The engine finally died when it became starved for fuel. The sound of the chopper’s frenzied destruction was replaced by the noise of the storm’s full force. It assaulted Anika’s ears like a hurricane, with hail-size chunks of ice rattling against the fuselage. Battered but unhurt, she began to shift bundles of clothes and boxes of food off of her. It seemed that the more she moved, the more the gear shifted and wedged around her. It was like trying to dig in quicksand. The agony radiating from her back wasn’t helping. Then she remembered she hadn’t heard anything from the pilot.
“Hello!” she called. “Are you okay?”
She got no response and called again and again, raising her voice until she was shrieking and tears were spilling down her cheeks.
“Get a grip on yourself, AK,” she said aloud, wiping her eyes. “He’s gone.”
This time she attacked the pile of equipment with deliberation, thinking through each move before executing it. There was a small amount of light spilling from the cockpit, and she balanced her need for caution with the urgency to get to the radios. When the batteries died, so would her chance of contacting the base camp.
Twenty minutes later, with cargo balanced precariously around her, Anika was almost free when the cockpit lights faded to nothing. Darkness enveloped her. She had to fight to keep panic at bay and was succeeding when a gust of wind slammed into the chopper, upsetting its center of gravity enough to topple the cargo back on top of her.
This time she could not stop the tears. They came in salty waves even as she again began to work, her jaw clamped tight to prevent her teeth from chattering. Without power, the radios were worthless. There was no need to move from where she sat, since there was little chance of a rescue. The moment of pessimism passed and left her infuriated with herself. She would not give up. Life was too precious to squander because of personal weakness.
It took another hour to extricate herself from the helicopter. Anika confirmed that the pilot was indeed dead — killed by the piece of rotor blade that had narrowly missed her — and fired the last flare into the darkness. On her walk around the chopper, she didn’t smell any fuel and assumed the self-sealing fuel bladders had not ruptured. She knew her luck was still holding when she found cans of jellied cooking fuel to keep herself warm.
Propped up in the hold, Anika Klein tucked her head into her arms and prepared to wait out the storm. She had to remain awake so she could light new cans of fuel when they went out, but the struggle became too much after only half an hour. Even as the first can guttered to a weak blue flame, her eyes closed. She jerked herself upright, cursing her weakness, and lit another one.
Her exhaustion was deeper than simple fatigue. She fingered the knot on her head again and decided that she had a mild concussion. Hope of rescue was the only thing keeping her going. It would be so easy to just lie back and let the inevitable overcome her.
“To sleep is to die,” she said aloud, mesmerized by the little tin of fire next to her. “To sleep is to die.”
She kept repeating the mantra, unaware that each utterance was a bit quieter, her voice more slurred and the pauses longer. She fell asleep with only ten minutes of heat remaining. When that second can burned out, the temperature in the chopper crashed to the ambient temperature of the Greenland ice sheet: minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit — nearly fifty degrees below freezing.
Something woke her an hour later. She found frost coating the front of her parka, and her body had stiffened. She didn’t dare open her eyes to look at her hands. She could feel they were frostbitten, as were her ears, the tip of her nose, and her cheeks. She felt more tired than she could possibly imagine and knew that she was dying. She’d survived the crash and the first few critical hours only to succumb to exposure.
She sniffled once and winced. Her nasal membranes were frozen. Still, she could detect a faint odor, a musky fragrance that was completely out of place with her predicament. It smelled like a man’s aftershave, something subtly masculine and diluted with the scent of the wearer himself. Anika smiled at the smell. It was like a last treat before she died.
“If you don’t mind me saying, Dr. Klein, your smile makes you look like a pixie.”
The voice galvanized her. She opened her eyes and saw a grinning man next to her. He had entered through the shattered cockpit. The noise she had heard must have been him crawling into the hold. She was too emotionally wasted to react to his presence. She merely looked at him in the glow from his flashlight, studying the planes of his face and how his gray eyes were shielded by dark brows. Ice glittered in his hair like gems. He was handsome in every sense of the word.
“Looks like you’ve built quite a nest for yourself in here,” the man said, noting the blankets piled on top of her and the cans of Sterno she’d neglected to keep lit. “If you want to stay, I’ll understand, but I think you’d be more comfortable in the Land Cruiser. The heater’s cranked and the base camp is only about an hour away.”
“Who are you?” Anika managed to ask.
“Philip Mercer at your service. Other than that touch of frostbite on your face, are you all right?”
Anika was thankful that her face was frozen so she could not show her shock. This was the very man she was looking for! Yet she was in no condition to question him. She had no idea who he was or whose side he was on. But if he wanted her dead, he wouldn’t have driven through the storm to rescue her. Meekly she held out a hand. When she tried to say thanks, her lips couldn’t form the word.
A minute later, Mercer had lifted her from the chopper and led her to where the Toyota was idling nearby. He got her buckled into the passenger seat before swinging around to the driver’s side. By the time he stepped into the rugged, cross-country vehicle, Anika was sound asleep, her head cocooned in the hood of her parka.
Without the need to replace a tire that had shredded about two miles from where he’d seen Anika fire the second flare, and with the storm all but over, Mercer made it back to the camp much quicker than the drive out. The whole time he was behind the wheel, he couldn’t get the gratified smile off his face. Anika Klein would not join the list of people he felt he had failed.
The following morning, Mercer roused Ira Lasko at sunup, and the two of them commandeered one of the Sno-Cats to return to the site of the crash. The couple hours of sleep had done nothing to alleviate his exhaustion, so he let the former submariner drive while he dozed in the passenger seat. Ira navigated by driving in Mercer’s tire prints from the night before, which were already being obscured by the constant wind. Because the tracked vehicle was much slower than the Land Cruiser, it took them two hours to reach the downed helicopter.
“We there yet?” Mercer asked, blinking sleep from his eyes when Ira tapped him on the shoulder.
“I told you to pee before we left, young man,” Ira quipped.
“I didn’t have to then.”
The humor vanished from Ira’s voice when they saw the helicopter sitting forlornly on the ice like an overturned insect. “Hard to believe anyone survived that.”
Mercer just grunted and opened the ’Cat’s door. Other than a few bits of debris, the snow around the crash site was a clean white blanket that hid the violence of what had happened. But when he looked closer, Mercer saw footprints that circled the downed helo and then vanished off to the north. For a split second he thought that the pilot hadn’t been killed in the crash and he had abandoned him out here last night.
He knew that couldn’t be true. He had seen the chunk of rotor blade sticking through the man’s neck and the frozen blood that coated his flight suit. The pilot had been dead long before he’d found the chopper. Because the footprints were nearly buried by snow he couldn’t tell where they originated or what size feet had made them. It was possible Anika Klein had made them, but that made as much sense as the dead pilot pulling a Lazarus act. She had been near death herself.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Ira asked when he saw what Mercer was studying.
“I don’t know what I’m thinking,” Mercer admitted. “Did someone beat us out here this morning to check out the crash?”
“I didn’t see any tracks besides yours, but it’s possible. Maybe they left right after you got back.”
“But why?” The pilot’s body was still strapped in his seat, his recovery being the principal reason Mercer and Ira had come out.
“Something on the chopper they didn’t want discovered?” Ira offered.
Lifting his feet to clear the powdery snow accumulated on the ground, Mercer started following the trail of prints. He was back at the crash site in just a few minutes. “They disappear about fifty yards away, blown clean by the wind.”
“What about a stowaway?”
