‘OK, now, clothing. Do you have a closet with heavy winter clothing?’
‘Sure. It’s a walk-in right beside the bedroom door.’
Captain Linnett nodded to his team sergeant who led the way by flashlight. The closet was spacious, full of winter kit.
‘There should be my pair of arctic snow boots, quilted pants and a parka with zippered hood.’
All gone.
‘Any skis or snowshoes, doctor?’
‘Sure, both. In the same cupboard.’
Also gone.
‘Any weapons at all? Compass?’
The big Bowie knife in its sheath should have been hanging inside the closet door and the compass and flashlight should have been in the drawers of the desk. They were all taken. That apart, the fugitive had ransacked the kitchen, but there had been no fresh food left there to rot. A newly opened, and emptied, tin of baked beans and the can opener lay on the worktop with two empty cans of soda. There was also an empty pickle jar that had been full of quarters but no one knew that.
‘Thanks, doc. I’d get up here when the weather clears with a team for a new window, and file a loss claim.’
The Alpha leader cut the connection and looked round at his unit.
‘Let’s go,’ was all he said. He knew the cabin and what the Afghan had taken shortened the odds and they could even now be against him. He put the fugitive, who must have spent over an hour in the cabin to Linnett’s thirty minutes, at two to three hours ahead, but now moving much faster.
Swallowing his pride he decided to bring up some cavalry. He called a pause and spoke to Fort Lewis again.
‘Tell McChord I want a Spectre and I want it now. Engage all the authority you need; Pentagon if you have to. I want it over the Cascades and talking to me direct.’
While waiting for their new ally to show up, the twelve men of Alpha 143 pressed on hard, pushing the pace. The sergeant-tracker was at poi
nt, his flashlight picking up the marks of the snowshoes of the fugitive in the frozen snow. They were pushing the pace, but they were carrying much more equipment than the man ahead of them. Linnett estimated they had to be keeping up, but were they gaining? Then the snow started. It was a blessing and a curse. As the deceptively gentle flakes drifted down from the conifers around them, they covered the rocks and stumps, permitting another quick pause to switch from shoes to the faster skis. They also wiped out the trail.
Linnett needed a guiding hand from heaven and it came just after midnight in the form of a Lockheed Martin AC-130 Hercules gunship, circling at twenty thousand feet, above the cloud layer but looking straight through it.
Among the many toys that Special Forces are given to play with the Spectre gunship is, from the viewpoint of the enemy on the ground, about as nasty as it gets.
The original Hercules transport plane has been gutted and her innards replaced with a cockpit-to-tail array of technology designed to locate, target and kill an opponent on the ground. It is seventy-two million dollars’ worth of pure bad news.
In its first ‘locate’ role it does not depend on daylight or dark, wind or rain, snow or hail. Mr Raytheon has been kind enough to provide a synthetic-aperture radar and infra-red thermal imager which can pick out any figure in a landscape that emits body heat. Nor is the image a vague blur; it is clear enough to differentiate between a four-legged beast and a two-legged one. But it still could not work out the weirdness of Mr Lemuel Wilson.
He too had a cabin, just outside the Pasayten Wilderness on the lower slopes of Mount Robinson. Unlike the Seattle surgeon, he prided himself on his capacity to over-winter up there, for he had no alternative metropolitan home.
So he survived without electricity, using a roaring log fire for heat and kerosene lamps for lighting. Each summer he hunted game and air-dried the meat strips for winter. He cut his own logs and gathered in forage for his tough mountain pony. But he had another hobby.
He had enough CB equipment, powered by a tiny generator, to spend his winter hours scanning the wavebands of the sheriff, the emergency services and the public utilities. That was how he heard the reports of a two-man aircrew down in the Wilderness and professional teams struggling towards the spot.
Lemuel Wilson was proud to call himself a concerned citizen. As so often, the authorities preferred the term ‘interfering busybody’. Hardly had the two airmen broadcast their plight, and the authorities had replied with their exact positions, than Lemuel Wilson had saddled up and ridden out. He intended to cross the southern half of the Wilderness to reach the Park and rescue Major Duval.
His band-scanning equipment was too cumbersome to bring along, so he never heard the two aviators were rescued anyway. But he did make human contact.
He did not see the man come at him. One second he was urging his horse through a deeper than usual snowdrift, the next a bank of snow came up to meet him. But the snow bank was a man in a silver space-age-material quilted two-piece.
There was nothing space age about the Bowie knife, invented around the time of the siege of the Alamo and still very efficient. One arm round his neck dragged him off his horse; as he crashed down the blade entered his rib cage from the back and sliced open his heart.
A thermal imager is fine for detecting body heat, but Lemuel Wilson’s corpse, dropped into a crevasse ten yards from where he died, lost its heat fast. By the time the AC-130 Spectre began its circling mission high above the Cascades thirty minutes later, Lemuel Wilson did not show up at all.
‘This is Spectre Echo Foxtrot, calling Team Alpha, do you read me, Alpha?’