Lost Girls (3 page)

“Miss Moore,” he said, abruptly pulling the headphones away. “I started this day with nineteen hours of daylight and a suggestion from Admiral Brigham that bringing you here was worth every hour doing it. That might not carry a lot of weight in the civilian world, but if Admiral Brigham also suggested you could fly this helicopter to Denali, I’d be strapping in next to you, so you see I do not take the admiral’s suggestions lightly. Plan on doing whatever it is you came here to do and have faith that I’ll keep you safe while you’re doing it. When we get my sister off this mountain, you will have the most grateful man on the planet at your beck and call.”

Sherry had to smile, but then she sensed Metcalf wasn’t smiling, so she pulled her microphone back in place and shifted nervously in her seat.

There were goose bumps on her arms. Not because she was cold, but from the sheer gravitas of the man. He was, she thought, one of the most intense human beings she had ever met.

The obvious consequence of Metcalf’s unwavering belief in Admiral Brigham’s word was to assume an unwavering belief of his own. A belief, though he knew nothing independently about her, that she was capable of assisting them by doing something a reasonable person might think impossible. It wasn’t logical by any stretch of the imagination. Faith wasn’t a transferable entity when it came to matters of life and death. And rappelling off the face of a mountain with an inexperienced climber who was also blind was in itself a matter of life and death.

What was she getting involved in here? she wondered. And what kind of men were these who would stake their lives on the word of a long-retired superior? Why did she suddenly feel the ponderous weight of responsibility? As if she had a stake in saving this team lost on the mountain. She was becoming one of them. No longer a one-person show, but part of a unit going on a mission. Suddenly she needed Metcalf to know that she wasn’t infallible. Any thinking person should know that, but Brigham had said something to him and now Metcalf was long past doubting her abilities, if ever he did.

This didn’t remotely correspond to Sherry’s experiences in the civilian world. Life for Sherry was a daily quagmire of uncertainty. Every year brought some new form of attack on what she did. Lawyers everywhere seemed bent on testing her right to practice what most people would call clairvoyance. It wasn’t clairvoyance, of course, not by a long shot. But instead of science making her more credible, it seemed only to make her a more desirable target, at least in the eyes of the legal world. Suddenly there was something they could point to. A tangible concern was at stake. If she wasn’t trying to defraud the public and was actually reading dead people’s memories, then the law had better get out there and regulate dead people’s memories, too. Someone had better ensure that the rights of the dead were protected. Or at least that’s what the lawyers were trying to get on record in a courtroom. Sherry found herself having to hire lawyers to protect her from lawyers.

This was a refreshing change, she thought, men and women who spoke plain English. A group of people who believed that lies and strategies had two different meanings.

She had learned about this phenomenon of blue or green love, whatever you called the brotherhood of arms, from her late friend Philadelphia police detective John Payne. But Metcalf took the concept of esprit de corps to a whole new level. It had only been necessary for Admiral Brigham to say it was possible for him to believe in her—that was all Metcalf needed, another man’s word. It was mind-boggling.

The Pave Hawk began to descend into updraft turbulence. The metal floors hammered under her feet and she felt herself tense, fingers clutching the bottom of her seat.

Metcalf was moving around the bay, organizing things for their departure, or so she imagined. She tried for the second or perhaps third time to guess what he might look like, knowing that voices could easily fool you. Usually Sherry put an approximate face on casual acquaintances and that was good enough. Sherry assigned variations of speech and manner certain physical characteristics and had no doubt they were well off their mark. Not that it mattered. Face recognition was not part of Sherry’s world. She was at liberty to imagine anything she liked about the people she came in contact with infrequently. When she did become close with someone, she cared more about his or her physical reality. When she became very close, she looked at his or her face with her hands. For some unfathomable reason she wanted to see Metcalf’s face.

