Red Snow

by Michael Slade

  Ouch!

  When he came in from the blizzard, he’d be struck by a wave of heat. Standing by the wood-burning stove in a cocoon of warmth, Zinc would peer out at the white world, stark and eerie, through an overlay of reflected Christmas lights. The next morning, he’d draw faces in the rime on the pane.

  Winter …

  Now that boy was a man on the cusp of forty. Transplanted to the gray blahs of Lotusland, where the rain, rain, rain replaced the requisite white, Zinc was forced into the mountains to enjoy his favorite season. Luckily, this year the Olympics had moved him up to Whistler, so the back of his Range Rover was stocked with all his winter gear: downhill and cross-country skis, snowboard, toboggan, and skates. That afternoon, he was slated to meet with Robert DeClercq, which had severely limited his options for outdoor exercise. That’s why he was seated on an icy bench beside frozen Alpha Lake, lacing up his blades, when the Latvian Iceman slit Jenna’s throat.

  * * *

  A spurt of blood arced across the falling snow, its warmth melting the flakes into drops of red rain. The skater completed his slashing spin with a reverse check that left him facing the carnage. His toe pick gouged a crimson hole in the ice.

  “Mommy!”

  The shriek of raw horror raised the hackles on Zinc’s neck. Out of the snowfall emerged a girl on wobbly skates, obviously circling the rink for Mom’s praise. Eyes wide and mouth agape, the child was transfixed by the spewing blood. Her howl of anguish shattered the brittle air.

  Ka-boom!

  * * *

  The explosion was loud enough to reverberate off the heights of Whistler Valley, setting off avalanches that could be heard but not seen. The Latvian Iceman nodded, for that meant the other Icemen had launched their assaults, too.

  Once professional soldiers trained in the tactics of winter warfare, the Icemen had been hand-picked for this work, the money from which would provide each killer with a platinum retirement plan. Their history went back to 1242 and the legendary Battle of the Ice, when Roman Catholic Teutonic Knights advanced against Russian pagans. During the battle, fought on frozen Lake Peipus, the pagan cavalry forced the knights onto thin ice, which gave way under the weight of their heavy armor, causing many to drown. From that point forward, the armies of northern Europe developed their winter warfare tactics, culminating in the greatest battle in the history of the world: the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad.

  Winter warfare was defined as armed conflict in exceptionally cold weather and snowy, icy terrain. Survival depended on sub-zero equipment: warm clothing and footwear, nutritious food, white camouflage, tents and thermal sleeping bags, heaters and adequate fuel. Winter warriors learned that snow holes made good shelter, and that frostbite and hypothermia were constant enemies. For ambushes and attacks, ski-equipped troops could rival the speed of and distance covered by light cavalry.

  Also, the Latvian could figure skate.

  That’s why he was assigned to kill Jenna and Becky Bond.

  Frozen with shock, the child stood on the ice in front of the bench, watching as two women tried frantically to stanch the spurts of arterial blood. Others in the park were also rushing to help, so the Iceman decided to put some distance between himself and the do-gooders, in case they mobbed him while he was busy killing the girl.

  Pushing off with one blade, the Latvian stormed toward Becky, wrapping an arm around her waist and scooping her off the ice. Captor and captive shot into the blizzard, heading for the middle of the lake. If not for the child’s colorful clothes, they’d have vanished completely, for the Iceman wore the white camouflage of a winter warrior.

  Snow, snow, fast-falling snow …

  Hurled in all directions by the erratic wind …

  Here, thought the killer, skidding to a halt.

  Yanking the toque from her head, he dropped the girl on her back on the cold crust of the lake. The blade of one skate pinned Becky’s hair to the snow-covered ice. The other—blood-splattered from what it had done to her mother—stood poised above the girl’s throat like the blade of a guillotine.

  * * *

  What’s the roughest sport? British rugby? American football? Canadian hockey?

