Denali Dreams (29 page)

Well, at least now he knew how she really felt.

He stomped into his house, flipped on the light, and spotted his gear. He let out a long sigh. A month on the High One would give him plenty of time to cool off. Get over her.

He shed his boots and jacket then dropped onto the bed. “Yeah, keep telling yourself that.”

I
t’d been three weeks since she’d taken the long road home. Walking anywhere in Talkeetna didn’t take long, but that road away from Logan felt like hours. That kiss, Logan’s tenderness, awakened what had died in her.

Startling. Terrifying. Beautiful.

Deline suppressed a smile as she stepped from the TFAT office, hands in her lightweight jacket. Though she knew he thought she was walking away for good, she’d just needed time to sort through it, figure out what she felt.

No, not true. She really had to stop lying to herself.

“I know exactly what I feel when it comes to Logan Knox.” Warmth. Happiness. Joy …

“You gotta be kidding me.”

Deline’s hiking boot hit the dirt just as the man’s voice registered. Roger Bender. Hauling in a breath, she took a step back, up onto the porch. Steeled herself as he came around the corner, his attention on his cell phone conversation.

“What do you mean? I thought you said those rangers had backup.” He grunted. “Yeah, well, suits him right.” He snorted. “Fine, I’ll tell her, but I’m not doing your dirty work anymore, Curt.”

Deline felt fury color her red. She looked over her shoulder. Curt wasn’t in the office.

Roger Bender met her gaze. “Gotta go.” He ended the call. “Deline! Thank God, I found you!”

She recoiled at his touch. “Get away from me.”

“Now be nice. Curt asked me to find you, and I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but that ranger fella you took a shine to is in trouble.”

“Logan.”

A smile, a greedy, slimy smile, filled his face. “That’s the one. He got in trouble up there. I don’t know what. Curt was too frantic. Said to get you up in there, help them search. If they don’t get him off the mountain he’s going to die.”

Trembling, she dared not believe this man. But … what if it was true? She turned and rushed into the office.

“Where’s Curt?”

One of the new hires shrugged. “Search and rescue, I think.”

Breath backed into her throat, Deline threw herself out the door. Sprinted over the tarmac to her Otter, trailed by a terrible, terrible feeling.

Thoughts of Deline and her soft kiss haunted his dreams that night and for the next week, chased him up onto the mountain. Up to High Camp. Through his patrols with the volunteers. Through a rescue. Through his duties—nothing like making sure people were using their CMCs, leaving the Alaska Range clean for those who came behind.

Why didn’t she like him? What was it about him that kept her from letting things happen? He saw the way she looked at him. As if it pained her to like him. At High Camp for a week and still moping around over Deline. Fourteen thousand, two hundred feet, and he couldn’t get away from her or the memories of that night at Christiansen Lake. That kiss.
Am I that pathetic?

To himself, he muttered, “Yeah, you are.”

“What’s that?” Dr. Reginald Malcolm asked as he stirred a pot early that morning. Malcolm had come from Colombia to volunteer—it was as much adrenaline as it was experience that compelled the burly man. Despite his age, the doctor was in peak physical shape.

“Nothing.” Logan snapped out of the mental fog and focused on patrolling.
Shake it off. Get your head in the game. Or you’ll end up in a crevasse the way you found David.

He could really use his friend right now. To talk to. To bounce this insanity off of.

Logan trudged to the kitchen tent and nodded at the other ranger working with him—Josh. The normally brilliant sun shielded itself with a thick storm cloud.

“Looks ominous,” Josh said as he handed a bowl to Logan.

Cradling the soup that wafted the warm, delicious scent of chicken and broth, Logan sat on the ice bench. “Yeah, Deanna told me a nasty one was coming in.” It was his curse, he guessed, for pushing things too far too fast with Deline. Why was it he could save lives and be a hero on the mountain but down there, where the air and people were normal, he couldn’t even save face? “I’d hoped the storm would change its mind.”

Josh laughed.

Logan peered out the tent, amazed at God’s creation. Smooth glittering tufts stretched over the pristine landscape. Jagged peaks thrust up out of the sunset-softened snow. Clouds enshrouded Mt. Foraker. Serene and stunning. Brutal and beautiful. Fierce and forbidding.

Just like Deline.

After cleaning up to erase as much carbon imprint as possible, Logan trekked out of the tent.

Laughter carried from one of the tents, and he spotted a team who’d spent yesterday ferrying their equipment back and forth to seventeen hundred. One of the men had taken a tumble and wrenched his ankle. Logan and his patrol had come upon him and the other three with him shortly after. The guy vowed, however, he wasn’t turning back. Said he’d take a day to give his ankle time to rest, but he wasn’t descending without summiting first.
“I’m too close to give up now.”

Hands in his ranger jacket, Logan stood staring up at the last three thousand feet of Denali. A perfect parallel to his relationship with Deline. The climb behind him had been the last two years. Summiting Denali was as much a feat as it would be to summit a relationship with Deline Tsosie.

And like the mountaineer, Logan wasn’t going to give up. Months ago, he realized she was the girl of his dreams. A bit out of his league, if anyone asked him, but she was the one he wanted. He’d consider it the ultimate prize to win her heart. He sent up a prayer, asking God for one chance, one opportunity to find out if Deline would accept him.

Exhausted after another patrol of checking the CMCs and monitoring hikers and helping in any fashion necessary, Logan dropped into his bedroll. Closed his eyes and let the numbing silence and cold embrace him.

Somewhere in the howling wind, a noise squawked.

