The Lost Patrol is more stuff of Mountie myth.

The stuff that goes wrong.

Among its duties in the Arctic, the Force carried the mail. The mail run from Dawson across the Mackenzie Mountains to Fort McPherson was 475 miles of heartless waste. In December 1910, Inspector Fitzgerald, a former shoe salesman, embarked with constables Kinney, Taylor, and Carter to make the run, taking light provisions for better speed. They traveled up the wrong valley in Wind River country, then floundered about in a wind chill of -100 degrees F. as food ran out.

The following March, Constable Dempster launched a search. Picking up the trail of empty corned-beef cans, he found an abandoned toboggan, harness, and dog bones. A flag fluttered from a tree on a riverbank, and there Dempster found two bodies. Kinney had starved to death. Taylor had shot himself.

Skin peeling from frostbite and scurvy, Fitzgerald and Carter had struggled on without food. After Carter died, Fitzgerald crossed his hands on his chest, placed a handkerchief over the constable's face, then prepared for his own end. He wrote his last will with a charred stick, closing it "God Bless AH" and signing his name with "R.N.W.M.P."—Royal North-West Mounted Police—before laying down to die twenty-five miles shy of Fort McPherson.

The Lost Patrol.

The heartless north.

And now Inspector Zinc Chandler had a lost patrol, too.

Sort of.

He stood over a desk in the Com Center, straining to make out the break-up on the tape the communications tech played a third time. "Hapless Valley? Can that be it? Play it again, Sam."

Sam rewound the tape and pushed Play.

The crisis at Totem Lake was past the point of no return. Weapons having reached the camp, the Mounted was under pressure from right-wing politicians to admit defeat and hand over to the army, which would blast the stronghold back to the Stone Age, or take down the camp themselves to herald the centennial of Almighty Voice. Bean counters were screaming about the cost of waiting it out, money more important to them than police lives. Spiritual leaders had entered the camp to pray with the rebels and counsel them to come out peacefully, which they would or wouldn't, casting the die. The ERT teams at Zulu base were ready to storm the barricades, having ringed the camp with Bison APCs and sharpshooters armed with laser guns positioned up trees. All communications from camp were by cell or radio phones, so the techs in the Com Center used high-end scanners with repeaters on mountaintops to intercept calls far and wide to gather intelligence. And that's how Sam picked up the garbled words from Gunanoot.

And why he summoned Chandler.

"Is she de . . ."

"Katt put up a fight. She will be if you don't . . . another daug . . . dead."

"Don't hurt her."

"Come, white man. Fly to ... Lake and have the pilot drop you . . . He . . . less Valle . . . A river runs . . . on foot. . . won't see me. Any sign of backup, she . . . my land. I hear every sou ..."

"Enhance it, Sam?"

"I tried, Inspector. What you don't hear isn't on tape. Bad enough it's from the outer range of the cell site, but there was interference between them and our repeater."

The Mad Dog entered the room.

"Dodd didn't make Fort St. James, Zinc. The chief called him back to Gunanoot. Villagers saw him land and pick up DeClercq. Radios are dead and ground radar lost them, but SAR Sat doesn't pick up E.L.T. No crash means in the air and blinding us."

A military man in plainclothes entered the room.

"I'm not here," he said.

"Right," said Chandler. "A plane outside the no-go zone is blinding us. Flying mountain valleys to thwart radar. Impress me with what you have to enforce the air ban."

"If we were involved—which we're not—we would lock onto all transmissions. Satellite phones and such come in off the bird. The point of transmission can be traced. That's how the Reds got Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev. He made a satellite call from his hideout. The Russians targeted a rocket on the source of the call to cream his ass."

"Bloodhound?" said Chandler.

"The military would dog in three ways:

"Acoustically, we'd insert a ring of ground-based sonars—like sonar buoys for submarines—around Totem Lake. A microphone picks up the sound of an engine and tells you where it is. Works well in the north, where planes are few and far between.

