Rocco holstered his Beretta and started for his truck. “Get his ID and the car’s registration,” Rocco ordered Angel. “Call it in to Max. He said they took Mandy in a green van. Get that info to the cops and to Kit. I’m going after the van.”
“And I’m going with you,” Val said. “Toss your keys to Angel and get in. Val had it in gear even before Rocco had shut the door. They drove another few miles down the road, looking off to each side, trying to find a spot where a car might have driven off the road. A car drove by, heading in the opposite direction, a woman at the wheel. A truck passed. It was as if nothing unusual had transpired here at all. No one knew that the woman Rocco loved had been kidnapped, disappearing like smoke in the wind.
He radioed Max in the control room at Mandy’s house. “Give me some good news.”
“The State Police have several road blocks set up between Centennial and Ryan Park. They’re looking for a green van or any vehicle that looks suspicious.”
“If they’ve got the road covered, get me info on any properties that might be abandoned up here. Properties that are far enough off road as to have some privacy. Anything that sold recently and could accommodate several fighters. Something. Anything. I don’t think they are still on the road.”
“On it.”
Max radioed back a few minutes later. “There’s a property on your left less than two miles from your current 20. It was a cabin rental site that has been without an owner for the last three years. I’m sending the map to your phone.”
“Thanks. Get someone to pick up Angel. He’s holding a package for us at a rest stop. Be sure to check out that car before moving it. And keep looking for other sites in case this one doesn’t pan out.”
“Roger that. Kelan is already en route. Keep us posted.”
Rocco’s phone pinged when the message came through. He studied the map a moment, then pointed to an upcoming drive. “There’s another private drive a little farther down the road. Turn there.”
Val pulled off the road. Rocco handed him the map he had open on his phone. “Looks like the cabins are about a mile up the road,” Rocco said. “Let’s go see what we’re dealing with.” They put their phones on vibrate, then jogged as far up the drive as they could go. They moved silently into the woods, creeping up a small rise that overlooked the lodges.
Parked in front of one of the cabins, among several other cars, was a green van. They eased into position. Val settled on his stomach and arranged his rifle. Rocco snapped a picture on his cell phone and sent it to Kit. The vehicles definitely looked parked, not abandoned. As he watched, a man stepped out of one of the cabins, slung an AK-47 over his shoulder, then lit a cigarette. When he walked around the other side of the cabin, Rocco radioed Kit.
“Found the green van. Got a nest of camel spiders up here armed with AKs. Permission to use lethal force.”
“Negative. We’re not giving those bastards any virgins today. We need to question them-there’s a bigger op at play than this one. Any sign of Mandy yet?”
“Negative.”
“The FBI’s coming up from Denver. Got a bomb unit from Carson in the air. Owen and I are on our way. Hold your position until we’re in place.”
“What’s your ETA?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Roger that.” Rocco nodded to Val. They watched the site a few minutes, waiting to catch the rhythm the guard used in his patrol.
“Looks like there’s only the one guard. He makes a simple loop,” Val commented.
“I’m going in closer,” Rocco said. “I want to see where Mandy is.”
He held his position until the patrol strolled by. There were eight cabins in an L-shaped formation. All had a front and back window and door. It was hard to tell from the way the vehicles were parked which cabins might be occupied. Looking in the rear window of the first cabin, Rocco could see the space was configured in an open floor plan. The front door stood open, but no one was inside. He motioned to Val that it was empty.
He walked casually across the alley between it and the next cabin. Looking in the window, he could see the space was empty. The third cabin held five men sitting on the floor. No Mandy. He signaled the count to Val, then moved on to the fourth. The window was broken in the back. It was empty. He kept on until he moved to the next to last cabin around the bend. Three men were inside, but no Mandy.
Where the hell was she? Had the green van not been the one that had taken her? Could she still be in the van? Had they stashed her somewhere?
Rocco checked the last cabin, which was empty. He stepped back into the woods, keeping absolutely still while the guard walked between his position and the cabins. When he’d circled around in front again, Rocco went up the hill and crossed to Val.
