02 Avalanche Pass

by John Flanagan

  “Twin fifty caliber Brownings, slaved to radar tracking, and a dozen or so Stinger missiles,” he said, by way of an explanation to the unspoken question in Markus’s eyes. “Just in case you should be talking to anyone from outside, I want you to know that no choppers are going to be coming up this valley.”

  He paused and Markus looked at him. Then, with a cold glint of a smile in his eye, Kormann corrected himself.

  “At least they might come up the valley, but they sure as hell won’t be going back down if they do,” he said. Markus nodded somberly. The twin mount heavy caliber machine guns might seem to be old technology in this era of missiles and electronic warfare, but he knew that combat in Vietnam and the Middle East had proved the effectiveness of radar-directed small arms fire against attacking aircraft—particularly slow movers like helicopters. He glanced around the roof and saw another twin fifty mount being installed at the opposite side. Between them, the two gun installations covered all approaches to the hotel. And in case there were any gaps, the shoulder-launched Stingers—heat-seeking AA missiles—would fill them in quickly enough.

  Evidently, Markus realized, their few moments of communication were over. Kormann shoved him roughly in the direction of the northern parapet. The duty manager shrugged and began walking in the direction indicated. Shivering in his thin blazer jacket and shirt, he walked toward the four-foot high parapet at the edge of the roof. He noted that Kormann had had the foresight to slip on a warm-looking parka. Markus stopped at the parapet, Kormann a few paces behind him.

  “Now what?” asked the duty manager. Dully, he looked out over the magnificent view. From here, you could see the massive peaks of the Wasatches all around them, and the heaving panorama of mountains that stretched out before them, all the way back to Salt Lake City. The city itself wasn’t visible from this point but at night, when the weather was clear or when there was a low overcast, you could see the loom of the city’s lights on the horizon, or reflected on the underbelly of the clouds.

  Kormann’s eyes were searching the valley below them, looking for something in the near distance. He found the single road that wound tortuously along the canyon and down to Salt Lake City. It was the only route in and out of the valley and its blacktop surface showed up clearly among the white snow cover of the rest of the terrain. It was a stark black ribbon among the shadowed white. His eyes narrowed briefly as he searched along the road, then came to rest on what he was looking for. He pointed.

  “There he is. Take a look,” he told Markus.

  The duty manager followed the direction indicated by the pointing arm and made out the tiny yellow shape of the shuttle bus crawling along Canyon Road. In the clear, cold air, he thought he could even make out a thin, ragged line of black diesel smoke drifting in the air behind the old bus. He wondered why Kormann had brought him up here to see this, then realized that the terrorist was speaking again, virtually mirroring his own thoughts.

  “Now, Ben, I wanted you to see this. Just like I wanted you to see those fifties over there.” He gestured briefly to the machine gun installations behind them, then looked back to the bus. “Because, Ben, I want you to be very clear in your own mind that we’re not just fooling around, blowing smoke up here. You get it?”

  Markus nodded doubtfully. He could understand the message implicit in the machine guns and the missiles. What the bus was going to tell him, he had no idea. Still, the edge of mockery in Kormann’s tone grated on his nerves. He glanced at the other man with hatred in his eyes.

  “You’ve killed one of my people, you bastard. I’m hardly likely to think you’re fooling around.”

  Kormann had taken the walkie-talkie from his belt. He was in the act of changing the transmission frequency when Markus spoke. He froze, his hands still on the little radio, then stepped a pace closer to Markus, his face only a few inches away.

  “Never let your emotions get the better of you, Ben,” he said in a dangerously low voice. “Particularly when you don’t have the power to back them up. Remember, you’re alive—and you really don’t have to be.”

  He held the duty manager’s gaze with his as he let the last words die in the cold air. The threat behind them was all too obvious and eventually, Markus felt his own eyes dropping from the other man’s. Kormann nodded, satisfied.

  “Just speak nice and do as you’re told, Ben, and you might survive. Okay?”

  Markus nodded, hating himself for his abject acquiescence, yet knowing there was nothing else he could do. Kormann returned his attention to the little radio, selected the new channel and pressed the talk button.

  “Kormann. You read?” he said. Markus heard the tiny, muted sound of an answering voice in the earphone against the other man’s head. It was too faint for him to make out the actual words.

  “How long?” Kormann asked and again there was an indecipherable answer.

  “When you’re ready,” Kormann said into the radio, then clipped it back to his belt. He glanced up and saw Markus’s eyes on him. He nodded toward the pass.

  “Watch the bus, Ben, not me,” he said, deceptively mild in his tone.

  Markus turned back to the road below them. He had lost sight of the bus as they had been talking. Now he traced the thin, winding line of the blacktop until he found it again—a tiny yellow beetle struggling along, laboring under the massive, snow-laden cliffs of Avalanche Pass—one of the steepest sections of the mountain.

  “Any time… now…” Kormann said, half under his breath. Sensing that something was about to happen, Markus riveted his attention on the old bus, straining to see more clearly, to make out more detail. But the dying light and the distance defeated him.

