Expect the Sunrise (12 page)

“Did she say anything?”

“Something. A name, I think”

Andee closed her eyes, relieved. She opened one of Sarah’s eyelids. Pupils seemed normal.
Thank You, Lord.

Sarah moaned.

Andee checked her other eye. “Sarah, wake up.” She patted her cheek. “Wake up.”

Sarah seemed restless, as if trying to escape the bonds of her slumber. Andee took her hand and squeezed. Sarah squeezed back. Andee wasn’t sure if the response was involuntary or a message.

She’d take it as a message. One of hope.

Please, Lord, send someone to us today.

She noticed Flint slumped against the back of the shelter, his back to the wall. He shivered slightly in his sleeping bag. She touched his forehead and found a slight temperature. She also noticed that Mac had vanished from his post. She’d slept soundly. “Where is everyone?”

“Outside,” Ishbane said.

Andee couldn’t believe they’d gotten past her position by the opening without her waking or that she’d fallen asleep in spite of her attempts to drive away her fatigue. She’d spent most of the night monitoring Sarah’s breathing and devising escape scenarios. She had to help Mac overcome his fear or dementia or whatever held him back from taking a full panoramic view of reality and agreeing to let her hike out—and soon.

Twice she had caught Mac with his hand on Sarah’s head, as if testing her temperature. It almost made Andee want to forgive him. But the fact that he’d bullied his way into command of their battered group with his FBI pedigree kept her from letting forgiveness take hold.

She couldn’t believe he was FBI. What kind of dumb luck did she have to be trapped with a Scottish FBI agent? Her mother would be trying to immunize her from the Scottish charm while her father would slap an arm around him, reliving old times at the bureau. Andee considered it history repeating itself, a sort of heavenly joke.

As if things couldn’t be worse.

She felt like she’d slept shoved into a tin can on a bed of baseballs. Leaning forward on her knees, she pushed aside the shelter flap. A gust of wind nearly stripped the breath from her lungs.

Snow blanketed the bowl in which they’d crashed, a million tiny diamonds sparkling in the light. It might be pretty if she were soaring above it, enjoying the scene from her safe cockpit. But hidden beneath this morning’s white blanket, the jagged rock, crevasses, and loose boulders lay in ambush.

Good thing Mac had collected much of their debris last night.

Andee scanned the pewter sky, with the sun melting away the night. It boded well for travel today, and she’d be able to make excellent time.

She heard popping and spitting, smelled smoke. Searching for the source, she climbed out of the shelter, pulled her blanket around her, and saw a pile of books and seat cushions.

Nina knelt before the pyre, blowing on the fire, coaxing it to life. Already flames licked the base, and black smoke, fueled by the vinyl seats, rose in a thickening trail into the sky. Sparks spat out, grabbed by the greedy wind and tossed hither. Andee watched in shock as they blanketed the crash area, some landing on the broken wings of the plane. What was worse, she saw Phillips shoving a seat cushion out through the cockpit door.

When Andee noticed a pile of used waterproof matches, she didn’t have to ask how they’d gotten the fire going. Had she packed another canister? Thankfully, she still had her lighter.

“What. Are. You.
Doing
?” She tried not to sound appalled, but had they any idea the resources they were consuming?

“Making a signal fire,” Nina said. Fatigue lined her eyes, sank her face, but her movements betrayed a woman on a mission. Apparently a mission to return to her children. “We figured that if they were looking for us, it would help to have smoke.”

That’s what the Emergency Locator Transmitter was for. The ELT operated on the VHF range of 121.5 kHz, with signals that bounced off satellites designated to listen for distress calls. Not only that, Andee, along with many other pilots, kept her radio receiver on “guard” frequency of 121.5, just in case. Even though no one had located them yet and they weren’t on any normal flight path, someone could still hear them. If help didn’t arrive soon, using up the matches was the first of many bad ideas.

Andee dropped her blanket and strode over to the airplane, grabbing the cushion just as Phillips emerged from the plane. “There is still avgas all over the place. This thing could go up.” She shoved the cushion at Phillips. “Stay out of the plane.”

When he blanched white, she felt instantly sorry. Out of all of them, Phillips seemed the one person she could count on. His prayer last night and his words about the apostle Paul and Timothy had touched her soul in a way she still couldn’t voice. She hoped he’d keep praying for God’s deliverance. She needed a reminder of God’s presence right about now as she faced a day of keeping everyone alive.

As she moved away from the plane, her gaze fell on a backpack—Sarah’s backpack—wedged against the instrument panel. It held Sarah’s Bible and possibly supplies.

Andee took a deep breath and squeezed into the cockpit, reaching for the pack. Her gaze fell on the ELT, their only hope of—

She felt hands on her legs, pulling at her. “Let me go, Phillips! I gotta get the ELT!” The hands tugged at the back of her jacket. “Stop—” She turned.

Mac. And he had her by the arm, his face twisted in fury or panic. “Get out of here!” He yanked her away from the plane, practically dragging her over the tundra.

She stumbled behind him and saw the blaze had caught, fueled by the wind and spray of gas on the vinyl seats. A bonfire of smoke and flames plumed, the fire hot and roaring, melting the snow around it, sparks showering down.

On the plane. And the damaged wings that stored fuel.

Run.
She’d barely put thought to action when the plane exploded.

Ka-boom!

One second she was running, and the next she’d landed facedown in the snow while a scorching, roaring fireball rolled over her head. Andee couldn’t breathe, let alone think. Atop her, she felt something—no
someone
—heavy pushing her head to the ground, breathing hard into her neck.
Mac?

