“Did you bring coffee?” Kevin called out.
“There wasn’t any left,” Ben shouted.
“Fuck!”
Jesse stepped out of his skis and propped them against the building, then swiped his ID, opened the door, and flipped on the light. It took him and Ben all of five minutes to gather what they needed—a dozen charges, and double that number of fuses and pull-tab igniters. They packed the igniters and fuses separately from the charges and piled all of it onto the back of the Sherpa. Then they stowed their poles and skis in the rack and climbed aboard the snowmobile.
Jesse called up to Kevin. “We’re good to go.”
The Sherpa’s engine roared as they headed up the mountain.
*
Jesse watched while Kevin studied the terrain. The man was an expert at knowing when to call a slope safe. It was one of the most important jobs at the resort. If he fucked up, people could die.
Jesse was learning to read the landscape, but it would take years before he’d have anything approaching Kevin’s skill. Still, some things were obvious even to him. That big cornice hanging from the cliff at the top of the ridge would have to be blasted into oblivion. That would dump more snow onto the slope below, which would have to be bombed, too.
Yeah, they had their work cut out for them.
Kevin pointed. “Let’s take down that cornice. Two charges—one high, one low.”
The goal was to trigger a series of small avalanches so that the shifting layers of snow would be settled before skiers hit the slopes.
Jesse prepared the charges. Not much bigger than cans of soup, each held two pounds of pentolite—a chalky mix of trinitrotoluene, aka TNT, and pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN. A single charge could easily blow the three of them to shit if mishandled.
Ben bent down to watch. “Did you work with pentolite as a Ranger?”
Jesse chuckled at the idea of Rangers throwing soup cans. “Uncle Sam had more powerful shit for us to play with.” He inserted the fuses, then attached the igniters. He held out one charge for Ben, kept the other for himself. “You ready?”
Ben nodded. “Let’s do this.”
They got into position, then synced their movements, igniting the fuses at the same time. They had 90 seconds to throw and take cover before the charges exploded.
Kevin watched from behind. “Jesse, you throw high. Ben, go low.”
“Got it. On three,” Jesse said. “One, two, three.”
He threw his charge, aiming for the top of the cornice. “Fire in the hole!”
They skied away, taking cover behind a large boulder, the seconds ticking by.
BAM!
A cloud of snow fell around them, bits of rock striking the boulder.
They skied out from behind their cover to find the cornice gone, its weight of snow scattered on the slope below them.
Kevin opened his mouth to say something but was cut off.
WHOOMP!
A deep rumble filled the air as the snow on the slope below them shifted.
Kevin grinned. “This slope is primed to slide.”
“So … more charges then?” asked Ben.
“Yep.”
Jesse got to work building more bombs.
*
By late afternoon, Ellie’s sore throat and fever were gone. Daniel was feeling better, too, judging from the way he bounded around the house in his Superman pajamas, little cape fluttering behind him.
Thank God for antibiotics.
Certain they all needed something healthful and restoring for supper, she decided to make chicken soup from scratch using some frozen chicken stock she’d made during the holidays. Her vision of how the evening would go—the kids playing peacefully in the playroom while she cooked and listened to NPR in the kitchen—was not at all how things turned out.
She’d just begun sautéing an onion when she heard Daisy wail. She wiped her hands on a towel and hurried to the playroom to find her little girl in tears.
“Danny fwoo a bock,” she sobbed, holding her right cheek.
“Let me see.” Ellie kissed her. “You’re going to be okay.”
Then she turned to Daniel, who stood there looking like he might cry, too. “Did you throw a block at your sister?”
Daniel wasn’t yet as verbal as Daisy, which left him at a distinct disadvantage when it came to these situations. “Day boke it.”
“She broke something you built?”
He nodded, despair and tears filling his blue eyes, his lower lip quivering.
“That’s not a reason to hit your sister. You hurt her. See?” She touched her finger to the red mark on Daisy’s cheek.
This was too much for Daniel, who probably hadn’t meant to hurt his sister. He began to cry, too.
Ellie resisted the urge to hug them both and stayed focused on the lesson. “Tell Daisy you’re sorry.”
He managed to get the words out amid his tears. “Sowwy, Day.”
Ellie looked at her daughter. “You upset Daniel when you knocked over his blocks. That wasn’t a nice thing to do.”
Daisy’s lower lip quivered. “It was too taw.”