The Gray Man

SEVENTEEN

Moments before Gentry had dropped exhaustedly to his sleeping bag for the night, he’d slid the large wall of rusty mesh to its position two feet inside the front door. The seven-foot-high contraption weighed over two hundred pounds and slid along a three-foot track on the floor. On each end of the fence there was a hinged wing, and each wing locked to a clasp on either side of the door. This effectively created a barricade capable of slowing down a breaching team, forcing them to bottleneck at the most dangerous point of any breach, the doorway. The mantrap was here when Court inherited the cache, and he had not placed much value in its capabilities due to the fact that it could easily be blown apart with explosives or knocked over with a battering ram or even a few serious blows from a boot heel, but as he leapt out of his sleeping bag to a crouch after the grenade went off out the front door, he immediately knew the rusty old barricade had just saved his soundly sleeping ass.

Frantically he kicked the two duffels of gear by his sleeping bag back down the hole to the tiny basement. He grabbed the Brügger & Thomet and fired a full magazine at the front door with one hand before sliding down into the hole. Once in the six-foot-deep cellar, he reached above and pulled the floorboard lid over himself.

Number Three knelt over bloody snow to the left of the shack’s entrance. The grenade fragment had hit him squarely in the elbow and passed through both meat and bone. But he was a disciplined soldier; he made little noise and quickly packed a handful of snow on the wound, wincing only with the shock of cold on skin, because he could not yet feel the pain he knew was soon to come.

Number One ignored his injured man as he ordered Two to set the fuse on his entire stock of breaching explosives and toss them through the doorway. A few seconds later a tissue-box-sized block of Semtex came to rest at the edge of the mantrap’s slide rail on the floor. The three uninjured Libyans at the front of the shack turned to run, and numbers Two and Four each grabbed Three under an arm and lifted him off the ground as they scrambled for cover.

It was quiet in the black forest for a few seconds. The only sounds to be heard were the gentle hiss of snow-flakes striking pine needles and their fallen brethren already on the ground, and the panting of the kill squad from Tripoli, now tucked tightly behind a fallen oak.

The black night and the soft sounds were replaced with a white flash and an earsplitting explosion that made the earlier hand grenade blast sound like the pop of a champagne cork. The doorway to the cabin, from the floor below to the slat roof above, blew to pieces, and lumber and fresh pine trees blew forward, landing as far away as one hundred feet from the building.

Bits of burning debris floated down with the snowfall through the pines as One, Two, and Four penetrated the wreckage of the cabin. Each man fired a burst or two as they entered the torn hole in the front wall. One went to the right, Two to the left, and Four moved straight through the small building. They used the light from burning fabric and paper to negotiate their footfalls over a blown-down metal fence, a smashed bookcase and table, several boxes and cooking utensils, and myriad unrecognizable objects.

Once the three were sure there was no one alive in either the main room or in the little bathroom, they began kicking over and through the debris on the floor, searching for the scorched and shredded body that surely must lie among the ruins. Five checked in to confirm all was quiet at the back of the cabin as the three Libyans inside began to worry. It was a small shack. Even in the deep shadows from the fires, it took less than ten seconds to verify there was no body to be found.

One looked to the ceiling. In a second he determined there was neither a loft nor an attic. Slowly he looked down to his feet.

“There’s a trapdoor here. Find it.”

Two did find it, next to the overturned furnace, after kicking a few coal bricks away. The fires were burning themselves out, so One turned on an electric lantern that had fallen from a shelf but had miraculously survived the explosion. He placed it on the floor next to the trapdoor.

“Careful. He may have set a surprise for us. Unless there is a tunnel through this mountain, he is trapped.”

Two and Four nodded; their confidence grew. The Gray Man was hiding like a rat below them.

Number Five stood behind a thick pine at the back of the structure. Twenty feet in front of him was the padlocked storage shed. It stood five feet high, alongside the cabin, but it was clearly not attached to it. He checked in with the men inside. They were about to lift the trapdoor with a long metal pole. Then they would toss grenades in, follow that with rifle fire, and then finally climb down to cut off their target’s head.

