steering and Graham behind, quickly caught up and passed. Soon all Lily

could see of the other two men was an indistinct blur of hunched figures

through a trailing cloud of fine surface snow.

She felt Gronquist tense as a large metal object rose up out of the

darkness at the far edge of the light's ray. Gronquist abruptly jammed

the handgrips around to his left. The edges of the front skis dug into

the ice and the snowmobile swerved away just one meter from striking a

piece of the plane's shattered wing. He made a frantic attempt to

straighten out, but the sudden twist of centrifugal force whipped the

sled around like the tail of a maddened rattlesnake. The top-heavy sled

went into a wild skid, jackknifed against the snowmobile and snapped the

hitch. The tips of the runners dug in and it flipped upside down,

scattering its load in the air like debris from an explosion.

Gronquist shouted something, but the words were cut off as the flat side

of a runner unerringly caught him on the shoulder, knocking him off the

snowmobile. He was thrown in a wide arc like a demolition ball about to

smash a wall. The hood of his coat was jerked back and the ice rose up

and struck his unprotected head.

Lily's arms were torn from around Gronquist's waist as he vanished into

the darkness. She thought she might be thrown clear. The sled missed

her, crashing to a stop a few meters away, but the snowmobile had other

ideas. Without Gronquist's hands on the clutch lever and throttle, it

came to a stop, teetering precariously at a forty-five-degree angle,

engine popping at idle.

It hung there for a brief moment, and then slowly heeled over to one

side, falling on Lily's legs from her hips down and pinning her

helplessly against the ice sheet.

Hoskins and Graham were not immediately aware of the accident behind

them, but they were about to run into a disaster of their own. After

covering another two hundred meters, Graham turned, more out of

curiosity than intuition, to check how far they had outdistanced Lily

and Gronquist. He was surprised to see their light hewn far to the

rear, stationary and pointing downward.

He pounded Hoskins's shoulder and shouted in his ear, "I think

something's happened to the others."

It had been Hoskins's original intention to find the depression in the

ice carved by the plane after it touched down and then follow it to the

final crash site. His eyes were straining to penetrate the gloom beyond

when Graham interrupted his concentration.

The words came indistinct over the growl of the snowmobile's exhaust. He

twisted his head and shouted back at Graham.

"I can't hear you."

"Something's wrong."

Hoskins nodded in understanding and refocused his attention on the

terrain ahead. The distraction was to cost them. Too late, he glimpsed

one of the troughs gouged by the landing gear almost as he was on it.