by Basil Sands
Shin was very cold.
The whine of another snowmobile echoed from behind him. He accelerated to stay ahead. His mind raced, trying to find a way to get away, steal a car, and complete the mission. A compact plastic box containing three vials of the fluid pressed against his body. He had tucked them inside the chest pocket of his coveralls as he got out of the Explorer. The pistol in the pocket of his parka poked his abdomen, reminding him of its presence.
The ground sloped gradually downward. In the dark, Shin could not clearly make out what lay ahead of him. A black shadow stretched across the snow about two hundred yards ahead. Another mile or two of open field continued on the other side.
Was the shadow just a dip in the ground? Shin glanced quickly to the right and saw a big white trooper truck in the distance. It was on an almost parallel path to him. Then, just ahead of the truck, he saw a bridge and realized where he was.
Hurricane Gulch!
The shadow yawned open in front of his snowmobile, revealing steep rock walls that plummeted five hundred feet to the frozen river below. The far edge was too far to reach. There was no time to turn away. He desperately twisted the tracks of his snowmobile, but the edge was under him half a second later.
Shin leaped back from the machine with all the thrust of his legs, twisting toward the snowy ground behind him as the snowmobile went airborne. The scream of the powerful racing engine suddenly rose in pitch as it no longer struggled against the pressure of the snow. Clawing at the air, Lieutenant Shin fell through the empty frozen night.
Snow smashed into his face and he felt pressure on the front of his body. He opened his eyes and saw that he had hit solid ground. There was still a chance! A chance to survive! He slid down the snow-covered wall into the crevasse.
Shin dug into the snow with what strength he had left. He grasped for any hand hold as he slid further over the edge. A tearing sound came from below him, followed by a sudden, searing pain in his right leg, then the fall stopped.
He hung in a thicket of alder that jutted out from the side of the cliff in a knot of gnarled branches. One of the branches had torn through his Carhartts. It punctured the skin and muscle of his calf. The pain was incredible, but the tree had stopped his descent.
The pursuing snowmobile whined twenty feet above him as it came to stop. The engine turned off. A frozen silence descended like a void blanket on the area. Footsteps crunched in the snow, breaking the stillness. Someone called out from the direction of the road.
“Did he go over the edge?” said the distant male voice.
“I don’t know. I saw him jump as the machine went over.”
Shin found a foothold just below his trapped leg. Bracing his left leg to support his body weight, he pulled his right leg free of the alder limb. He stifled a scream as the fleshy wound tore against the rough texture of the wood. He struggled not to faint.
He stood still, waiting for the waves of pain to quiet, and judged his situation. The snowmobile had crashed to the bottom of Hurricane Gulch and exploded in flames. He was about twenty feet beneath the edge of the cliff. The moon and stars illuminated the chasm with pale light, and he that the ledge continued from where he stood toward the road.
The bridge he had seen from the top was not visible as the line of the valley curved gradually. That same curve was also enough to keep him out of sight from whoever may be on the road.
The sound of more footsteps approached from the road. Shin reached up with his hand and wiped the snow and frost from the opening of his parka hood. The light pressure from the action sent a screech of white pain across his face as the cloth of the hood touched the frostbitten skin around his eyes and nose.
Once he recovered from the pain, Shin moved slowly along the ledge until he was sure of his footing, and then he began to scoot sideways faster until he came in sight of the bridge.
More footsteps crunched across the snow above him and passed to where the snowmobile had gone over the edge. He heard a voice talk into a radio.
The whup-whup-whup of a helicopter rose in the distance. The thundering machine followed the highway up from the south, then turned as it approached Hurricane Gulch. Shin forced himself to run through the pain in his legs. He reached the safe covering of the bridge just as the helicopter’s spotlight burst onto the snow-covered ledge. Much to his relief, the light from the helicopter slid down to the valley floor to scan the wreckage of the snowmobile rather than the ledge over which he had just crossed. They were looking in the wrong area.
