Eyes adjusting, she found herself in the cargo hold of a stolen van as it rattled along a mountain pass with a madman at the wheel and her blood gluing her to the floor. She felt herself sinking deeper and deeper into the void. She knew she was going to die. A part of her marveled at the fact that she had survived this long, had remained semiconscious this far. A part of her wondered if her captor knew exactly how long she would survive.
The madman seemed to have it all planned—the way he had surprised her at her apartment, the way he kept her bound yet conscious through most of it. She felt like a lamb being dressed for slaughter. The way he had nipped her fingers and her scalp to get the sacrificial blood, but avoiding any major arteries. And the way he had kept gibbering.
She recognized some of the words, the ancient tongue—Sumerian—and she knew something else. She knew who this creature was, and what he was capable of, and she knew he would probably sacrifice her. But now, as she drifted toward death, one of her last conscious thoughts was: why all the travel? Where was he taking her?
She was trying to come up with an answer when she heard the sirens.
At first they came from a great distance, as though from a dream, and she had to strain to hear them. They almost sounded like a nursery of crying babies—which was silly, but that’s exactly what occurred to her—whaaaaaa-whaaaaaaa-whaaaaaaa. Was she imagining the sounds?
Part of her problem was the shock, and part of her problem was the cold. She was shivering, approaching the final stages of hypothermia. She just wanted to go to sleep forever. She could’t hear very well, but there was something about the way the van was rumbling now, picking up speed, swaying and rocking violently, that told her those sirens were real, they were real, and they were closing in.
They were coming for the madman.
She blinked and swallowed and moved her head, coming awake on the floor of the van, enervated by the sounds of hot pursuit. She could see very little: the walls covered with filthy drop cloths, the scattered paint cans, some of them open and overturned—the rainbow colors of paint, the thinner and linseed oils mixing with her blood, a strange marbeling effect in the seams of the icy steel floor.
The van took a sharp corner and she rolled. The glue of dried blood ripped at her flesh. Bang! She hit a wall, eyes filling with stars. She choked. Ears ringing. The van was pitching and fishtailing now, apparently trying to elude the caterwauling sirens—whaaaaaa-whaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaa!
She lay on her back. Braced herself on a side panel. Her hands were numb and blackened with drying blood. She tried to hold on. The ride was getting bumpy now—engine roaring, chassis shuddering over rocks or potholes or logs or something.
The sirens faded.
Had he lost them? The van took a hairpin, and she slid backward toward the rear hatch doors. The van was climbing a steep grade now. Another turn. A steeper grade. Where the hell was he going? She tried to hold on to the floor. Where was he taking her? She could smell something faintly in her nostrils—pine? Dead rot? The mountains? Was he taking her into the mountains?
The mountains—why were mountains so important? She couldn’t remember. Couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe. The van was slowing down. The sirens were gone. Silence gripped the cargo hold. The gears began to grind. The van stopped.
Footsteps dragged awkwardly outside, coming around the vehicle.
The rear doors jumped open.
Maura County tumbled out onto the snow-crusted pavement. The impact of her bare flesh on the weathered asphalt popped like firecrackers in her skull. A gasp escaped her lungs. She lay there for a moment, shivering in the darkness, trying to breathe, her nude body numb, her hands still bound behind her. The sky was shrouded with skeletal pines, branches like supplicating arms, clawing at the black clouds. The madman towered over her like a monstrous, shadowy Gollum.
She closed her eyes. She knew her days were about to come to an end. She would be sacrificed to some esoteric god—her blood the medium, her corpse the message. What a fitting way for a science journalist to check out of this world: her own spoor transubstantiated into messages from beyond.
In those final moments, waiting to die, Maura’s mind ridiculously cast back over the years of failed romances. She had never even gotten on base with anybody. How pathetic. The tear on the side of her face burned in the cold wind, and she thought of Grove.
She would connect with him, perhaps, only in death—how perfect. At least she wore her good Bali bra and panties. Her mother always said, Never be caught dead in bad underwear. Maura sobbed in the darkness on the ground, and waited for a cold razor to take her pain away.
