65 Below (36 page)

“We don’t want him to stop in the mountains themselves—too much cover,” Johnson said. “Let’s allow him to get south of that area, down to the blueberry flats at the south end of Broad Pass. There will be no place to hide there.”

“What are the blueberry flats?” Wasner asked.

“A huge, open tundra flat at the top of the mountain range. At least, it’s the top as far as the road is concerned. There are no side roads, and it’s nearly twenty miles of flat land in every direction. Tons of blueberries grow up there in the late summer. This time of year, it’s normally filled with snowmobilers, but at these temperatures, there should be very few people, if any.”

As they started north, the radio sounded again with a frantic voice. “Dispatch 7-44! We are under fire! Repeat—we are under fire. He….oh, shit! Man down! Man down!”

The radio went silent. Then another adrenaline-laced voice came over the airwaves. “Denali Highway checkpoint has been overrun! Two troopers are down!” The voice was frantic. “He rammed through the barricade, firing an automatic weapon. The son of a bitch tossed a hand grenade at us! Suspect is headed south at high speed.”

Wyatt pushed the truck up the highway as fast as it would go. A pair of headlights flashed on the horizon. The trooper F250 dipped into a small gulley and lost sight of the other vehicle. As they topped the next rise, it appeared again briefly before going down another sloping valley in the road.

“Turn off your headlights!” Marcus called out. “So he doesn’t see us come back up this hill and do something crazy.”

Wyatt did as he said. The pale light of the three-quarter moon and the stars reflected off the snow, illuminating the road.

She hurtled on at more than seventy miles per hour toward the oncoming vehicle. Their bellies jumped in ticklish flutters as the big truck rolled up and down the rises and dips in the road.

Coming over the last rise, they rounded a curve that brought the road up to the wide-open expanse of the blueberry flats. It was a massive, practically treeless area of smooth, white snow. It stretched for miles in every direction, just as Marcus had said.

In the distance ahead, the Explorer barreled down the road toward them. They would be meeting in minutes.

“Stop the truck here!” Marcus said. “Turn it sideways across the road. Make a roadblock right in the middle. Everybody else,
get out
.”

Lonnie stopped the truck, and the others
immediately climbed down into the frigid night
. She turned the truck sideways. The twenty-sixe-foot-long F250 nearly covered the whole width of the pavement, leaving less than two feet on either side before the roadbed vanished in snow of unknown depth.

Wasner called an order to his men. “Sniper positions on each side, thirty feet out. Verify the license plate, then Forth, you take out the engine with the fifty when he gets about a hundred yards out. You and Clark be prepared to take out the driver as needed—just make sure it’s not some unlucky grandma with infinitely bad timing.”

The two men stepped into their snowshoes, took their weapons, and bounded across the snow. They dropped into firing positions ten yards on either side of the truck.

The Explorer drew closer.

“When he gets about two hundred yards from us, hit your lights, Lonnie,” Wasner said. “We don’t want to have him ram the truck by surprise. As soon as you hit the lights, hightail it out of the cab and off the road. He still may not stop.”

A mile away, the Explorer’s headlights dipped violently and came to an abrupt halt. Shin had seen the truck’s shape glint in the moonlight across the road. He paused, then turned around and drove back about half a mile. Three sets of flashing police lights flashed on the horizon about ten miles away as more troopers made their way toward the SUV.

“Excellent!” Marcus shouted. “He’s boxed in. We’ve got him now!”

Brake lights glowed bright red in the distance as the driver of the Explorer saw the troopers bearing down on him. The SUV lurched to the right and disappeared from the road.

“Where’d he go?” Wasner shouted. “Forth, Clark, can you see anything?”

Forth looked through the night vision scope on his Barrett .50 caliber rifle. “There’s a turn out up ahead with a truck and snowmobile on a trailer. He’s trying to start the snowmobile!”

A moment later, they heard the high-pitched scream of a performance snowmobile pierce the night in the distance.

“He got the machine off and is headed into the snow!”

“Shoot him!” Marcus shouted.