  Then there was a movement. Not from the bus, but from the cliff face high above it. A sudden fountain of white geysered upward, then another and another, in a line along the rim of the massive cliff, until there were six in all—the snow cloud of the first slowly drifting away on the light breeze as the last erupted into the late afternoon sky. The skin around Markus’s eyes tightened as he squinted, trying to see more clearly. There was a small halo of drifting snow hanging above the cliff… then a ragged black line zigzagged across the snow, following the line of the fountains they had just seen. Then, for a brief space, nothing.

  He glanced down. The tiny yellow bus was directly below the spot on the mountain where the black line scarred the white of the cliff face. Then, dimly to his ears came the reverberating echoes of six short, deep reports.

  “Oh Jesus…” Markus said softly, the horror of it all suddenly registering as he heard that familiar sound. It was the sound of explosive charges placed in the snow. Markus heard it most days this time of year as the ski patrol on Snow Eagles found those unstable areas of the mountain and brought them down before they could avalanche out of control.

  The zigzag gap was widening visibly and now he could sense movement in that mass of white as the entire face of the cliff, millions of tons of snow and loose rock, bulged outward below the line of the explosions and began to slide away from the tenuous grip that had held it there for the past three months of winter.

  Now it was a massive, moving wall of snow that thundered down the near vertical slope of the cliff, dwarfing the tiny yellow shape below it. In the mass of it all he could see the dark shapes of trees and rocks, tiny against the ever-growing, roiling mass. Flung snow stood clear and stark above it, like spray above a giant wave, and the avalanche was growing ever-wilder, ever-bigger, feeding on the mountain, devouring it, destroying it and everything in its path as the entire mountain surged on a downward slide.

  The deep voice reached him now, a thundering roar that he could almost feel in the pit of his belly, at the precise moment that the massive wall of snow and ice and rock swept over the road, obliterating the bus and the sixty people inside it in an instant, then sweeping on into the valley below the road, unchecked by the tiny obstacle.

  Markus watched in silent horror, staring fixedly at the spot where the bus had disappeared,
hopelessly willing it to emerge from the mass of snow and debris that had overwhelmed it—and knowing at the same time that it would never happen. The bus was no longer there. Crushed and flattened like a discarded tin can, it was rolling underneath the moving mass of the avalanche, buried deep in the snow and rock that continued to cascade down the mountain into the valley below.

  “Now perhaps it’s time we told someone what’s happening up here,” Kormann said. There was a note of satisfaction in his voice that woke a dark instinct within the pleasant-featured young manager. In that moment, he wanted to see the terrorist leader dead.

  FOURTEEN

  THE OVAL OFFICE

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON D.C.

  1800 HOURS, EASTERN TIME

  SATURDAY, DAY 1

  President Lowell C. Gorton looked around at the serious faces that surrounded the coffee table.

  “Hostages?” he said, the disbelief clear in his voice. “In Utah?”

  Morris Tildeman, director of the National Security Agency, nodded confirmation. “I’m afraid that’s right, Mr. President,” he said. At least, Gorton thought, he had the grace to look concerned about the whole thing. He didn’t like the NSA head and he knew the feeling was reciprocated. That was the problem when you inherited a job like the presidency. You had to accept the functionaries and assistants chosen by your predecessor—at least for the first six months or so. Then you could begin to make changes—slowly and deliberately. Tildeman would be the first of his. But that watershed moment was still two months away.

  Gorton had inherited the office when its previous incumbent had been stopped dead, three-quarters of a mile into his regular two-mile morning swim in the White House pool. There had been no warning. President Adam Lindsay Couch had been as fit as a bull—a relatively young man at forty-six, an athlete, a former Green Beret and a fitness fanatic.

  Unfortunately, his fitness regime did nothing to protect him against the thin-walled artery that suddenly burst in his brain. By the time his shocked Secret Service guards, floundering fully dressed in the chest deep water of the pool, had reached him, he was dead, his eyes staring in horror at the last thing he had seen—the tiled pattern on the bottom.

  And so Gorton had acceded to the presidency. It was a pity that the very qualities that had made him an ideal Number Two for Couch now were so inappropriate for the Number One position in the world. Gorton gave the appearance of being mature and thoughtful, a man who would consider his options before speaking or acting intemperately. This had given the Couch–Gorton ticket, or, as some unkind wits called it, the Couch–Potato ticket, the necessary balance in a political campaign.

  In fact, while Gorton appeared to be mature, thoughtful and analytical, he was in reality elderly, querulous and indecisive. As vice president, those failings hadn’t really mattered too much. After all, about the only thing a VP was required to do these days was turn up on election day and raise the winning president’s fist in victory. As president, it was all too often necessary to do something. To make a decision. To take a stand. And none of these were things that Gorton did well. Now he was faced with the first real crisis of his Administration and he didn’t even have the first inkling about how to assess it, let alone what steps should be taken to resolve it.

  A more intelligent man might have realized that the Emergency Council established by his predecessor, and now seated around the conference table, could give him invaluable support and advice in situations like these. Couch had selected a group of intelligent, experienced professionals to make up his inner circle. Consisting of the directors of the NSA, FBI, CIA and the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs, they were men, and one woman, who were not afraid to speak their minds and call a spade a spade. His own White House chief of staff and, of course, the head of Homeland Security, made up the numbers. In recent years, the Homeland Security Department maintained an overview on any security-related matter.

