Holding On
A Colorado High Country Novel
Pamela Clare
www.pamelaclare.com
Contents
Holding On
Acknlowledgements
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Thank You
Also by Pamela Clare
About the Author
Published by Pamela Clare, 2018
Cover Design by © Carrie Divine/Seductive Designs
Image: Petr Joura/Depositphotos
Copyright © 2018 by Pamela Clare
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic format without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials by violating the author’s rights. No one should be expected to work for free. If you support the arts and enjoy literature, do not participate in illegal file-sharing.
ISBN-10: 0-9987491-7-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-9987491-7-4
This book is dedicated to the all of hard-working dogs—search-and-rescue dogs, service dogs, military dogs, law-enforcement dogs—who save lives and make life better for all of us. It’s also dedicated to the wonderful people who train them.
Acknlowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the insights and support of Cathy Bryarly, whose work training SAR and HRD dogs has saved lives. She is a hero.
Many thanks to Michelle White, Benjamin Alexander, Jackie Turner, Shell Ryan, and Pat Egan Fordyce for holding my hand and encouraging me. For me, every book feels like Mt. Everest.
Thanks, too, to my father, Robert White, for answering questions and instilling in me at an early age a love of the outdoors and the mountains. Additional thanks to my brother, Robert White Jr., for his insights into big-peak climbing. He has touched the sky.
Last but not least, a big thank you to my loyal readers. You make it all worthwhile.
Prologue
Fifteen months ago
Mt. Everest
6:10 a.m.
Harrison Conrad took a belay stance, watching while Felix and Luka Stenger, twin brothers from Switzerland, made their way across the ladder spanning the crevasse. One at a time, they stepped out over a seemingly bottomless fissure in the ice, their crampons making their steps on the ladder’s rungs awkward.
Felix went first, showing no hesitation, and Luka followed, pausing for just a moment before he took his first step.
“Don’t worry, mate!” Bruce called from the other side near the base of a massive serac, a grin on his face. “If you fall and your harness fails, it will only kill you.”
“Nice.” Conrad grinned, feeding Luka more slack.
He kept both hands on the rope, even though the stubble on his jaw itched from the barley flour that had been thrown at them during the Puja—the prayer ceremony—at Base Camp. He wasn’t religious, Buddhist or otherwise, but given the dangers of this mountain, he didn’t object to a bit of intercession on their behalf.
They’d hit the ice at 4 a.m. It was a perfect day on Everest, the sunrise in their eyes as they headed east up Khumbu Icefall, Everest and Lhotse before them. Today was their second day on the mountain. Yesterday, they’d gone up the Icefall to Camp One then come back down to sleep at Base Camp to give their bodies time to acclimate to the extreme altitude. Tonight, they would sleep at Camp One.
It was Conrad’s third time climbing Everest. He and Bruce had climbed the Seven Summits—the highest mountains on the seven continents. They’d also climbed the rest of the 8000-meter peaks, including K2, Annapurna, Nanga Parbat, and Makalu. But it was Felix and Luka’s first time up an 8,000-meter peak. The brothers had made a name for themselves climbing all over Europe, in North America, and in the Andes. Anyone who could climb the Eiger in winter without ropes could handle Everest.
Luka made it to the other side, stepped off the ladder, then turned to belay Conrad over the abyss.
Conrad waited for Luka to take up the slack, finally scratching his jaw.
“On belay!” Luka called.
“Climbing!” Conrad stepped out onto the ladder. It was actually two ladders lashed together, their ends overlapping in the middle. Beneath their rungs lay nothing but air, the void disappearing into a monotone blue of glacial ice. He took one step and another and another, enjoying the buzz of adrenaline.
A groan. A cracking sound.
The ground shook, pitching him to his knees, the ladder rocking beneath him.
He heard the others cry out and looked up to see the serac falling, tons of ice collapsing onto Bruce and the others.
“Fuck!”
It couldn’t end like this.
Something struck Conrad’s helmet, and he fell, the world around him going black.
Scarlet Springs, Colorado
Just after 7 p.m.
Kenzie Morgan knelt down beside Gizmo, stroked the golden retriever’s silky chest to focus him, then unclipped him from his lead. “Okay, Gizmo. Search!”
Gizmo took off at a run, slowing to sniff some fallen timbers then moving on, his powerful canine nose leading him across the site of Scarlet Springs’ old landfill. The place had become an illegal dumpsite, but that made it a perfect location to test the skill of search-and-rescue dogs. Gizmo had forty-five minutes to find the hidden human remains to stay certified in HRD—human remains detection.
Kenzie followed after him, hustling to keep up. She knew that he was more than equal to the task. He was five years old now and had been working as an HRD and SAR dog for four years.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if he found an actual dead body?” JoAnne hurried alongside Kenzie, a clipboard in her left hand.
