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more.” The pilot tapped his watch. “I’ll get a refuel and wait to hear from you at basin camp.
    “You and your men will have until twenty-one thirty, but then we’ve got to fly,” the pilot continued. “That’s when the window starts to come down.”
    Sherry flipped open the hinged face of her watch. It was just after one P.M .
    “Copy that, twenty-one thirty hours,” Metcalf said to his men.
    Sherry could hear a change in the engine’s pitch.
    “Suit up,” Metcalf told her. “We’ll be out in a minute.”
    Sherry zipped her jacket to her neck and Velcroed the collar, slipped on her two pairs of glove liners, then allowed Metcalf to push on the heavy snow gloves. Her ice boots were already biting into her shins.
    The helicopter thumped on hard-packed snow, lifted several inches, and spun a ninety-degree arc with skids scraping ice.
    The pilot hovered the craft there, keeping its full weight off the snow. The door opened and the machine rocked as a blast of cold filled the cabin. Howling winds forced them to yell to be heard.
    Metcalf took her hand and tugged before they jumped into the snow.
    “Brace yourself between steps,” he yelled. “Imagine that you are walking in water, feet wide apart, and do not let go of the rope.”
    She took a wide stance. Feet apart and awkwardly testing the snow, she moved one foot then the other, crampons slicing noisily through the crust of ice.
    “It’s going to be hard going until we reach the edge of the ridge.”
    She nodded and he slipped a harness around her back and snapped it off at her waist. “Don’t want you sliding off the edge of the mountain on your back.”
    Sherry, who couldn’t have agreed more, said nothing.
    The going would be twice as slow because of her. An experienced climber would have made the descent in half the time. But getting to the body was only part of the ordeal. The minute they were finished with the body, they needed to contact the search team above and get back up to the ledge. Metcalf would be bearing much of her body weight on the ascent. She couldn’t imagine the complexities of what it took to do that, but her job was to maintain balance and concentrate on what she came to do. He would take care of the rest.
    “Sandstorm, this is North Sickle One,” he said, making a radio check to his men. “Do you copy?”
    Sherry heard a voice come over the air. “North Sickle, you are loud and clear, over.”
    Metcalf tapped Sherry’s arm gently as they began to approach the ledge. “We’re going to clip to cleats and rappel off the ridge. One of my men will keep safety lines on us until we’re over the wall, then we’ll fasten onto the fixed line. Use the toes of your boots. You’ll get used to them quick.”
    Sherry nodded, wondering what she’d let herself in for this time. It would have been an understatement to allow that she had spirit—she did—and she’d been in some pretty unusual places before, like belly down on the front line of an equatorial civil war or compressed into a metal cage and lowered into a coal mine. But Sherry did not consider herself to be reckless or an adrenaline junkie. She might have overcome the fear of not being able to see, but she respected life and feared whatever a prudent person might fear. She had no death wish.
    Step by step, they lowered themselves. Crampon by crampon, their boots dug into the mountainside, negotiating toeholds that were beaded with ice, rounded corners of slick granite smooth as glass, the wind bumping them on the lines as they were carefully lowered, but at last they were under the ridge and Metcalf clipped them to the wall. Then they began the slow descent down the face of granite. It took almost an hour to reach the body and when they did, Metcalf went silently to work, chipping away at the heavy cast of ice around the dead climber’s arm.
    The experience had been like nothing Sherry had ever known. It was both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, the