PART THIRTEEN: THE COULOIR*
The explosion throws him backwards so hard he thunks into the snow, head banging hard against a rock behind him.
He's dizzy. Can't get his bearings. Is seeing spots and flashing lights before his eyes. A loud screech of metal-on-metal. An ear-piercing groan. Something hits his pelvis. He expects to scream, to feel it crush his bones.
It doesn't. So he doesn't.
He tries to scoot away, but can't move. The tower has fallen, and John is pinned beneath it.
Fortunately there are three or more feet of snow beneath him, so all the tower leg really does is shove him down so his butt is against actual rock.
He's pretty certain nothing's broken. He's also pretty certain he's not going anywhere anytime soon.
"Dev!" he calls out, then chokes on the ash that seeps through the knit fabric of the balaclava. God, how his head aches. He wishes those damn stars would stop swirling around it. "Dev!"
It's silent. The ash sounds like falling rain. Smoke mixing with sulfur and a myriad of other acrid scents burns the linings of his nose and throat.
"John!"
Relief: sudden, pure, sweet. Dev's alive.
"I'm trapped!" John hollers.
"I'm coming!" is the reply.
It seems like forever later, but finally Dev's hand bumps into John's head, and he has to remember not to take a deep breath even as he's tamping down on the cry of joy that wants to escape his lips.
But his relief is short-lived as he remembers hearing and briefly catching a glimpse of Scott in his 'bird just as the eruption spewed the guts of what he's pretty sure is a volcano that hasn't ever been a volcano before, high into the air.
Would his brothers try to scale Denali? Do they even know John and Dev are there?
God, Dad will be pissed when he finds out we are.
Dev is trying, but he just can't get enough leverage in the snow to move the tower's leg off John's hips – especially not with one useless hand. John's mind races until finally he says, "Listen, get my pack off me, there's a flare gun in there."
"How will anyone see it through this ash?" Dev asks, even as he's helping John get his torso up high enough off the ground to pull the backpack off him.
There's a great rumbling, and John wonders if it's just his and Dev's luck that Denali's going to blow next. But wait, that's not an explosive sound, that's…
"Thunder?" he says aloud. And as soon as the word's left his lips, a flash of lightning confirms it. "Oh, shit," he breathes, eyes widening.
"What? John?" Dev stops digging through the backpack at the tone of his friend's voice.
"I'm trapped under a metal tower," John says. He swallows as another bolt of lightning streaks through the thick black cloud surrounding them.
Blackish-gray smoke billows around them.
More lightning.
Dev looks up.
Another jagged streak, then another.
Ash coats them and everything around them.
Five streaks of lightning appear together, small, touching, webbing the cloud of ash all at once.
"Shit," John breathes.
And then more.
Dev looks back down at John. "We have to get you out from under that."
But John knows he's well and truly stuck. The tower leg's got him pinned to the hard, jagged rock of the mountain. There is no give. They don't have the equipment his brothers have to cut through the tower.
The wind starts to pick up and John thinks about what he's got in that backpack. He'd had to leave Dev's behind in the chimney because he simply couldn't secure Dev and two backpacks to his person for the ascent. The flare gun, he thinks. Yes…that'll work!
"The flare gun. Dev, get the flare gun, it's one of our—it's a new design, it's not like your standard issue." He feels hope start to rise even as the wind whips up, battling to clear the air around them. He can feel that it's easier to breathe within minutes.
Dev finds the flare gun and four spare clips in a small plastic box.
"Load one," John says, "and then give me the gun and the clips and get back."
"Get back? What the hell are you going to do?"
John grins, though he guesses Dev can't tell through the balaclava. "Going to blast my way out."
"With this?" Dev asks as he slides the clip into the chamber, closes it and hands both it and the spare clips to John. "It's a flare gun, not TNT!"
John winks at him even as he feels his eyelashes start to ice over. "If there's nothing else my youngest brother taught me, it's that anything can be turned into an explosive," he quips.
Dev shakes his head. "John, what if—"
"Get back, Dev, I need to get myself out of here before I become fried chicken."
"You are many things, John Tracy," Dev says, grasping John's gloved hand with his own good one and giving it a squeeze. "Chicken is not one of them."
Their eyes meet and John squeezes back, then shoos his friend away.
John makes it happen, all right. A little too well, as it turns out. He's reversed the polarity on the flare gun, which Dev hasn't a clue doubles as a weapon and triples as precisely what he needed: another explosive. It comes in handy on hairy rescues, and right now, John thinks, it's going to save his life.
Lightning continues to flash all around as he removes his left glove, uses his thumb to flick the switch on the left side of the dark gray flare gun's handle, then puts his glove back on. He cranes his head around to see where Dev is…far enough away, now, by John's estimation. But even through the balaclava, John can see his friend is worried.
Well, John is too, so there you have it.
Invisibility cloak now gone thanks to John's destruction of the transmitter, John can easily see where the silver tower leg is resting against a slight uprising of rock to the right of his hip. He gives himself five seconds to pray he doesn't blow his own leg off, takes aim at the rock just under portion of tower six inches out from his hipbone, and fires.
Pain sears through his body, but he feels the rock give just enough under his butt and legs that he can wiggle free of the tower. Dev rushes forward and grabs the back of John's coat, hauling him back even as John's own limbs scramble to get away.
There's just one problem with the whole operation. The charge was a little more effective than John intended it to be, and blew away a wee bit more rock than he thought it would.
Oh, shit.
Maybe more than a wee bit.
