Spy Ski School (25 page)

The helicopter roared overhead once again.

“Ben!” someone yelled.

I peered out from the trees and saw Mike Brezinski getting off the ski lift. The helicopter hadn't been aiming for him, but he'd seen the attack. His face was now whiter than the snow around us and his eyes were wide with something I had never seen him show before: fear.

“Mike!” I yelled back to him. “Get away from us! Before they come back!”

But Mike was too frightened to listen to me. After all, heading out to the slopes would mean staying in the open, while the trees looked like safety. He kept pushing toward us.

Meanwhile, Warren wasn't looking too good. He'd turned green with nausea. “They almost got me,” he gasped. Then he bent over and threw up.

“Wow,” Zoe said, unimpressed. “Way to handle yourself in the heat of battle.”

“It's my first time!” Warren whined. “I've never been shot at before! Not with real bullets!”

“Neither have I,” Zoe told him. “And you don't see me upchucking my breakfast.”

The helicopter banked again, preparing for a third attack.

Erica was back on the move, racing for the howitzer.

Mike reached the cover of the trees in record time. He was panting heavily, completely shell-shocked with fear.

“You need to get out of here,” I told him. “Away from me.”

“No way,” he argued. “I'm not going out in the open! There's a maniac shooting from a helicopter out there!”

“That maniac is shooting at
us
,” I told him. “As long as you're with us, you're in danger.”

“At
you
?” Mike asked, incredulous. “Why would someone be shooting at you?”

There didn't seem to be any point in lying to him anymore. “Well, it's like you guessed: I'm a spy.”

Warren threw up again.

The helicopter swooped back toward us. We tried to maneuver around in the trees, putting the trunks between us and it.

“You're a spy?” Mike gasped.

“Why do you sound so surprised?” I asked. “You accused me of being one the other day.”

“I know, but I didn't think you were a
real
spy!” Mike exclaimed. “I thought you were just doing training and stuff ! This is insane!” He pointed at the incoming helicopter. “Those people are trying to kill you!”

“Yeah, that happens a lot,” I said.

The helicopter had changed its style of attack. Now, rather than racing over our heads, it approached slowly, then hovered right outside our stand of trees, searching for a gap to shoot through.

It was close enough that I could see one of Leo Shang's thugs was at the controls. Meanwhile, Dane Brammage sat in the open doorway, brandishing a machine gun. He found the gap between us, lifted the gun to his shoulder, and took aim at me. I saw him smile, as thought he was going to enjoy killing me.

And then Erica fired the howitzer.

The charge slammed into the rear of the helicopter, blowing the tail right off it. The rear rotor careened through the air, slicing through a nearby tree like it was a celery stalk. Mike, Zoe, Warren, Woodchuck, and I were all thrown to the ground by the blast. A hail of pinecones, knocked loose by the concussion, rained down upon us—along with a few startled squirrels.

Without its tail, the helicopter spun wildly out of control. Dane was flung from it like a rag doll, landing in the deep snow in the distance. The pilot desperately tried to get away from the trees. He managed to pull a short distance away, but then wobbled back in.

“Evasive action!” Woodchuck ordered.

We were already on the move. Even Mike, without any training at all, grasped that staying put was dangerous. We all raced out one side of the stand of trees just as the helicopter slammed into the other. The big rotors shaved the tops off a few pines, then thwacked into the thicker trunks, snapped off the helicopter, and cartwheeled through the air toward the Sno-Cat.

Erica leapt from the vehicle, stepped into her skis, and raced away just as the rotors came flying in. With a resounding
thunk
, they embedded in the Sno-Cat's roof like a lawn dart.

The rest of the helicopter crashed to the ground. The pilot leapt out and scrambled away.

Erica met up with us just as the copter exploded. We were pelted by more dislodged pinecones and squirrels. The woods promptly caught fire, blocking our way back to the ski slopes.

The Sno-Cat caught fire too. The helicopter rotors had punctured its gas tank. It started to burn quickly, the fire licking at the pile of howitzer ammunition that sat on the trailer.

Ahead of us, a flimsy rope fence lined the edge of the snowfield, right before the slope dropped away steeply. There was a small gate in it, but it had a bright red sign marked with a skull and crossbones, informing us that going beyond
the gate was leaving the Vail resort area and heading into the White River National Forest wilderness area, which would normally be a very bad idea because there was no easy way out, there were no rescue services, there was extreme avalanche danger, and there was a decent chance we could die.

Normally, I might have paid attention to a sign like this. But there were extenuating circumstances.

Dane Brammage was still alive. In fact, despite being flung from a moving helicopter, he didn't appear to have so much as skinned a knee. Apparently, the snowdrift he'd landed in had not only cushioned his fall, but it had also protected his machine gun. Dane snatched it up out of the snow and came after us.

We charged through the gate. The slope beyond it went downhill fast. It was exceptionally steep, wide open, and treeless, far tougher than anything I'd attempted before, but we had no other options. We dropped onto the slope as Dane opened fire again. His bullets whistled over our heads.

Mike and Woodchuck hit the slope with the most grace, zipping downhill quickly. Warren hit the slope without any grace at all. Instead, he hit the slope with his face—and then his backside—and then his face again as he somersaulted down the hill. Zoe and Erica didn't do much better. I managed to stay upright a good way down, but then I rushed a turn and wiped out myself.

Thankfully, the snow on the slope was extremely deep, covering anything that would have been painful to land on—like sharp rocks—with several feet of pillowy softness. I tumbled through it all like a sock in the dryer, losing my skis and poles, until I settled into more of a controlled skid down the mountain. To each side of me, Zoe and Erica were doing the same thing, having lost their skis as well. We were basically sledding without sleds, rocketing downhill on our backs with our feet in front of us, carving gouges through the snow.

