Rising Spirit

by Wayne Stinnett

  We were expecting our second child when I received orders to report to the battalion landing team of the newly reformed 1st Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment—the Walking Dead. I was with the BLT’s recon platoon, where I felt most at home. Late that spring, we received orders for a WestPac—a West Pacific cruise. Looking back, that was probably the lynch pin of our breakup.

  WestPacs were typically six-month deployments aboard naval warships, and I wasn’t there when Kim was born.

  Just weeks after returning to Camp Lejeune, I was transferred to the newly formed Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Team. FAST Marines were highly trained individuals, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice to protect Navy and Marine Corps assets from terrorist attacks anywhere in the world. That was just before Thanksgiving in 1989.

  Just days before Christmas and a week before Eve’s sixth birthday, my team was ordered to Panama. No planning, no discussion, no phone calls, just grab your gear and go. Sandy didn’t even know I was gone until the next day. By then, we’d already been inserted and my squad had made first contact with enemy forces. From there it quickly deteriorated into a waiting game for Noriega.

  When I got home, the house was empty. I found out from neighbors that Sandy had packed up and left on Christmas Day. I felt lost and lived on autopilot, pouring my soul into the job. That summer, I was promoted to Gunnery Sergeant, eleven years and three days after first stepping on the yellow footprints at Parris Island. It was to be my last promotion.

  I’d only talked to Sandy a few times since then. Her father had hired a hot-shot lawyer from Raleigh and in my absence had managed to get her full custody and a restraining order; hard to overturn in North Carolina. I tried.

  After refueling the plane in St. Augustine and again in Wilmington, I started my overland leg up to Shenandoah Regional Airport, with the sun falling away to the west. Looking off to the northeast, my eyes followed the sweep of coastline and I could just make out Onslow Bay and Cape Lookout, where Sandy and I had spent many weekends.

  The rest of the flight was uneventful, and I landed at Shenandoah Regional just as the sun slipped below the hills. On approach, I saw what looked like a flying boat parked on the grass just off one of the private aprons north of the runway. I got another glimpse as I taxied toward the fixed base operator.

  It was a Grumman Goose with U.S. Air Force markings. Probably owned by a collector. I would have loved to have one of those old flying boats one day. Unlike Island Hopper with her big Wipline floats, a flying boat was just that; the fuselage was a boat hull and the wheels retracted into the sides for water landings. They had small floats on the wingtips to keep the wings out of the water, but they floated on their hull-shaped fuselage.

  At his desk in his home office, Aiden Pritchard was just finishing a brief for a case in which he would be representing the Commonwealth of Virginia over the coming weeks. It was a slam dunk as far as Pritchard was concerned; the forensic evidence was overwhelming and indisputable.

  As he reached for the desk lamp to turn it off, his phone rang and he picked up the receiver. “Assistant Attorney Pritchard.”

  “It’s Lou,” a man said on the other end. “We have a problem.”

  Pritchard sat back in his chair and glanced at the open door. He could hear the TV in the family room and his wife rattling around in the kitchen, preparing dinner. “Is it concerning what I think it is?”

  “Yeah,” Sheriff Louis Taliaferro replied. “The judge is breathing down my neck wanting results. He wants to know where the witness disappeared to.”

  “I know, Lou. He’s giving me a hard time, as well.”

  “You need to do something, talk to them.”

  “I will,” Pritchard said. “I already called Luke. He’s getting the others together for a meeting after dinner.”

  “Good,” the sheriff said. “We don’t need that kind of problem.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Lou. See you tomorrow at brunch.”

  “Maybe we can swing some clubs afterward?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Pritchard replied, grinning. “See you then.”

  After dinner, Pritchard told his wife he had to meet someone in town and would be back by ten, then headed out to his new pickup in the driveway.

  The drive was a short one, but it wasn’t into town. Instead, he turned onto a dirt road that led up into the mountains west of his property. He found the spot halfway up and parked next to Luke’s pickup. Jeb’s truck was there, also, but not Stuart’s.

