Shot Clock

by Mark Parragh

  And she wasn’t wrong about Josh.

  “Okay,” he said at last. The word sounded small in the silence. “Okay. We’ll kill power to the car, keep it up here.” He looked around at the guns the mercenaries had dropped. “I’ll stage those so when a gun runs dry, you can fall back to a fresh one.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “And I’m not without resources here, you know.” She gestured to the door to the next room. “I’ve got a couple pretty serious drones over there.”

  Then her computer chimed, and a warning flashed onscreen. “See? Manual lock on the satellite. It’ll drift off if nobody’s here.”

  She gave him a wistful smile and then turned back to the keyboard and started sending commands.

  Crane turned to Josh and nodded over his shoulder. They started gathering up dropped weapons and taking them out to the lobby area. Crane looked back once, but Swift was still absorbed in the controls for the satellite antenna.

  He thought about the smile she’d given him before she’d turned away. He hoped he was wrong, but it looked like the smile someone might have when they knew they were seeing a loved one for the last time.

  Chapter 38

  Shani Abera put the ATAK back on her belt, her mind racing. The man they’d captured on the mountain was the one she was looking for. Every instinct told her this was the man from the gift shop, the one who had killed Paul, the man she fully expected would turn out to be John Crane.

  But there was more than that, she realized. He knew they had a list of civilians to be protected. And he knew a name from that list to confuse his captors. The only place he could have seen the list was on an ATAK—the one he’d taken from Hudgins after he’d killed him in the stairwell in the first-floor lounge. Recovering that ATAK was a top priority if she wanted to minimize the blowback from this disaster. But her men had searched him and hadn’t found the ATAK. They’d pulled him from a crevasse on the glacier, so perhaps he’d lost the ATAK there, safely consigned it to oblivion. But she wasn’t willing to bet on that. He had to be working with Redpoll’s trained pit bull, the woman called Swift. She would have claimed the ATAK. She was the one who knew how to get inside it, manipulate its file structure and pry out its secrets. If Crane was up there, Swift wouldn’t be too far away. And Redpoll wouldn’t be far from her.

  And suddenly she understood with chilling clarity what they were doing on the glacier. They’d taken him there. They meant to seize one of the helicopters and fly him out.

  So the man they’d captured would lead her to Swift, and Swift would lead her to Redpoll and the missing ATAK.

  Her own ATAK beeped, yanking her out of her thoughts.

  “Oracle, Bloodhound One. We’re done here. No joy. What are your orders, Captain?”

  So they’d finally finished the exhaustive task of sweeping the hotel, and they’d found nothing. Whether he was alive or dead, Redpoll had made it out of the hotel, and they’d taken him up the mountain. That was where the final moves would be played.

  “Stand by, Bloodhound One. Get your teams ready to pull out.”

  “Roger that, Oracle.” He sounded relieved. They all knew this mission had gone to hell. They knew the consequences wouldn’t be good. Now they just wanted to pull out and get as far from here as they could.

  She opened a channel to the lodge. They needed to know that Swift was in the area. They weren’t expecting to be directly involved in combat, but nothing about this mission had gone as expected. They needed to be ready.

  “Akron, this is Oracle. Come in.”

  There was no reply. She tried again. Nothing.

  She tried the drone operators. “Pegasus, Oracle. Come in.”

  Nothing.

  She was too late. She had to assume the lodge was in enemy hands. She swore loudly, and the civilians in the middle of the pavilion looked nervously up at her. She looked up at the mountains. Did she see the first hints of the coming dawn light on the peaks? No, not quite. Not yet. She had enough time to play one more card.

  She called up the channel to the search teams again. “All bloodhound teams withdraw from the hotel,” she snapped. “Reassemble at the Summer Pavilion ASAP.”

  She barely paid attention as the search teams acknowledged her order. She strode briskly into the center of the pavilion. “Listen up!”

  The civilians were already watching her. She could almost smell their fear. A woman clutched her husband’s hand, her knuckles white. A couple tried to look defiant, but she didn’t care anymore. She called in the guards who’d been watching them. They fell in behind her.

  “The threat to you is over,” she said. “Our operation is complete in this part of the complex. We’re pulling out.”

  The civilians looked at her, or at her men, or at each other in uncertainty.

  “What happens now?” one of them asked.

  “Turnstone told me I’d be protected,” another protested.

  “What happens now,” she said, “is that combat operations are moving to another part of the valley for final mopping up. You can do what you like. Authorities will be arriving soon to resume normal security duties. You’re free to leave here, but if I were you, I’d stay here and keep my head down until they arrive. I can’t guarantee your safety outside the pavilion.”

  There was a round of hushed murmuring and questions. A man in a bloodstained shirt stood, took a few tentative steps away, and then hurried to the door. When none of her soldiers took action to stop him, a few more filtered out. But most of them remained where they were.

  Abera didn’t care. For reasons of his own, Turnstone had wanted these people safely out of harm’s way, and so they were. But she was done with them now. In her mind, she’d already moved on to the next step, planning her assault on the mountain and the ski lodge.

