Still, Eddie felt like he was missing something. He stared closely at the monitors, and then it dawned on him. The equipment in this room was extremely high-tech. So why weren’t there any recorders? Cabo called down to have Omar come help him. Eddie told Omar to go ahead, and he and Lazzo would be up shortly. Then he told Lazzo what he was looking for. They pulled out their flashlights and started looking in corners, behind objects in the room, and anywhere else they could think of. Nothing. Then Lazzo snapped his fingers.
Lazzo had walked over to the monitors and tried to move them, and they pulled away from the wall easily. Behind each monitor there was a small box, and the ones behind the two working monitors both had lights on them. They appeared to be hard drives of some sort, and they had buttons on the back to go forward or backward or to record. Exactly what Eddie had been hoping for.
Eddie pushed the back button on one and ran it back until he was able to watch from the beginning what had unfolded. He saw four people come into the room wearing hooded white camouflaged military uniforms and ski masks. He couldn’t make out any distinguishing characteristics, but it appeared to be three good-sized men and one smaller male or female. Three of them were carrying handguns. The smaller one held nothing but a flashlight.
They entered the locker, and he forwarded the feed until the soldiers came in. He watched as they searched the lockers, as the first man went down with a gunshot to the head, as the man behind him took three shots to the chest, and as the third man entered to a headshot. Then there was an explosion, and four men came out of the locker wearing…business suits? Not the same white-uniformed people and no girl with them. Likely the guys from the hallway, the parking lot, and the ones who raced away in the jeep.
Those men engaged in a gunfight in the room and then appeared to continue it out into the hallway. So where was the girl? He watched as the four people in white uniforms suddenly reemerged from the bunker, with the smallest one of them carrying the girl. They turned the other way down the hallway and he lost sight of them. There was nothing recorded after that until more Qi Jia men showed up to search the room. Eddie switched to the other monitor.
On the other monitor the first action was a single Qi Jia soldier walking down the hallway towards the storage room. He had come from the direction of the stairs. So the white uniforms had come the other way. “Huh,” Eddie half laughed. He and Lazzo watched the gunfight between the Qi Jia soldiers and the men in business suits. They never saw the people in white uniforms on that monitor. Eddie looked at Lazzo, mulling over what to do with what he’d found. “Erase it,” he told his brother.
Lazzo nodded and did so on the hallway monitor. Eddie rewound the one watching the storage room and froze the picture where the four strangers first entered the room. This was the only glimpse he’d had of them from the front. Who are you? And how did you know the girl was here?
He turned to Lazzo, who had read his mind and was holding out his camera. Eddie nodded, enhanced the frame as close and clear as he could, took a quick picture, and then hit delete on that box too. They turned the boxes off and climbed out of the room.
Eddie called off the search and sent all his men outside, except Cabo, Omar and Lazzo. The four of them walked down the hallway in the direction the white-uniformed people had gone. They eventually came to a stairwell with a gap carved through it two flights up to open air. Eddie told Cabo to climb up through the hole to wherever it led and to stay there until they came to him. He, Lazzo, and Omar turned around and exited the building with the others. Eddie ordered the soldiers—other than those who had flown down with him—to return to their camps. He then led his men to where Cabo was waiting for them.
A few inches of snow had partially filled in the four sets of tracks Cabo pointed to, but Eddie’s men would still be able to follow them. The tracks were heading north, out of town towards the mountains. Where are you going?
The men were looking to him for answers, but he still had too many questions. It was already after 4:30 a.m. It would be light in a couple of hours. The tracks would be much easier to follow then and maybe, just maybe, they would lead them straight to the girl.
Eddie and his men walked back to the helicopter, and Eddie radioed in that the Americans had all been killed, and there was no sign of the girl—which only Lazzo knew to be a lie. The Russian commander was none too happy and ordered him not to return until he found her. He gave Eddie an 11 a.m. deadline to return to the Alpine Visitor Center base with the girl.
Eddie didn’t mention the four visitors, the recordings, or the tracks. He was still not comfortable with the intentions of the Russian commander, and he didn’t want to compromise his own value to this mission or to the other commanders. He ordered his men to grab an hour or so of sleep and told them all to be ready to go at 6 a.m. sharp.
He and Lazzo stepped inside the main entry of the Stanley Hotel and sat on the cold floor. “What you think, Lazzo?” Eddie asked, looking at the still photo he’d taken of the video from the supply room monitor. Eddie stared closely at the one holding the flashlight. That person seemed to have a curved black stick on his or her back. He hadn’t noticed that before. What the heck was that?
Lazzo shrugged. “I don’t like Russian,” he finally said, speaking of the Russian commander.
Eddie agreed. “Ya. These four men in white uniforms. They look Russian to you?”
Lazzo took the camera. “Uniforms, yes.” He paused. “The people… they are white,” he said, pointing at the skin around their masked but visible eyes, and nodding, indicating it was still possible. “But no.” He handed the camera back to Eddie. “You?”
Eddie shut the camera off, leaned his head back against the wall, and closed his eyes. “No,” he said. “No way.”
The Russian might be up to something, but he wasn’t working with the men in the suits to keep this girl safe. He wanted this girl up at the Alpine base. He wanted her to get info from the Vice President. The girl was his ticket to infamy. These four people in the white uniforms—they were someone else.
SIXTY: “Blake and Kaci”
It was almost 6 a.m. and starting to get light as Blake trudged through the deep snow, now carrying Reagan’s little sister. Blake was exhausted, but knew he had it much better than Cameron. He had to keep pushing forward. His thoughts drifted off to his own little sister.
Kaci wasn’t nearly as little as the vice president’s daughter, but he remembered waving goodbye to her, just days before the attacks, as she walked away from the security line at the Bismarck airport. They had gone on more than a hundred trips together in the eight years since her eighteenth birthday. This was the first time she was going alone.
The two of them had created a “bucket list” years ago, and they had checked off a dozen or so incredible destinations every year since: Cancun, New Zealand, the Dominican Republic, Alaska, a plethora of national parks—with tons of hiking, skydiving, river rafting expeditions—every imaginable kind of adventure. Their parents had died in a car accident when Blake was ten and Kaci was eight. His only aunt and uncle had taken them in but essentially ignored them for a decade, reaping the tax benefits from having dependents but neglecting their intended responsibilities. Blake had basically raised his little sister on his own.