Footprints in the Snow Page 6

  Without a word to anyone, he slipped out of the mess hall. When he was stationed on the front lines, he’d been spared these reports and the sense of futility that accompanied them.

  Outside, the night skies held the light of a million stars and a crescent moon. Luke focused on a single distant star—a pinprick of light—and whispered the name of one of the fallen soldiers. Then he named another star for another dead soldier. And another. As long as the stars continued to shine, the memory of these men would never fade.

  Reaching inside his jacket, he took out his Lucky Strike cigarettes, fired up his Zippo and lit up. The smoke curled through him, and he exhaled slowly. The war in Europe was winding down. The Nazis were on the run and final victory was all but guaranteed, which somehow made these deaths even more tragic. If only they could have survived for a few more weeks, for a month…they might have come home. Finally.

  He stood quietly in the shadow of the mess hall and finished his smoke. His time at Camp Hale was almost over. As soon as Fermi and the others were gone, Luke would prepare for his own deployment.

  The door to the mess hall opened. Shana and Dr. Fermi stepped outside. Like Luke, they paused to look up at the panorama of stars overhead.

  Where were the guards who should have accompanied Fermi? Why was he standing out here like a target? Silently, Luke removed his handgun from the holster.

  Speaking to Shana, Fermi said, “Someday, man will travel to those planets.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And what will we find?”

  “Somewhere in the universe, there must be intelligent life. In an infinite number of stars, the mathematical probability of life other than our own is a certainty.”

  “Alien life-forms.”

  “They may already be here, waiting for us to develop the advanced scientific tools to communicate with them.”

  Shana chuckled. “A paradox. The Fermi paradox. Mathematical probability indicates aliens exist, but where are they?”

  “Someday,” he said. “Someday, we will know.”

  Henry Harrison crashed through the door behind them. Only one arm was in his parka. In his free hand, he held his Garand rifle. “You two shouldn’t go wandering off. We still haven’t caught that sniper.”

  “I apologize,” Fermi said. “Will you escort us back to the residence?”

  “Come back inside. We need two people for an escort. Come on. Back inside.”

  As the door closed behind them, Luke shook his head. Discipline among the few remaining troops at Camp Hale was so halfhearted that it was dangerous. Fermi and his men must be protected; Luke didn’t want his last stateside assignment to end in disaster. He needed to discuss procedures with Captain Hughes.

  Walking quickly, he made his way along deserted pathways to the captain’s office in the one-story rectangular building where he’d talked to Shana earlier today. A light shone through the window of Hughes’s front office. Very likely, the captain would be tilted back in his chair, staring into space and ignoring the problems that piled up on his desk.

  As Luke watched, the outer door to the office building pushed open. A man dressed in black stepped through. His movements were furtive as he stepped onto the pathway. Was he a sniper? One of the men Luke had been pursuing?

  With his handgun at the ready, Luke broke into a run. If he could take this man into custody, he might find out who was after Fermi.

  The man in black pivoted and turned toward him.

  “Halt,” Luke shouted.

  Captain Hughes staggered through the door of his building. One hand braced against his forehead. With the other he aimed and fired point-blank.

  The figure in black fell to the ground. Hughes lurched toward him. He fired again. And again.

  What the hell was he doing? Luke raced to the fallen man and dropped down beside him. He tore open the snaps on the front of his jacket. His chest was already soaked in blood, but he wasn’t dead. He gasped.

  “Who are you?” Luke demanded. “Who do you work for?”

  He clutched the front of Luke’s jacket. His mouth worked frantically, trying to speak. He choked out a few words in a foreign language. Russian. He was speaking Russian. Though the Russians were against the Nazis and on the United States’ side, that was one hell of an uneasy alliance. Papa Joe Stalin was nearly as dangerous as Hitler—another guy who wanted to take over the world. And he needed scientists like Fermi to do it.

  The man in black cried out. A spasm wrenched through him, then his body went slack. He was gone. Dead.

