The Lions Of Lucerne

22

Scot found Vance Boyson and Nick Slattery at the edge of the perimeter, leaning against the flatbed of a Deer Valley avalanche-control truck checking their equipment. Vance had been a friend of Scot’s from his days on the freestyle ski team, as well as an important contact during Scot’s sweeps of Deer Valley for the president’s visit.

Vance noticed him approaching and dropped what he was doing to greet him. “Hey, Scot, how you feeling, man?”

“I’ve been better, fellas,” replied Scot.

“We heard you really took a good spill down the mountain.”

“It wasn’t anything worse than I’ve ever eaten off a jump.”

Nick stopped his equipment check and turned to join the conversation. “Is there any word yet? There must be a thousand ambulances up here, but we haven’t seen any of them go down. That’s not a good sign.”

“No, it’s not good,” said Scot. “Listen, I need a favor. Now that the weather’s a little better, can we get your bird up?”

Vance looked at Nick before responding. “Sure, where do you need to go?”

“I want to go up top on Squaw Peak to get a better look at where the avalanche started.”

Nick sucked in a big breath of air between his teeth. “The sheriff has told us that area is off-limits until further notice.”

“I’ll take full responsibility. The sheriff doesn’t even have to know. If he says anything, you inform him you have been directed by the Secret Service to lift one of their agents up there for further investigation.”

“Agent Harvath, you’re a cool guy and everything, but I don’t-”

Nick was interrupted by Vance. “Of course you don’t want to interfere with a federal investigation. If Scot says he needs to get up to that peak, then he needs to get up there. We were told from the beginning to provide the Secret Service with any and all assistance they required. Well, this agent needs assistance and he’s going to get it.” Vance winked at Scot and said, “Get in the truck.”

Deer Valley’s chopper was primed and ready for takeoff when they arrived at the helipad off the main access road. Scot and Vance spent the short drive talking about the equipment they would need when they got up to the peak. Most of it was standard gear that the chopper already carried, but when they came to a stop near the pad, Vance shouted instructions to Nick above the roar of the rotors.

The chopper rose rapidly and looking down, Scot could make out the flurry of activity below. Because of the route they took to get to the helipad, they had bypassed most of the chaos. Now, though, Scot could clearly make out the battalions of rescue vehicles and news trucks parked pell-mell along the roads.

As the chopper continued to rise, Scot discussed with Vance the details of the avalanche while he slid into a pair of Deer Valley yellow-and-green ski pants Nick had brought from the truck.

Everyone had been kept away from the peak, so even the Utah Avalanche Forecast Center experts hadn’t been able to get up there to conduct any examinations yet. All they had been able to do was make assumptions. A lot of snow had fallen, and avalanches were part of the natural order of things. Only so much snow can build up on the face of a mountain before it crumbles under its own weight and falls in the only direction it can, straight down.

“It really isn’t that unusual,” replied Nick via the microphone attached to his headset.

“It’s not the act itself that bothers me, it’s the timing and ferocity,” said Scot, who noticed the peak looming up in front of them. “Can the pilot get close enough to give me a good look at the face?”

“No can do. We don’t know how unstable it is, and the rotor wash could trigger another slide. There’s a small plateau in back, near the top. He can set it down there, and we can work our way around on foot.” Vance turned around in the copilot’s seat so he could see Scot’s face as he asked his next question. “You think you’re up to it?”

“Don’t worry about me. You just get us there.”

The hike to the face hadn’t been as easy as Scot had hoped. The wind was blowing four times stronger at this elevation, and the chopper pilot needed three attempts before he was able to put down on the small plateau. Harvath was losing the feeling in his fingers from the cold, and the pain in his muscles was increasing with each passing minute.

As the wind grew stronger, Nick suggested they rope up for safety. While Vance was handing the end of the rope to Scot, he asked, “What exactly are we looking for up here?”

“Pornography,” Scot replied.

Both Nick and Vance stopped what they were doing to look at him. “Pornography?”

“It’s an expression. I can’t give you a good definition of pornography, but I know it when I see it. I’ll know what we’re looking for when I see it.”

The group rounded the narrow ridge trail and began closing on the face of Squaw Peak. Vance led, with Scot next, followed by Nick. Harvath kept looking high and low, searching for anything that was out of the ordinary. He held up his hand and called out for Vance to stop. His climbing partners closed the gap and stood on either side of him.