  The immediate tactical problem was obvious, and she assumed it would be equally obvious to the group holding the lodge. The funicular was a deathtrap. No one could move safely through it in either direction. She wouldn’t waste her soldiers’ lives trying to force her way up the tunnel. The unit holding the glacier landing pad had already driven back one attack. They could do it again, more easily now that they knew to expect it.

  All she needed was a fire team watching the lower station, ready to cut down anyone who tried to break out that way. She would use the tracked support crawlers to take the rest of her forces up the service road and approach the lodge from the rear.

  She turned to her men. “Bako.”

  “Captain.”

  “Take three men and get to Northeast Maintenance. There should be four Panthers there. Get them ready to move. When I get the search teams back, we’ll double time it over there and head up to the lodge.”

  “They’ll be ready and idling when you get there, Captain.”

  Bako gestured to three of the men standing nearby, and they headed out without a word.

  She felt a twinge of regret as she watched them leave. Bako was a good man, smart, tough, effective. When she disappeared on the mountainside, he might think she’d been killed, or he might guess what she’d done. But either way, he would assume command and smoothly withdraw the rest of the troops. She was leaving him to face Turnstone’s wrath. But he’d been well down the original chain of command and had no part in the planning or in field command. She hoped that would save him the worst of it.

  She strode out of the pavilion, gesturing for the few remaining men to follow her. The night air was still heavy and damp from the rain. The sky was growing faintly brighter, after all. Time was running out.

  She saw bobbing points of light as some of her search teams hurried away from the looming bulk of the Cambie and headed toward the pavilion. She snatched her ATAK from her belt and opened the channel once again.

  “Move it!” she said. “We’ve got places to be.”

  Chapter 39

  Bloodhound Three had been the first team to make it back to the Summer Pavilion, so Abera had sent them to hold the lower funicular station. Now the others
had mostly made it out to the equipment shed at Northeast Maintenance. True to his word, Bako had the four Panther T6s lined up in front of the shed, engines rumbling and ready to move. The Panthers were tracked crawlers meant to carry heavy material up the steep service road that climbed the hills to the ski slope, and handle the snow on the mountain. The four flat beds were big enough to carry her whole team. The only ones not there now were the team at the bottom of the tunnel and the force holding the landing pad on the glacier. Once they’d retaken the ski lodge, it would be time to leave, and all the teams could use the tunnel to withdraw to the glacier.

  “Mount up!” she shouted at the last team of stragglers. They had a man who’d caught a bullet in one leg from a bodyguard. It was a minor wound, and a medic had patched him up. He’d make it, but he was slow. Time wasn’t something she had in excess right now.

  Then one of the signals team ran up holding a portable scanner. He looked nervous.

  “Captain, picking up a transmission! Got to be coming from our equipment on the mountain!”

  He hit a control, and she heard the chaotic sound of a digital signal. The matching waveform marched across the device’s screen.

  “What channel is that?” she snapped. “Why aren’t we jamming it?”

  “It’s a marine transponder channel, Captain,” her man answered. “It wasn’t part of the signals plan. Not considered usable.”

  They couldn’t simply jam everything, she knew. They’d chosen cellular, short wave, the frequencies that communications equipment would use. They were in the deep Rockies, more than five hundred miles from the sea. A marine transponder channel wasn’t a high priority. It had to be coming from their own transmitter in the ski lodge, she realized, because nothing else at the Cambie would be able to transmit on that band.

  “Is anything listening on this frequency?” she demanded. “Can they get that signal out?”

  “I don’t know, Captain,” he admitted. “They must think so. If there’s a satellite on this band…”

  She sighed and shook her head. This was all going to hell, and nothing she did seemed to stop it.

  “What are they sending?”

  “Data upload. Two files. One’s huge. It’s still uploading. But the other one’s a low kilobit sound file. It’s already complete.”

  He tapped controls, and she heard a woman’s voice over a hiss of background static.

  “This is Swift. I am inside the Amersfoort blackout zone. The incident here is a targeted assassination attempt on Redpoll launched by Turnstone. The attached file will provide proof that Turnstone has betrayed us. Redpoll is temporarily incapacitated, and I am assuming military command on his authority. Extraction plan Valkyrie, this location. Contain and stand down Turnstone, all NORAM forces, and any elements loyal to him. Immediately detain the following…”

  She reached over and turned off the audio. There it is, she thought. If Swift had indeed found some way to connect to the outside, then the cat was out of the bag. As Paul would have said, the shit had hit the fan. The worst had come to pass, but there was nothing she could do about it now. As her father had always said, you can’t build a house for last year’s summer.

  “Get on board,” she said to the signals man. Then she hurried to the lead crawler, and two men leaned over so she could pull herself up onto the bed.

  Bako stood at the front of the bed. When he saw she was aboard, he pounded his fist on the roof of the cab and shouted, “Move out!”

  The crawler lurched forward and headed for the cut in the woods that took the service road up into the mountains.

  Given how this one had turned out, Crane wasn’t planning to take any future vacations at the Cambie. But he had to admit they were very good at putting just what he needed right where he needed it. He’d used his keycard to open the ski shop, and outfitted himself and Josh with pants and jackets, skis, poles, boots, and backpacks for their gear.

