He spent the rest of the morning ripping plywood off the window wall, Jake helping as much as possible with his wrists bound loosely in front. The men reentered the cabin and found it permeated with the aroma of navy beans simmering in a pot over the fireplace’s heat. Pia served them generous helpings, and Alex announced that he was going hunting. “We have to live off the land. I may as well get started.”
With Jake stretched out on his mattress, his wrists and ankles tethered to the bed, Alex disconnected the microphone from the radio transmitter and buried it in snow under a tree a short distance from the cabin, along with the flare gun and fire axe he had taken from the helicopter. He pocketed the two remaining cartridges from Pia’s rifle. If Jake somehow managed to get free, he would have no means of calling for help and no effective weapons. He wouldn’t dare harm Pia and Frederick, knowing the certain consequences when Alex, fully armed, returned to the cabin.
When Alex was ready to depart for his hunt, Pia held his parka and zipped it for him. Standing on tiptoes, she slipped her arms around his neck and pulled until he bent for a kiss. “Be safe,” she said in a whisper-soft voice.
With a hand under her chin, Alex stared into her eyes. “Underneath that good-old-boy grin, Jake is still Faust’s man. Don’t take any chances while I’m away.”
* * *
Throughout the afternoon, slogging across the snow pack in search of game, Alex wandered ever farther from the cabin. No tracks, no scat, no signs of animals nibbling at the lower branches or the bark of evergreens. It was as if he and his little band were the only creatures living in this frigid isolation.
Late in the day, tired from miles of snowshoeing, he squatted to rest on the trail. Return to the cabin, he decided. Chop a hole in the ice on the lake and rig a hook so Pia and Jake could fish while he hunted. Starting at daylight tomorrow, head out for two days and hunt at a lower altitude. Unless they caught fish, they would exhaust their food supply during his absence, so another fruitless foray was not an option. Not with a hungry woman and child depending on him.
Thinking about Frederick, about how well the boy seemed to relate to him, sparked memories of his own childhood, of good times with his father. Inexorably, his mind progressed to his teen years and their growing alienation. The gulf that had opened between them when his father missed his mother’s funeral became unbridgeable after Alex spurned a West Point slot that his father somehow finagled for him. Colorado State University offered a partial scholarship. He found a part-time job and worked his way through until, in his senior year, a severe case of mononucleosis cost him the job and earned him incomplete grades in all his courses.
Feeling he’d run out of options, he withdrew and enlisted in the Army. He had been a raw recruit coping with his second day of basic training, still reeling from abrupt immersion in military discipline, when his drill instructor marched him to the company orderly room and left him there to face his father.
“You’ve got too much backbone and too little brains,” the elder Bryson said, his face reddening and his neck swelling as he paced the orderly room. He dipped a shoulder to accentuate a point, and his silver eagle insignia of rank glistened in the orderly room’s overhead lighting. “That combination has caused a lot of grief over the years, but it never led you to do anything quite this stupid.”
“I can still graduate,” Alex said. “The Army has a program that—”
His father cut him off. “Instead of living in a barracks with those recruits, you could be leading them. All you had to do was accept your slot at the Point.”
“My grades weren’t good enough for West Point. You pulled strings.”
“Of course I pulled strings. It was the only way to get you in.” His father resumed pacing. “Your grandfather earned his commission in the field. I went through cow-college ROTC. The moment we made field grade, we both ran into a solid wall of West Point graduates looking out for each other.” He stopped pacing and faced Alex. The ribbons on his chest looked like an artist’s rebellion against the monotony of his uniform’s Army green with flat, black trim. Each tiny, colorful ribbon, Alex knew, denoted an award his father had earned. “You could have broken out, been the first Bryson to wear a star.”
“I don’t want to be a general. I plan on becoming an economist.”
His father snorted in disgust. “Well, you got part of what you want. You’re definitely not going to be a general.”
“Dad.” Alex extended a hand toward his father. “If you’ll just—”
“Stand at attention, Private!”
The roared command stunned Alex. He snapped-to the way his forty-eight hours of basic training had conditioned him.
“We’re on a military post and in uniform. I’m Colonel Bryson, you’re Private Bryson. It’s a relationship you chose. Be man enough to honor it.”
“Yes, sir. Will there be anything else, sir?”
“You’re dismissed.”
Alex executed an about-face and marched from the orderly room. They did not speak again until his father, recently retired, visited him in the hospital eight years later.
The confrontation had stayed with Alex. It colored his every action, led him to reject easy alternatives and look for opportunities to assert his manhood. He needed to show his father and himself that he could make decisions, that he was more than equal to anything the Army threw at him.
And they’d tossed plenty his way. He proved adept at hand-to-hand combat, became an expert with small arms and a master at evasion and survival in rugged terrain. The more he excelled, the more the Army demanded. They taught him to kill with a knife, a gun, his bare hands. Repeatedly, they put him in harm’s way and rewarded his survival by giving him more training and injecting him back into kill-or-be-killed environments. When he’d become a coiled-spring engine of destruction, a martial automaton that his mother would not have recognized, the Army, too, had rejected him.
