Snow Blind

by Jim Heskett

  “Shouldn’t you leave those on?” Harry said. “It’ll distribute your weight better.”

  “Maybe so, but they won’t help much if I fall through the ice.”

  Big cracks spread out from his feet, like a spiderweb reaching in all directions. He was forty feet from the shore, and forty feet from the weapons cache. The ice squealed under his body weight, the lake threatening to swallow him whole at any second.

  32

  Layne held his arms out for balance even though there wasn't a real reason to do so. If the surface cracked, and he plummeted through it to the icy water below, good balance wouldn't matter.

  "Layne," Harry said from behind him, "I don't think this is a good idea. Forget about the weapons cache and come back here on the bank with me.”

  Layne considered this. Definitely wasn't a good idea, but he needed those guns. First, the deaths, and now the missing bodies. Something was up. He didn't know what, but something was coming.

  "I'll be fine," he said. After some consideration, he angled his body back to Harry and said, “if I fall through, do not come out here.”

  “Like hell I won’t. I’m not going to let you die.”

  “I appreciate that, but it doesn’t do us any good if we’re both at the bottom of this lake. Promise me you’ll stay right there, Harry, no matter what.”

  Harry frowned and mumbled something to himself Layne couldn’t hear. After a few seconds, he said, “fine. You better not crack that ice.”

  Then, leaving his snowshoes behind, Layne glided forward along the lake. With each step, his foot sank down through the snow, landing on the ice below. He could feel it cracking slightly beneath his weight.

  Now the question was, to move fast or to move slow? Layne opted for fast. He pushed forward, ignoring the widening fracture he could hear and feel with each step toward the center of the lake. He tried to forget about the fact that every forward movement put him further and further over deeper water. And although it was daytime, if he was submerged, he might not be able to see well enough to locate the hole he’d fallen through.

  Reach the drop, open the weapons cache, and get the hell out of here. He put an image of Cameron in his mind, playing in the snow out in front of the South Fork cabin. That image morphed into an internal movie of the last time she’d tried to make a snowman, but she couldn’t quite get a handle on the art of packing snow.

  The mental video looped through his head, keeping his breaths even as he trudged across the ice.

  In five more steps, he was close enough to the weapons cache that he could almost reach it. But, next time his foot touched down, a great rupture spread out from underneath his weight, and he could feel the water rising over the top of his boots. Not enough to sink him, but he was a few inches shorter than he had been.

  Hurry up, or be more careful? Each option held danger.

  No time to debate the finer points. He had to move.

  Layne ignored the spreading crack and reached out for the weapons cache. He swiped a hand over the top, clearing snow. As expected, he uncovered a wooden crate with dangling cables on the sides. "Thank you, Daphne," he muttered, and he removed one of the bungalow’s steak knives to wedge open the edge of the crate.

  As he leaned forward, the lake groaned.

  The water continued to rush higher as the crack spread. He had no idea how deep the water would be underneath him. Maybe ten feet, maybe thirty. Layne ripped the top off the cargo drop and discovered a selection of handguns, knives, small subcompact machine guns, and boxes upon boxes of ammunition. Rather than trying to drag the entire cache back with him, Layne opted to stuff his pockets with this much gear as he could. He selected two 9mm Beretta APX Combat pistols, a small Agram 2000 submachine gun, a couple knives, and a few boxes of ammo.

  Loaded up, he could feel the weight dragging his jacket down toward his knees. And that's when the crack turned into a tear.

  Before Layne knew what was happening, the wooden crate began to sink as the ice broke open with the same violent crash as a boom of thunder. The ice below shifted, and in less than a full second, the weapons crate had vanished. Bubbles in the water replaced it.

  Layne backpedaled, feeling the ice rupture underneath his feet. No time.

  He spun, and instead of slow or fast, he opted to sprint. He raced as fast as he could toward Harry, who was standing at the edge of the lake, waving his arms and yelling as he jumped up and down. Layne couldn't make out what Harry was saying, and it didn't matter.

