Close Encounters 9


Castle sat in the visitor's chair and spooned scrambled eggs into his mouth as his father talked. He knew the drill. Stick to the program, bide his time until he could figure out what the hell to do.

"The sedation was to your benefit, Richard."

It took every effort he had not to choke on those eggs.

"Your leg has healed cleanly. The concussion seems to be gone. MRI scans were clear. It was my decision to bring you out of heavy sedation."

Mitchell had promised. Mitchell had promised.

"I've gotten the team well in hand, as you'll see. You'll - of course - have six weeks of rehab assignment before you can join us officially. But I'm sure the company won't mind if you sit in on operations until then. Seeing as how it used to be your team."

And what about Beckett? Fuck Black for thinking that's all it would take. A few days heavy sedation to make him forget his wife.

"I've got a meeting in five, son. It's good to see you up and coming along - right on schedule. Mitchell will brief you about rehab, set up your training regimen."

Black stood and shambled out, his gait still crippled from where Castle had done serious damage, but he looked overjoyed.

And then Mitchell came in.

Castle pushed aside the tray and stood up. "Where is she?"

Mitchell swallowed hard. "I - Castle. You're gonna have to just listen to me."


Fur was everywhere.

It stuck to her fingers and got in her mouth; it clung to the dirt and snarled in the scrub brush, gristle and pelt alike.

Kate cleaned the knife once more, the blade singing against the side of the rock, kept her mouth closed to keep from breathing in fur.

She'd cleaned fish with her father; she'd descaled a trout and she'd plucked clean a duck sitting side by side with him on the back porch. Her father had once killed a deer, but he'd gotten it professionally cut; the meat came back wrapped just like what they'd get from the grocery store.

That winter they'd eaten venison for nearly every meal. Her father's rule: only kill what you can eat. And her mother had complained, rebelled, taken them out to eat whenever she got home early enough. Her father ate it alone, dogmatic and reserved in his meal, but not an ounce of resentment. He'd never killed a deer after that one summer.

She didn't know how to field dress a wolf.

The internal organs were first; she'd known that much. But she hadn't had anything to string up the wolf and she hadn't thought she could stand up that long anyway. So instead she had visualized the autopsy suite and her friend Lanie - God, so far from here - and she'd started at the sternum and cut her way through to the abdomen.

She had no idea how edible internal organs were without some kind of special preparation, but the intestines, the bladder - she had to remove them first. Without - spilling things. Without ruining the meat.

Her hands were shaking badly and the blade didn't go as far as she'd thought it would and so instead of gutting Wolf cleanly, she was hacking away. She had tears again and they rolled in fat drops down her cheeks and into the ragged open cavity of the Wolf's chest, the only memorial she could afford.

The lungs, the esophagus, the gaping wound she'd made in the diaphragm. She'd seen the inside of a human before, had stood over the body while Lanie had made the cuts, had even helped crack open the ribs. She had the torque and force now to do it with the knife, but she was a trembling and sweaty mess by the time it was over.

If she thought the ribs had been brutally difficult, the pelvis was impossible. She couldn't get at the lower intestines, the rectum, without fishing around and she didn't want to accidentally cut any of those open. They'd just have to stay, though the smell was overpowering. Intensely over-

Kate swallowed hard, but the nausea climbed up her throat. She closed her eyes, swaying, tried to battle it back. But it persisted.

She dropped the knife and crawled away, retched violently at the base of a crooked tree, her vision swimming. Beckett breathed shallowly through her nose, swiped her mouth off the inside of her shirt, tasting blood.

She sucked down a shaky cry that wanted out, and then she went back to the job.

The sun was liquid overhead, a smear of too-bright light that made her eyes hurt, but Wolf was a decimated mess before her. She had to salvage what meat she could.

When most of the organs were piled in a shallow basin made of the rock, her hands trembling and black with blood, she thought maybe the skin was next.

The pelt didn't come off in one smooth coat, as she'd naively expected. It came in clumps, jagged strips; she cut her own fingers more than she cut the hide. It was worthless (she'd thought, somehow, of tanning and stretching and the Native Americans and throwing it over herself at night - ha) and the smell was overwhelming and her hands were covered in it. Tarred and feathered.

