Landing Party: A Dinosaur Thriller by Rick Chesler

Author:Rick Chesler [Chesler, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2016-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

“How can we look at anything but your two asses with you blocking the view like that?” Richard grumbled.

But nothing could spoil Ethan’s good mood. “I certainly hope it’s not my ass you’re looking at as long as this lovely lady is lying here next to me.”

The group laughed, for the first time in a long time, while Ethan and Skylar crawled out of the tunnel onto a cramped platform cut into the volcano’s outer slope.

“We’re a little more than halfway up, from the looks of things.” Ethan stood up fully for the first time since entering the tunnel. He stretched, taking in the magnificent view of the empty Pacific Ocean and the brown volcano dropping precariously to meet it.

Skylar looked higher, at where there was to go from here. “Doesn’t look easy to get to, but I see what looks like a small plateau maybe forty feet above us, where we could set up a staging area and probably make that sat-phone call.”

Ethan rubbed the stubble on his chin as he pondered the proposed route. “That’s a near vertical stretch. We’ll have to break out the climbing gear, hammer in some pitons…”

Skylar looked past Ethan to the rest of the group. “Lara, can you get a signal from the edge here?”

The others parted to make way for the communications tech to move to the opening in the volcano’s face. Skylar stepped back into the tunnel, and Lara took her place at the window to the sky. She activated the sat-phone and stared at its screen while waiting to see if it would acquire a signal. A minute passed. and she shook her head.

“It still says ‘need clear view of sky’.”

Ethan shrugged. “We’ll have to make the climb, then. Even if we did make contact from here, there’s no way a heli could pick us up from this tunnel, anyway. So we might as well get on with it.”

Each of them set up their climbing gear. Richard was the most experienced climber of them, but due to his injuries, they decided Ethan should be the lead climber. The lead was the riskiest job, since he was the one who had to place the first safety lines, which the others would make use of as they followed in his vertical footsteps. It was crucial, therefore, that this person be extremely skilled, and Ethan’s experience climbing in the Alps to photograph eagles’ nests had earned him worldwide recognition as a wildlife photographer.

Ethan finished setting up his gear and asked Anita to belay him. She was also a somewhat experienced climber, and used to working with ropes and knots as a sailor. Furthermore, she was physically stronger than Lara and Skylar, and Ethan wanted someone with strength if he had to depend on them to catch him in a fall.

He moved to the edge and hammered a piton—a metal spike used to hold a rope—into the rock. The blows from his piton hammer echoed off the volcanic slope as Ethan drove the spike home.

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