  Layne could trace his footsteps back through the snow, and he aimed for his snowshoes, but at this speed, he didn't think he could grab them. The crack was chasing him like a gangster in a sports car.

  So he didn't try to retrieve the snowshoes. That was a problem to deal with thirty seconds from now, if he survived.

  With the ice disintegrating behind him, Layne ran with everything he had in him. Heart pounding, head thumping.

  Ten more steps. He focused on Harry, waving him on.

  Each leap splashed icy water up onto his pants, some reaching as high as his arms and face. His feet splashed, barely finding purchase on the disappearing ice with each motion forward.

  Five more paces. Almost there.

  The lake groaned as Layne heaved the last two jumps to reach safety.

  By the time he’d made it back to the shore and slumped into the snow, a line of open water had spread out behind him. The snow on either side of the open water tumbled in, like a reverse video of the Red Sea parting.

  "Holy shit," Harry said.

  Layne sat up, breathing heavily. Took him a few seconds to calm down enough to speak. "Yeah, man, you could say that."

  Layne stood up and adjusted his jacket, brushing snow from the sleeves. With all the residual energy, he was practically vibrating.

  "What about your snowshoes?" Harry asked.

  Layne gazed out over the open water of the lake, the ice still cracking and spreading apart across the entire space. He couldn’t even tell now where they’d been before they’d fallen in. “Not much I can do about that unless I want to freeze to death trying to retrieve them.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. Best to let it go, though.”

  And so they did. Harry and Layne pressed on, on a diagonal route away from the retreat center and toward the cave. It took them another forty-five minutes to reach the steep uphill climb at the foot of the mountain since Harry was already exhausted and Layne had no snowshoes. Each step became a chore.

  “Do you think Daphne intentionally dropped the crate on a lake?” Harry asked when they paused to eat a snack.

  “No, it was supposed to be over closer to the hill to the west. But, we didn’t even know there was a lake here. Google Earth showed that area as an open field.”

  “I’m just saying… I mean… this seems like the sort of thing Control would do on purpose. As a challenge, or something like that.”

  Layne grabbed a mouthful of snow to munch since his water bottle had been empty for a few minutes. “I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think this was intentional.”

  Harry shrugged and pressed a gloved finger against one side of his nose to eject a snot rocket. “Okay, if you say so.”

  When they started to ascend the hill, Layne was wet from the waist down. Snow everywhere. Cold gnawed at his bones. But still, he pressed on.

  And while Layne couldn't see the sun overhead because of the clouds, he didn't have to check his watch to know it was mid-day by the time they reached the area directly below the cave.

  Layne paused a few steps from the cave’s exterior plateau to take off his boots, dump the snow, and then wring out his socks.

  Harry paused, hesitant, peering up at the cave. Layne didn’t detect that same wolf smell as he had the day before, so he waved for Harry to go on ahead. Layne wriggled the toes of each foot, trying to force blood into them. He liked his toes and had no desire to lose them to frostbite.

  Harry pushed on ahead for the last fe
w steps of the climb and entered the cave first. And when he did, his mouth dropped open. Layne craned his neck and raised an eyebrow at him.

  "What is it?" Layne asked.

  "You need to see this."

  Layne slipped his boots back on and muscled up the last few steps, joining Harry at the mouth of the cave. And what he found there was a lot of nothing. The beacon was gone, the laptop was gone, everything. Someone had cleaned house.

  33

  Layne and Harry abandoned the cave since there was nothing left inside for them to investigate. In a perfect situation, they’d have forensic specialists comb through every inch of that cave, hunting down and cataloging each little piece of evidence about who’d come before them. Out here in the field, though, Layne and Harry lacked the tools and resources to do any of that.