A pattern in the gray, late-afternoon sky caught his attention and pulled his thoughts away from the past. He was on a ridge that gave him a view across the valley where the cabin was located, and the sight he saw there obliterated all other concerns. From the direction of the cabin, smoke boiled into the sky, a plume far too large to be from the chimney. At perhaps a thousand feet the plume met heavier air, flattened, and spread. It formed a skinny ashen tower capped by a dense, cloud-like mass.
Nightmare visions of Frederick and Pia trapped in the blazing cabin sent him loping across the snow pack as fast as his snowshoes permitted. It kept him moving, sucking giant gulps of frigid air that felt like fire in his lungs. Please God, he prayed silently, don’t let them be trapped inside.
Chapter 23
With exhaustion dogging him, his lungs pleading for more oxygen, Alex pressed full-tilt for the cabin. He was less than two miles away when overhead noise, the chilling thump, thump, thump of helicopter rotors churning the still, cold air, pulled his gaze skyward.
Cover! He veered into hiding under a stubby cedar tree. Seconds later, the high-pitched whine of turbine engines assaulted his ears. Three helicopters, traveling fast and low. They swept directly overhead.
Furious with himself for wandering so far and being gone so long, he resumed his headlong dash for the cabin. The helicopter turbines fell silent. They were on the ground, and he was at least fifteen minutes away.
The engines began winding up again as he reached a stand of aspen saplings within sight of the cabin, the last cover before fifty yards of open space that the cabin’s owner had cleared as a fire break. The helicopters lifted off moments before he cleared the trees and raced toward the cabin.
Confusion mixed with alarm as he approached. The cabin wasn’t burning; the smoke came from the lakeside deck. He found still-smoldering remnants of mattresses and couch cushions piled there. The deck’s wood planking had charred but refused to ignite. The cabin’s thick, hardwood outer door was scorched, the stone walls and tin roof smoke-blackened. But the fire hadn’t breached those barriers.
/> He stripped off his snowshoes and, gripping his rifle, kicked open the door. “Pia,” he called, forcing sound through his dread-tautened throat.
Only silence answered.
No one in the living room. Furnishings intact except for the couch cushions that were smoldering on the deck. In the kitchen, signs of a struggle: broken dishes, the table shoved askew, an overturned chair. By the chair, strips of a torn-up bed sheet, as if someone had been tied there. Dark stains were splattered waist-high on a wall. Blood, his frazzled mind said. Additional splotches formed a trail across the living room and into the master bedroom.
Fear of what he might find put lead in his legs as he followed the bloodstains through the open bedroom door. The rifle he had taken from the security man at Silver Hill, the weapon whose two remaining bullets he had pocketed as a security measure before leaving the cabin, lay just inside. Strands of hair clung to the top edge of the rifle’s stock, pasted there with what could only be blood. Jake lay on the bedroom floor, sprawled on his side near the two-way radio that sat atop a corner desk.
Alex turned the limp body and felt for a pulse. Nothing. He checked the other bedroom and found it empty. Where were Pia and Frederick? His empty stomach pumped bile as the answer forced itself upon him. The helicopters.
The only room he had not checked was the bathroom. He found it empty. Someone had scrawled a word across the mirror’s face, using what looked like blood. Reddish-black letters declared, INDIANS.
Indians? What was she trying to tell him? Maybe the message was from the men who had taken her away. A warning, or a macabre joke?
Back in the master bedroom, he spotted the navigation map he had brought with them from the wrecked helicopter. It lay open on the table by the two-way radio. Two naked wires protruded side-by-side from the transmitter. He touched them together, and the transmitter’s radio-frequency meter swung across the dial, indicating emission of a carrier wave. The evidence fell into place.
Alex had taken away the microphone to render the radio transmitter inoperative, but he had underestimated Jake’s ingenuity. By manipulating the naked wires like a telegraph key, the pilot must have sent a series of short and long carrier waves received by listeners as the dots and dashes of Morse Code. Using the map, Jake had no doubt radioed the cabin’s approximate longitude and latitude. The fire had been a signal to guide the helicopters in.
Willing his racing heart to slow, Alex mentally reconstructed events. Jake had somehow gotten loose. He and Pia must have fought in the kitchen. He had bested her and tied her there, then built the bonfire. Pia had slipped her bonds, caught him sending the message, and clubbed him before the helicopters arrived.
Back outside, Alex circled the cabin. The pattern that emerged from the jumble of boot prints told a story of desperate flight and relentless pursuit.
It looked like three or four men had been in each helicopter. Some of the tracks led from the landing site directly to the cabin’s front door, others circled to the rear deck. The men had left through the rear door of the cabin, milled around just beyond the deck, then headed toward the lake. The horde of outbound prints stopped some fifty yards from the cabin and angled back in the direction of the helicopter landing site. Where the boot prints turned, a single set of snowshoe tracks led on across the frozen lake.
Guessing the helicopters were on their way, Pia must have strapped on her snowshoes and set out cross-country with Frederick in her arms. An effort as gutsy as it was futile.
