Cornered on Ice

"Watch the lip," I told him. "The granite shears off after ten yards."

Stanimir did not look at his boots. He looked at my shoulder, measuring the angle of my pack against the drift. "I have crampons, Drastov."

"You have thirty pounds of steel wrench and too much pride," I said. "Put your spikes in my tracks."

He stepped off the concrete apron without another word, planting his front points directly into the crust where my heel had packed it down. The wind caught his heavy black parka, ballooning the fabric across his chest, but he did not sway. The man had the center of gravity of an anvil. It was infuriating, really. When an ordinary person stepped onto the north gully in sixty-mile-an-hour gusts, they staggered like a drunk leaving the mid-mountain tavern. Stanimir simply leaned three degrees into the gale and kept walking.

I wanted the iron guide cable in my left hand before the snow devils tore across the ridge. My fingers were already going stiff through my insulated leather mitts, and the steel cable was the only thing standing between us and a four-hundred-foot drop into the cedar scrub below.

I grabbed the frozen line. The chill bit through my gloves like a dog on an old bone.

"Crampon gouges," Stanimir said, shouting over the howl of the blowers. He pointed the blackened head of the valve wrench at the snow shelf five paces ahead. "Fresh. Ten minutes old at most."

"He was moving fast," I said.

"He was panicked."

"He lost his torch and his sidearm," I muttered, hauling myself along the cable. "He has plenty of reasons to run."

The north maintenance gully was never meant for human traffic in midwinter. The original Austrian engineers had blasted it out of the limestone in the nineteen-seventies so line-mechanics could haul grease barrels down to the weir without riding the freight tram. Over forty years, the rock had cracked, the cedar roots had split the shale, and the entire slot had turned into a funnel for wind-blown powder.

A gust slammed into my chest, knocking the breath out of my lungs.

A heavy hand hit the center of my back, broad and solid, bracing me against the limestone wall before my right boot could slip on the glazed rock.

I stiffened.

"Keep your weight forward," Stanimir said near my ear.

"I know how to walk on my own mountain, Vlashk."

"You know how to slide off it, too."

I did not slide. I shoved my hip against the rock, dug my toes into the crust, and pulled away from his palm. My ribs felt strangely warm where his glove had pressed. It was purely an autonomic reaction to sudden pressure, obviously. Adrenaline makes the blood pool in strange places when you are five seconds away from a fracture.

"The weir is four hundred yards down," I said, squinting through the blowing white drift. "If he gets the sluice override into Gate Nine, he drops the reservoir head."

"And if he drops the head?"

"The lower water mains lose thirty pounds of head pressure in sixty seconds," I told him. "The slurry in the delivery pipes turns to solid slush, the pipes burst from the frost plug, and both owners will spend the next ten years suing each other over the salvage rights."

"Charming," Stanimir said.

"They deserve each other."

"And the mountain?"

"The mountain doesn't deserve thirty tons of split steel," I snapped.

We rounded the dogleg bend where the limestone wall narrowed into a vertical slot. The roar of the blizzard changed pitch here, dropping from a high-altitude shriek to the deep, resonant thrum of trapped water. The weir sat at the bottom of the gorge like a concrete fortress, wedged tight between two sheer rock walls. It was three stories of poured aggregate, reinforced with rusted rebar and topped by a corrugated iron catwalk that ran forty yards across the frozen spillway.

Below the catwalk, fifty thousand gallons of sub-glacial runoff were supposed to churn through the high-pressure turbine pens, feeding the snow guns all the way down to the valley floor.

Right now, the emergency warning light on the intake housing was flashing amber.

"He's at the manual station," Stanimir said, dropping into a crouch behind a frozen boulder at the gully's mouth.

I slid in beside him. Our shoulders bumped hard. His arm was solid against mine, dense with muscle and cold-weather cordura, smelling faintly of machine oil, frozen wool, and the bitter copper tang of burnt thermite.

I looked past his jaw at the catwalk.

The saboteur was there. He was still wearing the unmarked black shell and the tactical helmet, but his movements were ragged now. His right arm hung slightly stiff from where my brass drift punch had caught his elbow back in Bay Nine. With his left hand, he was hammering an iron pry bar into the bronze padlock housing on Gate Nine's manual sluice wheel.

"He doesn't have the key," Stanimir murmured. "He's trying to shear the locking pawl."

