Daddy to the Rescue

by Susan Kearney

  Don’t get lost. Mark your trail. Abby is counting on you to come back.

  Sara fought her way to the dead tree she’d found earlier. With her boot, she cracked small branches from the trunk and set them in a pile. She made four trips with her arms full of branches and then made three more, rolling and dragging the thicker pieces that were too heavy to carry.

  This might be her only chance to gather wood. The storm might last another forty-eight hours. When she couldn’t take another step, she stopped gathering wood.

  Exhausted and freezing, she finally crawled back into the snow fort. In the darkness, she couldn’t see Abby’s coloring, but the baby’s breathing sounded steady. Sara dragged in her collected branches, leaving the bigger stuff outside but within reach.

  The moment to test her fire-making ability had arrived. But it was now pitch-dark. She dried her hands on the inside of her shirt, and held the wires to the battery with the free ends over the diaper stuffing by feel rather than using her sight. Then she crossed the wires.

  “Spark, damn it. Give me a spark.”

  Chapter Four

  With a heavy heart, Kirk watched the weather system blanket Colorado. In blizzard-like conditions, their ex-military chopper pilot, Jack Donovan, agreed, with a cocky nod, to fly them to base camp—but Logan okayed the mission only because lives were at stake. Kirk’s respect for Logan Kincaid rose several notches when he insisted on riding along and endangering his own life. Clearly, Logan didn’t just sit behind his desk. He took a hands-on approach to his business.

  “This is my operation,” Logan told him with one of those level looks that probably made subordinates immediately cease all arguments.

  “Look, I appreciate the help,” Kirk shouted into the wind, as the three men and Pepper ran toward the chopper at the Denver airport, “but you needn’t risk your life, too.”

  “I’m going.”

  Since Logan had made all the arrangements, Kirk couldn’t exactly kick the man off the mission. They took their seats, and Jack got immediate clearance from the tower to take off. “Strap in. Ride’s going to be bumpy.” He sounded cheerful, as if he looked forward to the challenge.

  Logan and Kirk strapped in, then Logan dialed and spoke into his cell phone. “Have we got her location yet?”

  Kirk held his breath, trying to read Logan’s expression. The man didn’t give away much. Probably out of habit. But the answer to his question was critical. The Rocky Mountains covered a vast area. Without knowing exactly where to look, he might take weeks to find Sara and their baby. Even if the FAA narrowed down the crash area to one square mile, if Sara and the child were buried by snow, finding them could take days. And they had only hours.

  Logan snapped his phone shut. “We have an eyewitness who pegged the crash site.”

  Some good news for a change. “Did he see the plane go down? Was there an explosion?”

  “Apparently, the plane struck an outcropping of rock. Debris shot two clouds of dust into the air.”

  “Two?”

  “Experts have told me this indicates that the plane probably broke into two pieces on impact. Hence, two dust clouds. Satellites would have picked up any explosion. None was reported.”

  “How close can you get me to the site?” Kirk asked.

  “About a third of the way up the mountain. The plane crashed below the timberline, close to the peak. The air’s too thin to fly the chopper and land above the site. And below is a steep grade covered by trees. The only areas devoid of trees aren’t suitable landing sites—either too steep or strewn with boulders.”

  “What about dropping Pepper and me down from a rope? The dog has a harness.”

  “We couldn’t even attempt it tonight. Too much wind.” Logan must have sensed that Kirk was about to argue and placed a calming hand on his shoulder. “Look, we want her found as soon as possible, too. But you won’t do her a lick of good if you go in and bash your brain into a tree.”

  As if to emphasize the strength of the blizzard outside, the chopper hit an air pocket and then a gust of wind lifted them. Jack muttered, fighting to keep the craft level. Kirk scratched Pepper behind the ears, proud that she took the roller-coaster ride like a pro.

