“Yes sir, we’d been paying close attention to her possible whereabouts. But it was some luck that we found her . . . Yes sir, well, maybe some skill as well, thank you, sir . . . Yes sir, Psy Ops command, at Alpha HQ. On the way, we’ll be there in half an hour.”
This guy is not too bright, thought Trance. He has a Glock, which ups his IQ about forty points, but he’s got an ego, which probably knocks it down about the same. Just pay attention, she told herself. This isn’t good, but they clearly don’t know where Vern and Perry are yet.
The car twisted through some mountain corners, and came to a brief stop at a gate of some kind, where the driver simply said, “Whitestream Security,” and got a grunt in return. They drove a few more minutes, and then stopped. The agent with the Glock draped the blanket over her head and lifted her from the car, squeezing her obliques a little more than he needed to in the process. He led her inside and through a hallway, depositing her on a folding chair before taking off the blanket.
Trance took a look around. The room was nondescript—a light green wall, a bookshelf, an American flag, a picture of the president. She knew instantly where she was, right down to the square meter. No need to have counted minutes on the freeway—this was an upstairs room in the barracks at the Ethan Allen Firing Range, Vermont’s only real military facility. More to the point, it was the place where America’s biathletes came to train—she’d spent every summer of her girlhood roller-skiing on the concrete track that ran through the woods, and she’d raced here a dozen times a winter. The year she’d gone to the Olympics, this was where she’d raced the qualifier, blazing through the course she knew like the back of her hand. Yes, she thought, these guys were none too bright. They might as well have brought her to her mother’s kitchen. But she looked around, blinking, pretending she hadn’t seen this very room a hundred times before—in biathlon season it was where they put the massage tables, rubbed away the lactic acid that gathered in calf and quad. She’d lain on her stomach and stared at this same flag, this same presidential portrait, albeit with a different face. She felt at home, as at home as you could be when your hands were cuffed and a man sat on the other side of the desk idly fingering a very powerful handgun.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in a very secure place, that’s all you need to know,” the man said. “That, and that if you cooperate nothing will happen.”
“Am I under arrest?” she asked. “Do I need a lawyer?”
“Like your friend Sylvia? Maybe she can spare you one of her posse? No, we don’t arrest traitors. You’re an . . . enemy combatant. And frankly, everyone thinks you’re dead, which means we can do pretty much what we’d like with you. I mean, it’s not like you could die again, is it?” He smiled.
You’re showing off, Trance thought. But she didn’t say anything.
The door opened, and another man walked in, this one in a blue shirt and yellow tie with an open Kevlar vest that said “Whitestream” front and back. “Hi, Dave,” he said. “And this would be our new friend?”
“Chet, meet Trance Harper. Olympic gold medalist, renowned sharpshooter, and traitor to her country. Trance, Chet is a psychological specialist—he can help deprogram you.” Trance just looked at the two of them and didn’t even bother shaking her head.
“Dave, why don’t you leave us alone for a few minutes so the two of us can get better acquainted?” said Chet. He pulled his Glock out of the vest while Dave picked his up and walked from the room.
“Sorry for Dave,” he said once the door had closed. “Psychologically speaking, he’s a little overexcited. You’re a big catch!”
I hope they’ve got the bright ones out doing something important, Trance thought.
“Now, Trance, we need you to do a little assignment for us, just make a little video to help us out,” he said.
She looked at him steadily, without saying a word, which seemed to disconcert him, because he began to talk a little faster.
“Just a short video. Not a long video. Just a few minutes. It says in your profile that you don’t like to talk in public. I get that. I didn’t like to speak in public either, till I joined Toastmasters International, which I recommend. But this will be easy. We’ll give you a script. You can add your own words if you want, but you don’t need to—you can just read off the paper.”
Trance stared at him a minute more, and finally said:
“Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘Why?’”
“I mean, why should I? I went for a run, your friend Dave tackled me and put me in a car at gunpoint, and brought me here to . . . some mysterious place. Why should I help you?”
