Their cold-weather clothing was the most important. They would be traveling several hundred miles farther north, and the weather would become even more unpredictable the closer they got to the Arctic coast. They transferred the remaining supplies across to the new vehicle’s backseat, making sure they left enough room so Thor could sit comfortably.
God, she hated to leave the bike behind, but where they were heading, there wasn’t going to be a need for it, and short of strapping it to the side of the Cat, nowhere to store it. She checked the panniers for anything that might be useful, but found only a gallon of water and a few cans of food.
It was going to have to stay with the SUV.
Emily helped Rhiannon climb back up onto the gantry, then returned to the SUV and clambered into the back, over the rear seats, grabbing the road atlas and a couple of energy bars stashed in the pocket of the passenger door.
After a final glance around, she dropped the keys onto the driver’s seat and climbed out, slamming the door closed behind her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The James Dalton Highway was a four-hundred-mile stretch of road connecting Fairbanks to the town of Deadhorse, just a few miles shy of the Arctic Ocean. The twisting road covered some of the most extreme terrain and weather conditions in the world. Temperatures could drop to minus thirty degrees centigrade and storms could blow in seemingly out of nowhere, reducing visibility to nothing and freezing anything caught unprotected in the open.
“Thanks so much for that,” said Emily as she recalled the information Jacob had relayed to her.
“What?” asked Rhiannon, yawning and stretching as she woke from a two-hour nap.
“I said it looks like snow,” lied Emily.
Rhiannon gave her one of those withering looks that only an adolescent girl could deliver: a cross between utter disdain and pity. Emily smiled. Maybe it was better that the world’s supply of teenage boys was probably extinct. This one would do more than break hearts; she could turn them into mincemeat with a single glance.
“Go back to sleep,” Emily suggested.
Rhiannon shook her head and stretched. “Not tired,” she said. “How long have we been driving for?”
Emily glanced down at the display panel on the dash. A timer in the top corner of the screen showed they had been on the road for almost four hours now. She had kept the speed down to a manageable thirty miles per hour, occasionally even as low as fifteen when she had to navigate a particularly tricky corner. The tachometer said they had traveled a total of 107 miles. Just over a quarter of their trip was already behind them.
Rhiannon might not be tired, but Emily felt her own eyes beginning to ache. Even though the outside temperature was a frigid fifteen degrees, inside the cab, thanks to the superb heating system, the temperature was a balmy seventy-two degrees. Combine that with the sweeping sheets of white on every side and the occasional rhythmic beat of the industrial-size wiper-blades as they swished away the ice and snow that built up on the windshield, and you had as good a recipe for falling asleep at the wheel as was ever invented. If it wasn’t for her unease at driving this thing, she would have probably landed them in a snowbank or off the side of a mountain by now.
They had about another 150 miles of driving ahead of them before they reached the tiny encampment of Coldfoot. Jacob had assured her that they would find fuel and somewhere to spend the night there.
“It’s the only stop between Fairbanks at the southern end of the highway and Deadhorse, where you’re heading at the opposite end, that you’ll find fuel,” he had told her.
Ahead, the road curved up a steep slope that ran over and between a pair of hills before disappearing into a bank of fog or low clouds that obscured the top; it was hard to tell exactly which.
Emily slowed the Sno-Cat as they rumbled up the slope.
She had spent some time checking out the bank of switches and had identified what most of them did. As the white mist enveloped them, she switched on the powerful halogen lamps mounted on either side of the cab. The light helped a little, but it also gave the fog/cloud a weird orange glow that strained her eyes even more as the light bounced back at her.
Emily eased off the gas a little as the road rose higher into the hills, curving and dipping unexpectedly. Her heart was in her mouth for most of the next fifteen minutes as they climbed higher and higher; then suddenly they were out of it. Emily could see the road disappear again between two icy peaks about a mile farther up the road, so she picked up her speed a little, quickly chewing up the distance to the ridge.
She glanced over at Rhiannon, but the kid was curled up on the seat, her head resting against the passenger window, eyes closed as her chest rose and descended rhythmically. Asleep again.
The weather had been clear for most of the drive so far, except for the occasional squall that blew in seemingly from nowhere and disappeared just as quickly. Now as they crowned the valley between the peaks, looking down onto the plain below them, she could see for miles ahead of her. It was breathtakingly beautiful. An unspoiled white canvas. In the distance, mountains rose into the air, crowned by thick waves of cloud, their dark outline providing an elegant border to the sheer simplicity of nature’s perfection.
Emily guided the Cat down the opposite side of the hill’s winding road, the same band of fog/clouds blanketed the descent for several miles ahead, completely obscuring the road from view. Emily switched the lamps back on as they penetrated the mist and slowed the Cat to a more manageable speed, edging it around a hairpin bend that dropped rapidly and then curved again in the opposite direction.
If Emily had taken her eyes off the road for even a second she would not have seen the eighteen-wheeler splayed across the road. When it materialized from out of the bank of fog there was less than ten feet left between the Cat and it. Emily slammed her foot against the brake pedal. The tracks instantly locked, bringing the machine to an almost immediate stop as its treads dug into the snow. Rhiannon tumbled off the seat with a cry of fear, hitting the console and falling in a pile of waving arms and legs to the floor.
“What was that? What was that?” she demanded as she pulled herself back into the seat. She screamed again when she saw the huge glinting curve of the tanker just feet from the front of the Cat’s engine.
“Where did that come from?” she demanded.
“I have no idea,” answered Emily. “Are you okay?”
Rhiannon, pouting just a little at the embarrassment of the spill, nodded that she thought she was. The only thing bruised was her dignity.
The lamps cut through the space between the Cat and the tanker, and Emily grabbed the handle of the one on her side of the cab, panning the light through the mist along the length of the other vehicle. The driver’s cabin of the truck hung over the right edge of the road, its back wheels the only thing keeping it from falling into the space beyond, snapping the cab from the trailer like a broken neck. The rest of the truck, a huge cylinder trailer of brushed silver, cut diagonally across the road, blocking most of the path.