  Kirk considered climbing the mountain from base camp, but the storm was so intense that he couldn’t see out two feet past the chopper’s window. He marveled that Jack could wrestle the chopper into flying at all. Sara had picked one helluva night to spend on a mountain. He prayed she wasn’t injured—knew she would use that super-smart brain of hers to save herself and the baby if she could. She had a way of coming up with brilliant solutions to problems that other people didn’t so much as understand, never mind solve. Back in college she not only had excelled as a student, but had overcome many of her high school insecurities.

  They’d been dating for two years when he decided to enter the military, and she’d supported him fully. She’d had only one condition.

  “Marry me, Kirk.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Now, why didn’t I think of that?”

  She scowled at him but her tone teased. “Because you believe I’m not strong enough to keep loving you while you’re gone?”

  That wasn’t his concern and she knew it. He didn’t think it was fair for a woman to tie herself to a man who wasn’t home very often.

  “As long as I can hook into the Internet, I can work anywhere.” She trailed her hand down one arm. “Say yes.” And then she pulled the trump card. “I need you, Kirk. I need a family….”

  Her grandmother had died during her junior year. The woman who had lived so frugally had left her granddaughter a car and a house with no mortgage. But she’d also left Sara with an emptiness in her heart.

  How could Kirk say no? He loved Sara. And in this day and age, he told himself, a man didn’t have to choose between a military career and a wife.

  He’d bought her a pearl engagement ring, the kind she thought pretty. Diamonds are cold, she told him. Pearls glow with warmth.

  Between graduation and their marriage plans, they’d been busy and happy. That summer when he’d left her for boot camp, she’d been fine. And she’d gone with him when he’d been stationed in Panama.

  She couldn’t go with him to Yugoslavia or the Middle East, and that’s when she started pressing him about starting a family. He kept putting her off. Her work was at a critical stage. She worked sixty to seventy hours a week. She didn’t have time to take care of a baby, and he wasn’t home.

  But the debate over whether to start a family hadn’t been the reason their marriage fell apart. She had been working so hard to drive her worries out of her mind. Worries about him.

  Working with his dog to sniff out bombs was dangerous. He’d had several injuries, a few close calls. And she’d worried over his safety to the point where she made herself sick. She lost weight, didn’t sleep, claimed she had nightmares about losing him—and had begged him to quit. Come home. Live with her and make a baby.

  He’d refused. And she had divorced him. For a while he’d felt as though she’d sliced off his right arm. Eventually, the wound grew numb—but it had never healed.

  Then, two days after he’d sent Abby the signed divorce papers, his partner and friend Gabby had died. A bomb had exploded in the building he was searching. With the passage of time and Kirk’s success in tracking down the terrorists that had killed his best friend, his grief over Gabby’s death had eased. And working with a new partner and on a new mission, he’d expected life to return to normal.

  But his divorce had haunted him. Without Sara at home waiting for him, the joy had gone out of his life. He no longer took pleasure in the adventure of his job, no longer took satisfaction in his successes. Without Sara, his life seemed meaningless. And that’s when he knew that she had been right. It was time to quit. He’d had to just finish his hitch, which had taken almost another year.

  He had made his decision too late, it turned out. He’d already lost Sara. He’d tried to phone, but she hadn’
t taken his calls. He’d left messages that she never answered. And he finally got her message. She didn’t want to talk to him, to see him.

  And now he knew she’d gone and had the baby without him. He couldn’t believe she’d never told him. There wasn’t a duplicitous bone in Sara’s body. He’d sooner believe that she’d gotten so wrapped up in her work that she’d simply forgotten to tell him. But not even Sara was that absentminded.

  Nevertheless, the question ate away at him like acid. Why hadn’t she told him that he had a daughter?

  “IF ONLY YOUR DAD could see us now.” Sara’s voice came to Kirk so clearly and loudly that it woke him from his dream.

  Kirk sat up with a start and took his bearings. The skilled chopper pilot had safely landed them at base camp in the middle of a blizzard. Even in the protected valley, the fierce winds had made last night’s landing hazardous, but Jack had whistled through his teeth and set them down with only a minor thud. They’d had to fight their way to the tents that stood protected in the lee of a cliff.

