Lost Girls Read Online Free Page B

craft began to make an arc. She could feel the tail coming around on its axis.
    “Once or twice,” the pilot said dryly.
    Sherry hoped he was smiling, too.
    “How many people climb Denali?” she asked, trying to keep her mind off the descent.
    “About twelve hundred a year,” the pilot said.
    “Most make it to the top?”
    “About half.”
    “Am I distracting you?”
    “Not in the least.”
    “Any die?”
    “Five or six a year. Fifty or sixty too broken to come back and try it again.”
    “How long does it take?”
    “Fifteen to twenty days on average, but Denali can be a cakewalk or it can be hell. No one walks into a storm on purpose.”
    “It’s impressive,” she said, “that people can do such things.”
    “You know there have been blind climbers on the summit?”
    “I’ve heard,” she said.
    And she had. Ever since reading about Erik Weihenmayer’s summit of Everest in 2001 she’d become interested in the sport. Weihenmayer had gone on to become both a world-class climber and an athlete after losing his sight at age thirteen. He had told his interviewers after Everest that summiting was far more than a spiritual quest. Erik liked the feel of hard rock under his hands. He liked the technical challenges. He liked, he told reporters, to surround himself with competent people, the kind of people who would make him a better human being.
    You didn’t have to think long on that. To be blind was not a choice. How to live and the kind of people you determined to follow was.
    There was some excited radio traffic over a cockpit speaker about an airlift off the Muldrow Glacier. Something was wrong with the lift arm of a rescue sling.
    “Down there?” the pilot said.
    Sherry felt Metcalf lean forward. She imagined him looking out a window in the door.
    “You can work with that?” Metcalf asked.
    “I can get you down,” the pilot allowed.
    Suddenly the vibrations in the floorboard smoothed out and the Pave Hawk began to move laterally, approaching the top of the ridge.
    “I never saw anything like it,” the pilot said.
    “The ice?” Metcalf asked.
    “I’ve been flying this mountain for fifteen years and it’s never looked like this.”
    “Tell me,” Sherry insisted.
    “Everything’s glazed over. Like ocean waves frozen mid-break.”
    She saw the surf breaking in her mind’s eye, a memory from her childhood in Wildwood, New Jersey, before the incident that took her sight at age five. Bluish white and elegantly curved, they would be dangerous for the rescuers to cross, she knew. This was not a place for amateurs, not a place for mistakes, and she thought once more that she was a potential liability to this man who was relying on her to save his sister. Once again she felt the obligation to qualify herself. She didn’t want to endanger anyone who was trying to get her down the side of a mountain unless he was very clear about her limitations. In spite of Brigham’s confidence in her ability, there were real-life issues to consider, the least being common sense and logic. What were the real possibilities that a man hanging upside down in a whiteout below the ridge would be lucid in the last few seconds of his life?
    She pulled away the microphone from her face. “Captain Metcalf, I don’t know what Admiral Brigham told you about me, but there are things I cannot do. I’m not a mind reader. I can only see what people were thinking about a few seconds before they died. I’m not always able to see anything relevant.”
    “I know what you do,” Metcalf said evenly, “and what I need when we get down there is for you to tell me what you see. I don’t care if you think it’s trivial, I don’t care if it makes sense to you or not. Don’t filter it. Tell me everything he was thinking about.”
    Sherry nodded, but she clearly didn’t understand. How could this navy captain be so certain this would work?
    “How long do we have?” Metcalf asked the pilot.
    “Eight hours, maybe a little