02 Avalanche Pass (26 page)

“You got any way to recharge it?” he asked, dreading the answer.

“Yeah. I can plug it into the car socket overnight. Now look, from where I am, I can see those guys on the hotel roof. They’ve got two twin fifty-caliber mounts down there and they look like they’re slaved to a radar system.”

“That’s right. Plus they tell us they’ve got Stinger missiles. You see any sign of those?”

“Can’t be sure but there are cases down there that could hold ’em. I’d say they’ve probably got ’em.”

“How many men, Jesse? Any idea? And how are they armed?”

“I figure around eighteen to twenty. They’ve all got automatic weapons—the one I saw looked like an Ingram—and probably sidearms. I’d say they…” The next few words were obscured and Colby leaned forward, calling urgently.

“Jesse? You still there? Jesse?”

The reply was a little garbled but he could make it out. “Still here, Colby. I think the battery’s just about dead. Could go any moment now. If I cut out, I’ll call again tomorrow or the next day. Your number will be in the phone memory now.”

“Jess!” Colby cut in urgently, “If you can contact this”—he checked the notes he’d been taking as they spoke—“Bowden girl, see if she can tell us who’s running this thing. Name, description, anything you can tell us, okay?”

“Got it. I’ll try to make contact with her this evening, see what she knows. Let me know if—”

The line went dead midsentence. There was a slight hissing noise from the speakers in the trailer. Colby stared at them, then at the monitor again.

“Jesse? You there, Parker?”

He waited a few seconds. There was no further word. The technician was checking his instruments, shaking his head.

“He’s gone, sir. The connection is broken.”

Jesse cursed as the phone went dead. He looked at the display window. The green light was out. There were no symbols visible on the screen. Dead as a dodo. That was the problem with this below freezing weather, he knew. It would kill a battery quicker than anything, cutting its endurance to a fraction of its normal charge life.

There was a wooden bench by the side of the terminal building and he slumped onto it, thinking through the logistics of the next few days. He couldn’t risk moving back to the hotel before dusk. The chances of being spotted in the open during daylight were too great. That meant he would be cutting it fine to make contact with Tina this evening. He’d need to make his way to the car and plug his phone battery into the car charger, then get across to the chairlift again before dawn the following day. Assuming everything worked out, he might be able to contact the FBI agent again tomorrow morning—Tuesday morning, he reminded himself. But if just one part of the schedule went wrong, it would be Wednesday before he could phone again.

Suddenly, he felt very tired and he leaned back against the steel side of the building, closing his eyes for a few moments and feeling the warmth of the sun on his face. He was in that position when there was a massive crash of machinery from the building and the wall shuddered against his back.

He came up off the bench in a second, his right hand fumbling
with the zip on his parka as he reached for the Colt. Then he stopped, his heart racing. He didn’t need the gun right away. But as he realized what had caused the noise, he knew he’d have to get out of sight, and quickly.

Someone had boarded the cable car at the bottom station. Whoever it was, he was on his way up the mountain right now and he’d be here in less than ten minutes.

J
esus,” said Morris Tildeman as he studied the printed sheet of notes the FBI director had prepared for the meeting. Benjamin had just finished expanding on the notes, repeating all that Dent Colby had passed on to him. Tildeman, Janet Haddenrich and Truscott Emery had been summoned to the FBI building for an emergency briefing.

“Have you taken this to the president?” Haddenrich asked now. Benjamin shook his head.

“I’m doing that directly. He’s been tied up with the G8 meeting this morning. He’s due back in the White House at 1:15. I’ve told Pohlsen that there’s been a development but we thought it best to let the president keep his normal schedule.

“We don’t want the bad guys getting any idea that we’ve heard anything out of the ordinary. We want to keep things looking as normal as possible. As far as they know, the White House is concerned, of course, but not involved.”

The others nodded. It only needed one nosy reporter to figure out that the president had canceled an important session with the G8 council so he could confer with the FBI, NSA and CIA directors and they’d have it linked to the situation in Utah. And then the kidnappers might start wondering why the White House was showing such an interest in the matter. After all, as Jesse had pointed out to Colby, the kidnappers were keeping track of events on TV.

“The question is,” Benjamin said now, “what sort of difference does this make?”

“Jesus, fifty people dead? That’s a pretty big difference, Linus,”
Morris Tildeman answered, shaking his head over the summary once more.

“It changes the entire scenario,” Emery put in and they all looked at him. He shrugged and spread his hands. “In a normal situation like this, the kidnappers leave themselves an out, right up to the point where they kill someone. Short of that point, they know the authorities will negotiate. Once that line is crossed, they know that there will be no real negotiation, no matter what is said. Once they’ve killed any of the hostages, they know that we can’t trust them to release the others. And these guys crossed that line on day one,” he added.

The FBI director nodded. “That’s the way I see it too. These guys are mass murderers. Simply no way we can let them get away with that. There’s no way we can realistically try to negotiate a solution and they’ll know it.”

“Except they don’t know we know,” Haddenrich put in. “At least that lets us keep up an appearance of negotiating.”

“More and more, I’m wondering whether they really want to negotiate, at all,” Emery said. “I can’t get rid of the feeling that there’s something more behind all this—something we’re not seeing.”

“The president isn’t going to buy your message theory now, Truss,” Benjamin told him.

The professor shrugged. “Doesn’t mean it’s not right,” he said.

“Christ, what a mess,” Benjamin said quietly. He looked around the assembled group. “I’d better get this to the president, see what he says. Anyone got any bright ideas before I go?”

“Keep up the negotiations. Keep stalling all we can until this guy can get us more information. That’s the one card we’ve got now.” It was Tildeman who spoke but the others nodded their agreement.

“What do we know about this Parker guy?” Haddenrich asked.

