Free Fall

by Kyle Mills

  “I don’t know.” Darby dropped into the hay and buried her head in her knees. “Why would they kill Tristan? Why kill Sam? Because we don’t mean anything to them. We don’t have money or power or important jobs.” She looked up at him with eyes that just couldn’t understand what they’d seen over the last few weeks. “A man in Texas once stopped by a place I was camping to tell me that I was a waste of skin. That’s what we are to these people. A waste of skin.”

  “Come on, Darby, you’re taking this too personally. These men don’t care about anything but their own power and influence. I was an FBI agent for more than twenty years and they’ll be perfectly happy to do away with me too. Look, we need to stay on track here. We need to get our hands on that file before they do. It’s our only way out of this.”

  She raised her head a few inches. “The file. The file. I don’t care about the file. I want to find Lori.”

  “One will most likely lead to the other.”

  Darby considered that for a moment, then suddenly jerked her head in his direction. “Wait a minute. What if she did know?”

  “Know what?”

  Darby stood and began looking around the barn, fixating randomly on things that didn’t seem to have any meaning. “I was stuffing it in a pack when she came up the ladder. I told her there was something I had to do.” She looked over at the skis leaning against the wall. “I grabbed my skis and left. I came back about six hours later. I mean, she’s the one… the one who showed me where that old lookout station was. We used to stop there to warm up when we were skiing in the backcountry.”

  Beamon hoped that wasn’t the case. If it was, the file was gone and her friend was dead, leaving them pretty much screwed. “You think she might have figured it out?”

  “Maybe. If they told her roughly what they were looking for, she might have put two and two together—”

  “And told them where to find it.”

  “No way. She’d have to show them.”

  Suddenly, Darby was in motion. She tore into the clothes strewn out in the hay, stacking some behind her and flinging the others across the loft.

  “What are you doing?” Beamon said.

  “She could still be up there! If it’s Vili and that man that came after us in Thailand, they couldn’t have beaten us back here by that much. I’ve got to go after her.”

  She stripped off her jeans and sweatshirt and began pulling on a pair of long underwear as Beamon considered the possibility. It was remote, but at least it was something. “How do we get up there?”

  “We? We don’t. I’m going to have to ski.”

  “What about a snowmobile?”

  She shook her head and continued throwing on layers of clothing. “Cliff bands. No way to get up there without going all the way around the back of the mountain.”

  Beamon looked down at the open door of the barn. The snow was whipping through it in waves that looked like small tornadoes.

  “Hold on now. Darby,” he said as her head reappeared through the top of a turtleneck. “I don’t think going out there right now is a great idea. The weather isn’t looking that good. Maybe we should wait it out and take snowmobiles up the long way. I don’t think it’s very likely that your friend’s up there.”

  Darby stopped with one leg in a pair of ski pants. “But are you sure?”

  He hesitated for a moment and then shook his head.

  “I’ll be back before morning, then,” Darby said. “If I’m not… well, don’t worry about it.”

  Beamon sighed quietly as she dug around for a glove to match the one in her hand.

  “As much as I deeply, sincerely, want to, you know I can’t let you go up there alone.”

  She stopped what she was doing for a brief moment and flashed him a sad smile. “Thanks, Mark. But you probably don’t even know how to ski. You’d never make it.”

  “And you probably don’t even know how to shoot a gun,” he said in response. “If you do find them, what are you going to do—throw snowballs? How are you going to save your friend?”

  That slowed her down a little. She stuck her nose in a small backpack and extracted the glove she’d been looking for, then turned and let her eyes move from his feet to his head.

  “George’s stuff is downstairs,” she said finally, tossing her skis and a pair of boots from the loft onto a pile of hay below. “Let’s see what we can find you.”

  The brightly colored Gore-Tex and polypropylene stretched uncomfortably over his midsection, but all in all the fit wasn’t that bad. In fact, the boots were perfect

  “So you can ski?” Darby said, obviously a little skeptical.

