“We have to turn them over to somebody first,” said Julian. “Whom did they tell you we give them to?”
“After we get them, we’ll report and get our orders at that time.”
Julian nodded as he studied Wright. Military intelligence must have uncharacteristically realized that Libyan agents weren’t going to do anything up here in the dead of winter but get themselves killed. So they had sent a force equipped for war. He understood.
Maximum force meant less likelihood of casualties. And Julian knew that if he went through the soldiers’ equipment, he would find body bags. He doubted that he would find handcuffs or restraints for moving prisoners.
Big Bear was crowded in the winter. When it snowed, Snow Summit and Bear Mountain filled up with people from Los Angeles. Right after the Thursday night weather report they began to call for reservations. Skiers and snowboarders came up in long convoys, pulled into parking spaces at the lodges, resorts, and condos, and began to fill every room. Houses that Hank and Marcia Dixon had never seen occupied suddenly had five or six cars parked in front of them and lights in every window. High trails the Dixons had hiked in the fall were passable only on snowshoes now, but nearly every morning they would see people struggling in deep drifts.
As soon as the first snowfall, Hank talked Marcia into going cross-country skiing with him. Hank had taken Emily and Anna every winter in Vermont until Emily was through college and had begun medical school, and he had continued after they were both gone. The attraction now was that Hank and Marcia could ski miles from the village, where the visiting flatlanders seldom ventured and there were no trails.
Nearly everything Hank did was intended to contribute to their security. Buying Marcia a diamond engagement ring and a wedding band seemed likely to make the Dixons look more like who they pretended to be, and therefore safer. Buying a long-range rifle in .338 Lapua and a good scope would allow Hank to take a position in an upper window of the cabin and shoot an attacker from a thousand yards. But if he and Marcia were a thousand yards from the nearest enemy, it would be far wiser to run. He bought the rings but didn’t buy the rifle.
To Hank, the hours of darkness were the most dangerous. Each time an assassin had been sent for him, the killer had arrived late at night, so in Big Bear Hank Dixon slept lightly. Nights made him miss his dogs more than ever. Whenever he heard a sound outside he would get out of bed and quietly slip out of the bedroom. Then he would walk to the window and look out on the snowdrifted hillside that led down into the sleeping town.
He would look for a vehicle parked along the narrow winding road, or maybe moving toward the cabin from below. Then he would go across the hall to the guest room with the best view of the hill and look up toward the crest. He knew that a sniper would prefer to fire into the window from above, where he would have a good view of the rooms and a superior firing position. When Hank felt particularly uneasy, he would use the night-vision binoculars to search the forest trails. Then he would pad back into the bedroom and slide under the covers into the space where Marcia’s body kept the bed warm. He would remind himself that there had been no car, there had been no men, and in time he would sleep.
The morning after the big snowstorm, the air was cold but the sun was bright, obscured only for seconds at a time by passing clouds blown by winds at high altitudes. Whenever the sun broke through the clouds, the glare of the snow brightened enough to hurt the eye.
Hank stood in the living room and saw an oversized black pickup truck with a snowplow blade mounted on the front. The truck had big tires with chains, and what looked like sandbags piled in the bed.
He watched the truck move up the right side of the road, its plow shouldering the snow to the edge of the pavement in a long, serpentine ridge. When the truck came to a cabin’s driveway it swept the snow across the front, blocking it. The truck wasn’t a municipal vehicle.
It had been snowing at Big Bear since the end of October, and he’d never seen this black truck come up the road before. He supposed that the owners of the other cabins in this section might have hired a local entrepreneur to plow their road and driveways to open them after the storm.