Zero Hour

“Place had two floors,” he said. “Ricci’s in the lead, takes our extraction team through the back door. We see four men downstairs, get the drop on them—”

“We.”

“Everybody but Ricci, yeah,” Thibodeau said. “Soon’s we’re in, I see him run on up to the second floor, see his backup follow. Ricci knew Julia was in an upstairs room, shook it outta one of her kidnappers. Knew she was alone with Le Chaute Sauvage, a killer who’d snuff a man or woman’s life same way you’d blink an eye.”

“When you say his backup… this would have been Derek Glenn from our San Diego unit.”

“Right.”

“A guy Ricci pulled in on the operation,” Nimec said. “He got tight with him since they worked together a couple years back.”

Thibodeau shrugged.

“Tight as anybody can be,” he said. “Or so I hear.”

Nimec grunted. “Okay, give me the rest.”

Thibodeau spread his hands.

“Didn’t see much after Glenn went up,” he said. “I hear a crash on the second floor, what I can tell is a door bein’ kicked in. Can’t leave the first floor till we got a clamp on it. Disarm the prisoners, cuff ’em, get ’em all together in a single room. Then check and secure the other rooms. And there are attack dogs need to be sedated. Once we get it all under control, I take some of the men upstairs—”

“This is how long after the entry?” Nimec said.

“These things, you know they move in a flash.”

“About how long, Rollie?” Nimec said.

Thibodeau shrugged, his hands still wide apart.

“More’n five minutes, less’n ten,” he said. “By the time I’m upstairs, Julia’s out of the room. I see Glenn in the hall keepin’ her steady on her feet… the Killer had her tied to a chair with ropes, and there’s still little pieces of ’em hangin’ from her. I order the men to get her safe away, then head toward the room where Ricci found her, but the door’s propped shut.”

“This is after Ricci kicked it in.”

“Be better if you go over that with him,” Thibodeau said. “From what I heard afterward, Ricci found the Killer holdin’ a knife to Julia’s throat, got a trigger on him, warned him he moved a hair, he was gonna die. There a history between them to consider. Ricci was trackin’ him for over a year, after he bolted from that germ-weapon plant in Canada. That whole time, Le Chaute Sauvage was layin’ low to ground, knowin’ Ricci was breathin’ down his neck. History. Ricci uses it to get into his head, offers him a deal — the Killer lets Julia go free, they both lose their weapons, face off man to man.” He paused a moment. “The Killer’s a hired hand. Got no personal reason to hurt Julia, knows he’s dead if he uses the knife. He figures Ricci’s givin’ him his only chance, goes for it.”

“And Ricci wedges a chair against the door as soon as Julia’s out.”

“Says his main reason was to put something there to block it ’case the Killer got around him, giving us a few seconds to pull her away. Used whatever he could reach, and the chair was it.”

Nimec looked at him.

“But putting it there wasn’t only about buying time for you,” he said. “It was also part of the two of them going at it alone.”

“That something to ask Ricci,” Thibodeau said. He reached for his soda, sipped. “It was all over in that room before I put the ram to the door. I come in, find him on the floor, his leg bleedin’ rivers from a knife cut. What I know from his report is that the two of them fought like hell, an’ Le Chaute Sauvage grabbed the blade from where Ricci dropped it. They wound up out on a balcony, out there hundreds of feet over the canyon, and the Killer took a long fall.”

Nimec sat very still, his eyes on Thibodeau.

“Took a fall, or was pushed?” he said. “Let’s get it right out in the open, Rollie.”

Thibodeau was quiet for a while, looking across the desk at Nimec.

“Tom Ricci never been my favorite person,” he said. “You won’t see me shed no tears for that killer, though. Whatever did or didn’t happen in there, Julia’s life was a tradeoff I gonna take any time. It’s finished, and we all got to walk on.”

“Doesn’t sound to me like you believe Ricci’s done that.”

“Try’n keep what I believe to myself,” Thibodeau said. He shrugged a little. “You asked what I knew for a fact, I answered based on what I saw and heard.”

Nimec shook his head.

“Some men does dead before their time,” he said. “Those were your words about Ricci, or close enough. You telling me now I got their meaning wrong?”

Thibodeau met his gaze.

“Can’t say what was in his mind going into that room,” he said. “Don’t got any more of a clue what’s on it now.”

“And that’s that,” Nimec said.

Thibodeau nodded and sat without further comment.

The silence between them stretched on, longer than the first. Then Nimec stood, his expression sober.

“If Ricci entered intending to execute a man, blocked the door so there wouldn’t be witnesses, I can’t let it go,” he said. “I need to find out.”

Thibodeau shrugged again. He drained what was left in the soda can, crunched it in his fist, tossed it into the wastebasket under his desk.

“You do, I expect it ain’t gonna come no good,” he said.

Nimec looked at him.

“Maybe not,” he said. “But I tell you one thing, Rollie. I don’t, and none of us better kid ourselves into thinking we’ll ever be able to walk on.”

* * *

Stiff-necked and fatigued after almost seventy-two hours of travel through stormy weather, Khalid exited the jeep, slammed the door behind him, and strode around to the front grille against an onrushing blast of snow.

He had been far short of the mark about the length of their drive to the Neelam Valley, estimating it would take a full two days, a prospect that had made him less than sanguine at the time. In hindsight, Khalid would have gladly accepted it. With the gale having inundated the entire region they needed to cover, he and Yousaf were still over a hundred kilometers from their destination. They would be fortunate to reach the village of Halmat by dawn in these conditions, and night was not yet even half over.

They had taken shifts driving round-the-clock, Yousaf adamant in his insistence they press onward over rolling mountainous terrain that would have taxed one’s endurance in the best of circumstances… and they had until now encountered nothing but winter at its most relentless and savage. When Yousaf did acquiesce to a stop, it would be just long enough for them to get out for a miserable, hurried piss in the cold wind and snow, or sit inside their vehicle eating sparely and hastily of meal rations appropriated from the army rangers they had disposed of behind them on the road to Chirak. Then, impatient, he would order them to move on.

The storm had eased only on occasion; Yousaf’s headstrong resolve never once. Earlier in their journey the snow had blown over the ground in wildly shifting eddies, twisting into undulant serpentine braids that deceived and wearied the eye, making it impossible to be sure they were even driving in a straight line. By the second night it began to come on hard and thick with the north wind’s direct frontal onslaught, piling up around them in deep rippled sheets, coating the windshield faster than their wipers could scrape it clean. Tonight’s progress had been an ever-worsening struggle as the center of the storm had seemed to gather around them in a turbulent mass. The moonlight had been choked off, the shadows of the mountain peaks and cornices blanked from sight along with any waypoints Khalid had meant to use for orientation. Were it not for their GPS receiver they would have certainly been lost, and might well have found themselves driving in endless, wandering circles. There had been embankments around which they had needed to detour, pits and ditches that seemed to open beneath them like sucking, toothless mouths. Even with Yousaf at the wheel, reluctant to lose a moment, they had twice needed to halt due to losses of visibility and traction. On each instance Khalid had left the jeep to remove large cakes of frozen debris from