take care of the problem?”
Grace held her breath waiting for Frank’s answer. Grey would be an easy target for Wayne.
“Not yet,” Frank said. “We’re almost there. We’ll make our stand at the trail while we wait for the others.”
Grace started breathing again.
Frank suddenly chuckled. “Not that anyone from this boondock town will be much of a challenge.” He twisted in his seat to look back at her, his face an abstract of sinister lines and shadows in the beam of his light. “You got a local sheriff in Pine Creek, sweet buns?” he asked. “One with more brawn than brains?”
“No,” Grace answered calmly. “But we occasionally get a visit from Superman.”
Grey stopped his snowmobile several hundred yards down from the crash site and walked the rest of the way. He circled first, making sure no one was waiting to surprise him, then finally approached the plane.
He dug his flashlight out of his pocket and shone it over the ground. It was pitch-black now, with the moon hidden by cloud cover and fog, and without the light he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.
What the light did show him were tracks, two distinct sets of creeper-covered boots that had churned up the ice and kicked it away from the gaping hole in the fuselage. Grey noticed where someone had dug a burrow under the plane, and he guessed that Grace’s missing disks had slipped under it four days ago.
He trailed his flashlight beam along the forest floor until he found where his stolen snowcat had stopped long enough for the engine heat to melt the ice. He sent the beam upward, letting the light follow the track the snowcat had made and decided that he was right. They were now headed toward West Shoulder Pass and would try to pick up the snowmobile trail on the other side.
Grey walked back to his own snowmobile, turned the machine northwest, straight toward the summit of TarStone Mountain. He could make better time despite the steeper terrain and be over West Shoulder Pass before Grace and her kidnappers. Ian and Callum and Morgan were approaching the pass from the south and should have arrived there by now. Grey knew he was betting Grace’s life on his gut instinct, but eight hundred years ago it was his gut that had most often kept him and his men alive. He’d been sure of very few things in these last four years, but tonight every drop of sweat pouring from his body screamed that he was right.
And his instinct would have been perfect if he had remembered the long, deep, high mountain pond carved into the southern slope of West Shoulder Pass.
Grace balked when Frank tried to pull her onto the frozen pond. It was still the dead of winter, but she knew these high ponds were usually spring-fed. The ice could be three feet thick in one place and two inches in another.
“Wait. It isn’t safe,” she said, finally getting him to stop. “There are springs.”
“It will hold us on foot,” Frank said.
He had taken the duct tape off her hands so walking wouldn’t be so awkward, but his grip on her wrist was unbreakable. And his sense of urgency was palpable. He looked down the ridge at their back trail through the weak dawn light, then turned and glared at her. “And I’m not going back empty-handed,” he finished, scanning the opposite shore.