Chapter 2 - THE ROAD UNDER THE SNOW
The first emergency call came at 6:17 p.m.
I remember the exact time because the clock above the operations board was seven minutes fast, and I had corrected it with a black marker on a piece of tape that morning. It was a tiny, pointless act of control during a holiday when everything else in my life felt out of place.
My name is Nathan Whitaker. I'm thirty-eight, a major stationed at Fort Carson, and on Christmas Eve I was supposed to be eating roast beef in my father's house outside Portland, Oregon. Instead, I was standing under fluorescent lights with a paper cup of coffee that had gone cold two hours earlier.
Sergeant Elena Alvarez answered the phone. I watched her face change as she listened.
“County emergency management,” she said, covering the receiver. “Major, they have a multi-vehicle shutdown north of the Springs. State patrol has crews out, but a secondary road is buried. They're asking what support the installation can provide if the request comes through.”
I set down my coffee.
“Get the duty officer and installation emergency manager on the line. Nobody self-deploys. We coordinate with the incident commander and move when we're authorized.”
Alvarez nodded. She was the kind of noncommissioned officer who could make a chaotic room feel organized simply by picking up a pencil. She had two children, both asleep at her sister's house by now, and she had intended to be sitting with them in matching pajamas.
“You should go,” I told her.
She held the phone against her shoulder. “And leave you with Lieutenant Briggs and his ability to lose a map while holding it?”
“Briggs has improved.”
“Last week he asked which side of the copier to feed the paper.”
“Go home, Sergeant.”
“After we sort the county request, sir.”
She went back to the phone before I could object.
Outside, the wind hit the building in long, hard waves. Snow raced sideways past the windows. The storm had been forecast, but it had strengthened faster than expected. Temperatures were dropping. A line of cars on the highway had become a line of stranded people, and the local responders were struggling to reach them.
Our base emergency teams were already checking generators, water lines, and barracks heating. The county was requesting additional transport capacity and personnel to help move civilians once rescue crews cleared safe routes. That sounded manageable on paper.
Then the second call came.
A charter bus carrying nineteen children and three adults had been reported missing between a youth music center and the main road. Their driver had radioed that he'd left the highway before the closure, looking for a route around a stalled truck. The last location ping put them near a low crossing on an isolated frontage road. The coach had a partially functioning heater and very little fuel.
The children had been returning from a holiday choir performance.
“Nineteen?” I asked.
Alvarez checked her notes. “Nineteen children. Three adults. Twenty-two total.”
The number hung in the room.
I thought of the two junior soldiers who had left earlier carrying presents for their kids. One was planning to teach his daughter how to ice skate. The other had promised his son he would be home in time to build a toy train. I had watched them leave with the selfish little satisfaction of a man who had decided he could do without Christmas as long as someone else got theirs.
Now nineteen other families were waiting for children who should already have been home.
The installation commander joined the call with county authorities. The state and local responders would remain in charge of civilian rescue. Our contribution, once approved, would be vehicles, personnel, and access to a heated staging facility. A guard unit was already working the main highway. We were assigned a supporting route to help reach the lost coach from the south.
“Major Whitaker, can your team move?” the colonel asked.
“Once route safety is confirmed and the request is recorded, yes, ma'am.”
“You'll have a county rescue officer with you. No improvising beyond your orders.”
“Understood.”
I selected a small team. Alvarez volunteered before I finished the list. Staff Sergeant Jonah Pike, our vehicle specialist, came in from the motor pool wearing his Santa hat over his winter cap. Specialist Caleb Ross checked the radios with hands that shook slightly, whether from cold or excitement I couldn't tell.
Ross had been scheduled to fly to Texas that morning. His wife was pregnant with their first child. He had turned back after the airport closed.
“You don't have to come,” I told him.
“Neither do you, sir.”
“That is not the same thing.”
He met my eyes. “My wife would want me to help.”
I made him call her before we left.
Before we left, I took ten minutes to check each person's cold-weather gear and confirm that someone outside the convoy knew our route and expected return time. It was tedious work. That was exactly why it mattered. Nothing about a snowstorm became safer because a rescue team wanted to look brave. Pike found an improperly fitted radio battery and corrected it. Ross discovered that one of the spare blankets had been stored wet. Alvarez replaced the bundle without making a speech about it. Each correction was small enough to be embarrassing and important enough to save somebody a miserable night.
The colonel caught me at the staging-room door.
“You volunteered for overnight duty, Whitaker. That doesn't mean you volunteered to carry the whole county on your shoulders.”
“I know, ma'am.”
“Good. If conditions exceed your capability, you turn around. The rescue is not improved by adding four more people to the casualty list.”
I nodded. It was the kind of warning a commander repeated because too many good people were tempted to confuse determination with permission to take foolish risks.
As I checked the loading manifest, I thought briefly of the Christmas mornings my mother had made special. She never bought expensive gifts. She cooked pancakes in the shape of stars and hid little notes in the shoes we'd leave beside the door. One year, when I was ten, she wrote: Be the person who notices when someone needs a hand.
Dad had always said she spoiled me with advice instead of toys.
I wondered what she would have made of my canceled ticket and the silence between him and me. I thought she would have been angry on my behalf. I also thought she would have told me not to waste the whole night being angry when there was work to do.
So I signed the final roster, sealed my phone inside my coat, and went outside into the storm.
The convoy pulled out at 7:09 p.m., led by a county rescue truck. Snow erased the road edges. The headlights illuminated little more than swirling white. Every few minutes the wind shifted, making the world appear to slide sideways even though the vehicle remained on the pavement.
My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket.
Dad.
Merry Christmas. Hope you aren't upset about our conversation. It just made sense this year. We'll talk after the holiday.
I read it twice, then locked the screen. There was nothing to say that would make him understand what his words had done. I had not begged to come. I had not threatened to stop visiting. I had simply obeyed the boundary he'd created, which apparently made me the unreasonable one.
At an intersection choked with snow, we stopped behind a state patrol SUV. Its emergency lights flashed blue and red across the drifts. A trooper climbed into our lead truck and spread a map over the dashboard.
“The bus is somewhere past the creek crossing,” she said. “Last confirmed contact was forty minutes ago. The driver reported a child with asthma, and then we lost him.”
“Can we reach the road?” I asked.
“Not by the highway. There may be a service lane running along the fence. But the lower crossing is flooding with drifting snow. If we go too far, we could get stuck with them.”
The trooper's name tag said FOSTER. Her cheeks were raw from the wind.
“We'll stop short of anything we can't verify,” I said. “No vehicle goes into an unmarked ditch just because someone's afraid of being late.”
She gave me a quick look. “You sound like somebody who has made a costly mistake before.”
“I've watched people make them.”
We moved slowly, using road markers and guidance from the county team. At 8:03, the lead vehicle stopped. Ahead was a field of white with no visible road, only the dark outline of trees bending in the wind.
Foster tried the bus frequency. Static answered.
She tried again.
“This is county rescue calling Pine Valley charter coach seventeen. If you copy, key the microphone twice.”
Nothing.
Pike leaned forward and pointed through the windshield. “Sir. Left side. See that?”
I narrowed my eyes. For a moment there was only snow. Then, far below the road, I saw a small, weak flash of amber.
“Could be a hazard light,” Ross said.
It flashed again. Three times. Then stopped.
Foster lifted the radio.
“Coach seventeen, if you can hear us, turn your lights on and off.”
The amber light blinked twice.
May you like
Somewhere down in the white darkness, twenty-two people were trying to tell us they were still alive.
And the ground between us and them was beginning to disappear beneath the storm.