But the blow did not come.
Maura opened her eyes and saw the monster standing near the gaping doors of the van. His face was buried in shadows. Unreadable. There was a flash—a yellow spark from a butane lighter—then a flame leaping across Ackerman’s face. He was grimacing in pain.
His teeth shone like maggots.
He held a soda bottle half-full of yellow fluid, its rag of a wick burning orange. It looked like a makeshift Molotov cocktail. He casually tossed it over his shoulder. It landed inside the paint-saturated van, clattering across the steel floor and puddles of blood and turpentine.
Maura started to crawl away. Ackerman whirled and vanished into the trees.
Maura managed to get halfway across the blacktop lot before the van erupted.
Primary access to Lake Clark National Park is by small aircraft or boat. The hundred-square-mile preserve is a trailless wilderness, riddled by lakes and rivers, forming one of the largest salmon fishing grounds in the world. At night, approaching from the air across the Cook Inlet, the mountainous region appears to rise out of the ground like a great black temple. The horizon to the north seems to draw the jagged range up into the void of space in a seamless carpet of vaporous clouds.
Riding in the shotgun seat of a small Piper Cub airplane retrofitted with pontoons, which had been contracted out of the Mount Redoubt Ranger Station only minutes earlier, Ulysses Grove was the first to see the incongruous dot of light on the fabric of blackness below the aircraft. “The hell is that?!” he yelled over the bellowing engine.
“What!” the pilot hollered back at him. A skinny, weathered man wearing a gray uniform, down vest, and yellow goggles, the pilot was a deputy with the park police.
“There! Down there!”
Grove pointed at the pinprick of brilliant yellow light twinkling in the darkness of the trees, and the plane lurched slightly as the pilot glanced through the side window down at the landscape three hundred feet below them. Sure enough, there was a smoldering ember in the blackness near the northwest corner of Bristol Bay.
“Looks like a goddamn fire!” the pilot yelled over the thrumming din.
“A fire!”
The pilot yanked the wheel, and the plane banked to the north, the g-forces sucking at the fuselage. “Haven’t had one of those in fifty years or more!”
“You got a twenty on that?”
The pilot shrugged. “Looks like the Mount Cairn Ranger Station!”
Grove nodded.
The scene of the crime.
Taking long, bracing breaths, Grove withdrew deeper into himself.
26
A Little Slice of Hell
Grove asked if the pilot could put the plane down anywhere near the fire.
The pilot reached up. Thumbed a button on the overhead console. A narrow lid flipped open with a laminated park map on the back of it. “Upper Bristol Lake’s pretty close!”
“Let’s do it!”
The pilot shot another glance out the side vent. “It’s pretty narrow down there!”
“Do it!”
The pilot took a deep breath. Wiped his face with the back of his hand. Then yanked the stick. The plane immediately banked steeper.
Grove felt the bottom of the aircraft fall out from beneath him, the vague horizon tilting, the engine screaming. He felt himself slide toward the door. An in
voluntary clutching at the handgrip on the opposite side of the cabin. Muscles and tendons flexing. His stomach lurching. Acid reflux. Wounds throbbing.
The trees rose toward them, opening up, revealing the north branch of Lake Clark. The water got closer and closer. Looked like a mile-long sheet of black glass reflecting the jagged shadows of the Chigmits to the south and the west. And that yellow, luminous bruise on a field of black, refracting off the lake—bloating, pulsing, a fifty-foot tongue of fire obscenely licking the sky.
The water levitated up toward the belly of the airplane until . . . bang!
The pontoons kissed the surface, and the cabin jerked, and the plane rattled, and Grove bit down hard, nearly cracking his molars. The engine whined and complained noisily as the pilot wrestled with the stick, struggling to keep the craft from sideswiping a rocky outcropping. It took several frenzied moments—as well as a quarter mile’s worth of lake—to finally brake the plane.
When the engine finally sputtered off, the silence was a tremendous weight pressing down on the aircraft.
