by Thomas Perry
“Then we get to go back to Yuma, where it’s warm, and you go on to your next assignment,” said Wright.
“We have to turn them over to somebody first,” said Julian. “Whom did they tell you we give them to?”
“After we get them, we’ll report and get our orders at that time.”
Julian nodded as he studied Wright. Military intelligence must have uncharacteristically realized that Libyan agents weren’t going to do anything up here in the dead of winter but get themselves killed. So they had sent a force equipped for war. He understood.
Maximum force meant less likelihood of casualties. And Julian knew that if he went through the soldiers’ equipment, he would find body bags. He doubted that he would find handcuffs or restraints for moving prisoners.
Big Bear was crowded in the winter. When it snowed, Snow Summit and Bear Mountain filled up with people from Los Angeles. Right after the Thursday night weather report they began to call for reservations. Skiers and snowboarders came up in long convoys, pulled into parking spaces at the lodges, resorts, and condos, and began to fill every room. Houses that Hank and Marcia Dixon had never seen occupied suddenly had five or six cars parked in front of them and lights in every window. High trails the Dixons had hiked in the fall were passable only on snowshoes now, but nearly every morning they would see people struggling in deep drifts.
As soon as the first snowfall, Hank talked Marcia into going cross-country skiing with him. Hank had taken Emily and Anna every winter in Vermont until Emily was through college and had begun medical school, and he had continued after they were both gone. The attraction now was that Hank and Marcia could ski miles from the village, where the visiting flatlanders seldom ventured and there were no trails.
Nearly everything Hank did was intended to contribute to their security. Buying Marcia a diamond engagement ring and a wedding band seemed likely to make the Dixons look more like who they pretended to be, and therefore safer. Buying a long-range rifle in .338 Lapua and a good scope would allow Hank to take a position in an upper window of the cabin and shoot an attacker from a thousand yards. But if he and Marcia were a thousand yards from the nearest enemy, it would be far wiser to run. He bought the rings but didn’t buy the rifle.
To Hank, the hours of darkness were the most dangerous. Each time an assassin had been sent for him, the killer had arrived late at night, so in Big Bear Hank Dixon slept lightly. Nights made him miss his dogs more than ever. Whenever he heard a sound outside he would get out of bed and quietly slip out of the bedroom. Then he would walk to the window and look out on the snow-drifted hillside that led down into the sleeping town.
He would look for a vehicle parked along the narrow winding road, or maybe moving toward the cabin from below. Then he would go across the hall to the guest room with the best view of the hill and look up toward the crest. He knew that a sniper would prefer to fire into the window from above, where he would have a good view of the rooms and a superior firing position. When Hank felt particularly uneasy, he would use the night-vision binoculars to search the forest trails. Then he would pad back into the bedroom and slide under the covers into the space where Marcia’s body kept the bed warm. He would remind himself that there had been no car, there had been no men, and in time he would sleep.
The morning after the big snowstorm, the air was cold but the sun was bright, obscured only for seconds at a time by passing clouds blown by winds at high altitudes. Whenever the sun broke through the clouds, the glare of the snow brightened enough to hurt the eye.
Hank stood in the living room and saw an oversized black pickup truck with a snowplow blade mounted on the front. The truck had big tires with chains, and what looked like sandbags piled in the bed.
He watched the truck move up the right side of the road, its plow shouldering the snow to the edge of the pavement in a long, serpentine ridge. When the truck came to a cabin’s driveway it swept the snow across the front, blocking it. The truck wasn’t a municipal vehicle.
It had been snowing at Big Bear since the end of October, and he’d never seen this black truck come up the road before. He supposed that the owners of the other cabins in this section might have hired a local entrepreneur to plow their road and driveways to open them after the storm.
