by Brad Thor
He and Amanda were going way too fast. One bump in their path and it would all be over. There was no way that any skier, even one of Scot Harvath’s caliber, could keep this up.
Then, he saw it. The outcropping of rock was racing up to meet them as quickly as the avalanche was racing down to swallow them.
Harvath put the distance at twenty yards and closing. His mind raced through the trillion calculations necessary to gauge the successful achievement of the next step in his plan: stopping.
The logical answer he received to his seemingly illogical request was simply, “Three…two…one…Now!”
Scot wrapped his arms tightly around Amanda and threw all of their collective weight over his left ski. He covered her as best he could with his body, acting as a human air bag to protect her from injury, as they brutally spun and pounded out of control toward the rocks below.
Over and over again they somersaulted with furious speed, each time crashing down hard on one or the other of Scot’s shoulders. Between the white snow of the bowl and the blowing white of the blizzard, Harvath fought hard to keep focused on which way was up and where their target was. It was impossible. They continued to flip wildly out of control. The sound of the avalanche was so loud now he couldn’t even think.
As quickly as they had been rolling, they were immediately stopped by slamming into a sheer wall of rock. Scot cried out in pain and held on to consciousness just long enough to see a torrent of wet snow pour over them and Amanda’s limp body lying motionless beside him.
8
The first thing he noticed when he regained consciousness was the eerie silence. The absence of noise was deafening. They had barely made it to the rock overhang in time. The plan had just worked. They were positioned beneath a narrow stone ledge that had formed a partial barrier to the avalanche. The claustrophobic box they were in was about eleven feet long, three-and-a-half feet wide, and four feet high. They were amazingly fortunate. Where there wasn’t rock, they found themselves surrounded by snow, but there was at least some room to move around—as if they were in a small cave. Scot hoped the other Secret Service agents had been as fortunate, but he doubted they had.
In the dark, Harvath began to slowly make an overall assessment of his condition. His ankles felt okay, shins were fine, knees were sore but probably would bear weight. His thighs felt like mush and were bruised, but didn’t seem like a problem as long as he was lying down. He carefully fished his Mag-Lite out of his pocket and turned it on. Next, he struggled to bring his knees up to raise himself into a sitting position, and that’s when the pain started shooting through every inch of his upper body. He gave up immediately.
Covering Amanda during their fall, Scot had taken most of the beating along his back and shoulders. From his waist up, everything hurt, and he couldn’t tell what might be broken. At least there were no apparent open fractures, and he was only bleeding slightly from an abrasion on his forehead, so for that he gave thanks.
From where he was lying, he could see the outline of Amanda’s left leg. He needed to get to her and knew it was going to hurt like hell, but he pushed the thought from his mind. With all the strength he could summon, Scot rocked his body slowly from right to left until he got up enough momentum to roll all the way over. He was right. Rolling over did hurt like hell, but it was nothing compared to what came next.
When he’d been on his back, he could look straight down past his ski boots and make out Amanda’s leg as she lay on her side. Now that he was on his stomach, he couldn’t see her, because she was behind him. Scot summoned up another surge of strength and, banishing the pain from his mind, managed to lift himself onto his elbows. This change of position sent searing, red-hot spikes of pain up his arms and into his battered shoulders. He began turning his body around upon the cold, rock-strewn snow so he could face Amanda. His legs refused to cooperate, and for a moment he was afraid he might be paralyzed. Eventually, he felt his ski boots move.
Scot’s incredibly weakened legs were not of much use, so he went back to dragging himself in Amanda’s direction while the incredible pain in his arms, shoulders, and back threatened to slam him back into unconsciousness.
It took the resilient Secret Service agent over fifteen minutes to crawl ten feet. Even though he didn’t want to, Scot was forced to stop every couple of seconds to catch his breath. He probably had cracked one, if not several, ribs in the tumble down the mountain. Nevertheless, he was alive, and if Amanda was too, then they both had won, so far.
