Spy Ski School (32 page)

I could also make out several dozen people at work in the mine, going about their jobs like it was any other day, completely unaware of their impending doom.

Spotting the bomb wasn't quite so easy. Even though we knew the exact location of the helicopter during the drop, right down to the inch, the bomb wasn't sitting out in the open at that very spot. Instead, it had tumbled down the snowy slopes and was now at some other, unknown point on an awfully big mountain.

Alexander, Erica, and I stood at the windows of the helicopter, scanning the ground below with binoculars while Cyrus hovered over the drop zone. Unfortunately, all any of us could see were rocks, trees, and snow.

“Maybe we should have brought some of the other guys,” I said to Erica.

“Like Warren?” she asked dismissively. “That kid couldn't find a bomb if it was taped to his butt.”

“Zoe could have helped,” I replied, and then added, “Mike, too.”

Erica gave me a sideways glance, then returned to her binoculars.

“He helped a lot today,” I said. “If it hadn't been for him, we'd be dead. He saved us while you were unconscious. Hopefully, your grandfather understands he's not a threat anymore.”

“He's even
more
of a threat now,” Erica pointed out. “He knows the truth about us. He knows we're spies. And he knows about the academy. That's a huge risk.”

“So what's Cyrus going to do, kill him?”

Erica made a noise I'd never heard her make before. It took me a moment to realize what it was. To my amazement, Erica had actually giggled.

“What's so funny?” I asked.

“There are other ways to deal with someone who's a threat besides killing him.”

“Like what?”

“Recruiting him.”

I lowered my binoculars to stare at Erica in shock. “You mean Cyrus has been thinking about recruiting Mike all along?”

“I have no idea what Grandpa has been thinking,” Erica admitted. “But I'm sure recruitment is an option. Like you said, Mike did well today. Of course, that won't mean diddly if we don't find this bomb and defuse it.”

Before I could pursue the conversation any further, Alexander gave a triumphant shout. “I see it!”

He pointed below us. On the eastern flank of the mountain, something metallic glinted in the sunlight. Unfortunately, it sat in the worst place imaginable. The only way to get down to it was to descend an exceptionally steep slope of
snow through a minefield of jagged rocks. And if that wasn't bad enough, the bomb sat only a few feet from the edge of a cliff, which dropped away into a canyon so deep, it looked like it went straight through the earth.

“They couldn't have dropped it into a nice flat meadow?” I groaned.

“I've got more bad news,” Cyrus announced from the cockpit. “There's nowhere for me to land the copter. I'm gonna have to keep it in the air. So you'll have to go down and defuse that thing yourselves.”

“Ourselves?” I had already been nervous at the thought of being anywhere near the bomb, but now my stomach started doing backflips.

As usual, though, Erica took it all in stride. She walked back to the pile of skis and poles in the cargo area and said, “Let's go.”

I followed her. We were still wearing the same ski boots we'd had on that morning. Cyrus hadn't brought us a change of footwear. My feet were in agony, but now the boots were finally going to come in handy again. I searched for a pair of skis with the right size bindings to clip into.

Alexander didn't grab a pair himself, however. “Um,” he said weakly. “I don't think I'll be able to join you. I, er . . . I can't ski.”

Even Erica seemed surprised by this. “Not even a little?”

“No,”
Alexander admitted. “All those bedtime stories I used to tell about leading evil criminal masterminds on wild chases down the slopes of the Karakoram Range . . . I made them all up.”

“I knew that,” Erica said flatly. “But I thought you at least had some
idea
how to ski.”

“No,” Alexander said. “I tried once. But on my very first run I skied into a tree and sprained my groin. So I never did it again.”

“Well, maybe you could walk down the slope somehow,” I suggested. “It'd take longer, but we could still use some help defusing that bomb.”

“Oh, I think that'd be even more of a bad idea,” Alexander replied. “To be honest, bomb defusion was never really my forte. In fact, I'm quite awful at it. I failed every one of my simulations. Ever. I get a little shaky when I get nervous.” He held up a hand to show us. It was trembling like a sapling in a hurricane. His fingers were twitching so badly, I could barely see them.