  Captain Hughes stood over Luke’s shoulder. He still held his pistol—ripe with the smell of cordite. “Son of a bitch. Is he dead?”

  “Very dead.” And unarmed. His handgun—a Beretta—was still in the holster.

  Hughes shouldn’t have killed the intruder. A dead man couldn’t respond to interrogation. He lowered the man to the ground and stood facing the captain. He was hurt, bleeding from a wound on his forehead. “You’re injured.”

  “It’s nothing.” Hughes waved him away. “I’m okay.”

  “What happened, sir?”

  “When I came back to my office, he was there. Behind my desk. He held a gun on me.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Wanted to know when Fermi was going back to New Mexico. I told him to go to hell, demanded that he identify himself. He rattled off some long Russian name. Said he was NKVD.”

  The NKVD were secret police; they handled espionage for the Soviets. “He admitted that he was a spy?”

  “Yeah.” The captain winced and rubbed at his forehead. “He offered me money to betray Fermi. Said it was going to happen, sooner or later. I might as well be the one to get the big paycheck.”

  “How did he even know Fermi was here? Does he have some kind of inside connection? Was he working with anybody else?”

  “I don’t know anything else. I charged at him. He whacked me on the forehead and I passed out.”

  Pathetic! Luke’s jaw tensed. The actions of Captain Hughes disgusted him. He’d failed to apprehend the Russian spy, failed to get any useful information, failed as a soldier and as a commanding officer. “Now what?”

  “Go through his pockets. Maybe you’ll find a clue.”

  Luke searched, but found no wallet. No identification. In the jacket pocket of the dead man was pack of cigarettes and a matchbook. Luke held it up to the light and read the logo. “Hotel Jerome. Aspen.”

  Chapter Six

  In times of war, regular legal procedures and investigations were sometimes suspended. Luke’s job was to follow the orders of his commanding officer, Captain Hughes, even when he didn’t agree with those orders.

  With Henry and Martin doing the heavy lifting, the body of the dead Russian was wrapped in sheets and carried to an empty shed that had been used to store equipment. The captain locked the door to the windowless building.

  Henry shivered; his face paled in the moonlight. “I’ve never seen a dead man before.”

  “Get used to it,” Hughes snapped. “This is war.”

  Not really. Luke bit his tongue to keep from speaking out. This was murder. Instead of hiding the body, they should have notified the local sheriff.

  “When the ground thaws, we’ll bury him,” Hughes said. “In an unmarked grave.”

  “Like he deserves,” Martin muttered.

  “He was a spy,” Hughes said. “An enemy of our country. He was trying to get his paws on Dr. Fermi, to uncover his top secret project.”

  That much made sense. But why had the Russian been inside the office building going through the captain’s files? If he was working with someone else, why hadn’t they opened fire when their man went down? Where was the sniper who shot at Fermi earlier today?

  “Top secret,” the captain repeated as if to reassure himself. He turned to Martin and Henry. “Say nothing about this man to anyone else. Not one word. That’s an order.”

  “Yes, sir,” they responded.

  Luke followed the captain along th
e dark pathways in the mostly empty Camp Hale. Last year at this time, the camp had been home for ten thousand men. The cold mountain valley echoed with their voices and their laughter. Every day meant a new training challenge as they pushed themselves to the limit. Practicing marksmanship. Learning mountain skills. Building the teamwork necessary for an elite fighting force.

  Now, the 10th Mountain Division had proved themselves in warfare. They were the first troops sent into battle, and they sustained high casualties. The ghosts of those fallen heroes haunted Camp Hale.

  At the office barracks, the captain motioned for them to come inside. He shrugged off his jacket and sat behind his desk. Luke didn’t like the way he looked. The medic had cleaned the captain’s head wound and slapped on a bandage, but that wasn’t the worst part of his appearance. The captain’s complexion had a waxy sheen. His eyebrows pulled into a scowl above weary, bloodshot eyes. A dark stubble covered his chin and jowls. His fingers trembled as he pulled a cigarette from a pack and lit up.

