The Descent From Truth (18 page)

Nightmare visions of Frederick and Pia trapped in the blazing cabin sent him loping across the snow pack as fast as his snowshoes permitted. It kept him moving, sucking giant gulps of frigid air that felt like fire in his lungs. Please God, he prayed silently, don’t let them be trapped inside.

Chapter 23

With exhaustion dogging him, his lungs pleading for more oxygen, Alex pressed full-tilt for the cabin. He was less than two miles away when overhead noise, the chilling
thump, thump, thump
of helicopter rotors churning the still, cold air, pulled his gaze skyward.

Cover! He veered into hiding under a stubby cedar tree. Seconds later, the high-pitched whine of turbine engines assaulted his ears. Three helicopters, traveling fast and low. They swept directly overhead.

Furious with himself for wandering so far and being gone so long, he resumed his headlong dash for the cabin. The helicopter turbines fell silent. They were on the ground, and he was at least fifteen minutes away.

The engines began winding up again as he reached a stand of aspen saplings within sight of the cabin, the last cover before fifty yards of open space that the cabin’s owner had cleared as a fire break. The helicopters lifted off moments before he cleared the trees and raced toward the cabin.

Confusion mixed with alarm as he approached. The cabin wasn’t burning; the smoke came from the lakeside deck. He found still-smoldering remnants of mattresses and couch cushions piled there. The deck’s wood planking had charred but refused to ignite. The cabin’s thick, hardwood outer door was scorched, the stone walls and tin roof smoke-blackened. But the fire hadn’t breached those barriers.

He stripped off his snowshoes and, gripping his rifle, kicked open the door. “Pia,” he called, forcing sound through his dread-tautened throat.

Only silence answered.

No one in the living room. Furnishings intact except for the couch cushions that were smoldering on the deck. In the kitchen, signs of a struggle: broken dishes, the table shoved askew, an overturned chair. By the chair, strips of a torn-up bed sheet, as if someone had been tied there. Dark stains were splattered waist-high on a wall. Blood, his frazzled mind said. Additional splotches formed a trail across the living room and into the master bedroom.

Fear of what he might find put lead in his legs as he followed the bloodstains through the open bedroom door. The rifle he had taken from the security man at Silver Hill, the weapon whose two remaining bullets he had pocketed as a security measure before leaving the cabin, lay just inside. Strands of hair clung to the top edge of the rifle’s stock, pasted there with what could only be blood. Jake lay on the bedroom floor, sprawled on his side near the two-way radio that sat atop a corner desk.

Alex turned the limp body and felt for a pulse. Nothing. He checked the other bedroom and found it empty. Where were Pia and Frederick? His empty stomach pumped bile as the answer forced itself upon him. The helicopters.

The only room he had not checked was the bathroom. He found it empty. Someone had scrawled a word across the mirror’s face, using what looked like blood. Reddish-black letters declared, INDIANS.

Indians? What was she trying to tell him? Maybe the message was from the men who had taken her away. A warning, or a macabre joke?

Back in the master bedroom, he spotted the navigation map he had brought with them from the wrecked helicopter. It lay open on the table by the two-way radio. Two naked wires protruded side-by-side from the transmitter. He touched them together, and the transmitter’s radio-frequency meter swung across the dial, indicating emission of a carrier wave. The evidence fell into place.

Alex had taken away the microphone to render the radio transmitter inoperative, but he had underestimated Jake’s ingenuity. By manipulating the naked wires like a telegraph key, the pilot must have sent a series of short and long carrier waves received by listeners as the dots and dashes of Morse Code. Using the map, Jake had no doubt radioed the cabin’s approximate longitude and latitude. The fire had been a signal to guide the helicopters in.

Willing his racing heart to slow, Alex mentally reconstructed events. Jake had somehow gotten loose. He and Pia must have fought in the kitchen. He had bested her and tied her there, then built the bonfire. Pia had slipped her bonds, caught him sending the message, and clubbed him before the helicopters arrived.