“Sir, if you could stay in your seat for a moment, I’ll get us over to the dock,” the pilot said, climbing out of his seat and grabbing a small oar.
Grove used the time alone to steady himself. His pressure bandage inside his jacket was stiff. Inside his leather gloves his hands were raw from the cold. He flexed them. The documents were folded lengthwise in his inner pocket. His brain was full of fractured impressions, and he tried to organize them. He tried to focus. The fire’s for you, old hoss, so don’t blow it. You got one chance, one opportunity to get this right, so let’s go.
The plane bobbed and slid sideways as the pilot couched on the pontoon, rowing them over to land. Water lapped against the floats. There was a bump, and then the sound of the pilot’s voice. Something about waiting there for an escort, and the head of the Anchorage field office.
Grove climbed out of the plane and stepped onto the weathered dock.
Dizziness washed over him. He fought it, grabbing a piling for purchase. The darkness was huge, the sky enormous. The cold wind buffeted him, clawed at his face. He buttoned his overcoat, lifting his collar. The bulge of his .357 felt reassuring on his wounded hip.
“Excuse me! Sir! Where you going?” The pilot’s voice rang out as Grove strode across the dock. “Sir? Sir!”
Grove was already crossing the adjacent gravel lot. He could see the glow of the fire over the treetops to the north. Maybe a quarter mile away. His heart thumped.
The pilot called out again, but Grove ignored the warnings and kept limping along.
He found an access road at the northwest corner of the lot and followed it, using the radiant yellow glow against the belly of the sky as his guide.
Seeing a place you’ve only read about can be disorienting. It can also be a revelation. Grove had studied the ranger’s journals, the police files, Detective Pinsky’s twenty-four-hour report, and the lab’s documents. They all described the trailhead at the base of Mount Cairn—the place where the Ackermans had first appeared with the Iceman’s remains—in similar fashions: a beautiful, sylvian switchback on the edge of the woods, with a quaint, little log ranger shack and a stunning vista of the snowcapped summit rising to the north.
But what Grove found that night as he rounded the corner at the top of the paved trail was nothing of the sort.
The carcass of an old panel van sat near the trail head, sputtering and billowing black smoke out its gaping rear doors. At least a half dozen emergency vehicles crowded the clearing with chaser lights boiling. The air stank of noxious gases, and was tinged a garish purple from all the bubble lights, an ugly little slice of hell.
Grove saw mostly park police, state troopers, and local evidence-techs running around, yelling at each other. Presumably the bureau had not yet arrived, the gravity of the situation not yet apparent. Grove was certain that Geisel and his men were on their way. Judging from the phase the fire was in—dwindling flames and a fog bank of smoke already permeating the park for miles—the feds would be here soon.
That was when Grove noticed the ambulance on the other side of the clearing.
His heart jumped. There was a light on inside the rear hold, a pair of paramedics administering CPR to a patient laid out on a gurney.
“FBI!”
Grove’s voice was hoarse as he staggered through the chaos, flashing his out-of-date investigator card to anyone who showed any interest. Oddly, nobody seemed the slightest bit fazed by Grove’s presence.
The rear door of the ambulance was ajar, and Grove peered in to find one of the paramedics—a heavyset Hispanic in a stained white uniform—working on Maura County. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, lady, c’mon,” he kept murmuring while he rhythmically nudged her chest—one-two-three-four-five—then leaned down and breathed more air into her lungs.
“Oh, Jesus, Jesus!”
Grove stood there gripping the door frame, unaware that he had even spoken, gaping at Maura’s wounds. Seventy-five percent of her battered, partially nude body was bandaged, much of the gauze soaked in her blood. The paramedic kept working on her. One-two-three-four-five. One-two-three-four-five. Grove looked away, his brain seared with emotion.
He prayed then.
He prayed to an obscure god that was a mishmash of his African heritage and own private cosmology. Until that moment, in fact, Grove had not even been aware of this god’s existence in his imagination. But now it materialized out of the murky shadows of his subconscious.