  As they stood on the plateau outside, a brief break in the clouds brought the sun out. Directly overhead, warming Layne’s face for the first time in days. But even the warmth of the sun couldn’t undo the exhaustion lingering in his muscles. A couple miles of slogging through knee-deep snow with no snowshoes had drained him.

  “Let’s make our way back,” Layne said as the clouds resumed their punishing domination over the sky. Total moments of sunshine: about six seconds. At least the snow had lightened to a trickle, and the wind wasn’t as bad at the moment. Maybe a break in the weather was coming, in the next day or two.

  “And do what when we get there?” Harry said as he strapped on his snowshoes. “All of our prime suspects are dead. We’re no closer to knowing who’s connected to this child slavery ring, and all we have to show for our efforts is a lot of useless crap.”

  Layne nodded. “I know. But let’s get back, anyway. We’ll hole up and look over our findings again. We must have missed something.”

  Harry harrumphed, but set out on a course toward the retreat center with no further complaint. The return trip should prove easier since their tracks were not covered with inches and inches of fresh snow.

  Layne trailed behind, because without snowshoes, Harry could further tamp down the path for him to follow. Packed snow was always easier than soft snow when it came to trailblazing.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” Harry said, tilting his face back toward Layne to speak against the breeze.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did you sleep with Janine?”

  Layne halted, and Harry did, too. Harry creaked around to face him, looking a little embarrassed. “No judgments, I mean, I’m only asking. She’s been all over you for days.”

  “No, I did not sleep with her.”

  “It’s just that you’re single, so I was wondering.”

  “Well,” Layne said, “I didn’t. Even before I knew she was married, I could tell she was playing some sort of game with me. I’m too old for the cat and mouse flirty crap, even with someone I’d be interested in dating.”

  Harry nodded. “I thought you might not do it because of Daphne.”

  “There is no me and Daphne. Not since before I left the team. Especially not now that I’ve been married, had a kid, and divorced. I’m not interested in flings anymore, not with Daphne Kurek or Janine Paluski, or anybody who wanders my way. Flings are for people who either have room left for regret, or they’re not capable of feeling it.”

  “Okay, okay. I get it.”

  Layne noticed the anger at the edge of his tone. “I don’t mean to lecture, Harry. I didn’t take your question personally. All the crap of this week is getting to me.”

  “I shouldn’t pry.”

  “No, I’m sorry I snapped at you. Everyone wants the salacious details. I’m a lot more boring than you might think.”

  Harry shrugged. “Aren’t we all?”

  He turned around, and they spent another hour trudging back to the retreat center in relative silence. Layne focused on his breathing and keeping an even march with his footfalls. He tried to conserve energy when possible.

  And when they were still ten minutes away, Layne could feel something wrong. Something in the air. Not like the stink of wolves from yesterday, but more of an ominous and vague odor, like a decomposing body.

  A flash of memory from London hit him: the smell of the failed warehouse raid, those charred bones inside the cages. The captive slaves inside those cages who had met with an end he could only imagine.

  Layne gripped a pistol and shoved a magazine into place.

  Harry reacted to the sound, almost falling into the snow. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t you smell it?”

  “Smell what?”

  Layne pointed as a mist of gray rose above one of the buildings at the SMRC, barely visible at the top of a hill. “There. Smoke.”

  Harry squinted. “That’s not good.”

  “Stay low on the approach. Let’s round the tennis courts to give us some cover.”

  Harry obliged, and they pushed ahead. They found it hard to conceal themselves since they were in dark jackets against a sea of pale snow. But they crept toward the tennis courts, using the meager chain link fence as a barrier.

  When they drew close enough, Layne noted a duo of snowcats at the edge of campus. But they were empty. No one loading luggage-laden retreat guests onto them.

  Because the guests of the SMRC were dying. Gunshots erupted across the campus, the sound ricocheting off the clouds above. Automatic weapons fire, in controlled bursts. Professional style.

  “What’s happening here?” Harry whispered.

  Layne pointed to a better hiding spot nearer to campus, and he dragged Harry with him to get a better look.

