The Devil's Dozen

Fourteen

We were three levels down under Snowman, but we might have been in the War Room of the Pentagon. Over a full bank of computers and programmers was an illuminated map showing Snowman in the center of all the mountains within a radius of ten miles.

“Part of the expenses,” King said. “The newest Honeywell computer.”

“But what for?” I asked. “Radar would cover the sky and your helicopters scan the ground. Nobody would try to approach through the mountains at night.”

“And if they did.” King waved one of his programmers aside and pressed a square button. One of the computer’s magnetic tapes became alive. On the screen two words, HEAT SENSORS, flashed and vanished. From a score of different points blue circles lit up. SOUND SENSORS flashed next. Again blue circles followed. “If they did, we would see some red lights. Tell me, Raki, what do you think we would do then?”

“Send out your Cobras?”

“Yes?”

“And have the Cobras attack.”

“No. No, Raki. You miss the essence of Snowman, just what makes this the perfect fortress that it is. And I’m surprised because you’re so clever. The way you manipulated the appearance of another kind of snow, opium, was a stroke of genius. Your snow was its own camouflage. My snow is its own weapon. Outside of a nuclear bomb or a volcano or an earthquake, perhaps the most powerful weapon on earth. What do you know about snow, Raki?”

“It’s white and cold. Not much more than that.”

“Then learn.”

King halted the sensor bank and pressed a button on the next computer. The map vanished from the screen and in its place were shifting crystals magnified 100 times.

“There are many kinds of snow. One Japanese scientist has defined seventy-nine different types. We, however, are willing to settle for the ten kinds used in the International Snow Classification Scale. This particular kind of snow is called plates. You’ll notice an inset with the international symbol, a hexagon.” King pressed the next button in the computer sequence. “Stellar crystals, like parallel stars. The symbol as you see is a six-pointed star. Plates and stellar crystals are what most people think of when they think of snow. But there are many other kinds.”

With Kings finger down on the computers RUN button, a profusion of crystals and symbols seemed to explode on the screen. Columns, needles, spatial dendrites, capped columns, irregular particles, graupel, ice pellets, and hail bloomed in icy splendor while my host talked.

“Avalanches are what I’m talking about. Avalanches falling thousands of feet, carrying a white blanket weighing a million tons, enough snow to bury whole armies, that’s what makes Snowman impregnable. But what makes an avalanche? Not just gravity, my friend. You have to consider temperature, depth hoar, rime, grain size, water content, wind drift, evaporation, tensile strength and viscoelasticity, and layer formation. Plate crystals easily make wind-driven avalanches. Needles and granular fragments pack together like a block of concrete, slower to break apart but colossal in its power when it does.”

“When it does,” I interjected. “That’s not a very dependable protection.”

“Like the weather, you mean? At one time you would have been right. But what do you think I have this computer brain imbedded beneath Snowman for? At a thousand sites in this part of the Cascades range I have not only heat and sound sensors but sensors grading every change in the snow formation. Telling me crystal formation, water flow, layer depth and stress, like the inventory of an armory. I would like to claim it was all my own idea but it was not. Look!”

King placed a magnetic tape on a computer. As soon as the tape started whirling, the screen filled with a mountain view.

“This is a film made by the United States Government at Alta, Utah in January 1964. It was made after a prolonged snowfall of fifty inches, and it illustrates avalanches and their causes.”

The screen showed a shelf of snow. The snow seemed solid enough. The film switched to a man in Forest Service uniform making a snowball. He smiled at the camera like a kid, and, like a kid, he threw the snowball. It was a soft lob, and it landed on the shelf with no more impact than a pound, but the whole shelf broke away. The Forest Service cameraman obviously knew what they were doing. The film followed a fracture line that stretched a mile down the slope as more and more tons of snow collapsed.

“Too unstable for our purposes,” King commented. “New snow on depth hoar. What we want is a reliable formation but capable of being triggered.”

The film focused on the Forest Ranger’s hand. Now, instead of a snowball, he held a grenade. The camera switched to a shelf of ice and snow — “More needles and columns,” King explained — and showed snowballs being thrown at the shelf without effect. The hand pulled the grenade pin and threw the grenade. It exploded in a white puff and, in a delayed reaction, the entire shelf split apart.

“I’m beginning to understand,” I admitted, “but that would hardly stop an army.”

“This will.”

