Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (38 page)

A cloud moved away from the peak and without warning the April sun blazed from a patch of hard blue sky. Before Dennis could drop the binoculars, light from the lenses flashed down into the bowl, sweeping across Oliver Cone on the Sno-Cat. Cone turned to gaze upward. He lifted a red-gloved hand.

The Sno-Cat halted. Its engine idled, the sound drifting up toward the peak. Awkwardly, like a cumbersome orange beast roused from torpor, the machine began to turn toward the upper reach of Devils Rockpile. Dennis calculated that between him and the Sno-Cat lay a distance of three hundred yards. The slope the machine would climb to reach him was an easy grade of twenty degrees.

He moved awkwardly. If he took off the gloves his hands would freeze within a minute. Twisting partly out of his backpack, he hauled out the first canister, armed the charge, set the blasting cap and fuse. He was tugging at the second charge when the air six inches from his head seemed to vibrate. He heard the crack of a rifle, then a plaintive whine echoing round the peaks.

He scrambled quickly behind a fir tree—a second later a steel- tipped arrow chunked into the tree, quivering there. Sophie had told him that Oliver Cone, using a telescope sight, could hit a bull’s-eye at a hundred yards.

Dennis pulled the ignition wire on the first canister, raised himself up and slung the four-pound cylinder down the slope. When the rifle cracked again, a branch lopped off from the tree and fell silently into the thick snow at his feet, followed by the whining echo bouncing all over the Maroon Bells.

Quickly Dennis rose again, hurling the second charge over the cornice and to the right, trying to bracket the slope above the Sno-Cat.

He had the one-minute safety margin before the charges exploded. If the pack was unstable, it would slide. He feared only that the shock waves of the explosion would set off the slab on his steeper side of the peak as well. He crouched behind the fir, sucking icy air into his lungs. He was nearly at the crest. He reckoned the angle behind and below him to be forty degrees, swooping down for nearly a thousand feet to the aspen groves.

Waiting for the explosion, fists clenched, he stared at the second hand on his watch as it moved placidly on its journey to thirty seconds … forty seconds … and then a minute passed …

Whumpf! Whumpf!
The canisters exploded, one after the other, the sound rising sharply in the bright midday air. Dennis waited for the following thunder of crumbling snowpack that would sweep down the slope and end his nightmare. He waited. And he heard nothing.

Then, louder than before, he heard the grumble of the Sno-Cat, ascending. The snowpack on the other side of the peak had held firm—it had not been steep enough to slide.

“Don’t panic,” Dennis told himself, aloud. “Just get the hell out of here.”

He stripped the snowshoe lashes from his boots and unslung the cross-country skis he had carried on his back. Part of his plan had been not to go down the mountain in the awkward snowshoes, but to ski back to the hut. It had not been part of the plan that a tanklike vehicle manned by sharpshooters would be at his heels. As he clicked the first metal toe cap of a boot into the lock on one ski, from a corner of his eye he caught a flash of orange through the trees. Wrenching the second snowshoe loose, he jammed his foot into the second ski—then came a series of light crackling sounds with the familiar whining echo. Another arrow skidded across the snow a foot away, skipped like a stone, and vanished. He looked up to see the machine clear of the trees and topping the crest. The hunters had him in easy range.

In a sudden fury of strength he planted his poles, shoved off downhill, and in a few seconds he felt he was flying. He could outski a SnoCat but he could not outski steel-jacketed bullets. Bent low, ski tips dangerously deep into the powder, he headed at a sharp angle for the firs on the left flank of the slope. He peered around as the Sno-Cat tipped over the cornice and bounced hard down onto the snowpack.

A familiar low clap of thunder—a deep
whoosh,
the growl of disturbed lions—and the cornice on the crest of Devils Rockpile collapsed.

To his left Dennis saw zigzagging cracks, as of windowpanes breaking in soundless slow motion, while to his right the surface of the snow foamed like a caldron of boiling milk. Dennis shot left along the upper angle of a crack, toward the trees. He was thirty feet from them when the snow gave way under him. He let go of his poles, jerking an arm downward to snap the release of the binding on one ski. He was reaching for the other ski when he was lifted into the air and supported on what felt like an immense soft hand. He was floating, and then something slammed into his chest and deprived him of breath. A hard edge bit into his ankle, his knee twisted—pain rocketed through his body.