  Kirk had eaten a self-heating meal that the army used for rations, he’d fed Pepper, and then he’d settled into his down sleeping bag for the night. Despite the long day, despite his need to sleep so he could get an early start if the storm broke, he had tossed and turned.

  And dreamed of Sara cuddling their baby in front of a warm fire. A sign from heaven? Or wishful thinking?

  Either way, he tried to hold on to the image. Although she’d divorced him, he liked thinking that Sara was happy and warm and safe. He’d never really understood how she’d felt during their marriage. While he may have laid his life on the line every day, she had to worry that he’d never return. Until now, he hadn’t comprehended what it felt like to have his guts tied into rigid knots with worry. Not knowing if she was alive or wounded or suffering felt like an acute stab wound to the gut, a pounding hammer on the brain. And she’d lived with that kind of intense pressure every day and night, while he’d searched for bombs, often in hostile countries.

  Every time they said goodbye, either in person, by phone, or by e-mail, she’d never known if she would hear from him again. That she’d lived with that kind of pressure for so many years only revealed her inner strength. He could no longer blame Sara for ending their marriage.

  The uncertainty of the past twenty hours had him ready to charge into the blizzard. Sara had gotten lost in her work to escape worrying about him. And that she’d loved her computer did little to ease his mind—especially when that very same work might be the reason she was up on that mountain.

  Kirk cracked his knuckles and barely refrained from howling at the storm. Pepper, sensitive as always to his moods, thrust her muzzle into his palm. Absently, he scratched behind her ears. Her soft woof warned him that someone approached.

  “Over here,” Kirk shouted, knowing the wind would muffle his words but hoping to lead whoever was out there to the shelter of his tent with as few missteps as possible.

  A minute later, Logan entered the tent, handed him a mug of coffee, then zipped the tent behind him. “Figured you might be up.”

  “Appreciate the coffee.” Kirk sipped, settled onto his cot and gestured toward the only chair.

  Pepper curled on her blanket at the foot of his cot. Calm and quiet, she was excellent about accepting people and had been trained to obey commands from other handlers. But there was a special bond between them that came from working together over a period of time. She would stay down on the cot until he signaled her by hand or voice that it was okay to move. Right now, she needed to rest. Their journey probably wouldn’t be long, but he suspected it would prove arduous.

  “Any break in the weather?” Kirk asked Logan.

  “Maybe in the next hour.”

  “I’m good to go.” Kirk took out a sweater of Sara’s that Logan had given him. She’d kept it wrapped in one of those clear plastic bags that gets thrown into the back of a closet and forgotten. He let Pepper take a few good sniffs. “Pepper’s the best search dog I’ve ever worked with. Since we already have a very good idea where the plane went down, Pepper should have little trouble picking up the scent. And…”

  “And you want to be the one who finds her?” Logan asked with a perceptiveness that made Kirk very glad this man wasn’t an enemy.

  “I’d like to be the one to find her, yes. Handlers are a tough breed. We have to keep up, running and swimming beside our dogs for hours, but climbing snow-covered mountains is beyond the abilities of all but the most experienced of us.”

  “Why?”

  “I may have to climb bare rock with just my hands and feet. Then I’ve got to have the strength to haul my dog up, too. We usually don’t carry much gear, but in these conditions, I’ll need to carry extra supplies. A blanket for Pepper so she has a warm place to rest. Food for her. A radio. Emergency first aid equipment.”

  “And a gun.”

  Kirk snapped his head up. He wished in the dim light of the oil lamp that he could see Logan’s face better. “You think that if Sara survived, whoever made her plane go down might try again?”

  “It’s only a possibility. But I like to go in prepared for every contingency.”

  “I don’t want to pack more than the absolute essentials.”

  “Agreed. Once you find the crash site, the chopper may be able to air-drop whatever you need.”

  If the weather cooperated.

  Neither man stated the obvious. That Sara and the baby might have died in the crash. That Kirk might be risking his life in a futile mission. However, if there was the slimmest chance that she was still alive, he had to go. And if she hadn’t made it, he wanted her death to count for something meaningful. If Sara’s face-recognition software could make their country safe by keeping out terrorists, Kirk, with Logan’s help, would see that the right people got it.

