“How did you get that word, Toni?”
“The jungle telegraph. He’s been contacting all the old troops, I take it, and asking everyone to pass the word along.”
“Okay. What is that word?”
“He’s at Winter Park, Colorado. A ski lodge there, called Snow Trails.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she said, sighing. “Gadgets said I shouldn’t tell you, but—I can’t make a decision like that.”
“You did right, Toni,” he assured her. “What’s happening in Vegas?”
He could picture her wrinkling that pert nose as she replied, “Same old stuff. We’re de-bugging a casino for a paranoid client who sees a badge behind every lapel.”
Bolan chuckled and said, “Give the guys my love.”
“All of it?”
“All you can’t handle,” he said soberly.
“Well they’re not going to get a drop,” she told him, just as soberly. “Uh, are you anywhere near Colorado?”
“I’m afraid so, Toni.”
“Oh. Well, dammit. Be careful, huh?”
“Name of the game,” he assured her.
“Do we, uh, have to go on like this? Meeting in secret? Can’t we, uh, get together over a cold night and, uh …?”
Bolan was chuckling as he told her, “All I can see from here is heat. When I find a cold night, though …”
“It’ll never happen,” she sniffed, and hung up.
She was, Bolan knew, probably right about that.
There was nothing ahead for Mack Bolan but heat. And, yeah, he had to go out and meet it.
12: THE OTHER
He crossed the Divide at Rollins Pass, making the approach to Winter Park via the back road, and immediately ran into heavy snowfall. The journey of less than twenty air miles had consumed several hours of ground travel in light snow along the east slope. The west slope had obviously been under heavy snow conditions for most of that time. A ranger had stopped him just west of the pass and suggested that he turn around at that point and return to East Portal.
“Is the road still open?” Bolan wanted to know.
“For now, yes sir,” the ranger told him. “But I can’t guarantee you’ll make it through. Especially with that tow vehicle.”
The situation was looking pretty grim, all right. Several inches of snow had accumulated already. Visibility was down to about a hundred feet and, as the ranger pointed out, “It’s a major storm system. Things are going to get much worse.”
But Bolan was less than five miles from his goal. He told the ranger, “I believe this cruiser can bull on through.”
The guy shook his head disgustedly at that decision but helped Bolan install tire chains, then sent him on his way with the parting advice: “If you get stalled, stay with your vehicle.”
Bolan thanked the man and went on, activating the optic and navigational support systems, which helped a little but not enough, and very quickly he found himself questioning the wisdom of his decision.
He was in a world apart, a frozen world of white stillness and vertigo-producing closeness, total isolation, constant danger.
He chuckled self-consciously at his own sudden uneasiness.
So what was new?
The snow, the whiteness, that was all that was new. It was not a different world but merely a different-colored one. The snow was not his enemy. It could, he knew, be his dearest friend in the challenging hours ahead.
So … who was the enemy?
Bolan had learned to trust Leo Turrin’s guts almost as much as his own. What was the “big thing” that was producing all the smiles and nods in the New York headshed? Who was the “other guy” whom they hoped to hit, after Bolan?
Why had Harrelson sent the message, and what did the message really mean? Was it a challenge, a suck, or a genuinely concerned attempt to reach an old friend with a dire warning?
They had been friends, sort of, at one time.
You didn’t have to exactly approve of a guy in order to like him. And Bolan had liked the guy. He’d been a cool warrior, nervy and daring but also very methodical—a sure hand to take in partnership with life hanging on every heartbeat.
What sort of hand was Frank Harrelson now extending to Mack Bolan?
It had not been difficult for Bolan to accept the idea that Harrelson was his principal enemy of the moment, not at all difficult. And his immediate reaction to Toni’s message had been entirely natural: Harrelson could not know that Bolan had linked him to the Colorado turkeyshoot; this was merely another suck, designed to lure the prey into the web. The “jungle telegraph” was not all that swift a means of communications. That word could have gone down days ago, and probably had—long before the formal hostilities had commenced in this area.
Still, there was an element of uncertainty in the entire hypothesis. Harrelson’s “link” to the Colorado action was an entirely circumstantial one.
It was that element of uncertainty which was now propelling Mack Bolan along a hazardous mountain road in a growing snowstorm to a ski lodge near Winter Park. That telephone conversation with Toni Blancanales was not the first time that day when Snow Trails lodge entered the picture. Brognola had introduced the place first, as the home and business of a terrified lady named Sanderson.
And, yeah, Bolan’s world was growing smaller all the time.
As small and as tight as that zone of visibility in a thickening snowstorm, as threatening and as deadly as that soft and silent fall of intricately patterned crystals of immobilizing stuff from above, as uncertain and mysterious as these brooding mountains in a sudden winter storm.
Bolan’s world, sure. But it was the only one he had. And he had to make it work for himself.
The resort was well marked and not at all difficult to find, despite the weather conditions. Far more difficult was the task of laying out the place, getting its lie and physical plant. It seemed to consist of a central building in the style of a large double A-frame, with small cabins sprinkled about in a random arrangement—the whole thing snuggled onto a small plateau overlooking the ski slopes. Visibility was bad and worsening by the moment, however, and Bolan could not be certain of his perspective.