  “I don’t think that spy was working alone,” he said.

  Luke agreed. “This morning, I pursued two men.”

  “Could be two. Could be more.” Hughes took a drag on his cigarette. “Could be somebody working inside Camp Hale.”

  “One of our guys,” Henry blurted. “You think one of our guys is a spy?”

  “Maybe not a guy,” Hughes said. “Henry, tell me about when you first saw Miss Parisi.”

  Though standing at ease, Luke tensed as he listened to the recitation from Henry and Martin about their first encounter with Shana on the slopes above Camp Hale. She wasn’t armed. She seemed confused. In her knapsack, she carried no identification other than her obviously forged International Driver’s License and a plastic card with her name on it.

  Henry added, “She said she knew Luke. Sergeant Rawlins.”

  “Thank you,” Captain Hughes said. “Tomorrow, I’ll have another assignment for you. An important mission. For right now, you’re dismissed.”

  When they left, he turned to Luke. “What do you know about this woman? Had you ever seen her before?”

  “Never.” And he didn’t know why he should be answering questions about Shana. They had a dead man on their hands. And a direct threat to Dr. Fermi. “May I make a suggestion, sir?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Send Fermi and his crew back to Los Alamos. We can’t provide adequate protection for them. Not with snipers in the trees and spies sneaking into buildings.”

  “We got ourselves a real SNAFU, Luke.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But we’re the 10th Mountain Division. We can handle a couple of Russian spies.”

  Though Luke was infinitely proud of his division, he didn’t see this as a matter of honor. “We need to be practical, sir. To file a report on the incident tonight and make plans to—”

  “I’m giving the orders.” His eyes narrowed. “Tell me about your contact with Miss Parisi.”

  “The blizzard hit. I saw her fall on the slopes, apparently suffering from altitude sickness, hypothermia and sloppy ski technique. I took her to the cabin where she spent the night and recovered.”

  “Did she say anything that would cause you to suspect that she was a spy?”

  “No, sir. She did not.”

  The captain stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the desk. During the past month, Luke had watched Captain Hughes slip deeper into exhaustion and a grim resignation. The captain had done too much drinking; he’d shown too little concern for the way Camp Hale was run. Discipline among the troops was almost nonexistent.

  With a murder hanging over his head, Captain Hughes was grasping at straws. He muttered, “Miss Parisi is suspicious.”

  “You’re wrong about her,” Luke said. “She loves this country. And she thinks Fermi is a god.”

  “If she’s convinced you, she can outsmart most of us. But I still think she knows more than she’s telling.”

  Unfortunately, Luke had to agree. Shana had secrets.

  “Here’s the plan,” Hughes said. “Tomorrow, I want you to go to the Hotel Jerome in Aspen. Take Martin and Henry with you. Spend the night there and see if you can sniff out the other men who were working with our dead spy.”

  Luke didn’t want to leave the camp. Protecting Fermi was the number-one priority, and he didn’t trust Captain Hughes to handle that job properly. “Why me?”

  “Because I’m sending Miss Parisi with you. If she’s in Aspen, she might try to contact her Russian spy colleagues.”

  “Sir, I don’t think—”

  “Don’t guard her too closely. Let her think she can wander around. If we give her enough rope, she just might hang herself.”

  TIME PASSED SLOWLY for Shana as she waited in her tiny square bedroom for Luke. She checked her wristwatch. It was almost nine o’clock. After dinner, she’d been escorted back to the main house by a phalanx of 10th Mountain Division G.I.’s who surrounded Fermi and the other two scientists from Los Alamos. Then Shana was shuffled off to her bedroom where she waited and waited and waited.

  Though Luke had assured her that she wasn’t a prisoner, an armed guard stood outside her bedroom door. Ever since Captain Hughes had marched into the mess hall and made his announcement about casualties, the atmosphere at Camp Hale had changed.

