The Descent From Truth (17 page)

After an interval that seemed to him interminable, she tugged on his ears, pulling him up on the bed. “It’s time, darling.”

Determined to gain a small victory by outlasting the woman as she moved on top of him, he treated their coupling as an athletic contest. To recharge his flagging erection, he shut his eyes and imagined the thighs straddling him were Pia’s, that the pelvis slamming against his and the voice mouthing a steady stream of obscenities, were hers. The mental picture became more focused, and his excitement grew. To keep from ejaculating, he opened his eyes. The reminder that the woman hovering over him wasn’t Pia, that he was at this bitch’s beck and call, drained away his urgency.

When it was over, she invited him to fix himself a vodka martini. “And bring me a fresh White Russian.” Sitting in bed with him, their backs cushioned by pillows and resting against the headboard, she returned the conversation to the projected transaction. “I’m concerned about getting the merchandise out of the country.”

“It won’t be a problem. They’re small enough to fit in a briefcase.”

“But American customs goes through briefcases.”

“At commercial airports, sure.” Pausing for a moment, he worked his jaw sideways. It ached from her blow and the extended workout. “My guys will have the Citation standing by at the Silver Hill landing strip.”

“Won’t customs inspect the plane before allowing it to leave the country?”

“They’ll go through the motions. But they’re more concerned with what comes in on private aircraft than what goes out. The way the aircrew will have it stashed, customs would have to tear the plane apart to find anything.”

“Even so, isn’t it possible they will stumble over it?”

“Anything’s possible. That’s why we won’t be on the plane. I have us booked on a commercial flight two days before the merchandise is to be delivered.”

“All right, darling.” She drained her glass and shifted to lie flat. “Do me again, and let’s call it a night.” He reached for her, but she pushed on his shoulders, urging him toward the foot of the bed. “Just your talented tongue. Then you can run along.”

Chapter 22

Alex awoke before dawn in his little group’s mountain refuge and took a moment to orient himself to his surroundings. As quietly as possible so as not to disturb the others, he fed wood shavings into the fireplace and blew on smoldering coals to coax a flame. Sitting cross-legged by the hearth, he waited until night and morning blended into soupy grayness. Then he began exploring.

Except for its windows and roof, the cabin appeared to be constructed of native materials: stone floors and walls, with rafters, beams, and interior finish hewn from Douglas fir. The wall that faced the lake was entirely windows. Intended only for summer occupancy, the cabin had no heat source other than the fireplaces, but removing the plywood cover would convert the south-facing window wall into a solar furnace. The stone floor would absorb heat all day and radiate it back during the night.

The roof, sheathed in corrugated metal, supported solar cells and solar water-heating panels. A large fiberglass tank sat a few yards away on a rocky knoll that placed it above the cabin’s elevation. Having spent a chunk of his childhood in Rocky Mountain backcountry, Alex understood the setup. During daylight hours, the solar-powered pump would draw water from the lake to fill the storage tank, allowing gravity to force a steady flow on demand. The roof-mounted solar heaters would provide hot water during sunlit days in spite of bitter cold. The system would have been drained for the winter, but if the intake was below the sheet of ice covering the lake, he figured he could get it working.

On the cabin’s south side, where the window wall looked out on the lake, a deck doubled as a roof for a storage area accessible through a door at the bottom of a short flight of stone steps. The storage area had no windows, so light flooding through the opened door provided the only illumination.

The frozen lake extended at least half a mile beyond the deck. When thawed, its length would accommodate a light airplane equipped with pontoons. That would be how construction materials and workmen had been brought to the site and how the owner got in and out. When the plane returned in the spring, it would be their ticket to civilization.

Back in the cabin, Alex found Pia awake and nursing Frederick. The pilot still slept. When Frederick finished his breakfast, Alex hoisted the youngster into his arms. With Pia in the lead, they investigated the cabin’s interior.

Beyond the living room they found a cramped kitchen, a shower-equipped bathroom, and two bedrooms. The window wall on the south side of the cabin continued across the larger of the two bedrooms. The room had a queen-sized bed and its own fireplace. A colorful, hooked rug covered the stone floor between the bed and the door. A corner desk held a two-way radio. The second bedroom was less than half as large. A chest of drawers, bunk beds, and a dresser filled it to capacity. The tiny kitchen had a compact range, oven, and refrigerator, all fueled with butane. The butane tanks, however, had been removed. A kitchen sink and the indoor toilet told Alex the owner had rigged a septic system.

Like the water pump, the two-way radio in the master bedroom depended on power from the rooftop solar cells. The radio had a backup battery that the solar cells recharged. Its receiver was wide-band, so they could pick up commercial radio stations and hear national news.

