Zachary's Christmas

by M. L. Buchman

  How many sleepless hours had she spent on that very question?

  She would be a good wife for a Vice President, perhaps even a good First Lady if he was elected.

  …and she would become a wretched and bitter person. How much would he love her then?

  Unable to tolerate the continuing silence, she finally removed the headset and simply let the roar of the wind fill her mind with white noise. She had taken all the joy out of the flight, but she hadn’t expected the question, and so had answered it too bluntly. She could have been gentler about it but, now that it was out, she didn’t know how to fix it.

  No more exhilarating loops or flips. No stomach-dropping dives or stalls.

  Zack simply flew them over some of the most beautiful landscape she’d ever seen and she did her best to not let him see her wipe at her eyes even though he sat directly behind her. The romance, the sensual play was gone as if it had never been.

  He swirled them down the Aosta Valley, carved an effortlessly graceful turn, and brought them back toward Courmayeur.

  They were lower now. They crested the brow of the ski area. The slopes were peppered with multitudes of skiers in colorful ski jackets against the white. Even though they were little more than dots from this elevation, she could now pick out the better skiers. They moved as smoothly as the Vice President flew his sailplane.

  She tried not to think about the fact that she’d probably just lost any chance at “Zack” privileges and would soon be sent packing homeward on the next commercial flight out of Italy.

  He swooped down over Courmayeur, caught in the throat of the narrow, steep-walled valley. Individual buildings were easy to see, despite their snow-covered roofs. The small villa where their nights had been so cozy. The tiny trattoria where she’d hoped to lead him tonight for penne with wild boar sauce and chocolate gelato. The large conference center that Zack would once again be immersed tomorrow, but now with her knife of refusal stabbed into his back.

  “If I could take it back, I would,” she whispered. But it did no good as her headset was clenched in her lap.

  Instead, all she could do was look out at the near-vertical cliffs and—

  # # #

  “What’s that?”

  Zack barely heard. He’d been flying numb, which was a good way to kill them both. Even something as simple and forgiving as a sailplane called for constant attention to detail. He’d brought them too low and if they didn’t find a good uplift, he’d never make it back to the airport.

  Her answer would be no? That couldn’t be right. Sure, it was far too soon to ask, but she already knew for certain that it was a no? Nothing had ever felt so right in his life, not his Air Force service or the two election nights where he’d been chosen as Vice President.

  Anne was gesticulating off to the left. He glanced over and couldn’t tell where she was pointing. He needed to figure out how to turn the plane in the narrow valley without catching a cliff wall, and get back out into the Aosta Valley.

  He could see that she was yelling as she thumped her forefinger against the cockpit glass.

  “Put on your damned headset if you have something to say, woman.”

  His growl of irritation must have been louder than he intended. Anne scrabbled on her headset, still speaking as she did so.

  “…d you see the explosion?” Again her fingertip pounding against the glass. “Look, there’s another. Though the first one was way brighter.”

  He caught a small thermal at that moment and milked it for two-hundred feet of lift. As he did, he glanced left and caught a glimpse of what looked like a flash of sunlight off the snow cap atop the peak. Except the sun was at the wrong angle and the flash was instantly lost in a cloud of snow.

  He found another couple hundred feet and saw a half-dozen dark figures standing back on a craggy limestone outcropping and throwing something out onto the snowfield. It was a motion he recognized, the same way you’d throw a…

  Zack clicked on the radio that linked him to the Marine’s Black Hawk helicopter following close behind, “Harvey.” Anne went silent the moment Zack spoke. “Atop the ridge, ten o’clock from my position. Six, seven figures, tossing grenades. Do you have them?”

  “Grenades?” Anne squeaked from the front seat.

  “Hold, we’re climbing for a better angle.”

  He started sliding in for a better view himself, when one of the distant figures made a different motion.

  Zack slammed the joystick forward and right. There was a sharp slapping sound close behind him. A sound he knew too well. Though it had been a long time, it was impossible to forget.

