Shot Clock

by Mark Parragh

  “Used to run out to the stables,” Couillard said quietly, as if she’d read Crane’s mind. “They took those out in the fifties. Too bad. Could use some horses right now.”

  Crane disagreed. In his experience, very few situations were improved by the addition of a horse. But he had more important things to discuss with her.

  “You were about to tell us what you were doing at the conference,” he said. “Why you were with Viking.”

  “Is that what you call him? Poor Blaise. I’ve been working him for a while now. Mapping his contacts, tracking his purchases. There was a lot of concern about his little private army, but I guess he’s not going to be a problem anymore.”

  “Killed in the initial attack?” Swift said, her tone sarcastic.

  Couillard gave a wry smile. “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

  Then she switched off her light, and they froze as figures moved quickly past the intersection with the main tunnel behind them. After a moment, she switched the light on briefly to confirm there was nothing in their way. Then she turned it off again, and they moved forward silently in blackness.

  The tunnel eventually curved gently to the right, and Couillard switched her light on again. Ahead, the tunnel ended in a larger chamber, just big enough to turn around a utility cart. A metal mesh stairway was bolted into one wall, leading up to a steel fire door.

  Josh sighed as they rolled Redpoll to the foot of the stairs. There was no elevator. Crane borrowed Couillard’s light and went up first. Beside the door, he found a card reader that beeped and flashed green when Crane slid his keycard across it.

  “Hmm. Could have used one of those,” Couillard observed.

  The door opened into a storage room stacked with boxes. As Crane swept the light across them, their labels indicated a mix of non-perishable foods, paper napkins, and soda cannisters. He listened but heard nothing.

  “I think it’s clear,” he said. Couillard took her light back and lit the stairs while Crane and Josh struggled to get Redpoll’s chair up the steps. When they were about halfway up, the frame clanged against the iron railing, and the sound echoed back through the tunnel. Swift hissed for silence.

  “You’re welcome to carry him yourself,” Josh muttered. But they got the chair up. Redpoll lay inert in the chair, his breathing steady but shallow and wet. He seemed stable for the moment, but Crane knew they were running out of time.

  Leaving the storage room, they found themselves in the snack bar’s kitchen. Beyond that was the front counter, a sweep of blue tile dotted with registers and a covered plate of muffins. Beyond that, the dining area took up the open center of the small building, with sweeping curves of glass around the doors at either end. The gift shop occupied the opposite side.

  The place appeared abandoned. The lights were out, and the fading light outside cast eerie shadows through the dining area.

  “Should grab something to eat while we’re here,” said Crane. “May be a while before we get another chance.”

  Josh rolled Redpoll out from behind the counter and sat beside him at a table marked for handicapped guests. Redpoll seemed to wake up and murmured something to Josh.

  “He’s thirsty,” Josh called. “Can he have something or no?”

  “No!” said Swift. “Keep him distracted.”

  She followed Crane as he headed toward the doors at one end of the building. They emerged onto a concrete patio overlooking the lake. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains, and an eerie twilight seeped through between the peaks. The wind had increased, and the clouds spit random spatters of rain at them. Crane suspected it was going to get a lot worse during the night. Even if they could make it to the glacier, the conditions would be less than ideal for flying a heavy helicopter through the mountains at night.

  Of course, that assumed they could get there. The Summer Pavilion was a bright glass lozenge overlooking the lake. It actually commanded a good view of the surrounding area, including the pathway around the lakeshore. If they wanted to get around it without being seen, they’d have to wait for full darkness, and then they’d have to go well around it. Swift was already plotting out a course. He followed her gaze and saw a low marshy expanse stretching up the valley from the edge of the lake. It had probably once been part of the lakebed. It would be muddy there, not easy to cross even without the rain Crane was expecting.

  “No way we’ll get the wheelchair through there,” he said. “We’ll have to rig a stretcher.”

  Swift murmured agreement.