Shin crossed under the bridge and climbed the cold steel support beams that brought him to the surface beside the road. He peeked up from the darkness of his cover, keeping within the dark shadow cast by the headlights of several police vehicles pulled over to the shoulder or in a turnoff about fifty yards up the road.
An F250 with the trooper logo on the door stood on the highway across from him. A single trooper stood by the open passenger door, looking into the vehicle. Everyone else was on the other side of the vehicles, looking in the direction of the effort to find him.
Lieutenant Shin’s entire body ached with the agony of frozen flesh. He rose from under the bridge and crept, pistol drawn, into the road toward the lone trooper. His body was stiff and his movements slow, as if rigor mortis were already setting in while he was still alive.
With a sudden burst of energy, he lunged forward and slammed the butt of the pistol into the back of the trooper’s hooded head. The blow was answered by a soft grunt and the blue-coated trooper crumpled across the passenger seat, unconscious. He shoved the legs in, shut the door, and moved around to the driver’s side. Shin got in and put the truck into gear. He took off down the road, as fast as he could. He was almost out of sight before he heard a voice on the radio.
“He got away in Wyatt’s truck! Suspect is fleeing south on the Parks in a trooper F250, license AST-198.”
“Where’s Wyatt?”
“She’s in the truck with him.”
Shin looked over at the unconscious trooper twisted uncomfortably in the seat next to him. He pulled the hooded head back and saw that it was indeed the face of a woman, Korean by her features.
“Excellent!” he said in his native tongue. “Looks like I have a good hostage.”
Two squad cars pulled up behind him, one in each lane, lights rotating. Shin pulled the truck into the center of the two lanes. Neither trooper could get in front of him. He accelerated to eighty miles per hour, following the curve of the road in the big truck.
The unconscious Trooper Wyatt slid down the seat into an even more uncomfortable position on the floor, facing back up toward Shin. Her limp body bounced like a ragdoll in the spacious cab of the truck as he sped over every bump and dip.
Chapter 44
Parks Highway
Hurricane Gulch
20 December
05:32 Hours
Marcus peered over the edge as PO3 Forth prepared to belay down the valley wall on a rope to verify that the man was actually dead, and if not, to find a trail to continue the chase of the North Korean commando. Forth had gotten about ten feet past the edge when a frantic voice sounded on the radio.
“He got away in Wyatt’s truck. Suspect is fleeing south on the Parks in a Trooper F250, license AST-198.”
Marcus shouted into his radio, “Where’s Wyatt?”
“She’s in the truck with him.”
Marcus raced back to the snowmobile, started it, and shot across the powdery white surface toward the waiting cruisers. As the machine came to a halt, he leaped off and ran to the nearest vehicle.
“Two are already after them!” shouted a nearby trooper sergeant. “We’ve also called the helicopter back, but it’s too cold for his engine. He wasn’t sure he could make it up here.”
Marcus looked around frantically, then said, “I’m taking one of your cruisers!”
The sergeant was about to protest, but Marcus had already run past him and jumped into the driver’s seat of one of the running p
olice cruisers. In ten minutes he caught up to them as they passed through a seasonally deserted tourist town high in the mountains. The buildings stood high on the edge of a precipitous gorge along the banks of the Nenana River. During the summer, the river surged with class four and five rapids that roared into Denali National Park. Now, just like everything around it, the river lay in frozen silence deep in the canyon, hundreds of feet below the boarded-up hotels and shops that waited quietly until the surge of tourists returned in the spring.
Marcus followed on. A hundred yards ahead of his vehicle, one of the cruisers inched forward and nudged the big truck on the rear driver’s side corner. The driver of the truck was skilled, obviously well trained in defensive driving. He swung with the bump to avoid being knocked out of control.
The trooper attempted the maneuver again, this time with considerably more force. When the truck countered the bump again, the second patrol car quickly accelerated. It slammed into the corner on the rear passenger side of the truck sending it into a slide that brought the rear into a forty-five degree angle, straddling the lane lines. The truck driver corrected and pressed the accelerator hard.
