by Thomas Perry
Always he looked for spots where he could set up an obstacle. At one stretch where the spaces between trees had been wide for a time, he found a slope that led down into a narrow space between trees. He stopped, took out his pocketknife, and cut a small slice in the lining of his jacket. He unraveled a length of loose nylon stitching, stretched it from one tree, across the path, around the opposite tree, and then bent a flexible pine branch as far back as he could, and held it there against the tree trunk with a forked stick. He tied the nylon line to the forked stick, so if the line was hit by a snowmobile, the forked stick would be tugged away and the pine branch would whip forward toward the head of a snowmobile driver.
From time to time when he saw the opportunity he would pick up a long, straight pine branch, strip it of twigs, and stab it into the snow between two trees where they had just passed, so it looked like a spear set there to impale a snowmobile. What he hoped it would do was slip under the snowmobile and strip it off its track like a tank trap, or at least jam the track for a few minutes.
Twice he found a rock in the space between two trees, and widened his stance slightly so one ski would pass on each side of it. Then he would shake a bit of snow off the branches above to cover the rock.
He led Marcia on, deeper in the woods and lower in altitude. After another half hour they came to a rocky canyon where they put on their hiking boots and carried their skis.
In the middle of the canyon, where the brush was thickest, Hank stopped and opened his backpack. He pulled out a shiny metal rectangle with smooth sides and a couple of vents on the removable top. He opened the top, took out a lighter, and lit the wick at the top, waited for a moment, and then restored the top.
“What are you doing?” Marcia asked.
“This is the best hiding place we’ve passed. This is a hand warmer. It burns lighter fluid, and lasts for hours.” He set the device down, propped between two rocks in a sheltered spot.
“What’s it for?”
“This is an army rifle squad. If they have infrared scopes, they’ll pick up the heat.”
When they had made it across and climbed up the other side they put on their skis and resumed their skiing to the east. The sound of the snowmobiles had faded and became inaudible. Hank said, “I don’t hear them anymore. Maybe one of the traps worked.”
This time their course was on an open plateau with a gradual eastward slope. Their most difficult task was to keep from accelerating to a dangerous, uncontrollable speed. Crashing into a tree could be fatal, and injuring a leg at this distance from a town would mean freezing to death. He hoped Zoe could stay upright in the center of the open slope. Then he thought he heard the sound of a snowmobile again.
23
As the three snowmobiles followed the ski tracks through the woods, Julian could see that the old man had left tracks in the narrowest openings between trees. Julian suspected that the old man had faked some of the tracks to lure a snowmobile into a space where it would get stuck. He said nothing about it, but waited.
In one of these passages the lead snowmobile driver got too eager. He drove too fast, scraped a pine tree on his right, caromed to the left, and hit a tree. The front cowling of the snowmobile was dented but, worse, the left ski at its front now pointed inward. The snowmobile became difficult to steer, and the driver had to keep wrenching it to the side to go straight. He stopped.
The other snowmobiles pulled to a stop around him at the side of the forest trail. Julian got off his snowmobile and went to take a look. While the driver and his passenger examined the ski, Julian looked at the dented hood. He opened it and examined the engine while he pushed out the dent. He pretended to finish the dent removal while he used his left hand to spin the wing nut to lift the air filter. He pushed on the butterfly valve of the carburetor and dropped in some of the sand he’d brought. Then he replaced the air filter, closed the hood, and stepped away. His sabotage had taken no more than five seconds.
Sergeant Wright called the radio operator at the cabin. He told him to look online for instructions for fixing this model snowmobile. They waited for about ten minutes before the radio operator called back with the instructions.
Julian heard the radio operator’s voice say, “Loosen all steering tie-rod jam nuts.”
One of the soldiers said into the radio, “Confirm locations of steering tie-rod jam nuts.”
Wright and the driver of the other remaining snowmobile restarted their machines and resumed their speed, following the trail of the cross-country skis.