Behind us, Warren was still tumbling, giving a yelp every time he thwacked into the ground: “Ouch! Oof ! Oh, my nose! Ow!” He was gathering snow as he rolled, turning into a giant snowball with arms and legs sticking out of it.

Eventually, the slope bottomed out, flattening enough to slow our descent. Mike and Woodchuck each skidded to a stop, panting with exhaustion. Erica, Zoe, and I tumbled into a pile beside them, tangled in a jumble of arms and legs but unharmed.

Warren crashed into a tree. The giant snowball he'd become burst on impact. His helmet slammed into the trunk so hard, it cracked in half. Thankfully, Warren's skull was protected, but he was knocked loopy from the impact. “I want a pony,” he murmured, and then collapsed backward into the snow.

I'd
ended up underneath both Zoe and Erica. They pried themselves off me and we all stared back up at the slope we'd come down. It appeared to be at least a thousand feet tall. We were at the bottom of a narrow gully, with an equally tall slope boxing us in on the other side. Climbing out again was going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

And then Dane Brammage appeared at the top of the slope. I saw the sunlight glint off his gun as he took aim at us again.

Before he could fire, however, the howitzer and all its munitions exploded. A massive fireball erupted at the top of the hill, blowing Dane over the edge of the cliff. He sailed through the air high above us, his eyes so wide with fear that I could see them even from where I stood. I didn't notice where he landed, though.

I was too distracted by the avalanche.

White River National Forest

South of Vail, Colorado

December 30

1030 hours

The explosion of the howitzer
had been deafening, and the noise echoed all over the walls of the canyon. The great sheet of snow that clung to the wall directly above us fractured and groaned.

“Uh-oh,” Woodchuck gasped. “That's not good.”

The snow began to slide. It hurtled down the mountainside toward us, roaring like a freight train.

Erica, who had just disentangled herself from Zoe and me, leapt back on top of us again. Beside me, I saw
Woodchuck doing the same thing to Mike and Warren.

“Hang on to me!” Erica screamed. Even though she was right next to me, I could barely hear her over the oncoming snow. Erica yanked a cord under her jacket, and a large yellow air bag suddenly inflated from her back.

The snow reached us a split second later. Without Erica's air bag, we might have been crushed beneath it. Instead, we were buoyed to the top, like a cork floating on water. The snow still threatened to rip Zoe and me away and drag us under, but we clung to Erica with all our might and let the avalanche carry us down the valley. I caught a glimpse of another yellow air bag close by—Woodchuck clutching Mike and Warren—but mostly all I saw was a jumble of white snow and blue sky as I was tossed about.

It was like riding a tidal wave made of snow. We were traveling at frightening speed; the sides of the valley were merely a blur as we raced past them. At the front of the wave, just ahead of us, massive trees snapped like toothpicks and vanished into the sea of white.

The avalanche lasted only seventy-three seconds, but it seemed much longer. And then, almost as suddenly as it had started, it was over. The avalanche petered out and we found ourselves well down the canyon from where we'd begun, lying atop a pile of snow so thick that the tops of the trees were barely poking through it.

We all lay where we were for a few seconds, spent from the ordeal—and thrilled that, after a helicopter attack, a tumble down a steep slope, and an avalanche, we were still alive. Everyone, that is, except for Erica. She quickly hopped to her feet, dusted herself off, and said, “Well, let's get going.” As though this sort of thing happened to her every day.

“Going where?” Zoe asked.

“Down the canyon,” Erica said, like it was obvious. “We certainly can't go back the way we came. It would have been tough enough to get back up that slope
before
the avalanche. And for all we know, Dane Brammage is still back there. That guy is ridiculously hard to kill. But I've studied the satellite maps of this area and I know there's a highway and a small town at the end of this canyon. Maybe five miles away. If we hurry, it shouldn't take more than a few hours.”

“Erica's right,” Woodchuck said. “If everyone's okay, we really shouldn't dawdle.”

I stood up, checking my various body parts to make sure they were all still attached and working. I had what felt like several tons of snow down my jacket and pants, which had chilled my nether regions, but other than that, I seemed to be fine.

Zoe seemed to be fine as well, although Warren remained pretty loopy. “Guys!” he exclaimed, still lying on his back. “These are the perfect conditions for making snow angels!”
He waggled his arms and legs in the snow to prove it.

“We might need to get him to a doctor,” Zoe suggested.

Mike also looked to be all right, physically at least. Mentally, he was in shock. He gaped at all of us, trying to make sense of everything. “So, all of you are spies too?”

“In training,” Zoe said helpfully.

“In training?” Mike echoed, then shifted his gaze to Erica. “You took out an enemy helicopter with a howitzer!”

Erica shrugged. “I'm at the top of my class.” She unzipped her ski parka to get the snow out of it, revealing the source of the yellow air bag she'd inflated. She was wearing the black vest she'd swiped from Epic Heli-Skiing. When she noticed me staring at it, she said, “I told you this had avalanche safety precautions built into it.”

“And you wore it today just in case something like this happened?” I asked.

“You know me. I always like to be prepared.” Erica pulled her phone out of her pocket and sighed, annoyed. “Ugh. There's no coverage in this stupid canyon.”

“We
are
in the wilderness,” Woodchuck pointed out, deflating his air bag. His had come from an avalanche vest as well; I assumed that, being a survivalist, he probably wore his all the time.

I checked my own phone. I didn't have any reception either.

Erica told Woodchuck, “I need to get in touch with my grandfather. Fast. He needs to know the Shangs are onto us.”