Hector Williams proved that he had good eyes. The silver glinted in the dwindling evening sun, and he pounced.
"Bro?"
"Cell phone," Sgt. Williams announced. "Not too many cell phones that people keep underneath the bushes outside of school."
"Children are always losing things," Principal Sanchez informed them. "I can show you a collection in the lost and found. Cell phones are now one of the most common items that the children lose—"
"Is it Lissy's?" Charlie asked, ignoring the woman and feeling sorrier and sorrier for Lissy Gerhardt who had to put up with the chattering every school day.
Williams scanned through the contacts. "Nope. Not unless 'Mom' has a different phone number than Tiffy Gerhardt."
Charlie bit back the inadvertent curse, afraid that it would set Mrs. Sanchez off again. Damn, but she reminded him of that nasty Spanish teacher he'd had back in high school! Woman had hated him on sight, gave him a 'C' when he was already fluent in Spanish, spoke it all the time at home. Grammar? Who needed it? Only saw that stuff in high class literature. Poetry, now, the good kind, didn't really have to use good grammar. Go for the feeling, the way it sounded. That was the thing. Grammar was secondary.
Charlie forced down the thoughts. This place was stirring up far too many memories, and it was interfering with his job.
"Dead end," Williams was saying.
"Wait a sec." Charlie picked up his head. "Ms. Sanchez, you say that you get cell phones in all the time? Did you get in any this afternoon?"
Ms. Sanchez scrunched her eyebrows, thinking. "Maybe. It's so common. Yes, I think I did. Two, I think. It was a slow day."
Charlie refused to let his hopes rise. "Can you show them to us?"
"Come with me." She led them back to her office, pulling out a well worn cardboard box from behind the counter. There were at least two dozen phones there of various sizes and styles. One beeped forlornly, indicating that it was hungry for a recharge. Charlie stared at the collection. "Which ones were from this afternoon?"
Mrs. Sanchez shook her head. "I'm sure I don't know. This children always know which one is theirs."
Williams sighed. "This may take a while."
Charlie had a better idea. "Maybe not." He pulled out his own phone and hit speed dial. "Mack?"
Fast: "You find her?"
"Not yet, man. We may have found her cell. Call her."
It only took a moment for a small pink oblong to begin warbling, a cell that was toward the top of the heap. Charlie snatched it up and answered the call. "Mack?"
"Charlie? That's the one, bro." Charlie could hear Mack fight to keep his voice steady. "Where was it?"
"Lost and found, Mack, at the school."
"We'll be right there."
Not a bad kid, for all he wanted to be an officer and a West Pointer to boot. That, Mack had to allow. The kid—only sixteen and still growing—was already as tall as Mack himself and heading up towards Jonas's height. Mack could maybe accept his daughter seeing him socially—maybe. And not soon. Maybe when she was thirty or so. Mack closed up his cell, putting those thoughts aside and speaking to Jonas. "They found something. We need to go."
"Can I do anything to help, sir?" Young Jimmy Woodman stood tall, ready to serve.
"Thank you, no," Jonas told him. "You've already helped by telling us what you know. If Sgt. Gerhardt's daughter does contact you—"
"Notify you; yes, sir," Jimmy acknowledged. "I'll call around, see if anyone else knows anything."
"You do that, son." Jonas appreciated the assistance, little help though it would be. Still, one never knew what could pop up… "Let's move."
Mack carefully placed his feelings into a small little corner of his mind and let the hunting instincts take over. They were not looking for his daughter. Master sergeant Mack Gerhardt was on a mission to track down a single human being, gender: female, and one who was last seen in this area. Gerhardt was an expert tracker, and all those skills would be needed.
"Footprints," he muttered, just loud enough so that the others could hear him. "Size six, maybe six and a half." Lissy's size! "Another print here: a man's, maybe ten. Another: size twelve. Big sucker. Deep prints, so he's pretty hefty." He rose from his squatting position to scan the terrain. The school building had taken on a half-familiar, half-terrifying demeanor. "Lissy exited the building there," he pointed, "and walked along here."
"Her friends were waiting for her over there, a block away." Williams pointed down the street.
"Which means that they likely didn't see whoever was waiting here," Jonas observed. "Any vehicle, Mack?"
"Tough to say. No tire tracks, plenty of dust. Lots of cars moving through."
"Wouldn't be easy to grab someone and not be noticed," Grey offered. "They have some way of enticing her in?"
"Lissy wouldn't do that," Mack told him bleakly. "She knows better." I hope. She's so upset now over Tiffy and me arguing that I don't know what she'd do.
Jonas noted the tall bushes that lined the sidewalk. "A snatch is possible. Two men, maybe some chloroform. One opens the door to a large vehicle, which blocks the view to the north and west. The bushes block the east. The other man takes her, pulls her into the vehicle."
