Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (37 page)

On the shelf next to the canned Campbell soups was the treasure they had come here for: a black leather-covered transceiver.

“You all warm up while I do this,” Dennis said. “And eat. We can’t light a fire—the smoke will carry in this wind, and they’ll spot it—but if you turn on the stove and pump up the Primus, Harry, we can warm our hands. Get some coffee brewing.”

“My hands,” Harry said. He was still shivering.

Sophie was busy rubbing her palms on Brian’s face to warm him. Lucy sat in a worn heap in the center of the floor, head between her knees. Dennis pumped the Primus, then set the coffee to brew on the stove.

He turned to the radio, a ten-channel cellular-phone-sized Motorola transceiver. He flipped the on-off switch to on, and when the light flickered red, he smiled. It blinked, grew pink, then red again.

“Weak, but it’s working.”

But which of the ten channels was the emergency channel? He knew only that the signal would go from the cabin’s antenna to a repeater site somewhere in Carbondale, and from there to the dispatch center of the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office. Dennis fiddled with the squelch knob to dampen the background noise, hit the PUSH TO TALK button, and began working his way through the channels.

“May Day! Is anyone out there? Anyone listening? This is an emergency! May Day …”

He heard only crackling sound: no human response. He tried another channel; then another. Still no response.

On the fifth try a woman’s distant voice cut through the static. “Sheriff’s Office … you … state your …”

Dennis heard nothing more.

“May Day!” he repeated. “This is Dennis Conway. I’m up in the Bells—”

The connection broke, the static returned, and he saw the red light on the transceiver fade to a pale pink, then go to black. He tried one channel after another. He heard only static.

“What’s the problem?” Sophie asked.

“The battery’s dead.”

“But you spoke to them! Did they hear you?”

“I don’t know. Even if they did, I didn’t say where I was.”

“Can’t you recharge the radio with the generator?”

“Yes, thank God,” Dennis said, “I can.”

He hauled the gasoline-powered generator out of the corner, hooked up the transceiver, then yanked the cord that would fire up the engine. The cord came running out smoothly, and nothing happened. The generator made a faint
put-put
sound like that of an outboard motor or lawnmower reluctant to start.

He pulled the cord three times; three times the engine failed to start. Bending, Dennis lifted the machine off the floorboards of the cabin—he moved it from side to side, listening for the swish of liquid. He groaned. “It’s out of gas.”

“There’s got to be gas here,” Sophie said. Dennis was already examining the padlock of the closet.

“How are you going to break it?” Sophie asked.

“I’m not. I’m going to break down the door.”

“Hang on there.” Harry looked up from where he sat huddled in a corner of the cabin. “Read that sign inside the front door. Says, ‘Please leave this hut as you would wish to find it. Thank you, Tenth Mountain Division Hut System.’ “

In response, with his ice axe, Dennis pounded the door into splinters. In less than a minute he squeezed his way into the closet, and Sophie followed.

The closet smelled of pine resin. It contained twenty-five-pound ammonium nitrate bombs, a 75mm recoilless rifle and a 105mm howitzer. There were sticks of gelatin dynamite, blocks of TNT cast into cylindrical canisters, blasting caps and safety fuses and pull wire, pouches, and elasticized heavy-duty rubber straps. All of this was for avalanche control.

“My God,” Harry said. He had risen and was peering over Sophie’s shoulder. “Someone wants to start a war.”

Dennis nodded his head gloomily. “But not a mechanized war. There’s no gasoline.”

“That’s not possible,” Sophie said, her voice trembling.

“They probably don’t re-equip this place until winter’s over and the hikers start coming. Why bother? Why would anyone be up in this part of the world now?”

Dennis pressed his hands against his temples. His eyes blurred and he had trouble controlling his breathing. I gambled, he realized. Fleeing Springhill to save Harry Parrot’s life put my children’s lives at risk, and I made the wrong decision. I gambled— and lost.

Dennis heated thick vegetable soup and opened a tin of crackers. The three adults and two children sat on mattresses in a circle around the stove, huddled together for the body warmth they could generate. It was almost eleven A.M., still snowing, but the wind had slackened to an icy breeze.

