Killer Mountain

by Peter Pinkham

  “My father taught me shooting, but I’m not about to challenge him on the rifle range.”

  “He’s cocky about his skiing. Think you can still take him?”

  “I can beat any man I know skiing.”

  Hudson grinned. It wasn’t said bragging, it was just a statement of fact. One of the many reasons he had fallen in love with this independent, part Abenaki girl nearly seventeen years younger than himself. “I’m sure the Kehi Sogmo will agree.”

  “Our Kinjames is a quick learner.” The early Abenaki Indians thought all white rulers were called King James, so the name became attached to all New Hampshire governors.

  “So’s his wife, Kinjamesiskva.”

  “I had to marry a linguist. I can’t believe you’re spending time studying a dead language.”

  “Abenaki has a beautiful sound.”

  “Like a tree falling in an empty forest. Who’s ever going to hear it?”

  “Maybe you can get New Hampshire’s Kehi Sogmo to make it the official New Hampshire language. He seemed quite impressed with your skiing.”

  A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “It’s a good thing for New Hampshire he’s a better governor than skier.” The annual race between the governors of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont had been held at Great Haystack a month earlier, with social skiing before and after, and New Hampshire’s Chief Executive, Norman Ducharme, had fallen several ways for the skiing and personality of the Chief Executive of Great Haystack. Cilla had an open invitation to call on his office anytime. The event had been good PR, Boston newspapers running photos of the governors at Great Haystack.

  “He isn’t the only one that’s been taken with you lately,” said Hudson with a mischievous grin.

  “Not with me, who I look like.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Some women might be flattered at a man’s interest. Cilla felt only a deep disgust. Hudson quickly changed the subject.

  “You heard Captain Midnight surprised Greg, Karla and Jason on the NASTAR course?”

  She nodded. “And that’s typical of Kurt, single minded. He decided that’s where the competition is and made it a point to know the racing hill cold. He’s spent hours practicing on it.”

  “So?”

  “When we race it will be on my terms.”

  Chapter 11

  February 28

  The opening came sooner than Cilla expected. Hudson left for Boston at three. John Krestinski was the special agent in the FBI’s regional office, whom he’d met the previous October at a time he and Cilla were under attack from an unknown source. There was respect between those two, Cilla thought. She analyzed it. Krestinski had been with the Bureau twenty years, and little impressed him any more. Certainly not a Cambridge small-businessman - Hudson had a modest games and puzzles firm in Massachusetts before selling to his partner - who’d decided to play detective and had suffered the consequences. But Hudson had come through. The FBI man had found in him a chess mind able to solve a three hundred year old puzzle from the arrangement of a few pieces of thread, and the mental and physical strength to overcome superior forces while wounded himself.

  Krestinski had earned Hudson’s respect by the job he held and the way he held it - with an open mind that hadn’t been shuttered by twenty years of bureaucracy. He and his wife, Anne, had come up for a ski weekend in January and, if the Rogers, who were most comfortable in each other’s company, could have been said to have close friends, the Krestinskis would have been among them.

  So what did the respect these two had for each other tell her about how she should earn the same from Kurt Britton? Only what she already knew. She had to prove herself as something more than the “flower person” Britton saw.

  His triple knock at the door. “A sprained knee in the Hayfields, sent her to Memorial. The slope was perfectly clear; she’ll probably sue anyway.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Women feel they should be taken care of. No matter how foolish or unskilled they are, we should arrange it so nothing happens to them.”

  “Men don’t?”

  “Some do, there’s always a wimp. With most when they crash they know it’s no one’s fault but their own. Besides, they’re tougher, and skiing isn’t an easy sport to learn.”

  “That women shouldn’t attempt?”

  He saw the glint in her eye and backed off a little. “Of course not. They just shouldn’t ski beyond their capabilities.”

  “Which are limited to the easier trails?”

  “You know the stuff women have been fed, anything a man can do, they can. Pick up any newspaper or magazine. So they come up here and damn near kill themselves trying to imitate the men.”

  “Karla Schutz? There’s no one more competent on the ski patrol.”

  “She’s Austrian. She grew up on skis. And even with that...”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I guess you heard I beat her the other day.”

  “And Greg and Jason.”

  “By a full second.”

  “On the racing hill.”

  “Where else?”

  “You feel a thirty-five second course is a true test of skiing ability?”

  Nonplussed. “That’s where people race, Cilla.”

  “Not the pros, they race the whole mountain. Maybe Karla would have beaten you over a longer distance where stamina comes into it.”

  His shoulders straightened a little. “When I was a Drill Instructor at Parris Island my platoon broke the record for rifle exercises. There were five of us standing at the end. At Lejeune I led the all day marches with sixty-pound packs. At Quantico...”

  “Semper Fi.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “We were talking skiing, Kurt, not boot camp.”

  “Lejeune and Quantico aren’t...”

  “Or Eagle Scout hikes.”

  He froze, his face turning beet color. “Just who do you think you are?” The dam broke, and weeks of frustration poured out. “You come in here in December, a skinny girl barely halfway through her twenties, no experience, and try to tell us how to run a ski area just because you skied a little when you were in school.”