  Getting Josh ready took some extra time. From what Crane could gather, Josh had been skiing once in high school, and that hadn’t gone especially well. He moved awkwardly in his boots, even though Crane had chosen boots with a walk mode for that reason. He nearly fell on the stone surface outside before they ever got to the slopes themselves. Crane worried that Josh wouldn’t be able to handle even the beginner slope, but he’d done all right. He wouldn’t be competing anytime soon, but they made reasonable time down the mountainside, following the overhead line of the ski lift. The clouds were mostly gone now, and the slopes gleamed in the emerging moonlight. All Crane heard was the hiss of his skis on the snow.

  Back there, Swift was doing what she felt she had to do. He hadn’t heard gunfire, at least. Perhaps they were moving cautiously. Maybe they weren’t going to try to retake the lodge. That was the best thing all around now. They should head back to the glaciers and withdraw their helicopters through the mountains. At least that way, he wouldn’t have to worry about her.

  Crane had considered going back to see Swift once more before they left to make sure she was all right, that she was ready for what might happen. But he’d decided against it. It was a weakness. There was nothing more he could do for her. He just wanted things to be different than they were, and since he had no way to make that happen, all he would be doing was wasting time neither of them could spare.

  It grew faintly warmer as they descended. The snow grew thinner, soft, and wet. The grass showed through in patches, and sometimes they had to cover a few awkward steps to get back to snow. Finally, Crane decided it would be easier to just ditch the skis and walk. He waved Josh toward a large rock on the uphill side of the slope. They sat down, took off their skis, and put their hiking boots back on.

  “Are we going to be all right?” Josh asked suddenly. “After this is over, I mean. It’s been bothering me all the way down. I know you wanted to stay and protect her. But you left her there to get me out.”

  “You’re my responsibility,” said Crane.

  But Josh wouldn’t leave it there.

  “And what if she gets herself killed all alone up there protecting her damn radio? Are you going to resent me because you were down here getting me to safety?”

  Crane stood up and tossed one of his poles like a javelin out over the patchy snow. It was a fair question for anybody else, but Josh shouldn’t have needed to ask it.

  “No,” he said, sitting down. He unzipped his pack and hauled out his hiking boots. “Not how it works.”

  “Okay,” said Josh. “Just want to make sure we’re good, no matter what happens. Because I’ll go back up there with you and save her, if that’s what you want to do.”

  Crane realized Josh meant it. He didn’t understand the tactical situation. He thought his weakness had forced them to withdraw from the battlefield. What he didn’t seem to understand was that they hadn’t really withdrawn at all. They were just as likely to end up the ones in trouble, depending on how the enemy chose to play this. But there was no reason to let Josh know that if he hadn’t figured it out yet.

  “You could have mentioned that before we came all the way down here,” he said as he slung his freshly loaded MP7 around his neck.

  “Oh…I…”

  “Kidding,” said Crane. “She can take care of herself. You ready? Let’s go.”

  Josh took Hank David’s gun from his pack and slipped it into his jacket pocket. Then they set off on foot down the slope.

  “Just want to be sure we’re still friends after all this,” said Josh.

  Crane scoffed in mock derision. “We’re not friends now,” he said. “I just hang around with you because you’ve got a cool boat.”

  Josh laughed. “Going to be spending a lot more time on it too! That’s my takeaway from this. Just stay on the boat. Don’t get off it for anything. That’s how they get you.”

  “Good thinking,” said Crane. “Stock up with twenty years’ worth of food and a Trivial Pursuit game. What else do you need?”

  Yeah, Crane told himself, we are going to be
all right.

  Crane picked up the pace. They were still exposed out here, and it was still several minutes’ walk down to the mouth of the service road. Until then, they were channeled into a narrow path where they’d be easy to intercept.

  Then he held up a hand and halted Josh. He stood still and held his breath, listening. He heard a sound rising from the valley, filtered through the trees and muffled by the snow.

  Engines. Coming their way.

  He’d feared that the mercenaries might make the same calculation he had, that the funicular tunnel was too dangerous, and the way to retake the ski lodge was up the same slope they were descending. He’d been hoping they’d make it out before they got there.

  So much for that.

  “Damn it,” he muttered. “Come on, let’s move!

  The crawlers emerged from the woods at the bottom of the slope, turned past the ski lift station, and headed uphill. Abera stood in the back of the lead machine beside Bako, who scanned the slopes ahead with night vision. All around her were the men she led, and more in the other crawlers behind them.

  She’d failed all of them.

  If Turnstone were here, he’d say that she’d proven she wasn’t cut out for command at this level, and she wouldn’t have an argument. Yes, she’d been forced to fit the mission into Turnstone’s parameters. But she’d had almost two years to plan, to put her assets in place, to prepare for this. And still, when it came time to execute, she’d been a step behind ever since Redpoll had made it out of the conference hall. No matter what she did, she never managed to retake the initiative.

  No, Turnstone would be right. She’d overstepped her abilities somehow. She was very good at what she did, but what she did was a level below where she’d tried to go. She knew the value of understanding her limitations. And now she’d discovered hers.