"He won't shear it," I whispered back. "That pawl is forged nickel-bronze. It was poured before his father was born."

"He has leverage, Drastov."

"I have the master."

I touched the heavy iron ring beneath my parka. The cold metal pressed reassuringly against my breastbone.

"What's the play?" Stanimir asked.

He looked at me. Not at the catwalk, not at the storm, but directly at my face. It was an odd feeling, having a tactical mercenary ask a gatekeeper for tactical permission. Most men who came to Privoz with high-altitude harnesses and encrypted tokens treated maintenance staff like snowdrifts to be shoveled out of their path. Stanimir just waited, holding his thirty-six-inch wrench in one gloved fist, his breathing slow and measured beneath his storm mask.

"The spillway is solid black ice," I told him. "If you charge him across the catwalk, he'll hear your crampons on the iron grating from thirty paces away. He'll drop through the overflow chute and ride the service ladder down to the access road."

"Where he has a snowcat waiting."

"Where he has whatever getaway his handlers paid for," I corrected. "We don't let him reach the road."

"So how do we close the distance?"

I pointed a mittened finger at the lower service platform running beneath the main deck. "The winter bypass trench. It runs behind the ice deflectors. It has six inches of clearance, zero wind, and about three hundred rusty bolt ends waiting to rip your knees open."

"Sounds like luxury," he said dryly.

"You'll hate every second of it."

"Lead the way, boss."

The corner of his mouth did not lift, but the line of his jaw eased just enough to show he wasn't terrified. That was something, at least. A terrified partner gets you killed on ice; a cocky one gets you buried in an avalanche. Stanimir sat in the narrow space between the two, which made him dangerous, useful, and far too easy to watch.

I ducked beneath the rock overhang, catching the lip of the lower catwalk with my boot.

The drop into the bypass trench was four feet of sheer concrete coated in rime. I swung my legs over the ledge, letting my heels take the impact. The vibration shot up my shins, jarring my teeth, but my spikes bit into the wood-and-rubber decking.

A second later, Stanimir dropped down beside me.

He landed without a sound. For a man who weighed over two hundred pounds with his winter gear on, he moved with the unnerving silence of an owl in a timber stand.

"Clear," he whispered.

We crawled.

The space beneath the weir catwalk was a claustrophobic nightmare of frost-crusted pipes, dripping condensation, and frozen steel struts. The roar of the water was deafening down here, a subterranean rumble that vibrated straight through the soles of our boots. Above our heads, the steel mesh of the upper deck rattled under the saboteur's frantic boots.

Clang. Clang. Crack.

He was hitting the locking pawl with the flat of his pry bar. Every blow sent a shower of powdered rust down through the grating into my hair.

I moved on my hands and knees, dragging my three-pound brass drift punch in my right fist. Ten yards. Fifteen. The ice deflectors hung in front of us like massive steel shields, angled at forty-five degrees to divert floating ice floes away from the turbine intake grates.

At the end of the trench, right beneath Gate Nine, the deflector was anchored to a massive cast-iron dog-lever.

If that dog-lever was tripped, the deflector swung sixty degrees on its counterweight, slamming against the upper catwalk's escape stair with three hundred pounds of spring-loaded tension.

It was designed to keep runaway timber from smashing the sluice gate.

Right now, it made a perfect cage.

I paused at the base of the lever, looking up through the mesh.

The saboteur was standing five feet above us, his back turned to the gorge, leaning his entire body weight into the pry bar. He was breathing in ragged, wheezing gasps through his thermal balaclava. The bronze lock housing on Gate Nine was mangled, the brass cylinder dented, but the heavy tumbler pins were still holding.

"Good locks," Stanimir murmured from right behind my shoulder.

His chest was pressed against my back in the narrow crawlway. I could feel the rhythmic rise and fall of his ribs, steady and warm against the sub-zero chill. It was impossible not to notice how broad his shoulders were in this miserable little concrete trough. There was barely two inches of clearance between his helmet and the iron rafters.

"Don't sound so surprised," I muttered, refusing to turn around. "I built the housing."

"Did you build the release lever?"

"No," I whispered, reaching out to wrap both gloves around the rusted iron trip-pin. "A lunatic from Salzburg built that in seventy-two. It takes eighty pounds of pull."

"On three?"