"It would take less than a second to pull off," Grey agreed. "Only the south is open, and if luck is with them…" He let the words trail off into the dying afternoon.
Jonas didn't let them stop there. "Time is on our side. School let out at," he automatically glanced at his watch, "at two forty-five. The ladies waiting for Mack's daughter left their meeting point at approximately three PM. It is now five fifty-five, which is very little time to travel any great distance."
"Plenty of time to kill her and dump the body." Mack couldn't help torturing himself.
"And for any such body to be found," Jonas reproved. "The fact that no body has turned up in the vicinity suggests that she's still alive. And they need her alive to question her."
"So where do we go from here?" Mack demanded. "You think any of those kids are going to remember seeing the vehicle here? Any of 'em check out a license plate?"
"No, but that security camera might." Grey jerked his thumb upward to the corner of the massive brick building where a black box was mounted.
Jonas nodded. "Let's go make another trip to the principal's office, children."
Principal Sanchez had already been beaten into submission by the previous visit of Grey and Williams. It took no time at all for the five soldiers to extract the contents of the security camera from her grasp.
It was an inexpensive security model, just right for a school in a town with little money to spend on fancy electronic toys. Parents screamed for better equipment, taxpayers refused to foot the bill, and the school was caught in the middle trying to do its best in an impossible situation.
Right now Mack was one of those screaming parents, despite not one word leaving his lips. These photos popping up on the computer screen in front of him and the others were all that they had to go on, and no amount of last minute recrimination was going to change that. You're damn good at your job, Sergeant Gerhardt. Are you good enough to save your daughter's life?
"Black van," Jonas pointed out, his deep voice cool and collected. He could have been planning a mission overseas. "It's here on the street by the exit for several screen shots."
"Here for about fifteen minutes," Williams estimated. "They arrived before school let out, and they waited."
"Which means that they knew what Lissy looked like. They were waiting for her." Mack was bleak.
"They had her picture," Brown pointed out.
That wasn't good enough for Jonas Blane. "Why here? Why as she left from school? If they knew what she looked like, it would have been easier to take her as she walked to school in the morning."
"That's right," Grey agreed. "Fewer people around. Less chance of being identified."
"They must not have realized that she had the locket until then," Blane decided. Again he glanced at his watch, not needing the time. "They arrive in the area first thing this morning, which was when we were extracting Masters. Sgt. Masters's wife is at work; they search her home while she is out. They don't find the locket, and realize that Masters didn't give it to his wife as they thought. They go to their pictures to try to figure to whom he passed the intel."
"And they settle on my daughter," Gerhardt growled. "Is that what you're saying, Jonas?"
"That is indeed what I am saying, Mack. It fits with the timeline. They search your own home while your family is away and likewise come up empty-handed. With that in mind, they choose to question Lissy to find the locket." Jonas indicated the computer screen. "Any way we can pull up a license plate? Identify the vehicle?"
Grey stared at the screen. "Looks like a Dodge Caravan, maybe 2008. Maybe 2007. Can't tell from this distance."
"Can anybody make out anything on the plates?" Mack couldn't, and it scared him. How were they going to track down a lead if they couldn't see the plates?
Jonas had the answer. "Sgt. Williams."
"Sir."
"Can you email this picture to someone at the base with a great deal of computer savvy?"
"I can, sir, and done."
"Good." Jonas stood up. "Hopefully we'll have a direction to pursue within thirty minutes."
The bastards inside were dead men. Of that, there was no doubt. The only question was, would it be within three minutes or five?
Alpha Unit had an address within fifteen minutes, not thirty. Colonel Ryan had put a top priority on the mission, knowing that a young girl's life depended on it—not to mention national security. No one knew just what Sgt. Masters had discovered, and likely even Masters himself hadn't known. If he had, Jonas reasoned, he wouldn't have entrusted it to Mack Gerhardt's daughter. He would have come straight in, cover be damned. So the tech support people had put a rush job on blowing up the pictures taken by the school security camera and had tracked down the license plate in a matter of minutes. From there it hadn't been hard to come up with an address.
The rat hole was an old brick building on the outskirts of town. A broken sign lying on the cracked sidewalk suggested that some time in the past the building had housed a printing business. Whether it had been prosperous or not was something that the team would never know. Right now it was more important to know the entrances and exits, how many floors, and whether a young girl was inside, waiting terrified for her father and his fellow soldiers to rescue her.
Williams slipped back to the group huddled behind the rusting car in front. "Side door, not in use," he reported. "Lot of trash blocking the exit. They're not getting out that way."
Brown had the other one. "Back door, clean. That's the one they're using. I didn't see any guards, though."
Jonas lowered his own binoculars. "They sure as hell ain't using the front door," he said softly. "It's blocked up as much as the side one." He came to a decision. "We go in the back door. We slide in quiet, take out however many we can before it hits the fan, then we finish big. Questions?" He looked at each of his men.