  “What was that?” Anne was twisting about looking for the source of the sound.

  “We’ve been shot at, but all they hit was the plane,” he tried to keep it light so that she wouldn’t panic. No room for that up here.

  “Are we going to crash? Are you hurt?”

  “Interesting priorities there, I feel hurt. But I’m fine and so is the plane; I wonder if the insurance waiver will cover this. We have no engines, no fuel, and no hydraulics for them to damage. We’re as safe as we can be without armor.” And whatever bastard had just tried to hurt Anne was going to go down and go down hard. He keyed the radio again, “Harvey. People atop the ridge are armed and shooting. We took a couple hits, but we and our craft are five-by-five.”

  “Roger, Sidekick. Remain clear. Coordinating with Italian authorities.”

  “Sidekick?” Anne asked, impressively level-headed for someone who’d just been shot at, probably for the first time in her life.

  “My whole family’s Secret Service codenames were designated with to start with S. I’m Sidekick, naturally. Mom was Swimmer the one time she visited.”

  “And your dad is Sir.”

  Zack laughed. Even after ripping out his heart, she could still make him laugh. “Sidewinder, but yes, he is. He used to fly the F-14 Tomcats which packed the sidewinder missiles.”

  “That’s…” Anne trailed off, twisting in her seat to look back toward the ridge. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “I don’t know, what do you…” But he didn’t finish as he too turned and looked. His evasion had taken them farther up the valley and cost him some altitude, but they could still see the cliff face above the town.

  What had changed was that a cornice of ice and rock had let go at the top of the mountain. Far more than would have happened naturally. It unfolded in slow motion, the first snow slip, an ice tumble, a rocky jut of the cliff. The first explosion that Anne had spotted must have been a more substantial device, followed up with grenades after the first one had broken the mountainside loose, but hadn’t quite knocked it off. It certainly had now, the entire cliff face was in motion.

  The slide began losing form and mutated into a seething curtain of boiling rock and ice.

  “They started an avalanche. We have to warn the town,” Anne cried out.

  “No time.” And there wasn’t.

  They could only watch in horror as it picked up speed. Within seconds, the jumble of ice and rock reached the tree line. Twenty-foot conifers were swept up like matchsticks. Farther down the slope, sixty-foot larch and spruce fell just as easily. The shattered trees only made it easier to see how broad and fast-moving the avalanche was.

  Small chalets which perched on the lower slopes disappeared. Below them lay the town.

  The valley was so narrow at this point, practically choking Courmayeur into two pieces, that there was little for the avalanche to hit. But what was there was hit and hit hard.

  The river and the road were buried. And the biggest building in the whole town, the conference center—where they were supposed to be meeting today but had taken a day off to allow tempers to cool—disappeared beneath a blizzard of snow and a crushing load of ice, rock, and trees.

  Chapter 9

  “There
are people down there,” Anne looked down at the wreckage. This couldn’t be real. Moments before there had been an idyllic stretch of a beautiful mountain town climbing through a narrow pass up into the main village. Now the entire width of the pass was nothing but chaos.

  “Harvey,” was Zack’s answer. “Patch me through to Aviano Air Force Base, encrypted.”

  When Harvey responded, she could hear gunfire in the background over her headphones. Zack turned the plane and glided back over the wreckage. Even as she looked down, she saw someone crawl out from under the snow and flop to the ground. “Survivors, Zack.”

  “I know,” his voice was a growl.

  That more than anything helped Anne return to the moment. She had to work the last sixty seconds backwards to make any sense of it.

  Conference center that was hosting the International Climate Change and Control Conference destroyed.

  Avalanche.

  Explosives.

  Men throwing explosives.

  That first massive flash she’d seen.

  The first big explosion hadn’t unleashed the avalanche as someone had hoped. But they’d thrown enough grenades afterward to finally break it loose.

