Killer View

18

IT BEGAN AS A SHUDDER, AS IF HE’D PUSHED THE SNOWMOBILE too hard, had thrown a belt or burned up some bearings. Walt felt it first in his legs, then his waist, and finally some spinal signal reached his brain that told him to look to his left.

His greatest fear was death by fire, with asphyxiation a close second. This included drowning. But more than drowning, being buried in an avalanche. He’d led enough Search and Rescue teams, both successful and not, to know the horror stories, and to see the results firsthand. If you were lucky enough to survive the churn-and few were-then you found yourself in a sea of blackness, disoriented and buried alive. Death came slowly: as your body chilled into hypothermia, your own breath contaminated what little air existed in your icy tomb and you suffocated, thrown first into hallucination, and, finally, a lung-bursting death.

His first thoughts, as he saw the mountain collapsing toward him, were not thoughts at all but images. He’d pulled out bodies, the faces frozen in looks of madness-terror-ridden masks of inescapable panic.

Then, for just a fraction of a second, above the fluid hillside cascading toward him, he made out the silhouetted shape of a man standing on the distant ridgeline. It might have been his imagination or wishful thinking: wanting to attribute this devil’s work to a man instead of synchronicity, his being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was too big a slide, traveling too fast down the hill, to try to cross its path. The one bit of luck working for Walt was that he’d slowed considerably as he’d headed into the curve, cautious of the range of the sniper’s rifle. He was not quite midslide, an area that looked to cover about two hundred yards. The first boulders of snow tumbled onto and across the cut of the roadbed, itself already buried in four feet of fresh snow. He jacked the handlebars, threw his left leg out, and gassed the accelerator, fishhooking the snowmobile into an about-face and cutting a deep rut that threatened to swallow the machine. Ironically, a snowmobile only worked well in deep snow if moving; if stopped or slowed significantly, it bogged down and was stranded.

The time consumed in turning it around cost him. More chunks of snow-two and three feet across-bounded on the road; the tremendous grinding sound of the slide overwhelmed him and literally shook the mechanized sled beneath him.

The avalanche came down the hill not as an arrow but as a snake’s tongue, its forks faster and more charged than its center. Beyond the road’s man-made, twenty-foot-wide patch of level track, the hill dropped away again precipitously, covered with trees and rock outcroppings.

He wasn’t going to make it: the snowmobile had slowed as a result of the turn and the rush of snow now coming down pushed across the road as a unit, shoving Walt and the snowmobile sideways out in front of its headlong force. He had to make it at least another sixty yards to clear the turn and it wasn’t going to happen.

Walt tugged on the handlebars and jumped the sled off the road. The snowmobile plowed into a drift, and Walt came fully off the seat, attached only by his bloodless grip. Behind him, the roar was unlike anything he’d ever heard: the open throat of a monster. The vehicle pulled up and out of the drift; Walt slammed back down onto the seat and twisted the accelerator, the full force of the avalanche now only yards behind him-a rising wall of debris shoved ahead of its unchecked force. Above the din, he heard the explosions of trees succumbing. The speed with which it now traveled dwarfed his own; one glance back told him as much.

There was no outru

At an incredible speed increased by the pull of gravity, he slalomed the sled down the hillside, narrowly missing tree trunks and dodging rocks. He tried to back off the accelerator, but it was no use: the whole hillside was moving out in front of that force, like he was riding a carpet being tugged out from under him. With the snow that carried him now itself in motion, the steering became unresponsive; he was no longer in control of the vehicle-the movement of the snow dictated his direction.

He faced a huge snow-covered rock to his right and a stand of massive trees straight ahead. He goosed the accelerator, yanked on the steering yoke-and nothing happened. The snowmobile carried him, as if on tracks, right for the tree trunks.

He leaped free and rolled, scrambling for the lee behind the rock outcropping. It was like swimming in sand. The crush of the avalanche lifted the snow beneath him and he rose like riding a wave. It firmed as it rose, the packed mass out in front, shelving up from under the fresh powder. He came to his knees like a surfer, measured his speed against the fixed position of the intractable rock outcropping, and dove.

Never the most athletic person, Walt nonetheless managed the perfect jump. Now behind the enormous rock that towered some twenty feet overhead, he scrambled on hands and knees to hide in its lee.

The snowmobile crashed into the trees. Walt reached the shelter of the rock face, hugging himself to the stone and gripping it with both gloves. It divided the avalanche, the ice and snow flying past in a deafening roar that terrified him more than the snow itself. Some rocks and chunks of ice flew overhead but landed beyond him, the outcropping fully screening him from the downthrust of the slide. It seemed to last an hour; in all, it was just over four minutes.

Walls of snow now rose fifteen feet on either side of him as the avalanche advanced down the hill. He thought he would be buried. And then, without warning, it stopped. As still as concrete.

All sound seemed to stop along with it, replaced by the quiet calm of a winter forest. Some wood creaked. He heard the chittering of a squirrel followed by the irritated call of a western magpie.

He slid down to a sitting position on a slight cushion of snow in the protection of the rock and gave a prayer of thanks.

Then, suddenly, he heard the distinctive buzz of a snowmobile.

It was ru

19

WALT CALLED OUT ON THE SATELLITE PHONE AND A CHALLIS deputy picked him up on Yankee Fork Road an hour later. Once in town, the Challis sheriff vented his frustration over Walt’s destruction of their property and the dispatching of his men on what turned out to be a wild-goose chase: no one towing snowmobiles or matching Aker’s description had been turned up at the now-defunct roadblocks. Walt’s promise to replace the destroyed snowmobile failed to gain him much ground. The wolf incident a year earlier lay between them.

Brandon had been driven to a hospital in Salmon, Idaho, which, as far as Walt was concerned, was the kiss of death, given the community’s isolation. The polio vaccine was considered advanced medicine in Salmon. Brandon ’s only hope was that Salmon probably saw plenty of gunshot wounds.

Walt and the sheriff organized a team of four to revisit the Aker’s cabin and collect evidence. There was much to be done, from photographing tracks, the broken window, and the cabin’s interior to searching beneath the trees for shell casings. Walt called in Fiona’s services and waited the two hours for her arrival.

It was agreed that Walt and Fiona could initially work the cabin.

Instead of snowshoeing up, everyone teamed up on snowmobiles. Fiona climbed on behind Walt. Her gloves were too thick for the strap on the seat behind him, so she ended up wrapping her arms around his waist, and she and Walt bounced their way up the road.

He leaned over his shoulder and shouted above the machine’s roar. “Everything we have points to a kidnapping.”

She shouted back. “This thing just gets crazier and crazier.”