He had unstrapped his ‘Top-Ski’ bag, and tested the telescopic sights. The T-bar came clearly into focus, through a faint bluish light behind the hairline cross. There was surprisingly little haze or shimmer, and no glare through the shield.
He glanced back up the mountain, to the tree line, and tried to calculate where Packer was waiting. Holy Moses, he thought, if that bastard tries anything! He didn’t think Packer was likely to shoot a colleague in the back; but then he was reckoning without that fat ogre, Pol, and his insidious influence.
4.02 p.m., and the radio in his pocket was still silent. Had that smart little bitch up on the Gotschnagrat ‘snafued’? Pushed the wrong button, or maybe just changed her mind? Packer had said she was a great one for that.
Ryderbeit lifted the telescopic lens again and focused the cross of the hairline on one of the empty bars. As it swung out of sight, the radio crackled in his pocket and a faint metallic voice, almost sexless, said, ‘Il devient froid — je rentre chez moi.’ Then silence.
Three skiers passed in close formation. Hell, he thought, if one of them happens to come by at the crucial moment. Well, he’d made provision for that: he’d shoot the sod and leave the Swiss police to sort that one out too.
He looked at his watch. They had reckoned on three clear minutes from the moment the call signal went out. When the second hand registered two minutes and thirty seconds, Ryderbeit lifted the Armalite and took aim.
He had removed his gloves and his hands were beginning to feel the cold. He stood braced back against the ice, the cross of the hairline sights trained on the exact point where the T-bar came into view.
At 4.05 a helicopter approached from the direction of the Gotschnagrat. It didn’t worry him at first, except that its noise threatened to drown the sound of any approaching skiers. He brought his eye up from the sights and watched it hovering above the T-bar; he guessed that the Royal party must have arrived.
Another two long minutes passed. His fingers were numb and his arms ached. Get on with it, Your Imperial Fucking Highness. Perhaps the bastard had broken a binding, or twisted his ankle coming down from the restaurant.
Come on! Get your Serene bum under that bar and move! Ryderbeit was not a man given to panic, but he hated waiting.
There was a bad moment when a sudden gust of wind swept against the mountain, sending up a flurry of powdered snow. As it cleared, two men bobbed into the sights, riding abreast on the T-bar. Then another two. All identical, in dark skiing clothes and matching caps, like uniforms. A third pair slid into the circular frame. The one on the right was a blond man in a yellow jacket. On his left, a man with grey hair, in a red, white and blue anorak and black goggles.
Holy Moses, they’re making it easy, he thought.
He kept them in the sights for just under two seconds, following the man on the left until the hairline cross held steadily to a point in the centre of his grey hair, exactly level with the goggles. Then he squeezed the trigger.
The recoil jerked the sights up, and in the ice-cold stillness the explosion was as sharp as a whip crack, followed by a series of rapid shattering echoes which seemed to grow louder and louder.
Even through the noise, he heard the second shot, above and behind him, followed by more echoes. He was still following the two bare-headed men on the T-bar, who were now gliding, or rather slithering, like a couple of drunks, with only the impetus of the bar under their buttocks keeping them upright. The blond man seemed oddly misshapen, shrunk and lopsided, and Ryderbeit saw something yellow lying in the snow behind him.
The man on the left was lolling forward, and his grey head had become dark and jagged — not a head at all, but two cliffs of cheekbone sagging backwards from the neck — while his anorak, through the bluish lens, was turning the same dark colour as his head. Then both figures toppled sideways, crumpling up in the snow with their skis sprawled out behind them. At the same moment the two men riding on the bar behind leaped forward, unclipped their skis, and began to run up the track. Neither of the men on the ground moved.
The helicopter had reappeared, dipping its tail and dropping down over the T-bar, the noise of its engine muffled by the double echoes of the shots that were still bouncing down the valley. Ryderbeit had unslung the Armalite, snapped off the telescopic sights, and was reaching for the empty ‘Top-Ski’ bag when he became aware of another sound. A deeper, heavier sound, like the first thunder of a storm.
