Page 2 of Mountain Impact

Drake stumbled again, this time ending up on his knees on the velvet green forest floor. He put his palm to the ground to steady himself.

“Colonel Pelegrin, the Brévent cable car is down. I repeat, one of the cabins just crashed into the forest.”

“How far away from Plan Praz are you?” the colonel asked.

Drake knew what the man was asking—the cable car connected Plan Praz and Le Brévent. At different points in the journey, the cable car could fly anywhere between thirty and two hundred feet off the ground. There was a big difference between those two figures in terms of the likelihood of finding survivors.

Drake didn’t get the chance to answer. In the distance, he could see the cabin. It was lying on its side, crumpled but still recognizable.

Cold sweat broke on his forehead.

Not again. Not this.

Drake’s mind flashed back to another cable car accident years earlier. Different time, different place, different cable car. The familiar phantom pain in his leg struck again—he’d been feeling it less and less in recent years, but it was like an old, never-forgotten friend.

Of course you’re being triggered.

A cable car fell just in front of you.

He clenched his hands into fists. He couldn’t let himself slip into a full-blown panic attack—not when so much depended on him.

A screamed ripped the air—a high, pained sound that brought Drake back from his stupor.

“There’s at least one person inside. I have to go, Colonel. I’m sending the exact location of the crash site.”

“Be careful, Jacobs,” Colonel Pelegrin said, cutting the connection.

With shaking hands, Drake shared his location. He trusted the colonel to get it to the right people―including his team.

The scream came again. Drake approached the wreck from the top side. The cabin was balanced precariously on a ledge—several large trees had stopped its fall for now, but it could go off again any second.

He, for one, didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when that happened.

#

Isolde

Dr. Isolde Durant’s colleagues were looking at her like she’d just sprouted a set of antennae on her forehead, rather than simply turned up at a crash site wearing a pair of jeans and sneakers.

Yes, I have days off, and sometimes I choose to wear jeans.

She shouldn’t have been surprised—most of the time the gendarmes only saw her in the office, where she was always wearing one of her professional, dark pant suits and a pair of black, low-heeled pumps.

Isolde purposefully didn’t hang out with people outside of work—it’s not that she was antisocial, but rather that her job as a police psychologist required impartiality, of the kind that was impossible to show once you’d been out sharing beers and laughs with someone.

Or once you’d been to bed with someone.

She shook her head to rid herself of the troublesome memory. That was not going to happen again.

Isolde had started working with the Chamonix police force right after finishing her PhD in Police & Public Safety Psychology seven years earlier. Policing was a dangerous, high-stress career anywhere, one where mental health issues were as common, if not more common, than physical ailments. But out here in the mountains, in one of the busiest mountain rescue services in the world, Isolde knew her job offering therapy, counseling, and stress management techniques to the brave men and women who kept the mountains safe was essential.

Unlike other police psychologists, who still advocated old-fashioned counseling approaches, Isolde didn’t like to get people together in groups to discuss their feelings―everything she did was designed to avoid pathologizing normal responses to trauma.

It was her dream that some of the techniques they were trying out here would, over the next years, be implemented in other progressive police departments around the world, and lead to an improvement in officers’ mental and emotional health.

Isolde was rarely out on the field, however—most of the time she worked from her office, on the top floor of the Chamonix police station. It was only once in a while that a critical accident or rescue scene was considered such high risk that she got called in on-site to offer immediate support to first responders.

A kind of psychological first aid.