A bolt of lightning hits the fallen tower, sparks illuminating the entire cloud of ash.
John yelps as Dev grabs him by the hood of his coat and yanks him back. They wind up flat on their backs two feet away as a large crack forms in the mountain, the force of the small explosion picking up speed until it's created nothing less than a long, thin chimney-like slide starting at the peak of Denali and ending…well, they're not sure where it ends.
"Glissade?" Dev pants as he pushes John off him, "Sliding down on our asses…your way…of getting us down?"
John barks out a laugh. "Yeah, went exactly according to plan."
"My ass," Dev retorts as both men haul themselves upright. "Actually, it's your ass."
John squints at him through the ice crystals covering his eyelashes. "Huh?"
"That got burned."
"No, it's only my l—oh," John says as his gloved hand finds that a tear in his snow pants goes up higher than he thought and that his left ass cheek is, indeed, singed. "Ow."
"I will give you hell until the sacred cows come home," Dev quips, "but only after you've ridden your burn down the side of the mountain and gotten us out of here."
Well, shit, this is going to hurt.
"Hang on, I need to confirm the tower's no longer transmitting."
"It's on its side, John, hit by lightning and spilling acrid smoke into the air. You think it's still transmitting?"
"I'm not leaving Denali until I know for sure," John says, reaching for the backpack and pulling his indicator device from its depths. He switches it on and nods once, curtly.
The signal is gone.
"Does that mean we can get the hell off this mountain now?" Dev asks. "Not for nothing, but I truly do not wish to witness another earthquake or further volcanic eruptions this closely."
"Me either," John mutters as he puts the device away.
That's when he hears a whirring sound. It's a sound he knows well, and he looks all around them until he locates it: one of Thunderbird One's remote cameras.
Suddenly he loves Scott a whole lot. He waves at the camera as Dev's adjusting the Velcro closures on the bottoms of his thermal pants, and tightening the laces on his climbing boots. John quickly signs a message to Scott, then realizes that Scott can't speak hand languages any better than he can speak spoken languages – other than English, of course. He imagines Scott's either royally pissed off right now or sweating in relief at having found his brother.
John holds up the wrist where his busted communicator is still sitting, points to it, and then points down to the gully he's opened up with the explosion. Then he makes a motion with his hand like a bird swooping down, only he hopes Scott gets that it's him and Dev sliding that he means to convey.
Somehow he doubts it, but he can always hope.
Dev rights himself and John quickly acts like he hasn't been trying to communicate with anyone at all. Instead, he points up to the remote camera and says, "Does that thing say International Rescue on the side of it?"
Dev's eyes widen and he comes to stand right next to John, peering up through his own ice-crystal-laden eyelashes. "I'll be damned," he breathes. "So it does. They've come to rescue us!"
Well, crap. Now if John goes ahead with his sliding-down-Denali plan, Dev's going to call him crazy since the boys in blue are on the case. What John doesn't know is whether or not the 'birds can make it through the ash that still hangs heavy around Denali, even given the high winds that have started blowing it to the east.
It'd be an easy rescue if not for the—
There's another explosion.
And Denali shakes.
Only this time, it's not from a volcano.
"What the hell was that?" Dev screeches, and thankfully isn't tall enough that it's directly into John's ear.
John's eyes are drawn to the top of the tower that's hanging off the opposite edge of the peak by about twenty feet and burning like a giant metal bonfire. Then the tower upends itself and slides right down the side of the mountain. Flames leap from whatever was sitting at the top of it as it goes, leaving a curling trail of black smoke in its wake.
"I don't think we have to worry about that signal anymore," John says as he hears a high-pitched whine in the distance.
And there she is, the great, hulking green ship that is Virgil's baby. She's headed straight for them and John is torn between wanting to do a Happy Dance and start waving his arms like a wild man, and trying to bury himself in a snow bank so he doesn't have to face the wrath of his brothers and father.
But, Tracys take their medicine like they do their candy. Of course, that doesn't mean he has to be happy about it.
"Is that what I think it is?" Dev asks as Thunderbird Two gets closer.
"What do you think it is?" John asks. Innocently, he's pretty sure.
"That's International Rescue!" Dev crows, and he does jump up and down.
Unfortunately.
Because just as Virgil gets to less than one hundred feet from the peak of Denali, the rock beneath John and Dev gives way.
Soft, powdery snow is where Alan and Scott, two hours later, find them lying as though they've just finished making snow angels.
They'd slid down the side of the mountain, all right. They'd even managed to somehow slot right into the gulley John had accidentally made.
Then they'd been flying. Not with wings. Not in Thunderbirds. Not by choice.
The last thing John remembers is watching a snow-and-ash-covered ledge growing nearer and nearer at an alarming rate.
Now he blinks awake to the very loud sound of Thunderbird Two's engines. Once he's able to focus his vision, it's to find two fully cold-proofed men he's quite sure are related to him dangling from Two's nose. The eyes look equal parts relieved and annoyed as Scott and Alan harness the two mountain victims – who aren't really any worse for the wear, all things considered – to themselves and Virgil starts winching them upwards.
While terribly excited that he's getting to see International Rescue at work firsthand, Dev – has he been awake the entire time, John wonders? - can't help but holler across the two feet of air separating the friends and their rescuers from each other. "John?"
"Yeah?"
"Next time you want to go mountain-climbing?"
"Yeah?"
"I will tell you, my friend, to take a long walk off a short pier."
John's responding laugh is mostly one of relief.
*Couloir: A gully, sometimes a potential route.