  Logan removed a satchel from his shoulder and tossed it onto the cot. “Things you might need.”

  The handgun was on top. Kirk removed the gun from an underarm holster, checked the load and the safety. “Extra ammo?”

  “Clipped to the back strap of the holster.”

  Kirk reached into the bag and pulled out several soft and plastic somethings. “Diapers.”

  “And powdered formula. While Sara is breast-feeding—”

  “And you know that because?”

  “One of my men accessed her medical records from her doctor’s computer.”

  Damn him. Logan had no right to invade Sara’s privacy. And yet, Kirk couldn’t fault the man. If Kirk climbed that mountain and arrived to find a hungry baby that Sara couldn’t feed, he’d be grateful for the dried formula. He merely needed to melt snow, pour the packet into the bottle and shake.

  He almost didn’t want to empty the rest of the items, but he forced himself. A sling to carry a baby. Gloves and heavy socks for Sara. A wad of cash?

  “The only thing that money is good for on that mountain is burning it for warmth.”

  “None of my men go on a mission without cash.”

  Kirk didn’t point out that he wasn’t one of Logan’s men. No doubt cash was a great contingency item—in most cases. But in the middle of the Rocky Mountains? “Look, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the gesture, but I’m already packing too much weight. And if I find them alive, I may have to carry them out.”

  “You aren’t going without the gun or the cash.”

  “Fine.” He’d sensed from the start that he’d have to do this Logan’s way or no way. He might have to take Logan’s supplies, but Kirk refrained from saying that he didn’t have to come back with either the gun or the cash.

  “There’s one other thing. I want you to maintain radio silence until you call the chopper in for a rescue or unless there’s an emergency.”

  “You really think someone is out there trying to stop us from getting to Sara?”

  Logan’s voice was grim. “I think they may try and beat you in recovering her work.”

  “How do you know they didn’t get
the information they wanted from her home?”

  “They trashed her home after the plane went down—which may indicate that they haven’t found the program. Obviously they still are searching. However, it’s also possible they simply wanted to ensure that they had accounted for every copy of her program.”

  “But you think whoever crashed her plane made a mistake? That they tried to kill Sara before they stole her work?”

  “It’s possible. And my team examined her computer’s hard drive. She wiped it clean—but if they’d found anything on it, they would have stolen it. I’m thinking they probably expected to steal the work off her hard drive at home.”

  “You’re guessing, aren’t you?”

  Logan nodded. “Guessing right is what I do best.”

  AS SOON AS THE BLIZZARD HAD SLOWED Kirk and Pepper headed out. The pressure of a real mission was different from a training run, and Pepper lost her relaxed demeanor and got down to it, bounding with eager leaps through the snow and lifting Kirk’s spirits.

  The German shepherd obviously enjoyed both her work and her strong rapport with him. And she was special. She didn’t really require a scent article, but since Logan had produced Sara’s sweater, Kirk had let her take in a good whiff. Pepper didn’t need tracks, or a starting point for her keen senses to locate Sara.

  Even the best handlers weren’t sure how the dogs tracked scent. Probably the scent carried in downward wind spirals in a widening cone shape. Pepper would zigzag back and forth until she picked up the scent, then hone in on it.

  But first they needed to climb the mountain and get closer to the crash site. Signaling Pepper to stay close, he and the dog moved as a team and at a steady pace. After an hour Kirk broke into a light sweat, but his specialized clothing wicked away moisture from his skin. Pepper wore booties to protect her feet from freezing or being cut as they climbed rough terrain and patches of ice.

  Sometimes the snow reached Kirk’s hips, other times he walked across slippery rocks, and once he took advantage of trail broken by large animals, probably deer. At first he barely noticed the additional weight of his pack, but after three hours, the straps cut into his shoulders. Kirk considered but resisted throwing away the gun and the cash that Logan had insisted he take with him. He stopped to rest and drink, giving Pepper water and a treat.