Or, rather, it became clear after I came back to consciousness. Landing on your head at that speed, merely getting knocked out has to be the epitome of lucky breaks. Others weren’t as lucky as I had been.
When I came to, the snowy vista stretching out before my eyes was dotted with prostrate human forms and pieces of bobsled. I forced myself to stagger over to the two forms closest to me. They turned out to be the Swiss bearers. Both had broken their necks in the accident. Both were dead. They looked like twin red-cheeked turkeys whose necks had been wrung.
I heard a groan. A figure sat up. It was Dickson. He ignored my shout to him and immediately began to search the terrain for the box of gold bars.
Bambi also stood up. I walked over to her. She was shaken up, but not badly hurt.
The two of us heard a groan from the remaining figure huddled on the snow. We ran over to her. It hadn’t been a groan at all. It had been a moan of ecstasy. Dorianne Brey was lying there oblivious, joyfully inhaling the bouquet of Nick Dickson’s dirty socks.
A shout from Dickson announced that he’d found the gold. He took the socks away from Dorianne long enough to determine that she could lead us the rest of the way back to civilization. We salvaged a piece of the bobsled big enough to haul the box of gold; at least we wouldn’t have to carry it that part of the way Where there was snow on the mountain slope. Within an hour of the accident, we were on our way again.
By nightfall we had run out of snow. There was no cave handy, and so we had to camp out in the open. If not the toughest, then certainly the most strenuous part of our journey lay in front of us the next day. It wasn’t going to be easy wrestling a box of gold weighing three hundred and ninety pounds the rest of the way down that mountain. The terrain before us was still pretty damn rugged.
It turned out to be a lot harder even than we’d anticipated. We’d been on the trail about an hour the next day when we ran into more serious trouble. It started with the sound of a dog-howl from high above us. We all turned and craned our necks. Bambi (the girl) was the first to spot the animal. She pointed. There, silhouetted against the snow on one of the slopes near the top of the mountain, was Bambi (the dog) .
True love? Revenge? There was no telling which it was that had caused her to break loose from Läger Shang and set out after us. But there she was, howling, and angling to lean on one of her haunches so that she might scratch a flea in her ear.
The agitated movement caused a piece of ice to break off the ledge on which she was perched and hurtle downward. The piece of ice struck below the snowline on the mountain and disturbed a few pebbles and started them rolling. The pebbles dislodged a very small rock. The rock bounced off a larger one -- about the size of a bowling ball—and started that one too in motion. The last I saw of Bambi (the dog), she was still perched there scratching and howling. After that the only thing I saw was the landslide descending on us.
It was terrifying. There was no place to hide. We were on a rocky, barren hillside. There was not so much as a niche, let alone a cave, in which we might seek shelter from the hurtling debris of pebbles, rocks, boulders, and slag.
Fear must have really activated Dickson’s adrenal glands and lent him a strength beyond his usual muscular capability. He hefted the three-hundred-ninety-pound box of gold as if it was a sack of feathers and used it as a shield against the flood of missiles raining down on him. I relied more on moving fast to get out of the way of the larger and more dangerous pieces. I did what I could to shield Bambi. She was also very quick on her feet, but nevertheless, before long we were both bleeding from the hail of smaller rocks we hadn’t been able to dodge.
Dorianne Brey, sadly, was past the age of being nimble. The old crone tried to hobble out of the worst of the storm, but her reaction time was slow and her judgment foggy with age. She strayed right into the path of the largest of the onrushing boulders. What was left after it passed over her wouldn’t have served to fill a geriatric thimble.
At last it was over. Bambi and I got busy treating each other’s many cuts and scratches and bruises. Dickson was in better shape, but he insisted on his fair share of the Mercurochrome. Then, as little as there was left of Dorianne Brey, we buried it-along with Dickson’s dirty socks, for sentiment’s sake.
We continued our downward trek, still wrestling with the damnable box of gold. It was twilight when we spied the faint outline of a Swiss village at the base of the mountain. As we came closer, lights began to spring up in the quaint old houses and chalets.
When we came to the outskirts of the village, Bambi (the girl) announced that she was taking her leave of us. “I’m going back to Läger Shang,” she told us. “It’s the simple life for me.”
For a minute I thought Dickson might try to stop her. But then he merely shrugged. There was no reason to force her to stay with us any longer—if, indeed, there ever had been. So he and I continued on to the village alone, carrying the increasingly heavy box of gold between us.
There was an inn. We took two rooms. The gold, naturally, stayed with Dickson. A hot bath and a hot meal, and then Dickson put through a transatlantic call to Rococco on his island in the Caribbean.
Rococco had heard from the kidnappers. The Lilliputian Liberation Army wanted Dickson to bring the gold to a certain palm tree on a certain island in the Caribbean at midnight the following evening. If he failed to comply, it was good-bye Alicia.
Dickson was to come alone except for me. I had to come along to identify the island and the palm tree. How was I supposed to do this? Simple. The kidnappers had also left a personal message from Alicia for me. The message was as follows:
“Bring the gold to the tree where we made love.”
His hand over the mouthpiece, Dickson asked me if the message made any sense to me.
I nodded.
He said a few more words to Rococco and hung up.
“We're not sure that we understand the [unintelligible] instructions,” Dickson said to me.
“I’m pretty sure I do,” I admitted.
“Coming to the heart of the question, which is with regard to our daugh—Oh, [expletive deleted]!--to our secretary’s chastity, are we to understand that you are responsible for depriving her of it?”
“Oh, no!” I assured him. “I certainly wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, we think in response to that question you should put the phrase ‘made love’ in perspective.”
“It’s a code phrase,” I improvised.
“Really? Well, that’s a relief. We surely don’t like to hear ladies using that kind of mother-[expletive deleted] language.”
Not that Dickson’s suspicions were assuaged. Besides worrying about what might have taken place sexwise between me and Alicia, he also must have wondered just how I could know what specific island and what specific palm tree was referred to in the kidnap message. Fortunately, he was kept too busy arranging for a hired car which would take us and the gold to a train which would take us to an airport where a privately chartered plane would fly us to Nassau in time to drive by cab to the place of our appointment on Paradise Island.
We arrived at the base of the tree shortly before midnight. It was a quiet night with the full moon playing hide-and-seek with the clouds. At moments the clearing around the palm was drenched with light. At other moments it hid sullenly in semidarkness.
We waited.
Suddenly, as the light followed its pattern of fading away, there was a noise from somewhere on the other side of the base of the pahn tree. It was a small noise, a scuttle of feet—tiny feet—reorganizing the sand under them. The moon returned and with it we were face to face with the leader of the Lilliputian Liberation Army.