  “I’m not in danger of making the Olympic team,” he said as she walked around him making last-minute adjustments to his gear. “In fact, I hate it with a passion on nice days. I just did it ‘cause my old girlfriend liked to.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Darby said, pulling something that looked like a tiny yellow walkie-talkie from her pocket.

  She flipped the power switch and zipped it into a pocket on his jacket that seemed to have been made for it.

  “What’s that?”

  “It transmits a signal. I’ve got one just like it. I can use it to find you.”

  “Can I use it to find you?”

  She shook her head. “It’s kind of complicated. Best you just keep me in sight.”

  forty-three

  Mark Beamon continued to search his brain to confirm that this was, indeed, the worst day of his life. He could almost feel the cigarette tar freezing into little black icicles in his lungs as he desperately sucked in the frigid air and tried to keep up with Darby. Despite the fact that she was breaking trail through at least a foot of loose snow and wearing a backpack that must have weighed fifty pounds, he hadn’t been any closer than twenty-five feet from her since they started.

  The wind kept gaining force as they continued up the shallow canyon, blowing snow straight up, sideways, in circles. Without the familiar sensation of gravity pulling him to the earth, Beamon doubted he would have been able to discern up from down. Even with it, the visual tricks of the snow were giving him a mild case of motion sickness.

  Beamon stopped for a moment, leaning against his poles and pulling his ice-encrusted scarf up over his mouth and nose in an attempt to warm the air a little before he breathed it in. Ten feet behind him, their ski tracks had already disappeared, victims of wind and drifting snow. And that pretty much sealed it. He was completely reliant on a goddamn twenty-seven-year-old girl for his survival. Without her, there was no chance he’d find his way out of the aptly named Wind River Mountains. A couple of lost hikers would find him in the spring with a string of obscenities still frozen in his throat.

  The unlikely amount of sweat running down his back was cooling rapidly and forced him to start moving again before he’d fully caught his breath. He struggled forward, feeling the burning in his legs and shoulders and the desperate pumping of his heart start again almost instantly. Fortunately, Darby had stopped about fifty yards ahead.

  “If the weather was a little better, you’d be able to see it over there,” she said over the howl of the wind, pointing a gloved hand into the swirling snow and fog. Beamon let himself fall over into a drift, which instantly formed itself to his body and created a dangerously comfortable place to lie down.

  Darby nodded toward a shallow depression in the snow that had survived near a dense stand of evergreens. It was about a foot wide and three feet long and looked suspiciously like ski tracks. “You see those?”

  “They could have been made by anyone,” Beamon managed to get out. His face was so cold his speech was noticeably slurred.

  Darby spread her arms wide, poles hanging from her wrists by leather straps. “Who would be out here on a day like today?”

  Beamon shook his head. “How much further?”

  “Not far. Are you okay to go on?”

  He nodded and looked around him. He didn’t know shit about ski tracks, but even he could
see that the ones in front of them weren’t very old. Those sons of bitches could be standing behind a tree ten feet away and he’d never know it with visibility what it was.

  Another half an hour of hard skiing seemed to take them nowhere. The snow was slowing down and visibility had improved somewhat, but everything still looked the same: white snow, green trees, gray rocks.

  Because of the improved conditions, and despite Beamon’s repeated warnings, Darby had pulled ahead another twenty-five yards or so. He kept struggling forward, trying to close the gap, but there was no way. Finally, he just stopped and pulled off his fogged-up goggles, letting the cold air dry the sweat on his face.

  When he looked up, he saw that Darby had stopped, too. She seemed to be staring down a steep slope that started at the bottom of the fifteen-foot cliff she was standing at the edge of. Something in her posture worried him. He slid his goggles back on and started toward her as fast as he could, considering his legs felt like silly putty and his heart was on the verge of a permanent breakdown. He’d closed to within twenty feet when she suddenly stripped off her pack and jumped off the cliff.

