A Cross to Kill

by Andrew Huff

  “Oops,” Cross said. “My fault.” He held up both hands as the officer rocked backward and his gun hand twitched. “Easy, cowboy. I’ll get it.” Cross took his time shifting in his chair, then kneeling against the table and ducking his torso under it to retrieve the can. Keeping the table as a shield between him and the officer, he shook the soda for good measure.

  He sat up and regained the officer’s watchful eye. With a thumb positioned against the tab of the can, he opened his free hand and asked, “Did you bring me the aspirin I asked for?”

  The officer’s neck muscles relaxed, and he reached for his jacket pocket. Cross maintained eye contact, as did the officer, and held his limbs and fingers frozen in place. The officer didn’t know it, but he was playing the old schoolyard game of chicken. Instead of bicycles, like he did in elementary school, Cross played this game with his eyes.

  He’d won every time in school.

  The man’s pupils shifted ever so slightly to his pocket as he slipped his fingers into it for the aspirin. Cross flicked the tab of the soda can with his thumb and pressed a finger against the pressurized stream of liquid as it exploded forth.

  The cola gushed against the officer’s nose and splashed into his eyes. He pulled his handgun from the holster and wiped at his eyes with his other hand. Cross kicked the table into the man’s midsection. The officer doubled over. Grabbing him by the jacket collar, Cross pulled him forward over the table and threw him into a heap on the floor.

  The man let go of the handgun, and it slid to a stop against a wall behind him. He scrambled for it on his hands and knees, but right as his fingers grazed against the grip, Cross lifted him up from behind and slammed him into the wall.

  Cross relaxed his hold on the man to give him a false opening. True to his training, the officer swung an elbow in reverse. Cross ducked and let the man spin onto his back. The officer pushed himself off the wall and prepared for a counterstrike.

  He threw his punch quick and hard, a sure hit against any other match, but Cross parried effectively and sent his own punch into the man’s nasal cavity with enough force to fracture bone. The officer’s head rocked backward and collided with the wall. His eyes crossed, his knees buckled, and he fell to the floor as consciousness slipped away.

  Cross slowed his breathing and froze his muscles. He watched the door for the reinforcements descending on him to avenge their fallen comrade, but the room remained silent.

  Satisfied with no additional visitors, Cross dragged the officer’s body flat against the floor and patted it down. He pulled the officer’s security card from a pocket and studied the man’s identification.

  “Sorry about this, Officer Hardy. But I’m going to need your clothes.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CROSS EXITED THE building with relative ease thanks to the generous donation of Officer Hardy’s black suit and security card. Vacant hallways and unlocked doors greeted him. He spotted a handful of soldiers patrolling the grounds of the Farm, but Cross prided himself in his convincing dramatic portrayal of a Company man sent on a purposeful errand. He kept his distance to minimize visibility of the dull blood and soda stains on the jacket.

  The charade worked to a degree, but Cross knew an impasse waited around a corner. His escape from the building might as well have been an afternoon stroll through a park, but the real challenge was leaving the grounds. The CIA took great pains to ensure the Farm was impenetrable from the outside, and even greater pains to make it difficult for its occupants to escape their tortuous training from the inside.

  Difficult, but not impossible.

  During his tenure at the Farm, Cross and his fellow new recruits heard legends of three different escape routes to the outside world. He wondered if the CIA handlers overseeing the compound left a few deliberate holes to further test a recruit’s acumen at circumventing imprisonment.

  Cross himself never bothered looking for the mythical tunnels, or whatever new method each escape story proposed. Not for fear of capture and subsequent cruelty, but mere lack of interest.

  As he marched across an open field, keeping an eye on a squad of soldiers to his left, he wished he had. He tried recalling any story that seemed valid, any memory that would give him an edge in his escape. He couldn’t just walk out the front gate.

  He needed a vehicle.

  Soldiers on his left stood between him and several SUVs. A tree line on his right hid thick walls capped by barbed wire. Another grouping of buildings ahead formed a concrete fortification against the bank of the York River.