Back outside, Alex circled the cabin. The pattern that emerged from the jumble of boot prints told a story of desperate flight and relentless pursuit.

It looked like three or four men had been in each helicopter. Some of the tracks led from the landing site directly to the cabin’s front door, others circled to the rear deck. The men had left through the rear door of the cabin, milled around just beyond the deck, then headed toward the lake. The horde of outbound prints stopped some fifty yards from the cabin and angled back in the direction of the helicopter landing site. Where the boot prints turned, a single set of snowshoe tracks led on across the frozen lake.

Guessing the helicopters were on their way, Pia must have strapped on her snowshoes and set out cross-country with Frederick in her arms. An effort as gutsy as it was futile.

The pursuers apparently decided to run her down with the helicopters instead of chasing her on foot. In open country during daylight, her snowshoe trail would be easy to follow from the air. Like dogs hounding a deer, the helicopters would chase her until she collapsed.

He needed to focus, to think this through. If he was going to do anything, be of any use to her, he had to control his despair and his rage. He had to think, plan.

Back in the bathroom, he studied the word scrawled on the mirror: INDIANS. Who were the Indians? What did the message have to do with what had happened?

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered when it hit him.

“That is where I would hide,” she’d said when he pulled loose flooring from the storage bin they had found in the room under the deck. “If this were your Old West and hostile Indians were attacking, I would hide in there and wait for you to rescue me.”

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered again, and headed for the under-deck enclosure. Feverishly, he kicked aside firewood that blocked the door, and flung it open.

Halfway to the bin, he heard Frederick’s muffled howls. The scared and angry screams assaulted him full blast when he lifted the bin’s heavy lid.

Frederick hauled himself erect. Bouncing up and down in fury, he worked his legs like pistons.

“Freddy,” Alex said as he lifted the boy out, “you’ve got one hell of a mother.” She had hidden her child and left a clue that no one else could decipher. Knowing Alex was due back anytime, knowing he’d left for the hunt with only three cartridges for his rifle, she lured the invaders away.

Rotor noise, barely discernable from beyond the lake, raised hair on the back of his neck. The sound grew rapidly louder. They must have caught Pia and decided to come back and search the cabin.

He raced back up the stairs and into the cabin, snatched the second rifle from Jake’s bedroom, and loaded it with the two cartridges he carried in his pocket. A total of five shots, and he had his utility knife. Not enough to hold off the seven or eight men whose tracks he had seen earlier. He would have to retreat into the mountains. He dashed to the kitchen and took stock of the paltry provisions: three cans of condensed soup left. He stuffed them into the baggy pockets of his thermal trousers.

A glance out a window revealed that one helicopter was gaining altitude and heading northwest, in the general direction of Silver Hill. His gut twisted at the thought that Pia was on board, being ferried to wherever Faust waited for her.

The other two helicopters were hovering over their previous landing zone, descending slowly. Coming back to see if in their haste they had overlooked anything important, he decided. Hoping to find clues to his whereabouts.

He turned from the window. As he retreated to the other side of the cabin, the helicopter noise wound down to silence; they were on the ground. The gunmen on board would form a skirmish line and advance toward the cabin. Those on the flanks would circle around to surround it. He climbed out through a window on the side opposite the helicopter landing zone. Murmuring softly to placate Frederick, he paused to snap on his snowshoes, then headed off at right angles to the cabin. He had about fifty yards of open ground to cover. Could he make it to the tree line before the gunmen spotted him and opened up with their rifles?

No rifle fire, but a flashlight beam appeared behind him. It pierced the thickening darkness and arced in broad sweeps across the snowscape. Clutching Frederick to his chest, he hustled to reach the trees before the light centered on him. The beam focused on his tracks and began moving along his trail. It splashed on the tree line as he entered, but he didn’t believe they had actually seen him.