They were all ready. Each one held an automatic, and each one was decked out in battle gear. It was a good thing that this was a deserted end of town, Jonas reflected grimly. One look at them, and the average citizen would be calling 911, convinced that World War III had begun.
Didn't matter. They were going into battle, no matter that this was American soil, and they were going to bring out a young girl to her father.
Jonas caught and held Mack Gerhardt's eyes. I'm putting you in the rear.
Pupils narrowed. Point was Gerhardt's position, and that was his daughter inside. Like hell.
Or you sit this one out.
It was a long moment.
Mack Gerhardt dropped his gaze first.
Jonas didn't waste time on his victory. "Let's go," was all he said. "Cool Breeze, you're on point. Take us in."
The dying light of evening only helped to cover their approach, shadows among shadows. The ground was hard and rocky beneath their boots, and Williams's foot slipped on a stray stone. He righted himself without a second thought, and it slowed them not one whit. The feral cat on the far fence made more noise.
The building sounded deserted, and there were no lights to give anything away. Jonas felt a momentary disquiet; was Gerhardt's daughter really here? Was this a wild goose chase?
Nothing to do but go forward. Even if the girl wasn't here, the building could still yield valuable clues as to where she—and the national security information—was. They weren't about to stop now.
Brown slowed to squirt a drop of oil onto the hinges of the back door, preventing any sound from giving them away. The door might not have squeaked, but then again it might have. They weren't going to take that chance. One by one they slipped inside, allowing the door to close quietly behind them. Enemy stronghold: breached.
Ears strained to hear: creaking of cooling struts in the night. Rustling of rats building a nest in the room to the right. Whistling of a breeze stealing in through the broken pane of glass in the distant room ahead. They moved ahead, silently, listening to the sounds of the night.
Two staircases: one leading up and the other down. Which direction? For Jonas, it was an easy decision to make. Upstairs had windows, ways for outsiders to peer and crawl in. Downstairs was a ground-covered basement with no way for a hostage to escape. It was dark inside a basement, with all the despair that darkness wrought. It was another technique to break a hostage, to find out where a small gold locket might be. Brown led them down the steps, pausing on each one to ensure that no creaking would give away their presence.
Then they caught it: a girl's cry. Not a sobbing of a broken heart, not a wail of fury over a social slight.
A cry of pain.
More than one pair of eyes turned to Gerhardt, wondering if the father could keep it together, if his training would hold.
It did. The hands trembled, and the eyes grew cold, but the training held. It was the best chance that Lissy Gerhardt had to get out of this alive, and her father was going to give her that chance no matter what it cost him inside. His training held.
Jonas nodded grimly. This would not take long. Hand signals flashed: Gerhardt and Brown on the left, Williams and Grey cover the right. He himself would take out the center, where the hostage likely was secured. On the count of three:
One.
Two.
Thre—
Blam!
If anyone had cared to later, they could have determined how many shots were fired by totting up the quantity of missing ammunition from each Unit soldier's kit. Sound would not have sufficed; each shot muffled the noise of the others, so much that it was only with difficulty that anyone could have heard more than two shots. Anyone in the neighborhood would have mistaken it for a badly tuned car engine backfiring.
To Mack and Lissy Gerhardt, it didn't matter. What did matter was that two bodies dropped to the floor, instantly dead and riddled with holes.
Lissy herself was tied to a chair in the middle of the empty room. The first thing that they all saw was the black mark across her face in the shape of a hand, a mark that extended across a swollen eye. A trickle of blood had seeped and dried over her lip, a lip that was trembling. Clothing was torn, her tee ripped across her shoulder to expose the lace bra beneath. Jonas chanced a look at one of her captors. The man had been caught in the middle of taking down his own pants, and there was little doubt in Jonas's mind as to the next tactic they had intended to use to get the girl to talk. Their deaths were too quick. He toed the weapons away from the pair, in case either one had survived the slaughter.
Secure the perimeter: Brown, Williams, and Grey immediately swung around to cover the door, in case anyone else in the building heard the commotion and came running. It would have been hard to miss, but there was no response. A small part of Jonas Blane decided that there was no other enemy soldier in the building, only these two now chilling on the floor.
Mission accomplished: package secure. Damaged, sure, but secure. Gerhardt's knife was out in a flash, slicing through the ropes that held his daughter to the chair. There were more bruises, Jonas saw when the rest of the girl's blouse fell away. There had been manhandling, likely during the kidnapping as well as after. If he tried, he would be able to identify fingerprints on her arm from where they'd grabbed her.
At the moment, it didn't matter. Lissy clung to her father, tears flowing, unable to speak. Mack held her close, newly aware of how precious she was to him—and how close he'd come to losing her forever.
