Chapter 85
Buy ReWire now on Amazon for only $3.99
JACK SLID DOWN the steep slope. At Kirkwood they would have put up a sign with triple black diamonds: Expert Only! He wasn’t an expert and he didn’t have skis, but he did his best.
He stepped outside himself on the adrenaline rush. He watched himself using arms and legs, butt cheeks and elbows to ride out the slide. The other part of him did fine for the first hundred meters or so. He knew he would tumble if he were dead or wounded. So he tumbled, letting himself roll as loosely as he could, feeling his left shoulder come apart from a hard turn. If he came to rest in their line of fire they might use him for target practice.
At the bottom of the bowl he went airborne and fell free for long enough to say quick good-byes. After he hit, it took long seconds he didn’t have to find his wind. The fall over the lip of the cliff had taken him out of their line of fire. He had landed on snow-covered Manzanita. The iron-strong branches were so full of oil they cushioned his fall even in this cold.
If he were in charge he would send out a search party. The enemy had proven more anal than he. He searched for the wound that knocked him off the cliff, trying not to think about Lee. He didn’t have a bullet wound. He had a dislocated left shoulder and what felt like another cracked rib, low down on the left. He had a badly bitten tongue, a twisted left knee, and no bullet hole.
As he crawled up the puddle-wide creek bed at the bottom of the cliff, he dragged his left leg and spit blood into the snow. He hoped the blood would last long enough for them to find it. If he didn’t slip his shoulder back into place soon, it would take hours of agony later, if he could even manage it on his own.
He cleaned the snow off a chest-high rock, tied one end of the shoulder holster to his left wrist and the other to a spur on the top of the rock. He lay face down on top of the rock and went to work. He rolled his body to the right, hoping the joint would come apart. It wouldn’t budge. The self-preserving tightness of the wound defeated him. On the sixth try, after he’d dug his toes into the side of the rock and leaned out, swinging like a fence on a cable, the shoulder slid out of joint. His luck changed. It only took one try to pop it back in.
When he slipped the shoulder holster back on he discovered why he didn’t have a bullet hole. The solid little Sig Sauer had taken a round. This would be the second time a Sig had saved his life. The warning might have been enough to save Lee’s life. The South African had yelled out a cease-fire as a few rounds thudded into the snow around him. He heard no shots after that. That could mean she was still alive.
That meant ransom. They had already tried to kidnap her once. If Lee was alive they would do everything they could do to keep her alive. That meant he had had an advantage. She would be worth more money than they had made in stock trades in a year as a hostage. So far the enemy had been most consistent in one thing: Greed. There were still way too fucking many ifs.
The chainsaw sound of souped-up snow machines filtered into his brain. He tried to visualize the map. How long would it take someone on a snowmobile to get to his location? Where was he? He closed his eyes and pictured the inside of the tent the last time he’d looked at the map. Lee crumbled crackers into chicken soup. The fat floating on top reflected light from his headlamp.
The map spread across their bags. If his fall had taken him to where he thought, he’d tumbled almost two hundred meters. The lip at the end was maybe another sixty-foot drop into the snow bank. He was on top of a ridge that was accessible to snowmobile. Best guess, the enemy could be here in as little as five minutes.
If they came in force he was dead. He didn’t know what their total numbers were, but he’d heard at least two engines. If he were the South African, or maybe Zimbabwean, he’d send at least two men on each machine. So, he would face four men. He had no weapons other than his Gerber and his addled wits, but he would win because right was on his side.
Yeah right. He heard himself humming the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as he foraged and constructed weapons. He had lost it.
“So what’s your point, Jack?” He asked himself, startled at the sound of his own voice.
He was supposed to lose it. Hell, he was supposed to be many times dead. Six minutes later he shivered in a natural rock lean-to thirty feet from where he’d planted his body. His hiding place was ten feet past the turn in the creek bed they’d have to follow to get at the body. He had stuffed his clothes with as many small branches as he could, and achieved an artful reach with the left sleeve of his parka.
His only weapons were a long lance, very sharp, but too brittle, a bolo, and his Gerber. Thick snow with big flakes fell quickly in this too-thin air.
The two snow machines showed right on time. He heard them race up the hill and slow, at a guess where he’d tumbled off the cliff. Both engines picked up speed as the enemy climbed the creek-bed toward his position. They moved slowly, but when they passed they were mounted. Only one person per machine! Trained troops didn’t recon from vehicles. He had a chance.
The first snowmobile edged past him, followed by the second, no more than twenty feet behind. The first driver slowed when he saw Jack’s decoy body, then accelerated with a shout. The second followed, speeding up so quickly Jack nearly missed his leap. His scything Gerber nearly took the head off the one on the rear track. The driver was strapped in and the force of Jack’s leap knocked the machine on its side. The fountain of blood from the man’s severed neck painted the creek red for a few seconds until his pump stopped.
Jack sprinted up the track made by the first machine, shutting out at the pain in his side. He leaped onto the driver just as the man jacked a round into the shotgun. Jack couldn’t cover the sound of the man’s scream fast enough to stop all of it. He slammed the Gerber into the man’s liver and lowered the volume. The next cut severed the man’s larynx and converted his scream to a wistful sigh. Any dismounted infantry should have been out in front. With as little expertise as these guys showed, they could be trailing.
He ran to the rear snowmobile, grabbed the SKS from the scabbard, and sprinted back to where he could cover the trail. Nothing. He was still getting dressed when the radio he hadn’t seen on the first snowmobile chattered.
“Green, this is White, come in. Green this is White, do you copy?”
It was the South African. White: how appropriate. He resisted the temptation to key the microphone and do his Smoky Robinson imitation: I Heard it Through the Grapevine…
“Green this is White. Come in you damn Kaffir.”
Jack looked at the body of the first driver he’d killed. He looked Japanese. “Kaffir” was an insulting way to refer to a full-blooded black male. The level to which the South Africans identified race, and its importance to them, struck him as immensely sad, as well as a huge waste of time. White would send someone to look for his missing patrol within minutes of losing contact. The radio he’d taken would let him listen in until they found it missing. Then they would either go silent or change frequencies. The enemy had provided him with transportation. He left welcoming presents for the search party and took his second ride on a snowmobile.
He was more suited to silent, mellow travel than the ring-dingy, silence shattering, smoke-spewing demon he rode that night. He didn’t have the thick, wind-defeating snowmobile suits the drivers had. No matter how far down behind the windscreen he hunched, the cold found openings that sliced his strength like a scalpel. When he crouched low enough to miss most of the wind, he couldn’t control the damn thing.
It felt like riding a motorcycle with two flat tires and no brakes in the mud. He fishtailed in turns, bogged down in the slushy snow, or spit out snow and gravel as the tracks bit down too far. He didn’t get close to finding the right RPM range.
“Green this is White. Come in, damn it! The girl isn’t badly hurt, but we still need to get to her to the infirmary.”
Jack stopped the snowmobile. Lee was alive! Or, was it disinformation? These people were smart. They wouldn’t have sent an idiot to capture him and Lee. So White had to be smart. Was it too soon for him to have come up with a response to the ambush? He computed odds. Lee was alive. Probably.