  He’d better have ridden with one of the other two, Pritchard thought, stepping out into the darkness.

  He reached behind the seat, took a long, black flashlight from a pouch and switched it on before striding toward the trail head. The meeting place he used with these men was easy to find. But the lights of anyone who came up the mountain would be visible to them and they’d hear another vehicle for miles.

  After a hundred yards through the woods on the worn path, he could see the light of the small fire. The two men sitting on logs around the well-used fire pit rose as Pritchard approached them.

  “It’s me,” he called out to his two nearest neighbors.

  The flickering light of the small flames played across the men’s faces and cast dancing shadows around the campsite as all three sat down.

  The two men Aiden had come to meet were older than him by a couple of decades, with gray stubble on their chins. They had been friends of his father. Though dressed in appropriate attire for a wilderness camp—jeans, flannel, and a light jacket against the promise of the fall’s first frost—Aiden was clean-shaven, with a recent haircut. His demeanor exuded authority.

  “You know why I called you up here,” Aiden said.

  “Yeah,” one of the men admitted, poking at the fire with a stick. “Look, Aiden, I didn’t know Stuart was gonna shoot the guy. You gotta believe that. We was just gonna rough ’em up and let ’em know they wasn’t welcome ’round these parts.”

  “Water under the bridge,” Aiden said. “We can’t go back and change that now.” Secretly, Aiden didn’t care that Stuart had shot the tree-hugger. As far as he was concerned, Stuart and Jeb should have found the woman and killed her, also. The two strangers had come for one thing only; to stir up trouble.

  Again, water under the bridge, Aiden thought.

  Aidan Pritchard looked at the two older men, fixing them with penetrating, dark eyes. “I don’t need to remind you that we have a lot on the line here. We don’t need a bunch of environmental activists sending DEQ up into the hills to inspect your fencing.”

  Pritchard, though only thirty-six years old, was one of the wealthiest and largest landowners in the Shenandoah Valley. As an attorney and officer of the court, he was very familiar with the comings and goings of agents who worked for Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality. But what concerned him more was what those agents might stumble upon if they lost their way on the slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains and ended up on his property.

  “We know that, Aidan,” the first man said. “We sided with your pa long before you were born. But you know how Stuart can be sometimes.”

  “He’s your cousin, Jeb,” the other man said, turning to his old friend. “You was there. You shoulda never let that boy carry a gun.”

  “I got no control over him,” Jeb fired back. “Hell, Luke, he used to be married to your niece. You know damned well nobody tells Stuart what to do.” Jeb poked at the fire with the stick and muttered, “Boy’s nuts ya ask me.”

  “Why isn’t he here?” Pritchard asked. “He’s late.”

  “He was making a run down to Lynchburg,” Jeb replied. “A hundred gallons at a good price. Won’t be back till near midnight.”

  Pritchard stared at Jeb until the older man looked up. “So, where is the woman now?”

  “Miami,” Jeb replied, still stirring the embers. “Staying with kin.” He tos
sed another log on the fire, sending sparks flying up into the night air. He looked up at Aiden. “Stuart’s a bit hotheaded sometimes, but the Army trained him with computers and stuff real good, and he’s a smart boy. Said the bitch left a paper trail a blind man could follow.”

  “Judge Whitaker is pissed,” Pritchard said. “He’s been all over Sheriff Taliaferro to get to the bottom of this and he’s leaning on my office, too. Lou’s one of us, but he can’t stall the new judge forever.”

  Aiden pronounced the sheriff’s last name Tolliver, though it was spelled completely differently. It was a common name in central Virginia, going back to pre-Revolutionary War days, and the pronunciation had become more Americanized over the ensuing two-and-a-half centuries. Pritchard’s own family had settled the valley in the early 1700s, as had the two older men’s ancestors. Nearly everyone in the valley was related through marriage or birth if you looked back far enough. Those that weren’t were newcomers to the valley.

