Up Close and Dangerous Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    She looked out the window for a while, watching Washington’s vast expanse beneath them. Commercial airliners were fast, but she preferred flying in smaller craft because she could see so much better at the lower altitudes. The loud drone of the engine was hypnotic and she actually did doze a little, her head resting against the back of the leather seat. The morning sun hit the windshield, warming the interior of the plane until she began to feel too warm and removed her lightweight silk jacket. She wouldn’t wear silk again for two weeks, she thought drowsily; the silk bed-sack she’d brought, in case her sleeping bag got too hot or too cool, didn’t count.
    When she glanced at her watch, she saw with surprise that they’d been in the air almost an hour and a half; time had seemed to be crawling, but maybe she’d dozed longer than she’d thought. “Where are we?” she asked, raising her voice so he could hear her.
    He lifted one earpiece of his headset and glanced over his shoulder at her. “Ma’am?” he asked; his expression was cold, but his tone was polite. Barely.
    “Where are we?” she repeated.
    “Coming up on Idaho.”
    She looked through the windshield and saw enormous white-capped mountains looming straight ahead. Her heart jumped and she couldn’t contain a gasp; they were on a collision course with the mountains unless this little plane could go higher—a lot higher.
    He replaced the earpiece, but she thought she saw a flicker of satisfaction in the set of his mouth. From her angle she couldn’t really tell, but if he’d heard her gasp she had no doubt he was amused. Of course the plane could go higher; they wouldn’t be in this one if it couldn’t. Jerk, she thought irritably.
    Settling back in her seat, she stared at the mountains. They were still a good distance away, but their size was so overwhelming that they seemed to be crouching right in front of her, like huge prehistoric beasts, waiting for her to get closer before they rose up and pounced.
    What was it about mountains? They had always tickled her imagination. In reality they sat there, big wrinkles in the earth. From the air they reminded her of a piece of paper that had been badly crumpled, then halfheartedly straightened. Unless they were volcanoes, the mountains never actually did anything, so why did they always seem so alive to her? She didn’t mean “alive” as in they had trees growing on them, or animals both small and large prowling around, but alive as in the mountains themselves seemed to live and breathe, to each have a personality, to communicate with one another. When she was little, she had thought hills were a mountain’s children, that when the hills grew up they would become mountains, and as they grew all the houses that had been built on them would go sliding off. She could remember being terrified any time she visited a home on even the teeniest slope, thinking that at any minute the ground would start rising beneath their feet and they’d begin sliding to their deaths.
    By the time she was ten she knew better, but she never quite lost the feeling that the mountains lived.
    Gray clouds were building ahead, butting and surging against the mountains as some weather system tried to build enough momentum to make it up and over. The old ladies were dressing up, she thought; the clouds draped around the mountains’ shoulders like a dirty boa, with the snowcaps jutting above and the broad green bases below.
    As they droned closer to the mountains, Justice began taking them to a higher altitude. The pitch of the engine changed as the air grew thinner. Thin wisps of clouds wrapped around them, then blew away; the aircraft hit a few bumps in the air, jolting her.
    Leaning forward, she tried to make out the altitude reading, but they hit another rough patch and she couldn’t focus on the numbers.
    “What’s our altitude?” she asked loudly.
    “Thirteen-five,” he said without taking his hands from the