The pursuers apparently decided to run her down with the helicopters instead of chasing her on foot. In open country during daylight, her snowshoe trail would be easy to follow from the air. Like dogs hounding a deer, the helicopters would chase her until she collapsed.
He needed to focus, to think this through. If he was going to do anything, be of any use to her, he had to control his despair and his rage. He had to think, plan.
Back in the bathroom, he studied the word scrawled on the mirror: INDIANS. Who were the Indians? What did the message have to do with what had happened?
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered when it hit him.
“That is where I would hide,” she’d said when he pulled loose flooring from the storage bin they had found in the room under the deck. “If this were your Old West and hostile Indians were attacking, I would hide in there and wait for you to rescue me.”
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered again, and headed for the under-deck enclosure. Feverishly, he kicked aside firewood that blocked the door, and flung it open.
Halfway to the bin, he heard Frederick’s muffled howls. The scared and angry screams assaulted him full blast when he lifted the bin’s heavy lid.
Frederick hauled himself erect. Bouncing up and down in fury, he worked his legs like pistons.
“Freddy,” Alex said as he lifted the boy out, “you’ve got one hell of a mother.” She had hidden her child and left a clue that no one else could decipher. Knowing Alex was due back anytime, knowing he’d left for the hunt with only three cartridges for his rifle, she lured the invaders away.
Rotor noise, barely discernable from beyond the lake, raised hair on the back of his neck. The sound grew rapidly louder. They must have caught Pia and decided to come back and search the cabin.
He raced back up the stairs and into the cabin, snatched the second rifle from Jake’s bedroom, and loaded it with the two cartridges he carried in his pocket. A total of five shots, and he had his utility knife. Not enough to hold off the seven or eight men whose tracks he had seen earlier. He would have to retreat into the mountains. He dashed to the kitchen and took stock of the paltry provisions: three cans of condensed soup left. He stuffed them into the baggy pockets of his thermal trousers.
A glance out a window revealed that one helicopter was gaining altitude and heading northwest, in the general direction of Silver Hill. His gut twisted at the thought that Pia was on board, being ferried to wherever Faust waited for her.
The other two helicopters were hovering over their previous landing zone, descending slowly. Coming back to see if in their haste they had overlooked anything important, he decided. Hoping to find clues to his whereabouts.
He turned from the window. As he retreated to the other side of the cabin, the helicopter noise wound down to silence; they were on the ground. The gunmen on board would form a skirmish line and advance toward the cabin. Those on the flanks would circle around to surround it. He climbed out through a window on the side opposite the helicopter landing zone. Murmuring softly to placate Frederick, he paused to snap on his snowshoes, then headed off at right angles to the cabin. He had about fifty yards of open ground to cover. Could he make it to the tree line before the gunmen spotted him and opened up with their rifles?
No rifle fire, but a flashlight beam appeared behind him. It pierced the thickening darkness and arced in broad sweeps across the snowscape. Clutching Frederick to his chest, he hustled to reach the trees before the light centered on him. The beam focused on his tracks and began moving along his trail. It splashed on the tree line as he entered, but he didn’t believe they had actually seen him.
With darkness settling in, and scattered trees for partial shelter, they would be unable to follow him from the air. But they would chase him on foot. He would be hard-pressed to outdistance them with Frederick in his arms, and clear skies meant no fresh snow to cover his tracks. The wind was kicking up and would eventually fill the tracks, but it would also drop the chill factor to a dangerous level.
Realizing that he was near the tree he had used as a marker when he hid the downed helicopter’s fire axe and flare gun, he paused long enough to dig them up. The flare gun, made of bright orange plastic and shaped much like a conventional pistol, fired cartridges that looked like twelve-gauge shotgun shells. One was loaded in the breech and three more were taped to the barrel. Not much of a weapon, but better than nothing. And the fire axe would be deadly at close quarters. He pushed the axe handle under his belt and slipped the flare gun into a pock
et on his parka.
Plodding through the stand of trees, he reached a stream, frozen now, that had cut a channel. Fighting exhaustion, he made his way upstream, concentrating on deep, regular breathing to pump up his oxygen supply. The gunmen would have to slow down, keep checking his snowshoe prints. And he was in good shape, used to long-distance snowshoeing.
His first challenge was to outdistance them. His second, to survive a night in the open with a year-old child. He could fashion an impromptu snow cave to keep the wind at bay, but how cold would it get overnight?
Go back to the wrecked helicopter, he decided. It would shelter them from the wind, and it carried flammable liquids that he could burn for heat. Its oil would be too congealed by the cold to drain, but maybe hydraulic fluid.
They had crash-landed at a substantially higher elevation than the cabin. That meant he was climbing for most of the way back to the chopper. And sparse oxygen at this altitude made the work twice as hard.
His reference point for finding the wreck was the sheer side of the mountain they had barely missed when they crash-landed. The mountain’s face loomed high enough to be seen from the valley where they found the cabin, and he remembered that the helicopter had come down between the mountain and a drop-off into a deep ravine. With those landmarks as guides, he found his way to the partially camouflaged wreck. None too soon; if he stumbled and fell, he was not certain he had enough strength left to get back on his feet.
The Descent From Truth Page 19