She listened to the flames growl around her as the fire consumed the plane in mini-explosions and found her extra gas can.

She shook. Mac’s arm covered her head. He felt so close and so protective, she didn’t know what to do with the feelings that rushed through her. His breaths came in ragged puffs. Then she lifted her head and looked at him. His blue eyes so luminous, so shocked, even worried. Another emotion followed. It dried her throat.

Anger.

He pushed away from her, turned on his hip, and stared at the plane. Andee’s eyes followed his gaze. Flames clawed out of the windows, chewed at the cover, and peeled the paint.

Mac turned and looked at her. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he blamed her.

“You okay?” he growled. He stood and pulled her up, staring at her for a long time.

She wasn’t sure how to respond. She nodded slowly.

“So much for getting out of here,” he said and marched away.

Mac’s suspect list had just expanded to three. His scrutiny ranged from Nina and Phillips, standing wide-eyed ten feet behind him, to Emma, who held a backpack in one hand as the flames roared through her plane. She seemed shaken when he met her gaze, and he saw fear ring her eyes. But terrorists were trained in deception. If he hadn’t seen the sparks from the bonfire ignite the plane with his own eyes, he’d suspect sabotage, aimed at taking out the ELT and any threat of interference.

A warm-up to the big event.

The flames billowed to the sky, mingled with the gold sunrise dissolving the vault of gray. The fire growled and popped and heated his face, melting the snow thirty feet away, turning the ground black.

He’d barely yanked Emma out in time. His knees and elbow hurt from his racing dive into the rocks. Just think what would have happened if he hadn’t looked up from his scrutiny of the map, only yards from the shelter, and spied Emma wiggling into the plane. He’d seen the bonfire erupt, the shower of sparks, and did the math on his way to haul her from the cockpit.

They’d barely escaped being charbroiled.

Then again one less terrorist to stop.

Unless she had an accomplice. She was probably meeting people, a scenario the two-way radio he’d found seemed to suggest. A pilot with connections and history on the North Slope wouldn’t be suspected of treason—she could easily bring in supplies and deliver the goods into the hands of the saboteurs.

Especially since she’d been the one politicking to hike out. Alone. Toward Disaster and the circle on the map.

Emma turned, as if reading his thoughts, and he met her troubled look. She shrugged away from his stare as she stumbled over to the fall of rocks and leaned against them, dropping the backpack at her feet.

The slump in her shoulders and the way she closed her eyes as if defeated nearly did him in. She was a good actress. He nearly wanted to believe that she felt overwhelmed with responsibility, that she cared only about getting them all home safely just like she claimed.

She sighed, opened her eyes, and fixed her attention on the plane. The acrid smell of burning rubber, grass, oil, and paper singed the air. The thunder of the flames backdropped the silence.

“Oh no.” Ishbane clutched his blanket around his shoulders, his face ashen. “How’d it happen?” he said to Mac.

Mac didn’t know quite how to answer. “Fuel plus spark equals big bang.”

Ishbane glared at him and mustered the energy to round on Emma. “Now what? How are they going to find us?” He sank to the ground, shaking. “We’re all going to die out here. We’ll freeze and start eating each other off, and in the spring only one of us will be alive. I don’t want to die.”

Me either
. But right now that wasn’t his highest priority.

“We’re not going to die,” Emma said quietly. She looked at Mac. “Because I’m going for help.”

Oh no, not again.
Mac blew out a long breath. Before he could answer, however, Phillips came to life. “I agree. Let her go. I’ll go with her, help her—”

“We’ve been through this,” Mac said. “We all stay, or we all leave. We stick together.”

Nina rubbed her hands on her arms, her high cheekbones pronounced against her wool stocking cap. A long black braid snaked down her back. She appeared weary or hungry, probably both. She swallowed, as if summoning courage. “I’ll go with you, Emma.”

Oh yeah, sure.
Like that was going to happen. He might as well give them back their map, make sure their two-way radio worked, and load them up with supplies. He even let out a grunt.

Oops.
Apparently Emma heard that, for she approached him in fewer strides than he expected. Standing with her hands on her hips, she stared at him with that heart-shaped face, close enough for him to see the dark flecks in her brown eyes, her long eyelashes, and the angry set of her mouth. Her hair hung in dark ringlets around her face, and for a second it occurred to him that he’d label her as pretty.

And furious.

“I don’t know what your problem is, FBI, but I hope you can see our dwindling list of options here.” She flung one arm out in the direction of the fire. “We could hope that some pilot is out early this morning, hunting for us, and he’ll see the signature in the sky. But our fire is going to puff out in a couple of hours at the most, and, sadly, Mr. Ishbane is correct. Our ELT was in my plane. So unless you have psychic powers or can make a snowball into a crystal ball, my legs are the only things getting us off this mountain.”

He felt his traitorous mouth curling in a smile.

Her jaw dropped. However, she recovered quickly. “Nina, Phillips, c’mere. I need to leave you some instructions.” She headed toward the shelter.

“Stop, Emma.”

She ignored him.

Mac stalked past a shivering Ishbane and caught her arm.

She whirled and he took a step back, not sure which sparks might be more dangerous. Tears formed in her eyes. “My best friend is seriously injured. She could be
dying
. There is
no way
I’m not going for help, even if I have to shoot you to get by you. So unless you want to be in there next to Flint and Sarah, nursing your own wounds,
get out of my way
.”