65 Below (34 page)

After a delicious meal, Marcus was given a room at the finest hotel available in Conakry. Once settled in, Marcus called his friend Linus and told him as much as he could, asking him to pass on to his parents the news that he was alive. Linus had started to say something back, but the connection, which had been very crackly from the start, abruptly went out and he was unable to reconnect the call. He then found a piece of paper and a pen and wrote two letters. The first was to his mother, the second to Lonnie.

Lonnie,

These past two months have been the hardest of my life, but I want you to know that it was the dream of seeing you again that sustained me through it all. I witnessed the most evil that men can do displayed like a parade before my eyes, but I put a stop to it. The desire to see you again, with honor, has been the sole motivating factor that led me to do what I did to not only survive, but to save the lives of those in my care.

If it were not for the vision of your beauty constantly floating before my mind, I would have had no reason to continue on in the adventure that I have endured.

I love you madly, and with extreme eagerness await the day we are together again.

Your Marine,

Your Love,

Marcus

1. Chapter 40
   

George Parks Highway

Sunshine, Alaska

20 December

03:35 Hours

Wyatt, Johnson, Wasner, and two of his SEALs landed in the state’s Blackhawk helicopter at the remote trooper post in the small town of Sunshine. The town was a fairly young settlement of about two hundred people scattered through the forest high in the mountains on the south side of the Alaska Range. In the clear, cold, starlit night, the shadowy outline of the mountains stood out against the inky darkness of the sky. High above the other peaks, like an emperor gazing upon his subjects, stood the massive mountain locally known as Denali. The literal translation of the Athabaskan name is ‘Great One’. Most Americans know it as Mount McKinley. The second tallest peak in the world, it juts skyward nearly five miles above sea level.

Wyatt borrowed a vehicle from the trooper post, a full size F250. Nestled in the eight-foot-long bed and facing toward the rear was a long track snowmobile. Both the truck and the snowmobile were painted bright white, with the blue trooper stripe and gold shield logo emblazoned on the door of the F250 and on the cowling of the snowmobile. Wyatt drove the truck. Marcus was up front in the passenger seat and the others sat in the spacious backseat with their weapons between their knees. Wyatt drove to a checkpoint at the junction of the Parks Highway and a small, unnamed road near Byers Lake.

The smaller road snaked its way east out of their view through the backcountry forty miles. At its end, the road terminates into the Denali Highway, which connects the Parks and Richardson Highways in the summer months. During the winter, deep snow renders the road impassible to all but snowmobiles and dog mushers.

As Wyatt pulled up to the intersection, one of the two troopers manning the barricade stretched across the Parks Highway stepped out of his vehicle and into the frigidly cold arctic air to greet them. He pulled his hood up over his head and arched his shoulders against the biting chill as he approached the truck. The temperature was nearly fifty below, and seemed to be dropping. The other trooper stayed in his warm cruiser, from which he could comfortably watch for southbound vehicles.

Wasner sent his two SEALs out to set up sniper positions to cover the road ahead. Marcus started to climb out from the passenger-side door after them.

“Marcus,” Lonnie said as he opened his door. “Can we talk for a minute?” She had no expression on her face, but Marcus got the message.

He turned to the others and said, “I’ll be right out, you guys. Get set up and we can run shifts so no one gets too cold.” He closed the door and turned toward her.

As soon as everyone else was out of earshot, she spoke. “I know this is an awkward time, but I have to get this off my chest right now. I just want to let you know how sorry I am for the way things ended up between us.”

Marcus stared at the dashboard, silent.

“When they said you were dead, my whole world fell apart. I even thought of killing myself, and probably would have, if my dad hadn’t come over one night.”

“You didn’t seem to waste too much time in mourning.”

“Not too much time?” Lonnie looked at him with a mix of anger and incredulity. “Marcus…you were dead. They said your body was blown to bits and there weren’t even enough parts to send home. How long was I supposed to wait for a ghost?”

Marcus remained silent for several seconds. Seconds that stretched to infinity for Lonnie.

She opened her mouth to speak, but the words were stuck in her throat, choking her as she tried to say them. “I…want another chance.” She took a deep breath. “I still love you.”

