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Emergency Locator Transmitter and the responder to 7700 MHz. Please, please let the ELT be working. Had she remembered to check the batteries? If they crashed, any plane flying overhead would hear their distress call.
    Andee glanced at Sarah. Her friend stared straight ahead, clasping the door grip.
    They cleared the buffer of clouds, and the rugged landscape below threatened to cut off her air. Calm down.
    The plane began to spin. Andee ordered herself to slow her breathing and mentally catalog her responses.
    Center the rudders. She fought the controls; her hands whitened as she forced her head to stay clear. The plane spun once, then leveled out. Thank You, God.
    What was her checklist for a forced landing? Turn fuel selector off. Throttle, closed. Mixture—idle cutoff. Mags, off. Land … ASAP.
    She pulled back on the yoke. The elevator responded and pulled the nose up slightly. She nudged her flaps down, slowing the plane.
    Land.
    The plummet and spin had driven her course northwest over the foothills and rising horizon of the Brooks Range, glistening peaks of doom. Crippled, she would descend until they splotched nose first onto some jagged spire. She glanced at her falling altimeter. With this much ice, even the engine running at full power couldn’t keep the plane in the air. They’d never keep the height—even over Foggytop Mountain. She had to find a place to land, one that wouldn’t rip them apart piece by piece. She felt sweat bead underneath her cap, but inside her leather coat a shiver ran up her spine.
    “Sarah, get on the horn and keep calling Mayday.” She handed Sarah the mike.
    The stall warning continued to blare.
    Andee evened the flaps, praying for response. The plane nosed up slightly, but at this speed, they’d be nothing but bear bait.
    The plush carpet of tundra beckoned below, but the Cessna refused to respond in time. They passed a canyon dissected by a stream of glacier flow, and she willed them above a sawtooth ridge and past the furrows of a glacier field at the mouth of a high-altitude basin.
    “Mayday, Mayday.” Andee heard the reined-in panic in Sarah’s voice.
    The scenery hurtled by, and the yoke shook in Andee’s grip. She adjusted the throttle to get a better mixture for more power, but to her dismay, it didn’t cut their descent.
    Praise the Lord, the flaps miraculously responded. She barely missed clipping the wing on a snowy boulder outcropping.
    The screaming in the passenger area stilled. She tasted their fear.
    She needed to find another carpeted basin to set them down in before they crashed so high they’d never be able to hike out, let alone survive the landing.
    Ripping off her headset, she glanced at Sarah. “Find me a meadow or a gravel bar to land on.”
    Sarah’s eyes widened.
    Andee heard moaning. A furtive glance behind her showed ashen faces. All except for McRae, who wore a grim, dark look, as if he might hold her personally responsible for the storm clouds that drove them from the sky.
    Then again she did too.
    “Prepare for crash landing.” Andee knew she didn’t have to yell to get her message across. She throttled back to an airspeed of 100 knots, then released the lock on the door.
    Nothing more than the roar of the motor filled the cabin.
    “There!” Sarah pointed to a swath of reddened tundra surrounded by cut granite spears and falls of gray scree splotched with white snow.
    Andee nodded and descended hard into the high meadow. Short approach, here we come. She cut her speed to 71 knots, thankful she now had flaps, and nosed the Cessna down, barely clearing the greedy claws of a sharpened peak.
    The plane hummed as she angled down. Andee was painfully aware that she’d probably lose her left wing at this angle. Please, Lord, straighten her up!
    The ground rose to meet the plane, and an eerie silence filled her ears as she cut the engine. The plane bumped hard on the tundra, skipped, bumped again, then bounced as the wheels hit a boulder. She