Going through the pine forests was slow and dangerous because the paths were narrow. A person on cross-country skis could glide through a two-foot gap, but a snowmobile could not. Even a three-foot space made a narrow passage, and if the ground under the snow wasn’t level, the vehicle could slide sideways into a tree, just as the first one had.
A couple of times the forested areas became so thick that Wright began to suspect, as Julian had, that the tracks leading into them might have been faked to get the snowmobiles trapped. At the next forested area Wright ordered the other working snowmobile to race ahead around the woods on open ground. But the men on the other snowmobile were unable to find the place where the ski tracks emerged into the open, and had to return to the spot where they had left the woods and inch onward with Wright and Julian.
Then the other snowmobile driver saw ski tracks reappear a hundred feet ahead, turned aside, and sped up to take a shortcut. He reached a place where he had to go through a narrow space between two trees. There was a shout, the bottom of the snowmobile scraped some hard object, and then bounced over it and stopped.
Wright and Julian pulled up beside the snowmobile as the two men got off to investigate. Wright dismounted and looked at the spot. “It’s a rock, Slavin. You hit a rock. Is that thing still okay?”
“I don’t know.” The driver restarted it, and it seemed fine. He moved the snowmobile forward a bit.
Both snowmobiles went forward very slowly, and Julian called to the driver of the other snowmobile: “Does that engine sound funny to you?” The driver stopped again and dismounted. Julian stepped closer and opened the hood. He looked closely at the exhaust assembly that ran from the engine toward the exhaust pipe. “The exhaust is too hot to touch,” he said. “But it seems to have a good connection.” Then he took off his gloves and ducked down to examine the engine.
Beside the exhaust duct was the chain case. He felt under it and found a plug like the ones under a car’s oil pan. He opened it until he felt chain lubricant leaking, and then closed it just enough for the threads to catch. Then he closed the hood and knelt to look under the aft part of the snowmobile. “I don’t see anything wrong,” he said. “Maybe there’s just a little rattle from the bump.” He closed the hood and got on the other snowmobile behind Wright.
They restarted their engines and resumed their search. Then the radio operator called Wright, and they stopped again. He said that the snowmobile with the damaged ski was repaired and realigned, but now the engine was malfunctioning. The engine would start, but then it would cough and sputter and stall. They had better assume it wouldn’t be fixed in time to be of use. Wright ordered the driver and his companion to try to drag the malfunctioning snowmobile to a place where they could load it onto the pickup truck.
Julian’s hope grew as the two remaining snowmobiles inched along the trail through the forest, sometimes hooking around the narrowest spaces and then finding no way to rejoin the trail. Sometimes they would begin to speed up, but then bounce over roots or rocks that made it too dangerous to continue in a straight line, so they moved in arcs in and out of the forest, taking up more time.
Wright drove to a stop and turned off his snowmobile. He said to Julian: “That rock was a trap. The ski tracks went right by on either side of it. That old man didn’t learn to move through snow in Libya. Has he ever served in country like this—maybe with the Tenth Mountain Division?”
“He lived in Vermont for a long time,” said Julian.
“Maybe that’s where he got good at this stuff. I haven’t seen his military records.”
“You chased him for a year without ever seeing his records?”
“I don’t even know his name,” said Julian. “This mission is about as secret as it can be.”
Wright stepped a few feet away, unzipped his snow pants, and urinated near the trees. He said, “Just a day ago we were in Yuma receiving a briefing. We were to hunt down a military traitor in California who had committed several murders. We were ordered to do it using plain unmarked gear with zero help from any civilian authority, and no contact with local police. We were told we’d be meeting a man from army intelligence who would be our source of information.”
“I guess they meant me.”
“But you don’t have much information, do you?”
“Not much. I don’t think they want either of us to know much more than we do. I can recognize him if I see him.”
