Project Hannibal by Kathryn Hoff (books suggested by elon musk .txt) 📕

I should have used a few satphone minutes to call my parents.

A deep vibration put Estelle’s senses on alert. Could it be a helicopter?

But as soon as she sat up, the sound was gone.

Sera, cross-legged on the ground, looked up dull-eyed from her pastime of braiding grass stems into a fragile, useless rope. “What’s wrong?”

“I thought I heard something.” Estelle scanned the gray clouds.

Nothing.

Estelle nodded to the grass rope. “What are you planning to do with that?”

“Eat it, if this goes on much longer.”

Annie was dozing. Her eyes were ringed and sunken, her breath quick and shallow. God, if you’re out there, send help soon.

Estelle lay down again. She wasn’t a big believer in God—as a doctor, she’d seen too much senseless tragedy. For her, church provided the comfort of community more than deep faith. But it didn’t make any kind of sense for her and Sera and Annie to have survived so far if they were just doomed to die here of hunger and cold anyway. There had to be more purpose to life than that.

I should have spent more time in church—maybe then I’d feel more hopeful about what comes next.

Ragged, uneven thunder echoed faintly through the ground.

Estelle bolted upright again. “I did hear something.” Annie opened her eyes dazedly.

An avalanche? The glacier on the move? Sweet Jesus, not an earthquake?

Sera stood and gazed at the sky. “I don’t see anything. Are you sure?”

“I’m not hallucinating. Something’s coming.”

A dark patch appeared on the southern horizon. Something moving. Something big—as big as an elephant.

Maybe she was hallucinating.

“Holy shit,” Sera said. “What is that?”

CHAPTER 34

One for the books

Estelle’s first impulse was to grab Sera and flee. But to where?

She helped Annie sit up. “Quick, take a look. What do you see?”

There were four or five of the animals now, cresting the southeast ridge a quarter mile away. They were still unclear, striding through the tall grass: great shaggy beasts with a swaying, ponderous walk.

Annie peered. “They walk kind of like bears.”

If they were a family of bears, the women were in big trouble.

A couple more of the creatures topped the ridge behind the first group. Red-brown in color.

The color of grizzlies.

“Can’t be bears,” Annie murmured. “Too many of them.”

Estelle relaxed a little. Except for a mother and cubs, bears didn’t travel together.

“Musk oxen?” Annie mused. “Too big.”

Sera stretched onto tiptoe, shading her eyes. “Do you have elephants in Alaska?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, you do now.” Sera stared, mouth gaping. “Call me crazy, but those are mammoths!” She broke into a grin. “And there’s someone riding on them!”

Before Estelle could tell her to stay down, Sera jumped, waving her arms and whooping. “Here! We’re over here!”

It wasn’t possible, but there they were. Mammoths. As if the models had stepped out of the natural history museum, they strode up the valley as if they’d been born there—heads rising over the sloped back, in-curled tusks cleaving the air in front, trunks swinging with every step.

And atop the front animals, two men riding like mahouts in an Asian travelogue.

“Well, I’ll be blessed,” Annie said softly. “Never in my life have I seen something like that.”

Estelle closed her mouth. “Me neither.”

Sera’s shouts had an effect. The animals had been heading for the downed plane, but the leader swerved in their direction. Some of the others strung out toward the glacier.

Estelle could see them better now. Each taller than a man, they forged up the hill through grass long enough to brush their bellies. Some carried saddlebags in brown camo. Only two carried riders.

They marched forward, faster than a human would walk, and Estelle began to worry about being run down. She stood in front of the improvised shelter, ready to wave them away from Annie. Even Sera stepped back.

“Amazing,” Sera murmured.

Twenty feet away, the leaders halted and the riders slipped off.

“Hello! Dr. Dupris?” While one man fiddled with the harnesses strapped to the mammoths, the other strode up the hill. “I’m awfully glad to see you. I’m State Wildlife Trooper Robbie Kanut.”

The animals congregated at the glacier runoff below the camp like office workers around the water cooler, dipping trunks into the shallow meltwater and blowing it into their mouths.

Estelle could only stare in disbelief. “Mammoths? I have a heart patient here who needs to be evacuated to Fairbanks, and they send mammoths? What kind of a rescue is this?”

Kanut felt distinctly unappreciated. In the fifty-four hours since the eruption, he’d covered forty miles of rough terrain to reach the women, traveling day and night, crossing mountains and rivers, perched atop a mammoth, no less . . . and he gets grief.

The girl—about sixteen, five foot four, a hundred twenty pounds, brown skin, brown hair and eyes—had wrapped him in a hug, grinning through her tears. The old lady watching from under a tarp-improvised tent had wheezed laughter that ended with a worrying cough.

But the doctor—size and coloring similar to the girl’s, adding about twenty pounds and twenty years—had ripped into Kanut. “We need help, not a circus sideshow. Of all the outlandish, totally impractical . . . what the hell are these, anyway?”

He gabbled explanations: yes, ma’am, all aircraft are still grounded, only form of transportation, secret government project. And all the while Cortez, unloading the animals, smirked.

“I’m here to assist you any way I can while we wait for evacuation,” Kanut added. “We have food and a tent . . .”

Cortez shot a scowl at Kanut’s offering up the tent but kept his mouth shut. What did he expect? There was no way Kanut was going to let the three women sleep on the ground.

The girl Sera went over to Cortez and gave him a hug. Now it