The mountains distorted its direction, but as it grew louder he guessed that it came from high above, rising and spreading with a rumbling growl, until the echoes of the shots and the sound of the helicopter were shut out altogether. He had just zipped up the ski bag when he felt, even through his thick boots with their plastic mouldings, a faint tremor. A couple of skiers flashed round the bend and one of them saw him and yelled something, waving upwards with his stick.
Ryderbeit had no time to follow Packer’s instructions and bury the ski bag and the radio in the soft snow. Instead, he dropped them where he stood, grabbed his own sticks and skis, and scrambled down the slope. The snow at the bottom was trembling; and the noise from above was now a steady roar like the sound of a heavy sea. As he rammed his boots into the ski bindings, he glanced upwards. Beyond the steep ridge above him, the deep blue of the sky was turning pale, smudged with white clouds that were growing thicker as he watched, swelling out into great cauliflower formations whose edges caught the sun with brilliant colours.
His excitement smothered all fear. He knew he was now going to have to ski as he had never skied before, or perhaps ever again. With a powerful thrust of his sticks he started down the run. The first few hundred yards allowed him only moderate speeds but they also gave him time to think. The whole run was now vibrating, as though he were skiing over corrugated iron, and the roar from above was growing louder, and seemed to be spreading.
He came to a ridge over a long steep slope where there were two pistes — one that zigzagged down, and a second one, with fewer tracks, which descended vertically. Ryderbeit braced his knees and his skis leapt over the edge, and he felt the freezing blast of air scooping back his cheeks as he leaned forward, knees flexed, his sticks pressed back against his thighs to cut down the wind resistance.
Ahead lay a line of trees; and through the yellow light of his goggles, his one eye glimpsed, as though looking at a film in slow motion, the stems of the huge pines snapping off at the roots and tumbling down under the bubbling channel of snow which carried behind it a long white cloud.
The piste turned left before the trees, and he was now skiing parallel, and only about fifty feet away from the avalanche. He reckoned his speed at between fifty and sixty miles an hour; but the snow was moving faster, and also beginning to spread. Behind him the whole mountain was smothered in white cloud.
A second stream of snow had reached the top of the ridge that he had just crossed, and now came pouring over the side like milk boiling over in a saucepan. Ryderbeit saw that if he followed the piste he would be cut off and buried within a few seconds.
He turned left and decided to risk the soft snow. With his skis pressed together and his body balanced forward as far as the bindings would permit, he was still able to maintain a high speed. The danger now lay in hidden rocks. After the heavy snow earlier in the season, these would be well hidden; and apart from the occasional mound and undulation he would have to rely on instinct and luck — two elements in which he had an enduring faith.
Below, beyond another ridge, he could see the dark pool of more woods — thicker this time, just above Wolfgang. The run from here down to the village became gentler, but whether it would slow the avalanche depended on how much impetus it was drawing from the snow above. His only hope was that the trees would help to break it up. He risked a glance behind him and saw the snow crawling down the slope like a great white hand, the fingers outstretched and reaching down towards him, the nearest one less than 200 feet behind him, and coming closer. He guessed that the snow must be travelling
at nearly eighty miles an hour.
He thought of throwing away his sticks, not only to break resistance, but to make him more free to manoeuvre; but he remembered having heard that if one got caught and buried in an avalanche, there were only two things to do: get your skis off and roll into a ball, before you were torn limb from limb, then try to push your sticks up through the surface so that the search parties could find you.
But Ryderbeit already saw his chances narrowing. Another glance behind showed him the approaching hand was beginning to bunch into a fist, with huge boulders for knuckles. This part of the avalanche seemed to be slowing, but the outer fingers were still racing ahead, until the one on the right, which was taking a direct course down the mountain towards Wolfgang, had overtaken him.
