Page 40 of Mountain Target

The altitude, my ass.

Beau didn’t look in her direction again, but there was a gruffness in his voice when he turned to thank the pilot—Kat, he called her—that made Val think perhaps he wasn’t as unaffected as he seemed.

The pilot smiled widely. “You’re welcome. I’m off to find Damien, but let me know if you need anything. I’ll be flying in and out all day.”

“That’s Commandant Damien Gray. He leads PGHM Team 1. He and his team are already at the other village,” Alex said beside her.

Val nodded gratefully. “And you’re …”

“Team 2. Recently relocated to Chamonix.”

Val followed Alex and Beau towards what she assumed was the village of Drages—and the word village seemed too large to fit this small, lost hamlet—just a few houses that had decided to grow together.

In all the time she’d been living in Chamonix, Val had never had reason to come this far up the mountain, but she felt it now, an isolation that was thick enough to have a presence.

How many people live here?

She shivered, trying to imagine what it would be like to live out here, isolated from the world—concentrated on putting one foot in front of another as her feet sank into the snow all the way past her thick hiking boots, small clumps of snow pooling in between the boots and her jeans.

And then she forgot the slight discomfort, as they stepped around the first building and her mind was assaulted by a sense of wrongness. Because one didn’t have to know the picturesque little town to understand that the enormous craters bisecting the winding main street didn’t belong there.

There was one person lying on a stretcher out in the snow, and two more figures—an older man, leaning on a younger man in uniform—stumbling towards them from one of the open doorways. Ry ran off towards them, supporting the man’s weight on his other side. Val focused on the prone figure. Because earthquakes and craters were completely alien to her, but people—people were something she knew.

She kneeled down on the snow beside the stretcher. An older woman, unconscious. A white gauze, already stained red with blood, had been wrapped hastily around her head. Valentina leaned over to unwrap it, when a tall man in a PGHM uniform appeared in front of her. His hair was spiky, as if he’d rolled out of bed just minutes earlier and not bothered with a comb or brush.

“Dr. Carrel?” he asked, a surprised expression on his face.

That was when she realized that she’d seen him before, at the hospital. A memory came to her then—not of his name, but of the injury she’d treated him for, a compound fracture of the left wrist. He’d been stoic, even joking around with a small child who’d come in with a cut on his forehead, while he waited to be wheeled into surgery.

“Lorenz van den Berg,” he supplied, helpfully. He raised the arm in question, twisting his wrist from side to side.

“I asked Dr. Carrel here to help,” Beau said swiftly. Val hadn’t even realized he’d come up behind her. “I take it you two know each other?”

“Dr. Carrel was at the ER last year, when I broke my wrist.”

Beau swallowed thickly. There was a story there that the men weren’t sharing.

“I’m glad you’re here, Doctor,” Lorenz said.

“Valentina,” she said, quickly. “What happened to her?”

“Hugo and I found her out on the street. Most likely, she ran outside when the earthquake hit, but lost her balance and hit her head against something.”

Ry and the other man—Hugo, she assumed, and she already knew she was going to have difficulty remembering all their names—approached with the old man between them, lowering his by now unconscious body gently onto an empty stretcher.

Without speaking, as if they’d done this before, she and Ry each chose a patient.

Divide and conquer.

Val moved close to check on the woman’s breathing and pulse.

“She’s breathing, and her pulse is steady.” She began a quick examination of the woman’s body. “No obvious injuries beyond the head wound.”

“Most likely a broken ankle, but his breathing is steady as well,” Ry said.

Though both victims were alive for now, they were of a certain age. And there were so many things to check, and so little they could do with the equipment they had … Val’s breath hitched when she thought of how much could go wrong.

At least Ry’s medical backpack was much more complete than her little bag, which she’d hastily put together back at the hospital. She watched as he began sorting through it now, bringing out a leg and foot brace.