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.
Shin crossed under the bridge and climbed the cold steel support beams that brought him to the surface beside the road. He peeked up from the darkness of his cover, keeping within the dark shadow cast by the headlights of several police vehicles pulled over to the shoulder or in a turnoff about fifty yards up the road.
An F250 with the trooper logo on the door stood on the highway across from him. A single trooper stood by the open passenger door, looking into the vehicle. Everyone else was on the other side of the vehicles, looking in the direction of the effort to find him.
Lieutenant Shin’s entire body ached with the agony of frozen flesh. He rose from under the bridge and crept, pistol drawn, into the road toward the lone trooper. His body was stiff and his movements slow, as if rigor mortis were already setting in while he was still alive.
With a sudden burst of energy, he lunged forward and slammed the butt of the pistol into the back of the trooper’s hooded head. The blow was answered by a soft grunt and the blue-coated trooper crumpled across the passenger seat, unconscious. He shoved the legs in, shut the door, and moved around to the driver’s side. Shin got in and put the truck into gear. He took off down the road, as fast as he could. He was almost out of sight before he heard a voice on the radio.
“He got away in Wyatt’s truck! Suspect is fleeing south on the Parks in a trooper F250, license AST-198.”
“Where’s Wyatt?”
“She’s in the truck with him.”
Shin looked over at the unconscious trooper twisted uncomfortably in the seat next to him. He pulled the hooded head back and saw that it was indeed the face of a woman, Korean by her features.
“Excellent!” he said in his native tongue. “Looks like I have a good hostage.”
Two squad cars pulled up behind him, one in each lane, lights rotating. Shin pulled the truck into the center of the two lanes. Neither trooper could get in front of him. He accelerated to eighty miles per hour, following the curve of the road in the big truck.
The unconscious Trooper Wyatt slid down the seat into an even more uncomfortable position on the floor, facing back up toward Shin. Her limp body bounced like a ragdoll in the spacious cab of the truck as he sped over every bump and dip.
Chapter 44
Marcus peered over the edge as PO3 Forth prepared to belay down the valley wall on a rope to verify that the man was actually dead, and if not, to find a trail to continue the chase of the North Korean commando. Forth had gotten about ten feet past the edge when a frantic voice sounded on the radio.
“He got away in Wyatt’s truck. Suspect is fleeing south on the Parks in a Trooper F250, license AST-198.”
Marcus shouted into his radio, “Where’s Wyatt?”
“She’s in the truck with him.”
Marcus raced back to the snowmobile, started it, and shot across the powdery white surface toward the waiting cruisers. As the machine came to a halt, he leaped off and ran to the nearest vehicle.
“Two are already after them!” shouted a nearby trooper sergeant. “We’ve also called the helicopter back, but it’s too cold for his engine. He wasn’t sure he could make it up here.”
Marcus looked around frantically, then said, “I’m taking one of your cruisers!”
The sergeant was about to protest, but Marcus had already run past him and jumped into the driver’s seat of one of the running police cruisers. In ten minutes he caught up to them as they passed through a seasonally deserted tourist town high in the mountains. The buildings stood high on the edge of a precipitous gorge along the banks of the Nenana River. During the summer, the river surged with class four and five rapids that roared into Denali National Park. Now, just like everything around it, the river lay in frozen silence deep in the canyon, hundreds of feet below the boarded-up hotels and shops that waited quietly until the surge of tourists returned in the spring.
Marcus followed on. A hundred yards ahead of his vehicle, one of the cruisers inched forward and nudged the big truck on the rear driver’s side corner. The driver of the truck was skilled, obviously well trained in defensive driving. He swung with the bump to avoid being knocked out of control.
The trooper attempted the maneuver again, this time with considerably more force. When the truck countered the bump again, the second patrol car quickly accelerated. It slammed into the corner on the rear passenger side of the truck sending it into a slide that brought the rear into a forty-five degree angle, straddling the lane lines. The truck driver corrected and pressed the accelerator hard.
The radio erupted with a voice. “Do that again and I will kill the lady Trooper! Do you understand?”
One of the troopers replied, “Pull the truck to the side of the road and get out now!”
There was no reply from the truck. With every part of his being, Marcus wanted to tell the troopers to stop, to keep from endangering Lonnie more. But any hint of weakness would embolden the driver of the truck.