He approached the cabin cautiously, circling around to gain the cover of the aspen grove some fifty yards away. The helicopters were gone.
On reflection, he saw the logic of that. Leaving the machines sitting out overnight in this climate would cause the oil to congeal so that the engines wouldn’t start without auxiliary heat. The pilots would have returned to Silver Hill, or wherever they were based. They would be standing by for a radio call from the gunmen requesting a pickup. How long would their leader wait before he concluded that something had gone wrong and dispatched a helicopter to investigate?
Inside the cabin Alex settled Frederick, sleeping once more, on the bed that he and Pia had positioned by the fireplace. He got the fire going and, sitting next to the boy, tried to decide what to do. Two basic steps: find a secure location to stow Frederick, and find a way to rescue Pia. Those were givens. The problem was to work out a strategy.
With no resources of his own, not even a way to get Frederick to safety, only one course remained open. With Pia’s and the child’s lives at stake, he had no choice but to ask for help from the one person to whom he’d sworn never to turn.
Chapter 25
“CQ, CQ,” Alex called over the cabin’s two-way radio, using the designation that invites anyone within hearing range to respond. He mixed the phonetic alphabet with a number to create a radio call sign. “This is Whiskey Oscar Zero Lima. Can anybody hear me?” He repeated the call endlessly, trying different frequencies and receiving only crackling static in response.
Was he even transmitting? He had retrieved the radio’s microphone from its hiding place in the aspen grove and experimented for more than an hour to undo Jake’s rewiring of the transmitter. His Army training in radios seemed skimpy and remote. He’d probably screwed everything up.
A Texas-twang voice broke through the static and chased away his growing despair. “Whiskey Oscar Zero Lima, this is Papa Alfa Seven Tango. Over.”
“Papa Alfa Seven Tango, I have an emergency and need you to relay for me. Over.”
“Roger, how can I help?”
“Please contact Colonel Matthew Ridgeway Bryson via land line. He’s in Grand Junction, Colorado. Tell him the call is from Alex Bryson.”
“Roger, stand by.”
His father was the last person on earth Alex wanted to ask for help—and the only one who could give it. But what if he wasn’t at home? Even if he was, would he be willing to lend a hand? They had met only twice in the last nine years. At their most recent meeting Alex had been immobilized on a hospital bed, his jaw wired shut, his face swathed in bandages. Wallowing in self-pity and unable to talk, he jotted get lost on a note pad.
“I won’t bother you again,” the colonel replied. He had stalked out.
“Whiskey Oscar Zero Lima, this is Papa Alfa Seven Tango. Over.”
The radio voice snapped Alex out of memory mode. He answered the call.
“I have Colonel Bryson on a land line,” the Texas twang said. “Stand by for a phone patch.”
Alex felt his throat tighten.
“Whiskey Oscar Zero Lima, your phone patch is connected. Go ahead.”
“Colonel, this is . . .” During Alex’s stretch in the Army, the protocol would have been to address each other by rank, but he was no longer Sergeant Bryson. “This is Alex. How do you read me? Over.”
“You’re coming in five-by-five. Go ahead.”
“I have a situation, Colonel. It requires logistical support.”
“You’re still five-by. Lay out your specs.”
Some of Alex’s tension drained away. The colonel might be a stiff-necked SOB, but he knew his only offspring well enough to read the urgency in his voice. The explanation had to be phrased so the radio operator and others who might listen in would not become suspicious and alert authorities. “I need rotary-wing airlift. Time is of the essence, and I would give this a men-only classification. Over.”
Static filled a brief interval. During Alex’s childhood, men-only had meant something strictly between father and son, a secret to be withheld from his mother. Would his father remember and understand that the situation could not be explained over the radio?
“I copy,” the colonel responded shortly. “Give me your coordinates.”
Alex read the longitude and latitude Jake had scrawled on the navigation map. “That’s a rough approximation.”
“Monitor this frequency,” his father ordered. “Out.”
That was it. Colonel Matthew Ridgeway Bryson, hotshot intelligence operative and dealmaker extraordinaire, had taken command. Everybody else was to stand by. Alex thanked the ham operator at Papa Alfa Seven Tango, signed off, and gave the cabin a thorough scrubbing with a cleaning solvent the owners had left under the kitchen sink. Faust’s people would probably retrieve Jake’s body and erase all evidence of his existence, but when the cabin’s owner returned and reported what would be seen as acts of vandalism, the county sheriff might dust for fingerprints. Alex’s prints were in national data files because of his Army stint.
Thinking about his father as he worked, he wondered how much blame he should personally shoulder for their long years of estrangement. His military experience had helped him understand his father’s absence from his mother’s funeral, an absence that had seemed inexcusable to him as a kid. But his father could have made allowances for his youth and tried harder to bridge the gap between them. And he should have accepted Alex’s college decision with a modicum of grace instead of railing at him about West Point. Also, he could have been more understanding about Alex’s enlistment in the Army.