“Any sign of her?” Val asked.
“No. I didn’t check the van, though. Maybe there were two vans. Maybe the bastard lied. They could be holding her in one of the bathrooms. The third cabin has five guys. The next to the last in that row has three. The others are all empty. I’m going to wait for Kit near the SUV.”
“When you come back, bring my bag. I’ve got plenty of zip ties in there.”
Rocco waited in the cover of a scrub pine. He wanted to rage, to storm the cabins, to kill the bastards working on al Jahni’s terror campaign. Instead, his training and his years of covert ops work kicked in like a core instinct, keeping him calm and focused.
At last, a black Expedition pulled into the drive and parked in front of Val’s SUV. Kit and Owen got out.
“What’s the situation?” Kit asked.
“A quarter of a mile up the road is a ridge that overlooks the campground and cabins.” Rocco knelt down and took up a stick to draw the layout they were working with. “Val’s there. A hundred and fifty meters below him is a line of eight cabins. This one has five tangos, that one has three. One guard patrols the circumference. The green van is here,” he marked an “x” in front of one of the cabins. “Three other vehicles are here, here, and here. No sign of Mandy, so go carefully.”
“Right. Kit will take the patrol,” Owen directed. “Then he and I will take the cabin with the three men in it. You and Val take this one. Let’s go.” They caught up to where Val was lying in wait.
“Any change?” Kit asked.
“Negative,” Val answered without looking away from his scope.
“When the guard is down, radio us,” Owen told Kit. They waited for the patrol to move around the corner before getting into position, four men moving silently as shadows down the steep slope of the ridge. The trees around them were mostly lodge pole pines, with a few aspen mixed in. Soft pine needles covered the ground, damp from the recent snowmelt. If the enemy looked at the right time, they might catch their movement, but they couldn’t be heard.
Rocco’s heart was pounding. With the man he’d caught earlier and the nine here, they’d take ten terrorists out of circulation today. One of them had to know where Mandy was.
As soon as Kit radioed he’d handled the patrol, Rocco and Val stormed their appointed cabin, Rocco coming in from the front, Val from the back. They filled the room with noise and shouts, throwing it into chaos.
“On the floor! On the floor! On the floor! Hands on your head!” Val shouted. Rocco repeated the order in Pashto and then Arabic. Two men complied, crashing to the floor with their hands over their heads. One tried to run past Val, and two turned on Rocco. Rocco slammed the butt of his rifle into the shoulder of one of the men who lunged at him, then jammed his elbow into the other man’s jaw.
“Give me a reason. One goddamned reason,” Rocco shouted at both of them. They didn’t try for him again. “Get down on the floor, hands on your heads.” In short order, they had all five men subdued. Once Val had secured them with zip ties, Rocco collected their weapons.
“Where is the woman, Mandy Fielding?” Rocco asked, watching their expressions. He switched to Pashto, then Arabic, repeating the question, all to blank, impassive faces.
“Was she
your woman?” one of the captives asked, his expression smug.
“She is my woman.”
“Perhaps, but not for long. Allah’s will is just. She will pay the price for whoring herself to an infidel.”
“What do you know of her? Where is she?”
“Beyond your reach, I would expect.”
The room fell quiet under that open threat until the metallic sound of Rocco unsheathing his knife broke the silence.
“What are you doing?” Val asked Rocco.
“I’m going to get him to tell me what he knows about Mandy. If he won’t talk to me, I’ll cut out his tongue so that he can’t talk to anyone ever again.” He looked at the row of men sitting against the wall. “And if he loses his tongue, I will start on the next, and the next. One of them knows something.”
“Huh.” Val walked to door and looked out toward the cottage where Kit and Owen were. “Better be quick about it. I doubt Kit would approve.”
Rocco pulled the man away from the line of the others. He forced him to the floor, pinning him with a hand on his throat. “Where is the woman?” The other four captives watched with pale faces and wide eyes.
“Go to hell,” the man spat.