  At six-foot-two, with 195 pounds of brawn, Zinc Chandler was built to throw the bodychecks of the bullish northern game. Though he lacked the fancy footwork of the masked blade runner, the Prairie boy knew how to power a puck across the ice and shoulder his bulk to take out anyone blocking his path.

  Whack!

  The guillotine was coming down when Zinc’s bodycheck cracked the killer’s ribs and launched him off the ice. The Latvian went spinning in an incomplete Axel jump. Figure skaters, however, learn the tricks of quick recovery, and the Iceman landed on both skates and kept going, intent on escape. Zinc was hot on his heels, fumbling to draw his Smith & Wesson through too many layers of clothes.

  The Iceman was better prepared.

  Zinc burst out of snow-blindness into a wormhole tunnel cleared by the wind. The Latvian was skating backwards, and the muzzle of his Beretta took aim at the pursuer’s heart.

  Bang!

  The bullet should have ripped through Zinc’s chest. But instead, the Iceman was airborne again. The bang was not a gunshot but the sound of the mercenary hitting the edge of a summer swimming platform—hidden by the snowfall—and flipping into a reverse somersault.

  Bam!

  That was a real shot, but it went wild.

  The platform had marked the end of solid ice. The crust at the heart of the lake wasn’t thick enough for human weight, and the Latvian’s hard landing cracked it into a spider’s web. When that gave, in he plunged.

  Zinc finally cleared his gun of its confining outerwear as he shaved the rink of ice to halt his forward motion. Still moving, he tucked his ankles up and hit the platform on his knees, skidding across to the far edge, just shy of taking an ice bath, too.

  Gun in hand, the Iceman surfaced directly in front of Zinc. But before the swimmer could shoot, the inspector fired from his hip. The Latvian’s head snapped back as a red hole appeared in the white balaclava. The frigid water turned crimson as the bloody mask sank.

  Ka-boom …

  Boom …

  Boom …

  More explosions made avalanches tumble down the peaks. But these were to the north.

  Boom!

  Stopwatch

  Buddy Hopkins was singing along with T. Rex when the vee-bid blew sky-high. “Vee-bid” stood for VBIED, and that stood for “vehicle-borne improvised explosive device,” which was just a fancy way of saying “truck bomb.” Unknown to Buddy, the device was affixed to the cargo tank behind his cab. It wasn’t a particularly powerful explosive—but then it didn’t need to be when his vehicle was a tanker full of gasoline.

  Convinced that he was the only North American able to appreciate Marc Bolan’s voice, Buddy was warbling along with “Raw Ramp,” the music blaring at ear-bleed volume, when the remote trigger tripped. Buddy’s wasn’t the only vehicle wired to explode. It was simply the first to reach the bridges.

  The attack on the three bridges was a work of saboteur’s art. This was the weakest point on the Sea to Sky Highway. Here, the railway and the highway came together to cross a creek. The creek bed was a manmade concrete V, hardened so the banks wouldn’t erode. One bridge accommodated trains. The other bridges, to and from, were for the steadily increasing Whistler traffic.

  As the self-appointed world’s authority on boogie music, Buddy had stuffed his iPod with tunes like John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen,” Canned Heat’s “Going Up the Country,” and ZZ Top’s “Tube Snake Boogie.” It was hard to play air guitar with his hands on the wheel of the rig, so Buddy was bobbing his head to Marc’s sexy ode when the remote triggers tripped. The bomb on his truck and the mines on the bridges were electronically set to blow when he reached a certain point in the road.

  Ka-boom!

  The tanker truck exploded into a roiling fireball, hurling chunks of shrapnel hundreds of feet in
the air. Waves of fire belched up and down the highway, frying other motorists to crisps as black as charcoal. The thunderous roar blew the sky clear of snow and filled it with an oily smoke so dark that night swallowed day. The mines under the bridges added to the havoc, buckling steel beams, melting bolts and rivets, and turning concrete to rubble. With the three spans destroyed, the creek bed became a castle moat cutting Whistler off from everything to the south.

  * * *

  The electric warrior who had mined the bridges was miles away to the north. A Germanic mercenary, he went by the code name Stopwatch.