“We’ve checked his background. Seems like he’s a good cop. Was a top flight homicide detective with Denver PD, then he had some kind of trouble in a shooting and moved back to Steamboat. Been with the sheriff’s department there for the past two years.”

“And the girl?” This time it was Tildeman who asked.

“We’ve pulled her records too. She’s ex-Marine Corps. Went in to
play softball and was assigned to the MPs. Got a good record. Nothing outstanding but a good solid record. Came out of the service and took a job with the hotel in security.” He spread his hands. That was it. “What more can I tell you?” he said.

Nobody answered. Then Janet Haddenrich spoke. “I guess we better make sure Maloney and his guys are ready to go on a moment’s notice,” she said.

Benjamin’s expression was pained. “We’ll stand to lose a lot of men if we send them in. And we could lose all the hostages,” he reminded her.

She sighed. He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know. “We may lose them anyway, Linus,” she said.

The cable car came to a halt at the top station, rocking back and forth on the pendulum of its massive single support arm as it slowed, then stopped, after its ten-minute haul up the face of the mountain. The automatic trip set the sliding door open and the single occupant stepped out.

Slim build, maybe five eleven, black hair going slightly gray at the temples. Regular, average features, the sort of guy who would be virtually impossible to pick out of a line-up. Utterly unremarkable, Jesse thought as he watched from the small loft window above the coffee shop at the rear of the terminal. The man was wearing a parka and sunglasses. He reached into the parka now and produced a cell phone. He looked around, saw the same bench Jesse had been sitting on a few minutes earlier and moved to it, punching numbers into the phone as he went.

It was fortunate that there’d been no fresh snow in the past three
days, Jesse thought. His tracks were just one set among many around the cable car terminal. He edged a little closer to the window, which he’d carefully worked ajar while he waited for the car to arrive.

“This is Kormann,” he heard the man say. Obviously, someone had answered at the other end. He paused briefly, obviously listening, then said one word:

“Friday.” Another pause, then: “You got that? As long as George stays on schedule, Friday is the day… good.”

He snapped the phone shut, breaking the connection, then turned back to the cable car once again. A few seconds later, Jesse heard the clunk of gears connecting and the rising whine of the massive electric motor as the tram moved out from the loading dock and began its swaying journey back to the valley floor.

Jesse frowned. It seemed like a hell of a long way to come simply to tell somebody Friday.

T
he main problem with hostage situations, thought Dent Colby, was boredom. You spent so much time sitting around waiting for the other side to do something, say something, demand something. And then you reacted to it. Or not.

But in between, the hours of waiting, of inaction, the feeling of impotence, got you wishing that something—anything—would happen. Then, all too often, when it did, you wished it hadn’t.

He was stretched out on the cot in his trailer trying to catch a nap. It was a futile attempt. The facts of the case whirled around inside his head, refusing to fit into a neat pattern and refusing to let his mind relax, along with his closed eyes.

Fifty people killed. Another forty to fifty held prisoner—under the threat of a terrible, suffocating death if the charges in the mountain were fired. Kidnappers who seemed panicky and irrational when they spoke to him, yet were totally in control according to their captives. Professional. Calm. Businesslike, Parker had said. It made no sense at all. Nor did the demand that the Irish terrorists be released.

He thought about the geography of the situation. Somehow, the kidnappers planned to get out when this was all over. Maybe they’d demand a helicopter and take hostages with them. That was the most likely way, the safest way, for them. There was no other way out of Snow Eagles Canyon. The road literally ended there. Behind and on three sides, there were thousands of square miles of wild, mountain country. The fourth side was the road back to Salt Lake
City—up until the time when it had been blocked by the avalanche, the only ground route in and out.

Dent and Colonel Maloney had already discussed the possibility of trying an end run: sending choppers in low over the wild back country, following the valleys and canyons on the far side of the canyon, popping up over the final ridge a bare mile from the target. But even that short run would expose them to the deadly accurate triple-A from the hotel roof. Besides, thought Dent, if he were the leader of the kidnappers, he’d have some kind of surveillance set up on those back ridges—maybe a remote-controlled camera like the one Colby himself was using to keep a visual on the hotel.

The Colorado deputy’s presence on the mountain was an enormous stroke of luck, of course. And, judging by the way things were shaping up, Dent was going to need every stroke of luck he could find.

The telephone on his desk burred quietly. He glanced up at the telltale screen above it to see the number displayed, then rolled quickly off the bed as he saw the number for Canyon Lodge.

“This is Agent Colby,” he said.

“What are you trying to pull here, Colby? What are you trying?” It was the second of the two men who usually made contact, the one who was normally the least excitable. Now, however, there was an edge of hysteria or anger in his voice. Dent’s immediate reaction was to assume that they’d captured Jesse. His pulse raced as he hesitated, not sure what to say.

“Trying?” he said finally. “We’re not trying anything here.”

“Oh, is that right? Is that right? Well maybe you think we’ve gone blind in here or something. Would that be right? You think we’ve gone blind?”

“I’m sorry,” Dent said slowly. “I don’t know what you’re—”

“The airplane, Agent Colby. The airplane that flew over here not five minutes ago. You think just because it’s high we’re not going to see it? Those things leave con trails, man! Did you think of that?”

“Just a moment.” Colby stepped to the trailer door, taking the cordless with him and switching off the loudspeakers. He glanced outside, looking high above them and, sure enough, there was the
feathered remains of a jet’s contrails, up at maybe thirty thousand feet, gradually dispersing in the stratospheric winds.

“You think we don’t know you Federals have got cameras that can look down on us from that sort of height? We’re not stupid, Agent Colby. So don’t go thinking we are!”

“Wait, please,” said Dent. “That aircraft has nothing to do with us. It’s a normal commercial flight.”