02 Avalanche Pass (38 page)

Knowing it was a futile gesture, he checked the cell phone but
there was no signal, only the inevitable message that the phone was “searching.” He put the phone away in his parka pocket, tapping his other pocket to make sure the Colt was still there.

This was all starting to come badly unraveled, thought Kormann, as he led the way back toward the gym. He thumbed the talk button once more and called:

“Gymnasium, report.”

He paused, waiting to hear a reply but none came. Cursing, he hit transmit again.

“Mosby, did you get that guy?”

“Negative. Pallisani and three of the others are still after him. He got on the chairlift and they followed.”

Kormann slammed his fist against the wall in anger. Once the intruder had reached the chairlift, Pallisani should have given the chase away. He was no good to Kormann halfway up the mountain and he’d reduced his available forces seriously—particularly now that the three men in the gymnasium seemed to have been disabled. He transmitted again.

“Pallisani. Come in.”

There was a pause, then Pallisani’s voice came back at him.

“Pallisani. We’re on the chairlift behind this guy.”

“Get your asses back down here! I need you. All hell is breaking loose here.”

“We’ll ride the chair around, Kormann,” Pallisani told him confidently. “I’ve checked a trail map and there are only two ways down from the top of this chair. They both go right under the chair line, so whichever way he goes, we’ll have a close range shot at him.”

Which was a logical mistake to make. Everyone knew you went
up a chairlift in order to ski down again. Pallisani assumed that the man he was chasing had boarded the chair in a reflex attempt to escape—in other words, it was the quickest available escape route. When he came off the chair, he’d be faced with two trails down and they both ran close to the lift line for the first couple of hundred yards—one on either side. After that, they split off in half-a-dozen different directions. But he could see that when Jesse started down, he’d have to stay close to the chairlift long enough for them to nail him.

It never occurred to him that Jesse was planning to keep going uphill when he left the chair.

“Okay,” Kormann said, accepting the inevitable. “Don’t waste any more time on him. We’ve got problems here… oh shit.”

The last two words came out involuntarily as he reached the ante room to the gym. The two heavy glass doors were piled high on the other side with leather and chrome gym equipment—weight benches, treadmills and heavy bags. Somehow the hostages had overpowered the guards and barricaded themselves inside the gym. Which meant they had the guards’ guns. Which meant…

He flung himself sideways just in time, as three heavy reports thumped out from the doorway, the slugs slamming into the concrete wall behind him.
Alston dived for cover in the opposite direction. More from frustration than anything else, Kormann leveled his Beretta and let go four shots at the door. The bullets starred the heavy shatterproof glass but didn’t penetrate. Now he could make out a dim shape crouched among the jumble of equipment that barricaded the doorway. The two doors left a gap of maybe half an inch where they met and the man on the other side had placed the muzzle of his gun right into that gap in order to get off his shots. It would take an incredibly lucky shot from this side to penetrate the gap.

“Mosby,” he said into the radio. “I need more men down here.”

“Are you kidding, Kormann?” said the incredulous voice. “We need them here in case there’s an attack.”

“There’s already an attack and it’s down here! The hostages have taken over the gym and they’ve got guns. There’s just me and Alston to keep them in at the moment. If they realize they’ve got us outnumbered and out-gunned, they might just decide to break out. Now get me three men down here right now!”

There was a pause as his words sank in. The man in charge on the roof assessed his needs, worked out which three men he could best spare, and replied:

“They’re on their way.”

“Make it fast,” Kormann said. He hit the radio again and contacted Harrison, still patrolling the first floor, ordering him to come to the gym. Alston, he noticed, had taken cover behind an angle of the wall opposite the entrance to the ante room. From there, he could see the door leading into the gym and he had the Ingram ready, covering it. Now that he considered the position, Kormann realized there was little chance of the captives breaking out. They had no way of knowing how shorthanded he was. Besides, if they were planning on escaping from the gym, they would have hardly piled all that crap in front of the door in the first place. He relaxed a little, realizing he had time to think.

