PART SIX: THE FREE CLIMB*
They've been climbing for three days. So far, it's been nothing worse than John's done before, although he will admit he doesn't think he'll ever feel his cheeks again. But he's certain of one thing: he's going to tell Brains his new modified thermoplastic material truly is a genius invention, because he's felt like he's had a space heater blasting him neck to toes the entire time.
The bad news is, the temperature's dropped from minus thirty-two Celsius to minus thirty-eight, but in spite of Mike asking repeatedly, both Dev and John refuse to stop. As Dev says two hours into their third day, "Now that we're here, there's no way I'm bailing."
John contemplates his friend as he clips his carabiner to an anchor Mike's left for him in the rock and checks the rope connecting Mike to him, and him to Dev, to ensure it's clear. He and Dev had been lab partners in their Physics 15a course at Harvard. As freshmen, both had been wide-eyed and ready to kick some ass. Unlike many of their classmates, they actually had.
Both had majored in Astronomy with a concentration in Astrophysics. Both had excelled and graduated summa cum laude, sharing top position in their class at the end of their senior year. Every project, every paper, every experiment had been performed together. The two were inseparable for those four years. And while they could party with the best of them, India-born Dev had chosen to return to his home country upon graduation, while John went on to attend his father's astronaut training school in Florida.
They'd never lost touch. They'd shared their findings and research with each other over the ensuing sixteen years. And they'd gotten together whenever they could, made a little more difficult after International Rescue became John's life.
Six years after returning to India, Dev had accepted a research position at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which led to the HAARP appointment four years earlier. While it wasn't specifically Dev's forte in terms of what he'd built of his career to date, his hope was that he'd help take HAARP to the next level.
The other thing Dev and John had always had in common was their interest in communications…initially satellite linkages and then later on space-to-space transmissions. It had been their joint work on an experiment way back in their Harvard days, on the effects of gamma rays on radio waves as they travel through space and how spatial bodies affect radio versus gamma wavelengths, that had led to all involved space agencies to be able to communicate long-range with the Zero-X when she finally made it to Mars.
John had never been more proud than the moment he'd heard the Zero X's Captain Travers say that he and his crew made it to the surface of the red planet. Monitoring from Thunderbird Five, with Dev on a voice-only speaker live, the two had enjoyed their little triumph together, as they had always enjoyed their successes together.
"Yahām̐ ēka lākha khōjōṁ, mērē dōsta," they had said in tandem. Which translated from Hindi to English as, "Here's to another million discoveries, my friend."
John is looking forward to saying that again once they reach the peak of the mountain, which Mike says at the clip they're moving, should be the next day. Good. Four days in, see what's on that mountaintop, and put a call into his father, either to tell him, "Hey, guess what, we decided to climb Denali, I'll be another week," or, "Dad, Colonel Hicks lied to you."
He much prefers the first.
But fears he's going to be facing the second.
Day Four dawns clear and cold as hell. By the time there's even a hint of light in the sky, the three men have been up, eaten their breakfasts, and have half their gear repacked already. John's taking a moment to stare up at what's left of the night sky. He's so used to viewing things from the top of Tracy Island's dormant volcano or, better yet, through Thunderbird Five's powerful multiple telescopes and deep-space cameras, that he's forgotten what a northern hemisphere sky looks like.
It's different, to be sure.
First is the Aurora borealis, which he's been enjoying each night until he forces himself into his one-man tent to sleep.
Then there is the meteor shower he caught a glimpse of just as he was preparing to fold up his tent.
The clarity of Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Lacerta. The beauty of Ursa Minor and Draco battling it out to the north, while Pisces, Aries and Pegasus float and fly through the skies to the south is breathtaking when viewed from a place where not only are both your feet firmly planted on the ground, but where there's absolutely no atmospheric interference.
Well, at least, none that can be seen with the naked eye.
John looks down at his EM hand-held radar. Both he and Dev have been keeping an eye on the readings so far, and neither like what they say. John likes it even less now, as he sees the EM reading spike. He frowns, finishes packing his gear, and is ready to go when Mike tells them to move out.
Dev front points over a patch of overhanging ice. John watches carefully to make sure Dev's placing his crampons right to keep his grip. Satisfied when Dev makes it to the rock above the ice, John continues his ascent, and lets his thoughts wander.
What will they do if they discover a device transmitting a higher frequency, stronger signal into the ionosphere, or possibly beyond? If it's cloaked, they'll be able to feel it, and John just happens to have a device with him that'll render most known cloaking technology useless. It's something he and Brains invented together after learning that the Hood had managed to develop some cloaking capabilities of his own.
Bastard.
John watches the placement of Mike's hands. This part of the mountain's a bit tricky with a twelve-foot nearly-sheer face to climb. They're dependent on Mike placing the anchors just right to catch them if they fall. The trouble is, there's about six inches of solid ice between them and the rock face. The titanium of the anchors and carabiners will withstand the cold, especially since the light breeze isn't really bringing too much of a windchill factor into the equation.
The concern is the rock beneath the rime, the thin ice covering it. While the twelve-inch anchors should be plenty in the event someone loses their footing, the rock they're anchored into is brittle at best, which is one reason many mountaineers won't climb this time of year. John's the largest and probably heaviest of the three men, so while the anchors might hold if Mike or Dev fall, John doing so could be disastrous.
Last thing he wants to do is become someone his own family needs to rescue.
But they're still making good time, and so far Mike's guidance and hardware placement has been impeccable, which is why John chose him to begin with. It's as John is hauling back to jam his right-hand ice axe into the mountainside that he senses something's not quite right.
The tip of the axe goes in clean and John pulls out his left-hand one, swings back and hits the ice with it. He adjusts his grip, and that's when he knows exactly what he's feeling.
It's a tremor. Just a minor earthquake that does little more than vibrate through the ice axes and the sabretooth crampons clipped to the bottoms of his double boots. He stops all movement and looks up to find Mike looking around in surprise. He looks down to find Dev looking up at him.
"You get tremors like that here often?" John calls up.
"I've never been on the mountain when there's been a quake!" Mike yells back at him. "We need to get to the brink of this cliff, just to be on the safe side!"
John resists the urge to answer with "F.A.B.," giving Mike the thumbs-up instead. He looks down at Dev. "Double-time!" he calls down. Dev nods his understanding, and John turns his attention back up to see that Mike is only a couple feet from the brink.
Denali begins to vibrate beneath him again. Only this time, it's stronger. Strong enough that the exhilaration of the climb disappears. Strong enough that it gets replaced by fear.
Then it stops, and all is quiet. John can hear the thwack of Dev's ice axes wedging into place beneath him. He hears the high-pitched sound of Mike pulling an axe out, and can almost hear it slicing through the air as Mike prepares to place it higher up.
There's a tingling at the base of his neck. It's the same feeling he gets out on rescues when something's about to go wrong. Gordon jokingly calls it his Spidey-sense. Right now, though, it's no joke. Dread fills John, and he opens his mouth to yell out a warning.
*Free Climb: To climb using only one's hands and feet without artificial aids.