“If you can't ski and you can't defuse a bomb,” Erica said, “then why did you volunteer to come along?”

“Moral support?” Alexander ventured.

Erica sighed and turned to me. “Looks like it's just us, then.”

I didn't really want to go either. Heading down to the
bomb merely looked like a couple hundred good ways to die. But if no one went, we were going to die anyhow, and it seemed better to die valiantly rather than chickenhearted in front of Erica.

I finally found a pair of skis with bindings that fit my boots and hoisted them to my shoulder. “Have you ever defused an X-43 before?” I asked Erica.

“No. I've never even seen an X-43. They're pretty rare. But Grandpa knows them—and he'll be on the radio to talk us through it. Then, once we're done, Dad will hoist us back up on the tether.” She turned to Alexander. “You
can
work the winch, can't you?”

“I think so,” Alexander said. He didn't sound quite as sure of himself as I'd hoped.

“So let's get moving,” Erica told me.

We carried our skis to the door of the helicopter and clipped them on. Cyrus lowered us as close to the mountaintop as he could get. Alexander threw open the door.

Even though we weren't too far above the slope, it was still going to be a big leap from a helicopter onto a sheer descent. On skis, no less. It was even more treacherous than the slope we'd attempted before the avalanche that morning.

I gulped in fear.

And then Erica put a hand on my shoulder and whispered
in my ear, “I know you can do this. You're a better skier than I am—and I'm good at everything.”

It wasn't exactly the greatest compliment in the world, but it bolstered my confidence enough. “Okay. Let's do it.”

Erica leapt out of the helicopter. She didn't even take a second to gather her nerve. She simply jumped, the same way she might have leapt off the bottom step of a staircase.

She stuck the landing on the slope, carved a nice turn around some jagged rocks, and started her way down. Despite her failure on her first run a few days before, she had improved greatly.

Like Woodchuck had said, a great deal of being able to ski something was simply
believing
you could ski it.

So I jumped out of the helicopter too.

The fall was the worst part. It probably took less than a second, but it felt much longer, and every last bit of it was terrifying.

Then I hit the mountain. The snow was so soft and deep, it was like landing in a giant cushion. The next thing I knew, I was skiing. It was awfully frightening, given that the slope was steep and full of sharp, head-splitting rocks and it ended in a precipitous drop to certain doom—but there was something exhilarating about it as well. As I carved my turns and followed Erica down through the virgin powder, it occurred to me that this was the type of thing people shelled out big
bucks to go helicopter skiing to do—minus the cliff and the nuclear bomb, of course—and I suddenly understood why. I was experiencing a physical high, and for a few seconds, the entire mission was quite enjoyable.

And then I wiped out.

One moment I was upright and life was good, and the next I was tumbling downhill toward a cliff and life was about to end very quickly. My skis flew off, my poles sailed away, and a few pounds of snow ended up in my pants. The sheer drop at the end of the slope rushed toward me.

I dug my heels into the snow as hard as I could, forcing them down until my boots hit the hard rock beneath the powder. My feet rattled along the ground, finding no purchase, while I sluiced through the snow and the cliff came closer and closer. . . .

Until, suddenly, my boots connected with a big rock, jarring me to a sudden stop.

The cliff edge was only ten feet away. Now that I was so close to it, I could see that the snow jutted over the edge a bit, like the frosting on a cupcake, making me wonder if there was even less solid ground between the cliff and me than I'd suspected.

Just to my right sat the bomb.

It was the size of a microwave oven, housed in a metal shell that was stamped with dozens of words in Russian, all
of which appeared to be warnings. For people who couldn't read Russian, there were also several skulls and crossbones, indicating trouble.

Erica slid to a stop beside me. I'd passed her while tumbling down the slope. “You made that a little more exciting than it had to be,” she said, then tossed her poles aside, shed her jacket, and removed her avalanche vest. Beneath it all, she wore her standard utility belt. She plugged a radio into her ear and said, “Okay, Grandpa. We're here.”