He had left his vehicles far to the rear, taking the final quarter-mile on foot, and the going had been rough. Clad in “life suit” and hooded parka, glare-reducing goggles, heavy boots, he was comfortable enough but would gladly have given someone a thousand dollars for a pair of snow-shoes. A foot or more of fresh snow was underfoot, and although there was no wind to speak of, the snowfall was almost as dense as a stationary cloud and the visiblity was nowhere.
He actually felt his way around that property, in a blind reconnaissance which was almost surrealistic as a final picture. He did satisfy himself, however, that the only evident signs of habitation were in that central building. Lights were on in there, and the good-smelling smoke from a wood fire was coming from the chimney. Once he thought he saw the shadow of someone standing at an upstairs window, and as he drew closer, he could hear the sound of recorded music.
There was no disturbance of the snowbed surrounding the house, no tracks, nor were there any signs that the place was anything other than the resort it was supposed to be, all but deserted in the first snow of the season.
An A-frame building is a curious structure, with sloping roofs forming the side walls, windowless except at front and back—a favored design in deep snow country, where the weight of accumulated snow on flat rooftops has been known to collapse conventional structures. This particular design employed two “A” sections in a T arrangement. Bolan had been inside similar buildings, and he could picture in his mind a typical interior layout. A vaulted main living area, chapellike in its soaring height, a small balcony leading to upstairs bedrooms at the rear. In this one, probably the entire upper level of the horizontal “A” section was given to bedrooms, the perpendicular “A” open all the way to the peak of the roof—some forty feet from floor to ceiling. Around t
o the rear, main level, kitchen and dining room—perhaps another bedroom or two tucked into the eaves where headroom was minimal.
And there was but one entrance at ground level.
It could be a tough one to crack, if cracking it needed. And it probably did. One does not simply saunter up to the spider’s parlor, knock on the door, and request entry.
Bolan circled the building several times, certain that he was invisible to any occupants, studying the possibilities and formulating a plan of entry. But when he finally made his move, it was the only move possible.
He went to the front porch and knocked on the door.
Through the glass front, he could see flames dancing from logs in the fireplace. A lovely blonde woman sat in front of it on a white furry rug, knees drawn up and arms encircling them, staring into the flames. She wore blue jeans and a ski sweater, and she seemed totally preoccupied with the contents of her mind, giving no indication of having heard the knock at the door.
Someone else did, though.
He was a guy of about twenty-five, square-jawed and hard, hostile and suspicious. He yelled through the door, “What do you want?”
“I’m in trouble,” Bolan yelled back. “Do you have a phone?”
“No phone. You’re on private property. Get off.”
Bolan raised his goggles, and the two glared at each other through the glass of the door. “You crazy?” Bolan yelled. “A man could die out here! Do you open the door or do I kick it down?”
The guy opened the door, but just a little, and the snout of a Colt .45 appeared there. “You want to kick this down, too?” sneered the man behind it.
Yeah, Bolan did want to do that.
He hit the door with both feet, putting all his weight into it and twisting aside in the backward fall. The Colt roared once and fell to the outside, the shot going wild, the guy going down in a pole-axed drop beyond the rebounding door.
Bolan scooped up the fallen weapon as he rolled on through, but there was no fight left in the nasty one. He’d obviously taken the full jolt with his forehead; he was unconscious and the head was already ballooning out above the eyebrows.
The blonde lady had come to her feet and covered half the distance to the doorway. She saw the pistol in Bolan’s hand, checked her forward motion, and cried out, “There’s another upstairs!”
But the warning was unnecessary.
The second man had already charged onto the balcony at the rear, clad in longjohns only and brandishing a long-barreled revolver. His reaction to that situation below him was professional and quick, throwing himself into a sideways dive and tossing off a shot that gouged the wood at Bolan’s feet.
The retort from the .45 was, however, quicker and a bit more professional. Three scorching rounds in rapid fire searched through the flimsy decorative wood enclosing that balcony and found target on the other side. The guy’s life bubbled away in mid-screech, and the lady turned from that with bugging eyes.
She was a real beauty, a Nordic type with long and graceful lines, and just a charming trace of Scandinavian in her speech. “Are you a policeman?” she gasped.
Bolan replied, “I’m afraid not.”
Yeah, a real beauty, even in heart-stopping terror.
“You must run! Quickly! Get help! They are waiting for the president!”
Bolan blinked his eyes at that, and said, “Give me that again?”
“There are more! All around—everywhere—hundreds! Quickly, please, get away and tell the police!” She was running out of voice. “The president—this weekend—skiing! Please! Please!”
Bolan pushed the door shut, deposited the .45 on a table, and opened the parka to check his own weapons.
Okay.
So now he knew.
He knew why the incredible effort, the fantastic investment, the unbelievable intrigue.
The “other guy” was the President of the United States.
13: TIME IN
Time was always such a relative thing. Ten seconds with your hand pressed to a hot stove could seem like ten minutes. Ten minutes with your arms enfolding the woman you love could seem like ten seconds. In the space of a single heartbeat, a dying man could reexperience his entire lifetime.