  “A lot in school.”

  “A little, a lot, what the hell’s the difference. You talk about pros, we’re the pros here; we’ve paid our dues. What have you done?”

  “I’ve got a lot to learn, I admit that.”

  “Well learn on somebody else’s mountain. Don’t come in here and make fun of the Marine Corps.”

  “I wasn’t making fun of the Corps. I was pointing out that you’d gotten off the subject.”

  “We were talking stamina. Working your body, not riding around in a machine. Good old fashioned stamina.”

  “In skiing.”

  “Stamina’s stamina, whether it’s skiing or field maneuvers.”

  “Not really; different muscles are involved. I doubt if I could carry a sixty pound pack around very long.”

  “But you could outlast me skiing?”

  “Shall we try and see?”

  “Lady, you name the time and place!”

  “How about now and Bale Out.”

  “The whole length?”

  “Of course.”

  A broad smile spread across the mountain manager’s face. “I’ll get my skis.”

  And alert the staff and crew, thought Cilla as he marched out to band music only he could hear. He won’t want anyone to miss this. She took her time, putting on her yellow jump suit, slipping feet into ski boots. After ten minutes of stretching she went down to the lockers for her skis. As expected, there was a crowd gathered on the slope side of the base station, Britton joking with some of the ski school instructors, idled by the absence of paying customers whose dollars had been spent the previous week. Cilla stepped into her skis and leaned far forward, then took them off and adjusted the tension. The supply room was next door. She took two aerial flares of the type used in mountain rescues, one that burst in the air as a
white light and one a red.

  Even the office staff were peeking out windows as Cilla glided up to the group on the snow. Britton was jovial and condescending.

  “Shall we ride up together?”

  “No. We start here.”

  Britton laughed shortly. “And see whose chair is fastest?”

  “We are racing Bale Out Trail, aren’t we?”

  “Damn right. We ski the whole mountain.”

  “Right, so let’s start. This red flare is yours; you set it off on the top to show you’ve reached it and are starting down. I have the white flare.”

  Puzzled. “For the timer?”

  “We won’t need a timer. Whoever reaches the bottom first wins. This is just so the spectators can tell where we are.”

  “They’ll know where we are. On Bale Out. Stop stalling and let’s get going.”

  “Fine. Go.” She turned to her left and started across the snow.”

  “Hey! Where are you going? The lift is over here.”

  Cilla stopped and turned back to him. “Weren’t we talking about stamina? Working the body not a machine?”

  “So?”

  “The lift is a machine. As you said, we’re racing the whole mountain. Both ways.” She turned back and headed for the bottom of Bale Out.

  There was a stunned look in Britton’s eyes as her words sank in. Then with a roar he took off after her, poling hard across the flats. They reached the trail mouth at the same time and started to climb together. Britton, practically running, skis slapping the snow, moved quickly ahead, herringboning his way up. Cilla concentrated on steady rhythm.

  Bale Out was a gentle grade at the bottom growing increasingly steep and sprouting giant moguls the last five hundred feet of its two-mile length. By the time Cilla reached halfway, Britton was a full hundred feet ahead, his breath coming in great gasps. She smiled to herself, the Marine was definitely gung ho. Maybe she shouldn’t have put down the Corps, but she had to get him angry enough. As a kid she had often climbed trails to ski - after school when the lifts had shut down. She doubted Kurt had ever climbed more than fifty feet before. There was a trick to it; one he would have automatically fallen into had his fury with her left him with a cooler head. Pace. That’s all. He wouldn’t have started one of his all day hikes at a run. But she had given him the opportunity to embarrass her, and then hidden the pea under a different shell at the last minute. He’d had no time to plan, just react.

  They were nearly even at the foot of the mogul field. The Marine was blowing like a whale heading for the beach. His head was down, but there was a look of grim determination on his face. The massive mounds required different technique; the downhill sides were steep to climb over, but if you tried to go up in between, your skis slipped backwards. Cilla sidestepped up them and reached the top with Britton fifty feet behind. She set off her flare, knowing the effect of the burst of white light on those watching - which was nearly everybody that worked for Great Haystack plus more than a few curious recreational skiers. A little showmanship Hudson would have appreciated.

  The run down was anticlimax. A loud cheer went up as she rounded the last turn in the trail and came into view of those watching. She sprayed snow on her stop and gave a little finishing hop. When Britton appeared the cheer had a sarcastic tone, which became more raucous when they could see he was covered with snow as though he’d gotten buried in a fall. The mountain manager skied through the spectators without a word - a rigid snowman - and disappeared around a corner of the base station.

  Cilla watched him go, wondering if she had made her point. Or an enemy.

  Chapter 12

  “Let me tell you a story.”

  John Krestinski sat back in his desk chair and folded his hands prepared to listen. Their dinner had been cut short by an Agency “emergency” - a daily occurrence according to the FBI man. The office had managed coffee.