Hank went away from the window to get a cup of coffee. As he poured it in a mug, he considered it likely that one of the owners had hired the plow. But he decided to keep an eye on the truck. He had learned over the years that things that didn’t seem right often weren’t. He could hear Marcia playing a few bars from the Chopin sonata she had been learning. She stopped, then played the same passage again.
He returned to the front window and saw the truck moving on the far side of the road, heading downward again, leaving the same winding ridge of snow all the way along. The driver never stopped to clear any of the driveways. Odd. Hank sipped his coffee and looked out at the roads below in the village while he listened to Marcia play. There were few cars out after the big snowfall. He stood for a few minutes, set his coffee on the table, and went out to the mudroom. He put on his quilted jacket, found his gloves in the pockets and his knitted cap in a sleeve. He picked up his sunglasses and opened the door to grasp the shovel and bring it inside.
He stood in the entrance to the living room and held up the shovel so Marcia would look up from the piano to see.
She stopped playing.
“I’m just going to dig us out,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”
“My hero,” she said, and went back to playing.
He went out and began to shovel. He had picked out the shovel himself, and he respected it. It was a black steel scoop shovel on a thick ash shaft, which he thought of as a coal shovel. It was heavier than a flat snow shovel and nearly as broad, but it didn’t bend and would slice under ice instead of bouncing over it.
As he worked, his breaths were thick white puffs in the crisp air. He cleared the barrier of snow at the bottom of the driveway and looked down on the village and the lake. He was concentrating on the shoveling, but part of his mind was still thinking about the truck. The only two cabins beyond theirs on this road were unoccupied. He hadn’t seen anybody, or even a parked car, in a month or more. He decided to watch for cars coming up the road toward the other cabins. Maybe one of the neighbors had seen the weather reports and had the plow come because he was on his way up here to ski the fresh snow.
Julian Carson walked quickly through the pinewoods above the three cabins that sat along the newly plowed road near the top of the mountain. He saw the target Henry Dixon standing on the driveway in front of the big cabin with a shovel. Julian recognized him immediately. Some part of Julian’s mind had kept alive the hope that Goddard had made a mistake, but it was the same man. Dixon looked as though he was clearing the way to drive the car out. Julian couldn’t let him do that. Julian sped up, walking only under the pine trees above the deep snowdrifts. He couldn’t afford to make noise or leave clear tracks, so he stayed in the woods. The pine branches formed such a thick thatch of needles under the trunks the forest ground was only dusted with thin powdery snow that would be difficult to read for tracks.
He came to a fallen pine tree and walked atop the trunk, moving quickly but keeping his balance, until he could step off into the path already pressed into the snow. The path led him to the back porch, a concrete block with three steps leading up to it. He went low and peered in the window. He could see the kitchen was empty. He knelt on the porch, took off his gloves, and reached into his pocket for his pick and tension wrench, then went to work on the bolt. The hardware on the door was practically new and very sturdy, and had a wide steel overlap to prevent anyone fitting a knife or screwdriver into the crack to jimmy the lock. Everything about the mechanism was big and thick, but the size of the keyway made the lock easier to pick. He lined up the pins quickly and opened the door. He heard classical music. A piano.
He moved swiftly through the kitchen into the living room, using the music to cover
the sounds his feet made on the floor. There was the woman he had seen the old man carrying out of the apartment in Chicago. He came up behind her. He put his forearm around her neck and stifled her first jerk of surprise, holding her tightly as he said softly, “Stay still, Zoe. Stay quiet.”
Hank finished clearing the mound of snow off the edge of the driveway and started toward the house. As he stopped at the side door and set the shovel against the wall, he took another look. The truck was gone. The town still looked deserted. He opened the door and noticed the piano had stopped.
Marcia was standing in the entrance to the living room. Her face was pale and her expression frightened. A hand pushed her aside, and Hank could see that the figure that stepped away from the wall behind her was James Harriman, the young special ops man.
Marcia said, “I’m so sorry. I never saw. I never heard—”
“It’s all right,” Hank said. His arms began to float away from his sides. “Where are the others, Mr. Harriman? Or are you going to do it?”