Five was missing all the action. He cursed aloud at the snow around him. His Skorpion waited at the low ready.

Suddenly he heard the coughing of an engine coming to life inside the cabin. No, not inside the cabin. In the storage shed. Just as his eyes moved down to the doors of the shed, a loud boom barked through the forest, the padlock blew forward and off, and the doors flew open wide. Number Five had just begun to lift his submachine gun to his eye when the motor noise screamed, and a large figure launched into the air from the darkened recesses of the small shed.

The young Libyan soldier had never before seen a snowmobile.

The bullet-shaped vehicle crashed back to the ground a few feet in front of him, and he dove to the side, rolling in the snow and slamming his back hard into a fallen stump. He looked up in time to see a human form on the back of the vehicle, leaning forward with a mask on his face and a large pack on his back. The image in his night vision goggles was a blur, and the blur was gone in a single second.

The Libyan scrambled for his submachine gun, but he’d lost it in the fallen needles and accumulating snow. By the time he’d gripped his weapon and lifted it to his face, the black shadow was disappearing over a tiny rise, tearing through snow and shrubbery and small saplings and flinging everything in its path to the left and right of its skids.

“Five! Report!” came One’s scream through the earpiece.

“He’s here! He’s back here! He’s heading up the mountain!”

“Shoot him!”

Five began running up the hill. “Come help me! He’s on a motorcycle with skis!”

The Gray Man knew he had to turn the snowmobile around and go right back down past the hit squad. The forest ended abruptly at a huge rocky wall on the top of the hill. He could perhaps find a place to hide in the woods for a while, but he knew all of Guarda was awake and calling the local constabulary a few kilometers away in Chur. It would take them a while to get there and most of an hour to get a real force in all the way from Davos, but Court had no intention of waiting around for minutes, much less hours.

“Shit!” he screamed into the icy air. He’d already left one of the two packs of gear behind. He could not fit it through the three-foot-long upward-sloping, dirt-walled tunnel from the dirt basement to the toolshed where he kept the snowmobile. He’d grabbed a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun from the cache to use to blow open the padlock from the inside, and now the powerful weapon rested in front of him between the handlebars of the snowmobile.

He was also furious because he knew there was only one other person alive who knew of the existence of this cache. Donald fucking Fitzroy. Sir Don had offered Court the established cache’s location soon after the Gray Man joined his stable. The venerable English handler had admitted at the time that the availability of the cache was due to the fact that the man who’d erected and used the hidden cabin no longer needed it, as he’d been found dismembered in a shallow grave somewhere just outside of Vladivostok.

Gentry hadn’t worried about the bad omen, and he’d accepted the gift of the shed from Fitzroy. He liked the central location, the seclusion of the village and the valley, and the fact that any approaching vehicle could be heard for hundreds of yards if it was on wheels or for miles if it was under propeller power.

It had been a good cache. It would have remained so, Gentry was certain, had Don Fitzroy not given up its location to the men trying to kill him.

The snowmobile ran out of snow forty seconds after heading up the mountain away from the killers. Gentry turned hard to avoid the granite wall a dozen feet high that ran both left and right. He used his feet and the throttle to turn the machine back around, facing towards the forest and cabin below and then the village beyond. For now, Court was protected by the lip of a hillock. He could not see down to the men with the guns and the bombs, and they could not see up to him. But they were surely at this moment negotiating their way up the icy, unpaved road. He had no idea if there were two men or five or fifteen or fifty. He only caught a brief glimpse of one at the rear of the shack, but he was hardly certain he hadn’t passed more men in the woods and, anyway, the bulk of the action had seemed to be at the front door.

Court considered his options for a moment. He looked around at his predicament and immediately pronounced himself trapped. He could fight a few of them, maybe, but the wide expanse in front of him over which they would surely come was a disadvantage. If they spread across the frozen meadow and approached simultaneously in a wide line, he would not be able to engage targets at his left, right, and center before they could gun him down.