  “A couple of men broke into our house two weeks ago. I came home to find a thug heading for the kitchen where Cilla had run to get a knife.” Hudson propped his chin on a fist. “They’d gone right upstairs and burst in on her in our bedroom; one had a knife and the other a gun. They made Cilla go downstairs with them. She caught one in the throat and made it to the kitchen when I got into it.” He leaned back in the padded chair. “She could have handled it herself if it hadn’t been for the gun.”

  Krestinski did not disagree with this assessment; in fact he wondered if the thugs realized how dangerous their choice of houses had been. The FBI man studied his friend, seeing a tall, rather ordinary looking man with light brown hair and mild eyes, until you noticed the powerful shoulders underneath the suit coat, and the tanned skin that in February Boston signaled either a just-returned vacationer or someone who was outdoors more winter hours than sensible New Englanders. “I’ve seen what happens when someone tries to tackle the two of you together. Did they survive?”

  “Got away.” Hudson grinned sheepishly.

  “Surprise. They say anything?”

  “Just that she should go with them, in a heavily accented voice. Where we don’t know; they’d only gotten to the foot of the stairs when she broke away.”

  “And you didn’t call Chief Solomon, I’m sure. You telling me this in an official capacity?”

  “No. Cilla said something about it being the wrong decade. I think her intuition took her further than her conscious mind. John, they were Russian.”

  Krestinski had been bringing his coffee to his mouth. The cup stopped halfway. “Russian. You sure?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am. Cilla heard one say some words. She thought they might be Swedish; they weren’t. I want to put it down as just a random robbery attempt.” He shook his head. “Do you hear me talking? `Just’ a robbery, as though it were a common everyday occurrence in Bartlett, New Hampshire for a house to be invaded by men with knife and gun. But what she heard was a Russian curse.”

  The FBI agent pursed his lips. “Hudson, you live way up there in the sticks. If you were in a half-civilized part of the world you’d know Russians are a growing part of the New England population. From my end of things, they are now one of the major drug trade players in this section of the country. It’s no longer just the old Italian mafia. They were followed by the Columbians, then the Jamaicans, and then the Asians. Now maybe it’s Russians. They started in the Boston area where a lot of them went to work in the taxi business; others, like most immigrating national groups, formed mobs when they found people weren’t falling all over themselves to hire them. And that they could make money faster taking it than earning it. They’re now spreading out over the Northeast. I’m surprised you haven’t seen them at Great Haystack.”

  “I’m not. If they skied, it wouldn’t be Alpine.”

  Krestinski looked out the window at the lights of City Hall Plaza. He’d sometimes searched to see if he could identify vestiges of what used to be Scollay Square, made famous by the Old Howard vaudeville theater; more so by the strippers who performed there. “Yes. And I’m talking a lot of crap. There’s no way they should be in your area.”

  Hudson nodded.

  “I’m trying to avoid thinking your errand for me might have brought harm to your family.”

  “So am I. But I hadn’t met or seen a Russian in years. I go to their country, where I’m bonked on the head, and a few days after I’m back, there are Russians invading my bedroom. Is it farfetched to connect the two? Maybe it is, I don’t know. I’ve been putting that question to myself the past week and finally decided to let you take a shot at it.”

  “You think the one who attacked you in St. Petersburg wasn’t just after your wallet.”

  “I had asked a lot of questions about your folks. Besides the police, I saw the hotel manager, maids, clerks, plus several coffee shops they visited, and your parents’ old St. Petersburg friends. Probably talked to 50 people in all. Russia’s not the best place in the world to ask about missing people. So, yeah, it could have been a warning. But if it was, that puts a new
face on what’s happened to them.”

  “Yeah… not a good one.” They both were silent with their thoughts. “I left the day after you did. There was no point.”

  “I was surprised you were able to get over there at all.”

  “My office wasn’t happy. We’ve had a kind of bothersome problem I’ve been on, but I had to come over when I heard you were in the hospital.”

  “And still no word?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “John, the thugs at my place wanted Cilla to go with them. Presumably out of the house, we haven’t got anything valuable in it. For sure no drugs. If they’re from the Boston area, and were after just any woman, they wouldn’t have come 140 miles for one. So why Cilla?”

  Krestinski studied his friend. “She was in a… what do you call it. Some Indian place… when you met her.”

  “An ashram.”

  “Yeah. An ashram. Could it be something from there?”

  “I doubt it. There was probably some grass around, but I don’t think they were in the selling business.”

  Krestinski rolled a pen around his fingers. “What does Cilla know about your side trip for me?”

  “Everything except my ending up in the hospital.”

  “How are you feeling now? That Russian doctor said you took a hell of a blow.”

  “I’m fine. John, I don’t want Cilla to know I got banged up over there. She’s had enough problems in her life. She needs me to provide a stable, secure and non-threatening environment. So far I’ve done a shit-poor job.”

  Krestinski looked out the window and sighed. “It may not get much better if mafia is involved, particularly Russian mafia because…”

  “They go after the wives?” Hudson put in.

  “Not just the wives. Anyone in a family they feel has crossed them. Aunts, uncles, maybe a cousin or two.” He leaned forward with his hands on the desk. “God, Hudson, I’m sorry. I should never have brought you into this.”