Chapter Seventeen #3
He went airborne at an ice patch over a root knob, and his body flung ninety degrees in the air.
He landed on his side, perpendicular to the direction in which he was traveling, and this sent him spinning, rolling over and over.
His bandaged knees took his body weight in a glancing blow as he spun, his feet caught a snowdrift, and this jerked his body around ninety degrees more.
He found himself headfirst, his duffel bag sled was long lost behind him now, and he shot out of the forest and into the meadow above the old village of Guarda with his hands out in front of him like Superman and with absolutely no control over his momentum.
The slide, in its entirety, lasted just over forty-five seconds. To Gentry it seemed like a lifetime.
When it was over, he lay on his back in the snow.
After taking a few seconds to control his vertigo, he sat up, checked his body for functionality, and then stood unsteadily in the black morning.
He took stock of his pain. The bullet wound in his right thigh throbbed more than usual; he was certain he’d reopened any flesh that had rejoined in the last two days.
His knees stung; they were likely bleeding.
His ankles hurt but seemed to be operational.
His rib cage on the right side flared with ache when he sucked in a breath of the cold mountain air.
He thought it likely he’d cracked one of his floating ribs, which would be painful but not particularly burdensome.
His left elbow seemed to have hit something, or a series of somethings, or every goddamn something on the mountainside, and the area along his funny bone was stiff and swelling.
With all that taken into account, the Gray Man knew he was fortunate to find himself in such good condition. Sliding, rolling, and bouncing down a steep hillside in the dark could have gone much worse, even without the gunmen firing machine guns at him.
Then he took stock of his belongings. His buoyed spirits sank anew.
He’d lost everything but the small Walther handgun in his ankle holster, his wallet snapped shut in his back pocket, and a folding knife in his front pocket.
Everything else—sat phone, medical equipment, extra ammo, guns, grenades, binoculars—all gone.
It took him another twenty minutes to get to the bottom of the valley, down to the one road and the one railroad track, to the one-room train station. The snow had turned to sleet, and he shivered, his ungloved hands buried deep in his pockets.
He saw a minivan, the only vehicle parked in the tiny lot.
He took this as the kill squad’s vehicle.
He broke the driver’s-side window and climbed in quickly, then smashed the steering column apart with two kicks of his boot heel.
In seconds he had the ignition barrel out, and in under a minute he’d sparked the ignition wires.
But the van would not start. Hurriedly he felt around under the dash for a kill switch.
Finding none, he climbed back out of the van, slammed the door shut, and jabbed his knife into each of the tires.
He knew sabotaging it would show the gunners he’d made it down this far and was certainly on the road by now but, he decided, they would have to leave Guarda immediately anyway.
The police would be arriving within minutes.
The kill team wouldn’t be able to search the forest for him all morning, so there was little use in trying to mislead them that he was still on the mountain.
As it stood, he figured they were no more than ten to twenty minutes behind him now, depending on how concerned they were about being detected by the villagers or how nervous they were about bumping into the first police cars coming up the hillside.
Court broke a small windowpane in the door to the train station, reached around, and opened the latch.
First he checked a schedule on a wall, a timetable for all the trains in the country.
Then he pulled a heavy brown coat off a coat stand.
Gentry slipped it on. It was a little tight at the shoulders, but it would keep him alive.
A woman’s bicycle with thick tires leaned against a wall, and Gentry took it, closed the door behind him, and winced along with the flare-up of pain in his lower rib cage when he kicked a leg over to mount it.
It was after six, and he knew the trains would not begin running through the valley until seven. He needed to make it to a larger village to get the first express train of the morning to Zurich.
So he biked west on the Engadine Road away from the hint of a faint orange daybreak behind him.
His lower back, right thigh, and left knee burned with each revolution of the pedals.
His face stung in the cold. He leaned into the snowfall, dead tired and wounded and disheartened.
He’d wasted an entire day going after documents and weapons, and he’d acquired nothing but injuries.
Still, there were few men on earth who could summon determination in the face of adversity as well as the haggard and bloody man in the ill-fitting coat on the woman’s bike.
He had no plan, no gear, no help, and now he was certain he had no friends.
Fitzroy had lied to him, had set him up.
Court knew he had every right to disappear and leave Don to whatever had hold of him, whatever made him burn his number one asset.
But Court decided to continue to the west, if only for now. He knew he needed a better understanding of what was going on, and he only knew one way to get it.