The owner had left bath towels and dishcloths but no bed linens. A shelf in the master bedroom held a row of matched books called Harvard Classics and several time-yellowed paperbacks that were part of a detective series featuring Ace Conner, Private Eye. In the kitchen they found dishes and cooking utensils but scant edibles: condiments, cooking oil, an unopened five-pound bag of cornmeal, a bag of flour that was perhaps a quarter used, some dried beans and peas, and several cans of condensed soup. The cabin was a godsend, but they faced a grim struggle to ride out what remained of the high-altitude winter.

“Until its owner reclaims it,” Pia said, “we have a home of our own.” Leaning against a kitchen counter, she touched her pursed lips with a stiffened index finger, a homemaker contemplating the arrangement of her new quarters. “The pilot can have the small bedroom. Let us move the top bunk from there into the living room, so Frederick can nap by the fire. Since there are no sheets or blankets, he will have to sleep with us at night. That way, we can give the pilot one of the sleeping bags. We have the bed sheets that we used for camouflage. One for our bed and one for his.”

“He won’t need a bed.”

Pia’s eyes got big. “What are you going to do?”

“There’s a storage room under the deck. Its walls are stone, and it has a strong door. We’ll keep him there.”

Exhaling deeply, she frowned. “It will be cold.”

“He has a parka.”

Pia argued that the pilot should be allowed to remain in the cabin. “Just because our enemy is inhumane doesn’t mean we must be.”

Alex capitulated. The pilot would stay inside with his ankles tethered so that he could shuffle about and his wrists bound loosely so that he could use his hands but could raise them only slightly above waist level. At night, and whenever Alex left the cabin, the man would be more securely bound.

A shout from the other room; the pilot had awakened. Alex loosened the ankle tether enough to permit small steps and escorted him into the living room.

Grinning, the pilot extended a hand as far toward Pia as his bound wrists permitted. “I’m Jake.”

Pia hesitated, shifting her gaze between the pilot and Alex. After a moment, she shook the hand. “Pia Ulmer.” She hoisted Frederick off the floor. “This is my son. His name is Frederick.”

“Howdy, Frederick.” Jake turned to Alex and flashed his smile. “And of course I know who you are. You’ve cut a hellacious swath through Theo Faust’s peace of mind.”

Alex grunted and kept his distance. If he were a prisoner, he would try to ingratiate himself and attack when he got close. After a breakfast of condensed soup and the last of his freeze-dried coffee, he dug a flashlight out of the helicopter’s survival kit. “Let’s check the cellar for supplies.” Walking slowly to accommodate Jake’s tethered ankles, he led his small band there. They found a stone-sided, waist-high bin about four feet square. Alex lifted its heavy wooden cover and directed the flashlight beam inside. The bin was empty, its wood-plank flooring loose. Hoping to find something useful, he reached inside and lifted a board. Just a stone-lined drainage sump.

“It is big enough for me to fit inside,” Pia said. With Frederick balanced on her hip, she leaned forward and stared into the cavity. “If this were your Old West and hostile Indians were attacking, I would hide in there and wait for you to rescue me.”

He was her anointed rescuer; Alex flushed with warmth. But he had hoped the cellar held something that would help them survive.

Back upstairs, an hour of experimentation got the solar-powered water pump working. Pia’s expression when a thin trickle of water streamed from the kitchen faucet, her beaming smile when Alex told her he also had the solar water heater operating, that she could soon have a warm bath, made him feel like a nuclear physicist. “We’ll have to drain the system at night to avoid freezing,” he said, “but it’ll only take a few minutes each morning to get it going again.”

He spent the rest of the morning ripping plywood off the window wall, Jake helping as much as possible with his wrists bound loosely in front. The men reentered the cabin and found it permeated with the aroma of navy beans simmering in a pot over the fireplace’s heat. Pia served them generous helpings, and Alex announced that he was going hunting. “We have to live off the land. I may as well get started.”

With Jake stretched out on his mattress, his wrists and ankles tethered to the bed, Alex disconnected the microphone from the radio transmitter and buried it in snow under a tree a short distance from the cabin, along with the flare gun and fire axe he had taken from the helicopter. He pocketed the two remaining cartridges from Pia’s rifle. If Jake somehow managed to get free, he would have no means of calling for help and no effective weapons. He wouldn’t dare harm Pia and Frederick, knowing the certain consequences when Alex, fully armed, returned to the cabin.

When Alex was ready to depart for his hunt, Pia held his parka and zipped it for him. Standing on tiptoes, she slipped her arms around his neck and pulled until he bent for a kiss. “Be safe,” she said in a whisper-soft voice.