Chet thought for a moment, as if the question hadn’t really occurred to him before. “I guess because—well, I guess because we’ll shoot you if you don’t.”
That’s the first smart thing anyone’s said since I got here, Trance thought. Not exactly Psy Ops, but persuasive. She looked up at the man and said: “Okay.”
Mrs. Barclay sat on the bed, watching TV with her silent friend. “I’ve got a Big Butt, but you don’t see me Working It,” she said. “What’s wrong with these people, Martha?”
Vern and Perry sat at the desk, making a series of phone calls to reporters—Perry had set up a new skein of VoIP lines, and he figured they were probably safe if they didn’t talk too long. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” said Vern. “Trance isn’t safe, not until we get the word out that they have her. Right now they can do anything they want with her—she might as well be at Guantánamo.”
“Hello, Louis?” he said. “Vern Barclay . . . Yeah, thanks, I thought it went well too . . . Look, they’ve got Trance, they got her last night, off the street in Montpelier . . . No, I don’t know who ‘they’ is, some kind of fed . . . Louis, you’re the reporter, that’s why I’m calling you.”
“Will he write a story?” asked Perry.
“We don’t have much for him to go on,” said Vern. “A call from someone saying he’s Vern Barclay telling him Trance Harper has been kidnapped by an unknown someone in a black car. But we don’t actually need him to write the story, we just need a few of them calling the authorities to check it out. Just so they know they can’t disappear her no questions asked.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” said Mrs. Barclay. “In fact, I think you better come watch the news.”
Their old friend Horace LaRossette was standing on the Church Street Mall in Burlington, lazy flakes of snow softly dropping around him. “Two big stories this evening in Vermont,” he said. “First, snow has begun to fall, and our Channel 3 YouCrew WeatherWatchers team is warning this will be the real thing. And fugitive Trance Harper has turned up alive—and not only that, she’s turned. Here’s a videotape just released by state authorities, exclusively to WVTV.”
Trance’s face filled the screen. She looked tired and tense, but fine. She began to talk, glancing down regularly at the paper in front of her.
“Hello, Vermonters,” she read, in the wooden tone she reserved for public speaking. “I would like to thank you all for your support and prayers. I am sure that they helped me escape unharmed from the terrorists that have been holding me. Those terrorists made me say things I did not believe, and ma—malign the country that I love. They are very dangerous and I hope they will be captured soon so their reign of terror will cease. They have misled many Vermonters into supporting their call for an independent Vermont, but I know any of you who go to town meeting next week will do the right thing and vote against terrorism. I hope many of you will join me and the governor tomorrow at the new retractable-roof facility off Exit Fourteen in Burlington for the Salute to America at six p.m.”
Trance looked down at her papers, and then up at the camera, suddenly speaking with more animation. “I’ve spent my whole life in Vermont, and I love the whole state: from Underhill to Richmond, from Jericho to Bolton, and everywhere in
between, along all the paths and trails of my girlhood. Please join me in helping to protect this place from, uh, terrorism. And thank you again for all your prayers.”
The screen flashed back to Horace—the snow was falling fast enough that it had begun to accumulate on the shoulders of his trench coat. “Last night it was Vern Barclay on the radio, and today Trance Harper on video—it seems safe to say they survived the shootout at their hiding place that we carried exclusively on Channel 3, but it also seems safe to say that their terror cell is breaking apart. We’ll have more reaction later, but first let’s switch to the Channel 3 Extreme Weather Center Emergency Desk, where Kitty Clarkson will have today’s Channel 3 Youcast so You can plan Your day.”
Kitty was pointing to a radar map that showed the entire Northeast about to be swallowed by a gaping maw of cloud, but Vern took the clicker and muted the sound. “At least we know she’s safe, and at least we know where she is—now we can go to work,” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘know where she is’?” asked Perry.
