“What do you mean, he wouldn’t let them?” Nat tried to reconcile the image of the reticent man physically restraining either of the trappers and failed. “Did he sabotage their traps?”
“Oh no, nothing like that. If he had, it would have been him that went missing, I’m sure. But he went ballistic when he saw the traps, started screaming a bunch of stuff we didn’t understand. And unfortunately, we didn’t have Igor to translate.”
Sound carried well in the mountains. “Wouldn’t have mattered anyway,” Igor yelled up at them. “He doesn’t speak much Russian. The Mansi have their own dialect.”
Nat took another breath of ice, her mind racing. “But Vasily speaks English. That’s one of the reasons I hired him. Didn’t he say anything you could understand?”
“Not much. He was too upset. Something about it being someone else’s territory and they had no right. That’s the most I got.”
“Maybe they went to set their traps once Vasily wasn’t looking. Or went hunting. Isn’t that possible?” From what she’d seen of Anubha, the Canadian was a strong-willed woman. A woman who’d been hired for her hunting ability and survival skills. It was likely she hadn’t let the Mansi tell her what to do.
“Sure, it’s possible, but you’d think they would have been back by morning, or at least left word with one of us. I had Lana check on them at dawn—didn’t want Joe to get the wrong idea after the other night—and it didn’t look like anyone had slept in their tent. Their sleeping bags were untouched.”
In spite of the admittedly grim scenario, Nat felt better. Anubha and Joe were more than capable of spending a few nights in the bush. That was why she’d hired them. They were independent, and as far as she’d seen, they’d formed no close ties with Lana. Certainly not with Steven or Vasily. Maybe if she’d been there, they would have felt an obligation to let her know where they were going and when they’d return. But she could see them not giving a rat’s ass about alerting Steven.
It was inconsiderate, at the very least. But not an emergency. Yet.
“Why didn’t anyone call me?” she asked. It would have been a hell of a lot easier than Steven coming back for their group.
“Everyone’s been having trouble with their phones. Either we can’t get a signal, or our batteries can’t hold a charge. I’m hoping you brought a power pack that’ll help.”
“Yes, we’ve got four of them.” They’d brought them for the podcast, but there was no reason why she couldn’t use them to charge everyone’s phones.
As the terrain grew increasingly difficult, even the mountaineer couldn’t spare the wind to speak any longer. Nat was grateful. She felt light-headed and had to concentrate on placing one ski after the other on the treacherous slope. There was no brainpower to spare to worry about Anubha and Joe. Trod, trod. Trod, trod. The incline was wicked enough that there were few opportunities to glide. She and Andrew had practiced the wrong things. Their training was all but useless.
She could hear his breath becoming harsher behind her. Nightmare visions of his collapsing on the snow and not getting up this time made her entire body tremble. She struggled to find her footing. Finally, she had to stop.
“How is he?”
Igor had an arm around Andrew, and was half carrying her friend up the slope. Nat marveled at the Russian’s strength, as he was also burdened with most of their supplies. “We will need to rest soon. His lungs, they are not so good.”
“We’re almost there,” Steven said, his exhalations drawing pictures in the frosty air. “Only about a half mile left.”
Nat groaned. Perhaps a half mile was nothing to the mountaineer, but for novice skiers who were ready to collapse, it might as well have been Nepal.
“You can do this.” Once again, his eyes seemed to look right through her. “Come up here next to me. We’ll do it together.”
Once stopped, it took a Herculean effort to get going again, but somehow she found the strength to join Steven. He grasped her shoulder. “You all right?”
“Yeah. Just tired. I had no idea it was going to be so difficult.”
“We’ll be there before you know it. Focus on the landscape and how beautiful it is. It will take your mind off the pain.”
Other than a blindingly blue sky, Nat didn’t see what was so beautiful about it. Kholat Syakhl was stark and forbidding, an endless expanse of white snow and black rock beneath the peaks. Its coldness came from more than the temperature.
It truly was No Man’s Land.
Steven managed a steady stream of chatter, which distracted her somewhat, but also increased her resentment. How was this so easy for him? Didn’t it pose the slightest challenge? At least he didn’t ask any questions. She might have mustered up the energy to drive her ski pole through his chest if he had.
The mountaineer was in the middle of a rant about how the 1996 Everest disaster had been preventable when something made him stop midsentence. “What the—”
At the sound of a woman’s voice crying, “Thank God; thank God,” Nat lifted her head. It was Lana, hurrying toward them from the opposite direction. Bizarrely, she wasn’t wearing her skis. She ran over the trail in her boots, staggering and nearly falling with every step.
Though Nat hated to even think the word in reference to another woman, the Olympian appeared to be hysterical. Lana’s hair was stringy and uncombed, her face red and streaked with tears.
“What are you doing? I told you we’d come straight back.” Steven grasped her by the arms to keep her from falling. Clearly too upset to speak, she held him close and sobbed, her shoulders heaving.
Igor pushed past Nat, who turned just in time to support Andrew before he fell.
“Lana, what is wrong? What happened? Are you hurt?”
The Russian was no more successful in getting answers, and Nat struggled under Andrew’s weight. “Steven, how much farther? I can’t hold him much longer.”
“Not far at all.” Steven nudged the weeping woman toward Igor and rushed to help, earning serious brownie points as he lifted Andrew’s weight from Nat’s shoulders. For his part, Andrew was as malleable as a rag doll, not reacting as he was passed from one team member to another. “Igor, can you and Lana lead the way? We have to reach camp. Andrew needs to rest.”
The Russian nodded, urging Lana forward, but she pushed away from him, stumbling off the trail and into deeper snow.
“No. No, I’m not going back there.”
“What are you doing?” Nat could hear the frustration in Steven’s voice, but it was obvious to her that Lana was in some kind of shock. She wasn’t thinking clearly if she thought going off trail would prove to be any kind of salvation. “Lana, we have to get back.”
The woman stopped thrashing through the snow long enough to meet their eyes. “I can’t. There’s too much blood. So much blood.”
~ Chapter Nine ~
Trepidation overwhelmed her as she reached camp, almost expecting to see everything in black and white like the famous Dyatlov photos—the tent with its torn side, half-collapsed beneath a mound of snow. Instead, the vivid nylon of Steven and Joe’s tents stood as a beacon against the whiteness, providing some welcome color. Nat was relieved to find they’d avoided the Dyatlov site entirely, pitching their tents on the other side.
The men had managed to convince Lana to accompany them, but the woman shook so severely Nat expected her to stop at any moment and refuse to go farther.
The camp was eerily quiet. She turned to Lana. “Where’s Vasily? Did he leave too?” If he had, she would sue his ass off. He’d been hired to help them through this, goddammit, not take off at the first sign of trouble.