  “Does Stuart know where in Miami the Sneed woman is staying?”

  “Yeah,” Jeb replied. “He knows. She musta hid out here for a coupla weeks, then flew out of Shenandoah Regional, headed straight to Miami.”

  “What should we do?” Luke asked.

  Pritchard’s eyes moved from one man to another. “Finish the job.”

  Jeb swallowed hard. “You mean…”

  “When Stuart gets here,” Pritchard said, rising, and brushing the back of his jeans, “tell him to pack. He’s going to Florida in the morning.”

  Chyrel had arranged a rental for me, a green Ford four-wheel-drive pickup. I didn’t have anything to haul—it would just be less conspicuous where I was going than the typical rental sedan.

  There was a bite in the air as I exited my plane. I’d dressed for the woods and brought a jacket, knowing it would be considerably cooler in central Virginia than in the Keys. Just a few years ago, I didn’t even own a jacket. But Armstrong Research sometimes sent me places where one was needed.

  After refueling Island Hopper and tying her down, I gathered my gear and carried it to the private fixed base operator’s building. There, I received the keys to the pickup from a pretty twenty-something FBO agent and headed outside.

  I stowed my gear in the small backseat of the extended cab pickup and climbed into the driver’s seat. The truck was nice, but I doubted it would have the off-road capability of The Beast, my ancient-on-the-outside International Travelall. But it was equipped with a navigation system.

  On my phone, I pulled up the addresses that Chyrel thought Sandy’s threatening email had come from. I punched the information into the GPS and the mechanical voice told me to proceed to the route and the guidance would start.

  Before leaving, I called Sara to let her know that I’d arrived okay and was going to be checking into a local motel soon, but she didn’t answer. Not unusual. She never carried her personal cell phone with her when she was on the bridge, and Ambrosia was probably miles out to sea by now. So, I left a message and told her I’d call again before I left Virginia.

  I knew I wasn’t going to be able to just walk up to a farmhouse and ask the owner for their ISP address or if they’d sent a threatening email to my ex. I’d have to snoop around the three farms and see if I could figure it out.

  The GPS told me the first address I’d entered was thirty-five miles away, straight down I-81 and north of Staunton. I left the airport and was quickly headed south on the interstate.

  Less than an hour later, I was driving west out of Staunton on Virginia Highway 254 toward Buffalo Gap. It was a two-lane blacktop that passed houses, farms, and fields, but little else. Turning southwest on another state highway, the GPS told me that my first waypoint was half a mile ahead on the left. With no other vehicles on the road, I slowed as I approached the first address.

  There was a heavy gate across the entrance, barbed wire extending from it in both directions, and a cattle guard below the gate. A cattle guard was nothing more than a trench with a wide grate made of pipes across it to support vehicles. Cattle wouldn’t walk on it, so it served as a barrier to keep them in when the real gate was left open.

  There was only a number on the mailbox. I debated checking the box to see if I could get anything from an envelope, but at this late hour, I was sure they’d collected any mail. I already had the names of the landowners, anyway. Chyrel had given me a brief report on each one. None had much of a recent criminal background, save a few traffic citations and a bar fight or two, and one was a lawyer. She said she’d dig deeper and would send me an update.

  Far down the track, I could see buildings, a couple with lights on, but I couldn’t tell if they were barns or homes. All three addresses were on this same road, so I started watching mailboxes for the next one.

  Ahead, a car turned out of a sideroad on the right, going the same direction I was. I slowed to let it get farther ahead, as I continued to look for the next mailbox.

  When I got to the second address, it was where the car had pulled out of, so I decided to follow the car. Again, the entrance was gated, with barbed wire fencing and a cattle guard. This one appeared a bit more upscale, with a sign over the gate that said, “Pritchard’s Ramble” and fresh paint on the gate itself.

  Aiden Pritchard was one of the names on the list, a lawyer and wealthy landowner who worked in the prosecutor’s office.

