Page 1 of Mountain Shadow

1

Jens

There was blood everywhere. Though in his ten years with the German Special Forces Command, Jens Melkopf had seen death up close multiple times, this scene was as macabre as any he remembered.

There was no need to check on cause of death for the pilot, who’d died impaled on the enormous branch that had crashed through the windshield.

Judging by its position, and by the amount of blood that had congealed around the corpse, the branch had pierced the man’s intestines. Had the branch gone in a few inches higher, it would have pierced his heart, and death would have been almost instantaneous. Instead, he’d bled to death slowly, likely over a period of a couple hours.

Swoosh.

Wind and snow flew in through the broken plexiglass windshield. Though it was late May already, snow wasn’t uncommon this high in the mountains.

Looking at the bloody instrument panel, Jens wondered what had caused the small aircraft to crash—but finding that out would be a job for a team of investigators who’d eventually comb through the scene. Jens and his team were search & rescue specialists, and so far it didn’t look like there was much for them to do here.

Jens’s eye was drawn to somebody moving outside. It was Kat—the pilot was pacing next to the rescue helicopter she’d flown them in. Her belly was already starting to round with the babies she and her boyfriend, Luc, were expecting, but her doctor had cleared her to keep flying for a couple of weeks longer. They’d need a new pilot for the duration of Kat’s maternity leave—though he’d never voice the thought out loud, Jens thought it unlikely that whoever they found would be as good a pilot as Kat.

Drake’s deep voice called out from the back of the aircraft.

“There’s another dead body back here, Jens.”

Giving the pilot one last look, Jens made his way out of the cockpit. He sidestepped around the debris, careful to disturb things as little as possible. He didn’t want to make things harder for the investigating team.

The first two rows of seats were crumpled beyond recognition, but the third and fourth rows were intact. There was a dead man sitting in the seat closest to the window. He had jet black hair and a full, thick beard. From the way his head hung, it was clear his neck had been broken on impact.

Drake snapped on a pair of gloves and checked through the man’s coat pockets.

“He doesn’t have any ID on him.”

“The pilot didn’t have any either.”

A bright green jacket below the seat next to the body caught Jens’s attention.

“Check this out. There’s another coat down there.”

“And the dead guy’s wearing his coat. So either the pilot left his coat back here …”

“… or else we’re missing a body,” Damien completed. Their boss’s large shadow filled the doorway. Dark sunglasses covered his eyes, but there was no mistaking the frown on his face.

As they walked back outside, Damien barked into his headpiece. “Tell the colonel there are two bodies. The pilot and a passenger. No ID on either of them, no flight plan or any sign of where they were heading. Sure,” Damien sighed. “I’ll hold. Put the colonel on.” He signaled to Drake, his second-in-command, to join him.

Jens walked past them. He didn’t envy Damien and Drake the conversation—the colonel wouldn’t be happy about the unidentified aircraft.

The Mont Blanc Search & Rescue team had heard about the plane crash from a group of hikers who’d seen it go down. Though it was hard to tell distance in the mountains, the hikers had done a reasonable job of pinpointing the general region. With some careful flying on Kat’s part, it’d only taken the team a couple of hours to find the wreck.

Outside the aircraft, Jens breathed in the icy mountain air gratefully. He’d almost forgotten what death smelled like when it happened in such close quarters.

“Uh, Jens?” Kat said, speaking loudly to be heard over the roaring wind. She pointed behind the aircraft at something she was seeing from her higher vantage point.

Jens lifted his Julbo glacier glasses. There, on the ground, he saw what the fresh snow had been hiding—faint tracks of something heavy that had been dragged away from the aircraft.

Or of someone who’d dragged himself along the ground.

Jens started following the tracks. He heard Kat scrambling down after him.

“Wait for me.”

Icy snow pummelled Jens in the face. A storm was brewing.