Julian said, “I sneaked up here to warn you, and there’s not much time.”
“Then warn me.”
“NSA found you. They store more information than they did in your time. They ran some instant searches, looking for anything that makes you different. Two days ago they figured out you were Henry Dixon, and you were here. Now there’s a rifle squad in the village suiting up.”
“Why are you warning me?”
“Because you lived up to the deal. You told the truth.”
“That’s it? I’m not a murderer or a thief?” said Hank.
Julian looked at him in surprise. “Well, yeah.”
“Neither is the average person. Would you risk your life for him?”
“I have. And so have you.” Harriman glanced toward the front window, an involuntary reflex. “We’ve all got to get out of here. They plowed the road so—”
“I know. So they could drive up here in cars to take us fast and get out. How soon?”
“A few minutes. No more than a half hour. Don’t try to take your car. They’ll be blocking the road.”
Hank said, “Thanks, Mr. Harriman.”
“You’re welcome. I hope you make it.” Julian went to the back door of the cabin and stopped. “I didn’t tell you this so you could kill a couple of our own guys.”
“Of course you didn’t,” said Hank. “I don’t want that either. I just want to stay alive.”
James Harriman turned away, stepped down into the path of footprints, and then along the fallen pine log into the woods.
Hank closed and locked the door and turned to Marcia.
She said, “I’m so sorry, Hank. I was playing, so I didn’t hear him.”
“You wouldn’t have anyway. This is what he’s trained to do. Now it’s time to get out.”
While she put on her warm jacket, hat, boots, and gloves, Hank ran to the coat closet and took the two backpacks that contained their bugout kits. He collected their cross-country skis and poles and bundled them tightly with bungee cords in the middle and both ends. He put their ski boots in the backpacks. Then they went to the back door and sat on the steps to put on their snowshoes.
Hank said, “Here. Put them on like this. Use the strap to go across the instep here.”
“That’s backward.”
“That’s right.” He stood up and walked a little. He left tracks that looked as though he were going in the opposite direction. He stepped on the tracks that James Harriman had made, making them unreadable. After a few seconds, Marcia was up with her snowshoes on backward too.
Hank led the way. He started up the hillside carrying their cross-country skis and poles. He set a strong pace, heading up the mountain at an angle into the pine forest above the cabin. Their tracks were not possible to hide, but these tracks looked as though they marked someone’s approach to the cabin.
When he was just below the summit of the hill he could hear Marcia’s breaths coming in windy gasps. He stopped and they sat in the snow to let her catch her breath.
Finally he said, “If this turns out to be the end, you’ll have to split off and go your own way. You’re still a kidnapping victim, and you can get out of this.”
She looked terrified, but said, “I want to stay with you.”
“That’s not smart,” he said.
“I made my own stupid decision for my own reasons, and it’s not going to change. Let’s get up and get moving.” She stood and began stepping up the hill at an angle to keep the snowshoes from tilting to the side and slipping.
Hank overtook her and kept climbing until they reached the ridge. They looked down at Big Bear Lake and the road leading up to their rented cabin. Hank pointed. Two black SUVs were stopped at the foot of the hill, preparing to make their way up the road.
Hank sat down and said, “It’s time to get our ski boots on.”
They set their ski boots on the snow in front of them, took off their snow boots, brushed off the snow, and stowed them in their packs. They put on the ski boots, and then Hank used two of the bungee cords to hang the snowshoes from their backpacks. They used their poles to steady themselves and stepped over the summit. He pointed with one of his poles.
“Look over that way. I want to head eastward along the high ridge as far as we can go. Follow me.”