The high ground was supposed to be a tactical advantage but, Gentry saw, this high ground sucked.

Off to his right there was another way down the hillside. A sheep trail, not more than four feet wide and incredibly steep, dropped more or less in a straight line through the forest towards the meadow on the other side. But the grade was far too sheer for the snowmobile to negotiate.

Even trying it would be suicide.

Now Court heard voices below him. Shouts of men, wild in the frenzy of the hunt.

They were moving up the road to him, closing on his cornered position.

“He’s got nowhere to run!” shouted number One. He didn’t bother with his radio. The noise from the explosion and the gunfire had withered his and his men’s hearing for the rest of the night. He just shouted out to the three men around him jogging up the slippery road. Number Three had been left behind at the cabin. He’d wrapped bandages over his injury, and he was lucid and ambulatory, even if out of the fight.

The four Libyans nearing the crest of the rise above them quickly dropped their magazines from their Skorpions and checked them for sufficient ammo. Professionally they reseated the clips and clicked them back into place. Their night vision goggles covered their eyes. The steady snowfall gave movement to the green view ahead. They slowed as they neared the top, spread quietly across the road without waiting for instructions to do so.

Suddenly the engine noise of the snowmobile screamed again. It revved higher and grew louder and then in front and above the four Libyans a single headlight appeared, glowed like a green specter in their night vision optics as it barreled down towards them.

“Open fire!” screamed number One with a shriek. The four assassins knelt into crouches and poured rounds at the oncoming vehicle. Twenty rounds a second of hollow-point ammunition sprayed from each of the four braying guns. Tracer rounds arced and struck and bounced into the sky like rocket-powered fireflies.

At thirty meters distance the vehicle left the ground. It floated to twenty-five meters and then came down hard, bounced again into the air, and then landed on its side. The light stayed on as the machine slid down the hill past the four Libyans and came to a stop twenty meters behind them.

The engine idled.

Hot gases poured from the motor and hazed the men’s optics.

Number One ran to the snowmobile after reloading his weapon. He slipped on ice and fell to his knees. Number Two passed him as he got back up. A quick scan around the road by all four men confirmed their suspicions.

“He’s not here!”

There was a moment when Court thought he might have been sliding at fifty miles an hour. Everything seemed faster at ground level, of course, and the snow and ice and crunchy bits of stick and grass that flew into his face no doubt added to the perception of speed.

But whatever the actual velocity, Gentry knew he was descending the sheep trail way too fast.

It was hard to part with the second duffel worth of gear, but he’d seen no alternative. He’d dumped the weapons and the grenades and the binoculars up there on the ice. He lashed the sawed-off shotgun to the handlebars to keep them straight and then used a length of cord to tie the throttle open. He watched the machine leap over the ledge and down the road, then he ran as fast as possible across the snow along the shelf, along the granite wall, to where the sheep trail began and led down at nearly twenty degrees through the forest, through the lower meadow, and then to the little village, still dark, still an hour from the first hues of dawn over the mountains to the east.

At a full sprint, Gentry leapt through the air, his injured feet first, holding the big canvas duffel bag behind his backside, and landed on the snow. The grade was especially sheer at the beginning. He’d lost control almost immediately but found his position again at a slightly less severe stretch of trail that proved to be all too short.

On the hillside to his left he could hear the gunfire and sense the flashes of light, but he did not turn his head away from his feet and what was in front of him.

For nearly a hundred yards he’d been happy with his plan. He sledded quickly out of the kill zone. And in truth, it wasn’t a bad plan really, but, as it turned out, its execution was wanting. When he skidded into the woods, the pine roots crossed the sheep trail, and he was sliding too fast to stop.

He went airborne at an ice patch over a root knob, and his body flung ninety degrees in the air. He landed on his side, perpendicular to the direction in which he was traveling, and this sent him spinning, rolling over and over. His bandaged knees took his body weight in a glancing blow as he spun, his feet caught a snowdrift, and this jerked his body around ninety degrees more. He found himself headfirst, his duffel bag sled was long lost behind him now, and he shot out of the forest and into the meadow above the old village of Guarda with his hands out in front of him like Superman and with absolutely no control over his momentum.