With darkness settling in, and scattered trees for partial shelter, they would be unable to follow him from the air. But they would chase him on foot. He would be hard-pressed to outdistance them with Frederick in his arms, and clear skies meant no fresh snow to cover his tracks. The wind was kicking up and would eventually fill the tracks, but it would also drop the chill factor to a dangerous level.

Realizing that he was near the tree he had used as a marker when he hid the downed helicopter’s fire axe and flare gun, he paused long enough to dig them up. The flare gun, made of bright orange plastic and shaped much like a conventional pistol, fired cartridges that looked like twelve-gauge shotgun shells. One was loaded in the breech and three more were taped to the barrel. Not much of a weapon, but better than nothing. And the fire axe would be deadly at close quarters. He pushed the axe handle under his belt and slipped the flare gun into a pocket on his parka.

Plodding through the stand of trees, he reached a stream, frozen now, that had cut a channel. Fighting exhaustion, he made his way upstream, concentrating on deep, regular breathing to pump up his oxygen supply. The gunmen would have to slow down, keep checking his snowshoe prints. And he was in good shape, used to long-distance snowshoeing.

His first challenge was to outdistance them. His second, to survive a night in the open with a year-old child. He could fashion an impromptu snow cave to keep the wind at bay, but how cold would it get overnight?

Go back to the wrecked helicopter, he decided. It would shelter them from the wind, and it carried flammable liquids that he could burn for heat. Its oil would be too congealed by the cold to drain, but maybe hydraulic fluid.

They had crash-landed at a substantially higher elevation than the cabin. That meant he was climbing for most of the way back to the chopper. And sparse oxygen at this altitude made the work twice as hard.

His reference point for finding the wreck was the sheer side of the mountain they had barely missed when they crash-landed. The mountain’s face loomed high enough to be seen from the valley where they found the cabin, and he remembered that the helicopter had come down between the mountain and a drop-off into a deep ravine. With those landmarks as guides, he found his way to the partially camouflaged wreck. None too soon; if he stumbled and fell, he was not certain he had enough strength left to get back on his feet.

A three-quarter moon had risen overhead. Its strong, silvery light in a cloudless, pollution-free sky revealed a snow mass clinging to the steep mountain wall above the downed helicopter and made him rethink his plan to take shelter inside. Working weekends and holidays at ski resorts during college, then during his short stint at Silver Hill, he had seen enough incipient avalanches to recognize one. The snow mass was primed to come down, and the helicopter was in its path.

Fighting back dismay at the prospect of more snowshoeing, of toughing out the night in a snow cave with no heat, he resisted the temptation to risk being caught by the avalanche. By himself, he might have given in, taken the chance, but not with Frederick. The boy deserved better.

“Okay, Freddy,” he mumbled, “Lets find a less hazardous abode.” Moving on carried its own risk, however. It meant he would have no cover if the gunmen caught up with him.

In the best of all worlds, the potential avalanche would actually happen but would trap the gunmen instead of him and Freddy. If the men worked their way up this narrow ridge, chances were they would spot the downed helicopter and guess he planned to take shelter there. Wouldn’t it be poetic justice if they closed in on the wreck and got buried in a cascade of snow?

At Silver Hill, he had helped reduce the danger to skiers by triggering avalanches while the lifts weren’t operating. His crew did it with satchel charges, remote-controlled explosives placed near the foot of potential avalanche sites. What if he lured his pursuers here and trapped them by precipitating an avalanche?

A fanciful thought, not at all practical; he had no explosives. He heaved a sigh of resignation and turned from the wreck to resume snowshoeing. After several paces, however, he paused again.

It might be possible. It would be risky but no more so than continuing to run. He was too tired to outdistance them for much longer.

He made his way back to the wreck and began plotting a strategy. Luring the men to this spot would be easy. Fire his rifle, and they would head for the sound. Coming up the ridge, they would see the helicopter and figure he was inside. One or more of them might have enough mountaineering experience to spot the avalanche risk, but probably no sooner than he had, and he was standing in the snow’s probable path before he recognized the danger.