“She sent a pretty strong signal,” said Vern. “Underhill and Jericho and Bolton and Richmond aren’t actually the ‘whole State of Vermont.’ In fact, they border each other, and in the middle is the exact place where Trance Harper spent half her life, the Ethan Allen Firing Range, where the National Guard has let the biathlon team train since before my time. For Vermont it’s pretty well guarded, but it’s still fourteen thousand acres, most of it woods. We’ll get her out—we’ve just got to start rounding up the right people.”
He went to the window and opened the curtain a bit—in the dusk, snow was coming down hard. It looked like the flakes were hurrying to get out of the sky so the next ones would have room to fall. He’d never in his life watched the snow come down without feeling unreasonably giddy—the world turning itself slippery and white and quiet and fast. And tonight it felt especially sweet. On their own, he figured he and his friends probably weren’t much of a match for the feds. But the feds hadn’t spent half their lives on skis. He remembered skiing in Oslo in the early ’60s, after some kind of world junior championship. He’d stayed on a few days, crisscrossing the trails in the Oslomarka at the edge of town and one day he’d fallen into an easy stride behind an older man. When he stopped to drink some water, Vern stopped with him, and found that he knew a little English from his days in the Resistance. The Americans had dropped weapons from airplanes far back in the woods, he said, and all winter long the skiers had hauled them back to the farmhouses on the edge of town.
“The Germans owned the cities,” the man said. “But the Germans—the Germans can’t really ski. So we owned everywhere else.”
27
Six men were gathered in the parking lot of the On the Rise Bakery in Richmond when Vern and Perry pulled in, fishtailing in the heavy snow; at least a foot had fallen overnight, and the storm was deepening. The men were eating fresh bagels and scones—they held out the sack as Vern and Perry stepped out into the cold.
“Coach.”
“Hey, Coach.”
“Good to see you, Coach.”
“Good to see you boys, and thanks for coming,” said Vern.
“I was glad you called,” said one, who was sitting on the hood of a Subaru. “Once I listened to Trance give that roadmap, I was about to round up the boys and see what we could do.”
“Let’s hope they didn’t figure out what she was doing,” said Vern. “Perry, this is Mike, and Mike, and that over there is Mike too, though we call him Replay, on account of he shoots like a dream but skis in slow motion.”
“Much faster now that I’ve retired and gone on an all-scone diet,” he said.
“I’m sure,” said Vern. “And this is Steve, and Burke, and Gardner. Guys, this is Perry. Doesn’t ski, but he does something better. Computers.”
“And music,” said Gardner. “I’ve got your compilation CD on my iPod. I play it when I work out.”
“Thanks,” said Perry. “Maybe I should go,” he added, nervous to be standing out in the open for the first time in weeks, even though the visibility was down to a dozen feet at best.
“Drive carefully,” said Vern. “Stick in the right lane of the Interstate, and stay at forty, and you’ll be okay. When you get to the university, go where I told you in the journalism building. There’ll be a door open, and a phone ready to use, and an actual fast Internet. Don’t worry too much about them tracing your calls—I think we’re going to be giving them enough to worry about today.”
Before Perry left, Vern pulled eight squat rifles from the trunk of the car and handed them out.
“I’ve got my gun with me,” said Burke. “What the heck is this thing?”
“These things shoot rubber bullets,” said Vern. “The Montpelier police use them for crowd control, and a friend of mine borrowed them this morning from the storage locker. Hopefully the day will pass without any riots and they’ll never know they’re missing.”
The men were examining the weapons curiously—sighting, playing with safeties. “These are ugly,” said Burke. “Why aren’t we using our regular rifles?”
“Well,” said Vern, “because I really don’t want you guys shooting actual bullets at federal officers. That’s a serious crime, the kind that lets you sit in prison for forty years. And I don’t think it will do our little movement much good either—shooting never seems to help, as the governor found out when they blew up that house in Starksboro.”
“Yeah, were you staying in that house or what?” asked Replay.