He was a big man. That much was obvious from the physical contact she’d had with him, especially in the limited constraints of the helicopter’s cargo bay. His chin, she thought, would be dimpled and square. His hair she imagined dark and buzzed across the scalp, his eyes were kind and blue, but for no other reason than…Suddenly she stopped, realizing she was fantasizing, and fantasizing was something Sherry Moore did not do.

“How high are we?” She spoke quickly into the headset.

“Just above sixteen thousand,” the pilot said. “We’ll be putting you down in a minute.”

“You’ve done this before?” Sherry joked.

The craft began to make an arc. She could feel the tail coming around on its axis.

“Once or twice,” the pilot said dryly.

Sherry hoped he was smiling, too.

“How many people climb Denali?” she asked, trying to keep her mind off the descent.

“About twelve hundred a year,” the pilot said.

“Most make it to the top?”

“About half.”

“Am I distracting you?”

“Not in the least.”

“Any die?”

“Five or six a year. Fifty or sixty too broken to come back and try it again.”

“How long does it take?”

“Fifteen to twenty days on average, but Denali can be a cakewalk or it can be hell. No one walks into a storm on purpose.”

“It’s impressive,” she said, “that people can do such things.”

“You know there have been blind climbers on the summit?”

“I’ve heard,” she said.

And she had. Ever since reading about Erik Weihenmayer’s summit of Everest in 2001 she’d become interested in the sport. Weihenmayer had gone on to become both a world-class climber and an athlete after losing his sight at age thirteen. He had told his interviewers after Everest that summiting was far more than a spiritual quest. Erik liked the feel of hard rock under his hands. He liked the technical challenges. He liked, he told reporters, to surround himself with competent people, the kind of people who would make him a better human being.

You didn’t have to think long on that. To be blind was not a choice. How to live and the kind of people you determined to follow was.

There was some excited radio traffic over a cockpit speaker about an airlift off the Muldrow Glacier. Something was wrong with the lift arm of a rescue sling.

“Down there?” the pilot said.

Sherry felt Metcalf lean forward. She imagined him looking out a window in the door.

“You can work with that?” Metcalf asked.

“I can get you down,” the pilot allowed.

Suddenly the vibrations in the floorboard smoothed out and the Pave Hawk began to move laterally, approaching the top of the ridge.

“I never saw anything like it,” the pilot said.

“The ice?” Metcalf asked.

“I’ve been flying this mountain for fifteen years and it’s never looked like this.”

“Tell me,” Sherry insisted.

“Everything’s glazed over. Like ocean waves frozen mid-break.”

She saw the surf breaking in her mind’s eye, a memory from her childhood in Wildwood, New Jersey, before the incident that took her sight at age five. Bluish white and elegantly curved, they would be dangerous for the rescuers to cross, she knew. This was not a place for amateurs, not a place for mistakes, and she thought once more that she was a potential liability to this man who was relying on her to save his sister. Once again she felt the obligation to qualify herself. She didn’t want to endanger anyone who was trying to get her down the side of a mountain unless he was very clear about her limitations. In spite of Brigham’s confidence in her ability, there were real-life issues to consider, the least being common sense and logic. What were the real possibilities that a man hanging upside down in a whiteout below the ridge would be lucid in the last few seconds of his life?

She pulled away the microphone from her face. “Captain Metcalf, I don’t know what Admiral Brigham told you about me, but there are things I cannot do. I’m not a mind reader. I can only see what people were thinking about a few seconds before they died. I’m not always able to see anything relevant.”

“I know what you do,” Metcalf said evenly, “and what I need when we get down there is for you to tell me what you see. I don’t care if you think it’s trivial, I don’t care if it makes sense to you or not. Don’t filter it. Tell me everything he was thinking about.”

Sherry nodded, but she clearly didn’t understand. How could this navy captain be so certain this would work?

“How long do we have?” Metcalf asked the pilot.

“Eight hours, maybe a little more.” The pilot tapped his watch. “I’ll get a refuel and wait to hear from you at basin camp.

