Resistance (Nomad Book 3)

by Matthew Mather

  From the doorway, Ufuk nodded.

  Although she could no longer see, she knew what actions would accompany the words she heard. The offering of a pen and the words: “I must ask you to sign for it, sir.” The lifting of a finger to the lips, a gesture of silence and complicity as the man began to take off his waistcoat. All carefully choreographed in advance.

  Ufuk approached him until he disappeared from view. The man would be removing Ufuk’s jacket and tie, and handing him his own tie and waistcoat. He would silently urge Ufuk to put them on, as he looped the garish tie Ufuk had been told to wear around his neck and donned the jacket.

  “Would you like me to open the champagne for you, sir?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Then came the folded slip of paper and the accompanying gesture for Ufuk to open it, as the man began the process of opening the champagne. The sound of the cork popping.

  Ufuk would now be reading the words on the paper, instructions to take the trolley to the lift where he would be met, to keep his head low and avoid looking anywhere but at the trolley.

  “Thank you, sir. Will that be all?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Do have a pleasant evening, sir.”

  Massarra stood and left their room. She went to the elevator and called it, selecting the floor on which the Deluxe Suite could be found when it arrived.

  When the doors opened, Ufuk was there waiting for her. She gestured for him to come inside and again indicted he should be silent.

  They rode the elevator down a single floor and she led him to their room. Ammon looked up as they entered, then went back to working on the laptop.

  “Who is he?” Ufuk asked.

  “He works with me. As does the man who is currently sitting in your suite.”

  “Do you really think this will work?”

  “We’ve been planning this. We know where their surveillance is and what it covers.”

  “How could you know?”

  “Better you don’t know our methods, Mr. Erdogmus. You need to be as clean as possible when the time comes and we don’t have a great deal of time. Our man can only sit in one place for so long. In a little while, he’ll order another bottle of champagne and you will need to deliver it.” She gestured to the bed where a bottle of champagne and another glass lay waiting. “Listen carefully. There is a serious leak in your organization. Someone is passing information on a number of your more sensitive projects to a third party.”

  “That’s not possible. I have internal security regularly checking—”

  She cut him off. “Not only is it possible, it has happened.” She handed him a small flash drive. “This is only some of what we know has been leaked.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “You are important to our organization, Mr. Erdogmus. We protect those who are important to us.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Show this to no one. As yet, we do not know to whom this information is being passed, or what precisely their interest is. We will continue to look into it. However, you will shortly begin interviews for a new secretarial assistant in one of your robotics projects in Bern. This woman will apply and you will ensure she is appointed. We will do the rest. Her details are also on the drive. Once you have viewed it, destroy it.”

  “You think it’s the Chinese?”

  “They’re keen for your collaboration with their Space Administration to continue. Placing you under surveillance is standard, to see if your contracts with China Aerospace Corporation are the principal reason you are here.”

  “Who else could be?”

  Massarra shrugged lightly. “Americans. You are breaching their anti-terrorism laws by exporting classified weapons technology—”

  “That I invented.”

  “But unfortunately you did not invent the proper laws to protect yourself at the same time. That is why you need me.”

  “So you think it’s the Americans?”

  “Whoever it is, they’re effective in concealing themselves.” She straightened his tie. It was a gesture of reassurance. “Now go. Conduct your business as you would on any other occasion. We will be in touch again.”

  “My own security—”

  “Must never know. No one can ever know. Is that understood? Let us do our work and we will protect you.”

  Chapter 5

  Italian Alps

  Jess stumbled out of the tunnel and into savage cold. Massarra had given them all LED headlamps as the elevator stopped and they exited into a rock corridor. It was almost pitch black outside. Murky tendrils of ochre ash and snow eddied and fell in the conical beams of their lights. Beneath her feet, a pristine veneer of glistening ice. Yet through the sharpened senses of an adrenaline-infused haze, glimpses of the landscape through the swirling mist summoned memories: long hours she had spent on skis in these massifs, and climbing waterfalls of ice, or bare rock.

  If for a moment she almost forgot where she stood, what events unfolded around her, when the vicious wind lashed her face, the illusion was swept away. Hector clung tight to her side, terrified at being in this cold again. Crouching in the snow and gazing downward through the eddying cloud, she glimpsed silhouetted shapes. Giovanni stumbled through the snow to take her in his arms.

  But Raffa stood alone in the snow.

  “Where’s Lucca?”

  “He didn’t make it out,” Giovanni said as quietly as he could.

  Massarra crouched in the snow. Beside her in the glistening ochre powder sat rucksacks and rope, and tools for climbing and trekking in snow. Ufuk handed Jess a down jacket. She shrugged it on.

  Through the churning atmosphere she could just make out, in the valley below, tiny specks of dancing light that spilled from torches held in frantic, frozen hands. The survivors from Sanctuary funneling out of what had to be the south tunnel Abbie had described. A clutch of buildings poked through the canopy of ice below. All of it lit by floodlights.

  Even from high on the slopes of the mountain, perhaps a mile away, she sensed their confusion and fear, these wealthy elite who had paid everything they had, or gathered and manipulated political favor, in order to be protected from the end of the world. Yet here they now were, thrown into a struggle to survive in the harshest possible landscape, utterly unequipped to deal with what lay ahead of them. The end of their world.