I’m still doing it, Alex thought. Still playing the old blame tapes. His childhood resentment of his father’s absence might have been excusable but not his adult reluctance to make the first move toward reconciliation. He had followed with pride the occasional indication of his father’s professional achievements: a news item about testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, military notices of special awards, senior officers asking if he was related to the Colonel Bryson who had pulled off this or that notable intelligence-gathering feat. And Alex knew his own military career had been monitored and sometimes abetted by his father—a fact Alex had always resented.
His cleaning chores finished, he entertained Frederick while staying alert for noise from the dimly glowing radio receiver. He had no idea when Faust’s people might send a helicopter to find out why those gunmen weren’t in radio contact, but it couldn’t be much longer. He grew increasingly edgy, but less than an hour elapsed before his father’s voice crackled from the receiver again. “Whiskey Oscar Zero Lima, this is Whiskey Echo Niner Victor. Do you read?”
The colonel had commandeered a ham radio. “Roger, Whiskey Echo Niner Victor. Go ahead.”
“A National Guard helicopter unit operates out of Gunnison. One of their pilots is flying a training mission in your sector. If he should sight a stranded civilian, he would be obliged to lend assistance. His ETA is approximately forty-five minutes.”
“Assistance is also needed with tactical planning,” Alex said. “Request rendezvous at earliest. Situation critical.”
“Understood. Upon arrival at Gunnison, check with the National Guard operations officer.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, Colonel. Out.”
With dawn lightening the eastern horizon, Alex chopped the cabin’s charred deck into fuel for two bonfires, using the fire axe he had taken from the wrecked helicopter. He staked the wood on opposite sides of what he deemed the best helicopter landing zone and piled green cedar boughs beside each.
As he alternated between working and entertaining Frederick, he wondered whether the next helicopter he heard would be the National Guard or Faust’s men. If Faust’s goons came first, it would be in force. With no weapons other than his knife and the fire axe, he couldn’t hold them off. He would take Frederick and retreat once more into the frozen wasteland. In the light of day, however, eluding his pursuers was problematic.
The radio cra
ckled to life. A National Guard helicopter pilot asked Alex to key his microphone for thirty seconds to enable a radio-compass fix on his position. Alex complied and explained about the bonfires. He recommended the pilot set down between them. Then he lit the timbers. When they were blazing, he added the cedar boughs to create towers of smoke.
* * *
At the Gunnison Municipal Airport, a National Guard operations officer welcomed Alex. Though middle-aged and wearing civilian clothes, the man’s bearing was unmistakably military. “Bull says you’re to sit tight. If you try to leave before he gets here, we’re supposed to restrain you.”
Alex’s father had earned the nickname Bull Bryson while training as an infantry officer at Fort Benning early in his career. Only his long-time friends used it. That explained how a National Guard helicopter happened to be operating in Alex’s sector. He reflected on that, and on his father’s oft-repeated lecture that friends were one’s ultimate bulwark against catastrophe, as he wiled away time by pacing the ready room with Frederick on his shoulder.
When Frederick wasn’t dozing, he whined. Hungry, Alex supposed. And he missed his mother. “I miss her, too, little guy,” Alex murmured. He tempted the fretting boy with items from the ready room’s vending machine. Frederick rejected them all.
The midday sun had climbed high overhead when a civilian taxi pulled up out front. It waited with idling engine while Alex’s father dashed inside. He and Alex faced off in silence, staring, and Alex’s emotions shifted into overdrive.
During his active military career, his father had seemed invincible. His appearance and bearing had always been impeccable: military posture, uniform wrinkle-free and neatly tailored, hair short and well groomed. He still looked imposing but no longer seemed invincible. His chestnut-brown hair was streaked with gray. It was longer—he needed a haircut—and thinner. He stood as ramrod-straight as ever but had lost weight. Time had erased his face’s smoothness and emphasized the bone structure underneath.
He glanced at Frederick, who slept where Alex had pushed together two lounge chairs to form a makeshift crib. “The kid with you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Frederick twisted on the cushions. He cried out and drifted back into fitful sleep.
The colonel inspected the restless youngster as if looking for defects. “Is he ill?”
“He’s hungry.”
“Why don’t you feed him?”
“This stuff?” Alex gestured toward the vending machine. Its display showed the crackers and candy that Frederick had spurned. “He wants his mother’s breast.”
Colonel Bryson pulled a neatly pressed handkerchief from his pocket and filled its center with a mound of sugar and dry coffee lightener from the coffee bar. He knotted the handkerchief’s fabric so the mixture formed a bulging lump at its center. Then he mixed more of the coffee lightener with hot water and dipped the fabric-encased lump in it. “Here you go, little fellow.” He rubbed it across Frederick’s lips.
Without opening his eyes, Frederick latched on to the warm, moistened ball and began sucking. The colonel hoisted him and spoke over his shoulder as they headed for the waiting taxi. “I have a plane on the civilian side of the field.”