  Terrorists. Some terror group who didn’t like the I4C conference. Never in her life had Tennessee felt so far away as this instant. The farm was safe, familiar…this was horrific.

  “This is Aviano tower, go ahead,” she heard over the headset.

  “I need to speak with your commanding officer.”

  “And who is placing this request?”

  “This is Captain Zachary Thomas, USAF (retired) and the Vice President of the United States. Get a move on!”

  It took only seconds and Zack was describing the situation to a colonel. Then he began issuing rapid-fire orders, “I need you to scramble every helo pararescue team you’ve got on-base and tell them to bring their dogs. We need Search and Rescue as well as medical elements. The flights are not to enter the valley directly, we don’t want to trigger a secondary avalanche. Have them land in the town or in fields to the far side. And not to pull rank that I don’t have, Colonel, but move it.”

  It would have taken a stronger man than the colonel or a stronger woman than herself to argue when Vice President Zachary Thomas used that tone.

  “Pararescue?” She didn’t know the term.

  “You might have heard of them as PJs, parajumpers. The Air Force PJs are the toughest warriors out there. Ever wonder who Delta or SEALs reach when they dial 911 from the center of a battlefield? It’s the PJs. I flew with them as pilot for most of my career.”

  “I thought you only flew…sailplanes,” she suddenly felt deeply foolish. She should have known that someone like Zack had done so much more than fly a sailplane and fix someone else’s jet. That’s what she’d guessed, because he was so competent about everything he did. The train engineer turned jet engineer, but she’d been so wrong. He flew into the center of battles to rescue people.

  “Fixed wing, this is the biggest plane I’ve flown. Put me in a Sikorsky Black Hawk and that would feel like home far more than One Observatory Circle. How did you not know that about me?”

  He circled them down lower.

  “I didn’t want to use the Internet to get to know you. It seemed like an unfair advantage going into the relationship. I remember ‘military service’ from your campaign, but that’s all.”

  His voice was a low growl that she could barely hear over the wind’s roar as they circled downward, “Yet another reason to appreciate the goddamn woman who won’t have me.”

  Anne decided that it was best to pretend she hadn’t heard or else she’d start crying. Maybe even beg to take back her own words, though she knew they were the right ones.

  “There,” with a hard bank they swooped down toward the beginner’s ski slope that had caused her so much trouble just a few days ago.

  “Sir, what are you doing?” Harvey sounded livid. “Return to Corrado Gex Airport immediately. That’s an order, sir.” Gunfire still echoed in Anne’s headset. She finally spotted the helicopter still high above the valley. It was in a hard bank, a line of tracer fire arced from its side across the blue sky like a golden laser beam. Even as she watched, it twisted hard in the other direction, but the line of gunfire merely changed angle to remain on target.

  “Out of range,” the Vice President spoke in that tone again. “We’re landing here, Harvey. You just make sure none of those bastards gets away. Sidekick out.”

  For the next sixty seconds Anne alternated between holding her breath and fighting a scream that kept trying to emerge from her chest. She didn’t know if it was the near misses with the tops of towering spruce, the low cables of the chair lift, or the occasional skier rushing right in front of them as they raced toward the calamity. Perhaps it was her own rage at what had just been done to the innocent people of this town.

  “Who, Zack? Who would do this?”

  “Insane environmentalists. Even more insane jihadists. Sick psychopaths. Doesn’t matter. Not our concern right now.”

  “Right,” she looked at the fast approaching snow field. “Our concern is surviving the landing.”

  “Oh ye of little faith. Our concern is helping those people.” Even as he spoke, he landed on the snow field. They skidded along for a heart-stopping few hundred feet—missed two skiers by inches, eased to a stop, and then in an incredible anticlimax, tipped gently to the side until one wingtip rested delicately on the snow. Within seconds, they were both out of the aircraft and racing toward the disaster.

  # # #

  For Zack, the next hours passed in a blur.