“Not important,” said Vern. “What’s important is, the rubber bullets these things fire are about the size of a roll-on deodorant. Now, the feds will be on snowmobiles—Arctic Cat X-700s to be precise. Since they’re military, they don’t have any environmental regs to follow, none of those fancy silencing mufflers. Just the old-fashioned twin pipes. And our old friend Lou at L. C. Greenwood and Sons assures me that one of these rubber bullets plugging one half of the exhaust should be enough to bring it to a halt while they flood the engine. Get both pipes and it’s a guarantee.”
“How accurate are these things?” asked one of the Mikes.
“Not accurate at all,” said Vern. “They’re designed to be fired into a crowd of protesters from forty yards away if you don’t care which protester you hit. You’re going to have to be close to the snowmobile if you want to have a chance. And here’s the thing—they’re going to be firing at you, and I’m pretty sure they’re going to be using real ammunition. This isn’t like biathlon—your targets never shot back. So you have to be careful. And quick. But you always were quick.”
“Except for Replay,” said Burke.
“Now with scone power,” he replied.
The men, in two Subaru station wagons with ski pods on the roof, followed a plow most of the way to the firing range. Vern sat in the backseat of one, cap pulled low over his brow. When they got to the first gate, Mike opened his window and leaned out.
“Hi, Howie,” he said. “How about this snow? First chance to practice all season.”
“Hi, boys—you go on in, but they’re closing the whole place down in two hours—snow emergency,” the fellow said. “Did you see Trance on TV yesterday? I’m glad she’s okay.”
They drove another mile or two on the entrance drive, till they were near the more heavily guarded interior gate, and then they stashed the vehicles behind a storage shed, and pulled on ski boots.
“Blue wax day,” said Vern, handing around a little canister of the stuff that lets skis stick on the uphills and slide on the downs. “Temperature won’t get above twenty-five, and this snow couldn’t be fresher. Here’s the plan, such as it is. I’m pretty sure they’ve got her up in the conference rooms above the main barracks—they’ll wait up there till it’s time to go down to the governor’s shindig. We’ll go up the main trail till we see trouble, and then you guys split in three pairs and tr
y to keep them occupied. I’m not carrying a weapon—I’m going to put Trance’s skis on my back so she’ll have some way to get out of there fast.”
“Frontal assault?” said Steve. “You don’t want to take the back trails?”
“I’m guessing they’re not expecting us, and I’m guessing our disguise might get us most of the way there,” said Vern. “I mean, we sort of look like a ski team.” All seven had stripped down to green spandex tops, with a map of Vermont in gold across the chest. The other six took out their rifle slings, and replaced their light and accurate biathlon rifles with the police weaponry, which looked like toys by comparison. Vern stuck on a knapsack, with side straps to keep Trance’s skis in place, and the seven of them struck out along the road. The snow was so deep already that skiing would have been hard work except for the set of tire tracks from some truck that had driven in perhaps an hour earlier. Two inches of snow had fallen since, but the track made a solid enough base to keep the skiing fast. They naturally formed two lines, three in one and four in the other, and set off at an easy tempo.
Easy for six of them, anyway, who were only a few years from high-level competition. A stiff pace for Vern, who was in his seventies and hadn’t moved in weeks. But the sheer pleasure of skiing made up for the tightness in his chest—they kicked forward more or less in unison, a fourteen-legged animal covering ground fast, with only the quiet hiss of ski on snow and the small clouds of breath to mark their passage. It’s all about efficiency, Vern kept reminding himself—it was always his mantra for the first ski of the year. As much glide from every push as you can get. No friction.
But gravity still applied, and the hill began to steepen as they approached the second, interior fence, this one topped with concertina wire. There was another gate, and they could see the guard in the small shack watching them with growing curiosity as they kept their steady pace in his direction. “Just keep going,” puffed Vern. “Don’t even slow down.” The guard came out of his hut to talk as they approached, but without breaking stride they crouched, their momentum letting them glide under the stop barrier, and then resumed their stride on the other side.
Radio Free Vermont Page 13