As he drew closer, he could see Amanda’s chest slowly heaving up and down in the beam of his small flashlight. Thank God, she was breathing. At least she was alive. Harvath tried feebly to call out to her, but all he could manage was a hoarse whisper. He would need to get a lot closer to communicate.
He continued his pattern of crawl, rest, crawl, rest, until his face was even with the back of Amanda’s head. With her face turned away toward the sheer rock wall of the overhang that had saved their lives, he couldn’t tell if she was conscious.
Scanning the top and back of her head, he didn’t see any injuries, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Scot knew that attempting to reposition her head could worsen any spinal trauma that might already be present. He would have to carefully support her head, neck, and shoulders, and at this point he didn’t have the strength to do it.
“Amanda?” he whispered in his hoarse, dry voice. “Can you hear me? Mandie sweetheart, it’s Scot. We’re alive. We made it, but I need you to talk to me. I need to know if you’re okay. C’mon, honey, just a couple of words. Let me know if you can hear what I am saying.”
Amanda didn’t respond, and Scot didn’t have the energy to keep talking. He had resisted for as long as he could the syrupy blanket of unconsciousness that had been threatening to overtake him. It was no use. As hard as he tried, he just couldn’t fight it. All he wanted now was to sleep. Peaceful sleep. I’m so sorry, Amanda.
9
“Palmer!” yelled Hollenbeck to the nearest Secret Service agent in the command center. “Get on the horn to Deer Valley and find out if those avalanche sirens are legit. I want to know why they’re sounding and if there has been an avalanche. I want a full, and I mean full report!”
“Yes, sir,” replied Palmer, who immediately contacted the resort’s emergency services department.
“Longo! One question. Are we green?”
“Negative. We are still dark.”
Tom Hollenbeck had been standing for the last nine minutes. He couldn’t think of sitting down. He needed to pace. His crew knew him well enough to steer clear.
He walked over to one of the windows and watched the whipping snow outside, racking his brain for what his next move should be. The president’s life, his daughter’s, and the lives of no less than thirty Secret Service agents were in his hands.
“Sir!” cried Palmer as she came running up to Hollenbeck with her notepad. “Deer Valley says that there was an avalanche.”
“Shit! Give me the w’s,” said Hollenbeck, which was Service slang for “who, what, where, when, and how many.”
Palmer looked down at her pad and began reading off her list of facts. “Apparently, this was a pretty big one. Several ski patrollers heard it and, knowing what it was, called it in to their base as a potential. Only two patrols actually got a visual and confirmed it.”
“Why only two?”
“Look at the way it’s snowing outside. With weather this bad, you’d have to be practically on top of anything to see it.”
“All right, so several patrols heard what sounded like an avalanche and called it in as a potential, while only two could actually give a positive visual on it. And they also called it in?”
“Correct, sir.”
“How? I thought their radios were down.”
“Yes, they are.”
“Then how did they do it?”
“Apparently, they used a citizen’s band radio inside one of their ski patrol huts.”
“A
CB?”
“The call came through loud and clear.”
“Why do you suppose a CB would work, but not our gear and not Deer Valley’s regular radios?”
“Apples and oranges.”
“What do you mean, ‘apples and oranges’?”
“The CB uses a different frequency than those used by the Secret Service or Deer Valley. The weird thing is that our gear is much more sophisticated. Everyone else should be having problems, not us.”
Hollenbeck agreed and tucked that nugget away for later while he proceeded with the matter at hand. “Okay, Palmer. Now for the ten-thousand-dollar question. Where did the avalanche begin?”
“According to the ski patrol, it began at Squaw Peak.”
Hollenbeck’s hand shot through a stack of papers and laminated charts on his desk, pulling out the topographical map the Secret Service’s TAT, or Threat Assessment Team, had prepared. It detailed all of the president’s known and potential ski routes, along with rotating postings for the JAR and CAT teams. Hollenbeck had a photographic memory and knew exactly where Squaw Peak was, but hoped in his heart of hearts that he was wrong. He wasn’t.