“You and your men will have until twenty-one thirty, but then we’ve got to fly,” the pilot continued. “That’s when the window starts to come down.”

Sherry flipped open the hinged face of her watch. It was just after one
P.M
.

“Copy that, twenty-one thirty hours,” Metcalf said to his men.

Sherry could hear a change in the engine’s pitch.

“Suit up,” Metcalf told her. “We’ll be out in a minute.”

Sherry zipped her jacket to her neck and Velcroed the collar, slipped on her two pairs of glove liners, then allowed Metcalf to push on the heavy snow gloves. Her ice boots were already biting into her shins.

The helicopter thumped on hard-packed snow, lifted several inches, and spun a ninety-degree arc with skids scraping ice.

The pilot hovered the craft there, keeping its full weight off the snow. The door opened and the machine rocked as a blast of cold filled the cabin. Howling winds forced them to yell to be heard.

Metcalf took her hand and tugged before they jumped into the snow.

“Brace yourself between steps,” he yelled. “Imagine that you are walking in water, feet wide apart, and do not let go of the rope.”

She took a wide stance. Feet apart and awkwardly testing the snow, she moved one foot then the other, crampons slicing noisily through the crust of ice.

“It’s going to be hard going until we reach the edge of the ridge.”

She nodded and he slipped a harness around her back and snapped it off at her waist. “Don’t want you sliding off the edge of the mountain on your back.”

Sherry, who couldn’t have agreed more, said nothing.

The going would be twice as slow because of her. An experienced climber would have made the descent in half the time. But getting to the body was only part of the ordeal. The minute they were finished with the body, they needed to contact the search team above and get back up to the ledge. Metcalf would be bearing much of her body weight on the ascent. She couldn’t imagine the complexities of what it took to do that, but her job was to maintain balance and concentrate on what she came to do. He would take care of the rest.

“Sandstorm, this is North Sickle One,” he said, making a radio check to his men. “Do you copy?”

Sherry heard a voice come over the air. “North Sickle, you are loud and clear, over.”

Metcalf tapped Sherry’s arm gently as they began to approach the ledge. “We’re going to clip to cleats and rappel off the ridge. One of my men will keep safety lines on us until we’re over the wall, then we’ll fasten onto the fixed line. Use the toes of your boots. You’ll get used to them quick.”

Sherry nodded, wondering what she’d let herself in for this time. It would have been an understatement to allow that she had spirit—she did—and she’d been in some pretty unusual places before, like belly down on the front line of an equatorial civil war or compressed into a metal cage and lowered into a coal mine. But Sherry did not consider herself to be reckless or an adrenaline junkie. She might have overcome the fear of not being able to see, but she respected life and feared whatever a prudent person might fear. She had no death wish.

Step by step, they lowered themselves. Crampon by crampon, their boots dug into the mountainside, negotiating toeholds that were beaded with ice, rounded corners of slick granite smooth as glass, the wind bumping them on the lines as they were carefully lowered, but at last they were under the ridge and Metcalf clipped them to the wall. Then they began the slow descent down the face of granite. It took almost an hour to reach the body and when they did, Metcalf went silently to work, chipping away at the heavy cast of ice around the dead climber’s arm.

The experience had been like nothing Sherry had ever known. It was both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, the physical challenges of identifying foot-and handholds on a brittle wall of ice, the nearly intoxicating rewards of personal achievement. This was nature and self-awareness at the extreme.

Metcalf’s immediate concern was clearing the corpse’s hand of ice and getting Sherry situated next to the body, making sure she was comfortable enough on her lines so she could forget about her physical situation and focus on what she came to do. Metcalf kept chipping away with the butt of his survival knife at the man’s glove, which was hanging below his body. Once it was clear, he used a chemical pack to thaw and remove it. It took fifteen minutes before he was guiding Sherry into position alongside the inverted corpse.