  The menacing blackness of the approaching storm stretched low above him, thin arms of clouds reaching forward to the horizon. A rumble of thunder in the distance was answered by the sharp wail of an alarm crying out from behind Cross.

  Officer Hardy must be awake.

  The riverside buildings would have to do. Cross maintained his pace, though he imagined his back was seconds from becoming a sniper’s target practice.

  I hope they aim for the knees.

  The yelling from behind overtook the noise from the alarm. He kept his eyes glued to the nearest door. Twenty yards and closing. Tires tearing through dirt joined the cacophony of sirens and shouts.

  Cross froze within an arm’s length of the door handle and paused to glance back at the facility. Across the field, a half-naked Officer Hardy stood huffing and puffing. Simpson and Guin flanked him on either side. Soldiers and SUVs spread out in all directions.

  Guin surveyed the compound, and Cross kept his eyes trained until they met hers. He expected a flash of anger, but instead her eyebrows drooped. Hardy spotted him at the same moment and shouted as he pointed toward Cross’s position. Soldiers and SUVs spun in their tracks and rushed the building.

  Cross grabbed for the door handle, but it pulled away from him as the door opened on its own. An older man in overalls started backward as he cried, “Hey, what’s going on?”

  Cross shook his head and frowned. Pulling Hardy’s handgun from his waistband, Cross forced the older man into the building and shut the door behind them. “Don’t do anything stupid and you won’t get hurt,” he said. “I’m only looking for a way out.”

  “Good luck, pal,” said the old man, more annoyed now than surprised. “This is Camp Perry. You can’t get out unless they let you out.”

  Cross glanced around the open warehouse structure and considered his options. Several enclosed docks floated in water covering half the floor. A mechanized door made up the entire wall of the building, trapped river water lapping at its base in a futile effort to be released back into the river channel. Rigid-hulled inflatable boats used by military police rocked in silence at the docks, three in total.

  “This’ll do,” Cross said and motioned to the wide garage door with an elbow. “I’m gonna need you to open that door, friend.”

  The old man complied in a calm, somewhat affable manner. With the flip of a heavy switch, gears cranked and forced rusty chains to lift the door up out of the water. Cross kept the handgun trained on the old man as he stepped into one of the inflatable boats and turned the key dangling in the ignition.

  Backing the boat away from the dock, Cross grinned at the old man before tossing him the handgun. With his mouth agape and forehead wrinkled in the center, the old man caught the gun and pointed it Cross’s direction. “What kind of a fool are you?” he bellowed.

  Without waiting for a reply, the old man squeezed the trigger. The gun clicked, but not a single bullet fired. His expression turned sour as he turned the handle over his grip and glared at the empty magazine well.

  As the boat puttered under the door, Cross winked back at the man and replied, “The worst kind.” He spun the wheel, and the boat groaned in protest as it twisted in the shallow water.

  From behind him, Cross heard the door explode, then combat boots smacking against the concrete slab. He jammed the accelerator forward, and the boat lurched. As it sliced through the water and out into the open, Cross looked over his shoulder t
o see a squad of military police taking aim.

  Lightning cracked overhead as fingers depressed triggers and a hailstorm of bullets smashed into the stern. Cross squatted to avoid the gunfire, though the MPs aimed aft in an effort to disable the craft.

  The distance between the boat and the covered dock expanded at a rapid rate until he was too far down the river for the rifles to be effective. The shooting stopped, punctuated by yet another web of lightning snaking its way from one storm cloud to another.

  Granted a reprieve from danger, Cross stood and gained his bearings. Camp Perry sat on the west bank of the York River, his back to the south. If he kept his nose pointed ahead, it’d take him north toward the river’s mouth and the Atlantic Ocean. Cross cycled through the stored map system in his mind and accessed what he knew about the area.

