02 Avalanche Pass (37 page)

“I found these on the stairs up here,” said Alston, and showed the way to where a blanket, a pair of battered Timberland moccasins and an empty soft drink bottle were lying on the stairs. Kormann surveyed them, a worried frown on his face. Who the hell had been sitting out here on the stairs, he asked himself. He sniffed the neck of the bottle and smelled coffee grounds. Someone had been keeping watch out here, he realized.

“Then I heard a door slam down there,” Alston continued, pointing down the stairwell. Kormann rounded on him instantly, fury in his eyes.

“You dumb fuck! Why the hell didn’t you mention that before?” he raged. Alston’s mouth worked silently. He knew what Kormann could do in one of these rages. He was saved by the radio.

“Kormann, this is Mosby. We’ve got a guy just broke cover from the hotel. He’s heading across the open space!”

“Stop him!” Kormann yelled into the radio. Then, turning to Pallisani and the three men who had accompanied him from the office, he pointed down the stairwell. “Get after him!”

Pallisani might not have been one of the world’s great thinkers, but he was ideal in a situation like this. He plunged down the stairwell, the three men following him, their feet clattering and echoing from the bare walls. Kormann turned back to Alston. The man was cowering away from him, keeping as much distance between them as he could manage. Kormann took a pace toward him. He had no idea what he was going to do but he wanted to smash his fist into the stupid face before him. Then his priorities changed in an instant as he heard shots from the gymnasium.

One thing that Tina Bowden had learned in her time in the Marines was the value of surprise. And diversion. If you could distract an enemy, then hit him when he least expected it, where he least expected it, you stood a good chance of coming out on top, even if the odds seemed to be stacked against you.

She’d spent the last few days trying to figure a way to take the guards by surprise, a way to distract them so as to give herself a few invaluable extra seconds of time. Now she realized she didn’t have to. It had been presented to her on a platter. She had no idea what had caused Kormann, Pallisani and the three men in the ante room to light out the way they did. Here in the gym, with the heavy glass doors shut, the gunshot had been all but inaudible. Had she been listening for it, she might have heard a dull, muffled thud. But the sounds of the people around her, coughing, talking or just moving restlessly where they sat, had effectively covered the sound.

All she knew was that the men outside had gone, leaving only the three inside guards. She might never again have a chance as good as this one, she realized, and as she did so, she acted upon the thought. She glanced around, looking to see where the guards were, catching Nate Pell’s eye and nodding surreptitiously. The ex-fighter-pilot had recognized the potential of the situation as well. He returned the nod, looking sideways to where the third guard was only a few yards away, his back turned.

Tina took a deep breath, slid her hand under the bedroll and closed it over the hard grips of the Smith and Wesson. The furthest of the two guards was looking in her direction, although not directly at her. He’d be the one she’d take first, she thought. She was surprised to notice how calmly her mind was working, how smoothly her body was following its directions. Sitting with her knees drawn up under her, she raised the gun in a two-handed grip,
thumbing back the hammer as it came up, and sighted with both eyes open, down the barrel, centering her sight line on the man’s chest. She heard an indrawn breath and an exclamation of surprise from someone nearby as they saw the gun in her hands. The guard heard the sound too and was looking around to see what had caused it. But she hadn’t raised herself above the mass of prisoners and he didn’t register the gun aiming at him until it was too late. She saw the final moment of realization on his face as she squeezed the trigger, then fired a second shot double action.

Both slugs hammered into the man’s chest cavity and he went down like a stone. Now she rose to her knees. People were screaming all around her and things were moving in slow motion as she swung the gun smoothly through an eighty degree arc to the second guard. He’d seen her all right and he was fumbling with the Ingram that was slung over his shoulder. But the sling had tangled and he wasted precious seconds clearing it. She fired, double action again, to get a shot away quickly, then thumbed back the hammer for a second, more deliberate shot.