The radio erupted with a voice. “Do that again and I will kill the lady Trooper! Do you understand?”
One of the troopers replied, “Pull the truck to the side of the road and get out now!”
There was no reply from the truck. With every part of his being, Marcus wanted to tell the troopers to stop, to keep from endangering Lonnie more. But any hint of weakness would embolden the driver of the truck.
For twenty years, Marcus had lived the policy of never negotiating with terrorists. If he tried to save Lonnie by giving in, thousands could die from the terrorist’s weapon of mass destruction.
The road suddenly opened wider as a broad shoulder expanded on both sides of the pavement. The patrol car on the left lunged forward with a burst of speed until he was parallel to the truck. The trooper attempted to slam sideways into the driver’s side front wheel. Before he made contact, the driver of the truck tapped the brakes. The sudden deceleration suddenly put the patrol car several feet in front of him.
Once the patrol car’s rear wheel was directly in front of the corner of the truck, the terrorist slammed hard to the left, smashing just behind the wheel well and sending the cruiser into an uncontrolled high-speed spin across the frozen pavement.
As the troopers vehicle spun three-quarters of a turn, the truck driver moved over to the left lane. He punched the accelerator again, this time smashing the front driver’s side fender hard enough to send the vehicle into a fresh spin. The Crown Victoria careened into the second patrol car that was still following. The two steel framed vehicles slammed into each other with a loud crash, impacting at a combined speed of nearly one hundred miles per hour. Glass and metal fragments shot through the air, some snapping violently against Marcus’s windshield and the side of the car. The light bar atop one spun through the air like a helicopter blade. It smashed into the rear of Marcus’s cruiser as he zipped past on the shoulder.
The two vehicles ground to a halt in a screech of metal on metal. Neither trooper moved to get out. Marcus radioed back to let the others know what happened and followed on with the pursuit.
At the junction of the Parks and the Sunshine Cutoff in the small town of Sunshine, the two remaining troopers from that post maintained the roadblock that had been set up while the others responded to the north when the suspect had been spotted.
Shin saw the flashing lights as he approached the intersection. The troopers were dragging a length of spike strips out of the back of a car and across the lane when they saw him coming and ran behind their vehicles, weapons in hand.
Marcus felt relief. Finally, they might stop this guy.
The roadblock almost completely covered the entrance to the Sunshine Cutoff—almost. In the left corner of the intersection, there was just enough shoulder to squeeze the truck through. The driver yanked hard to the left twenty feet before hitting the tire-puncturing spikes that would have ended his escape in an explosion of high-speed rubber.
The shoulder was just barely wide enough. The corner of the truck slammed into the tail-end of one of the patrol cars. The impact lifted the car off the ground as the truck plowed through.
He headed west on Sunshine Cutoff, toward the Talkeetna River. Marcus stayed in close pursuit.
Chapter 45
Parks Highway
Sunshine Cutoff
20 December
05:53 Hours
Trooper Wyatt had just begun to awaken from the initial blow when she was jolted by the impact of the collision with the blockade. She smacked the side of her head into the dashboard. A moan of pain escaped her as they roared past the last barricade.
Shin had not heard her moan in the commotion. His focus was on two things: the intensity of this chase, and the excruciating pain in his face, hands, and legs. His frostbitten flesh thawed rapidly in the heated cab of the truck. Every part of his body that had been touched by the minus sixty-five air had been mostly stiff and numb when he entered the truck. The nerve endings and blood vessels that were frozen solid twenty minutes earlier had awoken to a horrible new reality.
The pain of being warm was a thousand times worse than the pain of freezing.
Lieutenant Shin could barely see through eyelids that screamed every time he blinked. His hands felt as though they would explode from the searing agony of destroyed nerve endings that kept trying to inform his brain of the death of his fingers and flesh. Partially operating muscles in his hands and arms were still submitting to his will. With every move he made, his mind shouted curses to the sky.