  A cold chill iced the blood in his veins. Sure, he’d survived the frying pan. But pushing speeds of over sixty-five knots per hour meant it was less than ten minutes to the fire awaiting him near Yorktown. The navy, coast guard, Virginia Marine Police, you name it, shared access to the sea right there. Simpson could make a single phone call and have all three barricading Cross from the open waters.

  Let him. Cross’s plan didn’t require him to flee that far from Richmond. From Christine. He planned to get a safe distance from Camp Perry, find an obscure riverbank, and ditch the boat.

  Cross relaxed his shoulders and leaned against the wheel of the boat to catch his breath. As an exemplary officer, he’d never experienced life on the opposite side of authority. He could recognize the sensation of experiencing beauty or the anxiety of executing a precisely planned mission. This, however, was a new feeling to him. The very organization that had assigned him targets was now targeting him.

  His heart beat so fast he could feel the thump in his toes. The wind whipped against his hair, beating him lower and lower beneath the ineffective glass windshield.

  It lashed at him from the left, then the right, then swirled in all directions. His toes thumped harder. He slapped a palm against his chest to try to still the beating.

  His heart tapped back at him in a regular rhythm. The clouds obscuring the glare of the late-afternoon sun morphed into wicked shapes. Disoriented, he froze his grip on the steering wheel to keep from veering off course.

  A clap startled him, and he turned as a burst of light spread its web-like fingers through the clouds.

  He gasped.

  Against the gray sky rose two black amorphous shapes held aloft by knives slicing long, thin circles above. Cross stared at the noiseless monstrosities, their reality foreign to him. They grew larger and larger, howling in his ear.

  No, the wind. The wind howled in his ear. The sun disappeared beneath a storm cloud, the sky turned black, and Cross’s stupefaction came crashing around him as the two shapes came into focus and he recognized the distinct outline of stealth Black Hawk helicopters.

  They descended as they inched closer to him, the noise of their rotators finally distinguishable above the thunderstorm. Both Black Hawks ignited blinding lights spotting the inflatable boat in a shiny white circle of illumination. Cross struggled to maintain eye contact with each copter’s position without going blind.

  “Attention, civilian. Cease operation of your water vehicle immediately,” echoed the loudspeaker down the channel. “If you do not comply, there will be consequences.”

  Cross thought he might fire a quick quip back but decided it would be lost within the cyclone of wind descending from above. He gripped the steering wheel and jammed the accelerator as hard forward as it would go, and then some. The boat groaned in protest, then acquiesced and provided a few more knots of speed.

  He slipped away from the condemnation of the spotlight before the pilots could react. They increased air speed. Cross drove the boat erratically across the channel, dodging the incessant search of the lights.

  The two beams split from following each other, and each Black Hawk swept the surface of the river in an attempt to keep up with Cross’s evasive maneuvers. He veered to the left and let one of the lights reflect off the rigid hull of the boat before cutting a sharp right and disappearing into the darkness once more.

  He breathed easy. Though the pilot of the lead Hawk mentioned consequences, those did not appear to include the use of force.

  The black silhouette of one helicopter buzzed over him at a precariously low altitude. Cross surmised they intended to intimidate him into surrender. The lead Hawk broke off to his left as the other made a similar approach downriver.

  He plotted their trajectories in his mind and deduced an impending window of time in which he would be in both their blind spots. He had seconds, and would only get seconds. His brain clear, he trusted his calculation to provide him the chance he needed. If he stayed in open water, it would only be a matter of time before they goaded him into the expected blockade near Yorktown.

  A narrow branch of the river disappeared beneath a dark tree line just ahead on the right. Cross let the boat get carried in a natural drift by the storm-charged river system until the nose of the stern pointed at his escape path.

  The second Black Hawk passed overhead with the barest hum, and with its underbelly only feet above his head, he jerked the helm. The inflatable boat agreed to his command and sliced waves into the small waterway.