Time out of frame, yeah, could screw a guy up.
Bolan was screwed up, right now, and he knew it. It did not particularly help that he knew. He felt like a man living on sixty second time in a world that had suddenly slowed to ten second time—like living in a world where everything but yourself is moving in slow motion.
It seemed that there was a plot to hit the president—up here, yeah, in these mountains. And time had expanded, recalling and rearranging all the events of the past twenty-four hours into a melange of faces, conversations, actions—including the present moment—like a giant jigsaw puzzle whose pieces are dumped onto the floor, and the floor itself is part of the puzzle. It was all there, all of it, and somehow you knew that you had the picture spread before you—yet the picture was not yet put together.
The beautiful lady continued pleading with him to run for it and time in mind continued to slip and spin as he moved eerily through the frozen world, gripped by the certainty of truth in his gut and sinking despair in his heart.
The telephone was smashed beyond repair. The nearest communications point was the warwagon, a quarter-mile to the rear with a winter storm and God knew what else standing across the path. The lady kept insisting that “the others” were out there, somewhere, close enough to have heard the brief firefight. A dead man’s blood was dripping from the balcony, a dying man lay at his feet, and a Nordic goddess was babbling an hysterical tale of death to the chief.
Time was out of sync, yeah.
Bolan removed his parka and began unbuckling the combat rig which had been worn beneath it. He took off grenade clusters, munitions belts, weapons belts, utility pouches—arranged them carefully for reassembly—and again pulled on the parka then began the rearming process.
The sight of all that weaponry had an immediate settling effect on the lady. Calm blue eyes watched the preparations for combat as Bolan told her, “Get into something warm, Mrs. Sanderson. We’re leaving.”
“They are holding my brother,” she replied calmly. “They will kill him if I leave.”
“They’ll kill you both if you don’t,” he assured her. “Where are they holding him?”
“In the lift house, I believe. At the beginners’ slope.”
“Okay, we’ll get him. Get dressed.”
Those eyes flashed and sparkled as she made the decision, whirling toward an open closet near the door and snatching a ski suit.
“You know—my name,” she puffed, moving almost frantically again now, as she struggled into the outfit.
It was no time for explanations. He replied, “Yeah,” and began stringing the grenades.
“I know yours, too. You’re Mack Bolan, aren’t you.”
He did not confirm the identification, but asked her, “How far away is the lift house?”
“Three hundred meters perhaps.”
Nordic, yeah. He wondered fleetingly about the twists of life that had brought this lovely young woman to this place and time. Even more important, though, what would take her the thousand feet to her brother’s captors, and the quarter-mile beyond that in a blinding storm to temporal safety, and where would this journey end?
Gruffly, he asked her, “Where’s your husband?”
“I am a widow,” she informed him, almost absently, as she fumbled with the zipper to the ski togs.
Bolan positioned the AutoMag at his right hip, made a test draw and checked the action. “Where’d you hear my name?”
She replied, without raising eyes to him, “I have heard little else since early this morning. They were expecting you here, earlier. With much excitement and quivering anticipation. Then, shortly before noon, the helicopter returned with the news that you were being hunted down, in Denver.” Her gaze moved to the man on the floor. “Mr. Smith was great
ly disappointed with the news. He sulked the afternoon away and became inconsolable when the snow began deepening.” The cool gaze found Bolan’s. “He wanted to be the one to kill you.”
Yeah, time out of sync.
It seemed that he’d known this lady for a long while. He’d first placed eyes on her about ninety seconds ago, yet in that time-frozen melange of overlapping events, they’d been together from the beginning.
He dropped a death medal on “Mr. Smith” and told the lady, “We’re out of time. Let’s go.”
“My name is Giselda. Lars—my husband—called my Undy. You may call me Undy.”
“Undy?”
“Yes.” Her gaze wavered. “It is short for Undurridis. Do you know her?” She saw the answer in his eyes, and continued: “In Norse mythology, the ski goddess. Not that I—it is an easier name than Giselda.”
“Let’s hope the name fits,” Bolan gruffed. “Who’s the ski God?”
“Skade,” she replied.
“Call me that, then, and hope it fits, also. Do you have some cross-country skis around here?”
“In the outfit shop,” she told him. “Near the lift house.”
Bolan was certainly no Skade—but he had taken a military ski course in Germany, years ago, and he did know the shovel from the tail. He had, in fact, excelled in cross-country racing and had done a bit of ski mountaineering on a furlough in the Alps. All that had been a while ago, though—and certainly this was no time for a refresher course.
They were moving toward the door when Bolan tensed and lifted his head to an unfamiliar sound, outside, distant.
“It is the snowmobiles!” the woman cried. “They have returned!”
Snowmobiles!
He pivoted and dragged the woman with him toward the rear. “How many?” he snarled.
“Five, six! Perhaps more!”
Okay, then. Two men to a buggy translated to too damn many to face squarely, with a noncombatant in tow.
He moved her into the horizontal “A” section and onto an open deck overlooking the rear from a height of about twenty feet. From a hanging drop, then, say ten to twelve feet into cushioning snow.
Colorado Kill-Zone Page 8