  Stopwatch came from a long line of Doppelsöldners, or “double mercenaries”—soldiers of fortune who were paid extra for battling on the frontlines. His ancestors had been Landsknechts, foot soldiers famous for using long pikes to dismount charging knights in a crunch of armor. After 1500, Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, decreed that the Landsknechts could hire themselves out for pay, and they were soon the most feared troops in Europe, fighting in every major campaign for centuries.

  Of his ancestors, folks had often said, “They are as good as the gold you pay them, and last about as long as the beer.”

  But Stopwatch had had no interest in the life of a modern mercenary. The world’s hellholes—jungles where the insects eat you alive, and deserts where the broiling sun bakes your brains—were not for him. He preferred the concrete jungle, where his skills as a military marauder earned him more than his ancestors could ever have dreamed of.

  Stopwatch began at the top.

  The family villa in Salzburg had a war room where toy soldiers fought famous battles. His father had taught him how to recreate those turning points of history, the moments when victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat.

  Armchair maneuvers.

  As a man, Stopwatch had put that guidance to lucrative use. He got a thrill from pulling off the perfect heist. Like a climber scaling Mount Everest just because it’s there, Stopwatch was a soldier of fortune who stole fortunes just to prove he could.

  Mephisto had linked up with Stopwatch through the Internet. For their first collaboration, he’d wired him money through several shady Asian banks, and in return the soldier of fortune had stolen a priceless Rembrandt. The painting was now in the secret collection of a Russian tycoon, who planned to have it buried with him when he died.

  Who says you can’t take it with you?

  Not Stopwatch.

  He thrived on the law of demand and supply.

  His most recent mission for Mephisto had been the theft of an Egyptian mummy. In that operation, timed to the minute by a stopwatch he wore around his neck, he’d extracted the mummy from an armored car by blasting through it with a thermal lance. His mercenaries had diverted the vehicle to a red light, where it stopped over flat metal doors that opened to the cellar of a British pub. Wearing a fireproof Nomex suit, Stopwatch opened the doors and applied an acetylene torch to the undercarriage. Then, using the lance—which was similar to a Second World War flamethrower—he shot raw oxygen down a magnesium tube and ignited the hot spot beneath the driver’s seat.

  Foom!

  At 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit, a thermal lance will slice through a foot of steel in seconds. The driver exploded in a sizzle of steam, and Stopwatch removed the mummy like a doctor performing a Caesarean birth. That night, the loot was flown to Mephisto.

  “We need to meet,” said the email that had set up this subsequent mission. That broke the rules. Anonymity was the blind protecting both men.

  “Why?” wrote Stopwatch.

  “The planning required is too intricate. We need to discuss tactics face to face.”

  “What job is that big?”

  “The Olympics.”

  Stopwatch couldn’t resist the challenge, and he agreed to meet Mephisto in Venice. The mercenary came in conventional disguise. The psycho came wrapped in bandages that made him look like the Invisible Man.

  “That’s extreme,” said Stopwatch.

  “The bandages are real.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was thwarted by a Mountie named DeClercq. He ruined my plans for the mummy you provided and forced me to flee before I could eliminate those who’d seen my face. So I had to change it, resulting in this! The plastic surgeon botched the reconstruction.” Mephisto seethed with anger. “Mark my words: DeClercq will rue the day he was born. No one thwarts me. No one!”

  Stopwatch respected the settling of scores. “Is this about revenge?” he asked.

  “Yes. For geopolitical reasons I’m sure you can imagine but I’m sworn not to reveal, various European and Middle Eastern interests place a lot of value on sabotaging these Winter Olympics. It’s the price Canada pays for being in Afghanistan. And since DeClercq has such a pivotal role to play in providing Olympic security, ruining the games will also ruin him. He’ll piece together the clues and know it’s me, and this will be checkmate.”

  “A win-win situation.”

  Mephisto smirked. “All on my side.”

  “Security doesn’t come tighter than the Olympics,” said Stopwatch.

