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      To all the quiet heroes who do whatever is

      necessary to care for others

       Prologue

      Thunder Mountain opened its snowy maw and swallowed the crashing plane. The business jet, its engines dead, not designed to glide without the assistance of power, descended almost like a stone, but the pilot struggled manfully.

      The wild creatures, those not slumbering for winter, heard it come in, cutting through the air with a too-quiet but unnatural whoosh, heading for the only treeless space for miles. Those nearby froze and watched the thing slide, burying itself deeper in the snow as it went, metal screaming as it twisted, leaving a trail behind that would vanish quickly as the arriving blizzard blew mightily and dumped its heavy load. Then they turned and fled.

      All fell silent. The flakes continued to swirl madly, the wind to gust powerfully. Wise creatures found hiding places from the storm’s fury.

      And Thunder Mountain began to devour all the evidence of the crash.

       Chapter 1

      Chase Dakota stared at cockpit windscreens buried in snow, dirt, rocks and branches. Only the flickering light from his dying console allowed him to see anything at all. Moments later, to his relief, the emergency lights turned on again. Dim but essential.

      For long seconds he didn’t move, but instead listened. Listened to a world gone oddly silent, muffled by snow and the plane’s own soundproofing. No screams reached him. That could be good, or very bad.

      He was sweat-soaked from the effort of bringing this damn plane down. The instant the engines had cut out, he’d begun to fly a boulder not a bird, and his battle to optimize the aerodynamics and prevent a fatal dive had been Herculean. Hitting the mountain’s downslope had been a boon.

      Now he cut off the fuel pumps. Although they’d had a dramatic drop in fuel level, he couldn’t be sure something else hadn’t caused the dual flameout of his engines and that there might be more than fumes left. Next he switched off everything else that was nonessential now that they were no longer in the air. Mission accomplished.

      He took just a moment to do a mental self-check. He wasn’t aware of having lost consciousness at any point, but he might not have known it even if he had. Everything still seemed to be in working condition. Good.

      He didn’t have time for shock. He reached for the buckles of his harness and released them. His first priority was to check on his four passengers. Everything else could wait.

      Even as he rose and stepped through the small cockpit, his feet told him the plane had been seriously bent on impact. But looking back through the cabin as he pulled aside the accordion door, he saw with relief that the rest of the plane seemed to be intact. All of it. That meant his passengers were still with him. All of them.

      At first all he could hear was panicked breathing. Then a familiar voice said, “That was a helluva landing, Chase.”

      Billy Joe Yuma. An old buddy.

      “Not my preferred type,” Chase managed, working his way back through the narrow-bodied business jet. “Anyone hurt?”

      “I’m fine,” Yuma said. “So’s Wendy.”

      “Ms. Campbell?”

      “I … think I’m okay. My sister …”

      “I’m checking right now.”

      He passed the three people, still tightly buckled into their seats, and made his way to the small bedroom in the tail where the sick woman lay. He’d insisted that she be strapped in, overriding the Campbell woman’s objections, and never had he been gladder that he’d been willing to go toe-to-toe over something. He grabbed a flashlight from a wall compartment as he passed the small bathroom, and flicked it on.

      He saw her, still strapped in place, still too thin to be believed, but blinking. Awake. Aware. Panic filling her face.

      “It’s okay,” he said. “We came down in one piece.” “Fire?” she asked weakly.

      “Nope. None. You’re going to be okay.” An easy, hopeful lie. At this point he didn’t have the foggiest idea just how bad this was. He was counting the good things right now, and the good things were that his passengers were alive and his plane intact enough not to present additional problems.

      He paused, feeling the aircraft shift a bit as if the wind banged on its side. A quiet groan of metal answered, but nothing more.

      “My sister?” the woman on the bed asked, her voice faint.

      “She’s fine. Everyone’s okay. I’ll send her back, all right?”

      He didn’t even have to do that. As soon as he turned around, he was face-to-face with the imperious young woman who had hired him to take her and her sister to Minneapolis. If she weren’t so damn bossy, she’d have been an attractive Celtic beauty, with her black hair and deep blue eyes. “Cait,” she said.

      “She’s asking for you.”

      He stepped into the W.C. to give her room to pass. Then he headed back up the aisle. With every step he felt the torture the plane had gone through as it had slid along the mountain slope. The deep snow had helped, but it wasn’t enough to completely shield the plane from the ground underneath, especially boulders. This baby would never fly again.

      But now it had one last duty: to help them survive. Glancing out the portholes that weren’t yet fully covered by snow told him the blizzard conditions he’d been flying above had begun to reach them. Rescue lay a long way down the road of time and this mountain.

      He sat in an empty seat facing Wendy and Billy Joe Yuma. He’d known them both most of his life—the advantage of living in a small town. And he knew he was going to need them both now. They belonged to Conard County’s emergency-response team, Wendy as chief flight nurse, Yuma (he hated to be called Billy Joe) as the primary rescue chopper pilot.