PART FIVE: THE APPROACH*
"Hi, I'm Mike Talbot." A man slightly shorter than John, but taller than Dev, reaches out and shakes John's hand.
"John Tracy, and this is Dev Verma."
"So you're the crazy ones who want to scale McKinley in minus thirty degree temps, huh?"
"And you're the crazy mountaineer who agreed to take us," John replies.
"That I am, Mr. Tracy. I've been up and down that big old girl eighty-four times, and in way worse weather than we're going to have this week."
John sizes up the six-foot man with crew-cut brown hair. He'd checked into Talbot thoroughly the night before, after he and Dev had finished dinner and gone back to crash at Dev's place. (Where John found himself 'snuggled into' while he slept on the couch by one Nisha, who was determined to leave fur over every inch of his clothing.)
Mike Talbot is a legend with RMI Expeditions. He's led some of the toughest, most dangerous climbs Denali has seen in the last decade. Honorably discharged from the U.S. Army, the forty-four-year old man is the best bet John and Dev have of making it to the top of Denali on what John can almost hear his grandmother call 'this fool's errand.'
He won't be telling Mike anything about their real reason for wanting to scale the twenty thousand plus feet of mountain, unless it becomes absolutely necessary.
"I see you've got some of the best gear they make," Mike comments, inspecting the clothing both John and Dev are wearing, and all the gear spread around them. Mike kneels next to John's backpack. "Christ, is this the Trion One-Twenty backpack? I didn't even know it was on the market yet!"
"I have connections," John replies blithely.
Mike whistles long and low in appreciation as he continues to look through all the equipment. "I've never seen sleeping bags like this. What's this material? And your tent, too?"
"New, from Tracy Aerospace," John explains. "Invented to protect against regulated temperature control breakdowns in space."
"Much lower temps than McKinley," Mike says with a nod.
"Exactly."
"All right, well, it looks like you've got everything you need. I've got the food and water for me in my pack." Mike reaches out and grabs two bags off a nearby bench. "Here's one set of staples for each of you. Get yourselves packed up, and you get one last shot at real plumbing before we go. We leave in thirty minutes."
John mock-salutes Mike as he heads back into RMI's main building. Then he turns to look at Dev. "You haven't said much."
"I have not said anything," Dev counters as he goes about repacking his backpack.
"Nervous?"
"Not really. It's not the cold I am worried about. It's more what we may find at the summit of that mountain."
"So you do think there might be something up there."
"I could think of nothing else after reviewing the readings you sent me," Dev replies, zipping up one of his backpack's outer pockets. He stops, remaining in his crouched position, and looks up at his friend. "But what worries me more, is what you will do if we find that something."
"What do you mean? I'll have it shut down."
"How? If this is something being run in secret by the Navy and the Air Force, and if Colonel Hicks already has denied knowledge of such a thing, do you really think you or your father will have enough clout to make a difference?"
"We have our ways," John tells him, prompting a raised eyebrow from Dev. "What?"
"I once saw a television program," Dev says him as he rises to all of his five-foot-ten height, "in which a man said something similar to a woman. 'I thought only spies and Nazis said that,' is precisely what she said. To which he replied, 'Well, I'm not a Nazi.'"
"What, you think I'm a spy?" John asks, then laughs heartily. "Far from it," he says, clapping Dev on the shoulder. "Now come on, let's hit the head and then get a hot sandwich to tide us over. It'll be a while before we get lunch."
The men walk toward the building that houses both bathroom/shower combinations and a cafeteria. John smiles to himself. No, he definitely isn't a spy…
"All right, gentlemen, we'll be heading up the West Buttress. It's by far the easiest of all the ways to ascend McKinley." If Mike notices John grimace every time he doesn't use the Athabascan name for the mountain, he gives no sign. "I know you both were experienced as of a few years ago, according to what you said on the phone," he continues, with a nod to John, "but it's been a while and you've never climbed in minus thirty-two before."
"How long to make it to the summit?" John asks.
"I usually take larger groups, so crevasse rescue training takes an entire day. We'll chopper in to our West Buttress base camp, go through the training and probably make it to the 7,800-foot camp before sundown if you're as good as you say you are."
It takes everything in John not to tell Mike he doesn't need crevasse rescue training. Hell, John is trained in rescuing people from every conceivable situation, but that fact would be awfully hard to explain to Mike or Dev and besides, Dev probably needs the refresher. So John grabs his gear and follows the two men to the waiting helicopter.
He can't wait to get started. He can't wait to find out if what he thinks is sitting on top of Denali is really there. Because there's no better way to save peoples' lives than preventing disasters from happening in the first place. And if that signal is doing to the ionosphere what he and Brains are convinced it is, putting it out of commission is much better than International Rescue fighting to save lives after deadly storms and earthquakes have already happened.
*Approach: The section of the climb leading up to the technical section of the climb.