  Cross kept the engine gunning as he held the wheel in his firm grip and guided the craft down the passage and around obstacles nature provided. He couldn’t be sure if the two pilots witnessed his escape. Without the typical advanced warning of thunderous rotator blades, the Black Hawks could descend upon him and he wouldn’t know it until they wanted him to.

  He caught sight of a large grouping of trees with thick branches providing a canopy over the water. Aiming the boat for the base of the trees, he braced himself for impact.

  The vehicle’s hull smashed into exposed branches and lodged itself into the riverbank. Uninterested in the damage done to either boat or tree, Cross vaulted out of the craft and burrowed himself into the underbrush.

  He refused to breathe, resolved on transmitting his body’s resources into his auditory senses. He listened, searching. Either the light would pierce the trees and give chase, or the pilots would be disoriented and have to conduct a more thorough search.

  Seconds, then minutes, passed. In the distance, Cross caught the reflection of a searchlight pass behind the trees against the river’s edge. A clean getaway. Butch Cassidy would be proud.

  He jumped to his feet and ran farther into the forest with only one objective in focus: find Christine.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  WHERE WAS SHE?

  Her consciousness had returned to its normal state minutes ago, but Christine still struggled to trust her senses. The space wasn’t cold, though she felt a tinge of cold on the side of her body pressed against a hard surface. Her brain interpreted the sensation and concluded she was lying on a dark, cold floor.

  Her senses sharpened further. Everything was unfamiliar, though everything amounted to only a hint of four dark walls surrounding the floor and capped by a dark ceiling. And as far as she could tell, her body was the room’s sole furnishing.

  She retraced the events leading to her capture and remembered awakening for a brief moment in what she assumed was the back seat of a car. Someone had slipped a warm material over her nose and caused her to return to a peaceful slumber, the memory passing as mere shadow.

  Christine wondered when the panic would set in. She recalled its grip around her heart for the initial time period of her capture in Jordan. Was a second kidnapping supposed to be easy? She imagined John in a fight to win her back just outside the room. Perhaps that abated the crippling anxiety she expected.

  Or maybe she was resigned to a fate involving abduction, torture, and eventual execution. In Jordan, she’d decided it was her destiny. It may not have come then, but you could only outrun your destiny for so long.

  She pushed all the justifications from her min
d. None of them would do. Only one thing remained—the reason fear took a back seat to patience and trust: her conversation with Lori. And not the entire conversation. Over and over in her mind, Christine listened to Lori’s voice describing the story of the Bible.

  Not a story of the Bible. The story of the Bible. A summary of the entire work that contained one simple thread. A thread leading to the man named Jesus, a name Christine had heard countless times as a child but never paused to consider.

  The logical simplicity of Lori’s words surprised her. No one spoke about the Bible the way Lori did, at least no one Christine knew. And it sparked something in her. An undeniable, wonderful spark. Be it simple curiosity or something beyond the natural order of the world, her fixation on Lori’s discourse filled her heart with peace despite her circumstances.

  Whatever lay beyond the four walls of her prison, she believed in the certainty of her survival. And when she survived, she would return to the hospital and ask Lori to tell her more.

  A metal clank alerted her to the suggestion of movement at the facing wall. Feeling in full control of her limbs, she pulled herself into a seated position and dragged her rear across the slick floor until her back contacted the nearest barrier. Thick ridges in the wall prevented her from relaxing against it.

  Far on the opposite side, the metal wall inched its way open with anguishing screeches against itself. The bright glow of the sun pierced the air from the top of the room to its bottom. Christine raised a hand to shield her eyes from its burn.

  A dark blob appeared within the expanding glow and grew in size as it wobbled toward her. The blob slowly took the form of a man carrying a chair in his right hand. She strained her eyes to try to identify him, but only one distinguishing feature stood out: her abductor wore a stylish hat.

  Christine’s eyes adjusted to the new environment, and distracted from the man’s approach, she studied her makeshift jail. Ridges bore deep vertical lines in all four walls. The lines ran parallel to each other spaced ten or so inches apart. Flat metal sheets covered the ceiling and floor.