The slide, in its entirety, lasted just over forty-five seconds. To Gentry it seemed like a lifetime.

When it was over, he lay on his back in the snow. After taking a few seconds to control his vertigo, he sat up, checked his body for functionality, and then stood unsteadily in the black morning. He took stock of his pain. The bullet wound in his right thigh throbbed more than usual; he was certain he’d reopened any flesh that had rejoined in the last two days. His knees stung; they were likely bleeding. His ankles hurt but seemed to be operational. His rib cage on the right side flared with ache when he sucked in a breath of the cold mountain air. He thought it likely he’d cracked one of his floating ribs, which would be painful but not particularly burdensome. His left elbow seemed to have hit something, or a series of somethings, or every goddamn something on the mountainside, and the area along his funny bone was stiff and swelling.

With all that taken into account, the Gray Man knew he was fortunate to find himself in such good condition. Sliding, rolling, and bouncing down a steep hillside in the dark could have gone much worse, even without the gunmen firing machine guns at him.

Then he took stock of his belongings. His buoyed spirits sank anew. He’d lost everything but the small Walther handgun in his ankle holster, his wallet snapped shut in his back pocket, and a folding knife in his front pocket. Everything else — sat phone, medical equipment, extra ammo, guns, grenades, binoculars — all gone.

It took him another twenty minutes to get to the bottom of the valley, down to the one road and the one railroad track, to the one-room train station. The snow had turned to sleet, and he shivered, his ungloved hands buried deep in his pockets.

He saw a minivan, the only vehicle parked in the tiny lot. He took this as the kill squad’s vehicle. He broke the driver’s-side window and climbed in quickly, then smashed the steering column apart with two kicks of his boot heel. In seconds he had the ignition barrel out, and in under a minute he’d sparked the ignition wires. But the van would not start. Hurriedly he felt around under the dash for a kill switch. Finding none, he climbed back out of the van, slammed the door shut, and jabbed his knife into each of the tires. He knew sabotaging it would show the gunners he’d made it down this far and was certainly on the road by now but, he decided, they would have to leave Guarda immediately anyway. The police would be arriving within minutes. The kill team wouldn’t be able to search the forest for him all morning, so there was little use in trying to mis lead them that he was still on the mountain.

As it stood, he figured they were no more than ten to twenty minutes behind him now, depending on how concerned they were about being detected by the villagers or how nervous they were about bumping into the first police cars coming up the hillside.

Court broke a small windowpane in the door to the train station, reached around, and opened the latch. First he checked a schedule on a wall, a timetable for all the trains in the country. Then he pulled a heavy brown coat off a coat stand. Gentry slipped it on. It was a little tight at the shoulders, but it would keep him alive. A woman’s bicycle with thick tires leaned against a wall, and Gentry took it, closed the door behind him, and winced along with the flare-up of pain in his lower rib cage when he kicked a leg over to mount it.

It was after six, and he knew the trains would not begin running through the valley until seven. He needed to make it to a larger village to get the first express train of the morning to Zurich.

So he biked west on the Engadine Road away from the hint of a faint orange daybreak behind him. His lower back, right thigh, and left knee burned with each revolution of the pedals. His face stung in the cold. He leaned into the snowfall, dead tired and wounded and disheartened. He’d wasted an entire day going after documents and weapons, and he’d acquired nothing but injuries. Still, there were few men on earth who could summon determination in the face of adversity as well as the haggard and bloody man in the ill-fitting coat on the woman’s bike. He had no plan, no gear, no help, and now he was certain he had no friends. Fitzroy had lied to him, had set him up. Court knew he had every right to disappear and leave Don to whatever had hold of him, whatever made him burn his number one asset.

But Court decided to continue to the west, if only for now. He knew he needed a better understanding of what was going on, and he only knew one way to get it.