  Then another sound rose in the distance, and Crane recognized the shriek of a jet engine echoing off the mountainsides. He looked east and saw it—a dark shape lit briefly by the last gleam of sunlight through the peaks. It banked around the curve in the lake, still descending, and sped toward them. The engine’s scream seemed to split the sky apart as it flew over them at only a couple hundred feet of altitude. The glass behind Crane trembled. Windows must be rattling all over the hotel, he realized.

  As the plane shot past, Crane managed to make out stubby wings, the curve of the cockpit perched atop the fuselage, twin rudders jutting up at angles. Then the fighter was past them, afterburners flaring, climbing sharply as it disappeared down the valley. The roar of its engines echoed off the slopes and slowly died out.

  Josh came running out. “What the hell was that?”

  “That,” said Swift, “was an F-18 Hornet.”

  “Canadian Forces, most likely,” Crane added, “out of Cold Lake.”

  The Canadian Forces airbase at Cold Lake was about four hundred and fifty miles away. Given how far they were from any help, a jet fighter would have been the first thing with the speed and the range to get there. And there was a recon variant of the Hornet that replaced the nose gun with a pod containing visible and infrared sensors and a synthetic aperture radar. It wasn’t ideal, but at least it would provide some idea of what was going on. He had no trouble believing that for the most powerful people on Earth—the ones who weren’t already here—finding out what had gone wrong at the Amersfoort Conference had quickly become a top priority.

  “Instead of a satellite?” Josh asked.

  “Maybe they couldn’t get anything overhead fast enough at this latitude,” said Crane. “Or maybe they did and still wanted a closer look.”

  “We should get back inside,” said Swift. “The drones could be watching to see who sticks their heads out to look at the shiny airplane. And I’m going to block the door we came through from the tunnels.”

  “Right,” said Crane. If they were sweeping the tunnels, they might decide to check the side tunnels, as well.

  As they came back inside, Beverlee Couillard was coming out of the gift shop with a pile of outdoor hiking clothes over one arm and a pair of boots in her hand.

  “I don’t suppose that was help,” she said.

  “Just the neighbors peering over the fence to see what we’re up to,” Crane answered.

  She nodded. “Thought so. Probably be morning before any serious response can make it in.”

  That lined up with Crane’s thinking. The overflight would have picked up the deliberate radio jamming. It would have seen the two Chinooks on the glacier. If nothing else, those would raise the appropriate alarm. But it would take time to get a special forces team into the area and deploy them. In the end, nothing about this changed Crane’s assessment of the situation. Redpoll’s chances of survival were getting longer all the time, but if they were to have any chance of saving him, they needed to get out themselves. There wasn’t time to wait for help to arrive.

  Couillard was looking him over. Yes, he knew he looked like hell by now. “You should check it out in there yourself,” she said. “Great selection. Top brand stuff. And you can’t beat these prices.”

  Chapter 26

  In the Summer Pavilion, a terrified guest screamed as the fighter shot by overhead, and the whole glass structure seemed about to shake apart. Shani Abera caught a glimpse of it as it flew away, bu
t then she had to turn her attention to the people clustered in the center of the pavilion. A couple looked as if they were ready to break for the doors, and her men were on edge. All she needed was a stampede and someone on the Protected List getting shot.

  “That’s enough!” she shouted. “Everybody sit down. We’re not in danger here.” She gestured to the guards to lower their weapons, and the guests gradually settled down, though she didn’t like the way they were whispering among themselves.

  She took her ATAK from her belt and called the operations center in the ski lodge. “What the hell was that?” she hissed, turning away toward the glass wall.

  “Single fighter jet,” they replied, “approached from the east, moving fast. It’s already gone.”

  A recon overflight, then. Canadian out of Cold Lake, most likely, or maybe American Air National Guard flying out of Fairchild. It wasn’t good news, whoever sent it. They would have seen the helicopters and the drones, picked up the radio jamming, maybe even located a concentration of people here on infrared. That was just the first plane to arrive. There would be more. How long before she had special forces paratroopers descending on her?