  “That’s why we’ll strike before the shield is in place. To sell an Olympic bid to a frugal public, the organizers low-balled the cost of security. You couldn’t protect an outhouse with what they budgeted. After Vancouver won the games and couldn’t back out, the actual cost was revealed. The price tag was so exorbitant that there was nothing left to protect any qualifying competitions. The only money available is being spent on the actual Olympics in February 2010.”

  “So when do we strike?”

  “In December.”

  “We’ll need a team of winter warriors,” Stopwatch said.

  “Is that a problem?”

  The Austrian shook his head. “There’s not much call for soldiers of fortune with winter skills. I’ll find killers hungry for cash. I’ll call them Icemen.”

  * * *

  “The skater,” Mephisto had said the night before. “I need his expertise. Scarlett overheard Nick Craven talking on his phone just before she snuffed him. He was making plans to meet Jenna Bond and her daughter, Becky, at Alpha Lake at noon. I want them both killed. My face may be different, but my body and my voice are the same. I can’t chance being recognized.”

  So Stopwatch now had three missions in play. The blast that echoed up the valley from the south meant that the route linking Whistler to Vancouver was blocked. The time told him that the Latvian Iceman was taking care of Bond and her kid. And meanwhile, Stopwatch himself was blocking the route linking Whistler to the north.

  * * *

  Who the hell would build a log cabin today?

  Sure, Whistler was developing at the speed of light, with some celebrity chalets selling in the multimillion-dollar range. But December was the month to hibernate, not build. So why was this contractor offering a bonus to have these logs delivered now?

  Some people!

  Treetop—“T.T.” to his logging camp buddies—had been a high rigger before his accident. No fir had been too tall for him to scale until a chainsaw bucked and chewed into his leg. After that, he had switched to hauling loads, which didn’t earn danger pay but did put grub on the table.

  Today, T.T. was dressed like the quintessential Canuck: red-checked flannel shirt and blue jeans over steel-toed boots, stubbled chin beneath a peaked Molson beer cap, and a quilted, sleeveless green jacket zipped up his chest.

  “Timber!”

  The Cowboy Junkies were on the radio, singing their cover version of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane,” as the rig trundled down the slope, approaching Whistler from the north. Because this stretch of highway ran from the ski resort to the sticks, instead of down to Vancouver, there’d been no reason to widen it for the games. Just two lanes zigzagged above the junction where the road, the railway, and the electrical towers powering Whistler met.

  Through the foggy windows of the cab, T.T. could barely make out the passing Slow signs. The trees alongside the highway were like skeleto
ns scratching bony fingers at the somber, smothering sky. As T.T. cleared the windshield with his hand, the railway bridge crossing the road ahead suddenly materialized.

  Could there be a worse road in the world for truckers?

  “No,” T.T. answered himself.

  It was bad enough that snowstorms like this could close it down, and that Mother Nature could sever the route at will with avalanches and erosion. What was worse—at least to T.T.’s mind—was the snooty Olympics. For the duration of the games, the road would be closed to all but “permitted vehicles,” which didn’t include his. Two weeks! Do you think those Olympians gave a rat’s ass about a hard-working trucker just trying to—

  What happened next wasn’t amorphous, hazy, or cold. Since light travels faster than sound, T.T. was first blinded by the dual explosions around the supports for the rail bridge. Perhaps he heard the booms, but if so, it was only for the split-second before the shards of metal crashed like spears through the windshield. The span above the road smashed down like a portcullis sealing a gate. The rig, with its driver spiked to his seat, caromed into the bridge and flipped on its side, spilling the timber onto the highway like a giant playing pick-up sticks.

  * * *

  The problem with public officials is that most don’t have criminal minds. That’s why the powers-that-be had assumed there was a backup system in case of a power failure.

  Stopwatch knew better.

  The dams that power British Columbia were in the north. Electricity was transmitted to the Lower Mainland by the shortest possible route, so both the primary and the backup feeds hummed down this valley side by side. To plunge Whistler into darkness, all Stopwatch had to do was cut all the power lines.