by Stuart Gibbs
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re jealous of Jessica Shang! Because she hugged Ben.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Erica snapped. Only, while this was exactly the sort of thing I’d heard Erica say plenty of times, the way she said it didn’t sound like Erica at all. Instead, she sounded strangely ill at ease. As though Zoe had struck a nerve.
Zoe seemed to sense this too. “I don’t think it’s so dumb,” she said. “And just so you know, you don’t have anything to worry about. Ben has no interest in Jessica Shang.”
“He has a crush on her,” Erica said flatly.
“He only thinks she’s pretty,” Zoe emphasized. “But he likes you. A lot. And if you’re jealous of Jessica, I’m betting you like him, too.”
“This conversation is over,” Erica said.
“Oh, come on!” Zoe protested. “You need to deal with your feelings, not avoid them.”
“I’m not avoiding my feelings,” Erica replied. “We need to stop talking! Listen!”
Zoe stopped talking and listened. I ceased eavesdropping and focused on my surroundings too.
We were almost at the top of the mountain. The end of the lift was only a few chairs ahead of us. Beyond it, I could see a flat, wide-open plain of snow, which ended abruptly in what must have been a sharp drop.
The lift machinery was quite loud, whirring and clanking as each new chair arrived. I could barely hear anything over it.
But there was something. A thrumming noise. Distant, but getting louder.
“All I hear is a helicopter,” Zoe said.
“It’s coming toward us,” Erica explained.
Zoe didn’t question this. Neither did I. Erica might not have understood her own emotions—or anyone else’s for that matter—but if anyone knew how to tell the direction a helicopter was traveling merely from the sound, it was her.
I swiveled around in my seat, scanning the surrounding mountains. Despite the clear day, it was hard to pick out the helicopter, but I eventually found it: a black blur on the western horizon, quickly growing bigger as it approached.
“Is something wrong?” Woodchuck asked, sensing my unease.
“Erica thinks so,” I told him, pointing. “There’s a helicopter coming this way fast.”
“So?” Warren asked. “It’s probably just search and rescue.”
“Those are red.” Woodchuck’s face was creased with concern. “That one’s not. It looks like it’s for heli-skiing, but those are supposed to stay well clear of the resort.”
My phone suddenly started ringing. So did Warren’s. And Woodchuck’s. And Erica’s and Zoe’s. At exactly the same moment. And they rang with the very specific ringtone we used to specify an emergency alert.
Before any of us could answer, though, the helicopter started shooting.
SNEAK ATTACK
Blue Sky Basin
Vail Mountain
December 30
1015 hours
Luckily for us, there was a small control room at the top of the ski lift. Our chairs moved behind it just in time. The bullets ricocheted off it and shattered the windows, but they didn’t reach us.
Still, the control room wasn’t much protection. Especially since it shielded us from only one direction. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much other cover on the mountaintop. Only a small stand of trees fifty feet away.
Ahead of us, Erica and Zoe’s chair arrived at the end of the lift. The two of them leapt off it and raced for the trees.
The helicopter roared over our heads, so low that the wind from its rotors pushed down on us like an open hand.
My chair reached the end of the lift and Woodchuck, Warren, and I sprang off it, poling as hard as we could after the girls.
Thankfully, there weren’t any other skiers on the mountaintop at the moment. What few were around had already started down the slopes and were well clear of the gunfire. Which left only us to serve as targets.
And as targets went, we were awfully good ones. We were now right out in the open. If the stand of trees had been downhill from us, we could have at least skied to it quickly; instead, we had to cross flat ground. That wasn’t easy on skis. Especially with two feet of new snow piled up. We all had to go with a combination of pushing with our poles and galloping along with our skis on, which was like trying to sprint with two-by-fours nailed to our shoes. In addition, we were at one of the highest points at the ski resort, nearly two miles above sea level, so the altitude was taking a toll on Warren, Zoe, and me. I felt like I could barely breathe in the thin air. Our progress was agonizingly slow.