The first bullet went low and right and hit him in the left hip, spinning him around and dropping him to his knees. He was numb from the waist down on one side of his body and the Ingram was pointing at the floor as he struggled against the shock of the impact. The bullet, with a magnum load behind it, had smashed into the large bones of his hip, causing massive trauma. Instead of passing through the soft tissue of the body, it had transmitted the full force of the bullet to hard, resisting bone, jarring, smashing and shocking its way through. It wasn’t a killing shot but it was a completely disabling one. As he fought to retain consciousness, Tina’s second shot took him in the chest cavity and everything went black.

There was panic in the room and now Tina came to her feet, turning to face the direction where the third guard had been, fully expecting a burst of automatic fire to tear into her. Instead, she saw the grinning face of Nate Pell, holding an Ingram in one hand and a small dumbbell in the other. As Tina had fired her first two shots, the guard close by him had turned toward the noise. Pell and two of his companions had leapt upon the man, using the small, heavy
exercise weight as a bludgeon. He was down before Tina fired her third shot. Senator Carling watched in fascination as Pell and Carl Aldiss, the Sperry Rand radar expert, hurried to secure the unconscious man’s guns. Pell took the 9 millimeter automatic, while Aldiss was running his hands over the Ingram with an appearance of utter familiarity.

“You know what you’re doing there, Carl?” said the senator. Aldiss smiled at him calmly. Pell and he were good friends and the pilot had taken him into his confidence the day before.

“I don’t spend all my time in dark rooms with a CRT, Senator,” he said. As a matter of fact, Aldiss was a keen hunter and an expert shot, not that you’d know it from his mild, bespectacled, studious appearance. But Pell knew it. That was why he had instantly turned the Ingram over to him.

As the two men, accompanied by Bob Soropoulos from Rockair, made their way through the confused crowd of hostages to where Tina stood, the security officer was doing her best to calm the panicky hostages around her.

“Quiet, people! Please! Quiet!” she glanced around, caught Ben Markus’s eye. The manager was a quick thinker and he could be depended upon to stay calm in a crisis. “Ben, give me hand barricading this door, will you?”

She began dragging one of the heavy weight benches toward the door, to block its opening. Markus lent a hand and snapped at several of the other hostages to join in. Suddenly the dam of uncertainty broke and there were willing hands on all sides as people realized this was their chance. Now they had a tangle of weight benches and Nautilus machines stacked in the doorway and Tina waved the other people back out of a direct line.

“Get back along that wall,” she yelled, gesturing with the gun to back up her orders. Gradually, the milling crowd fell away, as Pell and his two companions began stacking heavy punching bags against the barricade. Tina caught the senator’s eye and moved toward him. “Senator Carling, I’m Tina Bowden, security officer for Canyon. Could you please take charge of the people back there while we secure the room, sir? Just get them to move as far back into this blind
corner as they can, and stay there. Maybe they could stack more of the machines there as cover.”

Carling nodded. He was still a little taken aback to find that the attractive girl, whom he’d thought of as a receptionist, had taken out two of the terrorists within the space of five seconds and four carefully aimed shots. But he moved to carry out her suggestion, his air of authority invaluable in calming the excited hostages and bringing some semblance of order to things.

Ben Markus finished wedging the stainless steel bar from a barbell set between the two handles of the doors, then turned back to survey the result.

“They won’t come through there in a hurry,” he said, and Tina nodded grimly.

“That’s the general idea. With any luck, there’s a rescue assault on the way now. All we have to do is hold them off for a few minutes.” Jesse had told her half an hour but she thought it sounded better her way. Besides, now they were committed. Markus looked worried momentarily.

“What if they blow the charges on the mountain?” he said.

Tina laughed harshly. “With them still here?” she asked. “Let me ask you, Ben, do these guys strike you as suicidal fanatics?”

Markus hesitated, thinking it through. Then his expression hardened as he saw the reason in her words. “No. As a matter of fact, they don’t,” he replied. Then, in a brisker, more decisive tone, “So what can I do to help?”

Tina held out one of the automatic pistols they’d taken from the guards. “Give us a hand holding the line. Can you use one of these?”