“You see that?” said Scot, motioning to a small crevice that had a pocket of chipped stone just above their heads.

“Sure do,” said Nick.

“It looks like someone has been up here doing a little climbing, and it looks relatively recent,” replied Vance.

“This area is technically off-limits, isn’t it?” asked Scot.

Vance was the first to respond. “It always is. Especially during the winter and even more so with the president’s visit. Heck, you were the one calling the shots. None of our guys were even allowed up here unless one of your men was with us.”

“And did any of your guys come up here?”

“They would have needed to be cleared by either me or Nick, and as far as I know, there were no requests, so neither of us cleared anyone.”

Scot turned to Nick for confirmation, who nodded his head in agreement.

Fifty feet below them, Scot could see the shelf of snow and ice from which the avalanche had broken off. It wasn’t hard to distinguish, as the levels of snow above and below were so dramatically different. Vance saw what Scot was looking at and immediately spoke. “Lemme guess.”

“Yeah, I need to take a closer look.”

Knowing he would be outvoted no matter what he said, Nick unshouldered his pack and began laying out the coils of rope they had brought along, leaving Vance to, hopefully, talk some sense into Agent Harvath as they untied their safety line.

“Scot, we have no idea how stable or unstable that shelf is down there.”

“All the more reason I have to get down to it now.”

“Can you explain to me what you hope to find down there?”

“I can’t go into great detail, Vance, but I don’t think that avalanche started on its own. I think somebody helped it.”

“What? You think somebody triggered that avalanche on purpose? Why would somebody do that?”

“I don’t have all the answers, but I’m starting to put together a picture. See that?” Scot gestured toward where Nick had wisely chosen a new location in the rock crevice in which to drive a piton, so as not to disturb the area Harvath had pointed out earlier. “I think somebody was up here, not too long ago, who hammered in one or several pitons, depending on how much support they needed, and belayed down the face.”

“But that’s nuts. No amateur backcountry climber would have done that.”

“Who said anything about amateurs? These people were extremely professional.”

“Even so, how do you know that their climbing caused the avalanche?”

“I don’t think the climbing caused it. As a matter of fact, I think whoever was responsible for the avalanche was long gone from here by the time it started. Are we ready up there, Nick?”

Nick gave the thumbs-up. He had placed a couple of extra pitons just to be sure and threw Harvath a new length of rope on which he would be belayed.

“Take this,” said Harvath, throwing Nick an orange wax crayon he had removed from the command center. “I want you to draw an X next to each one of the pitons you’ve placed, so that the investigative team can tell the difference between your work and what was here before we got here. Nick nodded and began marking off his piton locations.

Scot looped the rope through the metal ring in his harness and threw the coil of rope in his right hand over the ridge and down the face of Squaw Peak. Vance tied off a safety line to the harness and began giving Scot instructions.

“You look like you know what you’re doing, so I am going to assume you’ve rappelled before.”

“More times and from more different objects than you can possibly imagine.” Scot grinned.

“Well, this is going to be a little bit different. Because we have no idea how stable the snow is, you can’t bounce down; you’ve got to walk back very slowly. Place your feet with extreme caution and listen very carefully for any cracking sounds that might indicate the shelf is moving or might be ready to break away. You got it?”

“Yeah, I got it,” said Scot as he turned his back to the ridge and the valley far below. Looking over at Nick he asked, “On belay?”

“Belay on,” Nick replied.

“Climbing,” said Scot.

Which was followed by the mountaineer’s response from Nick, “Climb on.”

Ever so slowly, Scot leaned back into his harness and allowed himself to take baby steps over the lip of the ridge until he was standing on the icy face itself. He gave each of his balled fists a couple of quick squeezes to try and warm up his fingers before slowly letting out the slack in his rope.

As Scot moved backward down the face, choosing each step with care, Nick released the necessary amounts of slack from the line.

Harvath noticed divot-like depressions in the snow that could have been footprints or merely small, windblown craters. It was hard to tell.

The descent seemed to take forever as he moved step by step, always stopping to listen before lightly putting his weight on the next foot behind him. Scot’s aching body was cooperating so far, but just barely. A small smile crossed his lips as he thought of what Dr. Trawick would have said had Scot asked permission to go climb a mountain. He probably would have certified him insane right there.

