PART NINE: THE PITCH*
It seems like it takes an eternity. Every time he pulls himself an arm-length up, the wind tosses him around like he's feather-light. He slides a little. He loses his footing. He grits his teeth against the aches and forces himself to compartmentalize discomfort, to be dealt with later.
He's had to do it before. Rescues aren't always so easy, so cut and dry that every Tracy comes out unscathed. No, he doesn't go out on as many as Virgil, Scott or Gordon. He and Alan alternating on Five means the other three always get more field time.
But if anyone thinks it's easy to be thousands of klicks above the Earth listening as walls fall on your brothers, as fire engulfs their equipment, as they don't quite get out of a danger zone unharmed, well, they've got another think coming.
Al deals with it pretty well, John thinks. Sometimes he gets late-night calls from Thunderbird Five in the aftermath of a rescue that doesn't quite go as anyone plans. Al won't say much on some of those calls, but on others he talks a mile a minute like he's going to explode if he doesn't release the tension.
John gets it. He does. He just deals with it differently. He's not the heart-on-his-sleeve type of personality that Al is. He's more the type to deal with things himself, work through issues and problems and emotions where it's all hidden from view of the outside world. And that includes his family members.
He doesn't ever mind listening to or talking with Alan. Of all the Tracy sons, he knows he's really the only one who can identify with what's going on in Alan's head when he's up there. Al's much more a people-person than John, anyway. Though John's not a loner by any stretch of the imagination, and often seeks out the company of others just to pass the time, he's equally happy to be on his own.
There's all the research he does, all the searching through the depths of space to prove theories or make new discoveries. Writing his astronomy books, essays, papers and articles on his latest trains of thought where the pulsars, quasars, black holes, dark matter and magnatars are concerned. Just last week he thinks he discovered a brand-new galaxy roughly eighty-three million light-years from Earth with a black hole dead center of it.
The excitement of the moment he confirmed his readings seems so far away now.
"John!"
The voice is much closer, and John looks up. At first he sees nothing but swirling snow, but then something dark. "Dev?" he hollers.
"Yes! John, I see you! Are you okay?"
"Yeah!" John yells back. He pulls himself up once more…twice…three times, and he's roughly even with Dev. He can barely tell that the man's got himself upright, but Dev's hand reaches out and grabs his arm to confirm his orientation. "We have to get to the chimney!" John tells him, wondering if his words are actually making more sense than they sound like they are.
Numb lips tend to make vowel and consonant formation difficult.
"You hurt?" he asks Dev, who's mostly sideways to face him.
"Busted fingers!"
Shit. That means he's going to have to do half the work of getting Dev up to that chimney. Trouble is, he's not entirely certain how far they are from it now. They're below the ice sheet still, which means they'll have to try and traverse it with this hurricane-force storm throwing them every which way.
"We need another route up!" John yells.
"Ice is thinner back there!" Dev hollers back, indicating the area of the mountain currently at his back.
Okay, thinner ice means John can either break it away so they're against solid rock, or if he places screws and anchors, they're likely to be more stable than the ones that are embedded in ice only.
"Oh, shit," he hears Dev say, and a half-second later, knows why. The mountain is moving again.
"Jesus…hold on!" he says, lunging forward and grabbing Dev in a one-armed bear hug. Dev cries out, probably because of his broken fingers on the hand furthest from John, but wraps his good arm and hand around John and holds on tight.
By the time this earthquake stops, John and Dev are swinging to and fro like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. John reaches out with his left hand and manages to catch the rope above them, which brings them to a crashing halt.
Dev screams as his right hand hits the mountain, and goes limp in John's arms.
Great, he thinks. Now I need a Plan B for my Plan B.
Oh, to have International Rescue's equipment at-hand. And oh, that he'd told his father where he was going.
Hindsight being twenty-twenty and all.
Though it's tricky, John manages to slide his right arm out of his backpack strap, letting the pack fall to the crook of his left arm, all without letting go of Dev. "Come on, man, wake up!" he yells into Dev's ear, but doubts even that gets through. Because if he's not mistaken, the wind has increased.
This is so not good.
He estimates the chimney to be about twelve feet up and two feet to the left of where Dev had indicated there was less ice. That's probably a good two feet over in and of itself, which means twelve feet up and four left before he makes it to what he hopes is enough protection to ride this storm out.
Wedging the backpack in between his pelvis and the mountain, John slides his left arm out of the strap and unzips the main compartment. There's a brand-new twenty-foot coil of rope, a backup safety line. It's all he's got, so it's what he's going to use. He's also got a balaclava, but right now Dev needs it more than he does, so he goes about the business of getting it over Dev's head, then pulling the toque he was already wearing down over top of it. It's about all he can do to keep him warm right now. He gets his helmet back on over top of that, almost giving up on trying to refasten the chin strap. He manages, though.
Next comes the job of lashing Dev's body to his, while still leaving himself able to maneuver to make the climb with the added weight of a life-sized ragdoll. John snorts at what he imagines Dev would say if he heard that particular thought.
He slings the backpack over his left shoulder and uses his right side to pin Dev to the side of the mountain, then works as quick as he can to fashion a makeshift rope harness. He gets the contraption up between Dev's legs and tied around both of their waists, his left loose enough to shift Dev to his back.
There's a loud crack nearby and John thinks, Thundersnow, as he takes a deep breath, then flips his body quickly so Dev's front is up against his back. He yanks the end of the rope to tighten it around both his and Dev's waists, then wrenches both his arms back to bring the two loose ends of the rope up Dev's back, over his shoulders, and then over his own shoulders. He finishes by tying those ends together in the area of his breastbone, and then securing the remaining double-tail to the rope already tight around his abdomen.
He turns sideways, letting Dev go slack to test out whether the jerry-rigged sling will hold. It seems secure, as Dev only settles a few inches. There. Now he's got to go right, up, and left.
And the storm's not letting up.
He's lost his screw pack, so he's…he laughs to himself…slightly screwed. Reaching into a side pocket of the backpack, he pulls out his cell phone. He has to take a glove off to work the touch-screen, and holy shit, it's cold!
Doesn't matter anyway. He was afraid there'd be no signal, and he's right. What's worse is the tether their phones usually have to Thunderbird Five seems to be blocked as well. He stuffs the phone into an inside coat pocket, half his brain working at the question of why Five's powerful satellite feed wouldn't be able to reach them.
There's only one time he's encountered any sort of atmospheric condition that rendered Five's signal useless, and that was due to an overabundance of gamma rays thanks to a heavy solar flare.
Damn. If a solar flare occurred two days ago, the clouds of electrons, ions and atoms could very well be hitting Earth right now. And if there's an overabundance of gamma rays produced as a result, that would explain Five being unreachable.
Great, let's just add insult to injury and show John what a monumentally bad idea this was.
Well, shit.
*Pitch: A section of climbing between two belay points, no longer than the length of a climbing rope.