Squaw Peak was the highest peak of Deer Valley, and it fed directly into the basin the president and his daughter were skiing through.
In anticipation of Hollenbeck’s next question, Palmer said, “The slide was on this side of the mountain and would have funneled a wall of snow, ice, and debris directly along the routes of Hat Trick and Goldilocks.”
For the first time in ten minutes, Hollenbeck sat back down in his chair.
10
With almost a straight vertical drop and so much that could have gone wrong with the descent, Miner’s Lions had done an exceptional job. His men deserved their sobriquet. They certainly had the hearts of lions. In assembling the best-trained force-for-hire in the world, Miner had revived Switzerland’s illustrious mercenary tradition. It seemed only fitting that his men should carry a name that honored their predecessors.
Not far from the heart of the city of Lucerne was a majestic monument carved into a sheer rock face. It depicted a lion resting on a shield bearing the Swiss coat of arms and paid tribute to the 786 members of the Swiss Guard who died defending King Louis and Marie Antoinette during an attack on the Tuileries in 1792. Even the American author Mark Twain had called it the most “moving” piece of rock in the world. Upon Miner’s suggestion, his men had taken the name and had been his band of courageous and deadly Lions ever since.
It took the Lions ten minutes to make their descent. When they emerged from the icy crevice, the lead skiers took off their skies and began removing a series of snow-white tarps that hid three Ski-Doo snowmobiles.
No words were spoken, as time was still a critical element. Dryer helped Schebel attach the toboggan to the back of one of the snowmobiles, and Miner unzipped the bag carrying the president to make sure his IV was still firmly in place.
The rest of the crew snapped out of their bindings and placed their skis into the specially fitted tubes on the sides of their snowmobiles. There were two riders on each machine, one to drive and another to lay down fire if need be, though Miner knew it wouldn’t be necessary.
He climbed onto the back of the snowmobile driven by Dryer, which would pull the toboggan, and gave the signal to fire up the machines and move out.
11
Scot Harvath’s eyes snapped open as a searing bolt of pain spat him back into consciousness. His entire body ached. The sensation ebbed away, and then another wave came crashing back in.
He had known pain of this magnitude before, as well as soul-chilling cold, during his SEAL training. That training had taught Scot that what the mind believes, the body will achieve. He and his fellow teammates had joked that in SEAL training they had known the most horrific torture ever conceived of by the civilized world, but every single ounce of it had been designed to prepare him for situations just like this. SEALs absolutely, positively never give up. The SEAL motto was, “The only easy day was yesterday,” and even though Scot Harvath’s paychecks now came from the Secret Service, he would always be a SEAL.
Scot moved just a fraction and had to suppress the urge to cry out. It didn’t matter. One of the benefits of the pain, if you could look at it that way, was that his head was clearing and he was regaining control. His body would have no choice but to cooperate with him. Passing out again was not an option. It couldn’t be an option. Scot was acutely aware that with each ten minutes that passed, avalanche survival rates for those buried beneath the snow dropped like a stone.
Harvath painfully pulled himself into a sitting position and wiggled his way over so that he was sitting directly above Amanda Rutledge’s head. He set the Mag-Lite next to him and turned his palms upward. Carefully, he slid both of his hands beneath her back, supporting her head, neck, and shoulders as he rolled her over. She made no sound and continued to breathe in slow, shallow breaths.
“Mandie? It’s Scot. Can you wake up for me? Say something, honey. C’mon.”
Scot removed his small backpack, placed it on the ground next to him, and retrieved his flashlight. He opened Amanda’s eyes, expertly shining the light into each one. Her pupils didn’t constrict. That was a bad sign. He focused his thoughts on getting them to safety.
There was no way to tell how deeply they were buried. In an avalanche, the heavy snow could set up like wet concrete, making it nearly impossible to dig your way out.
Scot remembered his radios and gave them both another try. “Mayday, Mayday. Birdhouse, this is Norseman. We need assistance. Over.