"On one," I said. "I don't believe in waiting for men to count."

I threw my weight backward, hauling the trip-pin with everything in my shoulders.

The rusted pin shrieked. It fought me for half a heartbeat, seizing on four decades of grit and frozen grease, then snapped free with a sharp clack.

Above us, the counterweight dropped.

The massive steel ice-deflector surged upward on its heavy pivot, swinging like a guillotine through the spray. It slammed against the outer railing of the upper catwalk with a violent, bone-rattling boom that echoed off the granite walls of the gorge.

The saboteur let out a muffled curse as the iron mesh smashed into his escape ladder, crumpling the aluminum rungs and wedging the gate exit shut with three tons of spring tension.

His way off the weir was gone.

"Now," I yelled.

Stanimir did not use the service ladder. He grabbed the overhead grating with both hands, hauled his entire upper body through the maintenance hatch like an acrobat clearing a vault, and planted both boots onto the upper deck.

I scrambled up right behind him, kicking my crampons into the iron rungs.

The saboteur spun around, dropping the pry bar. The heavy iron bar clattered across the slick grating, sliding over the edge and tumbling two hundred feet into the dark gorge below.

He reached for his belt, his hand flying to a secondary combat knife sheathed on his tactical vest.

Stanimir didn't give him the room to draw it.

He stepped inside the saboteur's reach, swinging the forged thirty-six-inch valve wrench in a tight, short arc. He didn't swing for the man's head; he swung for the knee.

The steel jaws of the wrench caught the saboteur's outer thigh guard with a sickening, hollow crunch.

The saboteur yelled, his leg folding beneath him on the slick ice. He lunged forward, throwing his entire weight at Stanimir's midsection to tackle him onto the black ice of the spillway.

They hit the deck together with a violent crash.

Ice chips sprayed across the catwalk. The two men rolled across the frozen grating, locked in a brutal, thrashing knot of cordura and steel. The saboteur got his left forearm across Stanimir's throat, trying to use the leverage of the railing to crush his windpipe.

Stanimir didn't panic. He didn't even yell.

He brought his left heel back, driving his crampon points straight into the saboteur's calf, then drove the heel of his gloved palm into the man's broken elbow.

The saboteur shrieked as the joint popped.

His grip broke.

Before the man could recover, Stanimir rolled, pinned the saboteur's shoulders flat against the frosted iron grating, and drove his knee hard into the center of his chest plate.

The saboteur's breath left him in a loud, wheezing gasp.

Stanimir caught the man's throat with his left hand, pressing him down until the back of the tactical helmet slammed against the steel floor. With his right hand, Stanimir brought the blackened head of the valve wrench up, holding twenty pounds of forged steel three inches above the saboteur's visor.

"Don't," Stanimir said.

His voice was terrifyingly calm. It wasn't the shout of an angry brawler; it was the flat, clinical warning of a professional who knew exactly how many pounds of pressure it took to shatter a skull.

The saboteur went completely limp.

The wind howled across the catwalk, whipping snow into our faces, but on the iron deck, nobody moved.

I stood over them, my chest heaving, my boots planted wide on the ice. I was holding my three-pound brass drift punch like a club, ready to crack a collarbone if the man twitched.

He didn't twitch.

"He's done," Stanimir said, looking up at me through the blizzard.

A stray lock of dark hair was plastered to Stanimir's forehead with sweat and melting rime. His chest was heaving beneath his torn vest, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on mine with an intensity that made my pulse jump in my throat.

I swallowed hard.

"Zipties are in my thigh pocket," I said, my voice steadier than I expected.

Stanimir reached down, snagging the heavy industrial cable ties from my open pocket without taking his weight off the man's chest. He pulled the saboteur's arms behind his back, wrenching the wrists together and cinching the heavy nylon ties until they bit deep into the tactical sleeves. He threw a second loop around the man's ankles, securing him tightly to the heavy iron balustrade of Gate Nine.

"He's not going anywhere," Stanimir said, finally standing up.

He swayed slightly on the ice.

My hand shot out, catching his forearm before I could stop myself.

His jacket was cold and wet, but the muscle underneath was rigid, vibrating with the aftershocks of pure adrenaline. He didn't pull away. He looked down at my hand on his sleeve, then slowly raised his eyes to meet mine.

"Thanks," he said quietly.

