Chapter 13 - Crawling Through the Whiteout
The twin-tracked Hägglunds roared to life with the guttural roar of a turbocharged five-cylinder diesel. Its wide rubber tracks bit into the sheer ice outside Outpost Bravo's perimeter gate, kicking up rooster tails of frozen crust as Diaz slammed the transmission into high-ratio four-wheel crawl.
Inside the cab, the heater blew lukewarm air that barely kept the frost from creeping across the inside of the ballistic windshield. Mason sat in the navigator’s bucket, his eyes glued to a small green monitor displaying raw radar topography, his headset crackling with the fading pulse of Avery Sloan’s manual signal.
"Wind shear is gusting at seventy knots!" Diaz yelled over the engine deafening whine. "Visibility is zero! I can't see the front hood, Mason! I’m driving blind!"
"Hold your heading at zero-two-four!" Mason commanded, leaning forward until his forehead almost touched the display. "We’re coming up on the Nunatak ridge. In four hundred meters, the terrain drops thirty degrees into an ice crevasse field. If you drift five meters to the port side, the track will break through a snow bridge!"
"Talk to me, navigator!" Diaz shouted, wrestling the hydraulic steering yoke as the heavy vehicle bucked and leaned against a violent blast of wind that threatened to roll the six-ton machine onto its side.
"Keep your speed at twelve knots! Tap the left brake... good! Hold that line!" Mason's voice was steady as iron.
In the dark of the cab, Mason felt a surreal sense of full-circle fate. Six months ago, in the torrential downpour of Texas, he had been the panicked boy clinging to the wheel while Avery Sloan's voice whispered salvation into his ear. She had held his mind steady through the storm. Now, with the roles reversed, he channeled every ounce of her calm, mathematical precision into the headset.
Beep... beep... bee-ee-eep...
The audio pulse changed tone, turning thin and scratchy.
"Signal attenuation!" Mason called out, his pulse spiking. "The transmitter battery is dying. She’s losing voltage. We have less than twenty minutes before the beacon goes dark permanently!"
"The terrain is getting jagged!" Diaz grunted as the tracks ground violently over blue glacial ice, throwing both men against their four-point safety harnesses. "Ground radar shows a massive fissure dead ahead! It spans three hundred yards across our path!"
Mason slammed his fist against the dash. "Where's the bridge?"
May you like
"There is no bridge! It’s a sheer shear-line drop!"
Mason toggled the satellite elevation overlay he had downloaded before departing. His eyes scanned the contours, looking not for roads, but for natural bedrock formations beneath the snow—the very lesson Avery had berated him for ignoring during the mock ambush at Fort Calder.