I inserted my own radio just in time to hear Cyrus reply, “Good. Is there a metal casing on the bomb?”

“Yes,” Erica replied.

“Take it off. And be careful. One wrong move and Colorado gets a new crater.”

“I'm well aware how dangerous this is.” Erica removed two Phillips-head screwdrivers from her utility belt and handed one to me.

Six screws held the casing atop the bomb. Erica went to work on them.

Even though we were surrounded by snow, the sun was out and all my exertion and nerves had already made me start sweating. I took off my jacket and gloves as well, freeing my arms and fingers, and started on the screws.

The snow groaned and shifted around us, tilting slightly toward the edge of the cliff.

Erica popped out the first screw. “Grandpa, tell Dad to get that tether ready.”

“Is there a problem?”

“There's a decent chance the whole snowpack we're sitting atop is unstable and about to slide over the edge of the cliff. So yes, I'd consider that a problem.”

“I'll see what I can do. Try not to get distracted.”

That was easy for Cyrus to say. He wasn't
on
the snowpack on the edge of the cliff. But I did my best to focus, pulling out one screw, then another, trying to ignore the groaning snow and the sickening sense that we were slowly drifting with it.

Erica popped out the third screw.

I got another out a few seconds later. “Done.”

“Okay,” Erica told me. “Grab the casing with both hands and we'll lift it off. Very carefully.”

I grabbed the casing. So did Erica. We lifted as gingerly as we could. It came off with surprising ease, revealing the guts of the bomb beneath.

There were two yellow canisters marked with radiation symbols and more skulls and crossbones. They were strapped together with duct tape and surrounded by a nest of red wires, all of which were connected to a digital timer.

The timer indicated there were only two minutes and five seconds left until detonation.

My stomach was well past doing backflips. Now it did a triple axel roundoff with a twist.

Even Erica seemed shaken. “Crap on a cracker,” she said under her breath.

“Another problem?” asked Cyrus.

“We have less than two minutes to defuse this thing,” Erica reported. “And there's a whole rat's nest of wires.”

“Just clip the red one,” Cyrus told her.

“They're
all
red,” Erica informed him.

“They are?” Cyrus asked. “Curse those Soviets! Everything always had to be red with them.”

“So which one should I cut?” Erica asked.

“It's hard to know without looking at it,” Cyrus said.

There were now only ninety seconds left on the timer. Erica pulled out her phone. “I'm going to take a picture and send it to you,” she said, then glanced at the screen. “Actually, scratch that. I don't have any reception.”

“I'm afraid you're going to have to wing it, then, sweetheart,” Cyrus said.

“Wing it?” Erica's normally calm voice cracked. “But . . .”

“No ‘buts,' ” Cyrus said. “You know more about bombs than any girl your age. More than most people, period. You can do this.”

Erica nodded, gathering herself, and then looked at me. “One of these wires must connect to the detonator. The rest
are triggers. So we need to find the right one and yank it. If we pull the wrong one . . . we all go kablooey.”

I inspected the bomb. I couldn't even see the detonator. It was wedged below the yellow canisters beneath the snow. And it looked like every wire was snaking down toward where that might be.

The snow groaned and shifted again. A few chunks by the edge split off and dropped into the canyon.

The sound of the helicopter's rotors grew louder and louder. A wind kicked up around us. I figured Cyrus was lowering the copter toward us, and Alexander was probably playing out the tether, but I couldn't take the time to look up. I needed every bit of focus, every last fraction of a second to scan the tangle of red wires, looking for the one that would shut the bomb off.

There were only sixty seconds left.

I didn't have the slightest idea which wire was the correct one to cut. And neither did Erica.

But then something occurred to me. “Why would all the fake wires be triggers?” I asked.

“Because that's the way bombs are made,” Erica said.

“Is it? I mean, building in a whole bunch of triggers seems kind of overzealous, doesn't it? That assumes someone's going to be defusing the bomb, which probably doesn't happen very often. I mean, I know
we've
had to defuse a bomb before, but overall, that's pretty rare, right?”