The road he had turned onto was a newly constructed access road for the local residents who lived on homesteads on the west side of the Talkeetna River. It was a well-maintained sixteen-mile stretch of pavement. It ran toward the river for the first two miles, then turned south and paralleled the river until reconnecting with the Parks. A local heavy equipment company owner who lived at one end plowed it in winter, keeping it clear and the driving easy.
Shin planned to shake the tail, kill whoever it was, if necessary, and return to the highway. He glanced in the mirror. A single trooper cruiser followed close behind him. No more voices chattered on the radio. The troopers had switched frequencies to keep their communication out of his hearing.
Lieutenant Shin Chun Soo alone was the last hope of the People’s Republic of Korea to bring the hated American empire to its knees. He would show them what a truly devoted communist could do. He would show them the power of Juche, the power of one man. No country, no people, and certainly no god could stop a man who desired to win as deeply as did Lieutenant Shin Chun Soo.
He neared the intersection with the highway. Earlier in the year, he had visited a big farmhouse nearby while on a reconnaissance mission. Shin would turn into the circular driveway and try to get the driver of the police cruiser stuck in the snow as he headed back to the road with his four-wheel drive.
The North Korean commando slowed to make the turn. A sudden movement flashed from the passenger side. Shin turned to see a gun. The woman trooper he had thought unconscious pointed her weapon up at him. He jerked his head back just as a blinding flash of light erupted from it. The shot thundered in the confined space. A bullet whipped past his nose and smashed the window next to him. Frozen air rushed in to touch his already painful face.
Shin grabbed at the hand that held the pistol and yanked hard. His grip was unexpectedly weak. The fingers that wrapped around the barrel burned with searing pain as he contacted the metal and met with resistance.
Lonnie Wyatt kicked up at him with one leg. She smashed the heel of her boot into his right knee. The heavy rubber tread made contact with the frostbitten flesh. Shin screamed in pain as the dead, thawed flesh tore open.
Shin turned in rage and grabbed her flailing leg, pulling her with all his might. As he pulled, the rotting flesh of his middle finger split at the knuckle and peele
d from the appendage like an over-ripe tomato skin. The avulsed flesh slid toward the tip, where it bunched up in a bloody mess. Flashing white lines shot across his eyes as the shredded nerve endings sent emergency messages to his brain.
He retracted his hand. Wyatt pulled back and again tried to aim with her pistol. Shin pushed the pain out of his mind and grabbed the weapon from his own lap. His forearm was in mid-swing, bringing the weapon around to shoot the crazed woman, when the truck slammed to a stop. The air bag, which had not deployed in all the collisions with the patrol cars earlier, finally exploded in his face. His weapon arm was pinned between the bag and his own chest
Shin fired his pistol into the bag. It deflated like a burst balloon. Lonnie had banged against the glove box again. Cross-eyed and in a swirl of dizziness, she frantically tried to find the pistol that had fallen from her grip in the crash.
The North Korean lieutenant worked to free his pistol hand from the binding air bag. He wanted to be rid of the woman. The gun in the deflated bag and would not let him bring it around toward her. The pain in his hand and arm convinced him to give up and get out of the truck instead.
Shin climbed out and quickly surveyed his surroundings. The truck had smashed through the wood-framed house. He stood in the living room of the two-story structure.
A figure moved down a flight of stairs to his left. The shadow cast by the headlights revealed a man with a rifle in his hands. Shin spun toward the moving shape, pointed his pistol, and fired three shots. The figure slammed back against the wall and tumbled face forward. The rifle clattered to the bottom of the staircase.
Shin heard a moan in the truck. Eyes wild with rage he turned, raised the pistol and fired three more times into the cab. The body of the woman trooper convulsed violently. Her face grimaced; eyes squeezed shut, lips burst open in a rush of air. All three bullets smashed her chest. She struggled to breath.
Shin squeezed his eyes to focus through his own pain. He raised the pistol, wavering and unsteady. He pulled the trigger again. A spatter of blood shot across the passenger-side door.