This was not a secure location. Jonas Blane needed to get his men and the victim out of here and back to the base where she could receive medical attention—and they could find Masters's locket with its all-important cache of information. A clean up team could take care of this location and look for evidence of other enemy soldiers, but Jonas's mission now was to return to base with the victim and her information.
"Move out," he told them. "Cool Breeze: point. I'll take our—" he checked his language, "—I'll cover our back. Dirt Diver, in the middle." With the victim.
It was tight squeeze in the vehicle with five men and one girl, but not one of them complained. Grey put himself behind the wheel to drive. Jonas pulled out his comm. link. "Snake Doc to base."
"Base here, Snake Doc. Situation?"
"Package acquired. Send a clean up team."
"Will do, Snake Doc, and I will inform Dirty Mama. You have any more intel for me?" Where's the damn locket?
Jonas glanced at Lissy Gerhardt, still clinging to her father. "That's a negative, base."
"You'd best hurry it up, Snake Doc. We may have a situation."
"A situation?"
"We'll fill you in upon arrival. Base out."
Jonas closed down the link. "Dirt Diver." It was a command, even with its brevity.
Gerhardt was not happy, but he was a Unit soldier. He snugged his daughter tighter, welcoming the tight quarters of the vehicle that kept them from swaying with the curves in the road. "Lissy?"
"Da-daddy?"
Jonas could hear the pain in the father's voice. "Lissy, what did those men want?" As if Master Sergeant Gerhardt didn't know.
More tears. More blood: the cut on her lip opened up again when she licked them in fear.
"Lissy?" Jonas hadn't known that Gerhardt could speak so tenderly.
"Daddy, they hurt me!" It came out in a wail.
There might have been a tear in Gerhardt's own eye, but Jonas wasn't about to swear to it to his superiors. The muscles in Gerhardt's arms surrounding his daughter did tighten. "I know, baby. I know. They won't ever do that again."
Time to take control, because Dirt Diver wasn't. "Ms. Gerhardt." In deep tones.
It helped. Jonas could see the girl visibly work to control herself, to pull herself together. For all she'd been through, she was still a military brat, brought up with military discipline. She was Mack Gerhardt's daughter.
"What did those men want?"
The tears flowed, but they didn't stop Lissy Gerhardt. "They…they wanted my locket. The one that Sgt. Masters gave to me. He said to keep it safe for him, to pretend that it was mine until he asked for it back." A choked back sob. "I thought that he wanted me to keep it so that his wife wouldn't find it. It was going to be a present for her!" Lissy could barely get the last words out.
Gerhardt's arms tightened reflexively once again, and Jonas nodded. It fit. It fit all too damn well. The enemy would have expected Masters to hand over the locket to his wife, just in case, so Masters had fooled them by passing it to someone else. "Where is the locket now? Did you tell them the location?" He wouldn't have blamed her one bit if she had. Grown men would have broken under what she had just gone through.
"I lost it!" she wailed. "I didn't know what to tell them!"
"It's okay, baby," Gerhardt murmured, calming her, kissing the top of her head. His eyes met those of his team leader.
It was not okay. Jonas deepened his voice. "What did you tell them?" Which direction are we going to chase?
Lissy struggled to keep calm. "I told them that I lost it, Uncle Jonas. And…and then they hit me." Over and over again…
If Gerhardt could have gone back and killed those men again, he would have.
Jonas didn't have that luxury. "What else did they ask, Ms. Gerhardt?"
"They…they asked me…about what I did. When I lost the necklace."
It made sense. The girl lost the necklace and her captors wanted to find it. They would hunt in every place that she had been. They'd already searched the Gerhardt house, now they'd search the neighborhood and shoot anyone who got in their way. "When did you realize it was missing?"
Another tear, dashed away by knuckles with scraped skin. Lissy Gerhardt had not gone quietly to her doom. "This morning. I couldn't find it."
"When did you last see it?"
"Yesterday. I wore it to school."
A small window to explore. Jonas kept going. "Did you have it when you came home from school yesterday?"
"I…I think so. I'm pretty sure."
Jonas let the uncertainty pass. "Where did you go after school?"
"Mrs. Brown's house. I promised to watch Serena and Teddy for a couple of hours, so that Mrs. Brown could go grocery shopping."
Jonas exchanged a glance with Bob Brown. Searching the man's own home would be next. "Did you have it when you left?"
"I…I…think so. Maybe. I'm not sure."
Big uncertainty. Searching the Brown residence took on a higher priority. "Where did you go next?"
"Home." That was definite, and it meant that the Gerhardt home would also be subject to search.
There was still another topic to broach. "Did you tell them that?"
No need to ask who 'they' were. Lissy's lip quivered. "Yes." I'm sorry! I'm sorry!
"You have nothing to be ashamed of, Ms. Gerhardt," Jonas told her before Mack Gerhardt could say anything. "Your job was to survive until your father and I could come for you. You did admirably."