37
"Shit," said Randy Lockwood. Out of the whirling snow he could see the lead car of the motorcade, light bar flashing, the sound of its siren muffled by the storm. If Tritt was nearby they had no more than a few seconds to find him. Behind the Winter Falls cruiser he could see the trailing line of Escalades, one of them with the president inside. He gritted his teeth and prayed that this man Holliday was wrong.
As a rule the average person rarely looks higher than the horizon directly in front of him. This is a natural instinct bred into the human race for millions of years, since man's predators almost inevitably approached him on the same level, whether from the front or the rear. It is also the first instinct to disappear very quickly among military personnel and even civilians in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; like the unofficial motto of the Eighty-second Airborne in Vietnam, death very often came from above.
Holliday knew that if Tritt was nearby he'd go for the high ground. The square in front of the Municipal Building had two-story, Victorian-era buildings on the east side and the same on the west, with the Municipal Building forming the northern side of the square. The south, or Main Street side, was taken up by the Dominion Hotel, a squat, seven-story, flat-roofed brick building that looked down onto the park that formed the center of the square.
As the motorcade swept around the eastern side of the square Holliday looked up. At first nothing seemed out of place. The Dominion Hotel, like every other building in Winter Falls, was dark.
"Anything?" Lockwood said.
"No," said Holliday, squinting through the heavy snowfall. The motorcade was pulling up in front of the Municipal Building.
"There!" said Peggy, pointing.
"What?"
"Third floor, fourth from the left. The window's open! Who the hell would have a window open on a night like this?"
Holliday stared upward, following her pointing finger. He caught a flutter of movement as the wind billowed the curtains. It was Kandahar, before he'd lost his eye. A fluttering window and a shadow with a cell phone. The Humvee stopped just in front of the IED before it exploded and the.50-caliber machine gun on the vehicle shredded the window frame around the twitching curtain and the shadowy figure behind it. He didn't hesitate and neither did Lockwood. They fired simultaneously just as Tritt's finger pushed down on the firing button of the antitank rocket.
The world exploded all around them. A flame trail from the rocket arced down from the hotel window, catching the Super Puma helicopter squarely between the sliding door and the slightly sagging multiple rotors, striking the big twin Turbomeca engines and rupturing the fuel lines. For a fraction of a second there was silence and it seemed as though little or no damage had been done. Then the explosive warhead of the rocket detonated and the entire helicopter was enveloped in a growing fireball. The blast wave knocked Holliday, Peggy and Lockwood to the ground as fractured pieces of rotor spun off in all directions, one piece slicing through the front entrance of Uncle Jimmy's Sport Paradise, while a second, larger piece sawed through the middle of the lead police cruiser in the motorcade, instantly killing both the driver and his partner.
Through the smoke and flames there was no way to know what had happened to the president. A cloud of choking smoke drifted over the square as Holliday, Lockwood and Peggy picked themselves up. Combined with the heavy snowfall, visibility was now almost zero.
"He was on the third floor," said Lockwood.
"Which way would he go?" Holliday asked.
"If he's smart he'll figure on roadblocks."
"What does that mean?"
"He's probably got a snowmobile someplace. They use them to get out to the ice-fishing huts. It wouldn't look out of place down by the docks."
Holliday nodded. "He cuts across the lake and he's gone before anybody has time to think. Somewhere along the line he dials his sat phone and blows Winter Falls to hell."
"Something like that."
Holliday turned to Peggy. "Find the top cop in charge over there," he said, pointing toward the flaming remains of the helicopter. Tell whoever it is that the chief and I are going after Tritt, and they should start looking for more truck bombs before it's too late."
"You're not just trying to get rid of me are you?"
"Don't be an idiot. I'm trying to save lives. Go!"
She went.
"Now what?" Holliday said.
"Follow me," said Lockwood. He turned and disappeared into the smoke and snow, heading across the street to the inn.
It had been too soon, but Tritt didn't have any choice. He fired the rocket, dropped the hot metal tube unceremoniously off his shoulder and headed for the door, patting the pocket of his heavy parka to make sure the satellite phone was still there. He ran out into the dark hallway, ignored the elevator to the left and turned right until he reached the door leading to the stairwell.
A minute later he reached the lobby, which was now swarming with guests and hotel employees. People were calling out to one another, someone was crying and flashlight beams were cutting through the haze that had started filling up the main-floor reception area. Everything smelled of smoke and jet fuel. No one noticed as Tritt headed into the restaurant at the rear of the hotel, then pushed through the swinging doors leading into the kitchen. Ninety seconds after destroying the helicopter in the square he was racing down the alley behind the hotel, and two minutes after that he was turning the key in the ignition of the big, silver Yamaha Vector snowmobile parked behind the patio of Gorman's Restaurant. He twisted the throttle, turned the snowmobile into a tight circle and headed west, out onto the frozen lake.
Tritt smiled behind his heavy woolen balaclava mask and stared out into the snow-filled emptiness of the night. The job was done. With a top speed of seventy miles an hour, no one could catch him now. At the halfway mark he'd stop the vehicle, take out the satellite phone and punch the preset number. It would be the largest non-nuclear blast since the Texas City explosion in 1947, which virtually leveled the entire town.
"We're too late," said Lockwood. Both men stood at the bottom of the steps that led down to the dock behind Gorman's Restaurant. They could see the imprints of Tritt's boots in the fresh snow and they could faintly hear the sound of the receding snowmobile. There were three more of the vehicles parked at the foot of the stairs, all three surrounded by the pungent odor of freshly spilled gasoline. Tritt had ripped out the fuel lines. "We'll never catch him. The son of a bitch is going to blow up my town and there's not a damn thing I can do about it."
"I wouldn't give up quite so quickly," said Holliday. He walked across the ice to where the line of iceboats was parked. He ran his hand over the sleek, jet-black fiberglass body of one of the water-bug-shaped boats. "These are Monotype-XVs," he said. "I didn't even know they had them in the States."
"You know how to sail one of these things?" Lockwood asked. The drag-racer bodies were about thirty feet long, with masts almost as high and a broad outrigger with a long bronze-and-steel blade at each end.
There was a third blade at the rear of the body, and the insectlike boat was steered with a large automobile-style wheel in the snug back cockpit. The pilot of the boat also handled the movement and adjustment of the sail through a system of lines and pulleys, while the front cockpit for the copilot essentially provided ballast and a counterweight to prevent the front end of the craft from taking to the air.
"I was stationed in Helsinki for a while. My people had this crazy idea to get assets out of St. Petersburg using iceboats like these across the Gulf of Finland. We never tried it but I learned the basics."