To the east, the helicopter banked, coming around for another attack.
“We are screwed!” Warren cried. “We’re sitting ptarmigans out here!”
“Ptarmigans?” Woodchuck asked.
“Don’t get him started,” I gasped.
I pushed on my poles as hard as I could, straining with every ounce of strength, racing for the safety of the trees. Zoe and Warren did the same. Even though both were beginners, in the heat of the moment, they were handling themselves well. Woodchuck was right beside us.
However, Erica suddenly veered off, away from the trees and out into the open.
“What are you doing?” I yelled.
“Saving your butts!” she yelled back. “Get yourselves to cover!”
The helicopter was coming back, moving quickly toward us again.
I now saw what Erica was heading for: A Sno-Cat was parked at the edge of the snowfield. It was a large vehicle with treads instead of tires, used to groom snow and do other maintenance around the resort. This one had a trailer hitched to the back, also with treads instead of wheels, and atop that sat one of the ski patrol’s avalanche howitzers.
Erica didn’t have enough time to get there, though. The only shelter between her and it was a lone outhouse, set atop the mountain since it was several miles to the closest real bathroom. Erica popped off her skis and dove behind it as the helicopter opened fire again. Bullets shredded the tiny building, then raced across the snowy plain toward us, leaving a trail of tiny geysers. We reached the safety of the trees just in time. The bullets ricocheted off the trunks, snapping branches and annihilating pinecones.
The helicopter roared overhead once again.
“Ben!” someone yelled.
I peered out from the trees and saw Mike Brezinski getting off the ski lift. The helicopter hadn’t been aiming for him, but he’d seen the attack. His face was now whiter than the snow around us and his eyes were wide with something I had never seen him show before: fear.
“Mike!” I yelled back to him. “Get away from us! Before they come back!”
But Mike was too frightened to listen to me. After all, heading out to the slopes would mean staying in the open, while the trees looked like safety. He kept pushing toward us.
Meanwhile, Warren wasn’t looking too good. He’d turned green with nausea. “They almost got me,” he gasped. Then he bent over and threw up.
“Wow,” Zoe said, unimpressed. “Way to handle yourself in the heat of battle.”
“It’s my first time!” Warren whined. “I’ve never been shot at before! Not with real bullets!”
“Neither have I,” Zoe told him. “And you don’t see me upchucking my breakfast.”
The helicopter banked again, preparing for a third attack.
Erica was back on the move, racing for the howitzer.
Mike reached the cover of the trees in record time. He was panting heavily, completely shell-shocked with fear.
“You need to get out of here,” I told him. “Away from me.”
“No way,” he argued. “I’m not going out in the open! There’s a maniac shooting from a helicopter out there!”
“That maniac is shooting at us,” I told him. “As long as you’re with us, you’re in danger.”
“At you?” Mike asked, incredulous. “Why would someone be shooting at you?”
There didn�
��t seem to be any point in lying to him anymore. “Well, it’s like you guessed: I’m a spy.”
Warren threw up again.
The helicopter swooped back toward us. We tried to maneuver around in the trees, putting the trunks between us and it.
“You’re a spy?” Mike gasped.
“Why do you sound so surprised?” I asked. “You accused me of being one the other day.”
“I know, but I didn’t think you were a real spy!” Mike exclaimed. “I thought you were just doing training and stuff ! This is insane!” He pointed at the incoming helicopter. “Those people are trying to kill you!”
“Yeah, that happens a lot,” I said.
The helicopter had changed its style of attack. Now, rather than racing over our heads, it approached slowly, then hovered right outside our stand of trees, searching for a gap to shoot through.
It was close enough that I could see one of Leo Shang’s thugs was at the controls. Meanwhile, Dane Brammage sat in the open doorway, brandishing a machine gun. He found the gap between us, lifted the gun to his shoulder, and took aim at me. I saw him smile, as thought he was going to enjoy killing me.
And then Erica fired the howitzer.