The boys in Utah had gone all out. On the screen was a seventy-five-millimeter Howitzer being loaded for action. The target was one whole face of a mountain that looked about a mile away.

“An explosive shell,” King said. “What you want is shock to break the supporting layer. Of course, as you will see, these men did not know exactly how much shock.”

The Howitzer fired. The screen showed an almost invisible hit on the mountain, and then, in a rapid transformation, the mountain seemed to shake. Ton after ton fell from the high peaks to lower ones, collecting more weight and speed. Around the base of the mountain, a white skirt grew.

Suddenly the camera wheeled. On the next mountain another avalanche was falling. The same was true of the third mountain in the range, all from the one artillery shell. And the snow from the first avalanche continued to fall and move towards the camera.

“The snow is approaching at about 120 miles per hour,” King commented.

Again the camera turned. This time to the mountain directly behind the Howitzer. The peak was hidden in a haze of snow powder as tons of snow cascaded downward toward the men and the cannon. The camera became agitated. Men could be seen running. Others stopped to strap on their skis.

Two tidal waves came together. The men furthest from the camera disappeared first. The Howitzer bounced like a toy into the air. The camera swung wildly, and the screen went black.

King leaned on the END RUN button. On the screen again was the illuminated map of Snowman.

“They understood the power they were releasing but they made two errors,” he said as he took the tape off. “Their crystal analysis was nonexistent, and they fired from the ground. Thus, they no longer exist. Our Cobras are fitted with explosive grenades or rockets. We know exactly how much of what ammunition to use because our computer constantly analyzes the snow on every approach to Snowman. Intruders are wiped out and buried at the same time. Our Cobras, operating from the air, return untouched. You see, our secret weapon is snow, and the humorous thing is that no approaching enemy would ever guess our secret until it was too late.”

“That is probably true,” I confessed. AXE was going to send in its raiding party by foot. The whole attack force would be erased according to King’s plan. “A very ingenious system.”

“That’s not all of it. The avalanche system eliminates the strike by force. There is also infiltration to deal with, the threat of one man insinuating himself into Snowman as a guest. So I have computerized a system to guard against spies as well. This,” King’s eyebrows rose, “you may find most fascinating of all.”

From his jacket pocket he took a punched computer card.

“On this card is a portrait of Raki Senevres. That is, everything we have learned about you from my own direct observation and from Vera’s experiences with you. Physical characteristics are noted by only up to a point so that disguise won’t mislead us. However, your body build and special skills, physical and mental, such as languages, driving, and murder, everything absolutely known is here. We will see literally whether Raki Senevres is actually someone else, someone who has been sent here to dispose of us and whom we should dispose of first. My daughter wants to believe you are what you seem. I,” he tapped his lapel with the card, “take a slightly different tack. I believe you are what you seem, also, and you seem to me far too competent an operator to have suddenly come from nowhere, the way Raki Senevres has.”

I looked at the punch card, and my back crawled with fear. I shrugged.

“You’re right, I’m interested. Go ahead.”

King fed the card into the Honeywell’s scanner. Again, the map vanished from the view screen. Vera’s eyes slid from me to the screen. She may have loved me, but she was a Borgia. She was curious, too.

The screen split in two. Line by line, moving from the top down, the computer was building a silhouette of me on the left half of the screen, a literal silhouette of my body with notations of weight, height, body type, skull shape, musculature. Combat experience and linguistic abilities followed with social skills and general knowledge. The psychiatric profile was heavily emphasized, and I knew enough Freud to read that I was independent, genital, and Oedipally antagonistic.

“Now, let’s see who matches,” King set a new magnetic tape in motion.

On the right-hand side of the screen, silhouettes and statistics flashed by.

“You see, I have been preparing for a man like you, and I’ve created a special memory bank of the most dangerous men in the world. I looked for men with very particular talents, men of courage and intelligence, men who worked for any agency with any possible reason for destroying us. In the bank are agents of the FBI, CIA, and military intelligence, but also agents from every European and South American intelligence group, including Cuba and the USSR. Since the United States has reached a detente with the People’s Republic of China, I’ve also added their top agents to the list. Not to mention the very best assassins from our natural business competitors...”

A silhouette stayed on the right side of the screen. There was a match.

“I’m flattered,” King said, as he read the name of the match. “Nick Carter. Well, Mr. Carter, now would you say Snowman’s protective system is complete?”