A Mountaineer Who Wants To Kill - Part 1

Steely Dan was almost loud enough to drown out the deadening hum of the Airbus A320's engines. Aaron Mann adjusted his headphones and tried to close his eyes and see his father. This had been Dad's favorite album. He could see the elder Mann wobbling his head in rhythm with Walter Becker's guitar and the washboard road under the tires of their mud-caked 4Runner on the way to another weekend ramble through the mountains. Dad. And Steely Dan. And that rusted blue 4Runner stuffed full of rope and harnesses and a dutch oven with a broken handle. And the hum of the road like the hum of jet engines, only softer. Less angry. Less violent.

Aaron moved his hands to his lap to give Bill-the-accountant-from-Atlanta a turn with the armrest. He let his head fall to his shoulder and peeked through the window at the jumbled landscape below. The cataclysm punching those mountains toward the sky must have been enormous. The chain stretched beyond his view from forty-thousand feet, through Myanmar and into China. It was a squalid terrain where nothing living was allowed to stay, scraped by glaciers stained brown like the skid marks of nature, dotted with bitter peaks that threatened to claw the belly of the airliner. Up here, Aaron thought, it was all blues riffs and armrests, the dull drone of engines and sun-lit memories of his father. Below, it was all icefalls and tallus and spindrift.

And murder.