“Deer Valley, Deer Valley, do you copy? Over.”
Nothing but the crackle of static came back. Scot decided to conserve his energy and his oxygen. There were more important things to think about now. Number one, he had to keep Amanda warm and try to stabilize her. Number two, he had to get them both out of this situation alive.
So far he was batting a thousand on the staying-alive part, but their fight was only fifty percent complete. Without any radio contact or anybody knowing where they were trapped, there was no telling how long a search party would take to find them. With the weather the way it was, efforts were going to be severely hampered.
Harvath had opted against having the detail agents carry the avalanche-safety transmitter-receivers so popular with backcountry skiers. The avalanche transmitter-receiver was about the size of a small walkie-talkie and was constantly set on transmit, broadcasting a low-frequency signal, so that if someone were ever trapped in an avalanche, like now, other people in the party could set theirs to receive and start homing in on that person’s location to rescue him or her. Scot was completely against this equipment for several reasons.
One, an unfriendly source could potentially lock in on these signals, and two, with JAR and CAT teams strategically interspersed along their routes, help would always be immediately available via radio contact, if not visually. All things considered, he thought the choice not to outfit agents with the avalanche transmitter-receivers was still the right one. However, Scot had never anticipated that their radios would go out.
As if they didn’t already have enough problems, Scot looked at his watch and realized it was nearing 4:45 P.M. The sun would be setting soon, and as it went down, so would the temperature. If they didn’t get themselves out and to someplace warm, they’d be Popsicles by morning.
12
Harvath slid out of his jacket and placed it over Amanda to help keep her warm. She was lying on snow-covered ground, so the gesture was more symbolic than anything else. Amanda would have been better served with the jacket placed beneath her, but he’d already moved her once and didn’t want to risk it again.
Her pupils not constricting was a sign of abnormal brain function. Despite all of Scot’s efforts to cushion Amanda, she’d probably hit her head during the fall down the mountain. Only a doctor would be able to know for sure what her prognosis was, and that made their situation all the more dire.
As
Scot’s head continued to clear, he realized they probably had a little more air available to them than he’d originally thought. He needed to begin the dangerous process of extricating himself and Amanda from their snowy dungeon. He crawled back down toward Amanda’s feet, dragging his backpack with him.
Confident that he was far enough away that a minor cave-in of snow or ice wouldn’t land on Amanda, Scot reached into his pack and withdrew what looked like a telescoping ski pole. The pole was known as an avalanche probe and was used by search parties to feel for avalanche victims beneath the snow. As Scot began extending the device, he breathed a sigh of gratitude that he had been safety conscious enough to bring it along.
He picked an angle that looked to be the safest and easiest to dig out from and began feeding the pole through, careful not to disturb any unstable snow. The pole fed out for what felt like a million miles. They had survived a major avalanche.
Shrugging off the fatigue that leaned on him like a heavy boulder, Harvath assembled his collapsible snow shovel and prayed he wouldn’t bring the icy roof crumbling down on top of them.
Bending his knees and putting one foot against the rock wall behind him for leverage, Scot began the delicate process of digging out. The last thing he wanted to do was to cause a cave-in.
When he felt he had tunneled a sufficient distance forward, he began scraping the snow along the ceiling in front of him. It created an ice spray that rained down on his face and hands. The process was agonizingly slow. Time and again, Scot backed out of the tunnel, pulling the recently shoveled snow toward him, and deposited it within their frigid cave.
On his eleventh grueling trip back into the tunnel, Scot felt the shovel break the surface. He let the crisp plates of frozen snow fall down on him as he dug an exit wide enough to crawl through.
A chill wind howled as he pulled himself through, and the snow was falling harder and blowing faster than before. The sun was completely gone, and Scot couldn’t make out anything below them in the terrible conditions. He sat on the rim with his heavily booted feet resting within the tunnel and took two seconds to catch his breath. It was biting cold, but at this moment he didn’t feel it.