  Paul hurried in from the support building with a questioning look. After someone had probed their checkpoint in the tunnels earlier, she’d sent him down with extra men to reinforce the position and clear the path to the main building. They’d found nothing. Whoever was harassing them was effectively using the maze of the hotel complex. Again, she felt the touch of the man going by John Crane. Horton had known something about him, but what? Who was he? Former special forces, intelligence, something else entirely?

  She gave Paul a look she meant to be reassuring, but she didn’t feel very reassured.

  “Recon plane,” she murmured to him. “The outside world’s starting to get curious.”

  Paul shook his head. “Told you this was a bad idea.”

  She said nothing. How the hell had they still not found Redpoll either living or dead? Swift remained unaccounted for, as well, but Redpoll had brought no one else with him. Had she gotten lucky and chosen a hiding place in the small area of the hotel they hadn’t yet cleared? It seemed unlikely that she could have gotten the badly wounded Redpoll that far into the hotel by herself.

  Her satellite phone beeped.

  She looked at it for a moment as it beeped again and the access light blinked at her.

  “That’s all we freaking need right now,” said Paul.

  She gave him a look and then accepted the call. “Sir.”

  “I’m not happy,” said Turnstone. “Can you guess why?”

  “We’re proceeding on schedule, sir,” she said. “We’re moving as quickly as possible while maintaining a thorough search. We mustn’t let them slip through the net.”

  “You’ve been telling me that all day,” Turnstone said, and she heard the cold menace in his voice. “You were just overflown by a Canadian fighter jet.”

  “Yes, sir. We knew that might happen. We’ve accounted for it in the planning.” Technically true, she thought, but if it happened, it meant things were going very badly. And Turnstone knew it.

  “Tell me you’ve got Redpoll.”

  She took a breath. “We don’t have him yet.” She started to explain, but then she heard him raging, his voice muffled as though he had a hand over his mouthpiece. She listened for a solid thirty seconds before he came back on.

  “Why not?”

  “We have to be thorough,” she said. “We’re clearing the hotel room by room and floor by floor.” She glanced at the screen of her ATAK. “We expect that to be complete in another ninety minutes. But, sir, I have to say he’s almost certainly dead. He’s an old man who took a shot from a high-powered assault weapon more than eight hours ago.”

  “No,” said Turnstone. “Until you see a body, Redpoll’s alive. He’s a tough old bastard. Don’t underestimate him. Or that bitch of his. I see the Kill List still shows her unresolved. Find her, and you’ll find him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And get moving! I’ve given you all the cover I can. Things are moving here. You may have until morning, but no more than that. Before then, I need to know beyond any doubt that Redpoll is dead, and your team needs to be gone without a trace. Failure on either of those will have exceptionally dire consequences for you. Am I clear?”

  “Very clear, sir. We’ll be out of here well before then.”

  “With proof of Redpoll’s death.”

  “Yes, sir, with solid proof.”

  Then the call simply dropped. Shani stood for a moment with the phone still pressed against her ear. She realized she was afraid for the first time since she’d accepted the assignment. She knew the sort of things Turnstone was capable of. She’d seen enough to know that she didn’t want to be on the receiving end. She didn’t want Paul to find out what Turnstone could do. She didn’t want her parents or her brother to find out how far-reaching and endless Turnstone’s rage could be.

  “Everything okay?” Paul said quietly.

  She folded up the phone’s antenna and turned to him. “The bugout bags still there?”

  He grinned. “Unless a bear dug them up.” Then he registered her expression, and his own went still. “You’re serious. You really think we need…Is it that bad?”

  She had been working at the Cambie for more than a year, laying the groundwork for this operation, getting her people onto the payroll, mapping the grounds, figuring out how to execute Turnstone’s mission. Paul had posed as a guest, but he’d come to the Cambie at least half a dozen times. They’d hiked the valley until they could find their way around in the dark.

