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I could hear him barking at Tag to get the bird in the air no matter what, but I was sure Tag was responding with a saner head about it being a suicide mission with this horrible visibility. He was right, too. I could barely see the rock face only a few feet away from me. Wet, dense fog flowed all around me.
When Zach came back to me, he was calm and in control. He walked me through the simple process of taking another sip of my water, fishing out a granola bar from the emergency pack and eating it, and finally he asked if I needed to pee.
“What?” I asked in surprise.
“Go ahead and whip it out. When else will you get a chance to piss on a cathedral?”
“Stop making jokes, asshole. It isn’t funny,” I snapped. Besides, I didn’t need to pee and the idea of whipping out my dick in this freezing rain was not pleasant.
“Hang tight,” Zach said quickly.
“Har, har,” I said under my breath as I dangled precariously over nothing but low cloud cover.
“We just heard from base. Morrie has appendicitis. They’re taking him to Kalispell for surgery,” Zach explained.
I knew he was trying to distract me, and I was grateful for it. “Tough break. Glad you got him down.” And I was. As long as I was healthy and safely bolted in, I was still better off than he was.
But it didn’t feel that way when I started to shiver.
“Use your bivvy bag,” Zach said. “I can hear your teeth chattering.”
He still sounded like a bossy know-it-all, but I was so fucking thankful for his voice on the other end of the comms.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Want to be ready for you when you get here.”
Zach continued trying to pass the time with distracting stories, telling me about the time he and Jake had been sure they’d spotted a crocodile in the river that had run behind their house while they’d lived in a small town in Alaska. Despite my exhaustion, I couldn’t help but laugh when Zach told me how he’d tried to make a run for it when he’d been sure the crocodile was coming onshore, but his big brother had tackled him mid-flight so Jake wouldn't be left alone in the inky dark of night when they made their grand discovery. In the end, their big discovery had turned out to be nothing more than large sheets of ice breaking apart and floating downstream.
I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the soothing sound of his familiar voice, but within moments, Zach was shouting at me.
“Wake the fuck up! Do you hear me? Wake the fuck up, Lucky Reed, goddammit.”
I jerked awake and damned near scared myself shitless, grabbing for the slick rock face and knocking my hip hard into the bolt. “Shit! You scared me to death, asshole! Do you have any idea what it’s like to wake up like that?”
My heart almost hammered out of my chest, but I noticed the visibility had cleared a little bit. I could see the barest hint of the red helicopter paint across the valley through the mist.
Within minutes, it moved.
“Incoming,” Zach said. “Prepare for short-haul rescue.”
“The longline?” I asked stupidly. We’d drilled those rescues countless times over the past two weeks. Someone would hook into the stationary longline in the meadow to be hauled to a rescue site rather than rappelling out of the helicopter. It was safer in many cases. It was also used when the victim couldn’t help the ascent into the helicopter. “I can ascend,” I told him. “Just drop a line when you get here.”
“Forget it,” he said. “I’m already on the hook.”
Zach was coming to get me. I closed my eyes and breathed out.
Chapter 13
Zach
Four hours.
Lucky had been hanging from that sheer cliff face for four hours while fate kept me from being able to get to him.
It didn’t sound like much, but with every damned second that had passed, I’d felt more and more pressure squeeze around my heart until my brain and body didn’t even seem to work right together anymore.
“It’s not your fault,” Tag said for the millionth time over my headset. He thought this was simply my own guilt over stranding a trainee in the middle of a drill. As if Lucky was nothing more than one of my students. “You know as well as I do that weather happens, man. Especially up here.”
“I know that,” I said. “Just get us there.”
I hadn’t told him about the degradation of the line Lucky had been hanging from or the mysterious substance on the rope. It would only serve as a distraction, and until Lucky was back safely on the ground, we couldn’t afford any distractions.
Tag’s approach was careful and deliberate as usual, but it seemed to go in slow motion. When I finally got close enough to lock eyes with Lucky, I wanted to shout with joy.
