Snow Blind

by Jim Heskett

  “Fair enough. What do we do?"

  “Nothing. That could be anything over there. Could be a ray of sunlight bouncing off a beer can someone left in the snow.”

  “Or, it could be something meaningful. I’m not sure what else I can do here, sitting in front of my laptop, trying to connect to the internet and failing. Or, sometimes when I do connect, my searches pull nothing interesting or useful. I’ve been waiting on NSA data for four days, and they don’t seem in any hurry to get back to me. Ditto on my FBI queries.”

  Layne had an instinct to call Daphne and see if she could do something about that, but when he glanced at his phone, he had no service.

  “No bars, right?” Harry said.

  “Nope. Been in and out for three or four days now. Seems to be better at night.”

  “So, what are we supposed to do? We’re running out of time, especially since you had to get all macho and get yourself kicked out for fighting.”

  Layne scowled, which made Harry grin. “I’m just messing with you about that one. I know it’s not your fault.”

  “Point taken, though,” Layne said. “We don’t have anything better to go on, and we’re headed for zero in a hurry.”

  “At the very least, maybe if we get away from these buildings and move further out into the open, we’ll have better service, and we can talk to Control about our next steps.”

  Harry, at times reserved and deferential, certainly wasn’t acting that way right now. Layne could see the frustration on his face. The reaching for any sort of answer.

  "Well," Layne said, arching his back to stretch, "if we plan to hike over there, we'll need a means to get there. Snowshoes, if we have to. Snowmobiles would be better.”

  “I asked about snowmobiles yesterday,” Harry said. “They don’t have any. At least, not any they’re willing to let us use.”

  “Snowshoes it is, then,” Layne said. “I know where to go.”

  Layne and Harry donned warm clothes and weatherproof jackets since it was still dripping a steady cascade of white flakes, as it had for the last several days. The talk of the roads reopening seemed a fantasy.

  Layne and Harry trudged across walkways outside the bungalows which had been shoveled by the maintenance staff only hours before, but which were already again buried by several inches of fresh powder. They advanced to the far side of the main lodge, to a connected satellite building containing the equipment shed. Snowshoes, cross-country skis, winter gear that residents or guests could check out to explore the mountains during free periods.

  Layne opened the door and stepped inside to a small room with winter gear hanging on racks all over the walls, and stacks of sleds in one corner. Like a mountain town tourist ski shop, but without the inflated price tags on all the gear. A middle-aged woman with gray-threaded hair sat at a desk, the light from a tablet bouncing off her eyeglasses. She dragged a finger across the screen, guiding a pixelated alpine skier along a slalom course.

  She paused her game and glanced up at them. “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so,” Layne said. “We were planning to get snowshoes.”

  The woman frowned. “You sure that’s a good idea? Not the most stable conditions today. I would hate for you to go out there and start up some hill and find yourself buried in a snow drift. Sorry, hope that didn’t sound too morbid.”

  “I’m from Colorado,” he said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  The lady nodded and lifted a clipboard. “If you say so, young man. Name?”

  “Leonard Priest.”

  After her eyes flicked over the clipboard, her face fell. “Sorry, Leonard, current retreat guests only.”

  “What about me?” Harry said. “Harvey Brown.”

  “I assume you want two sets of snowshoes?”

  Harry nodded sheepishly.

  “No can do, gentlemen. I’m very sorry.”

  She finalized the conversation by lowering her face back to her tablet and un-pausing her game. Just like that, any hope of borrowing equipment seemed to fizzle and dry up in the air.

  Layne and Harry scooted out the door, pulling their hoods up. Layne sighed. “We’re running out of time to do anything useful today.”

  “So, what do we do?” Harry asked.

  “Did you see that door in the corner of the room?”

  Harry nodded.

  “Go back in there and try to talk her into it. Just keep her distracted for two minutes. Three, tops.”

  Realization dawned on his face. “Stealing snowshoes? Not very ‘Boy Scout’ of you.”