Throughout the climb, Scot paid close attention to the strange pockmarks he was seeing in the snow about three feet off to his left. He realized they were too uniform to be a naturally occurring phenomenon. What prevented him from believing they could be footprints was their small size. Then it hit him.

Scot looked up at his own marks made scaling down the face. His prints were about half the size of regular prints, and for good reason. When they had gotten out of the helicopter, Vance had handed him a pair of crampons. The sharp metal teeth strapped to his boots were the same devices that would have been worn by any climber, even a half-wit amateur, when trying to tackle a surface covered with snow and ice. Whoever left the tracks off to Scot’s left did so knowing that by the time they were discovered, the person who made them would be hundreds, if not thousands of miles away.

Scot was nearing the edge of the shelf where the avalanche had broken away. He glanced again at the tracks left by the previous phantom climber and noticed they had begun to veer away from him. He steadied himself on the rope and carefully lifted his right hand to depress the talk button on the Deer Valley radio strapped to his chest.

“Vance, do you read me? Over.”

“Yeah, I got ya. What’s up?”

“We were right. Making my way down, I can see there’s been somebody here recently with crampons.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure enough. Listen, the trail diverges off to my left and then over the lip. I’m going to need to push off and swing over to where the tracks end. I’ll need some slack. Give me about twenty more feet.”

“We’ll let out the slack; just be careful you don’t touch off another slide, okay?”

“I am being careful, and believe me, if you’ve got another way to do this, I’m all ears. At some point I have to swing out over the lip, so I’d rather get it over with. Out.”

Scot waited until he saw a sufficient amount of the line slide down the face and dangle beneath him. He calculated how much thrust he would need to push himself off the snow to reach his target and hoped that using that much force wouldn’t crack the shelf beneath him and send it tumbling into the valley below. There were a lot of rescue personnel and many of his fellow agents still combing the area down there for survivors. Scot was convinced the first slide had been no accident, but there was no telling what instabilities were left behind.

Testing the strength in his legs, Scot bent painfully at the knees several times to get the momentum going to launch him in the right direction. Above on the ridge, Vance and Nick could only hope Scot knew what he was doing, because they were operating completely blind.

On the count of three, Scot once again told himself. One…two…three!

The push sent him backward into the air, away from the steep peak face and hurling toward the area beneath the shelf where the crampon tracks disappeared.

Knees bent, ready to absorb the impact, Scot’s body came back hard and fast toward its target. Judging by his speed, he thought that he had pushed off with a little too much force and consequently was coming back in too fast. He braced himself for the impact.

When the shark-teeth-like crampons dug into the ice, the jolt raced up his legs, past where it should have been absorbed by his knees. Scot had misjudged his own strength. His knees had not yet fully forgiven him for the punishment they had suffered over the past twenty-four hours, and they failed to take the brunt of the shock. His legs buckled, and his whole upper body slammed into the sheer face. Scot didn’t dare take either of his hands from the rope.

Snow and ice began showering down on top of him. He could hear Vance calling frantically over the radio. The snow was beginning to fall faster, and Harvath knew he didn’t have much time.

Through the shower of snow, he quickly looked above him along the ridge as best he could, then looked down. Both above and below him there were marks consistent with the detonation of some sort of explosive device. From the little he could see, it had not been the type of device fired by avalanche-control cannons from the valley. The spread and pattern were completely different.

When Scot let out a little more slack to drop closer to the area beneath him, he was hit from above by a sheet of ice that felt as if it weighed at least one hundred pounds, and he was knocked right off the face.

He tightened his grip frantically on his rope, knowing that it only had a finite amount of feet before it ran out. He cursed himself for being taken off guard by the ice sheet and loosening his grip in the first place. Scot fell with sickening speed, all the while fighting to regain control. He bumped his head several times, and then, with a loud snap, everything came to a halt.

With the blood rushing to his head, Scot realized that he was hanging upside down by his safety line. He made a mental note to kiss Nick and Vance right after he punched both of their lights out for letting him fall so far. About ten feet above him, he could see where his primary rope had come to its end.

Knowing, or actually hoping, Nick and Vance would be doing their best to pull him back up to the ridge, Scot summoned what strength he could and tried to right himself. His body was weak and sore, but it complied. As he swung back into the face and dug in with his crampons, Scot promised himself that very soon he’d take that long overdue vacation.