  Instead of friendly snowcat drivers to take everyone down the mountain, the vehicles had delivered a small army. Hiding behind a boulder at the edge of campus, Layne and Harry watched more than a dozen heavily armed men in white jackets and matching pants descend upon the bungalows, lighting them up with automatic weapons fire.

  The retreat center had turned into a bloodbath.

  INTERLUDE 4

  London | Six years ago

  Layne sits, perched behind a large garbage bin in a Whitechapel alley. It’s nighttime, and the stench of the alley invades his nostrils like an unwelcome houseguest. They must be on the backside of a restaurant-and-pub row because it stinks like discarded food and stale beer.

  Oleg leans over the balcony on a second-floor window in the building next to Layne. Alicia is hiding across the street, cloistered behind a collection of unmarked wooden crates. Back at their operations base, Harry monitors the approaching cars. Daphne is also at HQ, a voice in all of their earpieces.

  Across the street, Layne meets Alicia’s eye. “You look nervous, Boy Scout,” she says.

  He shakes his head. “Not at all. Not even a little.”

  “Cut the chatter,” Daphne says over the earpieces. “We’re forty-five seconds out.”

  But Layne is nervous, and he can’t say why. It’s a nebulous dread, like an invisible cloud, and it won’t go away. He’s got a lump at the base of his throat—not quite nausea—but it’s hovering on the edge.

  Alicia grins at Layne and pulls down her night vision goggles to seat them on her face. He’s opted not to wear his. In a few moments, when those two cars come tearing through the alley, he doesn’t want their headlights to blind him. He’d rather be a little squinty beforehand and rely on his other senses to know when it’s about to happen.

  Two cars. One full of Russian women to be placed in unwilling chains on a boat headed for somewhere, the other car full of the men who will put them there.

  Layne grips the stock of his AR-15 and breathes to even his heart rate. It’s more challenging than he realized to put aside his anger over what the bad guys are doing. He doesn’t usually feel like this on operations. When he was green, sure, he’d become so nervous about taking a life that he would empty his stomach in the nearest toilet, almost as a pre-game ritual for his first half-dozen kills. Then, he got used to it. He learned how to treat it as a job. He learned how to detach from th
e operation and how to let go when situations turned to shit.

  Not anymore. Layne doesn’t know how not to take this personally, as if he’s forgotten how to ride the bike.

  “Thirty seconds,” says the voice of Daphne in his ear.

  Layne wishes they could toss a bed of caltrop spikes across the road to stop the first vehicle cold, but there are too many unknowns. If the vehicles are too close together, disabling the first one can cause a crash with the second. And they don’t know if the traffickers’ or the captives’ car will come first.

  If any of those innocent women die, Layne doesn’t know if he can let it go this time. Not after those charred bones in the warehouse. Those images have never left his mind. The smell of the ashy remains. The feeling of grit on the bone as he twisted it in his hand.

  So, this is their plan instead: A roadblock of debris. Busted streetlights to hide the roadblock for as long as possible. Until the last second, the hostiles will think it’s a normal delivery run, with open streets and no surveillance.

  Once they’re close, about to meet the barricade, they will have no choice but to hit the brakes. The team will close in behind them, sealing the hostiles in. At gunpoint, Layne and his team will first figure out which car is which. Then, they’ll neutralize the hostiles and recover the hostages.

  If it goes well, they won’t have to fire a single shot. Simple, easy, in and out.

  But, so far, nothing in this London operation has been simple or easy. Layne’s stomach continues to constrict, sending bile up into his throat. He tries to will it away, but it won’t disappear on command.

  He doesn’t understand why he feels this way.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Control says. “They’re coming in fast, so get ready at the rear.”

  Alicia will cover the rear. Layne, the front. Oleg, from above, will monitor any stragglers who try to exit the vehicles and make a break for it. He’s the failsafe control, but Alicia and Layne are the primary operators on the ground.