Marcus closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the seat. Lonnie turned away from him. She faced out the windshield and forced the tears that welled up to stay down. “I understand if you hate me. I acted like a whore while you were suffering in Africa, thinking I was waiting for you. If you don’t want me, just don’t say anything and I’ll get the message and leave it alone.”

Marcus inhaled deeply through his nose. His muscular chest expanded inside the thick parka. In a deep, thoughtful voice, he said, “I have four hundred pages of poetry I wrote for you since I escaped Sierra Leone.”

Lonnie turned and looked into his face. The stone-cold warrior expression had faded. A warm gentleness she remembered from long ago returned to his eyes, but with a twinge of pain.

“I haven’t been with another woman since I proposed to you in Europe. I waited for you to change your mind for several years, but you didn’t, so I decided I would be better off if I just died in the line of duty. I quit being careful and volunteered for all kinds of crazy missions all over the world. I always kept a large military life insurance policy, naming you as the beneficiary if anything should happen to me. For some reason, I kept surviving, although God knows I shouldn’t have.”

He locked his deep brown eyes on hers. “When you wrote to me before I left for Africa, I thought you had come around and we could live happily ever after. Thirty-two good men were killed, but somehow I survived. I just knew it had to be because God was smiling on me and wanted me to get back to you. The image of you in my dreams is what saved me as I crossed that whole war-torn country, being hunted like an animal.”

The tears in Lonnie’s eyes overflowed and ran in streams down her cheeks.

“When you didn’t answer my letter, I got scared. I thought something had happened to you in your job with the troopers. Linus told me the truth later.”

Lonnie wiped her eyes and cheeks with shaking fingers. Her lower lip quivered. She feared she was on the verge of bawling out loud.

Marcus continued. “I truly hoped you would have a happy marriage with Jerry. I never stopped loving you, but decided that if you would be happier without me, I would just disappear.”

She tried to talk, but the sound balled up in her throat and would not come out. Individual tears escaped and slid over her cheeks. Lonnie glanced out the window of the truck to make sure no one was looking at her. After a long silence, she forced out the words. “I am so sorry.”

Marcus reached across the space between the two seats and took her hand in his own. “I know. This is a pretty crappy world and the circumstances of our reunion have not been anything like what I had wished for.” He took her other hand in his. “If we live through this, and you really want to, we’ll erase the past and try again.”

“Yes,” she replied. “Let’s try again.”

1. Chapter 41
   

North Side of the Denali Range

Near Healy, Alaska

20 December

03:35 Hours

Four armed men, dressed in military uniforms and carrying a hodge-podge of weapons and equipment, hiked toward the road in the mountains just north of Healy, an alpine city built in the sparse, rocky terrain around the Isabella Coal Mine. The Alaska State Defense Force had no real winter maneuvers per se. Staff Sergeant Aaron Michaels had been determined to change that since he joined the ASDF just after 9-11.

As a young man, Michaels had dreamed of being a Marine. That dream was crushed, due to boot camp injuries he had received as a nineteen-year-old private back in the eighties. He had stayed in good shape and tried to reenlist in the Marines numerous times, only to be sent away by the recruiters. At the age of thirty-four, through a combination of frustration and patriotism, he ended at the recruiting office for the Alaska State Defense Force, which had gladly accepted him for whatever he was willing to do.

The ASDF is, for lack of a better term, a militia. Unlike many of the private militias in the Lower 48, it is a legitimate, although minimally funded, paramilitary law enforcement and security organization run by the state of Alaska under the authority of the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. In the days since 9/11, units of the ASDF have often been called to month-long stints of active duty to back up trooper or National Guard operations that need additional manpower.

Members of the various units in the ASDF have, since the terrorist bombings in New York, been called up for duty guarding the pipeline, the Anchorage Port, the Alaska Railroad, and other similar missions. One such unit had been instrumental in the capture of two suspected terrorists who were caught mapping the underside of a pipeline bridge north of Fairbanks.

