The Old Man(66)
They were a ten-man squad that included a medic, and Staff Sergeant Wright as team leader. One of the eight riflemen was a radio operator-maintainer. For this mission he was equipped with other devices besides a radiotelephone. He spent a few minutes plugging in a couple of olive drab army-issue laptops, hacking into the Wi-Fi network, changing the password, and adding his phone and some other equipment to the network. Then he went to work.
The radio operator began studying the screen of his laptop and relaying weather information to Staff Sergeant Wright while Wright looked out the window at the falling snow. The snow was steady, with big white flakes floating down past the window and already building a layer of white on the ground. The flood lamp mounted on the eaves of the building threw enough light to make the flakes fifty or sixty feet away glow against the dark sky, obscuring the view.
To Julian, Wright’s confidence was a bad sign. The sergeant wasn’t paying attention to what his men did, and that meant they had worked together for a while and Wright knew he didn’t even have to look anymore. The old man up the mountain in the cabin might be clever, but in a confrontation he would have no hope against men like these.
After about five minutes Wright turned away from the window, and his men looked in his direction in silence. He said, “The snow is going to get heavier and the air colder, and it won’t stop coming down until morning, guys. Pelham and Slavin, go get the pickup configured to plow. Kelly and Oldham, take one of the SUVs and find something heavy to weigh down the truck bed for traction—bags of gravel or sand, or whatever you find.”
The four men put on their winter gear and went outside. Sergeant Wright went into the kitchen to the sink and drew a glass of water, and then sat at the table across from Julian. “Mr. Carson. You’re sure you’ll recognize him when you see him, right?”
“I’ve seen him three times,” said Julian. “The first time he seemed to be a creaky old guy walking his dogs. The next time he suddenly turned up in the dark to show me he had his gun in my face, and the third time he was disguised to look like a crazy old homeless guy living on the street. He’s well trained, and he hasn’t forgotten any tricks.”
“I understand that you want to take him alive. Is that right?”
Julian nodded. “Yes. And there are two of them. He has the woman, Zoe McDonald, with him. We’d like to take her alive too.”
“Of course, if we can,” said Wright. “Alive or dead, though, he’s the priority. And he’s a killer. You know what an armed assault on a building can be like.”
“Yeah,” said Julian. “I do. I’m wondering if this operation has changed since I was briefed. I wasn’t expecting to conduct a heavily armed frontal assault.”
“When I was briefed they said he had killed some foreign agents who had tried to take him quietly a couple of times in different cities. So military intel cranked up the heat.”
“If we get the two of them alive, what do your orders say happens next?” said Julian.
“Then we get to go back to Yuma, where it’s warm, and you go on to your next assignment,” said Wright.
“We have to turn them over to somebody first,” said Julian. “Whom did they tell you we give them to?”
“After we get them, we’ll report and get our orders at that time.”
Julian nodded as he studied Wright. Military intelligence must have uncharacteristically realized that Libyan agents weren’t going to do anything up here in the dead of winter but get themselves killed. So they had sent a force equipped for war. He understood.
Maximum force meant less likelihood of casualties. And Julian knew that if he went through the soldiers’ equipment, he would find body bags. He doubted that he would find handcuffs or restraints for moving prisoners.
Big Bear was crowded in the winter. When it snowed, Snow Summit and Bear Mountain filled up with people from Los Angeles. Right after the Thursday night weather report they began to call for reservations. Skiers and snowboarders came up in long convoys, pulled into parking spaces at the lodges, resorts, and condos, and began to fill every room. Houses that Hank and Marcia Dixon had never seen occupied suddenly had five or six cars parked in front of them and lights in every window. High trails the Dixons had hiked in the fall were passable only on snowshoes now, but nearly every morning they would see people struggling in deep drifts.
As soon as the first snowfall, Hank talked Marcia into going cross-country skiing with him. Hank had taken Emily and Anna every winter in Vermont until Emily was through college and had begun medical school, and he had continued after they were both gone. The attraction now was that Hank and Marcia could ski miles from the village, where the visiting flatlanders seldom ventured and there were no trails.
Nearly everything Hank did was intended to contribute to their security. Buying Marcia a diamond engagement ring and a wedding band seemed likely to make the Dixons look more like who they pretended to be, and therefore safer. Buying a long-range rifle in .338 Lapua and a good scope would allow Hank to take a position in an upper window of the cabin and shoot an attacker from a thousand yards. But if he and Marcia were a thousand yards from the nearest enemy, it would be far wiser to run. He bought the rings but didn’t buy the rifle.
To Hank, the hours of darkness were the most dangerous. Each time an assassin had been sent for him, the killer had arrived late at night, so in Big Bear Hank Dixon slept lightly. Nights made him miss his dogs more than ever. Whenever he heard a sound outside he would get out of bed and quietly slip out of the bedroom. Then he would walk to the window and look out on the snowdrifted hillside that led down into the sleeping town.