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“Stop that,” Marsh barked. “You’re fucking distracting me.”
When she kept retching, he reached over and whacked on the back of her head. The plane dipped and quivered, and suddenly they were heading in a different direction.
Marsh cursed and worked on regaining control of the plane.
Moving so slowly she wanted to scream, Elias turned the handle and opened the cubby. He took out a bag and handed it to her. As she retched into it, she pointed a flailing elbow at the spray can. Would he understand? Would her gesture penetrate the haze of the sedative he’d been given?
Outside the plane, she saw the granite face of a sharp peak slide past, then treetops. They were about to land. Their time for grabbing potential weapons was almost up. She retched again, using her head to point at the spray can.
Elias wrapped his hand around it and tucked it under his jacket.
Thank God.
She settled back in her seat with a groan, still holding the empty airsickness bag. “False alarm. But at least I’m ready if you can’t make a smooth landing.”
“We have to land on a fucking glacier now. This is on you.”
“A what?”
Wildly, she looked out the window, and sure enough, they were heading directly for what must be the Korch Glacier. She knew the ice fields that fed the Korch extended for many miles into the frozen wilderness. From Firelight Ridge, only a piece of it was visible. How far deep into the glacier were they? How close to the Ice Falls?
“You can’t land on a glacier.” Surely that wasn’t possible. What if they hit a crevasse? They could tumble deep into the ice and never be seen again.
“It’s better than landing in the trees,” Marsh growled. “You made me miss my coordinates, and we’re almost out of fuel.”
“But—”
“This was your doing. You should have stayed out of our business. Now shut up and hang on.”
She clutched the grab bar with both hands and considered closing her eyes and contemplating weighty things like her purpose in life, and had she fulfilled it, and what could she do better if she, by some miracle, survived this. But she had to watch, couldn’t tear her gaze away from the vast icy surface looming ahead of them.
It was so uneven, with cracks and ice boulders and ice gravel and actual gravel and swirls and gaps and flashes of crystalline blue and dirty gray. She’d never thought much about ice before, except for the smooth cubes in her drinks, or the slick sidewalks after a freeze. This glacial ice was an entirely different beast, a mile thick, its surface roughened and scarred by its long journey carving its way through mountains.
She could relate to that, she thought almost hysterically. I’ve carved through mountains too. I’m scarred too.
They were about fifty feet above the surface when she spotted a yawning gap in the ice. “Crevasse,” she gasped. “On the right.”
Marsh jerked to the left. A hundred feet. Eighty. Forgetting all about her airsickness, she scanned for more crevasses and boulders. A light ice mist threaded across the surface. What was it hiding? Were they about to slide headlong off a cliff of ice, or into one of those misshapen ice formations as big as houses?
Her stomach clenched as they touched down with a crunching, grinding sound, like a million ice cubes tossed into a wood chipper. The plane bounced and bumped across the rocky surface. It took all of Jimmy Marsh’s strength to keep the wings mostly level while he steered toward the clearest path across the ice. They hurtled forward, the wheels spraying ice and rocks that made Molly cringe away from the window.
And then, unbelievably, miraculously, they came to a stop.
On a glacier.
Far from anything familiar.
37
Sam tracked down Agent Bradley at the local ATF headquarters, where he and several other agents were monitoring reports from the raid going on at the Chilkoots’ place.
He had to physically haul the agent to his feet—and get several federally issued firearms pointed at him—to get the man’s attention.
“They took my plane and my…Molly. And they took Elias back. This is on you. You said he’d be safe.”
“I know. I know. Let me go.”
Sam released his grip on the agent’s jacket. “You know?”