A few minutes later, the snowplow truck with its plow raised to shield the truck from gunfire sped up the road to the mountain cabin with the two SUVs directly behind it. The vehicles stopped in front of the cabin and Julian and the rifle squad poured out and entered the cabin from both doors at once. They found the cabin empty. There were two half-filled coffee cups that still felt warm, a refrigerator full of fresh food, and a bed upstairs that had been slept in and remade. But the two occupants were gone.
Sergeant Wright sent out four men as scouts to find tracks and follow them while the other men established a working headquarters in the cabin and began to search for any indication of which direction the pair had taken. In an hour, the two men who had gone up the mountain to search for tracks reported by radio that the snowshoe impressions leading down to the cabin were backward. The subjects had gone up wearing their snowshoes reversed.
Sergeant Wright ordered the two scouts to keep following the backward tracks through the snow, and sent four others down to the village to rent snowmobiles. He told his radio operator to man a communication post in the cabin with two searchers, maintain radio contact with all parties, and keep track of their GPS positions.
While all the other men were occupied, Julian loitered by the side of the pickup truck with the plow on the front. He leaned against the truck and let his bare hand hang above the truck bed, where eight sand bags had been piled. He could see that one of the bags had leaked a thin stream of sand onto the shiny black surface. He casually brushed off some of the sand, but kept some of it in his hand. As he walked away, he put his hand into his pocket and deposited the sand there.
The SUV returned from a sport rental store in town, but only the driver was in it. The other three men came up the hill a hundred yards behind it on three snowmobiles. Wright told two of the men on snowmobiles he wanted them to head up the mountain, following the snowshoe trail, and rendezvous with the two scouts on foot. Wright and Julian would follow on the third snowmobile. As the first two headed upward Julian noticed that they towed short plastic sleds, the sort that were used for towing game home from a hunting trip. Julian didn’t have to strain his imagination to know what those were for.
Within a few minutes the three snowmobiles had reached the spot where the scouts were waiting. At this point the backward snowshoe tracks ended, and ski tracks appeared. The tracks were long and thin, with the marks of ski poles at intervals, the tracks of cross-country skis.
The two scouts climbed on the backs of the two snowmobiles towing sleds. Now their party consisted of Wright and Julian on one snowmobile, and two men on each of the others—six fully armed men on three machines.
The three snowmob
iles moved forward, following the ski tracks into the mountains. They were able to go fast over the open stretches, eating up ski tracks in a few minutes that must have taken a half hour to make.
Hank skied through a wooded area. The snow was untouched and drifted. He could see the distance between the tall trees was wide enough so they could maintain good speed. In the fall he had chosen skis that were a size short for both of them. The slightly shorter skis were easier to control and to keep on the path, but they were a bit slower than longer ones would have been on the straight, open inclines.
Hank knew that the backward snowshoe trail would not fool an army rifle team for long, and they would soon pick up the ski trail. He headed into a denser part of the forest, where branches brushed his shoulders as he passed. Top speed for a cross-country skier at his level was probably fifteen miles an hour on flat ground. Through the woods he judged they were traveling about ten.
He had seen that there were tree wells, areas around the bases of big trees where the snow cover was too sparse to ski on, so he stayed away from them. He knew that he and Marcia could go much faster on a downslope, but that the trees at lower altitudes would be closer together. He tried to navigate and keep them at the right level.
They had gone a few miles in silence except for their heavy breathing and the scrape of their skis over the snow, when Hank’s ears began to pick up another sound. At first it was a buzz, like the noise of distant chain saws. Hank tried to tell whether it was somebody cutting wood or something else. As they went on, the noise didn’t fade. Instead it grew louder and deeper. He stopped and let Marcia catch up.
“What is that?” she said.
“It sounds like snowmobiles,” he said. “We can’t outrun snowmobiles, but we can try to go places where they have to slow down.” He pushed off and led them downward into thicker woods, where the lowest branches of some of the trees nearly swept the ground and others intertwined at shoulder level. Hank had driven snowmobiles in Vermont and New Hampshire, and now he looked for places that would slow the vehicles down.