The sound of a cough pierced his praying, and Grove looked up.
Maura County was moving. She was alive. Her body shuddering, convulsing, she gasped for air—a fine mist of her own blood spraying across the paramedic’s uniform. The paramedic gave her a shot of something, then felt her neck. He nodded at his partner. “Got her back,” he said. “Got her back, man, got her back.”
Grove pushed the door open.
“Hey!” the other paramedic called out as Grove climbed onboard. “Who the hell are you?”
Grove crouched and shuffled past the paramedic, nearly knocking the IV stand over.
He went down on his knees, put his arms around the journalist. Laid his forehead on her shoulder. The paramedics tried to pull him off, but he held on to her. Her flesh was cold and smelled of alcohol and copper. Her breathing was steady. She was going to make it.
Grove’s voice was so soft it was nearly inaudible: “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, so sorry . . .”
They finally managed to tear him away.
They got him back outside the ambulance, and the big Mexican paramedic stayed with Maura while the other one—a younger man with a punkish blond crew cut—tried to make some sense of what was going on with Grove. “Sir, I’m going to need to know who you are,” he said.
“FBI,” Grove said.
“Yeah, okay, so—”
“Ulysses Grove, FBI, Behavioral Science Unit.” The tears on Grove’s face dried in the icy wind. “Please go take care of her, please.”
“Um . . . yeah.”
Grove was backing away. The paramedic let out a puzzled sigh, then shrugged and went back to the ambulance. Grove turned and took a few shaky steps.
Then he paused, standing there on unsteady legs directly in front of the smoldering Econoline van.
The dwindling flames blurred in his wet eyes. His throat burned. Teeth clenched. The other cops were too busy to notice—or even care—that a strange man who claimed he was from the FBI was standing in their midst, gazing balefully at the burning vehicle.
Grove gazed over his shoulder at the ranger cabin twenty yards away. It sat under a canopy of spruce boughs, buried in shadow, the fire reflecting off its single little framed window. Grove took a deep breath. The empty shack was waiting. The mountain was waiting.
Grove knew what he had to do.
The ranger cabin had a single-cylinder Yale sand-cast dead bolt. Grove had studied breaking-and-entering techniques at Quantico, and had honed his knowledge of locks
to a fine edge. Like many other field agents, he had the picking abilities of a good second-story man.
He snapped the lock in under five seconds.
He sought two things in the dark, airless confines of the shack—and he found both of them. First he needed a trail map of the south face of Mount Cairn. He found one in a Lake Clark park guide under the unfinished wooden counter that faced the door. He tore out the map page, folded it in half, and slid it into his back pocket.
A noise outside made him jump. One of the sirens had squawked suddenly. The ambulance was pulling away. Taking Maura away.
Thank God.
Grove searched the deserted shack for the second item that he needed—something to wear on the mountainside. Boots or a down coat or a sweater. Something.
Again he got lucky: of the three individuals who regularly worked at the Mount Cairn trailhead station—Grove saw their names on the counter, printed on table tents—two were female, one male. Apparently the male ranger was a bit of a slob.
Under the work desk in the rear Grove found a stash of Maxim magazines, old greasy White Castle sacks, and a gym bag. Grove opened the bag with shaking hands.
Inside was a pair of well-worn all-terrain boots, the blond suede uppers worn down to a scorched, shit-brown color. They were a couple of sizes too small, but Grove managed to squeeze his blistered feet into them. There was also a sweat-stained fleece vest and a large nylon windbreaker with the park ranger insignia on the back. A coil of nylon rope lay on the bottom of the bag, as well as a few miscellaneous pieces of climbing gear—rusty carabiners, an ice ax, crampons, and boot gators.
Grove hurriedly changed into the outer wear—shrugging off his Armani sport coat—while the voices and flames and bubble lights and radios crackled in dissonant chaos outside. Grove’s hands were still trembling as he checked the .357 magnum. He had twelve rounds left. Six in the cylinder, six in the speed-loader on his belt.
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