“That’ll have to be good enough.” Wright zipped up and walked back to the snowmobile. There was a radio call from the other snowmobile. Wright said, “We’ll be right there.” They climbed back on their snowmobile and made their way to the spot ahead where the other two men had stopped.
The snowmobile driver had come through too fast, with his eyes on the ski tracks. A limb bent back and rigged as a trap to swing into the opening between two trees had hit him across the forehead. The two men were examining the limb that had hit him. Wright looked at Julian. “What do you think, Mr. Carson?”
Julian saw the chance to introduce doubt and uneasiness. “That’s the kind of thing he’d do. I don’t know the details of his record, but in his day just about all the combat was in jungles. They used snares and bungee stakes and tiger pits.”
“He could have killed me,” said the injured man.
“He could have, but he decided not to,” said Julian. “The way they did it was to add a sharpened ten-inch stick at a right angle to the branch so when it hit you it would kill you. It’s a warning. We may not see the next one either, and that one could be placed so it’ll break a neck or spear one of us. He knows how to do it.”
Wright leaned closer and spoke so only Julian could hear. “I do not relish having any of my squad killed out here in the woods by some crazy traitor.”
“I don’t want that to happen either,” said Julian. He was secretly rejoicing. The old man had given Julian another opportunity to slow the team down and make them cautious.
Wright had a solution. “All right. The tracks are still headed due east. We’ll get out of the woods, go east in the open, and try to pick up their tracks again. Keep up, and don’t slow down. We don’t want to give him an easy shot.”
The two men mounted the other snowmobile, and the driver started it. The engine whirred, caught, and roared to life, but then there was a horrible noise. There was smoke coming out of the air intakes on the hood and out of the exhaust, and the engine stopped. Julian knew that the plug at the bottom of the chain case had finally vibrated enough to fall off and the chain oil had leaked out. The chain had heated up and failed.
The driver opened the hood, stared uncomprehendingly at the smoke, fanned it out of his face, and then reached for the chain case and recoiled from the heat.
Julian stayed where he was, but put his hand on the pistol in his pocket. “Wow. I thought that engine sounded funny.”
Wright looked at the engine and nodded. “Yeah, you did.” He turned to his two men and said, “Damn. Where the fuck did you guys rent these snowmobiles? They’re absolute crap.”
Wright got back onto his snowmobile. “Okay. Take the cargo sled off that piece of junk and hitch it to the back of this one. Do a good job, because there’s nowhere else for you to ride.”
The two soldiers attached the flat sled and then sat on it. The front man held on to the towrope and the other held on to him. Wright moved slowly at first, out onto the open snow. He tentatively added speed, but when he reached about fifteen miles an hour, one of the men called out: “Sergeant Wright!”
Wright looked back and saw they were getting bounced around too much to hold on any longer. He slowed down drastically.
Then they moved east along the edge of the forest. Julian clung to the snowmobile seat behind Wright. They went along for some time, trying to avoid rough spots and irregularities in the terrain. They came to a spot where the wind had blown away a layer of snow to reveal a double layer of cut pine branches laid crosswise in a grid. Wright got off the snowmobile and kicked aside the pine branches. Below them was a three-foot-deep, rock-lined natural depression that looked like part of a frozen streambed. Wright said, “That man is starting to get on my nerves.”
Now the sun was low behind them. At the next spot where they were shielded a bit from view, Wright stopped again. He said, “We’ve run out of ski tracks. I think that means we’re ahead of them. Night comes early in the mountains. The old man and his girlfriend won’t be able to ski through these woods in the dark. They’ll be out in the open on the slopes. And they’ll be tired as hell. I want to stay ahead and find a place to wait for them.”
For the last of the sunlight and into the early darkness the one remaining snowmobile limped along, carrying Wright and Julian, and towing the two men in the sled. And then they reached a sight Julian had not expected. They came over a rise and saw lights. Below them was a highway, and on it were a seemingly endless stream of white headlights snaking up into the mountains and down to the flatland below.
