Northern Lights

happens." As the sun speared up, she took sunglasses out of her pocket and put them on. Below, she saw the snake of dogsled trails, spirals of chimney smoke, a wedge of trees, a rise of land. She used the landmarks as much as her gauges.
    "Binoculars in the compartment there," she told him. And made a small adjustment in the propeller pitch, eased the throttle forward.
    "I brought my own." He unzipped his parka, pulled them out from where they hung around his neck. "Tell me where to look."
    "If they attempted a climb up the south face, they'd've been dumped off on the Sun Glacier."
    "Dumped off ? By who?"
    "That's a mystery, isn't it?" Her jaw set. "Some yahoo too interested in money to blow them off. A lot of people have planes, and a lot of people fly them. It doesn't make them pilots. Whoever it was didn't report them when the storm came through and sure as hell didn't pick them back up."
    "Fucking crazy."
    "It's all right to be crazy, it's not all right to be stupid. And that's the category this falls into. Air's going to get rougher when we hit the mountains."
    "Don't say hit and mountain in the same sentence."
    He looked down—a slice of trees, an ocean of snow, a plate of ice that was a lake, a huddle of perhaps six cabins all appearing, disappearing through clouds. It should have seemed barren, stark, and instead it was stunning. The sky was already going that deep, hard blue, with the cruel elegance of the mountains etched over it.
    He thought of three boys trapped in that cruelty for six days.
    She banked, sharp right, and he had to reach deep inside for the grit just to keep his eyes open. The mountains, blue and white and monstrous, swallowed the view. She dipped through a gap, and all he could see, on either side, was rock and ice and death.
    Over the whine of the engines, he heard something like thunder. And saw a tsunami of snow burst from the mountain.
    "What the—"
    "Avalanche." Her voice was utterly calm as the plane began to shake. "You're going to want to hold on."
    It gushed, white over white over white, an iced volcano erupting, charging the air with the roar of a thousand runaway trains while the plane ping-ponged right, left, up, down.
    He thought he heard Meg curse, and what sounded like antiaircraft fire beat against the plane. The storm that vomited out of the mountain spewed bits of debris over the windscreen. But it wasn't fear that rushed into him. It was awe.
    Metal pinged and rang as bullets of ice and rock struck the plane. Wind dragged at it, yanked at it, pelted it until it seemed inevitable they would crash into the cliff face or simply be smashed apart by shrapnel.
    Then they were cruising between walls of ice, over a narrow, frozen valley and into the blue.
    "Kiss my ass!" She let out a whoop, threw her head back and laughed. " That was a ride."
    "Awesome," Nate agreed, and twisted in his seat, trying to turn enough to see the rest of the show. "I've never seen anything like it."
    "Mountains are moody. You never know when they're going to take a shot." She slid her gaze toward him. "You're pretty cool under fire, chief."
    "You, too." He settled back in his seat. And wondered if his pounding heart had broken any of his ribs. "So . . . come here often?"
    "Every chance I get. You can start making use of those binocs. We've got a lot of area to cover, and we won't be the only ones covering it. Keep a sharp eye." She fixed on headphones. "I'll be in communication with control."
    "Where do I aim my sharp eye?"
    "There." She lifted her chin. "One o'clock."
    Compared to Denali, it seemed almost tame, and its beauty somewhat ordinary beside The Mountain's magnificence. There were smaller peaks ranging between what they called No Name and Denali, and there were larger, rolling back, spearing up, all in a jagged, layered wall against the sky.
    "How big is it?"
    "Twelve thousand and change. A good, challenging climb in April or May, trickier, but not impossible in the winter. Unless you're a group of college kids on a lark, then it's next to suicide. We find out who transported three underage kids, dumped them out in January, there'll be hell to pay."
    He knew that tone of voice—flat, emotionless. "You think they're dead."
    "Oh, yeah."
    "But you're here anyway."
    "Won't be the first time I've looked for bodies—or found them." She thought of the supplies and gear in the plane. Emergency rations, medical supplies, thermal blankets. And prayed there would be cause to use them.
    "Look for