He took the big pistol, turning it over in his hands. “Not very well,” he admitted, “but I’ll hang onto it until you can find someone better.”

Tina flashed him a smile and turned to the group of hostages huddled back away from the doorway. She held up the third pistol and one of the Ingrams and called out:

“Anyone here know how to use one of these?”

To her surprise, the first person to step forward was Ralph, the chef. “Don’t know about the machine gun,” he said, “but I’ve fired
a pistol some.” She nodded and handed him the Beretta, watching as he expertly dropped the magazine out of the butt, then eased the slide to make sure there was no round chambered. He slapped the magazine back in, worked the action and then set the safety.

“I guess you have at that,” she said, and he looked up at her, his eyes angry.

“Let that son-of-a-bitch stick his head around that door,” he said. “I’ll give him fucking French fries.”

J
esse was halfway across the cleared space to the chairlift building when he heard the first rattle of automatic fire from above and behind him. The snow to his left came alive with fountaining spurts as the bullets whipped home—not in a straight line, the way they do in the movies, when a special-effects man pumps a blast of air down a perforated hose, but in a rough, elliptically shaped killing field created by the movement of the Ingram’s barrel as it recoiled.

He cursed to himself as he redoubled his efforts, poling more savagely to gain a little extra speed. This was all going to hell in a handbasket, he thought. He hadn’t had time to warn Dent Colby that the shooting had started and now there was no way he could phone the FBI agent until he reached the top of the mountain.

More shots from above him and more bullets zipped into the snow. But visibility was poor in the heavy falling snow and the range from eight stones up was a little too much for the short-barreled Ingrams. The second burst went even wider.

He’d heard the shouting behind him as the body of the man he’d killed had been discovered and he knew his only chance was to make it to the chairlift. His skis and boots were in the ski room and he’d slammed in there, dragging the boots on in a fever of panic. Of course, that had been a mistake. His foot jammed in one of the boots, refusing to go in properly as a clip caught and the boot wouldn’t open fully. Desperately he thrust at it, his efforts only serving to jam the clip even tighter. In the end, he had to stop, calm down, force the clip open, back off and try again, slowly. When he did it that way, his foot slid easily into the boot but it had all cost
him precious minutes. Learning from his mistake, he donned the other boot carefully and without haste, then tossed his skis flat on the snow and stepped into the bindings.

There was no time to fasten the boot clips and he skied with his boots gaping open. That was no real problem as the ground was even and there was barely any slope. He skated as fast as he could, waiting for the inevitable moment of discovery. Now he was barely twenty yards from the chairlift terminal and there were at least three automatic weapons firing at him from the roof.

He skied under the overhanging eaves of the terminal and halted for a moment, breathing heavily from a mixture of fear and exertion. The men on the roof couldn’t see him now and he paused to get his breath. It was a mistake. A volley of shots from ground level spanged into the metal stanchions supporting the terminal roof and he looked back to four men running from the hotel toward him.

“Shit!” he muttered and skied straight to the chair line, dropping awkwardly into a chair just as it made the connection to the main cable and swooped up the mountain. Behind him he heard more shouting, and a bullet screeched off the metal pylon that supported the chairlift cable. He squirmed around in the chair and saw the four men behind him, waiting to load on one of the chairs. Unused to the mechanism, they selected one of the slow-moving chairs on the disconnect bull wheel. Then, as the line of chairs leveled out, they were blocked from his sight.

He figured they were maybe fifteen chairs behind him and that was too damn close for comfort. He bent down and began fastening the clips on his boots. He might manage the level ground between the hotel and the chairlift without having them fastened, but side-stepping up through the thick ungroomed snow at the top of the chairlift would be another matter altogether—with the boots unfastened, he’d probably step clear out of them. He remembered that the men had been running across the clear ground and that meant they had no skis. That should hold them up when they hit the thick, thigh-deep snow at the top of the chair, he thought grimly. He wondered if it would be a big enough delay.