The charge slammed into the rear of the helicopter, blowing the tail right off it. The rear rotor careened through the air, slicing through a nearby tree like it was a celery stalk. Mike, Zoe, Warren, Woodchuck, and I were all thrown to the ground by the blast. A hail of pinecones, knocked loose by the concussion, rained down upon us—along with a few startled squirrels.
Without its tail, the helicopter spun wildly out of control. Dane was flung from it like a rag doll, landing in the deep snow in the distance. The pilot desperately tried to get away from the trees. He managed to pull a short distance away, but then wobbled back in.
“Evasive action!” Woodchuck ordered.
We were already on the move. Even Mike, without any training at all, grasped that staying put was dangerous. We all raced out one side of the stand of trees just as the helicopter slammed into the other. The big rotors shaved the tops off a few pines, then thwacked into the thicker trunks, snapped off the helicopter, and cartwheeled through the air toward the Sno-Cat.
Erica leapt from the vehicle, stepped into her skis, and raced away just as the rotors came flying in. With a resounding thunk, they embedded in the Sno-Cat’s roof like a lawn dart.
The rest of the helicopter crashed to the ground. The pilot leapt out and scrambled away.
Erica met up with us just as the copter exploded. We were pelted by more dislodged pinecones and squirrels. The woods promptly caught fire, blocking our way back to the ski slopes.
The Sno-Cat caught fire too. The helicopter rotors had punctured its gas tank. It started to burn quickly, the fire licking at the pile of howitzer ammunition that sat on the trailer.
Ahead of us, a flimsy rope fence lined the edge of the snowfield, right before the slope dropped away steeply. There was a small gate in it, but it had a bright red sign marked with a skull and crossbones, informing us that going beyond the gate was leaving the Vail resort area and heading into the White River National Forest wilderness area, which would normally be a very bad idea because there was no easy way out, there were no rescue services, there was extreme avalanche danger, and there was a decent chance we could die.
Normally, I might have paid attention to a sign like this. But there were extenuating circumstances.
Dane Brammage was still alive. In fact, despite being flung from a moving helicopter, he didn’t appear to have so much as skinned a knee. Apparently, the snowdrift he’d landed in had not only cushioned his fall, but it had also protected his machine gun. Dane snatched it up out of the snow and came after us.
We charged through the gate. The slope beyond it went downhill fast. It was exceptionally steep, wide open, and treeless, far tougher than anything I’d attempted before, but we had no other options. We dropped onto the slope as Dane opened fire again. His bullets whistled over our heads.
Mike and Woodchuck hit the slope with the most grace, zipping downhill quickly. Warren hit the slope without any grace at all. Instead, he hit the slope with his face—and then his backside—and then his face again as he somersaulted down the hill. Zoe and Erica didn’t do much better. I managed to stay upright a good way down, but then I rushed a turn and wiped out myself.
Thankfully, the snow on the slope was extremely deep, covering anything that would have been painful to land on—like sharp rocks—with several feet of pillowy softness. I tumbled through it all like a sock in the dryer, losing my skis and poles, until I settled into more of a controlled skid down the mountain. To each side of me, Zoe and Erica were doing the same thing, having lost their skis as well. We were basically sledding without sleds, rocketing downhill on our backs with our feet in front of us, carving gouges through the snow.
Behind us, Warren was still tumbling, giving a yelp every time he thwacked into the ground: “Ouch! Oof ! Oh, my nose! Ow!” He was gathering snow as he rolled, turning into a giant snowball with arms and legs sticking out of it.
Eventually, the slope bottomed out, flattening enough to slow our descent. Mike and Woodchuck each skidded to a stop, panting with exhaustion. Erica, Zoe, and I tumbled into a pile beside them, tangled in a jumble of arms and legs but unharmed.
Warren crashed into a tree. The giant snowball he’d become burst on impact. His helmet slammed into the trunk so hard, it cracked in half. Thankfully, Warren’s skull was protected, but he was knocked loopy from the impact. “I want a pony,” he murmured, and then collapsed backward into the snow.