She should've started a fire first. The smell - she was afraid of bringing wild animals to the site now, with the scent of blood and death even though the smoke would go up and alert the humans.

She had to. She had to start a fire and burn the organs - or char them enough to eat. She had to have something; she was blacking out even as she worked, finding consciousness a moment before the blade slipped out of her grimy hands.

She had to start a fire before the animals came looking, before something nastier wanted a piece of Wolf.

Beckett scraped the blade against the rocks again and then turned slowly towards the flat land.

A fire.

CIA training hadn't exactly prepared her for this.


"I tasked a satellite through Homeland," Mitchell started quietly. "We searched for lone heat signatures, but it was..."

"You said the Russian Army," Castle interrupted. He didn't want to know about damn heat signatures. "Did you go on foot? Because the machines can't tell you-"

"Listen to me, Castle."

If Mitchell reached out and put his hand on Castle's knee, he would lose it. He would fucking lose it.

"I couldn't get close enough," Mitchell shook his head. "I got to the border and couldn't get across. I tried - shit, I tried, Castle."

He grit his teeth and clenched his fists, ducked his head to keep from going into a rage. He couldn't afford that, not if he wanted to get the fuck out of here.

"So you left her there," he said finally, breathing shallowly.

"No. No, I - Castle, I tasked the satellite and I holed up there for two days. There were pockets of Russians, and then the wildlife-"

"Wildlife."

"I swear I looked. Castle, I started my search at the sight where we picked you up and then I expanded out to the facility - even though it's crawling with Russians."

"And?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary. Just maneuvers, clean-up... Castle, there's something else."

Castle drew in a breath and paced the room, needing space, needing out of here.

"The car."

He stopped, the light from the window glaring across his bare feet. "The car."

Mitchell let out a breath. "We'd been tracking the Russian army anyway, so I had all these sat images from their deployments, movements in the area, their clean up and acquisitions and-"

"Fucking get on with it," he growled. But he couldn't turn and look at Mitchell.

"Russians found the car. The company car. They found it."

He closed his eyes. "How do you know. Confirmation?"

"I burned a source in Russian command to get it. It's the one we provided you in Samara. The one you drove to Mayak when you connected up with Beckett and Vadim. Same car you and Beckett hid in that cave and then walked-"

"Fuck," he growled and punched the wall with his fist, felt the bones shift and bloom with pain. "Fuck. The car. They got the car. Did they get Beckett?"

"No mention of an asset. Only the car. Which means they know we had people in the area and so they've been running search parameters through out the countryside."

"Shit," he moaned, his chest tight with it, his hand throbbing.

"No, that's good. That's good because it means they don't have her either. She's still - out there. If she's alive."

"She's alive," he insisted. But he didn't - she was alive. She had to be alive.

"Castle, you're gonna have to-"

"No, I'm not." He turned away from the window and faced Mitchell. "I'm getting out of here and I'm going back-"

"You can't get past the border."

"I can. I will. Beckett is out there. Did you search the coordinates I gave you for the car?"

"I told you the heat signatures didn't-"

"Fuck that. Do you know how cold it gets at night? Body temps drop."

"I took that into consideration," Mitchell placated, holding up both hands.

"No. Don't." Castle strode past him and grabbed the pile of belongings they'd left on his bedside tray, searching for the one thing... the only thing that mattered... where was it? Had his father found it? "Where's the phone? Fuck. What happened to my phone?"

"I took it."

He growled and turned but Mitchell was already holding it out; he'd pulled it from a jacket pocket. "Black - I didn't think you wanted him to have it. I took it with me, hoping that she'd call. If she... Castle, you have to face it. She's probably dead."

"She's not," he growled, snatching the phone from Mitchell. "I'm going to Russia and I'm finding my wife. You can either help me or I can fucking go up against you right here, right now."

"Castle."

"Choose."

Mitchell sighed, stared at him for a too-long moment. "Fine." He shook his head and leaned back against the wall. "Let me think. I can get you out of here, just give me a second to think."

More like it.


Kate curled on her side and panted through another round of terrible, awful nausea. Her stomach cramped and twisted and she drew her knees tighter into her chest, tried to keep breathing.

Couldn't.