A few seconds later he was cut off from the last stretch of the normal run down to the village. He saw a solitary skier below him make a desperate effort to escape into the deep snow. The tip of the finger reached him, and the figure with its skis and sticks whirled like a Catherine wheel and was gone.
And now Ryderbeit noticed something else — something that seemed contrary to the laws of nature. So far the avalanche had been flowing like cascading water, its path following that of least resistance, in search of its own level. Suddenly, a few hundred feet from the trees above Wolfgang, one of the outlying fingers which had already overtaken him took a sharp turn and exploded in a burst of powdered snow, then continued at a much slower pace towards the woods. The first trees had already been crushed, and the ones behind were bent backwards like the bristles of a brush; but they did not break. The snow spread out with the consistency of clotted cream, rising in places to the tops of the pines. But the main impetus of the avalanche had been halted.
Ryderbeit now changed direction and headed for the woods, through a trough of deep snow where the tips of his skis sank several inches below the crusty surface. The noise above was beginning to subside and the air was now full of the clatter of helicopters.
He hit the piste about fifty feet beyond the wall of tumbled snow and rocks where the avalanche had finally spent itself against the trees. Two minutes later he was in Wolfgang.
The road in front of the Kulm Hotel was blocked by cars and crowds, with more cars crawling up the road from Klosters, followed by the ugly panting of sirens. As Ryderbeit kicked off his skis, he was surrounded by people asking what had happened. He forced his way through, without answering, and made for the tiny railway station. It seemed to be the only spot that was deserted. At the same time he noticed that there were no cars coming down from Davos.
He turned and headed for the hotel, where he struggled through the crowded lobby and was told what he had already suspected: both the road and railway from Davos to Klosters were blocked.
He left his skis and sticks in the rack outside the hotel, where they would probably remain for days without being noticed; lit a cigar, and began to run, at a clumsy jog-trot in his heavy boots, down the road towards Klosters. With luck he could be in the Vereina Hotel in twenty minutes; but he had no chance of making the 4.30 train to Landquart, for the connecting express to Zürich.
Packer had heard the avalanche as he was about to bury his gun and radio behind the tree. It took him several seconds to realize what was happening. His first reaction was irritation at seeing that his own shot — the second one — had missed the Ruler and hit his partner on the T-bar.
Then he heard the noise: and for a moment just stood and watched the progress of the avalanche with a peculiar detachment. It was only later that he came to appreciate the special advantages of the disaster.
The mainstream of the snow passed well below him; and he knew, with the same detachment, that Sammy Ryderbeit would be dead within a few seconds. The thought neither shocked nor saddened him, any more than he had liked or disliked Ryderbeit. The Rhodesian had served his purpose, and now they were rid of him. Packer even felt a dishonourable sense of relief; for once the deed was done, Ryderbeit would always have been a liability. Even if he had disappeared, sooner or later he would have managed to commit some indiscretion or outrage, and so keep the trail alight.
Packer waited until the full force of the avalanche had passed and saw, far above, the great slabs of naked mountainside — a patchwork of black rock and dead brown grass — like a cake with the icing scraped off. Then he put on his skis and began the four-mile run down the Schwartzalp to Klosters. He had just time to see, across the three ridges of snow, the helicopter settle beside the T-bar where a group of men had crowded round the bodies like ants round two scraps of meat.
A quarter of an hour later he reached the edge of the town; it was jammed with traffic which had been pushed on to the side of the road to make way for the ambulances, police cars and rescue teams. It took him another ten minutes on foot, carrying his skis, to reach the station where he had left the Fiat; and another five to edge the car up through the crowded streets to the Vereina Hotel.
The lobby, lounge and bar were packed and full of static tension — people standing, waiting, shouting questions without getting answers. Packer left his skis at the door, and on his way through to the bar heard voices claiming that ten people had been killed — thirty — fifty — Wolfgang was cut off — half the village had been buried — had been wiped out altogether. A large German with an orange moustache was announcing, with grave relish, that a Swiss police officer had just informed him that at least 200 were dead.