The target was a mile and a half away. Not impossible, but not easy. Forth took aim and fired at the snowmobile. As the firing pin struck the bullet, the snowmobile disappeared into a dip in the snow and vanished. The shot exploded into the darkness, but the bullet only spent itself on open air, landing harmlessly in the snow three miles away.

In the back of the F250, a long track snowmobile sat under a black nylon tarp. Marcus called to Lonnie, “Do you have the keys to that thing?”

“They’re on the keychain in the ignition.”

Marcus ran to the truck and disconnected the quick release on the keychain that dropped the snowmobile key into his hand. He grabbed the helmet from between the front seats. He spun back outside, put his hand on the bed of the truck, and thrust himself up and over into the back, where the snowmobile waited to be put into action. Marcus yanked the tarp off the machine, slid his balaclava up to cover his face, then pulled on the helmet. Wasner lowered the tailgate as Marcus jumped onto the seat of the snowmobile. The machine started on the second attempt.

He let it warm up for only a moment before he punched the thumb lever throttle and accelerated like a rocket out the back of the truck bed. The machine landed at high speed on the snow and shot across the surface in pursuit. Marcus half-stood above the seat of the machine, letting the hinge of his knees swing with the force of the ride and leaning his body against tight turns and bumps as he careened across the mountain tundra in search of his target.

The North Korean’s snowmobile briefly crested a small hill off to the east. Marcus saw it and was on his trail. The speedometer on the machine pegged at 110 miles per hour. The snowmobiles headed due south, parallel to the road.
He can’t possibly hope to make it all the way to Anchorage on that thing.
He cut across the plain at an angle, hoping to intercept him.

Wasner called out to the others, “Get back in the truck and head south! Let’s try to catch up to them. He’s got to get back on the road some time.”

Lonnie, Wasner, Clark, and Forth piled into the truck. Lonnie straightened it back up in the lane, then took off to the south.

Out the driver’s side windows, they saw the headlights of the snowmobiles bob up and down as they bounced across the frigid surface. The temperature had dropped to negative sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit. The air itself had become deadly.

1. Chapter 43
   

Parks Highway

Blueberry Flats

20 December

04:45 Hours

Lieutenant Shin was cold.

When he took the snowmobile off the trailer, he found no helmet in or around the truck. Shin knew that he would need protection from the wind created by driving one of these machines. He had hoped that the small Plexiglas wind-shield that rose from the cowling would have provided more protection than it did. He had pulled his balaclava up to cover his face, and tightened the strings of his parka’s hood to reduce the amount of air that entered the opening as much as possible without restricting his vision.

All his efforts, as it turned out, did not do much to keep him warm. In spite of the heavy wool pants over which he had pulled a pair of insulated Carhartt bib coveralls his entire body was freezing.

Carhartt bib coveralls are the most commonly seen winter clothing in Alaska and are typically worn along with the ubiquitous bunny boots. The coveralls come in three different levels of insulation: uninsulated, medium, and heavy. The medium and heavy insulation levels are visibly distinguished by the color of the inner shell—medium being red, and heavy being black.

The red insulation can maintain relative comfort at ambient air temperatures as low as –20, not accounting for wind. The heavy black insulation could maintain the same comfort level in ambient air temperatures as cold as –70, likewise not accounting for wind.

Lieutenant Shin’s Carhartt’s liner was red. Icy fingers of air forced their way through the tightly woven flap inside the zipper that sealed the lower part of the legs beneath the knees. A painful stripe of frostbite steadily grew along the upper calf of his left leg. He regretted not having purchased the thicker clothing. Icy tentacles of excruciating pain grasped at his right knee as the frigid air pressed through the not-quite-thick-enough liner and penetrated the wool trousers to find his skin.

In addition to the inadequate thickness of Shin’s clothing, the speed of the race made him aware of every loose flap and open end in his parka. The windshield did nothing to stop the swirling currents of one hundred-plus plus mile-per-hour air from rushing up the sides of the open bottom of his parka. What had been a temperature of –65 was now presenting itself with a wind-chill factor of nearly two hundred degrees below zero on any exposed skin.