Dennis said, “Sophie, …” and she raised her head slowly. She hadn’t slept all night. “Who would be in that Sno-Cat following us?”

“Oliver Cone and the McKee brothers. Maybe a few more men from the quarry.”

“Would they know about this hut?”

“Oliver hunts here all the time. They’ll try the hut first before they do anything else.”

They’ll be close, Dennis thought. And closing in.

“What will they do when they find us?”

“You want to know?” Harry stretched out a gloved hand to tap Dennis’s knee. “They ain’t come up here to negotiate. You heard them say they were going to cain me—do what their daddies did to Julian Rice in Mexico. And since you’re here with me, trying to keep me alive, they’ll do it to you too.”

Dennis looked at Sophie. Unhappily, she nodded in agreement. Oliver Cone was a killer. He knew that.

“But not you,” he said. “Not my kids.”

“I’d be a witness,” Sophie said. “So would Brian and Lucy.”

“Sophie… they’re just
kids.”

She turned her head away, turned back to the children. They were leaning against her, eyes closed, deep in a merciful asleep.

He saw that the strength had ebbed from Sophie. She had acted against the needs of the people she had known all her life in favor of Harry and Dennis and his children. She had battled through the storm to lead them here to safety. She had done all she could do. The failure of the radio and generator had sapped her will to act. Dennis saw her head droop, her eyes flutter, then close. It struck him like a physical blow: she had given up. Surrendered to defeat and exhaustion and the cold.

Dennis clambered to his feet, took deep breaths for a minute. Then he crossed the room and squeezed into the closet through the smashed door. There he surveyed its contents of avalanche control and rescue equipment.

Harry had followed and peered in over Dennis’s shoulder. “You know how to use this stuff?”

Nodding, Dennis laid a hand on the steel stock of the recoilless rifle. “Second World War. The howitzer is probably vintage 1925—a good year for howitzers. These charges are full of TNT. TNT is older than you, Harry. And it doesn’t need batteries or gasoline.”

Sophie and the children still slept. It had stopped snowing, and patches of pale blue sky were working their way down from the zenith toward the mountaintops.

Warming his hands over the stove, Dennis studied the topographical map. The men in the Sno-Cat knew these mountains well. They were hunters. There were only two routes they could use. One was straight down the North Fork of the Crystal from a southerly direction, but if they did that then above them would loom the wild monuments of the Bells with their unstable multiple layers of the long winter’s snow. The safer way to the cabin would be the slower one along the route of the pack trail, the way Sophie had chosen.

Dennis picked a point on the map where the trail and the North Fork of the Crystal seemed to nearly converge, where the hunters would be forced to pick their final access route. It was at the southern entrance to Lead King Basin on the edge of a mountain called Devils Rockpile. Sophie and he had passed it without looking up; they had been battling wind and snow, keeping the children on the move.

“Harry, before you got blown out of that trench in Cháteau- Thierry, did you fire a weapon?”

“Not at anything that moved,” Harry said.

He showed Harry how to load and fire the recoilless rifle, which was meant to be fired from a pedestal mounted on a flatbed truck but could also be handheld over the shoulder or propped on a window ledge. It had no recoil, although its back blast was equal to the force that propelled the shell from the barrel.

“If it’s loaded, Harry, and you stand behind it when you pull the lanyard, you never get to see that hundred-and-first candle on your birthday cake.”

Dennis assembled the TNT canisters, crimped the caps and cut the safety fuses to one-minute lengths for a margin of retreat. He tried on some old cross-country boots left in the clothes chest by the ski patrol. One pair was too tight, another too big. With an extra layer of wool socks, the big pair would do. The boots were sized for one of the two pairs of cross-country skis standing in the rack.

Watching him carefully, Harry asked, “What are you going to do?”

“There’s a mountain called Devils Rockpile. They have to go there, and I’ll meet them.” He spoke softly. “I’m not going to wake Sophie and the kids. If I’m not back yet when they get up, tell them where I went.”

Harry hugged him fiercely. “None of this was supposed to happen, Denny. You didn’t need to get involved. If they show up here, I’m not going to fire that goddam weapon. I’m going out to them. It’s me they want, not Sophie and your kids. The world doesn’t need another artist.”

