Free Fall (46 page)

He dropped about a foot or so before he jerked to a stop and was flipped around so that his back was against the snow. He felt himself choke on something, snow or fear probably, and started coughing violently as he stared down into the abyss.

"Mark! Mark! Are you listening? Don't get scared and make any sudden moves, but I'm starting to lose my grip."

Darby's voice snapped him back into reality and he craned his neck around to look up at her. She had one hand wrapped around her axe and the other around the collar of his jacket. That tiny little gloved hand was all that was between him and ... He moved as calmly as he could, grabbing hold of her arm and flipping himself over to face the slope again. A moment later, he had his boots dug in and had climbed up far enough to get ahold of his ice axe.

"Oh, shit," he coughed, gripping the axe so hard it was sending shooting pains up his forearm.

"Oh, shit."

Darby let go of the front of his jacket and moved her hand to the back of it, helping him to maintain his balance.

"I guess that's why climbers don't carry guns," she said as Beamon's choking slowly subsided.

"Are you okay?"

He nodded, still unable to speak. Fuck private industry. Fuck the FBI.

That warm, safe jail cell was looking better and better.

"You're sure? You're okay?"

"Yeah. Fine. I'm fine."

"Did you ... " Beamon turned his head with comic slowness and looked below him at the visible marks in the snow that his gun had made.

"God, I hope so."

He also hoped that the man was alone.

They started up together, eyes once again locked on the snow beneath the lookout tower. When they reached the top of the slope, Beamon waved at her to stay where she was and slid forward on his stomach. He was out in the open now, the proverbial sitting duck. He didn't care, though. At least the goddamn ground was flat.

Miraculously, he made it across the open snow and pressed his back against the bank guarding the underside of the lookout. He glanced back at Darby and gave her a tentative thumbs-up, then threw himself over the berm, holding his ice axe in front of him as a weapon.

There was no one there.

He looked around the deeply shadowed space, finding nothing but snow some of which was tinted pink with blood. He crawled to the far side and looked out into the clearing. The steep slope rising into the sky two hundred yards to the east provided a flawless white backdrop, making the man struggling toward the treeline stand out perfectly.

Beamon burst out into the flat sunlight and started running after the man as best he could through the intermittently deep and wind-packed snow. He could hear Darby coming up quickly behind him and waved her off without looking back. He was about fifteen yards behind when the man turned, holding a pistol out in front of him. Beamon dove to the ground at the same time the man fell backward into the snow. The gun went off, but the bullet sped harmlessly into the darkening sky.

Beamon covered the rest of the distance in a crouch and ended up in a badly controlled slide and a brief struggle to relieve the man of his weapon.

"Fuck you," he said weakly as Beamon stood and aimed the gun down at him.

"Are you all right?" Darby yelled, running up behind him, but stopping short when she saw the blood spreading out beneath the man lying in the snow. Her eyes moved up his face and she instantly recognized him as the man who had imprisoned her in that horrible Thai jail cell.

She took an involuntary step backward.

"Where is it?" Beamon said, not looking at the man, but scanning the trees at the edge of the clearing, searching for movement.

"Long gone," he replied in a faded, but still smug, voice.

Darby shuffled back and forth for a few moments, then pushed past Beamon and crouched down next to the man.

"I sent it on ahead while I waited here for you," he said, ignoring Darby as she opened up his jacket and cut through his sweater and shirt with a pocketknife.

Beamon looked around the clearing again while Darby wadded up a piece of nylon clothing and pressed it against the man's wound. This asshole didn't look any better equipped to get out of here by himself than he did. There was just no way he was alone.

"Where's the Slovenian?" Beamon said.

He saw Darby twitch at his words and then go back to working on the man's wound, finally taking his bare right hand and pressing it against the makeshift bandage she'd fashioned. That done, she stood and started walking silently back toward the lookout tower.

"Like I said. He and your file are long gone."

"Then, tell me about David Hallorin."

The man laughed and Beamon could see that his teeth were the same pink as the snow beneath him.

"Oh, I could tell you some things about him. And I will when you get me to a hospital."

Beamon was suddenly aware of the absurdity of carrying on an interrogation of a wounded man on a frozen mountain in Wyoming.

"Okay.

Fine. We'll get you all fixed up. But how about you ante up a little information to motivate me? Who are you?"

The man coughed out another laugh. The crimson of his teeth had deepened a bit.

"I think you're plenty motivated already, Beamon. You want Hallorin and I'm the only man who can give him to you." He looked past Beamon for a moment.

"What's she doing?"

Darby had reappeared about twenty feet behind them and was digging in the snow with her ice axe for no apparent reason.

"I have no idea," Beamon said absently, trying to get the facts in his head into some kind of coherent order. What now? Dangle the son of a bitch over a cliff by his ankles? There was no point this guy had him by the balls and he was smart enough to know it. Threats would just sound silly. His only option was to save this prick and hope to get the story later.

The sound of the ice axe repeatedly hitting the snow behind him intruded into his thoughts and eventually forced him to turn around.

"Darby, what the hell are you doing? I can't hear myself think here."

She ignored him a skill she seemed to be developing at an alarming rate and smoothed out something that looked like a chair cut out of the snow.

He watched passively as she stood and walked over to the man lying at his feet. Still perplexed, he didn't interfere when she grabbed the man's lapels and dragged him toward her construction as he howled and swore in pain.

It was a chair. She dropped him into it and stood directly in front of him.

