The Old Man(70)

He led Marcia on, deeper in the woods and lower in altitude. After another half hour they came to a rocky canyon where they put on their hiking boots and carried their skis.

In the middle of the canyon, where the brush was thickest, Hank stopped and opened his backpack. He pulled out a shiny metal rectangle with smooth sides and a couple of vents on the removable top. He opened the top, took out a lighter, and lit the wick at the top, waited for a moment, and then restored the top.

“What are you doing?” Marcia asked.

“This is the best hiding place we’ve passed. This is a hand warmer. It burns lighter fluid, and lasts for hours.” He set the device down, propped between two rocks in a sheltered spot.

“What’s it for?”

“This is an army rifle squad. If they have infrared scopes, they’ll pick up the heat.”

When they had made it across and climbed up the other side they put on their skis and resumed their skiing to the east. The sound of the snowmobiles had faded and became inaudible. Hank said, “I don’t hear them anymore. Maybe one of the traps worked.”

This time their course was on an open plateau with a gradual eastward slope. Their most difficult task was to keep from accelerating to a dangerous, uncontrollable speed. Crashing into a tree could be fatal, and injuring a leg at this distance from a town would mean freezing to death. He hoped Zoe could stay upright in the center of the open slope. Then he thought he heard the sound of a snowmobile again.





23


As the three snowmobiles followed the ski tracks through the woods, Julian could see that the old man had left tracks in the narrowest openings between trees. Julian suspected that the old man had faked some of the tracks to lure a snowmobile into a space where it would get stuck. He said nothing about it, but waited.

In one of these passages the lead snowmobile driver got too eager. He drove too fast, scraped a pine tree on his right, caromed to the left, and hit a tree. The front cowling of the snowmobile was dented but, worse, the left ski at its front now pointed inward. The snowmobile became difficult to steer, and the driver had to keep wrenching it to the side to go straight. He stopped.

The other snowmobiles pulled to a stop around him at the side of the forest trail. Julian got off his snowmobile and went to take a look. While the driver and his passenger examined the ski, Julian looked at the dented hood. He opened it and examined the engine while he pushed out the dent. He pretended to finish the dent removal while he used his left hand to spin the wing nut to lift the air filter. He pushed on the butterfly valve of the carburetor and dropped in some of the sand he’d brought. Then he replaced the air filter, closed the hood, and stepped away. His sabotage had taken no more than five seconds.

Sergeant Wright called the radio operator at the cabin. He told him to look online for instructions for fixing this model snowmobile. They waited for about ten minutes before the radio operator called back with the instructions.

Julian heard the radio operator’s voice say, “Loosen all steering tie-rod jam nuts.”

One of the soldiers said into the radio, “Confirm locations of steering tie-rod jam nuts.”

Wright and the driver of the other remaining snowmobile restarted their machines and resumed their speed, following the trail of the cross-country skis.

Going through the pine forests was slow and dangerous because the paths were narrow. A person on cross-country skis could glide through a two-foot gap, but a snowmobile could not. Even a three-foot space made a narrow passage, and if the ground under the snow wasn’t level, the vehicle could slide sideways into a tree, just as the first one had.

A couple of times the forested areas became so thick that Wright began to suspect, as Julian had, that the tracks leading into them might have been faked to get the snowmobiles trapped. At the next forested area Wright ordered the other working snowmobile to race ahead around the woods on open ground. But the men on the other snowmobile were unable to find the place where the ski tracks emerged into the open, and had to return to the spot where they had left the woods and inch onward with Wright and Julian.

Then the other snowmobile driver saw ski tracks reappear a hundred feet ahead, turned aside, and sped up to take a shortcut. He reached a place where he had to go through a narrow space between two trees. There was a shout, the bottom of the snowmobile scraped some hard object, and then bounced over it and stopped.

Wright and Julian pulled up beside the snowmobile as the two men got off to investigate. Wright dismounted and looked at the spot. “It’s a rock, Slavin. You hit a rock. Is that thing still okay?”

“I don’t know.” The driver restarted it, and it seemed fine. He moved the snowmobile forward a bit.

Both snowmobiles went forward very slowly, and Julian called to the driver of the other snowmobile: “Does that engine sound funny to you?” The driver stopped again and dismounted. Julian stepped closer and opened the hood. He looked closely at the exhaust assembly that ran from the engine toward the exhaust pipe. “The exhaust is too hot to touch,” he said. “But it seems to have a good connection.” Then he took off his gloves and ducked down to examine the engine.

Beside the exhaust duct was the chain case. He felt under it and found a plug like the ones under a car’s oil pan. He opened it until he felt chain lubricant leaking, and then closed it just enough for the threads to catch. Then he closed the hood and knelt to look under the aft part of the snowmobile. “I don’t see anything wrong,” he said. “Maybe there’s just a little rattle from the bump.” He closed the hood and got on the other snowmobile behind Wright.