“Yeah, that would be hilarious.” Kenzie watched Gizmo, who skirted around a rusted box spring and headed toward a pile of discarded lumber.
A mountain cottontail darted out of the pile, catching Gizmo’s attention.
“Leave it!” Kenzie called.
The dog stopped to watch but didn’t give chase.
Good boy.
“Back to work!” Kenzie called.
Gizmo let the rabbit go, dismissing the lumber and heading toward a jumbled pile of broken concrete blocks. He stopped, pawed at the rock, climbed to the top of the mound, then ran down again, circling to the other side. He pawed, sniffed—and sat.
Kenzie glanced at her watch. “That didn’t even take him five minutes.”
She hurried over to him, drew a bag of doggy sausages out of her pocket, and fed him a few pieces, petting and praising him. “Good boy! Good boy! You found it.”
The “it” in this case was a bit of donated cadaver—a section of humerus with decomposing muscle, adipose tissue, and skin still attached. Kenzie kept it in a steel container in the freezer in
her garage, taking it out early enough so that it could thaw and release its god-awful stench for the dogs. Fortunately, she wasn’t a dog. Unless she was right on top of it, she couldn’t smell it at all.
JoAnne knelt down beside Gizmo, her gray hair fluttering in the warm evening breeze. “Good job, Gizmo. I guess you passed HRD—again.”
“You hear that, buddy?” Kenzie pulled Gizmo’s favorite toy out of her pocket and played tug-of-war with him for a minute before letting him have it. “Who’s up next?”
Back down at the road, several other handlers waited beside covered pickups and SUVs, dogs crated inside, each waiting its turn to be tested. Most had driven long distances from homes across Colorado to be here today. It wasn’t a bad day to hang out in the mountains. The sky was cloudless, the sunshine warm, the breeze fresh.
JoAnne was busy filling out Gizmo’s certificate. “Cathy’s here with Sam. She has to get to the airport to pick up her brother, but she wants Sam to have a shot.”
Sam was a young bloodhound, barely a year old. Today would be good practice for both Cathy and Sam. A handler had to relearn search-and-rescue with each dog, as each dog’s body language was different. That had been true for Kenzie when she’d started training Gizmo, and she was a professional dog trainer.
JoAnne handed her the certificate. “Are you going to stay, or do you have to get back to the kennel?”
Kenzie glanced at her watch. “I might hang around to see how Sam does.”
Kenzie wasn’t in any particular hurry. It was Friday, so she didn’t have any classes to teach this evening. She trusted her staff to close up her pet supply store and manage the kennel while she was out.
She bent down, clipped the leash to Gizmo’s collar, and was about to take him back to her truck to give him water and crate him when her Team buzzer went off.
Kenzie had been a primary member of the all-volunteer Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue Team, called the Team by locals, for five years now. She wasn’t a climber like most of its members, but provided canine help.
She drew the pager out of her pocket, glanced at the message—and the breath left her lungs.
DISASTER ON EVEREST. LISTENING IN TO BASE CAMP.
Harrison.
Gizmo whined, always sensitive to her mood.
“Uh-oh.” JoAnne looked up from her clipboard. “Something happened.”
“I have to go.” Kenzie jammed the pager back into the pocket of her jeans and ran toward her truck, heart thrumming, Gizmo bounding along beside her.
“What do you want me to do with the human remains?” JoAnne shouted after her.
“Stick them in your freezer!” Kenzie was barely aware of what she was saying. “I’ll pick them up later!”
Had Conrad’s team been hit by a blizzard? Had someone fallen?
Please don’t let it be Harrison! Not Harrison.
Harrison Conrad was a world-renowned climber and the Team’s lead alpinist. More than that, he was a good friend. He’d left Colorado a couple of months ago, hoping to summit Everest again with his Aussie friend Bruce Jones and those Swiss climbing twins. Kenzie couldn’t understand what drove him to risk his life like this, and she’d told him as much. He had already climbed Everest twice. Why take his chances with the mountain again?
He’d grinned, his tanned face so damned handsome. “I promise I’ll come back in one piece.”
He’d better not have broken that promise, or she would kill him.
Damn it, Harrison!
A sick feeling in her stomach, she fumbled with her keys as she unlocked the topper, dropped the tailgate, and opened Gizmo’s crate. “Hop up. Time to go.”
Gizmo jumped up, stepped into the crate, and plopped down, tongue lolling. She would have to give him water at The Cave—Team headquarters.
She shut the crate, the tailgate, and the topper, then ran around to the front of her truck and climbed into the driver’s seat. The drive down to Scarlet Springs took only ten minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. She parked outside The Cave’s big bay doors, opened the topper to give Gizmo air, then hurried inside, dread like lead in her stomach.