She lurched to her knees and shuffled over two feet, vomited hard, her body in a rictus of agony. She fell to her elbows and heaved again, her whole system turned inside out. She crawled away from the mess, the darkness of the cave closing down on her.

How long now? Two days, two times she'd heard that damn bird in the tree go on for hours and hours as the sun rose. Two mornings of vomiting, two mornings she'd had nothing but stomach acid eating away at her.

Her arms trembled but she pushed through the darkness to the trickling water. Had to have water. Couldn't keep throwing up.

Something had to stay down. Two days since she'd cooked the Wolf and - God - maybe something had been wrong with it, maybe she hadn't cooked it long enough, but she'd set the fucking organs on fire and the meat was - she hadn't looked at it that great, it'd already been dark that first day, pitch black outside and inside and she'd shoved down as much as she thought her cramped stomach could handle.

The water was icy cold and burned her throat, but she lapped at it and then washed her hands in the slow-moving current.

The blood. There'd been so much guts and gristle and fur and-

Kate groaned and pressed her forehead to the rock, shivering now, her sweat drying on the back of her neck, along her belly. Freezing again.

Three nights now? No, no, wait. That first night she'd fallen asleep and woken. . .late. Late enough, her body so heavy and stiff that she'd known it had been a few days. She'd been slick with sweat, her hair grimy and plastered to her skull, and she'd done her best to wash off in the trickle of water coming through the cave.

She had no idea how long now. She'd meant to...

She'd meant to do... something.

Keep moving. She had to keep moving, the Wolf was-

Beckett groaned and shook her head despite the agony that pulsed the moment she moved, the fire that burned in her bones and ripped apart her guts. The Wolf was dead; the car was gone. She tried to repeat it like a mantra, tried to make it stick.

It wasn't bad food, it wasn't that the meat was rancid or not well-cooked.

It was her. She was...

She couldn't keep it down because it'd been too long without.

Even the water was coming back up.

Beckett moaned into the rock and the shivering started up again, the waves of nausea rising up from her stomach and vibrating her limbs until she was gagging it back, her chest and torso contorting to rid her body of every last drop.

She turned her head. Couldn't throw up in the stream. Couldn't poison her water supply. Couldn't throw up.

She had to keep it down. Had to. She had to keep it.

She pressed her mouth to her arm and refused, refused, refused it.

She wouldn't.

When it passed, it finally passed, when it passed she was shivering so hard her teeth chattered but she was drenched in sweat.

She curled onto her side and put the rock to her back, closed her eyes.

This wasn't going to work.

Not even Wolf could save her.


Castle hiked in over the ridgeline, on his hands and knees when he got to where the razor wire fence met the ground. He snapped the wire with handheld cutters, replaced the man-sized section carefully so that it would pass a cursory inspection.

This far out, that was all he was expecting from the border patrol. Cursory.

He smeared his hand along the black paint at his forehead; it itched but he couldn't scratch or it'd burn and leave clear streaks of skin. He put the cutters back in a pocket of his army pack and took out the water, sipped it slowly.

He had a massive amount of supplies weighing him down, but he didn't know Beckett's condition. When he found her - when he found her - he was assuming he'd have to triage her in the field.

He'd packed for concussion, shrapnel wounds, and broken bones. Plus dehydration and malnourishment. Radiation pills, but...

It'd been thirteen days since the mortar shell, thirteen days since his father had hurried him out of there on the chopper and left Beckett to fend for herself against the whole damn Russian Army. If anyone could survive thirteen days, it was stubborn, strong-willed Kate Beckett.

He'd spent a grand total of three days conscious during that time. The last two of those spent traveling from Ramstein Base in Germany to Kiev, Ukraine by special flight - a cargo plane which required him to be literally crated in and out. In Kiev, he'd bought a spot on an illegal transport to Georgia and from there - shit, finally, - he'd crossed into Kazakhstan.

And now he'd slipped the fence into Russia.

A hundred more miles to go.

Castle put the water away and cinched the pack tighter on his shoulders, and then he crouched low and began a slow jog down the ridgeline, searching for tracks to take him away from the border and deeper into Russia.

He followed what looked like nothing more than a goat path until it broadened into a low-lying field of grass, the Russian steppe as far as he could see. He removed the transmitter from his pocket that kept relaying his signal to Mitchell and he dropped it to the ground.