The most exposed part of Shin’s body was the area around his eyes. That was the only place that did not have at least some protection by a layer of parka or cloth. He had tried to keep his face behind the windshield as much as possible, but every bump thrust his head above it and into the biting cold air. Frost formed around his eyelids and extended from the opening of the parka’s hood like a puff of white hair.

Shin was very cold.

The whine of another snowmobile echoed from behind him. He accelerated to stay ahead. His mind raced, trying to find a way to get away, steal a car, and complete the mission. A compact plastic box containing three vials of the fluid pressed against his body. He had tucked them inside the chest pocket of his coveralls as he got out of the Explorer. The pistol in the pocket of his parka poked his abdomen, reminding him of its presence.

The ground sloped gradually downward. In the dark, Shin could not clearly make out what lay ahead of him. A black shadow stretched across the snow about two hundred yards ahead. Another mile or two of open field continued on the other side.

Was the shadow just a dip in the ground?
Shin glanced quickly to the right and saw a big white trooper truck in the distance. It was on an almost parallel path to him. Then, just ahead of the truck, he saw a bridge and realized where he was.

Hurricane Gulch!

The shadow yawned open in front of his snowmobile, revealing steep rock walls that plummeted five hundred feet to the frozen river below. The far edge was too far to reach. There was no time to turn away. He desperately twisted the tracks of his snowmobile, but the edge was under him half a second later.

Shin leaped back from the machine with all the thrust of his legs, twisting toward the snowy ground behind him as the snowmobile went airborne. The scream of the powerful racing engine suddenly rose in
pitch
as it no longer struggled against the pressure of the snow. Clawing at the air, Lieutenant Shin fell through the empty frozen night.

Snow smashed into his face and he felt pressure on the front of his body. He opened his eyes and saw that he had hit solid ground. There was still a chance! A chance to survive! He slid down the snow-covered wall into the crevasse.

Shin dug into the snow with what strength he had left. He grasped for any hand hold as he slid further over the edge. A tearing sound came from below him, followed by a sudden, searing pain in his right leg, then the fall stopped.

He hung in a thicket of alder that jutted out from the side of the cliff in a knot of gnarled branches. One of the branches had torn through his Carhartts. It punctured the skin and muscle of his calf. The pain was incredible, but the tree had stopped his descent.

The pursuing snowmobile whined twenty feet above him as it came to stop. The engine turned off. A frozen
silence
descended like a void blanket on the area. Footsteps crunched in the snow, breaking the stillness. Someone called out from the direction of the road.

“Did he go over the edge?” said the distant male voice.

“I don’t know. I saw him jump as the machine went over.”

Shin found a foothold just below his trapped leg. Bracing his left leg to support his body weight, he pulled his right leg free of the alder limb. He stifled a scream as the fleshy wound tore against the rough texture of the wood. He struggled not to faint.

He stood still, waiting for the waves of pain to quiet, and judged his situation. The snowmobile had crashed to the bottom of Hurricane Gulch and exploded in flames. He was about twenty feet beneath the edge of the cliff. The moon and stars illuminated the chasm with pale light, and he that the ledge continued from where he stood toward the road.

The bridge he had seen from the top was not visible as the line of the valley curved gradually. That same curve was also enough to keep him out of sight from whoever may be on the road.

The sound of more footsteps approached from the road. Shin reached up with his hand and wiped the snow and frost from the opening of his parka hood. The light pressure from the action sent a screech of white pain across his face as the cloth of the hood touched the frostbitten skin around his eyes and nose.

Once he recovered from the pain, Shin moved slowly along the ledge until he was sure of his footing, and then he began to scoot sideways faster until he came in sight of the bridge.

More footsteps crunched across the snow above him and passed to where the snowmobile had gone over the edge. He heard a voice talk into a radio.

The whup-whup-whup of a helicopter rose in the
distance
. The thundering machine followed the highway up from the south, then turned as it approached Hurricane Gulch. Shin forced himself to run through the pain in his legs. He reached the safe covering of the bridge just as the helicopter’s spotlight burst onto the snow-covered ledge. Much to his relief, the light from the helicopter slid down to the valley floor to scan the wreckage of the snowmobile rather than the ledge over which he had just crossed. They were looking in the wrong area.