Logan eased up, confused. His mind blurred.

The noise again.

Sat phone!

Logan grabbed it from the ice shelf and answered, “Ranger Knox.”

“Logan!” Deanna’s shaky, frantic voice drew him up. Sitting, he waited for her to continue. “Logan, it’s Deanna.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Have you seen Deline?”

His gaze darted back and forth. “Deanna, did you forget? I’m at fourteen hundred.”

“I know! I know—she was doing a tour, radioed in and said something was wrong.”

On his knees, heart pounding, Logan yanked the tent’s zipper.

Snow and ice barreled in. He ripped it closed.

“What’re you saying?” he asked, her panic now tangible in his own body.

“Radar shows nothing, Logan. She went down. We lost her.”

I
t’d been too easy. So easy, he felt guilty.

But she’d taken the bait like a starving rat. Gobbled it right up. Hopped in her plane and lifted into the skies … never to be seen again.

He wasn’t proud of what he’d done. Not really. She’d been a nice girl. Pretty, even. But she wouldn’t give up that fool notion of taking over TFAT.
He
needed that business. She didn’t. She wanted it, but she didn’t need it. Not the way he did.

She pushed me to do this.

Hadn’t even noticed the tampering he’d done. She’d get up there, think she was on some rescue mission, then … “Breaking news at six!” he exclaimed with a chuckle.

“Roger Bender.”

Over his shoulder, Roger saw the sheriff stalking toward him, one hand hovering over his holstered weapon.

Weightlessness coupled with deadly silence engulfed her. She attempted to restart the engines. Eyes glued to the rapidly slowing propeller that went from looking like a heat plume in front of the Otter to a slowing ceiling fan blade.

“Mayday! Mayday! This is November 5-6-2 Tango Foxtrot. Having trouble—”

A wind gust caught her. Threw her Otter sideways. With no engines she had no control. Panic thrummed against the silent scream.

“Mayday! Mayday! This is November 5-6-2 Tango Foxtrot—”

“November 5-6-2, this is Control. What is the problem?”

“I—” Deline bit off the sentence as she saw the sheer granite relief of Ruth’s Gorge storming toward her. “Oh, God, help!”

“November 5-6-2! Deline—talk to us.”

Hearing her voice name snapped Deline back to the present. “I … engines … something’s wrong. Losing altitude.”

And fast. The plane glided down … down … no control … right toward a ten-thousand-foot wall of granite. “Great Gorge … not—”

A loud moaning vibrated through the hull. Deline looked over her shoulder. The left wing sheared off. The plane canted.

Glacier and granite rushed up at her.

Pop!

Deline jolted upward.

Pain howled. She threw herself back with a scream, clamping a hand over her left leg. Her stomach threatened to heave against the agony and smell of fuel mixed with blood. Something pressed into her face—the headset. She pushed it off with a grunt. Feeling suffocated, trapped, upside down …

Her mind whiplashed as her awareness surged to the forefront. The plane … it sat tilted. The right wing propped against something. The weight of sitting at an odd angle—for however long she’d been here unconscious—proved painful. Her shoulder and leg pulsed a fresh wave of pain with each heartbeat.

Have to get out of here.
Through the fiery shards and nausea, she groped for the headset that clattered against fiberglass and steel. “November …” It hurt to talk. What was she saying? Her code—ID—whatever. “This is … November 5-6-2 Tango Foxtrot….” She panted against the exertion.

Nothing. Not static. Not anything … why wasn’t it working?

She slumped back … sideways, bracing herself as she remembered what happened. The conversation with Roger Bender. His warnings that Logan had been badly injured, that Curt wanted her to fly up to retrieve him. That she had to get him off the mountain or he’d die. Of what happened.

Wet and hot, her thigh felt … weird.
What …?
She peered down and grimaced. Her breakfast came hurtling back up. She hurled to the right, all over the passenger seat that now lay crumpled and littered with glass.

Must move. Get out.
She released her harness and tried to extract herself without falling. Gravity exerted its force. Her leg slipped. Fire lit through her muscles. And shoulder. She couldn’t give in to it. Had to get out. Carefully, she lowered herself.

Fire lit down her leg. And shoulder.

Her other arm collapsed.

She dropped. Pitched forward. Slid toward the back of the Otter.

She hit her head. So hard her teeth clamped. Cold pain shocked her body. Sent her reeling back into blackness.

W
ind ripped at Logan. The driving snow taunted him. Dared him to continue the rescue mission. Hoodie up, mouth and nose covered, he used the poles to probe for crevasses and keep moving forward. The weather hadn’t devolved into a storm, but the snow had proven relentless, as if Denali were as angry as Logan that Deline had crashed. TFAT couldn’t do flyovers because a lenticular cloud had formed around the peak, making it impossible to see. The only option was to climb it. Find her.

Roped up with Josh and the patrol volunteers, he skied in the direction her plane would have most likely gone, judging from the known facts. Karon said climbers on Ruth’s Glacier saw an Otter’s wing get sheared off as it glided northeast until it vanished over the amphitheater and into a cloud. That meant, if his guess was right—and he hoped it wasn’t—the normal flight path would take her right around to the Wickersham Wall.

Which apparently matched the last communication the control tower had with Deline, who’d mentioned the Great Gorge. Freezing tundra. Granite walls. The mental image of her plane collapsing accordion-style against those sheer reliefs propelled him onward. A mile or so north of Camp 3, they were at the Edge of the World. His breath caught every time he saw it, but right now—Deline was all he cared about.