"You almost went over the rail," I lied. "I didn't want to explain a dead body to the coroner."

"Of course not. That would involve paperwork."

"Mountains of paperwork," I said.

I let go of his sleeve. My fingers felt cold the second I broke contact. It was just the wind, I told myself. A sixty-mile-an-hour gale will strip the heat out of anything in half a second.

I turned away from him and dropped to my knees in front of Gate Nine's manual station.

The bronze lock housing was battered, scarred by deep gouges from the pry bar, but the heavy German cylinder had refused to yield. I pulled my master key from beneath my coat, slid the notched brass blade into the keyway, and turned it.

The tumblers aligned with a clean, heavy chunk.

I grabbed the spokes of the five-foot cast-iron wheel and hauled downward with both arms.

The gear teeth engaged. Deep inside the concrete belly of the weir, the massive sluice gates grooved downward into their seals with a muffled hydraulic hiss. The amber warning light above our heads flickered once, twice, and switched to steady, reassuring green.

The pressure dials on the intake housing immediately stabilized: eighty-eight pounds per square inch across all four turbine feeds.

The reservoir head was safe.

The snow guns would run.

"The mains are secured," I said, resting my forehead against the cold iron of the wheel for three precious seconds.

"Good work, gatekeeper."

Stanimir stepped up beside me, leaning against the housing. Without saying a word, he shifted his body three inches to the left, planting himself squarely in the path of the north gale and shielding me from the driving spindrift coming off the peak.

He didn't make a show of it. He didn't offer a patronizing comment. He just stood there like a stone wall, letting his heavy frame take the brunt of the wind while I caught my breath.

I noticed it. Of course I noticed it.

I didn't say anything, because acknowledging it would mean acknowledging that having him beside me felt better than being alone in this freezing tomb. Neutral gatekeepers do not enjoy having large, dangerous men block the wind for them.

"We need to search him," I said, pointing at the pinned saboteur. "Find out who paid his retainer."

Stanimir crouched beside the captive, stripping the tactical belt and cutting away the auxiliary pouches with a pocket blade. He tossed a bundle of det-cord, two smoke canisters, and a spare radio battery onto the grating.

"Nothing marked," Stanimir muttered. "Standard black-market field kit. No names, no unit patches."

Then something on the deck began to hiss.

A small, military-grade multichannel transceiver had fallen from the saboteur's torn chest pocket during the scuffle, wedging itself between two iron ribs of the floor grating.

A red LED blinked on the faceplate.

Ksshh-kzzzzt.

Static crackled through the small speaker, followed by a sharp burst of white noise.

Stanimir's hand froze over the tool pouch. He looked at the radio, then up at me, his eyes narrowing.

"Leave it on the deck," he whispered.

I didn't touch it. I knelt on the ice, staring at the flashing red diode as the static cleared into a clean, encrypted carrier tone.

A voice came over the speaker.

It was sharp. It was impatient. It was perfectly educated and entirely accustomed to having its orders obeyed without hesitation.

"Delta One, report," the voice snapped through the speaker. "The mid-mountain telemetry is dark, but the emergency loop at the weir is still green on my board. Have you blown the intake valves or not?"

The saboteur groaned beneath the railing, but Stanimir pressed a boot down on his sternum, silencing him instantly.

The voice crackled again, irritated by the delay.

"Answer the channel, damn it. Levskor's legal team is already drafting the emergency receivership filing in the upper lodge. If the weir isn't flooded by seven, Danika's insurance adjusters will have physical possession of the pumps before we can sign the transfer. Report your position."

I stopped breathing.

The voice was not an anonymous mercenary. It wasn't a shadow broker in some distant capital.

I had heard that voice three days ago in the central administrative chalet, arguing with the resort's head of finance over the purchase orders for the north-face lift cables.

It was Levskor Chizk's chief asset manager.

The call wasn't coming from outside the mountain.

It was coming from the penthouse suite of the Grand Privoz Lodge, five hundred yards above our heads.

I looked at Stanimir across the frozen grating.

His jaw was set in hard, granite lines, his thumb resting lightly against the cold steel of his wrench.

"Looks like your employer isn't the only one selling tickets," he said softly.

I picked up the radio from the ice.

The red light blinked in the palm of my glove, steady and cold.

"Delta One is out of service," I said into the microphone. "And the weir is locked."

I clicked the channel off.