"Visually, we'd scramble an F-18 with airborne radar. You watch Desert Storm? We use that. Tracks every plane in radar range on a screen. Because it looks down from above, flying low to use mountains as a blind is a joke.

"Visually, an F-18 would also have forward-looking infrared. It picks up every source of heat around, and what's hotter in this deep freeze than the engine of a plane?"

A dispatcher entered from a side room.

"It's going down, Inspector. They need you at Zulu base."

Outside, the rotors of a Force JetRanger began to whirl.

As Chandler grabbed his parka and ran to catch the chopper, he called back to the invisible man.

"Whatever it takes, find that plane and where it sets down in the mountains."

The sense of isolation reached out and seized him by the throat. When the drone of Dodd's bush plane died away, he knew he'd cut his umbilical cord to the modern world, and except for the radio phone in one pocket and .38 in the other, he could be the first human to cross the land bridge from Asia ten thousand—who knew how many?—years ago.

He wondered how it got the name Headless Valley. Silent and white, white and silent, the land about him slept under a soft blanket of snow and a hard sheet of ice, rumbling occasionally as it turned over in deep slumber. Across these waves of drifted snow he trudged, trudged, trudged, the muffled shuffle of his snowshoes a lullaby, puffs of powder kicked up to dress him from toe to head in white, the north a ghost town in which he was the only ghost, as he tramped into the valley V squeezed between peaks.

. . . shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffte ...

When he stopped to listen, the snow absorbed every sound.

Ice walls and vertical rock reached high into the sky, crowding him to induce the feeling he was locked in an icebox. The flat light of winter was fading fast, for these were the darkest of the dark days, and before long the pale glow wore itself out. In deep drifts snow is never white, but rather every shade this side of blue. Tramping his way up the valley on the frozen river, he moved along a stark, eerie, shadowless chasm, mile upon mile of banked drifts and ice-encrusted trees before him, soundless as death and deafness except for the faint squeak of shoes on trackless freeze. The bony branches of the maples raised their limbs from the snow like skeletons out of a graveyard. Designed for winter, the Sitka spruce resembled alpine huts, the slopes of their branches sliding off snow before the weight could break them. Smears of spruce spread up the sides of the valley.

. . .shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffle . . .

He crossed a line of caribou tracks heading up the mountain. In still weather frigid air settles into the valleys, so wildlife moves up to where it is slightly warmer. Soft, diffused gray gave way to a long period of twilight. The Mountie felt cold infiltrate the edges of his parka. It nipped at his bare ears, so he untied the overhead flaps of his beaver-skin hat, pulling them down the sides of his cheeks to retie the string under his chin.

Arctic wind began to whistle down the valley V.

Whhhhooooooooo . . .

With no shadows and deepening twilight, it became hard to determine what was ahead of his shoes. Did it slope up, down, into a hollow, or was the drift flat? A beaver lodge bulging from the ice sent him sprawling to mitts and knees.

He moved to the bank of the river, but that was no help, for willow bushes beneath the snow collapsed when he stepped on them. It seemed as if the land itself was booby-trapped.

The meaning of wind chill was driven home. Every few minutes he had to wipe the back of his mitt across his eyes to keep frosted lashes from freezing together when he blinked.

. . shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffle . . .

The snuff from twilight to darkness stirred primal fear. Into the utter black above rose a winter moon.

As night tightened around him, the landscape fused.

Molten moonbeams glistened the way. As he continued shhhhuffling up the silver valley, sparkling ice crystals fell from the trees. Backed by celestial pin pricks, the mountains were dark teeth, and he looked up from the belly of the beast. If he strained, he could hear water flowing and freezing under his feet.

A howl that shattered the stillness brought him to a halt.

It was startling in the frozen hush.

The image that formed in his mind had flaming eyes and flashing fangs.

More howls joined in, starting on a high note but dropping in tone.

The mournful calls echoed down the valley.

This was the tune of year when wolves hunted in a pack.

The wavering call sent shivers up his spine.

Oww. Oww. Owwhoo-oo-oo ...