He felt himself falling a second time. But there was no blow when he struck the surface of the mountain. He fell into white mist.

He began to swim. The snow was engulfing him, bearing him down the mountain at a speed he couldn’t calculate. But he knew enough to swim through it, to try and stay on top of it. He needed only to breathe—to breathe was vital.
Breathe!
Hurtling, tumbling downward, he commanded himself to breathe. But something prevented him from obeying. He flailed arms and legs, tried to swim, and tried to work out what wouldn’t let him breathe, until he realized that his mouth was full of snow, snow moving into his lungs, choking him, and that he was going to drown.

He tried to spit out the snow but it was a hard ball that had settled behind his teeth and bulged against his cheeks and refused to move. His nostrils were full of snow too. He heard a crunch, a convulsive settling. He had come to rest somewhere. He couldn’t move, couldn’t see. The world was completely white. Something was pressing into his chest and thighs. He felt comfortable but he knew it was death to be comfortable. He bit and crunched at the snow in his mouth. The cold assaulted his teeth and gums.

Breathe!

Chew!

Air moved minutely into his lungs.
Chew! Spit! Breathe!

He flexed a hand and it touched nothing. He could move his fingers. He reasoned that the hand was up in the air. Close to the surface. I can get out, he decided, if I keep breathing and don’t give up.

Breathe!

Inch by inch, he hauled himself out of the snow until out of the corner of one snowpacked eye he saw a blue blur of sky.

Ten minutes later he lay on an icy bed of hard slabbed snow, five hundred feet down the mountain from where the avalanche had first struck him. Every muscle in his body hurt; every bone felt bruised. He had fought a battle with the mountain and he hadn’t lost—not yet. He sat up and began to drag himself painfully the remaining ten feet to the shelter of the aspen trees in case the snowpack of the Rockpile should fracture again.

He was alive, and that seemed miraculous. Not safe, but alive. He scanned the mountain for signs of the Sno-Cat, but at first saw nothing. Then his sight adjusted to the glare and he made out a spot of orange at the bottom of the bowl. Tumbled on its back like a giant bug, the machine had come to an ungainly rest against the border of the trees five hundred feet below him and a thousand feet below the crest. It was motionless and silent. No human being was near it.

Dennis sat huddled on the edge of the aspen grove. He had his backpack, but he had lost his ski goggles and the light was a dagger in his eyes. It was a sunny, beautiful day. His knee was blown, the pain violent enough so that when he tried to stand, he toppled over and for a few seconds lost consciousness. I won’t try that again, he concluded.

His watch had been torn from his wrist but the sun told him it was early afternoon. By dark he would be asleep; by midnight, dead. But Sophie was safe now. After a while she would realize that somehow he had succeeded, that no one was coming to the hut. When she woke, she would have her confidence back. She would light a fire, leave Harry and the children in the hut, hitch a ride on a friendly eagle, and get through to Aspen. She’ll do it. Somewhere, even if it’s in Springhill, she’ll mourn for me as long as she has to, and at the same time she’ll raise my children. Raise them well.

Dennis nodded groggily; he had accepted his departure. He was not ashamed of anything he had done in the years of living, except perhaps the way he had won his last trial. But he had won it and there was a satisfaction in that. His mouth widened in a half-frozen smile.

He wondered who would find him, and when. It might take until summer. Maybe longer. Not many hiked here.

A strange thought worked its way into his fading consciousness.
Both my children will probably live to be one hundred years old.
That’s the legacy I leave to them. He could depart with that knowledge fixed as a touchstone in his mind.

While he was pondering and speculating, drifting toward sleep and easy death, he heard a coarse grating sound he knew well. The grating noise changed gradually to a rhythmic pounding. It was a sound that years ago in Vietnam he had learned to love and hate. The pounding grew louder. He couldn’t see its source. It was coming from south of Devils Rockpile. It was there; he was positive of it. How or why, he didn’t know, but it was there.

Wearily he reached into his snow-clogged backpack and lifted out one of the signal flares. They were built to withstand any weather. He activated it and tossed it as high and far as he could. The flare landed in the middle of the slope, sputtered uncertainly… and then, with astonishing speed to the eyes of a man half dead, shot high into the mountain air in a dazzling pattern of red-white-and-blue light.