  “What just happened?” Jess demanded.

  “I couldn’t have predicted what Müller would do,” Ufuk said. “I knew he would do something, but this…” He gestured to the mountain behind them and shook his head. Somewhere behind his voice, above the angry wind, in the cold, ever-shifting air, came the vibrating hum of far off engines.

  “You’re saying Müller destroyed his own base of operations?”

  “I’m just guessing.”

  “Why would he do that? Nobody was going to prosecute him. I was the one in jail.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “How many people were in there?”

  “Five thousand, give or take.”

  Jess peered into the distance, down the mountain. Maybe a few hundred people seemed to be scrambling around. “My God…”

  “We think Lucca made it out,” Ufuk added said. “I saw him with another group running along the main artery route toward to the funicular carriages.”

  She looked Ufuk in the eye, held his gaze as her teeth chattered. “Did you do this? Why did you disappear two days ago? You left me.”

  “I didn’t leave you. We don’t have time to discuss this.” He turned to Massarra. “We should leave for the refuge now.”

  The Israeli nodded. She gazed at the crowds below. “We will freeze if we don’t move.”

  “How are we getting off the mountain?” Jess demanded. She hoped they had a plan. Massarra was right. They’d freeze to death inside an hour.

  Already Jess felt her internal body temperature falling. Her hands, even inside the gloves, were numb. At least twenty below, maybe colder. Even
in good weather, with sunlight, it was a full day hike from this altitude. In this ice and snow, with just the light of their headlamps, it would be a march into death.

  “I’ll explain more when we get to the refuge.” Ufuk pushed her forward. “Müller will be searching for us. We need to get out of the open.”

  “What about Roger?” she said. “Did he make it out?”

  “We have no idea.”

  Jess observed the manner in which Massarra and Ufuk spoke to each other. A professional relationship existed between them, one in which Massarra was respectful, as though he was her superior, but also where Ufuk placed his trust in someone with skills he required. How had they met? What connected them, and how might that connection shed some light on Ufuk’s motives?

  Jess’s mind switched into operational mode. “Get the crampons on, and we should rope up.”

  The whine of drone engines crept over the sound of the wind. Similar to the sound of the Predator drones US forces had deployed in Afghanistan.

  “I suggest two rope teams.” Massarra handed her a duffel bag. “You lead one, I’ll lead the other. Agreed?” She gave no indication if she heard the drones, but Massarra must have caught the tightness in her face because she asked: “Are you all right?”

  Jess didn’t know what to say. How much didn’t she know? “When we get down off the mountain, we’ll get some distance between us and Sanctuary, but the second we get some time, I need answers.”

  “We should get moving,” was all Massarra replied.

  Jess helped Raffa and Hector don their crampons, making subtle adjustments to ensure the fit was good. She tied them into harnesses and gave Hector gentle words of encouragement, telling him to keep the soles of his crampons flat to the mountain, even where it sloped acutely and it might have seemed unnatural to match the angle.

  Massarra led the first rope team with Ufuk and Raffa. Jess followed with Giovanni and Hector. They followed the tight edge of a cornice, staying close the ridge. She led them slowly, adjusting her own rhythm to theirs. Where once there might have been a trail tracking the edge of the mountain, there were only layered drifts veneered by puce, volcanic residue. Somewhere from the east came a growl that resonated above the wind. A vivid amber flash lit the clouds. The snow beneath her feet shimmered.

  Massarra urged them onward.

  Jess’s crampons bit comfortingly into snow at first, but then into a layer of névé beneath. The ash made the snow shift in layers as it settled. There would be slick, lethal passages as both rope teams made their way down. If one of them fell, would the rest react fast enough to hold them?

  Her fingers tightened around the grips of her ice axes, but she pressed on. She barely heard the yell above the roar of the wind, but she did hear Giovanni’s shout from right behind her. She turned instantly and began to move backward.

  “Kneel down,” she shouted. “Stabilize yourselves with your axes and wait for me. Don’t move!”

  She uncoiled the rope around her body to give herself room to move and clambered along the ridge. Another scream, followed by shouts. She tracked her way across toward them. Two huddled shapes, both looking down. Massarra had already squatted a belay in the snow, legs splayed outward and boots dug deep. From her waist, the rope was taut and angled down over a cornice.

  “How far?” she asked the Israeli.

  “Maybe ten meters.”

  Jess untied herself from her own rope and took Massarra’s discarded axes. She drove one into the snow behind her and used a long sling to tie an ice-axe belay around Massarra’s harness. She wound a carabiner sling around the second axe then drove into the snow as far as it would go. She ran a new length of rope through the carabiner.

  “Put your foot next to the axe on top of the sling,” she said to Massarra. “Brace yourself with the other foot. Understand?”

  The air trembled with the whine of the approaching drones, circling in sweeping surveillance. The only thing masking their body heat was the bitter wind and spindrift that encircled them.

  Jess forced herself to focus. “If I fall, it will go tight, but you’ll be able to hold it. Don’t feed it through; I don’t need that. Just hold a fall.”