"You're going to die," she said matter-of-factly. The man looked up at her like she was speaking Swahili. Darby pointed to the west, where the sun had turned the snow-covered mountains a deep purple. It was a spectacular effect, making it impossible to tell where the mountains ended and the sky began.

"It's one of the most beautiful places in the world," Darby continued.

"A lot better than what you had planned for me. A lot better than you deserve, you son of a bitch."

She picked up her ice axe and started walking smoothly through the snow toward the mouth of the canyon where they had stashed their skis and other equipment.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" the man slurred at her back.

"Get the fuck back here, you bitch!"

Beamon grabbed her by the arm as she passed.

"Darby, we need him."

"This isn't New York," she said. He was a little shocked by the anger in her voice it didn't seem to fit her.

"What do you want to do? Call an ambulance?"

"No, I don't want to call an ambulance. I want to make a litter or something and drag him to a hospital."

"He's dead. Look at him."

Beamon did. Blood had soaked through a good half of his clothing and was actually dripping off him as he tried to stand. She was right.

"Last chance to unburden your conscience," Beamon said, taking a few steps toward the man.

"Fuck you! We had a deal. You get me out of here. You get me out of here and I'll tell you everything."

Beamon turned up his gloved hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"I'll be lucky to get myself out of here."

"You can go to hell!" the man yelled as Beamon turned and started to follow Darby out. Surprisingly, though, he was finding it almost impossible to walk away. He'd been unfortunate enough to have killed men before, but he'd never left one of them to die. There had always been helicopters, doctors, hospitals ... "Wait, Darby," Beamon said, trying to increase his speed to a jog in the deep snow. For once she listened to him and stopped dead in her tracks.

As he came alongside her, though, she didn't seem to be aware that he was there.

He looked behind him at the man who had now fallen from his makeshift chair and was attempting to crawl in their direction.

"Jesus, Darby. I don't care if it's pointless, we can't just leave him "Did you hear that, Mark?"

He had heard something. The wind? They looked up at the steep slope hanging over them and both saw a distant figure standing at the top of it.

"What the hell is that?" Beamon said.

Whoever it was, he was shouting down to them, but the distance and the wind made it impossible to decipher his words.

"It's Vili," Darby said as the quiet shouting stopped and the figure huddled to himself for a moment. When he straightened out, Beamon could see a plume of smoke rising from his hand.

"Oh, shit," Darby said quietly. She grabbed him by the jacket and started running, pulling him along behind.

"Go for the trees, Mark!

We've got to make it to the trees!"

She let go of him and sprinted ahead, seeming to float over the snow that he was becoming more and more mired down in. When he looked behind him, the smoke plume had left Vili Marcek's hand and was arcing gracefully through the air.

There was a muffled whup and a plume of white snow, followed by a loud cracking sound. Darby was far ahead by the time Beamon felt the low rumble come up through the ground into his feet and legs. She was nearly to the trees. She was going to make it. But he wasn't.

Beamon slowed and then stopped, turning back toward the slope just before he was engulfed in a billowing cloud of snow and ice. He felt it washing over him, gaining weight and force, filling his mouth and every gap in his clothing. The world flashed the white of snow, the red of the sunset, and the deep blue of the sky, more times than he could process as he was turned over and over by the irresistible force of the slide.

He didn't bother to fight, instead closing his eyes and relaxing, waiting for all the colors to permanently turn black.

He didn't know how long it took it could have been seconds or hours, but it finally stopped. Despite the darkness, silence, and lack of gravity, it wasn't exactly what he expected. If this was death, it was going to be a cold and boring afterlife.

He experimented with moving, but was held completely immobile by the pressure all around him. The flair of pain he felt in his right shoulder suggested that he was still alive, but he couldn't decide whether or not that was a good thing.

He suddenly realized that he wasn't breathing and tried to take in a tentative breath, but didn't get any air. Thinking that the snow was packed in around his face, he jerked his head forward to try to clear an air pocket, but found that nature had already created one. He forced back the panic that was starting to overtake him, finally realizing that he had snow packed into his mouth and nose. He forced what little air he had out of his lungs, clearing a passageway and starting to breathe again.

To what end he wasn't sure. There couldn't be more than a few minutes of oxygen in there with him.

He thought of Carrie and Emory, then about Darby, who was probably futilely searching for him in the thousands of tons of snow that had come down the slope. She wouldn't survive on her own. He was sorry about that.

The quality of the air didn't support deep thought for long. As he started breathing in less oxygen and more carbon dioxide, he could see the sparkling lights on the insides of his eyelids grow in intensity.

He was only vaguely aware of a sudden, sharp pain in his back and assumed it was a disk exploding or his spine giving way. Nothing to worry too much about at this point.

"Mark!"

The voice was muffled. It didn't sound real.

Another pain less severe and in the back of his head. He couldn't ignore it this time, because of the cold rush of air that accompanied it.

"Mark!"

His head cleared a little and he could hear the loud crunch of snow reverberating in his ears. He abandoned the shallow breaths he'd been taking and sucked in a lungful of clean air.

"Mark! Can you hear me?"

He felt a hand clearing the snow away from his face and wiping it roughly from his nose.

"I... uh. Yeah," he said, opening his eyes to see the sky spinning sickeningly above him. He focused on Darby as she drove a bright yellow shovel into the snow above him.

"Just relax, Mark. I'll have you out in a second. Can you move? Where are you hurt?"