Chapter Sixteen #2
By four ten, the snowfall had picked up.
Court was up the hill and in the village now.
He saw not a single soul, though there were still some lights on in the little hotel.
The lights of the homes of the villagers were all extinguished, the shepherds and the blacksmiths and the innkeepers and the pensioners were sound asleep for a few hours more.
He continued on, still climbing higher through the village, past ancient stone water troughs for the sheep flocks that moved through the hamlet’s pedestrian-only streets, past the tiny gardens surrounded by tiny fences in front of the tiny homes, until he broke out the other end of town and climbed higher up the steep hill along a dirt path.
The evening’s snow settled on earlier accumulation, and it nearly blanketed the hillside, though even in the moonless night Gentry could see patches of darkness, bare spots on the prominence that had yet to accept the cover of the white powder.
After climbing through the white meadows for three hundred yards above Guarda, Gentry clicked on his small tactical flashlight.
Behind him was sheer pastureland, but he was now entering a pine forest, and the snow swirling through the trees and the black night made the road invisible ahead of him.
The light helped. He pressed forward another hundred yards and found his destination in the woods, a tiny shack.
It stood thirty yards from the road, which continued on and up through disused private property.
There was no reason anyone else would pass by, and no reason, if someone did, that they would look hard to their right through the forest and notice the simple structure.
A huge, rusty padlock hung uninvitingly on the front door, the three windows around the one-room shack were boarded from the inside, and the surrounding pines grew unfettered nearly to the edges of the building.
Gentry walked through the trees and circled the building with his tac light.
At the back of the cabin stood a utility shed, also heavily padlocked, and he checked this and found it secure.
Continuing around the structure, he scanned the walls, the wooden slats on the roof, and finally the front door.
He took off his gloves, ran his fingers around the door’s edges slowly and, in the top right corner he found it.
A wooden toothpick jabbed flush with the frame.
Had the door been opened, this telltale would have dropped to the ground and given the Gray Man the tipoff that his cabin had been compromised by visitors.
Satisfying himself that the location was secure, Court next turned his back to the front door, took thirty measured steps away into the pines, pushing through the needled branches. At thirty paces, he shifted five yards to his right and knelt down.
The key was buried in a metal coffee tin, just six inches or so below the pine mulch and frozen dirt. He dug it out with a flat rock. After retrieving the key, he returned to the cabin and opened the lock.
The interior air was dry and stale and every bit as cold as outside the door. There was a knee-high coal furnace in a corner, but Gentry ignored it. Instead, he lit a lantern on a card table in the center of the room, its dim glow the only warmth to be had.
A shelf on the wall held cases of military rations, meals ready to eat, and the thirty-six-year-old American tore into the first MRE he could grab as soon as he came out of the restroom with the chemical toilet. He ate hard crackers and cookies, wolfed them down as he sat alone at the card table.
He finished his meal in ninety seconds. Next he stood and pushed the squat coal furnace out of the corner and lifted the loose floorboards below it.
Placing the tactical light in his mouth, he climbed down a wooden ladder exposed with the removal of the floorboards, into a dirt-walled basement six feet high and ten feet square.
When he turned from the ladder, he faced three chest-high stacks of black cases, each case the size of a very large toolbox.
This took up nearly half the room in the underground cellar, and a metal workbench filled the space to his right.
There was only room to climb up and down the ladder and move sufficiently to manipulate the cases.
Court hefted the first container off the first stack, dropped it heavily on the table, and flicked open the latch.
Early that morning, when Court told Fitzroy he would rescue his family, he immediately decided to go to Guarda, Switzerland, to his massive weapons cache hidden in the forest. He had a half dozen other stores around the continent, but nothing like Guarda.
Guarda was the mother lode.
The heavy metal.
The first case housed a black Swiss Brügger they remained stowed for now.