  Massarra nodded.

  Jess climbed down. She did so quickly, concerned Ufuk might be injured. When she reached him, she dug in as tightly as the terrain would allow while the wind tried to wrench her from the mountain’s face.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I think my ankle is twisted.”

  “You’ve lost your axe?”

  Ufuk nodded.

  “It’s okay—you can use one of mine. But you need to do something a little different, okay? You need to dig the front two points into the snow as far as you can. Kick really hard and climb as though you’re climbing a ladder. Massarra has hold of you and she’s anchored into the snow.”

  Ufuk nodded.

  “If you’re ankle is bad, you can only really use it to stabilize yourself as you climb. So small steps and take it as slowly as you need to. It’s only ten meters, so take your time.”

  Their progress seemed impossibly slow, the wind buffeting both of them as they climbed. Eventually she reached the ledge where Giovanni helped them up. Using an axe as a support, her other arm thrown around Giovanni’s shoulders, they struggled slowly down the mountain from there, hunkered low against the howling wind.

  Relief flooded Jess when Massarra shouted and pointed downward along a wide, open sea of sastrugi, to what might have been a building. Jess could barely make it out, but as they walked, they came to a red-shuttered alpine hut almost completely buried by snow. On a long sign Jess saw words that read “Refugio Sassal Masone.”

  Chapter 6

  Sassal Massone, Italian Alps

  Above the whistling of the wind, Jess heard a low rumble. At first she thought it might be a drone, swooping in to better pick up the radiation of heat from their bodies. Through the mist came a flickering light, but it wasn’t a drone—it was a snowcat, a quad-tracked vehicle with a large white-and-gray camouflage painted cab she glimpsed through the maelstrom.

  Someone found us, her mind screamed in panic—but was this a good or a bad thing? Better to err on the side of caution, she decided immediately, and she turned to her rope team. She shouted to find cover, to find somewhere to hide so she could investigate.

  The vehicle swiftly closed the distance between them.

  Ufuk, his face hidden behind his fur-lined hood and goggles, interrupted her. He reached for her with one hand and tore his goggles away with the other. “It’s okay,” he said, leaning in to be heard above the wind. “These are my people.”

  “Your people?”

  Ufuk nodded, and led them toward the refuge as the snowcat churned through the mist. Light flooded over them, catching twinkling crystals in its bright beams. The broad rectangular cab appeared, the front section with four windows, each with wipers furiously going back and forth. Military men sat inside. The cab sat on four tracks that clawed their way easily over the snow toward them. Ufuk waved toward the hut as the snowcat swept past them and came to a jolting halt just beyond. The men filtered out and into the snow, weapons out, providing a defensive perimeter.

  “They’re my security contractors,” Ufuk said as they entered the hut past him. “They have an egress plan for us.” He removed his gloves and hood, and dropped the goggles onto a table. “There is food and water, and medical supplies if we need them. But we need to be quick.” He took Jess’s arm as she passed him. “I think you saved my life back there.”

  Jess paused, but shrugged off his hand and entered without replying.

  She needed answers, but was too frozen and exhausted right now.

  The hut was warmer than she expected. Beyond the entrance hall, where boots and climbing equipment were normally stored, was a low, wide common room. Books still lay on dusty shelves and alpine paintings still hung on the walls. Somehow they made the place feel even more desolate. A reminder of the old world that could n
ever be again. There were long tables and chairs and, for a moment, Jess remembered time spent in similar huts, sharing stories with other alpinists over hot soup and warm bread. But that time was long gone.

  From a room toward the back of the hut came a tall man clothed in white, arctic warfare battle dress. A radio on his armored chest hissed gently, but no voices came from it. He reached Ufuk and extended a hand, which Ufuk took. Behind him, a second man stood, similarly dressed.

  “Where is the rest of the team?” Ufuk asked.

  “Patrolling. They’ll be back in an hour. We need to secure this flank of the mountain and the terrain down to Alp Grüm.”

  “We need to leave.”

  “There’s still drone activity overhead. Recon will call us when the time is right. Sit back and relax. It’ll be a little while.”

  “The longer we wait here—”

  “This is what you pay us for, Mr. Erdogmus.”

  “Why would someone be searching for us?” Jess asked. She’d warmed up enough to ask questions. “Why the drones? Why are these men here?” It seemed much too convenient that Ufuk would have mercenaries ready on a second’s notice. He still hadn’t said why he’d disappeared from Sanctuary two days before. Had he been planning all this?

  “I will answer all your questions, to the best of my ability, once we’re on the way,” Ufuk replied.

  “And where are we going? Is there another Sanctuary?”

  “The only other one I know of is in China.”

  “A Vivas installation then? Something like that?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why the hell are you being evasive?”

  “Jess, we need to rest,” Giovanni said, taking her arm. “Everyone is exhausted. We should eat too. And I need to go to the bathroom.”

  Ufuk pointed helpfully at a stairwell leading down.

  The door opened again and Massarra walked through, a billowing chaos of snow and ash sweeping in with her. She pulled down her hood and shook her hair. Ufuk’s man tensed.