The elevator doors sighed open and the three men from the roof arrived to join them. Figuring he now had more than enough bodies to keep the situation under control, he sent one of the men back to the roof and positioned the other two to support Alston. The third man departed, muttering inaudibly for the most part, although Kormann made out the words “make up his fucking mind” quite clearly. He needed time and space to think, so, denied access to the gymnasium office, he took over one of the rooms down the corridor, using a master key he had taken from Ben Markus.

It might still be possible to salvage something out of this mess, he thought. After all, he was being paid five million dollars to pull this off. Half the money was already in a Swiss account and the other half would go in when word reached Estevez that the hostages were dead. It would mean bringing the timetable forward by a few hours but it might just work out. It was just as well Pallisani was stuck on the chairlift, he thought. He didn’t want the ex-mafioso privy to the conversation he was about to have.

He glanced over his shoulder to make sure none of his men was
within earshot, then lifted the phone from its cradle and pressed nine. There was slight delay and he heard the low warble that told him he had an outside line. Quickly, he punched in the numbers for a cell phone. A voice answered on the first ring.

“Hello.”

“It’s me,” he said quickly. There was no need to identify himself any further. Nobody else had the number to call. “In twenty, okay?”

“I thought—” the voice began, sounding concerned. They weren’t supposed to be doing this in daylight. Kormann cut him off quickly.

“Don’t argue. In twenty.” He waited, willing the other man to acknowledge and get off the line. He was sure the calls on this line would be being monitored by the FBI but he figured they’d have little idea what the cryptic message “twenty” would mean. They might suspect something but they couldn’t be sure. He had no idea that his previous call to the same number had been overheard and passed on to the agent-in-charge at Canyon Road.

“Okay. Understood,” the pilot said and broke the connection. Kormann replaced the phone in its cradle and smiled to himself. Maybe things were working out after all, he thought. His client wanted the senator dead. That was what this had all been about, right from the get-go. Maybe he wanted it to appear as a tragic accident in the course of a terrorist situation, hiding one murder among many. Hiding one tree in a forest.

This wasn’t exactly the way Kormann had planned things. But the main point was, he could still fulfill the contract and get himself out of here.

Twenty minutes gave him time, he thought. It was ten minutes to the top by the cable car. From there, if he detonated the charges set in the mountain, the resulting confusion would give the chopper an opportunity to come in low over the back ridges and get him out. There was even a chance they wouldn’t be seen: the helicopter was painted all white and the pilot was an expert in following the terrain and using the mountains and ridges to mask any radar in the area. They’d practiced the approach to the cable car station on a remote mountain in Wyoming several weeks before, finding a series of mountains, ridges and valleys that pretty well matched the situation
here. After four days’ practice, the pilot had managed to fly the approach with only one brief, two-second appearance on a radar screen. Chances were good that in the confusion caused by the mountain coming down, even that would be missed.

He wished he’d had the time to get the captives into the Atrium restaurant, where the two-story-high glass walls would have exposed them more fully. Still, he figured, the calculations were that the hotel would be buried up to the fourth floor level, and there were sufficient window openings in the gymnasium to ensure that the rock, snow and ice would smash its way in, burying anyone inside. He smiled grimly. The hostages’ action in barricading the doors only served to contain them in the danger area. His only possible problem was how to keep his men occupied while he made it to the cable car.

While he was thinking about it, the problem solved itself. One of the men from the roof came into the room, hesitating at the door until Kormann saw him and gestured him in.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “We need to get that door open if we’re going to get them out of there.”

Kormann nodded agreement. “The glass is pretty well bulletproof, and unless you want to be shot to pieces while you’re moving all that furniture they’ve piled against it, I don’t see how you plan to accomplish it,” he said. The man waited till he’d finished, as if he’d foreseen the answer. Then he said simply:

“Why not use one of the Stingers?”

Kormann looked at him in admiration. It was a brilliant piece of lateral thinking.