  Beamon watched, horrified, as she fell through the air and disappeared into an explosion of snow when she hit the ground. An instant later, she burst out of it, still upright, and began making fast, graceful turns down the steep slope.

  Having no idea what was going on, he dug out his pistol and sighted along it, anticipating Darby’s path. About seventy-five yards in front of her, he saw what she was moving toward. A broken patch of red and black, half-covered with snow. He lowered his gun and concentrated on the odd burst of color as Darby skidded to a stop in front of it. As she brushed away the accumulated snow, it took on human form.

  Darby hovered over the motionless figure for a moment and then fell on her back in the snow. She lay there long enough for Beamon to fight his way to the lip of the cliff she’d jumped from. It was too steep for him to climb down and there was no way he was just going to throw himself off like she had. He couldn’t even yell down to her for fear that he might be heard. All in all, he was completely useless.

  Probably ten minutes went by—he couldn’t be sure because his watch was trapped below God knew how many layers of clothing—before Darby lifted herself into a sitting position. Another five and she had removed her skis and was hiking back up the steep slope with them, violently kicking into the snow with every step. When she got close enough, Beamon laid down on his stomach and reached over the cliff. She climbed up a bit and silently passed her skis and poles to him before skillfully negotiating the rock face in her boots and gloves.

  When she came over the top, she didn’t say anything—just pulled on her pack, stepped back into her bindings, and started up the canyon again.

  “Was it Lori?” Beamon said, before she got too far away.

  She nodded without looking back.

  “I’m so sorry, Darby.”

  “No time now, Mark. I’ll think about it later.” The pain in her voice was barely under control.

  He should have stopped this. He should have found her faster. None of this should have ever happened.

  Darby moved slower now, making it possible for him to stay within ten feet The snow and wind had continued to taper off and there was actually a patch of blue sky in the distant west On the negative side, the sun was pretty close to it. It was going to start getting dark soon.

  The skiing got easier as the weather improved. But with the better visibility came the increased chance that they would be spotted. Beamon tried to stay alert, but exhaustion and the unfamiliar surroundings made it impossible. If someone had decided to set up an ambush, he and Darby were dead.

  They had skied for another nearly unbearable fifteen minutes when Darby stopped at the edge of the densely wooded area that they had been moving through. Ahead of them was a windswept ridge that rose steeply and finally seemed to disappear into the sky as earth and snow suddenly dropped away. Just before that, though, was a small square building on stilts, perched in a position that would give it a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the mountains and valleys below.

  “Unzip the top of my pack and get the binoculars out, Mark.”

  Beamon had to take his gloves off, but finally worked the frozen zipper loose and pulled out a pair of binoculars. “I don’t see anyone,” he said, using them to scan the clearing in front of them. “But that doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot.”

  The lookout building was obviously abandoned—a collection of broken boards and shingles, with a rusted stovepipe protruding from what was left of the roof. There seemed to be no tracks around it—not that he’d have expected any with the wind gusts that they had suffered through earlier that day. He kept moving the binoculars back and forth, examining every square foot of the clearing, but there wasn’t anything to see.

  “I don’t know. Darby….”

  “What?”

  “Maybe they got what they were looking for and took off.” He handed her the binoculars and she used them to go over the same terrain. “Or maybe not The New York Philharmonic could be sitting out there if they were in white tuxes.”

  He didn’t belong out here; this was what S.W.A.T. was for. They’d have been so excited—cute new winter camo, white guns, skis….

  “So what do we do, Mark?” Her words were clipped and monotone, undoubtedly the by-product of trying to shut down her emotions and forget her friend Lori’s frozen body at the base of that ridge.

  “Well, we went through all the trouble of coming up here. You say you left the file in that lookout tower?”

  She nodded. “Under the floorboards.”