“You first.” Rocco put a knee on the man’s abdomen and gripped his jaw in his left hand. The man clamped his teeth shut and struggled against Rocco’s attempts to get his mouth open.
“Come hold him,” he ordered Val.
Val shouldered his rifle and knelt down, pinning the man’s head between his knees. “Go for it. Just don’t cut me.”
“Stop!” one of the other men shouted. “She is not here. They took her up the hill to another building.”
Rocco sent Val a quick look. “Go,” Val told him. “I got this.”
As he reached the door, a man he’d not seen before stepped inside. He took one look at Rocco and Val, then glanced around the room. Seeing what was happening, he took off. Rocco ran after him. He got almost to the foot of the hill where a drive led up and out of sight before Rocco tackled him. He was shouting a warning-to whom, Rocco had no idea. A quick right hook silenced him.
Rocco heard someone running fast behind him. Kit was closing in on him. He left Kit to deal with the terrorist and continued up the hill, scoping out the area, watching for threats. Straight ahead was another building. An old sign hanging askew over the front door read, “Office & Mercantile.”
Rocco ran up to the entrance, then flanked the front door, straining to hear any sound inside. All was silent. He cleared the main room, then each of the smaller rooms. The building was empty of humans. Its sole occupant was a chair set in the middle of the room. Freshly severed ropes lay discarded on the floor.
Rocco kicked the chair across the room as he bellowed a curse. He took another turn through the building, trying to see if there was a basement, a closet, another space where they might have stashed Mandy, another clue as to what they might have done with her, all to no avail. The place was clean.
When he came back into the main room, Kit was finishing a call. His face was pale, his eyes bleak as he met Rocco’s gaze.
Chapter 20
“Highway Patrol reported a woman matching Mandy’s description walking east on Highway 130, not far from here,” Kit told him.
“Alone?” Rocco asked.
Kit nodded. Rocco ran down the drive to the main road. He turned right and kept jogging. Flashing lights at the crest of a distant hill told him the cops had shut down the road. He rounded a bend in the road and saw Mandy walking up ahead.
“Mandy!” he called, relieved to find her. She didn’t acknowledge him. What had happened to her? Why wasn’t she responding to him? She kept moving forward in a slow, determined stride, like a sleepwalker. She wore a shirt that was too large for her-one he didn’t recognize.
“Mandy!” He came even with her. When she didn’t acknowledge him, he caught her arm and pulled her around, revealing the thick belt of C-4 tied to her waist. He recognized that particular configuration of explosives. Kadisha had worn one just like it when she’d handed Zavi to him.
A paralyzing bolt of fear shot through Rocco. His nightmare was about to repeat. His body felt brittle as he hit his knees.
When she saw his reaction, Mandy drew a ragged breath. “I can’t stop.” She shook her head. “He said I had two hours to get back to my house.” She kept moving, but backward.
Rocco looked up at her as the distance between them slowly increased. “Who said?”
“One of the men. I don’t know his name. Asan, Asand, I don’t remember.”
“How many men were there?”
“Two.”
“Hold still.”
“I can’t. He said he’s watching the progress the belt is making. If it stops, he will detonate it. And if anyone tries to disarm it, he will detonate it.”
Rocco pushed to his feet as he glanced around them, shoving his hands into his hair. Highway 130 looked like a war zone. Cops were everywhere. Several black SUVs had parked in haphazard places across the road. The woods were crawling with soldiers and search dogs. He could hear various radio conversations. A helicopter was parked on the upward rise of one of the hills. He couldn’t tell if the bomb disposal team had arrived, but he wasn’t waiting another minute to get Mandy safe.
“Ehsan Asir is what his name is.” He walked toward Mandy. “I can disarm it.”
“No!” She turned around. “No. Don’t come near me.”
Rocco jogged to get in front of her, walking backward as she continued her relentless stride forward. He opened the edges of the man’s shirt that she wore.
She shoved him away. “Please, Rocco. Please, go. You don’t have to die, too.”