There was no time to debate it. Dennis looked once at Brian and Lucy, and then at his wife. He dared not bend to kiss them for fear they would wake.

He slipped out the door into the cold morning.

In snowshoes, the slender cross-country skis slung over his shoulder, binoculars snug against his chest, Dennis worked his way southward along a series of gullies and a feeder canyon. He had taken off his mittens and wore Thinsulate ski gloves with two pair of silk liners under them. In his backpack he carried two of the four-pound gelatin dynamite canisters. He had armed them in the hut; it might never be possible to do it on the icy peak he was bound for. He packed two safety flares. He had thought of taking a rescue beacon, but if an avalanche caught and covered him, whom would he signal? He would be alone in the Bells.

Devils Rockpile soared to 11,000 feet. In the white heart of winter the rocks for which it was named were barely visible. Dennis plodded steadily and slowly up a bowl on the steep north face, trying to traverse and keep clumps of trees between himself and the peak in case somehow, above him, the snowpack fractured. His breath was ragged. The higher he climbed, the colder it grew.

The snow had eased but the wind swirled. Even in the gloves his fingers felt as if they were resting on a block of ice. His lungs ached from cold that could drain strength from muscles and will from the mind. The cold commanded you to obey. You could bend into the wind and by that fraction of angle shield your face from its force, but there was no way of evading the motionless cold that invaded from all directions, sucking out your warm core. You could give in to it, Dennis knew, could feel conquered by a power so strong there was no shame in defeat. He had heard that men, when they froze to death, in the last moments before sleep felt warm, peaceful, enwombed. Now he understood why. There was a moment when you felt you could not be any colder: you and the cold were one. Death, although not quite welcome, was no longer shunned. To surrender to the cold was purpose enough, and in that surrender was a form of glory.

The wind eased a little. He had to halt climbing to steady his breathing. For a few seconds he raised the flap of his ski hat so that one ear was free.

The faint deep chug of an engine broke the silence. It was coming from the other side of the tree line at the crest of the peak. He pulled the hat down again; he believed that in another few seconds his ear would have frozen.

But now he knew where the pursuers were—just where he had assumed: on the far side of Devils Rockpile, below him in the drainage canyon formed by the North Fork of the Crystal. He had been there in summer on a fine day with blue sky and green meadows; today it was unrecognizable.

He kept climbing, tramping through drifts below the tree line, staying away from the trunks where he knew the living warmth of the trees could create hidden pits into whose softness a man could sink up to his neck or vanish.

He emerged at the top of the Rockpile near a horizontal cornice of nearly frozen snow, and dropped quickly to a prone position.

Only a few hundred yards below him on the frozen riverbed he saw the hulk of the Thiokol Sno-Cat—6,000 pounds of bright-orange aluminum constructed like a giant tractor with an oversized plow in front. A heated cabin towered above the plow and on either side of it were huge black tractor treads to crush relentlessly through the snow. In the bed behind the cabin Dennis could see two men.

With one hand he unslung his binoculars from under the parka, and with the other hand he lifted his ski goggles from his forehead. The sudden brightness nearly blinded him. The binoculars clamped to his eyes felt like circles of ice. Made clumsy by the cold, his fingers spun the dials. The image shimmered, then cleared.

He focused on the faces of the men riding the Sno-Cat. He saw Oliver Cone and Peter Frazee. Frazee carried a hunting rifle with a scoped sight. Strapped to the back of Oliver Cone’s parka were a steel bow and quiver of metal arrows.

These were the descendants of Larissa McKee and William Lovell. They don’t hate me, Dennis knew, but they believe Harry and I stand in the way of their survival. And blood lust would also have taken hold. The hunt and the savagery of the mountains themselves would plunge these men back into a primitive world. Dennis saw that world in the machine chugging brutelike along the river toward the hut where their quarry—his friend, his wife, his children—waited. The Sno-Cat grunted like a beast in rut.

He remembered the night long ago when he chased away the bear and felt like an adventurer, a city boy happily out of his element. A year ago he had been sheltered with his family in a world where no harm could penetrate. A week ago in court he had played civilized games. That world had vanished. This was no game.