Neither of us was thinking about the past.
Chapter Twenty-four
I woke because I was freezing. I might have slept forever, there on that hard ground, had I not sensed that something was missing. Something was wrong.
Someone.
As quickly as I could, I pulled on my boots; but I didn’t bother calling out his name. Zach wasn’t in the cave, I knew it. He wasn’t outside gathering wood or securing our perimeter. I already knew where he was—what he was doing. And so I ran faster, out of the dry cave and into the snow. I pushed against trees and climbed over rocks, following the tracks, cursing that he hadn’t even woken me to say good-bye. And when I reached the tree line beneath the icy fortress overhead, I knew exactly what I was going to see:
A lone figure walking through the snow, hands held high above his head in surrender.
I thought about our plan, but also about what he’d said the night before—that maybe he belonged inside that prison too.
“Zach—” I wanted to yell, but in truth the word was nothing but a whisper. We were already out of time.
A door was sliding open on the mountain. Men in white jumpsuits carrying rifles were running down the icy banks, their sights never wavering from the person who was walking toward them, yelling, “I’m Zach Goode. And I’d like to turn myself in.”
One could say it was the cold light of morning that made me see things so differently. But at the top of the world in the middle of winter, there wasn’t that much light to begin with. An eerie gray filled the sky, and I couldn’t help myself; I glanced around, expecting Zach to be there, forgetting he was gone.
Covert Operations Report
Operatives McHenry, Baxter, Sutton, and Morgan joined Zachary Goode for a high-risk, potentially high-reward operation in the Alaskan arctic.
The Operatives also REALLY wished they’d packed extra socks.
By late afternoon, the sunlight was fleeting. Shadows spread across the glistening white plain that stretched between the line of trees where my roommates and I lay on our stomachs, looking up at the fortress above.
“It’s kind of beautiful,” Liz said, her gaze sweeping over the vista.
“It won’t be when that gets here.” Bex pointed to the horizon. Clouds churned, blocking our view of the distant peaks. I could imagine the swirling winds and blowing snow of the coming storm.
A hundred yards of open ground, just snow and ice and some of the most highly calibrated motion sensors and trip wires in the world, stood between us and the compound. Zach’s footsteps from that morning were barely visible, filled in by blowing snow.
“What’s the time?” Bex asked, even though we all knew the answer.
“Showtime.” I looked into the sky. A dark spot was on the horizon just ahead of the ominous clouds. I kept my gaze glued to the helicopter that was no doubt bringing agents to interrogate Zach inside the mountaintop fortress.
“Okay, Lizzie. Are you sure you’re okay staying here by yourself? It will be totally dark in an hour. If we’re not back by then, I guess…”
“Cam,” Liz started slowly, “if this takes more than one hour, then my being alone out here is the least of our problems. Now, go,” she said, and none of us had to be told twice.
The helicopter grew lower the closer it got to the prison, so we set off running across the open ground beneath the whirl of the spinning blades and the cover of the blowing snow. We’d bleached the gear we’d found in the safe house until everything was white, and we almost blended into the wilderness, bolting over rocks and across ice, up the steep cliffs to the very vent shaft I’d emerged from less than a week before.
On the side of the mountain, a massive door began to rise up out of the ground, opening to allow the helicopter to land inside the fortress.
“Door closing in four-three-two—” I started.
“The charges?” Bex asked Macey, who handed her a tiny pack of explosives that we attached to the grate the prison had secured over the airshaft.
She nodded. “Done.”
“Then, fire in the hole,” Bex said, and the three of us threw our hands over our heads as a subtle pop filled the air. Plumes of smoke and snow blew into the wind, but it was almost untraceable in the quickly coming darkness.
“Okay, Cam,” Bex told me. She shot a cable, sent it spiraling to the top of the shaft. “After you.”
I know air ducts and secret passageways. I’m not even a little bit claustrophobic or afraid of spiders. But the darkness that surrounded me then was unlike any that I had ever felt or seen.
I’d been there—in that very shaft—just days before. But then there had been fear and adrenaline. The first time I’d been running away. Now I was climbing toward. I don’t expect most people to understand the difference, but there is one. I didn’t just have to survive—I had to carry. And that made the climbing all the harder. There was time in that quiet place to think, to worry—a nagging, lingering voice that warned that maybe, just maybe we weren’t doing the right thing. Maybe we would be too late.