Packer found Sarah sitting by herself on the far stool of the bar. She was still wearing her dark glasses and headscarf, and was staring at the bottles behind the counter, both hands round a glass of thick brown liquid that looked like soup.
She saw him in the mirror, and did not even turn as he slipped on to the stool beside hers. He leaned forward to kiss her, but she jerked her head sideways so that his lips brushed her ear.
‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Apart from bringing the whole mountain down?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Well, even through telescopic sights I could see that his head ended at his lower teeth —’
Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Please! Do you have to go into such horrible detail? You know that sort of thing makes me sick.’
‘You had something to do with it,’ he reminded her. She said nothing, but gulped her drink.
Packer paused. ‘Ryderbeit’s dead too,’ he said slowly.
‘What?’
‘The avalanche. He was right underneath it.’
‘Did you see him die?’
‘It was too far away. But nobody could have got out of that. He was a good skier — wonderful balance and plenty of guts — but to outrun an avalanche you have to be in the Olympic class. And bloody lucky.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid skiing on Kilimanjaro and in the Lebanon just isn’t the same thing. And his luck gave out too.’ He shrugged. ‘Poor Sammy.’
Sarah made no comment. Packer leaned on the bar, his forehead on his hands. He felt sick with exhaustion. Out of the din of voices he heard the big German yelling, in ugly English, ‘There was shootings on the mountain! Some bloody Swiss army fool bringing down an avalanche on the Weissfluh — then wham! — both sides of the mountain come down!’
‘It was probably those damn choppers,’ an American voice called. ‘They’ve been flying far too low — protecting that goddamn emperor up in the big chalet. Something like this was bound to happen.’
‘I tell you, this whole bloody business is the fault of that damned emperor fellow,’ the German declared loudly.
Sarah finished her drink and asked for another. Packer lifted his head and peered at her. Her expression behind the dark glasses was stiff and pale.
‘And you?’ he said. ‘It went all right?’
‘Easy as pie,’ she answered; but there was a nervous edge to her voice.
‘No hitches?’ he said gently.
‘Oh, just some creep who came up and searched my bag, then tried to pick me up.’
> ‘Did he find the radio?’
She gave a brittle laugh. ‘The fool thought it was a transistor. I sent the message while he was watching.’
‘Christ,’ Packer breathed; then smiled. ‘You’re a brave girl, Sarah.’
‘Thank you.’
The barman put down another glass of brown liquid in front of her. Packer nodded at it. ‘What’s that?’
‘A “bull shot”. Vodka and consommé. Don’t you remember, I used to drink it in the Ritz at lunchtime? When we first met, while I was going through my wild phase.’
He looked at her wearily. ‘It seems a long time ago. Come to think of it, I suppose it was. You used to say you were in love with me.’
She laughed. ‘Only after I’d had a few drinks.’ She lifted the glass and took a swallow worthy of Sammy Ryderbeit. Then she sat very still, staring straight ahead.
Packer said at last, ‘We ought to go. The road down to Landquart will be full of ambulances and relief teams, and it’s going to be a slow drive. We must try to make it before they start setting up roadblocks.’
‘Owen — I’m not going.’
‘You’re what?’
‘I’m not going with you.’
He blinked and licked his lips. ‘What the hell are you saying?’
‘I’m staying here.’
‘To do what?’ he asked, gaping at her,
‘I’m going to that party in St Moritz tonight. Don’t you remember — the one we were invited to last night in the Chesa when you walked out on me?’
He sat up and rounded on her. ‘Don’t be a bloody little fool! The Ruler’s been assassinated and you were in on it. You were seen with me last night by that agent, Chamaz. And that’s just for starters.’
‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about that,’ she replied, with exasperating coolness. ‘He also saw me with DJ and Jocelyn and Serena Knox-Partington — and Jo’s head of one of the biggest electrical firms in Britain. You think they’ll try and bump him off too?’
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