“I can bypass the heat seeker so that it’ll fire on command,” the man added. Kormann nodded. He knew that under normal conditions, the Stinger needed to have its infrared seeker head locked onto a heat-emitting target before the launcher would fire.

He had no idea if the explosive warhead on the Stinger would arm in the short distance it took to reach the glass doors. But the effect of a rocket-powered missile on the double doors and the hastily erected barricade behind it wasn’t hard to imagine. The damn thing would probably tear around and around the room, ripping the
place to shreds. In addition, it would keep the men here occupied while he made a break for it.

“Do it,” he said, rising from the chair beside the phone. “I’m going to the lobby to make a call to that FBI guy—keep them off our backs.” He saw the man’s eyes drop to the phone on the bedside table. “This one’s screwed,” he added in explanation. “I can’t get a line on it.”

The man nodded. There was no reason why he should question the statement.

“One thing,” he said. “Mosby won’t like me taking one of the missiles. He looks after them like he paid for them.”

Mosby would complain, of course, because the Stingers were intended for anti-aircraft defense. But they had fifteen of them and they could spare one. Not that it mattered if they couldn’t, Kormann thought grimly.

“I’ll radio him,” he said, reaching for the walkie-talkie at his belt. “You get going.”

A
gent Colby!” The door to the communications van flew open, slamming back against the aluminium side of the vehicle and the technician came out running, yelling for Dent.

The agent-in-charge was making a last-minute check of the line of choppers, ready and laden with grim-faced armed men. The engines were spooled up and turning over, the choppers ready to launch immediately. At the head of the line were the two angular Apache attack birds, hung all over with weaponry. Maloney was in the lead Blackhawk troop carrier, while three other Blackhawks carried the rest of his assault team. Dent would ride in the second of the troop carriers. The idling turbojets masked the frantic calls from the communications tech and it was Cale Lawson who saw him running down the line of helicopters parked along the road.

“Looks like someone wants your attention,” he said, touching Dent’s arm. Colby turned as the technician pounded up to him, breathless in the thin, cold mountain air.

“Agent Colby…” he gasped, “we’ve… monitored a… call from… Kormann.”

“He wants to talk?” Colby asked. He had a moment’s illogical fear that Kormann had got wind of the preparations here, that somehow, he was aware of the line of choppers ready to take off. The technician shook his head, speaking more easily now as he got his breath back.

“No. It was to someone else. He just said: ‘It’s me. Twenty.’ Then, when the other guy sounded like he was questioning it, he repeated it: ‘twenty.’”

“Twenty?” Colby repeated. “Twenty what?”

Again the technician shook his head. “That was all he said. Just ‘twenty.’”

“Twenty men?” Maloney suggested. “Twenty miles?”

The technician held up a hand, remembering a small detail. “‘In twenty,’” he said. “He spoke to the other guy and said ‘In twenty.’ Then the other guy sounded like he was going to argue and Roger repeated it: ‘In twenty.’”

“Twenty minutes?” Lawson suggested. “Maybe he’s pulling the plug, calling for his pick-up.”

“Jesus,” said Maloney softly, instinctively looking around to his Blackhawk. Colby hesitated.

“We haven’t heard from Jesse…” he said uncertainly. He couldn’t order the attack on such indefinite evidence.

“Maybe they caught him,” Lawson said. “Maybe that’s why Kormann’s in a rush all of a sudden. He might know we’re onto him.”

“How did he sound?” Colby asked the technician. The man faltered. “He sounded… I guess… how do you mean?” he said finally. Colby tried to disguise his irritation.

“Did he sound panicky? Excited? Was he yelling or anything?”

“No. He didn’t yell. He sounded pretty normal, I guess,” the man replied, feeling guilty that he couldn’t add anything useful to the conversation.

“Damn!” said Colby with sudden venom. He felt totally helpless, totally powerless. His fists clenched and unclenched without his being aware of the fact. He’d just like five minutes with that bastard Kormann, he thought. Two even.

“Agent Colby?” It was Maloney. Colby turned to the marine to hear what he had to say.