There wasn’t time for him to think, only to react. For most, reacting without thinking could be a dangerous thing, but not when you were trained to make life-or-death decisions in milliseconds.

Based on where the sound of the avalanche came from, Scot instinctively knew that they were right in its path. The job of a protective detail in a threat situation was to immediately cover and evacuate their protectee. Evacuation in this case was impossible, at least for the time being, but maybe, just maybe, Scot had a chance of covering the president’s daughter. It would take every ounce of skill and strength he had in his body.

He managed to yell, “Avalanche,” he hoped loudly enough for the other agents to hear, and then voiced a quiet, “Oh, shit,” to himself. There wasn’t time to tell the other Secret Service agents what he was planning to do.

Amanda apparently didn’t hear his cry of “Avalanche” or know what the loud noise was, because she kept slowly skiing down the bowl. Scot pulled up short on his downhill ski and, squatting deeply like a weight lifter getting ready to deadlift, positioned himself behind Amanda. This had one chance of working.

The tidal wave of snow was already barreling down on top of them. Assuming the radios were still out of commission, Scot yelled for the other agents to follow him. With the roar of the avalanche filling his ears, he couldn’t be sure if anyone had heard him.

“Don’t move! Just let me take you,” yelled Scot as he grabbed all one hundred and ten pounds of Amanda Rutledge around the waist and lifted her up off her skis. Startled, she screamed, but didn’t fight him. The severe downhill angle and their combined mass sent them rocketing down the slope. With the diminished visibility, Scot couldn’t be sure if he had calculated right. He had to be dead-on. If they undershot what he’d seen, they would be dead. If they overshot it, they would be dead. And if the blinding snow had played a trick on his eyes and what he thought would be there wasn’t, that also could result only in their death.

While Amanda was by no means heavy for a girl of her age and Scot Harvath was in incredible shape, carrying her as they raced downhill ripped and tore at every fiber of his tightly muscled body. His entire back was on fire, and his thighs felt as if there were red-hot coils wrapped around them. Every primal instinct within him shouted for him to let her go and save himself, but he had been trained to be a master of not only his body but his mind, which meant that fear and pain would serve him, not the other way around.

Amanda must have known what was going on, at least on some level, because the minute Scot picked her up, she went as limp as a kitten lifted by the scruff of the neck.

He’d known when he heard the sound of the avalanche that outrunning it would be impossible. He didn’t even dare venture another look back. The slightest wasted movement could immediately put the two of them on the losing side of this equation.

The freezing ice and blowing snow tore into Scot’s face like shards of broken glass. He and Amanda picked up more speed as they traversed the face of the bowl. This was where the simple physics of Scot’s plan was working severely against them. In an avalanche, the heavy snow chooses the fastest path available to it. Drawn by gravity, this path is always straight down, tearing apart anything in its way. Instead of going straight down, Scot and Amanda were going almost straight across the mountain. With each foot they gained in going across, the avalanche gained fifty coming down. There was absolutely no room for slipups.

Scot had no idea if his fellow agents had heard him yell, if they had interpreted the sound of the avalanche for what it was, or how they had reacted. For now at least, there was no way to find out. He could only hope that they had taken his lead and were following right behind.

The roar had become deafening, and it reverberated throughout Scot’s entire body, shaking him as he held Amanda. It seemed as if they had been traveling forever, even though it had been only a matter of seconds. Where are those goddamn rocks? he screamed to himself.

As it turned out, Scot had dangerously undershot his target. Through the blizzard of blowing snow, he could just make out the outcropping, further across the face and significantly below where they were now. Damn it! he thought.

Knowing this was his last chance, Scot pointed his skis, himself, and Amanda straight for the bottom.

They picked up speed at a terrifying rate. Scot’s knees pistoned up and down like jackhammers as he absorbed not only his weight but also Amanda’s. He fought with all of his might to keep control of his skis, which were furiously slapping the packed snow like a pair of loose dock planks in a hurricane.

He and Amanda were going way too fast. One bump in their path and it would all be over. There was no way that any skier, even one of Scot Harvath’s caliber, could keep this up.

Then, he saw it. The outcropping of rock was racing up to meet them as quickly as the avalanche was racing down to swallow them.

Harvath put the distance at twenty yards and closing. His mind raced through the trillion calculations necessary to gauge the successful achievement of the next step in his plan: stopping.

The logical answer he received to his seemingly illogical request was simply, “Three…two…one…Now!”

Scot wrapped his arms tightly around Amanda and threw all of their collective weight over his left ski. He covered her as best he could with his body, acting as a human air bag to protect her from injury, as they brutally spun and pounded out of control toward the rocks below.

Over and over again they somersaulted with furious speed, each time crashing down hard on one or the other of Scot’s shoulders. Between the white snow of the bowl and the blowing white of the blizzard, Harvath fought hard to keep focused on which way was up and where their target was. It was impossible. They continued to flip wildly out of control. The sound of the avalanche was so loud now he couldn’t even think.

As quickly as they had been rolling, they were immediately stopped by slamming into a sheer wall of rock. Scot cried out in pain and held on to consciousness just long enough to see a torrent of wet snow pour over them and Amanda’s limp body lying motionless beside him.

The first thing he noticed when he regained consciousness was the eerie silence. The absence of noise was deafening. They had barely made it to the rock overhang in time. The plan had just worked. They were positioned beneath a narrow stone ledge that had formed a partial barrier to the avalanche. The claustrophobic box they were in was about eleven feet long, three-and-a-half feet wide, and four feet high. They were amazingly fortunate. Where there wasn’t rock, they found themselves surrounded by snow, but there was at least some room to move around-as if they were in a small cave. Scot hoped the other Secret Service agents had been as fortunate, but he doubted they had.

In the dark, Harvath began to slowly make an overall assessment of his condition. His ankles felt okay, shins were fine, knees were sore but probably would bear weight. His thighs felt like mush and were bruised, but didn’t seem like a problem as long as he was lying down. He carefully fished his Mag-Lite out of his pocket and turned it on. Next, he struggled to bring his knees up to raise himself into a sitting position, and that’s when the pain started shooting through every inch of his upper body. He gave up immediately.

Covering Amanda during their fall, Scot had taken most of the beating along his back and shoulders. From his waist up, everything hurt, and he couldn’t tell what might be broken. At least there were no apparent open fractures, and he was only bleeding slightly from an abrasion on his forehead, so for that he gave thanks.