He had removed his gloves and his hands were beginning to feel the cold. He stood braced back against the ice, the cross of the hairline sights trained on the exact point where the T-bar came into view.
At 4.05 a helicopter approached from the direction of the Gotschnagrat. It didn’t worry him at first, except that its noise threatened to drown the sound of any approaching skiers. He brought his eye up from the sights and watched it hovering above the T-bar; he guessed that the Royal party must have arrived.
Another two long minutes passed. His fingers were numb and his arms ached. Get on with it, Your Imperial Fucking Highness. Perhaps the bastard had broken a binding, or twisted his ankle coming down from the restaurant.
Come on! Get your Serene bum under that bar and move! Ryderbeit was not a man given to panic, but he hated waiting.
There was a bad moment when a sudden gust of wind swept against the mountain, sending up a flurry of powdered snow. As it cleared, two men bobbed into the sights, riding abreast on the T-bar. Then another two. All identical, in dark skiing clothes and matching caps, like uniforms. A third pair slid into the circular frame. The one on the right was a blond man in a yellow jacket. On his left, a man with grey hair, in a red, white and blue anorak and black goggles.
Holy Moses, they’re making it easy, he thought.
He kept them in the sights for just under two seconds, following the man on the left until the hairline cross held steadily to a point in the centre of his grey hair, exactly level with the goggles. Then he squeezed the trigger.
The recoil jerked the sights up, and in the ice-cold stillness the explosion was as sharp as a whip crack, followed by a series of rapid shattering echoes which seemed to grow louder and louder.
Even through the noise, he heard the second shot, above and behind him, followed by more echoes. He was still following the two bare-headed men on the T-bar, who were now gliding, or rather slithering, like a couple of drunks, with only the impetus of the bar under their buttocks keeping them upright. The blond man seemed oddly misshapen, shrunk and lopsided, and Ryderbeit saw something yellow lying in the snow behind him.
The man on the left was lolling forward, and his grey head had become dark and jagged — not a head at all, but two cliffs of cheekbone sagging backwards from the neck — while his anorak, through the bluish lens, was turning the same dark colour as his head. Then both figures toppled sideways, crumpling up in the snow with their skis sprawled out behind them. At the same moment the two men riding on the bar behind leaped forward, unclipped their skis, and began to run up the track. Neither of the men on the ground moved.
The helicopter had reappeared, dipping its tail and dropping down over the T-bar, the noise of its engine muffled by the double echoes of the shots that were still bouncing down the valley. Ryderbeit had unslung the Armalite, snapped off the telescopic sights, and was reaching for the empty ‘Top-Ski’ bag when he became aware of another sound. A deeper, heavier sound, like the first thunder of a storm.
The mountains distorted its direction, but as it grew louder he guessed that it came from high above, rising and spreading with a rumbling growl, until the echoes of the shots and the sound of the helicopter were shut out altogether. He had just zipped up the ski bag when he felt, even through his thick boots with their plastic mouldings, a faint tremor. A couple of skiers flashed round the bend and one of them saw him and yelled something, waving upwards with his stick.
Ryderbeit had no time to follow Packer’s instructions and bury the ski bag and the radio in the soft snow. Instead, he dropped them where he stood, grabbed his own sticks and skis, and scrambled down the slope. The snow at the bottom was trembling; and the noise from above was now a steady roar like the sound of a heavy sea. As he rammed his boots into the ski bindings, he glanced upwards. Beyond the steep ridge above him, the deep blue of the sky was turning pale, smudged with white clouds that were growing thicker as he watched, swelling out into great cauliflower formations whose edges caught the sun with brilliant colours.
His excitement smothered all fear. He knew he was now going to have to ski as he had never skied before, or perhaps ever again. With a powerful thrust of his sticks he started down the run. The first few hundred yards allowed him only moderate speeds but they also gave him time to think. The whole run was now vibrating, as though he were skiing over corrugated iron, and the roar from above was growing louder, and seemed to be spreading.
He came to a ridge over a long steep slope where there were two pistes — one that zigzagged down, and a second one, with fewer tracks, which descended vertically. Ryderbeit braced his knees and his skis leapt over the edge, and he felt the freezing blast of air scooping back his cheeks as he leaned forward, knees flexed, his sticks pressed back against his thighs to cut down the wind resistance.
Ahead lay a line of trees; and through the yellow light of his goggles, his one eye glimpsed, as though looking at a film in slow motion, the stems of the huge pines snapping off at the roots and tumbling down under the bubbling channel of snow which carried behind it a long white cloud.
The piste turned left before the trees, and he was now skiing parallel, and only about fifty feet away from the
