Kenzie got on her radio. “Sixteen eighty-eight to Indian Peaks Command. The missing party has been located.”
“Oh, thank God, you’re here. My wife fell from the top of those rocks up there and broke her leg. I think she has a concussion, too. I tried to keep her warm, but…”
The woman lay still and pale, her head resting against her husband’s chest.
Kenzie wasn’t a paramedic, but she could tell the woman was in urgent need of medical help.
Harrison opened his pack, drew out some hand warmers, and activated them. “Tuck these inside her jacket. Paramedics are right behind us.”
“I’m Kenzie Morgan from the Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue Team, and this is Gizmo.” She petted Gizmo, praising him and giving him treats. “Good boy, Gizmo. You did it.”
Gizmo had earned his paycheck.
Now it was time for the rest of the Team to take over.
Chapter 9
While Kenzie walked backto the parking lot with Gizmo, Conrad worked with Belcourt to create the anchor that would enable the Team to bear the two victims in litters up the steep, snowy slope. He hadn’t tied a knot or worked with a piece of climbing gear since that awful day on the Icefall, but his fingers hadn’t forgotten.
It surprised him that the others had let him be involved. He was no longer a member of the Team, after all, and Megs, who was staffing the radio back at The Cave, was a hard-ass about protocol. Team rules demanded that all rescue participants be Team members or first responders. The rules also required any Team member who’d been through any kind of trauma be cleared by Esri before working a call. But apparently, Megs hadn’t voiced an objection.
Conrad double-checked the belay he’d rigged around a large ponderosa pine. “Do you want to look at this?”
Belcourt shook his head. “You’ve been at this a lot longer than I have. Maybe you should checkmyknots.”
Conrad grinned. “Nah. I trust you.”
“Likewise.” Belcourt was an engineer and a genius. He’d come to Colorado from the Pine Ridge reservation to study engineering and had fallen in love with climbing, mastering it in a year and becoming a primary Team member as fast as Moretti. For him, rescues were interesting physics problems that had to be worked out on the fly. He spent his free time engineering gadgets to make rescues more efficient and safer.
This rescue was pretty straightforward. They had two adults to get up the slope in two separate litters, and the anchor had to be strong enough to support their weight, plus the weight of the six Team members who would carry each litter. The Team members would be walking, but to minimize the risk of them slipping and dropping the litter, they would also be on belay. That meant the anchor had to hold about two thousand pounds.
Once the litter reached the top of the slope, they would remove the ropes and attach big ATV wheels to the bottom—one of Belcourt’s innovations—and roll the litters quickly down the trail to the parking lot, where two ambulances waited. Taylor and Hawke, who were both paramedics, said the woman had a fractured femur and that both she and her husband were hypothermic.
They were both damned lucky to be alive. Conrad had seen more than one fractured femur sever the femoral artery, causing the victim to bleed out in minutes.
Conrad and Belcourt finished the anchor, then attached ropes to the first litter while six Team members—Ahearn, Taylor, Sasha, Nicole, Herrera, and Moretti—roped themselves in.
Apart from the fact that he didn’t have a radio and wasn’t listening in to the radio traffic, it felt like old times. The first litter up the slope carried the wife, who was much worse off than her husband.
Conrad and Belcourt detached the ropes, then crawled beneath the litter and affixed the big ATV wheel, and six Team members headed off down the trail with the unconscious woman. Then they repeated the entire process with the husband’s litter. Now that his wife was safe and the adrenaline gone, he had lapsed into semi-consciousness, though he kept insisting he could walk.
“Let us handle it from here, okay, buddy?” Hawke’s voice was reassuring.
It was a quick rescue as rescues went, with both parties off to the hospital within an hour of being located. There were high-fives in the parking lot, where Kenzie was waiting for Conrad by her truck.
“Good work, folks,” Ahearn called. “We’ll debrief this at The Cave and then head to Knockers.”
Kenzie reached for Conrad, hugged him. “Thanks for being here.”
“I didn’t do much.”
“You helped solve the anchor problem, leaving another Team member free to carry a litter.”
Okay, that was true.
Inside her truck, Kenzie turned to him. “Are you sure you want to go to Knockers? It’s Sunday, so it probably won’t be too busy.”
Knockers, named for the legendary tommyknockers that supposedly lived in the abandoned mines around Scarlet Springs, was the place where locals came to unwind, eat, drink great beer, play pool, and show off their moves on the climbing wall. Conrad had been avoiding the place, but now…