He took a breath and then he crushed his heel over it, ending the signal and letting Mitchell know he'd made it across.

If the Russians found him now, he'd have plausible deniability. No CIA tech on him, not even a phone. Not even that phone. He'd left it with Mitchell.

He was on his own out here. He'd never been so entirely without back-up before. He and Beckett would have to traverse back across the border alone, but-

Shit.

First he had to find her.

He had a hundred more miles to go.

He was appropriating a car the moment he came to a road.


The farm had been a fucking sign from the Universe. All he could say.

He drove the borrowed, rusted-out truck down the M5 towards Samara, going as fast as he dared, and couldn't believe how lucky that had been. Silo, farmhouse, and then a harsh line of stubbled field had given over to a storage barn.

The place had been deserted. The barn's padlock was so old that vines had grown up around the handles of the door and through the links of the chain.

He'd broken out a window and crawled inside when he'd seen the truck. In the thin light, he'd skimmed his hands over the hood and propped it open and he'd seen the problem.

Spark plugs not attached. All it took. Gas was already in the tank and he added more from the red carton next to the workbench, a thick coating of dust over everything.

He'd crawled back out and hacked at the padlock with the axe he'd found inside, and then he was rolling the truck in neutral towards the doors and out. The farmhouse stayed dark and no one came to look.

He'd replaced the chain and padlock as best he could, had threaded the vines back through the links and the handle, had made it look as un-assed as he could.

And now he had transportation.

He was getting close. He could feel it. He had the axe in the truck bed and his pack in the seat beside him and he could practically feel Beckett out there, calling to him, Kate his own true north.


Damn it.

He had to turn around and go back, hide the truck somewhere. There was no way he was getting through that checkpoint.

Castle veered onto a dirt track off the road - he'd already had to divert from the M5 because of roadblocks - and he went down a few miles until he could safely stop. He checked the paper map and traced his finger over the approximate place he was and then a line towards the underground facility.

Okay, time to think.

He'd plotted a series of five coordinates - places he thought Beckett might have been - and he needed to eliminate them quickly. From where he was, the underground facility itself was closest, but he really hoped she hadn't gone back that way.

In hindsight, they knew now that the Russian Army had overrun the facility, but even though she might not have known, she still could see that those mortar shells had been coming from that direction. She was smart; she was very smart.

Even though the facility was closest, he was going to rule it out.

That left the cave where they'd hidden the car and the cave where his father had set up camp. If she was being followed by the Russian Army, if she knew the car had been taken, she'd have gone for his father's Batcave.

But the Batcave was clear in the other direction from the car, and he had to choose - one direction or the other.

She didn't have much time.

Castle scraped a hand down his face and recalled her message to him on the phone. She'd known he'd get it eventually, she had known he'd be held up for a while in recovery. She'd had to convince herself he'd be okay - you'll be fine, you'll be fine.

Where would she go? What choice would she make, knowing that it might be a good long while before anyone came for her?

Castle growled and started the truck, turned it around, his foot heavy on the gas, aching to get there.

He hoped he'd made the right choice.


He had to ditch the truck about twenty miles out and hike in the rest of the way. He avoided the Russian patrol, despite a burning need to terminally subdue the threat, and he let them live and continued on.

Killing scouts would only alert the Russians that he was here and he didn't have the time to lie in wait and do it right. He had a good pace set, quick enough with the pack on his shoulders, but he was afraid it wasn't fast enough for Beckett.

He had this burning in his guts that wouldn't let up, no matter how fast he ate up the distance. He was out of conditioning, lying in bed for thirteen days, and he felt the cramps in his muscles even if his body still knew the basic rhythms for breathing.

The pack was heavy and his legs were weak and he wasn't going his usual pace.

He tried not to let it drag him down, tried not to let himself think about how damn slow he was now.

It was taking too long.

The sun flared overhead and dipped down, and still he kept up his pace, pushing past the tightness in his chest and the stiffness in his thighs, kept going. It'd take him all afternoon to get there, so he'd be approaching the caves in the dark, which wasn't ideal.

But this was the fastest he dared.

He scrambled to a halt when he heard footsteps, the call of men, and he darted his head around, searching for signs of them.