She hurried through the bay doors, past Rescue 1 and Rescue 2—the Team’s big SAR vehicles—and walked through the entrance to the Ops Room.
Most of the Team was already there, gathered near the table that held the radios and computer. Eric Hawke stood in his turnout pants and a navy-blue T-shirt next to Austin Taylor, who wore his hunter-green park ranger uniform. Chaska was there, too, with his younger sister, Winona, a wildlife vet. Sasha Dillon, the Team’s other celebrity climber, sat beside Megs Hill, the Team’s co-founder and director, and her partner, Mitch Ahearn. Jesse Moretti and Creed Herrera stood toward the rear, tatted arms crossed over their chests. Gabe Rossiter, whom Kenzie hadn’t seen in ages, stood off to one side with Malachi O’Brien, who was still dressed in scrubs from his shift in the ER.
The grave expressions on their faces told her that something terrible had happened.
She hugged her arms around herself and went to stand beside Hawke, who met her gaze and shook his head.
God! What did that mean?
“What happened?” Kenzie whispered.
“A serac collapsed on Conrad’s team on the Khumbu Icefall. Someone who was watching through binoculars from Base Camp witnessed it. He says it buried them all.”
Kenzie’s knees gave. She sank into a chair, her throat tight. “No.”
Harrison couldn’t be gone. He couldn’t be.
Even as her heart told her this was impossible, she knew no one could survive being buried under tons of ice.
Hawke rested a reassuring hand on her shoulder but said no more.
A burst of static came from the computer, its browser open to one of the adventure climbing sites that monitored Everest expeditions every spring. Then came the sound of a woman’s voice.
“They’re starting up the Icefall now.”
Megs glanced over her shoulder at the rest of them. “It’s going to take the rescue team a few hours to reach the site.”
“A few hours?” The words were out before Kenzie realized she’d spoken.
“The Icefall is a death trap,” Gabe explained. “They have to be careful.”
“Right. Okay.” Kenzie knew that.
The Khumbu Icefall was where climbers began their ascent of Mt. Everest. An enormous, near-vertical river of ice, the glacier was prone to avalanches. It also had deep crevasses and towering walls of unstable ice, called seracs, that could collapse without warning.
Please, not Harrison.
Images played through her mind. Harrison carrying a lost little boy on his shoulders after Gizmo had found the child. Harrison teasing Kenzie about her thirtieth birthday. Harrison flying up the climbing wall at Knockers, the town’s brewpub and social hub. Harrison washing mud off Rescue 1 wearing nothing but shorts, his body all lean muscle.
He couldn’t just be … gone.
The minutes ticked by with agonizing slowness, the woman who was operating the radio at Base Camp giving them periodic updates. Other Team members drifted through the door, sitting or standing in silence. Isaac Rogers. Dave Hatfield. Nicole Turner. Bahir Acharya, the new guy.
Kenzie couldn’t just sit here. She went out to her truck, leashed Gizmo, and brought him inside. She filled his water bowl in the kitchen and brought it to her seat beside Hawke. Gizmo drank thirstily before curling up at her feet to nap.
A burst of static.
A woman’s voice came through the computer’s speakers, her message breaking up. “I’m getting a report … popped up out of nowhere … Looks like … Waiting to get confirm…”
Kenzie’s pulse skipped, everyone in the room seeming to hold their breath.
“Still waiting for confirmation,” the woman’s voice said.
Another burst of static.
This time the excitement in the woman’s voice was unmistakable. “… Conrad… It’s definitely him… must’ve fallen into the crevasse or so
mething … He’s alive!”
The Ops Room exploded in cheers.
Boneless with relief, Kenzie found herself blinking back tears.
Chapter 1
Tengboche, Nepal
August 26
Harrison Conrad sat in the lotus position in the back corner of the Dokhang—the prayer hall—at the Tengboche Monastery, his eyes closed, his back pressed against the wooden planks of the wall.
“Om muni muni maha muni shakyamuni soha.”
He chanted along with the monks, focusing his awareness on the words and music. The monks’ deep voices filled the space around him, drums, cymbals, and horns punctuating the chant. The spice of incense mingled with the warm scent of butter lamps and the musky odor of so many human bodies together.
The last of the season’s tourists were there, too, watching, sneaking illegal videos with cellphones, coughing from the altitude, but Conrad had forgotten about them. Everything around him was light. It penetrated him, raised him up, driving out the darkness that lived inside him.
“Om muni muni maha muni shakyamuni soha. Om muni muni maha muni shakyamuni soha.”
Om, wise one, wise one, greatly wise one, wise one of the Shakyans, Hail!
Time lost all meaning, the mantra spinning itself over and over again, weaving through Conrad’s consciousness until his mind was blank, the emptiness bringing with it a sense of peace. No pain. No regret. No guilt.