  “Borrowing them,” Layne said. “We’ll bring them back. I promise. And don’t call me Boy Scout.”

  Harry lifted his hands in surrender as he sucked in a few labored breaths. His eyes widened a little, the beginning stages of a panic attack.

  “It’s going to be fine,” Layne said.

  “I know. It’s just… field work was never my thing.”

  “It’s no big deal, Harry. All you have to do is chat up a little old lady for a few minutes. You’re charming. You can do this.”

  Harry spread a frown, but he turned and reentered the small building without any further complaint. Layne cinched his hood close and skirted around the back. Had to be stealthy and efficient.

  He made quick work of the lock on the back door and slid into a dark room littered with shelves. Clothes, gear, sleds and other miscellany. The back storage room for the main display room out front. Crouching, he skirted across the carpet to the door on the far side. He pressed his ear against it and listened to the warble of Harry and the desk lady chatting back and forth.

  Layne placed a hand on the doorknob. He gave it a small tug and found it wasn’t locked. Holding his breath, he opened the door a crack and scooted over so he could peer inside. Harry was making an impassioned plea to borrow the snowshoes, while the woman’s back was to Layne. Her head shook back and forth every few seconds. Harry was laying it on a bit thick, but that was fine. Layne was almost done here.

  He opened the door a little more, quick and precise, to prevent it from creaking. Several sets of snowshoes were only a few feet from the door, and Layne leaned inside, reaching out for them.

  Harry’s eyes flashed at him, and then quickly diverted back to the woman. He was rambling fast and furious, keeping her occupied.

  Layne snatched two pairs of snowshoes and withdrew from the room as fast as he’d come. When he eased the door shut behind him, he was glad his daughter wasn’t here to see him stealing. This would not be one of the stories he would tell her later in life.

  Layne skirted across the room and then waited outside for Harry to join him, a pair of illicit snowshoes in his hand.

  Off to chase the blinking light, with no idea what the hell it could be.

  24

  The snowshoes helped, but not much. With any and all established wilderness trails buried deep beneath the snow, Layne and Harry had to slog along and invent their own trails as they went. Harry, not exactly in shape, was drenched in sweat within ten minutes.

  Past the open field at the edge of campus, they slid into an expanse of trees and then another clearing. Despite the lack of GPS or a paper map, they had the peak of the mountain ahead to use as a guide.

  “Hiking poles would’ve helped, you cruel taskmaster,” Harry said, huffing and puffing.

  Layne grunted. “I was in a hurry. We’re lucky to have snowshoes.”

  They traversed a snowy plain, headed for a set of dense trees leading up to a craggy mountain peak. The blinking light was somewhere up there, maybe a half mile, maybe a mile. The exact distance depended on how many turns would be required to safely ascend the slope leading up to the mountain. Layne didn’t feel great about his avalanche readiness, as it had been years since he’d taken classes. They would have to tread lightly and hope for the best.

  At the edge of the thick field leading to their destination, they entered the trees and pushed on. Harry required breaks every few minutes, and Layne used the downtim
e to consider his overall plan.

  As the sun dipped low in the sky, they took a long break and ate the granola bars they’d brought along. Layne had shoved his down the front of his underwear to keep it from freezing, an old winter backpacking trick. He didn’t mention this to Harry.

  At the edge of the trees, something in the air changed, but Layne couldn’t say what it was. A weird scent, but a familiar one he hadn’t encountered in a long time.

  “Do you smell that?”

  Harry tilted his nose up and sniffed, then he shook his head. “Smells like snow to me. Snow and trees and a whole lotta nothing.”

  A flash of memory appeared to Layne. The odor of the charred bones in the warehouse in London, during the first phase of the operation. And that made him think of the one bone they’d found with the circular pattern carved into it. Maybe if they’d figured out right away what the carving was, the rest of it wouldn’t have gone so wrong.

  Layne wasn’t the kind of person to wallow in regret, but he’d never been able to shake the memory of that last official operation in London.