I’d ended up underneath both Zoe and Erica. They pried themselves off me and we all stared back up at the slope we’d come down. It appeared to be at least a thousand feet tall. We were at the bottom of a narrow gully, with an equally tall slope boxing us in on the other side. Climbing out again was going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
And then Dane Brammage appeared at the top of the slope. I saw the sunlight glint off his gun as he took aim at us again.
Before he could fire, however, the howitzer and all its munitions exploded. A massive fireball erupted at the top of the hill, blowing Dane over the edge of the cliff. He sailed through the air high above us, his eyes so wide with fear that I could see them even from where I stood. I didn’t notice where he landed, though.
I was too distracted by the avalanche.
SNOW SAFETY
White River National Forest
South of Vail, Colorado
December 30
1030 hours
The explosion of the howitzer had been deafening, and the noise echoed all over the walls of the canyon. The great sheet of snow that clung to the wall directly above us fractured and groaned.
“Uh-oh,” Woodchuck gasped. “That’s not good.”
The snow began to slide. It hurtled down the mountainside toward us, roaring like a freight train.
Erica, who had just disentangled herself from Zoe and me, leapt back on top of us again. Beside me, I saw Woodchuck doing the same thing to Mike and Warren.
“Hang on to me!” Erica screamed. Even though she was right next to me, I could barely hear her over the oncoming snow. Erica yanked a cord under her jacket, and a large yellow air bag suddenly inflated from her back.
The snow reached us a split second later. Without Erica’s air bag, we might have been crushed beneath it. Instead, we were buoyed to the top, like a cork floating on water. The snow still threatened to rip Zoe and me away and drag us under, but we clung to Erica with all our might and let the avalanche carry us down the valley. I caught a glimpse of another yellow air bag close by—Woodchuck clutching Mike and Warren—but mostly all I saw was a jumble of white snow and blue sky as I was tossed about.
It was like riding a tidal wave made of snow. We were traveling at frightening speed; the sides of the valley were merely a blur as we raced past them. At the front of the wave, just ahead of us, massive trees snapped like
toothpicks and vanished into the sea of white.
The avalanche lasted only seventy-three seconds, but it seemed much longer. And then, almost as suddenly as it had started, it was over. The avalanche petered out and we found ourselves well down the canyon from where we’d begun, lying atop a pile of snow so thick that the tops of the trees were barely poking through it.
We all lay where we were for a few seconds, spent from the ordeal—and thrilled that, after a helicopter attack, a tumble down a steep slope, and an avalanche, we were still alive. Everyone, that is, except for Erica. She quickly hopped to her feet, dusted herself off, and said, “Well, let’s get going.” As though this sort of thing happened to her every day.
“Going where?” Zoe asked.
“Down the canyon,” Erica said, like it was obvious. “We certainly can’t go back the way we came. It would have been tough enough to get back up that slope before the avalanche. And for all we know, Dane Brammage is still back there. That guy is ridiculously hard to kill. But I’ve studied the satellite maps of this area and I know there’s a highway and a small town at the end of this canyon. Maybe five miles away. If we hurry, it shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”
“Erica’s right,” Woodchuck said. “If everyone’s okay, we really shouldn’t dawdle.”
I stood up, checking my various body parts to make sure they were all still attached and working. I had what felt like several tons of snow down my jacket and pants, which had chilled my nether regions, but other than that, I seemed to be fine.
Zoe seemed to be fine as well, although Warren remained pretty loopy. “Guys!” he exclaimed, still lying on his back. “These are the perfect conditions for making snow angels!” He waggled his arms and legs in the snow to prove it.
“We might need to get him to a doctor,” Zoe suggested.
Mike also looked to be all right, physically at least. Mentally, he was in shock. He gaped at all of us, trying to make sense of everything. “So, all of you are spies too?”
“In training,” Zoe said helpfully.