“Son of a bitch…” Nina just had time to mumble before blackness swallowed her senses.

Chase panned the binoculars up the length of the valley. The moon was high in the night sky, the snowy mountains bathed in a vivid ghost light-a spectacular sight.

But natural beauty was the last thing on his mind. Instead, he focused on something man-made and charmlessly utilitarian.

“So Yuen’s in there?” he asked, breath steaming in the cold air as he surveyed the factory complex sprawled across the valley floor below.

“As far as I know,” said his companion. Mitzi Fontana was a long-haired and pretty Swiss blonde in her early twenties. “He’s been there a few hours. I persuaded one of the staff to tell me when he left the hotel.”

Chase took a moment to glance at the low-cut blouse beneath her partly fastened coat. “I won’t ask how.”

She smiled. “Oh, Eddie! They had no luggage with them, so they haven’t checked out. This is the only place they could have gone.”

“Unless they wanted some quiet time on the piste, but somehow I don’t think Yuen came here for the skiing. Any chance he left before we got here?”

“My friend at the hotel promised to call me if he came back. So far, he hasn’t.”

“Could be en route, but…” There was no sign of any traffic traveling down the road to the nearest town, two miles away. Chase raised the binoculars to confirm that there was no other way out; about half a mile beyond the factory, the valley was abruptly truncated by a sheer wall of concrete, a hydroelectric dam. The generating station at its base was lit up as brightly as Yuen’s facility.

More lights at the top of the dam caught his attention, a building right at the edge of the sheer valley side. “What’s that up there?”

“A cable car station,” Mitzi told him.

Chase perked up. “A cable car?” Now that he knew what to look for, he picked out a seemingly gossamer-thin line catching the moonlight, running from the building down to a similar station within the factory’s boundary fence.

“Please, Eddie,” she sighed, “don’t start talking about Where Eagles Dare.”

“Aw, come on, it’s one of my favorite films-and the scenery’s perfect for it.” He laughed briefly, before returning to business. “Where does it go?”

“There’s an airstrip about a mile from the dam.”

He frowned. “So Yuen could have left that way?”

“No, I checked. There is a private jet at the airstrip, and it has not left yet.”

“That’s something, then.” He turned the binoculars back to the factory. Security looked tight; tighter than he would have expected for just a microchip manufacturing facility. “What about Sophia? Is she with him?”

“According to my friend at the hotel, there was a woman with him, but he did not get a good look at her-she was taken straight from the suite to the car by two bodyguards.”

“It has to be her. Do you know what kind of car it was?”

“A black Mercedes. I’m afraid I don’t know the model.”

“Whatever’s the most expensive, I bet.” Chase lowered the binoculars. “Thanks for helping me with this, Mitzi. I know it was short notice.”

“And rather pricey!” She nodded at the bundles in the backseat of her SUV. “My skydiving club was rather surprised that I needed a parachute so urgently. And somehow I suspect I won’t be able to return it for a refund…”

“I’ll pay you back,” Chase assured her.

She patted his arm. “I’m joking, Eddie. I already owe you much more than the price of a parachute.”

He shook his head. “You don’t owe me anything. I’ll take care of it when I get back.”

“If you get back,” Mitzi said hesitantly. “Eddie, don’t you think you’re rushing into this?”

“If I didn’t rush into things, you and your mother wouldn’t be alive,” he snapped, more harshly than he’d meant to. “Sorry. But Sophia’s down there, and I’m going to get her out. That’s all there is to it.”

“In that case, all I can do is wish you good luck and help you on your way,” she said resignedly. “But Eddie, please don’t blow up the dam. My grandparents live down the valley.”

He grinned. “I’ll try not to.”

Mitzi laughed, then suddenly fixed him with a stern stare. “Really. Don’t.”

“I dunno where I got this reputation,” Chase said with a nonchalant shrug, then opened the car’s rear door and moved the parachute aside. He nodded approvingly as he saw a gun and a hand grenade.

“Where did you get these?”

“I go rock climbing as well. One of my instructors used to be in the army. He kept a few souvenirs.”

Chase grinned. “Skydiving, rock climbing… you’re turning into a right action girl.”

“All because of you, Eddie,” Mitzi told him, beaming.

Slightly embarrassed by her attention, Chase picked up another bundle which he unrolled and spread out on the ground. Then he took an aerosol can and shook it.

Mitzi wrinkled her nose as he knelt and started work. “I see that’s something else I won’t be able to get a refund for…”

A few minutes later, Mitzi pulled her Porsche Cayenne out of the scenic vantage point from where she and Chase had surveyed the valley onto a four-lane highway slicing through the mountains. At the height of the skiing season it would be packed with vacationers, but now, in the middle of the night, it was deserted.

Ahead, stretching across the valley in the direction of Bern, was a bridge, an elegant span with a single central support rising more than five hundred feet above the valley floor. Mitzi checked that the road was clear, then accelerated towards it. “Are you ready?” she shouted to Chase.

He wasn’t in the SUV with her-he was on top of it, crouched on the roof with one hand holding the roof rack. “Go for it!” he yelled, extending his other arm out behind him for balance. The one-piece garment he was wearing over his clothes rippled as the wind rapidly increased, the car passing forty, fifty miles per hour as it reached the bridge.

Mitzi gingerly drifted the Cayenne almost to the barriers at the center of the highway, still accelerating. Sixty, and they were coming up to the center of the bridge, its highest point-

“Now!” Chase bellowed.

Mitzi swerved the car hard across both lanes, seemingly on a suicidal course to plow straight through the concrete wall-then at the last possible moment swung back into line, the whole vehicle swaying-

Giving Chase an extra boost as he leaped from the roof into empty space.

He threw his arms and legs wide into a star shape, the triangles of fabric stretching between his wrists and waist snapping open like the wings of a bat. Another nylon wedge between his legs filled with air as he fell.

The wing suit couldn’t stop his descent-the amount of extra lift the material provided was far too small-but it could slow it.

And let him direct it.

Chase tilted his outstretched arms to bring himself into a turn. The lights of the microchip plant wheeled into view below.

Not as far below as they had been just seconds before. Although he was now gliding up the valley at an ever-increasing pace, his rate of vertical descent was practically pure free fall.

Icy wind slashed at his face. He had already dropped below 350 feet, three hundred-

He tore at the rip cord.

The parachute erupted from its pack like a slow-motion explosion, black as the night sky. Chase braced himself, swinging to an upright position as the straps yanked tight, and grabbed the control lines.

The barbed-wire top of the high perimeter fence swept past below. The black paint he had sprayed over the vivid yellow panels of the wing suit would reduce the chance of his being seen, but if some guard had heard the thump of the parachute opening and recognized its cause, he could still be spotted, highlighted by the glow of the moon…