  “What’s on your mind?” Harry said, still panting as he chewed his food.

  “The warehouse.”

  “London?”

  Layne nodded and swiped a dusting of recent snow off the sleeves of his jacket. “Those memories are like bad pennies, man.”

  “I hear you.”

  “How does it not bother you every day?”

  Harry shrugged. “Maybe because I stayed on after, so I didn’t have enough time to process everything and keep replaying it in my head. It was just another operation in a string of them. Some were great, some we broke even, and the rest ended in misery. I got used to it after a while.”

  Layne pondered this and decided Harry had a point. The last op had left an ugly taste in his mouth, partially because there was no debrief. No cool down. Once he’d left London, he leaped straight into a “normal” civilian life.

  “Ready,” Harry said after a long pause, readjusting his backpack and pivoting in the snow. Layne exited from Memory Lane and shoved his granola bar wrapper into his pocket.

  Layne sniffed again and decided the smell wasn’t the same as the charred bones. This was something different. Something unusual.

  They trudged up, with Layne leading the charge. Going uphill, he made a crisscross pattern along the slope, ascending a little higher with each turn. He kept an eye on the angle and the looseness of the snow to determine avalanche likelihood. So far, so good.

  After another twenty minutes, they hit a false summit, and Layne could see the blinking light up ahead. Just a few more minutes of uphill drudgery and they’d arrive at their destination. Or, at least, where they assumed it to be.

  “You see that?” Harry said.

  “I do.” Layne squinted as the shape above them came into focus. “It’s an icicle.”

  “That makes sense. There’s a cave there. The icicle is reflecting the light from something inside it.”

  Layne pressed on, higher and higher, making it to the plateau acting as a front porch for the cave somewhere around the time the sun had fully set.

  When they reached level with the icicle, Harry had been correct. A dark cave, maybe a hundred feet deep, carved into the side of the mountain.

  And the source of the blinking light finally revealed itself. Sitting on a shipping crate was a laptop connected to an external battery, with some sort of electronic device attached to an antenna, the literal source of the blinking light. The light pointed at the icicle perfectly to reflect it toward the SMRC. Layne had to assume that had been an accident.

  “Is that a… beacon?” Layne said.

  “Probably. Or a tracker of some kind. I won’t know until I can hack it.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Harry cracked his knuckles and took a deep breath. “Let’s find out who’s talking to this thing.”

  He sat on the ground at the cave’s exterior plateau and unstrapped his feet from his snowshoes. Layne did the same. Now wearing regular boots only, they entered the cave, Layne enjoying a brief respite from the snow overhead.

  The inside of the cave stank like death. Layne had to lift his sleeve to his mouth, and he could see Harry gagging against the stench. After a few seconds, though, they both seemed to grow accustomed to it, and then Layne barely noticed it any longer.

  Harry unzipped his backpack to remove cables and a small tablet. He plugged a cable into the tablet. “If I can’t hack it directly, I’ll download as much data as possible and take it back with us.”

  “Will that take long?”

  “No way to know yet.”

  Layne eyed the sky, rapidly growing full dark. “Hurry. With these clouds, we won’t have any moonlight to guide us on our way back.”

  “Got it.”

  As Layne waited, he rested near the front of the cave entrance. He didn’t think it likely, but there was a chance the owner of this beacon might be somewhere nearby.

  That strange exterior smell returned. So familiar, but Layne couldn’t place it. Something he’d smelled when camping or hiking before, for sure. Maybe the deep smell of the trees and snow were confusing his senses out here. The moist air kept playing tricks on his nose.

  On the little plateau overlooking a small drop off, Layne breathed in the cold mountain air and watched the snow obscure the evening sky like a million pieces of confetti. He wished for a clear night so he could see the stars. There would be an infinite number of them out here, this far from the city. The stars were one major reason he preferred to reside at the cabin in South Fork as opposed to his apartment in Boulder. The wide, open skies, the deer wandering through his front yard, the lack of noise pollution for miles.