There. Just over the horizon line.

Fuck.

It was flat grassland from here to eternity.

Castle dipped low and sank into the waist high grass off the track, slunk back farther as he dragged his pack after him. He felt a twinge in his knee and ignored it, crawled on his belly away from the dirt path.

He held his breath and kept his head down as the soldiers passed in lazy formation. Another patrol, probably hadn't seen any action this far from the facility. Probably weren't looking for signs of a covert agent either.

He waited a good ten minutes and then he rose silently to his feet and stared after them.

Meant they hadn't seen signs of Beckett either, if they weren't on alert.

Was he going the right way at all?


Castle was breathing hard now, the run of cave entrances right in front of him, the scent of cold in his nostrils as night fell. He had maybe a hundred yards before he was there and he felt it in his guts like flame.

He didn't want to have wasted this whole day. He didn't even know how many days she had - if she was even still - he could be thirteen days too damn late and he had no more time.

Castle hesitated when he saw the ragged line in the dirt, his breath so loud in his own ears that at first he didn't hear it.

Russians.

Fuck. He dropped to one knee and turned towards the east, hunched in the dirt right past the grass, the caves so close.

But so far.

Troop movement just past the clump of trees. It looked like an intense search - since this was an area so much closer to the point of impact. He should've known they'd be combing this region, going over it and over it.

The car had been here. It stood to reason the Russians wouldn't give up that easily.

Castle hunched his shoulders and slowly took off the pack, kept his eyes on the distant troops. The light had almost gone and the darkness was doing him favors now, covering his approach.

It went against everything in him to slink back to that field of grass on the Russian steppe, away from the caves, but he couldn't stay out in the open.

Could he?

He waited in the darkness, indecisive for once his damn life, and he couldn't. He was this close to her; he could feel it. She was there. She had to be there.

Castle reached into his pack and slid out his knife, holstered his gun at his thigh. He withdrew the blade from its sheath and kept his eyes on the Russian squad.

He counted, from this distance, about fifteen. But he could be wrong, he was seeing clumps of guys and estimating. Should their three-man scout group come upon him, he didn't want to attract attention.

He'd slit their throats and drag them into the grass. He'd fucking-

Castle growled and hunkered down a little farther, on his haunches in the dirt.

No. No, he couldn't. If Beckett was there, then he couldn't draw attention to her. He'd couldn't.

But he wasn't retreating. Hell, no.

Not doing it. She was close. A matter of yards. He wasn't going back.

Castle put the pack on his shoulders and adjusted it tighter to his back; he got low and began moving forward.

The squad had pulled out flashlights and were using them to scan the area, looking pretty serious about their search, so Castle headed for the first cave entrance. He couldn't believe they hadn't seen, didn't know how this range connected, but it was likely these guys weren't natives to the region.

Someone had to be though. Someone had to know - or would know soon. Someone. It couldn't go on like this, searching the flat lands for her, before they went back to the cave where they'd found the car and discovered the tunnels that connected between them.

He paused when the light swung his way, crouched close to the earth. He breathed slowly through his nose until he was sure they were focused elsewhere, and then he kept crawling forward.

It took nearly twenty minutes to cross the last one hundred yards, but by the time he got to the clump of runty trees near the entrance, the Russian troops had pushed farther down the ridge line.

He put his hand to the tree and gripped the bark, watching the soldiers scour the grass. His fingers scuffed at the bark and he frowned, glanced down. Ash marks against the tree trunk.

He crouched down and pressed his fingers to the dirt at the base of the tree, felt the sticky residue. Something had been burned here.

By someone.

Castle cast one last look through the darkness towards the Russians moving away from him and then he darted for the cave entrance, going in blind and by memory alone.

When he slammed into the side of the rock wall, he grunted and dropped to his knees, skimmed his hands over it until he met no resistance.

There it was.

Damn, his shoulder ached.

Castle shuffled inside, going slowly, feeling his way until he thought he was deep enough inside that the beam of his flashlight wouldn't be seen. He flicked it on and scanned the interior and immediately, immediately, he knew she'd been here.

Vomit and blood, the shine of one of his military issue knives. And the carcass of an animal.

She'd been here. But he didn't know if she'd survived it.