With a hand under her chin, Alex stared into her eyes. “Underneath that good-old-boy grin, Jake is still Faust’s man. Don’t take any chances while I’m away.”

* * *

Throughout the afternoon, slogging across the snow pack in search of game, Alex wandered ever farther from the cabin. No tracks, no scat, no signs of animals nibbling at the lower branches or the bark of evergreens. It was as if he and his little band were the only creatures living in this frigid isolation.

Late in the day, tired from miles of snowshoeing, he squatted to rest on the trail. Return to the cabin, he decided. Chop a hole in the ice on the lake and rig a hook so Pia and Jake could fish while he hunted. Starting at daylight tomorrow, head out for two days and hunt at a lower altitude. Unless they caught fish, they would exhaust their food supply during his absence, so another fruitless foray was not an option. Not with a hungry woman and child depending on him.

Thinking about Frederick, about how well the boy seemed to relate to him, sparked memories of his own childhood, of good times with his father. Inexorably, his mind progressed to his teen years and their growing alienation. The gulf that had opened between them when his father missed his mother’s funeral became unbridgeable after Alex spurned a West Point slot that his father somehow finagled for him. Colorado State University offered a partial scholarship. He found a part-time job and worked his way through until, in his senior year, a severe case of mononucleosis cost him the job and earned him incomplete grades in all his courses.

Feeling he’d run out of options, he withdrew and enlisted in the Army. He had been a raw recruit coping with his second day of basic training, still reeling from abrupt immersion in military discipline, when his drill instructor marched him to the company orderly room and left him there to face his father.

“You’ve got too much backbone and too little brains,” the elder Bryson said, his face reddening and his neck swelling as he paced the orderly room. He dipped a shoulder to accentuate a point, and his silver eagle insignia of rank glistened in the orderly room’s overhead lighting. “That combination has caused a lot of grief over the years, but it never led you to do anything quite this stupid.”

“I can still graduate,” Alex said. “The Army has a program that—”

His father cut him off. “Instead of living in a barracks with those recruits, you could be leading them. All you had to do was accept your slot at the Point.”

“My grades weren’t good enough for West Point. You pulled strings.”

“Of course I pulled strings. It was the only way to get you in.” His father resumed pacing. “Your grandfather earned his commission in the field. I went through cow-college ROTC. The moment we made field grade, we both ran into a solid wall of West Point graduates looking out for each other.” He stopped pacing and faced Alex. The ribbons on his chest looked like an artist’s rebellion against the monotony of his uniform’s Army green with flat, black trim. Each tiny, colorful ribbon, Alex knew, denoted an award his father had earned. “You could have broken out, been the first Bryson to wear a star.”

“I don’t want to be a general. I plan on becoming an economist.”

His father snorted in disgust. “Well, you got part of what you want. You’re definitely not going to be a general.”

“Dad.” Alex extended a hand toward his father. “If you’ll just—”

“Stand at attention, Private!”

The roared command stunned Alex. He snapped-to the way his forty-eight hours of basic training had conditioned him.

“We’re on a military post and in uniform. I’m Colonel Bryson, you’re Private Bryson. It’s a relationship you chose. Be man enough to honor it.”

“Yes,
sir
. Will there be anything else,
sir
?”

“You’re dismissed.”

Alex executed an about-face and marched from the orderly room. They did not speak again until his father, recently retired, visited him in the hospital eight years later.

The confrontation had stayed with Alex. It colored his every action, led him to reject easy alternatives and look for opportunities to assert his manhood. He needed to show his father and himself that he could make decisions, that he was more than equal to anything the Army threw at him.

And they’d tossed plenty his way. He proved adept at hand-to-hand combat, became an expert with small arms and a master at evasion and survival in rugged terrain. The more he excelled, the more the Army demanded. They taught him to kill with a knife, a gun, his bare hands. Repeatedly, they put him in harm’s way and rewarded his survival by giving him more training and injecting him back into kill-or-be-killed environments. When he’d become a coiled-spring engine of destruction, a martial automaton that his mother would not have recognized, the Army, too, had rejected him.

A pattern in the gray, late-afternoon sky caught his attention and pulled his thoughts away from the past. He was on a ridge that gave him a view across the valley where the cabin was located, and the sight he saw there obliterated all other concerns. From the direction of the cabin, smoke boiled into the sky, a plume far too large to be from the chimney. At perhaps a thousand feet the plume met heavier air, flattened, and spread. It formed a skinny ashen tower capped by a dense, cloud-like mass.