  A confident and secure person, President Couch had selected a group who were willing to argue and make suggestions. For Gorton, however, their independence and candor were a challenge to his already shaky authority. He regarded them with suspicion and dislike, seeing conspiracy where there was none and regarding discussion as dissent and disrespect.

  “They’ve sealed off the access to the resort, Mr. President.” Tildeman was speaking again. “And they say they’ve placed explosive charges in the mountain overlooking the hotel. Any attempt to rescue the hostages will result in their bringing the mountain down on the whole resort.”

  Gorton’s lip curled slightly at the pedantic NSA chief’s carefully correct grammar. Any other person in the room would have said “will result in them bringing the mountain down,” but not Tildeman. He interrupted.

  “Can they do that?” Gorton asked.

  Tildeman hesitated. General Sam Barrett, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and an air force four-star, nodded gravely. “I’d say it wouldn’t be too hard, Mr. President,” he said. “Some time back, one of our hotshot pilots came too low over that area and the sonic boom buried the hotel up to the fourth floor.” Gorton looked at the military man and shook his head slowly, as if in disbelief that anyone could be so goddamn stupid.

  “So I guess we’re looking at Al Qaeda here, is that right?” Gorton directed the question at Bennington Traill, director of Homeland Security—a former two-star general who had spent his career in the military justice system. Traill hesitated before he replied.

  “We’re not leaping to that conclusion straightaway, Mr. President. We’ve had no indication of any potential Al Qaeda operations in the northwest,” he replied.

  Gorton snorted derisively. “We had no indication of 9/11 either,” he said.

  But Traill shook his head. “We had warning, sir. We didn’t act on it.”

  The CIA and FBI chiefs shifted uncomfortably. While neither of them had been the incumbents at the time of 9/11, they still suffered from the fact that their respective agencies had been unwilling to share information—with disastrous results. Traill glanced at them with a hint of apology. He had no wish to rake over past mistakes.

  “The point is, Mr. President,” Traill continued, “this situation bears none of the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda operation. Or any of the other major Middle Eastern groups.”

  Gorton gestured impatiently. “How many hallmarks do you want, Mr. Traill?” he asked. “They’ve taken a group of Americans hostage. That’s typical Al Qaeda behavior as far as I’m concerned.”

  He looked around the group of faces, expecting to see agreement in their expressions. Instead, he saw a few heads shaking.

  Linus Benjamin, director of the FBI, decided it was time to take some of the presidential heat off Traill.

  “That’s just the point, Mr. President. They’ve taken hostages. And there’s been mention of ransom.” Gorton frowned, not understanding, and the Homeland Security director resumed the explanation.

  “Those people don’t give a damn about money. They’re getting billions from their Saudi supporters. And they aren’t interested in taking hostages. All they want to do is kill Americans in large numbers. If it were them, my guess is that the people in Utah would be dead already.”

  “That’s crap!” Gorton said angrily. “I’ve seen hostage videotapes. Sometimes it seems those bastards at Al Jazeera are running them back to back.”

  Traill nodded. “Admittedly. But they’re usually the work of fringe groups and they’ve all occurred in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. This is a major operation, not an ad hoc event where a fringe group of insurgents just happened to get lucky at a roadblock.”

  “Well if it isn’t Al Qaeda, or any of the other Middle Eastern groups, who’s holding ’em—the goddamn Mormons?” Gorton asked.

  “The hostage takers haven’t been identified so far Mr. President,” Benjamin told him, although he knew the president was aware of the fact. He was aware of all the facts. A briefing sheet had been distributed before the emergency meeting was called. �
��We’re assuming for the moment that they’re a new group.”

  “After all, new groups are springing up all the time,” Gorton said, acid dripping from his tone.

  Benjamin thought it was time for the discussion to move on to more fruitful areas, rather than continuing to wrangle over what they didn’t know.

  “We have a plan of the resort here, Mr. President,” he said. He moved now to an easel where a rough plan of the area was set up.

  “As you can see, Mr. President, there’s just the one road in, which the kidnappers have successfully blocked with an avalanche. There’s nearly a quarter mile of the road covered by rock, snow and ice. It’ll take weeks to clear it.”

  “Then why don’t we go in the back door?” the president asked. “Isn’t that what we’ve got choppers for?”

  Benjamin frowned uncomfortably. “There is no ‘back door’ as you put it, sir,” he said. “The resort is in a huge U-shaped valley. Over the back, there are steep cliffs and heavily wooded slopes. We couldn’t move troops up there if we tried. And if we use choppers, odds are the kidnappers will hear or see them coming and start killing hostages.” He swept his hand around the horseshoe-shaped ridge that rose above the hotel. “They’ve said they have men on watch at the top of this ridge here. We’ve got no reason to disbelieve them.”

  The president stared fixedly at the diagram. The position was virtually impregnable, he could see—particularly if the kidnappers were willing to sacrifice themselves with their victims. And that was a possibility that couldn’t be discounted these days.

  “What about the hostages?” he asked. “Where are they?”