Wright gathered his men. “All right, guys. We’ll park the snowmobile in the woods over there.” He pointed to the left. “We’ll watch for our two fugitives.” The men got off the sled and moved on foot into the thick woods while Wright drove the snowmobile in after them.
When everything was quiet again, Wright took out his radio and called his radio operator at the cabin. “Group leader to base. We’ve reached a major road here. It’s got to be Route 38. Get a call into HQ. Request a chopper with an infrared scope be sent to our location to sweep the area behind us and beyond the road to the east. Advise when you have an answer.”
Wright turned to Julian. “If they have body heat the chopper will see them. If they don’t have body heat they’re dead. That would be good enough for me.”
The sun had set, and the Dixons needed to get as far as they could before the light was totally gone. Hank kept them moving along at a speed that felt as though it must be their maximum.
As the light disappeared behind them and the shadows on the snow ahead blended into the general haze of blowing snow, they heard another engine sound. Still very far away, it was louder and deeper than a snowmobile. Hank knew exactly what it was. He made a gradual turn toward the woods to his right. He kept going until he was at least two hundred feet in, and under thick branches.
Marcia, following in his tracks, caught up and stood there beside him. “What can we do?”
“Wait and see what the chopper does. Stay in the thick part and don’t move. If they have infrared scopes, all we can do is dig into deep snowdrifts, cover ourselves completely, and hope they move on.”
Julian saw Sergeant Wright’s call for air support for what it was, a fighter making his last big swing a powerful one, knowing that if it didn’t connect he was finished. The men were cold, tired, and frustrated. They were sheltering among the trees, saying very little.
The helicopter appeared from the east a short time later, moving fast at a high altitude, and then descended and began to make its sweep of the area beyond Route 38. It looked to Julian as though the land on that side was rougher, and the hills steeper.
Julian spoke even less than the other men. He volunteered no opinions, which seemed to him like offering medical advice in a morgue. He followed Sergeant Wright’s strategy and stayed in the cover of the trees to stare over the snow-covered expanse to the west to discern the approach of the two skiers. He was not subject to Wright’s command, but it was the least he could do at this moment, and he hoped it would help direct s
uspicion away from him. The cover of the woods kept the cold west winds from punishing him the way they had in the open, and the rest was welcome.
When the helicopter was gone, the world was silent again except for the constant radio chatter between Sergeant Wright and his radio operator back in the Dixons’ cabin. The men listened to the conversation, which was a series of reports that the helicopter had found nothing up to some set of coordinates, and then, minutes later, nothing up to the next set.
Suddenly, the helicopter reported a heat signature in a valley some distance to the west. Wright grinned. “There you go, guys. They’ve got something.”
There was a pause in the transmissions for several minutes. The helicopter was landing to send two men to get a better look. After a few tense minutes the pilot radioed back, “The heat signature was from a pocket warmer.”
“Say again,” said Wright.
“The heat source was not a human being. It was a pocket device that burns lighter fluid. It’s for staying warm in cold weather.”
“Roger,” said Wright.
He stomped around in the snow for a few seconds. “That’s perfect. The son of a bitch figured we’d use infrared scopes to find him.”
Ten minutes later, the helicopter pilot reported that his aircraft had been recalled to its base. As it came over their position, the helicopter hovered for a moment, circled once, and then kept going to the east.
Wright said, “All right. That’s it, gentlemen. Get on the sled. We’re going to head back. We’re going to take the open spaces this time and skirt the woods. If you see anything, sing out. There aren’t going to be any innocent bystanders out in these mountains tonight.”
24
A few hundred yards away, Hank Dixon crouched in the woods and watched the helicopter reappear from the west, complete a circle over a stand of trees, and hover over a spot near where it had first appeared. Why would a search helicopter fly over the same spot twice? He guessed that the pilot must be flying over the rifle squad, a kind of informal good-bye as it flew back to the east.