The cabby dropped them near a single-engine Cessna that Alex assumed his father had rented. “What do I need to know?” his father asked after Alex had stowed his rifle, snowshoes, backpack, and skis in a fuselage storage bin and his parka behind the seats.
“Someone’s trying to harm Freddy. They have his mother. I’m going after her.”
“The kid yours?”
“No, sir. Not the way you mean.”
“What’s the legal situation?”
“Law’s on their side. And they have unlimited resources.”
Still holding Frederick, the colonel took a pursed-lips moment to absorb that. “I have to file a flight plan. Where to?”
Alex shrugged. “Do you have to list your passengers?”
“I’ll file as a solo flier bound for Fort Collins.” The colonel passed Frederick to Alex. “Visual flight rules. That way, I can make an unscheduled stop without being detected. You can brief me when we’re airborne.”
In the air, Alex barely finished explaining his situation before physical exhaustion kicked in. He couldn’t plan or even think clearly. Despair pushed him to the raw edge of panic.
“You’ve done fine so far,” his father said, shifting his attention between Alex and the airplane controls. “You need to rest now, regain your perspective. We’ll be airborne for awhile. Try to sleep.”
With a grateful nod, Alex freed himself from the shoulder harness on the copilot seat. He eased his weary frame between the seats and into the cargo space behind them.
Frederick lay there on Alex’s spread-out parka, sleeping peacefully. On the civilian side of the airfield, they had found a vending machine with flavored yogurt. The little guy’s stomach was full, but his sleep-clenched fingers still gripped the ersatz breast Alex’s father had concocted. Alex slipped off his boots and curled himself around the sleeping child in the cramped space. He would close his eyes for just a few minutes, he promised himself.
* * *
A change in atmospheric pressure pulled Alex awake. The sun was low on the horizon, so he had been out for some time. His father had banked the plane and put it into a shallow dive.
Frederick stood in the copilot seat. Lashed to the shoulder harness by the elder Bryson’s belt, he could sit or pull himself erect. On his feet, he could look out the side window. Seated, he could reach for the flight controls but could not touch them. The colonel talked to him as if he were a fellow adult who understood airplanes and navigation. Frederick responded with his characteristic nonsense syllables that sounded like a perfectly comprehensible language if one knew the code.
Alex put a hand on his father’s shoulder. “Where are we?”
“Approaching Greely—I’m dropping below air traffic control radar. Every airport has a landing and take-off log. Given the influence you say these people have, we don’t want to leave that kind of trail.” He leveled off so near the ground that Alex could see drivers inside cars on a highway below. “I’ll set down on a side road near town. I want you and Freddy to hop a Greyhound to Boulder. I’ll meet you there tomorrow in time for breakfast. Pay for your overnight room with cash. No credit card record.”
Alex frowned. “I have money in the bank, but my wallet’s pretty much tapped out.”
“I anticipated that. Parents seldom get emergency calls without money being involved.” The colonel pulled a roll of bills from his pocket. “This is all I could scrape together on short notice.” He also gave Alex a prepaid cell phone and a slip of paper with a phone number. “Memorize the number. It’s in Denver, but calls are automatically forwarded.”
He lived on the western side of the Continental Divide, yet he had a Denver number? “I thought you retired.”
“But I didn’t die. I’ll contact you tomorrow.”
* * *
Alex reached Boulder shortly after dark and checked into an Embassy Suites hotel. He and Frederick had dinner, and he played with the youngster until sleep began to overtake both of them. They stretched out on the bed together, and Alex slept until Frederick awakened him shortly before daylight. Both of them were eager for breakfast when Alex’s father called. The colonel agreed to meet them at a Denny’s restaurant across the street from the hotel.
Alex’s mood lightened as he watched Frederick eat. Seated in a highchair in the restaurant, the child pushed scrambled eggs into his mouth with both hands. But Pia belonged in the picture. An image of her sitting where his father was now, reaching from time to time to wipe errant egg from Frederick’s face or to adjust the plastic bib the restaurant had supplied, stirred his rage anew. I’ll get her back, he vowed silently. For both of us.
Frederick, no longer hungry, began to fidget and fret. The colonel distracted him with teaspoons, handing them to him one by one. Giggling, Frederick tossed them onto t
he floor.
“Have you worked out a strategy?” the colonel asked between tosses.
“Yes, sir,” Alex said. “I know exactly what I’m going to do.”
“I don’t want to hear details. Just enough so I know you have a reasonable chance.” The colonel placed another spoon in Frederick’s hand. “I don’t mind having Freddy for company while you do whatever you think you must. But I need some assurance that you’ll be able to reclaim him.”
Overnight rest had erased Alex’s uncertainty. “If Pia’s at Silver Hill, I’m going to get her. If she isn’t there, I’ll look for her in Peru. She’ll be with Faust, and he won’t be that hard to find.”
The Descent From Truth Page 21
