Polar Shift

The uphill skier said in a slow, Southern drawl, 'You're Karl Schroeder, if I'm not mistaken.'

The name he had discarded decades before sounded shockingly alien to his ears, but he held his smile.

'I'm afraid you are mistaken, friend. My name is Svensen. Arne Svensen.'

Taking his time, the skier planted his ski poles into the snow, removed one glove, reached inside his suit and extracted a PPK Walther pistol. 'Let's not play games, Arne. We've authenticated your identity with fingerprints.'

Impossible.

'I'm afraid you've confused me with someone else.'

The man chuckled. 'Don't you remember? We were standing behind you at the bar.'

The old man combed his memory and recalled an incident at the Hell Roaring Saloon, the apres-ski watering hole at the bottom of the mountain. He had been pounding down beers as only an Austrian can. He had come back to his stool from a restroom break and found his half-filled beer mug had vanished. The bar was busy, and he assumed another customer had mistakenly walked off with his drink.

'The beer mug,' he said. 'That was you.'

The man nodded. 'We watched you for an hour, but it was worth the wait. You left us a full set of fingerprints. We've been on your ass ever since.'

The schuss-schuss of skis came from up-trail.

'Don't do anything stupid,' said the man, glancing uphill. He covered the gun with his gloved hand.

A moment later, a lone skier flew by in a blur and disappeared down the trail without slowing.

Schroeder had known that his transformation from cold-blooded warrior to human being would leave him vulnerable. But he had come to believe that his new identity had successfully insulated him from his old life. The gun pointed at his heart was persuasive evidence to the contrary.

'What do you want?' Schroeder said. He spoke with the world-weariness of a fugitive who had been run to ground.

'I want you to shut up and do what I say. They tell me you're an ex-soldier, so you know how to follow orders.'

'Some soldier,' the other man said with undisguised scorn. 'All I see from here is an over-the-hill guy crapping his pants.'

They both laughed.

Good.

They knew he had been in the military, but he guessed they didn't know that he had graduated from one of the world's most notorious killing schools. He had kept his martial arts and marksmanship skills honed, and, although he was pushing eighty, constant physical exercise and strenuous outdoor pursuits had maintained a body many men half his age would have envied.

He remained calm and confident. They would be on his turf, where he knew every tree and boulder.

'I was a soldier a long time ago. Now I'm just an old man.' He lowered his head, hunching his shoulders to project an attitude of submission, and injected a tremor into his deep voice.

'We know a lot more about you than you think,' said the man with a gun. 'We know what you eat, where you sleep. We know where you and your mutt live.'

They had been in his house.

'Where the mutt used to live,' said the other man.

He stared at the man. 'You killed my dog? Why?'

'Your little wiener wouldn't stop yapping. We gave him a pill to shut him up.'

The friendly little female dachshund he had named Schatsky was probably barking because she was glad to see the intruders.

A coldness seemed to flow into his body. In his mind, he heard his classroom mentor, Professor Heinz. The cherubic psychopath with the kindly blue eyes had been rewarded with a teaching sinecure at the Wevelsburg monastery for his work designing the Nazi death machine.

In skilled hands, nearly any ordinary object can be a lethal weapon, the professor was saying in his soft-spoken voice. The hard end of this newspaper rolled into a tight coil can be used to break a man's nose and drive the bone splinters into his brain. This fountain pen can penetrate the eye and cause death. This metal wrist- watch band worn across the knuckles is capable of breaking facial bones. This belt makes a wonderful garrote if you can't quickly remove your boot laces …

Schroeder's grip tightened on the pole handles.

'I'll do whatever you say,' he said. 'Maybe we can work this out.'

'Sure,' the man said with the flicker of a smile. 'First, I want you to ski slowly to the base of the mountain. Follow my dog-loving friend. He's got a gun too. I'll be right behind you. At the end of the run, take your skis off, stick them in the rack and walk to the east parking lot.'

'May I ask where you're taking me?'

'We're not taking you anywhere. We're delivering you.'

'Think of us like FedEx or UPS,' the other man said.

His companion said, 'Nothing personal. Just business. Move it. Nice and easy.' He gestured with the gun, then he tucked it back into his suit so he could ski unhindered.

With the downhill man in the lead and Schroeder in the middle, they skied the trail single file at a moderate speed. Schroeder sized up the man ahead as an aggressive skier whose muscle partly made up for his lack of technical skill. He glanced back at the other man and guessed from his free-form technique that he was the less accomplished skier. Still, they were young and strong, and they were armed.

A snowboarder flew by and disappeared down the trail.

Gambling that his escort would reflexively glance at the moving object, Schroeder made his move. He made a wide turn, but instead of traversing he spun his body around 180 degrees so that he was facing uphill.

His escort didn't see the maneuver until it was too late. He tried to stop. Schroeder jammed his downhill ski into the snow. He grasped his right ski pole with both hands, letting the other pole hang by its strap, and drove the steel tip into the small fleshy part of the man's neck above the turtleneck.

The man was still moving when the tip punched a ragged hole in his throat below the Adam's apple. He let out a wet gurgle, his legs went out from under him and he crashed to the snow where he writhed in terrible agony.

Schroeder sidestepped the flailing body like a matador evading a stricken bull.

The lead man glanced over his shoulder. Schroeder yanked back his improvised spear. He dug his poles in and swooped down the trail. He drove his right elbow into the man's cheek and knocked him off balance. With knees bent and head low in a tuck, he schussed straight down the trail until he neared the bottom of the run, where the trail made a sharp turn to the right.

The second skier must have been carrying a machine pistol under his jacket because the burp of automatic gunfire shattered the mountain stillness.

The shots harmlessly shredded the overhead tree branches.

A second later, Schroeder was safely out of the line of fire.

He turned onto a narrow, double-black expert run that twisted down the side of the mountain like a corkscrew. The ski patrol had strung yellow tape and put up a sign, saying the trail was closed.

Schroeder ducked under the tape. The trail dropped into an almost vertical run. The snow had a brownish tinge, showing that the cover was thin. The surface was broken by large patches of bare ground. Rocks that normally lay under the snow base were exposed.

He heard gunfire behind him, and miniature fountains of mud erupted a few feet away. The shooter was at the top of the ridge, firing down.

Schroeder slalomed between bare ground and rocks. His skis hit slush and almost ground to a stop, but there was just enough of a skim coat to allow the skis to keep sliding.

Schroeder wove his way through a field of short moguls and got onto a steep pitch where the snow cover was adequate. He heard gunshots off to his right. His pursuer was skiing down a trail that was parallel to Schroeder's, firing through the glade that separated them. Most of the shots hit trees. The gunman saw that he was missing his mark and went into the woods separating the two trails.