three who viewed it were of the breed who found such sights exhilarating.
The team leader threw his head back and challenged the wind with a wild wolf howl. "I claim this mountain by right of conquest and hereby name it...What in the hell are we going to name it anyway?"
"You were first man up, Ian," the smallest of the three climbers pointed out, her voice muffled by her wind mask. "So by rights it should be Mount Rutherford."
"Agh, no! This should not be!" the third member of the climbing team protested. "Our lovely Miss Brown is the first lady to climb this formidable peak. It should be Mount Kayla."
"That's very sweet, Stefan, but it still won't rate you more than a handshake back at the station."
Ian Rutherford, an Oxford biology major, chuckled. "I suppose we shouldn't worry about it. No matter what we might name it, we'll just end up calling it West Peak as we always have."
"You suffer from excessive realism, Ian." Stefan Kropodkin, of McGill's cosmic ray research program, grinned into the heavy woolen muffler that covered the lower half of his face.
"I think we need a little realism at the moment." Kayla Brown was in geophysics at Purdue. "We're already an hour off our schedule, and Dr. Creston wasn't too happy about us coming up here in the first place."
"Another man with little romance in his soul," Kropodkin grunted.
"We still have enough time for a few photographs," Rutherford replied, unslinging his rucksack. "Cresty certainly can't object to that."
They saw it as they cautiously worked around the perimeter of the tiny plateau, and it was the sharp eyes of the little geophysicist-to-be from Indiana who made the discovery.
"Hey, guys, what's that? Down there on the glacier."
Rutherford peered down into the saddle between the peaks. There was something there, just barely visible through the snow haze. He shoved his goggles up and pulled his binoculars out of their case. Being careful not to allow their frigid metal to touch his facial skin, he peered through them.
"Bloody hell! There is something down there!" He passed the field glasses to his friend. "What do you think, Stefan?"
The Eastern European looked for a long time. Then he lowered the binoculars. "It's a plane," he said wonderingly, "a plane on the ice."
Chapter Two
Huckleberry Ridge Mountain Warfare Training Center
Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan "Jon" Smith U.S. Army, MD, stood with his back to the edge of the cliff and took his final look around.
It was beautiful up here. From this point, one could look southward along the western slope of the Cascade range, the mountains all stone blue-gray, snow-frost white and forest evergreen. Shreds of mist hovered protectively over the lower slopes, and the golden glow of the sunrise streamed through the notchbacks of the ridgeline. With a further twist of his head he could include the distant, shattered cone of Mount St. Helens in his field of vision, a thin haze of steam cupped in the volcano's gaping crater.
It reminded Smith of long-past summers in Yellowstone, and the childhood pride and thrill of packing into the backcountry for the first time with his father and Uncle Ian.
The air especially, chill, sweet, and biting with life. He took a last deep breath of it, relishing the experience, and stepped backward off the edge of the precipice.
His horizon rotated a smooth ninety degrees, and the climbing harness gave him a reassuring hug as the thick green nylon rope laced through his carabiners took up the strain. With his weight held by the rappelling brake and the cleated soles of his Danner "Fort Lewis" mountain boots braced against the lichen-mottled black basalt, he stood on the vertical face of the cliff. He was still new enough to the experience that he grinned with exhilaration. By God, this was better than lab work!
"Okay, Colonel," the loud-hailer-amplified voice of the instructor echoed up from the base of the cliff, "push off and take it easy."
Above, Smith's fellow students, clad in the same forest camouflage that he wore, peered over the cliff edge. This was the big drop, the 150-foot rappelling descent. The slack of the rope trailed away below him, and Smith gave it a final clearing flick. Then he snapped his legs straight, shoving away from the rock and allowing the line to feed through the brake.
In Smith's continuing efforts to balance the wildly diverse aspects of his life, that of soldier, scientist, physician, and spy, this mountain warfare course had been a resounding success.