7
Patty didn’t have time to wonder at Mick’s final signal to Sofia. In seconds she was colder than after an icy Grand Banks wave swept the length of her Gloucester swordfish boat. They were falling from fifteen thousand feet at over a hundred miles an hour.
The wind chill was horrendous.
And the view was incredible.
It was dawn at Mount Hayes, the sun a bright, deep-red orb rising over the spiky rock-and-ice shrouded peaks of the Eastern Alaska Range. The impossibly rugged mountainscape sprawled in every direction except north. In that direction, the steep slopes tumbled down into a broad river valley where the Tanana River flowed west before the far side of the valley climbed anew up another section of the range to the north. Every peak was lit like a brilliant ruddy torch by the low-
