Roz Fox - Her Mistletoe Miracle

Mick’s fingers stilled instantly. He shrugged off the way she’d mistaken him for Jess, and did his best to treat her more gently as he placed her flat on her back. She let out another ragged cry as her eyes went back in her head. She’d blacked out again. He rolled two additional blankets lengthwise to stabilize her hips, then covered her from neck to toe with another. Though his own hands ached with the cold, he looped straps around her waist, hips and ankles, and buckled her firmly on the litter. Mick glanced up as the man in the ball cap, Roger, hoisted himself over the ledge of the crevasse with a lot of help from Chuck Hutton. Roger swayed unsteadily and suddenly bent at the waist and vomited all over the snow.

Rising, and ignoring the stab to his bad hip, Mick tripped over Norm as together they converged on the pair standing next to the crevasse.

Roger managed a shaky, “Jess is d…de…dead. I think he br…broke his neck in the fall.” With a cry, Roger grabbed the front of Chuck’s jacket. “I told him two hours out that we should pack it in and go home. But no, the macho asshole called me a wimp. It could’ve been you, or me, or any of us dead at the bottom of that hole!”

Mick sensed Roger was a blip on the radar away from hysteria. He’d seen it in combat with men forced to face their own mortality. Roughly, he broke Roger’s grip on Chuck, who shot Mick a grateful, ashen-faced nod.

“We’ve got to bring him up,” Mick commanded, fighting his reeling thoughts. He knew he sounded harsh and unfeeling as he called upon his military training. “I’ve got a tarp in the aircraft we can wrap him in. I’ll have to leave…uh…the body with you. The rangers are bringing a toboggan.” Mick broke off. “We’ve gotta work fast. I have two injured women needing medical attention. Norm and Chuck, help me carry Hana to the Huey. If she wakes up and asks, don’t say a word about Jess.”

The men moved like zombies. Mick reminded Chuck, “I’ll leave blankets and hot coffee. Pitch a tent and crawl inside out of the weather until the rangers arrive. Keep a light on so they can spot you in the dark. They estimated reaching here between eleven and midnight.”

“I’m not waiting with any dead body. You can fly us all out.” Roger latched on to Mick’s throat. “I’ve seen war movies. A chopper the size of yours can haul a platoon. You’re not leaving us here to freeze and die like Jess.”

Up close, Mick could see how young Roger was—eighteen or nineteen. Which didn’t make him less of a threat. In his current state of mind, the kid could easily do something stupid that would permanently ground the Huey.

Mick tried to reason with him. “Under normal circumstances the Huey could carry that kind of a payload. Mine’s been renovated to haul freight. In this weather, the extra weight puts me in danger of crashing and killing us all.”

“I’m not staying here.” Roger tightened his choke hold on Mick. Norm dropped his coffee, splashing hot liquid across the snow as he leaped forward to pull Roger off Mick. But the younger man wasn’t easily dislodged.

Mick gagged as they struggled. He tried, but was unable to gain solid footing in the slippery snow. He’d seen men go temporarily insane under fire. To Roger, this mountain was the enemy, and Mick’s helicopter represented safe passage out.

Norm hooked Roger under both arms, breaking his grip, as Chuck hauled back and decked the kid with a roundhouse punch. As quickly as he’d attacked Mick, Roger sagged to his knees, leaving Norm grappling with his dead weight.

“Jeez, Chuck, why’d you hit him so hard? He’s out cold,” Norm yelled.

Chuck began to look wild-eyed himself. “I just reacted, man.” He flexed his hands nervously.

Mick rubbed his throat. “He’ll be okay. I owe you guys. I wish I could take everyone, but I think I’ll be lucky to get the injured out.” Mick relieved Norm of the young man, and deposited Roger’s limp body on a soft pile of blankets. “He’ll be woozy for a while after he wakes up. Listen, the rangers will rescue you. And if you care at all about Hana and Kari, help me get Hana into the chopper and out of this weather. Then…I’ll lend a hand with…uh…Jess.”

As they lifted the litter Hana began to thrash about and talk nonsense. Although he hated having to leave Kari alone with her, Mick felt obligated to help with Jess.

No one wanted to go into the pit again, but because Norm was the lightest, he was chosen to be roped down. Mick and Chuck lowered him in silence. Bringing up a body wasn’t a chore any of them wanted. But it had to be done. The process took longer than Mick had judged, because he had to keep prodding Chuck to pull on his rope. Once they had the body up, Chuck and Norm were so rattled, erecting the tents fell to Mick. The other men didn’t understand why Mick demanded two of their tents, and he wasn’t about to spell out for them that Jess needed to be under cover because of wolves and other predators.

Long shadows had slipped across the eerily silent clearing by the time Mick finished and flatly declared, “Look, I’ve gotta take off.” Mick shook hands with first Norm then Chuck. As he left the site, the men dragged Roger, who had begun to stir, into the larger of the two tents. Mick knew they didn’t want him to leave, but it was now or never.

Kari was gritting her teeth in pain, and Hana looked like death waiting in the wings.

Mick hadn’t totally shut down the rotors, hoping to keep them from freezing up. Still, as he tried to lift off, the escalating wind was determined to drive him back into the hillside. He waged a battle of determination in his head while steadily increasing power to the rotors.

Sweat popped out on his brow and several drops slid down his nose as the tail rotor caught the downdraft and the main body of the aircraft bucked and pitched. He thought he was a goner.

Both women screamed, nearly bursting Mick’s eardrums. He’d outfitted them with headsets to minimize the chopper noise, and also as a means to communicate with them if they panicked. Kari had resisted being buckled on a stretcher, but she couldn’t get up to sit in the copilot’s seat, so Mick had insisted on strapping her in. Because Hana had thrashed about earlier, Mick worried she’d break her restraints now or in flight.

He recognized that this wasn’t the safest way to carry injured passengers on a two-hour flight. But he’d come this far, and Hana was alive. She’d said something the other day that stuck with Mick. Or rather, it was something she’d implied—a lot of people in Hana Egan’s life had let her down. By damn, he didn’t intend to be another person who failed her.

A giant sucking sound rent the air. The big helicopter popped loose from the stranglehold of the downdrafts and shot up and away from the side hill like a cork exploding from a champagne bottle. Mick’s lungs eased as he let out a breath.

“Mick?” Kari’s voice spoke urgently in his ear. “I felt the wall behind me rattle. What’s wrong? Are we going down?” Fear made her voice shrill.

“Relax, Kari. Everything’s fine,” he said, hoping she couldn’t see him shake out a handkerchief and mop his forehead. “How did Hana deal with liftoff?”

“Fine, I guess. God, I hurt everywhere from all the shaking.”

“Sorry. I wish I had more pillows.”

She said nothing, which was okay with Mick. He wanted to radio the ranger station and let someone there know his passengers’ names and his destination. He’d also like them to alert Wylie’s rescue party as to what they’d find at the end of their trek, but that wasn’t the way Kari and Hana should learn what happened to Jess.

Trudy Morgenthal, the regular dispatcher, picked up Mick’s call to headquarters. “Nice of you to touch base at long last, Callen. You’ve got everyone in a tizzy. And in Marlee’s condition, a tizzy’s the last thing she needs.”