  Zack and Anne had joined the other villagers converging on the area of the slide. The few who had managed to rescue themselves were tended to or carried off. Then began the arduous task of calling out and digging.

  Anne had a natural flair for organizing panicked people into useful work parties and they soon had clear markers up defining areas which had been searched. The ski patrol came down off the mountain and offered their skills and manpower, but Anne remained in charge of whole sections of the effort.

  Zack hadn’t done this level of brute force labor since the Air Force and was soon solely focused on the task in front of him. Call, listen, step. Call, listen, step. Dig down into rock, ice, or rubble if there was even a hint of a sound.

  Eventually Harvey had landed and tried to extract him, and almost earned a fist in the face for his troubles. Zack’s anger needed a direction. His anger at the senseless violence and death that six years in war zones had not inured him to. His anger at the attackers. And underneath, his pain at Anne’s unexplained refusal.

  Ultimately Harvey and the other Secret Service agents had collected around him and they’d all worked together as a team. The Marines had the only helicopter in the area, which was rapidly converted from security to medevac.

  Then pararescue jumpers and a half dozen combat-search-and-rescue dogs had parachuted down out of the sky like angels from heaven. The search began moving much faster with the CSAR dogs’ keen senses and the PJs’ incredibly advanced skills. The fatalities were light, but the casualties were soon overwhelming hospitals as far away as Milan. Helicopters, both American and Italian, were soon dotting every open field, rushing out the injured, rushing in with aid.

  Night fell, lights came on, and the work continued. The work turned deeply grim when they reached the conference center. The representatives who had decided to work through the day had been caught. They uncovered people he knew, had talked to, fought with, and respected. They were now battered, freezing to death, or worse. The fatality count which had remained in the teens for some hours rose sharply and passed fifty before the night was through with no signs of abating soon.

  It was late afternoon of the next day before he was dragged away, no longer able to do much more than stumble about. The American delegatio
n had been missing four. Two they’d found in a shattered corridor, the other two were found hours later around four a.m.—very much alive and happily sharing body warmth beneath the conference table that had saved their lives.

  Ready to drop in his tracks, Zack knew that he was becoming more of a hindrance to the operation than an asset. Time to pull back, regroup. Most of the other delegates had returned home. There would be another conference at another time. Many had sought him out among the wreckage to shake his hand and promise that they too would return to finish what had been begun. Others had worked beside him for a time until one by one it became clear that political delegates were not up to professional rescue standards and were escorted away by their security teams.

  Harvey had let him fight on until he was one of the last, but between the increased size of his Protection Detail—under threat of renewed terrorist activity—and the news coverage that had discovered him laboring in the midst of the disaster, he was causing more problems than he was solving.

  The retreat didn’t stop at the hotel room. He was soon swept aboard the same Marine Two helicopter that had wiped out the terrorist cell—with their still-unknown affiliation. They had fought to the last man and died just that way. No one had stepped forward yet to claim the deed.

  Marine Two whistled due to the many holes that the terrorists’ bullets had punched, but it reached Milan safely. Air Force Two was in the air before his brain clicked into place and he missed Anne—an oversight he might never forgive himself.

  He took one look at Cornelia and didn’t have the heart to wake her, rather doubted if he could. Her unerring radar had found him within minutes of landing despite the chaos and she hadn’t left his side since. He’d had to carry her to the plane and belt her in himself.

  He moved on to the back of Air Force Two where his Secret Service team and aides were seated.

  “Where is she?”

  Harvey didn’t answer, he was passed out in his seat. Of the few still awake, no one knew.

  Zack grabbed Harvey’s shoulder, finally had to shake him hard to rouse him. Harvey came to with a fist headed for Zack’s jaw. Despite starting from a dead sleep, it connected hard enough to send Zack tumbling backward to land in the laps of the two agents across the aisle. One grunted in his sleep, one didn’t even do that.