Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire by Christa Faust, Gabriel Hunt Page A

batch of narrow strips. While Gabriel rubbed warmth back into Millie’s icy foot, Nils cobbled together a temporary foot covering for Millie to wear while his boot dried.
    “Damn that was close,” Millie said, letting out along shaky breath. “I never realized how much I like having ten toes until just now.”
    Nils tied the makeshift boot onto Millie’s foot and helped him up, handing the parka back to Gabriel.
    “Can you walk like that?” Gabriel asked.
    “Remember that time in San Borja, with the hot tar?” Millie said. “Compared to that, this is a piece of cake.”
    “Just the same,” Gabriel said, and put an arm across the big man’s waist. Millie didn’t object and leaned on him heavily as they headed into the narrow tunnel.
    As they went, Gabriel started to notice veins of exposed rock peeking through gaps in the ice on the walls and ceiling. And after a series of snaking hairpin turns and switchbacks, the team found themselves in an entirely different type of cave.
    It was long and narrow, approximately the size and shape of the interior of a school bus—but that was not what was unusual. What was unusual was the fact that the walls had no ice on them at all. It was solid rock on every side. It was also warmer, uncomfortably so.
    At the far end of the cave was a crooked, vertical crack that looked like it wouldn’t be wide enough to admit Millie unless he turned sideways and held his breath. Beside the crack was a heap of broken rock.
    “Look,” Gabriel said, pointing to a bit of neon green fabric barely visible beneath the rubble.
    Velda made a soft, anguished sound in her throat and ran to the pile, dropping to her knees. She began moving pieces of stone off the fabric, revealing it to be the sleeve of a thermal parka.
    “It’s empty!” Velda cried, pulling the parka from beneath the rocks. She pointed to the large, indeliblemarker letters above the label that read SILVER. “It’s my father’s.” She frowned and gripped the parka’s collar tighter. “He couldn’t last thirty minutes without this on the surface. Why would he take it off?”
    “Same reason I’m about to,” Gabriel said. He was starting to sweat profusely under his many thermal layers. The ambient temperature in the cave had to be nearly fifty degrees. He unzipped his parka and removed his gloves. “Can’t you feel how much warmer it’s getting?”
    Nils unzipped as well. “We must be near some kind of previously undetected geothermic anomaly.”
    “You think it’s warm there,” Rue said, having slipped easily into the crack in the rock wall. “Check this out. This is where the warm air’s coming from.”
    Gabriel walked over, stuck his hand inside. Sure enough.
    “Listen,” he said. “We need to take some of our gear off or we’ll get overheated—but we can’t leave it behind. We may not be able to return the way we came.”
    “No problem,” Millie said. “I can carry the lot of ’em.”
    “We’ll each carry our own,” Gabriel said, squeezing his parka into a compact bundle.
    The other team members quickly stripped out of their freezer suits, but the polar fleece pullovers and pants beneath were still much too warm for the inexplicably balmy temperature inside the cave. Even stripped down to their last layer of high-tech, lightweight, moisturewicking thermals, they still felt sticky and overheated.
    “Shh,” Velda said, pausing from trying to force the zipper shut on her now overstuffed pack and putting a finger to her lips. “Do you hear that?”
    “What?” Mille asked, cocking his massive head.
    “Sounds like…” Velda began.
    Millie casually slapped at the back of his neck and Gabriel grabbed his thick wrist, eyes wide. Millie frowned quizzically as Gabriel turned the big man’s hand over to reveal a squashed mosquito and tiny splotch of bright blood.
    “A mosquito!” Velda said, her voice incredulous.
    “So what?” Millie shrugged. “This little squirt ain’t nothing compared to