The rank and file of the ASDF are comprised of volunteers ranging in age from eighteen to seventy-five, the majority between forty and sixty. Most are former or retired members of the US military. They use Alaska Army National Guard surplus or personally owned equipment and weapons. When on patrol, ASDF members quite often look more like hunters than soldiers, typically carrying a variety of weapons ranging from Chinese-made MAK-90s, Russian SKS, Vietnam-era British L1A1 rifles, AR-15s or their own Winchester or Remington 30-06 bolt-action hunting rifles.

Soldiers of the ASDF are not paid unless called to active duty deployments by the governor. There had been several dozen such paid call-ups since 9/11. Staff Sergeant Michaels, a computer network technician by trade, and the dozen mostly younger men in his command had participated in exactly zero of these paid call-ups. His unit had always been ready to go, but much to his chagrin, never got the call. Despite the letdown, he insisted on keeping the men of the 492nd Alaska Coastal Scouts ready to move and constantly had them in training—as often, that is, as they were willing to attend, and his wife was willing to let him go.

Michaels and three of his men had taken it upon themselves to do some extreme cold-weather training in the mountains of the Alaska Range. The forecast called for cold but tolerable temperatures between –30 and –40. The small thermometer Michaels carried in his web gear showed it was hovering around –50 degrees. The sky was clear and the stars bright. That indicated it was only going to get colder.

Concerned with the safety of his men and not wanting to risk cold-weather injuries, Michaels ordered them to pack up and head out before it got any colder. As long as they kept moving, their bodies would generate enough heat to keep them from freezing. If they were to stop and make camp, the temperature could easily get one or more of them badly injured or killed.

Each man wore an insulated neoprene facemask, called a gator, both to protect the skin of his face and to warm the air before it entered his lungs. At forty below, the moisture in one’s nose freezes on every inhalation of raw air. At fifty below, boiling liquid, when tossed in the air from a cup, instantly freezes as it falls to the ground, forming itself into perfectly shaped tiny BB-sized ice pellets.

If the temperature drops to –60 or colder, life comes into jeopardy. Exposed skin, especially the fingers, ears, and nose, will freeze solid in under three minutes. If a person stops moving, they will begin showing symptoms of hypothermia within fifteen minutes. If not properly dressed, that person could freeze to death in under thirty minutes.

Michaels, originally from Fairbanks, had experienced temperatures as cold as –75 on two occasions. He knew they needed to get out of the mountains before the cold became deadly.

Corporal Terrence Jones, a thirty-year-old carpenter from Wasilla with no family and no military experience other than six months in the ASDF, led the patrol as they made their way back to the vehicles they had parked in a pullout beside the highway. Following behind him were twenty-one-year-old Corporal Michael Phelps, a second-year ROTC student at UAA, and Sergeant Charles Barnes, a thirty-one year-old family man with three small children. Barnes, a former Air Force cook, worked as a souschef in one of Anchorage’s many classy restaurants.

After a three-hour hike, they topped a ridge that brought them to within sight of the highway. Their vehicle waited for them in a paved turnoff less than a mile away.

Blue and red flashing beacons from two police cars pulsed across the road near their truck. A pair of spotlights brightly illuminated the highway ahead of the police cars as well the turnoff.

“What’s going on up there?” Michaels asked.

“Dunno, Sarge,” Jones replied as he slid his binoculars from the case clasped on his web gear. He peered toward the highway and said, “Looks like some kind of a checkpoint or something. Two troopers with a barricade blocking both lanes.”

“A check-point? You mean like a sobriety checkpoint? In this weather?” Phelps questioned.“Dang. The troopers must be desperate for tickets to sit out in this crap.”

“No kidding,” replied Barnes, “Especially at this time of the morning! It’s freaking half-past three a.m. and fifty below zero! Who in the hell do they expect catch driving drunk this far out in the boonies, anyway—Jack Frost?”

“Maybe they’ll let us sit in their cars while my truck warms up.” Michaels said. “Let’s get moving. My feet are numb.”

The ragtag squad of militia soldiers trundled across the deep snow, carried by large, military surplus wire-mesh snowshoes. It was twenty minutes before they descended the ridge and crossed the last mile of nearly flat snow-covered tundra. The last few hundred yards was easy, as a recent wind had cleared most of the loose snow and caused a thick, hard shell to form across the surface of what remained.