“No one’s going to die.”
A sob caught on one of Mandy’s exhalations. A tear splashed on his hand. He looked up at her.
“I love you,” she whispered, lifting her hands to cup his face. “I want you to live. I want you to find the joy that’s been denied you so far.”
Rocco clamped his mouth shut as he tried to stem the tidal wave of hatred that filled him for Ehsan Asir-the man Kadisha had been expected to marry before Rocco came into her life-the man he now knew had killed Kadisha and turned Rocco’s life into a living hell. He’d had Rocco in his sights ever since Halim had favored Rocco. The bastard needed to die a bad death.
“Look at me, Mandy.” She did, then dropped her gaze again to the belt of explosives. “Don’t look down. Look at me. Only me.” She did as he ordered. Tears were pooling in her eyes, drowning her gaze. He clamped his jaw shut, calming the rage that simmered so close to the surface.
He pulled the detonation wires from the blocks of C-4 and twisted them away from anything they might touch, then he pulled the cell phone free and pocketed it. Finally, he unbuckled the belt and set it on the wayside.
Mandy wavered on her feet. Her face had gone pale. Rocco pulled her into a tight hold as he radioed Kit. “I got her. She’s safe. They’d strapped a bomb to her. It’s Ehsan Asir. I’m going to kill the motherfucker and it will be self-defense. The belt is here on the wayside. Have someone come get it.”
He wrapped both arms around Mandy. His woman. She loved him. She loved him. She’d told him this morning, but he’d still been in a daze then. Her declaration sunk in now. He could feel her trembling in his arms. He tore the shirt Ehsan had made her wear off her, leaving her in just her tank top. He didn’t want another man’s clothing on her-especially not that bastard’s. She pressed her face against his chest. He knew he probably stunk-he’d been running in full on panic mode for hours-but he didn’t care and she didn’t seem to mind.
“I can’t believe how easy that was for you to disarm. I could have done it.” She pulled back and glared at him. “I’m an idiot. I don’t know anything! Leaving it on as I did, I could have gotten us killed.” She looked up at him. “I thought I was dying, Rocco.”
He felt her anger grow, swallowing her love, filling her with hate. He’d done this to her. Brought
darkness to her world. He had to get her out of there, had to get her back home where things could appear normal again before she lost herself to the realities of his life.
A black SUV pulled up. He opened the door and shoved her inside, then climbed in after her. Shock had made her movements sluggish. He leaned over her and fastened her seat belt, then slapped the driver’s seat. “Let’s get out of here.”
The driver turned and faced him. “As you wish,” he said in a heavily accented Middle Eastern voice. Mandy gasped.
“Yes, do take us out of here,” another man said from the third row of seats. Ehsan Asir. “But do go slowly. There is no need to call attention to ourselves.”
“What do you want, Asir?”
The terrorist smiled. “I want what you took from me. Kadisha was the light of my life. We’d planned for years to be married. Did you know that? Did she never mention me?”
“That why you killed her? Blew her whole fucking village to hell. You call that love?”
Ehsan’s face tightened, his eyes darkened as he sifted through memories. “Ghalib Halim set me aside when he saw that you had your sights on her. He wanted you. The Gray Ghost. He used Kadisha as bait to draw you in. It worked. Just like he’d said it would. He knew who you were, the whole time. You thought you were so brilliant, fooling all of us.”
“What he knew was that you were playing him, spying on him, and selling information. Of course he wasn’t going to let you marry his daughter.”
He thrust his chin at Rocco. “No it was I who fooled you. I discovered who your contacts were from my friendly askars. They told me about Mr. Bolanger and Mr. Bladen. I knew if we got to them, we’d get to you here in America. We found men here to assist us, used their greed to buy them. Our rage was righteous and our cause was just. Praise Allah.”
Rocco looked around them. They were slowly weaving among the vehicles parked all over the road. As soon as they cleared the police barricade, they’d escalate in speed. He had to act fast if he wanted to get Mandy out of the SUV.
The Edge Of Courage Page 25