  At the far end of the lake was an old logging road nearly overrun by forest, but still passable. It led down through the mountains to the Bow River and eventually to the Icefields Parkway. Beneath a boulder where the trail passed the end of the lake, they’d buried two backpacks. They were emergency resources, meant to be used only in extreme circumstances. They contained clothes and gear for surviving in the remote mountains, weapons, cash and clean credit cards, passports. They were a last resort, and on jobs like this one, she made a point of placing them somewhere out of the way but reachable in an emergency.

  Actually using them would mean giving up everything she’d worked so hard to build, abandoning her men, cutting every tie. But if it came to that, if the only choice remaining was to drop off the face of the Earth forever, then the bags were there.

  But no, she told herself. This job had gone horribly wrong from the beginning, but they weren’t there yet. Not yet.

  “No,” she said softly to Paul, and she laid a hand on his bicep. “Just find him. Find him fast. Pull a squad off the floor sweeps and start searching the grounds. By now, either he’s very damn lucky to be hiding out in the little bit of the hotel we haven’t gotten to yet, or else he’s not in the main building.”

  She reached down and tapped the ATAK clipped to his belt. “Tracker on. I want to know where you are.”

  He smiled. “You got it, Captain.”

  She pulled her own device from her belt and tapped for group address.

  “This is Oracle,” she told them. “I’m modifying the rules of engagement. Anybody on the Protected List, bring them in as usual. Anybody who’s not on the Protected List, eliminate on identification. Oracle out.”

  Paul raised an eyebrow. “Now we’re playing hardball?”

  She chose to ignore the implied criticism. “Now we’re playing hardball. Collect your team and get moving. I want a status report on the canoe shed and the outdoors shop inside of an hour.”

  He nodded and headed out. She watched him go and then fielded a request for a couple squad leaders in the hotel for confirmation of her order.

  Yes, she told them, they were killing anybody who wasn’t on the Protected List. She’d made the decision, and she expected it to be carried out. They could no longer afford civilians, or potential hostiles, running loose behind their perimeter.

  Time was
running out, she told herself after they’d acknowledged and gotten back to work. This one was going to be close. Some niceties would have to be dispensed with.

  Chapter 27

  Josh sprawled in a metal and plastic chair in the dark and listened to Redpoll’s breathing. He could hear rain driving against the glass at the near end of the dining area. Swift sat by herself at the far end. He could just see her silhouetted against the glass there. Couillard was pacing the length of the building, back and forth. She’d been doing it for almost an hour now. He could see Crane rooting through the clothes and camping gear in the outdoor gift shop by the dim light of an electric lantern he’d appropriated. He was apparently looking for just the right pair of hiking pants.

  Man takes his clothes way too seriously. Everything has to have just the right kind of tactical cotton weave or some damn thing.

  And the designer labels! Jesus, for someone who spends half his time crawling in the dirt and blowing stuff up, he’s such a freaking clothes snob.

  Pff, try ordering dinner with him.

  Makes him easy to shop for, at least. Holidays will be coming up, assuming we don’t get killed before morning.

  Eh, maybe not. He’ll say he likes it, but he’ll return it and get something that looks just like it but has subtly different pocket flaps.

  Redpoll gasped suddenly and moaned, “Ana?”

  Josh leaned over. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “Don’t try to move. Just stay still.”

  Redpoll’s eyes fluttered open. “Ah,” he said. “Mr. Sulenski. Forgive me. I was dreaming. I was in a better place, no offense.”

  Josh glanced around at the abandoned snack bar. “Yeah, none taken. You mentioned a name. Ana?”

  “Yes. I should tell you. She illuminates my point.” Redpoll coughed and winced. “Nothing,” he said as Josh leaned toward him in concern, “it’s nothing. I met Ana in college. We fell in love. I wanted to marry her. But I told you where I come from. I was living a dream. I begged her to come with me, but she would not join me in that life. She always said so. If I didn’t break from the world I knew, she would leave me. And I wanted that other life with her. But in the end…”