  The vehicle ahead turned out to be a pickup, though I didn’t get close enough to determine what make it was. I let it get half a mile ahead, in case the driver got nervous. After two miles, the brake lights came on and the pickup turned off the road to the right. As I got closer, I could tell it was a dirt road by the glow of the truck’s tail lights in a rising plume of dust.

  Slowing, I reached back and grabbed my tactical backpack and set it on the front passenger seat. Then I pulled out my night-vision goggles, turned them on, and perched them on my forehead. When I reached the spot where the other truck had turned off the main road, I doused the headlights and pulled the night optics down over my face.

  This road wasn’t gated, so I figured it was a public road, but I didn’t want to take any chances. The taillights of the other truck glowed in the gray-green light of the night optics, subduing my visibility when I looked toward it, as it adjusted to the brighter light. I lowered my head, so that the lights wouldn’t interfere, and the optics adjusted again, providing better visibility of the road ahead. Every now and then, I looked up to see where the truck was.

  After ten minutes, the truck’s brake lights came on and it turned to the left. When I reached the place it had turned, I found that it was just a curve in the road, deeply rutted. Ahead and higher up, I saw the truck turning back to the right; a switchback. A quick glance at the GPS told me that the road zig-zagged up the side of a mountain.

  Steep mountains would be impossible to drive straight up, so roads are often built to follow the contour of the land, rising less steeply along the flank and turning back in the opposite direction to continue the climb.

  I followed the truck at a safe distance for the next thirty minutes, until it pulled off the road. The reverse lights flashed as the driver put it in park, then the inside light came on.

  Finding a safe place, I slowed and idled off the road, using the parking brake to stop, so no light would come on. I put the Ford in neutral, mashing down hard on the parking brake. Before I opened the door, I made sure the inside lights were in the off position.

  Exiting the pickup with my tactical pack, I quickly shouldered it. My Sig Sauer P229 was holstered under my shirt, behind my back. I moved quickly up the hill toward the truck, not really knowing what I’d find or who.

  When I reached the other vehicle, it was parked with two more pickups. The one I’d followed was a newer model Dodge Ram, but the other two were at least ten years old and showed a lot of wear; work trucks or farm trucks.

  Approaching cautiously, I didn�
��t see anyone or any movement. I scanned the area slowly. There was a faint glow coming through the trees and I occasionally saw a light bouncing and swinging from side to side.

  I felt the hoods of the other two trucks, they were both warm. All three had just arrived. Moving as quietly as possible, I followed a foot path that didn’t get a lot of use. As I got nearer, I recognized the glow as a campfire. The guy with the flashlight was moving toward the fire and I could hear voices.

  I moved off the foot path, making my way quietly through the dense woods and rocky terrain. The trees were mostly hardwoods—oaks, maples, and sycamores—but as I started up out of a dry creek bottom, there were occasional stands of pines, which I recognized as hickory pines. I tried to keep close to them as I made my way toward the fire, flanking the guy with the flashlight. The dense cover of sound-dampening needles and lack of undergrowth allowed me to get ahead of him. It was still slow going, and as I neared the fire, I moved quickly and silently from tree to tree.

  The man I’d followed approached two other guys, who were sitting around a small fire, the light from which would mean the three wouldn’t be able to see more than ten feet beyond its soft glow, as they subconsciously stared into the flames. I moved to a position behind a deadfall, where I could peer under the trunk and see all three men quite clearly from just fifty or so feet away.

  The two men saw the flashlight approaching and stood. I hunkered down to see what happened next. Men didn’t meet in the middle of the night in the woods to discuss the weather.

  When I got to a hotel on the outskirts of Staunton at 2300, I was still digesting all that I’d heard up on the mountain. I checked in and got a room with a patio that had a southern exposure; I needed to talk to Deuce on the sat-phone. Before I could get it out of my pack, my encrypted Armstrong cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my pack instead and answered it.

  “Hey,” a voice said. “It’s DJ.”

  “DJ Martin?”