  He wanted his daughter Cameron to grow up there, in the mountains of Southern Colorado. To attend a tiny school and have a small group of friends who were far enough away from the cities they would have a hard time finding ways to get into trouble. Hopefully. But with an ex-wife with partial custody who insisted on living in the Denver metro area, it wasn’t likely. Layne had no desire to engage in a custody battle. If it came to that, he didn’t want Cam to get lost in the middle.

  Inessa Parrish wasn’t a bad woman; Layne thought she was a good mother, actually. She’d been a shitty wife, but a consistently good mother. And he knew Cameron needed her.

  Whatever Layne wanted for himself would have to rate second in importance.

  Five more minutes went by, and Layne finally leaned back toward his colleague. “How’s it going back there?”

  “The encryption on this thing’s firmware is like a block of cement. I’m copying the contents of the drive so we can take it back to our room. If I can spread out and give it my full attention, I’ll have a better shot.”

  “ETA?”

  “I’m almost done.”

  Layne resumed his quiet meditation for another couple minutes while Harry worked behind him. The smell grew stronger. So much so, Layne thought he might be on the verge of having a stroke. A different scent than the one from the interior of the cave itself. The interior smell was like rotten meat. Something had probably died in there, back in the darkness.

  Shuffling behind him. “Done, for now,” Harry said as he slid the tablet and cables into his backpack.

  Layne hiked back into the cave to help Harry with his gear, and then they set out to retrieve their snowshoes, just beyond the lip of the cave.

  And that’s when Layne discovered the source of that eerily familiar smell that had been with them for hours. A pack of three snarling wolves, hovering outside their cave.

  25

  Three wolves perched in the snow, baring teeth. Snow dusted their gray coats. Fog plumed from their open mouths as they growled and lowered their heads. Eyes on fire.

  “Holy shit,” Harry said. His voice sounded tenuous and shaky, and he clutched his laptop against his chest like a shield.

  Layne raised his hand and held it out in front of Harry to provide an arm ba
r. "Back inside the cave."

  “Uhh,” Harry said, "I think that's where they’re trying to go."

  Good point. The wolves didn’t seem inclined to allow safe passage, and they weren’t intimidated by humans enough to cower. This was an impasse. This cave held their most recent kill, and they considered Layne and Harry to be challengers for their dinner.

  Any way he and Harry would try to move, the wolves would not be in favor.

  Then, an idea appeared. As the largest of the three wolves—the one in the middle— crept forward, Layne ducked down and grabbed a metal and plastic snowshoe. He raised it with one hand while using his other to shove Harry back a step, out of harm's way and deeper in the cave.

  “That’s close enough,” Layne said to the animal. “I don’t want to do this, but I can’t let you come any closer.”

  Layne flashed back to five days ago, checking into the SMRC. The front desk lady warning him of wolves in the area. She’d said the local wolves displayed no fear of humans. This tidbit was proving to be true.

  “I don’t like the way they’re looking at us,” Harry said.

  “Just stay back. Stay behind me.”

  Layne kept the snowshoe raised and aimed at the middle one while the two flanking wolves inched forward. They were probably waiting for the alpha to make the first move.

  Layne tried to keep all three in his vision at once.

  The center wolf leaped. Layne swung the snowshoe, with the spiky cleats pointed down, toward the animal. He smacked it in the head, knocking the creature to the ground. The other two wolves yelped and rushed forward, directly at Layne.

  He jumped back a step, to give himself a little more room to react. The left wolf reached him first, and Layne jabbed out a foot and knocked it to the side while preparing to swing his weapon at the other one. He brought the snowshoe down on top of its snout. The beast jerked and landed with a thud, skittering to the side and driving it into the snow at the edge of the plateau.

  He’d gotten in a good blow on that one, and the injured wolf didn't seem interested in rising for another round. It limped off the edge of the plateau, escaping down the mountain.