  In the end, the file was the only thing that mattered. It was probably a trap, but their lives weren’t worth much without it “I guess we should go take a look, then.”

  She put her eyes to the binoculars again and moved them slowly across the empty snow in front of them. “They could be in the lookout tower. There’s no way to tell.”

  “What’s in there?” Beamon asked. “Is there more than one way in and out?”

  “No. Only one door—it’s on the other side. There used to be windows, but they broke a long time ago, and me and some friends boarded them up. Other than that, there’s nothing in there. Maybe some Powerbars or something left over from last year.”

  “So it’s not in use anymore.”

  She shook her head and moved to a slightly better vantage point “See that steep slope behind it? The Forest Service decided that it could slide, so they ended up building a new lookout in a better location a few miles from here.”

  “Slide. You mean avalanche?” Beamon looked up at the steep slope dwarfing the tiny building. “That’s all we fucking need.”

  “Relax, Mark. Snow conditions are pretty stable today. Besides, I’ve never seen that slope slide. I mean, the building’s still there, right? More than likely, the Forest Service had some money they didn’t know what to do with.”

  The certainty in her voice made him feel a little better, but he was still stuck in a completely unfamiliar situation and was dead sure that someone, somewhere out here, was waiting for him with a really, really big gun. The colorful Popsicle that had been Darby’s friend Lori pretty much guaranteed that.

  “Do you think they might be inside, Mark?”

  “No. There’s no way to see out Sort of evens out the element of surprise if they can’t see us coming and just have to wait for the door to open. If it were me, I’d be under it. Looks like there’s a pretty deep indention under those stilts.”

  Beamon motioned to Darby and she followed him back down the way they’d come. After putting about a hundred yards between them and the clearing, Beamon turned to the west He continued forward through the deep snow until he broke out of the densely packed trees and found himself at the edge of what seemed like an almost vertical snow slope.

  “What about down there?” he said, looking along the edge of the drop-off to confirm that they were out of sight of the lookout tower. />
  “Down there what?”

  “Could we go down there a ways and traverse to where we’re right beneath the tower? If anybody’s up there, they’re expecting us to come up the canyon.”

  She looked doubtful. “Well, I could, but…”

  “Come on, Darby. I’ve done pretty well so far, haven’t I?” Beamon popped off his skis and walked closer toward the edge in his boots.

  “Not too close, Mark.”

  The large evergreens at the bottom of the slope looked to be about a half an inch tall. He felt himself getting a little dizzy from the height and stepped back.

  “Yeah, you’ve skied okay, Mark. You have.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, seeming to gather her will. “Look, Lori’s dead. So are Sam and Tristan. Getting you killed isn’t going to do anything to change that”

  “I don’t see this as an either-or situation, Darby. If we lose control of the file, we’ve got nothing—no leverage to use against anyone. Do you think in that situation the men who have killed your friends are just going to leave us alone and hope that we won’t do something desperate like try to get our story printed in the papers? Believe me when I say that I don’t want to hang my ass out a thousand feet off the ground, but we’ve got a chance here. If not now, when?”

  She looked down the slope for a moment and then dropped her pack into the snow. She dug out a stuff sack with a sleeping bag and tossed it to him, then went back to searching around in the pack, finally coming up with a rope and a shovel.

  “Take the sleeping bag out of there and fill the sack with snow. As much as you can pack into it,” she said, starting to dig a hole about ten feet back from the edge of the precipice.

  He did as he was told, feeling the exhaustion in his arms as he shoved snow into the sack with his gloved hands.

  “Okay,” he said when he’d finished and rolled it toward her. She climbed out of the hole she had dug and started clearing a narrow trench of the same depth to the edge of the slope. He still had no idea what she was doing, but she seemed to, so he wrapped his arms around himself and tried to stay warm as she secured one end of the rope around the middle of the snow-filled stuff sack, dropped the sack into the hole she’d dug, then threw the other end of the rope off the edge of the slope.