  There was an aura of tension, a terrible awareness that a war was raging halfway around the world. Though they were tucked away in the high Rockies, the specter of those European battlegrounds haunted these men, some of whom would still be shipping out.

  She checked her wristwatch again. Only five minutes had passed. Where was Luke? Why hadn’t he come to her?

  Earlier today, when they were alone in the uranium mine, she’d promised to reveal something about herself. Did she dare tell him the huge secret? The big kahuna? The unbelievable fact that she was from another century?

  It wasn’t as if she had a lot of options. Literally, she knew no one. She had no money, and ATMs hadn’t been invented. No identification. No transportation. Her only thread of hope came from Luke. He had found her, had saved her life. Twice. Wasn’t that enough to make her trust him?

  Her instincts told her no. Not yet. They’d barely begun to warm up to each other after their conversation in the uranium mine when he’d revealed a bit about himself. When she thought of how he’d befriended Roberto the orphan, her heart clenched. Her mind painted a picture of tall, muscular Luke in his fatigues and helmet, leading an abandoned child away from battle. He was a good man, a good soldier who masked his tenderness behind a macho facade.

  But she wasn’t sure that his kindness would extend to her. If she told him that she’d been swept away from her century, he might slap her into a strait-jacket and ship her off to the nearest sanitarium. She shuddered at the thought of what might pass for psychiatric treatment in this era. Shock treatments? Surgical lobotomy?

  She hopped off the square bed and padded to the window in her stocking feet. Though she’d been warned not to stand directly in front of the glass, silhouetted against the light as a target for a sniper, there was no rule about peeking around the edge of the blinds. She saw a couple of men walking quickly along the cleared pathway. Other guards patrolled the perimeter of the building. The heightened security caused the hairs at the back of her neck to stand up. Danger was approaching.

  There was a knock at her door. Finally! Luke had come to see her. “Come in.”

  When he stepped inside and closed the door behind him, she had an urge to race toward him and throw herself into his arms. His stern expression held her back. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

  “You’ve got to tell me about your background, Shana. I need proof of your identity.”

  “You saw me working today. Isn’t that proof enough that I’m a geologist?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “Fermi trusts me,” she said. “He said my analysis on the ore samples gave him all the information he needed.”
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br />   “Captain Hughes is convinced that you’re a spy.”

  Fear took root in her consciousness. She knew what happened to traitors and spies during wartime. The captain had the authority to lock her up in a guardhouse and throw away the key. “What should I do?”

  “I need identification.”

  “There’s nothing.” Desperately, she tried a different explanation. “Remember how I told you about Kuwait. All my contacts are there. In the Middle East. It’s impossible to reach them.”

  “Even if that’s true, you must have luggage. Or a place you were staying in Leadville. A car. Anything.” The urgency in his voice worried her. “You didn’t just appear by magic on that slope in the middle of a blizzard.”

  But that was exactly what had happened, though probably not by magic. Shana didn’t believe in elves and fairies and magical wands. But the scientific process that had thrown her through time was beyond her ability to comprehend. Like Fermi’s paradox. She must have traveled through time because she was here, but she didn’t have the tools to explain the process.

  Though waves of tension prickled across her flesh, she forced herself to appear calm as she walked to the bed and perched on the edge. “I promised to tell you secrets about myself. Here goes.”

  Luke slipped off his jacket and dropped it on the floor. He sat at the foot of her bed and watched her through cool blue eyes.

  “I’ve always been a logical person,” she said. “From the time I was a little girl, I wanted to know how things worked and why. I needed answers. My father’s career as a diplomat was perfect for somebody like me because we traveled to different embassies all over the world, and I had a chance to explore a variety of different things.”

  “Interesting childhood,” he said impatiently. “But I need to know about the present, Shana.”

  “I’ll get there,” she promised. First, he needed to understand something about her. “I guess you could say that I’m kind of a loner.”

  “I thought embassies were places for fancy parties and social events.”

  “Not for a kid. I hated getting dressed up. Still do.”