Part 3
The county snowcat entered Blackstone Pass at 8:31 p.m., its work lights cutting a narrow tunnel through the storm. Sheriff Holt rode in the SAR truck directly behind it. Cal drove the next vehicle with Gabe in the passenger seat, while two Iron Ridge trucks carried recovery equipment and additional volunteers.
They moved at less than ten miles an hour. The snowcat cleared the center of the highway, but wind filled its tracks almost immediately. Gabe watched both shoulders, searching for a taillight, a reflection, or a break in the unbroken white.
At mile 29, Holt ordered the formation to slow further. Nate’s SUV had entered from the west, which meant the search team had to examine every drop-off between the camera and the summit. Volunteers walked short sections beside the vehicles, tethered to safety lines whenever the shoulder disappeared.
Near mile 31, Cal saw a broken reflector post angled toward the ravine. He stopped and aimed a handheld light across the drift. Beneath the fresh accumulation, two shallow channels curved off the pavement.
“Tire marks,” he said.
Holt came over the radio. “All vehicles hold position. Ground team with me.”
Gabe was outside before Cal finished securing the truck. Wind caught his coat and shoved him toward the road, but Cal grabbed the back of it.
“You stay behind me,” Cal said. “If we find them, I need room to work.”
The tracks ended at a steep wooded slope. Several young pines had snapped in the same direction, their exposed wood still pale beneath the snow. Gabe descended with Cal, Holt, and two SAR volunteers, using a rope anchored to the lead vehicle.
Nate’s SUV rested on its side against a ponderosa pine. Snow had already covered much of the roof and hood, but Gabe recognized the Montana plate and a dent near the rear bumper from the week Nate had backed into a trailer hitch.
He reached the windshield and saw his brother inside.
Cal checked for a pulse, then looked toward Holt and shook his head. Gabe placed one gloved hand against the cold bodywork. His grief arrived as a pressure beneath his ribs, but there was no time to let it become anything else.
“The boys,” he said. “Find the boys.”
The upper rear door had been forced beyond its normal travel. Cal climbed into the cabin and directed his light toward the car seats. Both were empty.
Gabe followed him in. He touched Mason’s seat, then Ben’s, as if the warmth of his hand could tell him how long they had been gone.
“The harnesses were cut,” Cal said. He held up one frayed section and found the orange emergency cutter nearby. “Whoever did this supported them before cutting. There’s no blood on the seats, and I don’t see an injury pattern back here.”
Holt searched the cargo compartment. “Two children’s coats are missing. So is the fleece from this bag.”
Cal checked the floor behind the second row. “Cargo liner’s gone too.”
Gabe looked at him. “Someone got them out.”
“Looks that way.”
“Then where are they?”
Outside, one of the SAR volunteers called for Holt. Beneath the trees, where the branches had protected the ground from the heaviest snowfall, a churned path led uphill. Mixed with small footprints was a broad, shallow groove.
Cal crouched beside it. “That’s the cargo liner. Someone used it to pull one of the boys.”
The trail reached the highway and vanished in the blowing snow. Holt studied the route map under the hood of her coat. Greyhaven lay more than fifteen miles west of the crash. East of mile 31, the only enclosed structure before the county line was the maintenance shelter at mile 40.
“If the person who took them knew this road, that’s where they’d go,” she said.
“And if they didn’t?” Gabe asked.
Cal swept his light across the buried mile marker. “They still went east. The protected tracks on the slope angle that way.”
Holt radioed the snowcat and expanded the search line along the eastern shoulder. Nate’s body would remain secured in the vehicle until a recovery team could reach him safely. Gabe hated leaving his brother, but the small drag groove beneath the trees had given him something grief could not: a direction.
The convoy resumed. Volunteers checked drainage cuts, disabled call boxes, and clusters of trees where someone might have sought protection. At mile 34, a searcher found a scrap of gray duct tape frozen into the snow near the shoulder. At mile 36, the lee side of a drift preserved part of the cargo liner’s curved track.
Someone had carried the twins for miles.
Gabe sat rigidly beside Cal, counting every reflector post. “Could they survive that long?”
“Children lose heat fast,” Cal said. He did not soften the truth. “But whoever took the coats and blanket understood what mattered. That gives them a chance.”
At mile 40, the snowcat’s lights found the maintenance shelter. The building looked like another section of drift until the beam caught the top of its steel door.
Fresh snow had been pushed away from the threshold. A broken padlock lay beside a short lug wrench.
“Command, we have signs of entry,” Cal reported. “Medical team forward.”
Gabe followed him through the drift. Holt and two SAR members approached with insulated rescue wraps, a rigid litter, oxygen, and warmed packs. Cal tested the door, found it blocked from inside, and pushed steadily until it opened.
Their lights crossed the dark shelter and settled on the raised platform at the back.
Two small winter coats and a fleece blanket covered a tight huddle. Beneath them, a bare-shouldered teenage boy had folded himself around Mason and Ben, holding one child against his chest and the other within the curve of his legs. His skin was pale beneath a network of bruises, and one ruined boot had split wide around a foot wrapped in a frozen sock.
Gabe dropped beside them. He recognized Mason’s hair first, then Ben’s cheek against the teenager’s collarbone.
Cal stopped him before he pulled them apart. “Slowly. Severe hypothermia can make the heart unstable.”
He placed a hand beneath Mason’s coat, then checked Ben. “Both boys are breathing.”
Gabe bowed his head for one second, his hand hovering over his sons without touching them.
Cal moved to Owen. He watched the boy’s chest, then pressed two fingers carefully to his neck and held them there far longer than Gabe could bear. At last, Cal looked up. “He has a pulse,” he said. “It’s faint. We have to move him gently…”
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