Fourth of July in the Maroon Bells! The snowpack glittered colorfully, reflecting the changing pattern, and didn’t fracture.

An open-tailed Lama AS-315 helicopter, with a Plexiglas bubble and latticework boom, just like the rescue choppers Dennis had seen sweep the sky over Da Nang, hovered above him against the sun. Its rotor thudded and pounded and battered the air and he wondered for a few moments if the concussion would start another avalanche. He knew it couldn’t land at an angle of more than six degrees. But it didn’t need to land. From its belly there hung a fifty-foot static nylon rope, and in a cone-shaped net at the end of that wonderful rope which would neither stretch nor break crouched Mickey Karp and one other man from the Mountain Rescue team.

Ten minutes later the short-haul harness lifted Dennis into the Lama. The pilot was another stranger to Dennis. But the uniformed Pitkin County deputy sheriff working with the Mountain Rescue team to unhook and unstrap him was someone he knew well. She was Queenie O’Hare.

Dennis said, “Thank you,” in a voice that seemed to him to be coming from some source other than his mouth, oddly far away.

He told Queenie that his wife and two children and a very old man named Harry Parrot were in a Tenth Mountain hut not too far from Devils Rockpile. If they liked, Dennis said, he would be happy to guide them there.

Queenie asked if any of the people in the hut were hurt, and Dennis said he didn’t believe so.

“In that case,” Queenie said, “we’ll get you to a vehicle at the staging area first, and they can take you down to the hospital. Then we’ll go back for your family. Sounds like they’ll be just fine.”

That was all Dennis needed to know, and he passed out. But he woke again at the staging area, on Quarry Road in Springhill, when he was loaded into a rescue van by the Mountain Rescue team. Finally he focused his eyes on Mickey Karp.

“I thought I was dead,” he admitted.

“You probably would be,” Mickey Karp said, “if you hadn’t had appointments this morning. You didn’t show, and none of your phones answered. I got worried. Lila drove up to Springhill. You weren’t here, and that didn’t seem right. So when the Sheriff’s Office called me and said they’d had a message from you on the emergency channel from the Bells, it was pretty clear. Josh wouldn’t send Mountain Rescue on land vehicles—the risk equation didn’t balance. But he must have had some leftover cash in the treasury and he must like you, so he hired a high-altitude helicopter from Fort Collins. Don’t worry, you’ll get the bill. We took a ride with them, and you lit up the sky. Now there’s only one thing we need to know, Dennis. What the hell were you all doing up there?”

“I need to sleep,” Dennis said, and closed his eyes.

On the way down to the hospital in Glenwood Springs, Queenie patched through on her cellular to the Lama. They had been able to land near the Tenth Mountain hut. They were coming back with four passengers.

Dennis woke. “Everyone’s all right?” he asked anxiously.

“Everyone except the old man.”

“What happened to him?”

“Frostbite,” Queenie reported. “He’ll lose a few fingers off his hands.”

“Both hands?” Dennis asked unhappily.

Queenie nodded. “But he’s alive and cheerful. Tough old bird—they say he’ll live to be a hundred.”

Chapter 30
The Outer Limits

IN JOSH GAMBLE’S office in the Aspen courthouse, Dennis sat on a stiff-backed chair, his knee clamped in a metal brace. Outside, the sun had begun to melt the snowpack.

The grandfather clock chimed the hour. Cracking his knuckles as he talked, the sheriff thumped back and forth on the worn, ash- stained carpet.

“Four avalanche victims, inside and around that Sno-Cat. Four! Count ‘em. All of them armed. The month of April, in case you don’t know, Dennis, is a hell of a long way before or after the hunting season. Sheriff over in Gunnison calls me every day—tells me no one in Springhill knows a damn thing. Bullshit is what I say. Someone knows. And I need to know too, because I don’t sleep well when bullshit flows and things don’t make sense. Those four men were hunting you. Tell me why.”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” Dennis said.

“Try me.”

‘‘Give me time, Josh.”

“You got Ray Bond on your tail. He calls every day too, tells me he wants to charge you with
something.
“

“What’s he have in mind? Breaking and entering a closet? I paid the repair bill to the Tenth Mountain people. I paid for the helicopter. Those four men were killed by an avalanche. You know it and so does Ray Bond.”