High-Risk Affair

by RaeAnne Thayne

  "You said he's not ready, emotionally or physically. What did you mean?" she pressed. "How was he injured?"

  It suddenly seemed vitally important that she know.

  The man sighed, his blue eyes dark and murky. After a moment's hesitation, as if he were trying to make up his mind what to say, he leaned against the kitchen sink and spoke.

  "Two weeks ago, Cale was shot while trying to find two little girls who had been kidnapped by their father. Andy Decker was mentally ill and had a history of violence toward the girls and their mother, so there was some urgency in trying to find them. We were all running around like crazy, following different leads. Cale discovered Decker had years ago stayed at a remote cabin in the mountains west of the Salt Lake Valley. It was a slim lead, but he decided to check it out and he walked into a nightmare."

  "The man was there?"

  "Right. As he approached, he heard gunfire. He iden-tified himself and ordered the shooter to put down his weapon, but Decker was out of control. He came out shooting. Cale took a hit in the shoulder and had no choice but to return fire, only to discover after he had, uh, subdued the suspect that he had tracked Decker down about a minute too late to save either of the girls."

  "How old were they?" Her chest ached for him, for

  the pain and guilt she knew he must live with.

  "Six and four." McKinnon cleared his throat. "It wasn't agood scene. The worst was that Cale was completely on his own for far too long. Like I said, this was a remote location and it took about fifteen or twenty minutes after he called it in for help to get there. By the time other officers arrived on the scene, Cale was barely conscious from the loss of blood, but he was still desperately trying to resuscitate both girls. To no avail, I'm afraid."

  She tried to catch her cry of distress, but some of it escaped.

  Agent McKinnon sighed. "I shouldn't have told you. He won't be happy about it. Cale is one of my closest friends but he's also an intensely private person. He doesn't share pieces of himself very easily."

  And yet he had told her about his sister the night before, about his father and his anger and the years he had spent in foster care. She sensed he didn't share that with many people and she wondered again why he had chosen to tell her.

  "I'm glad I know."

  So many things made a terrible kind of sense now, like the bleak, haunted look in his eyes and the careful way he moved sometimes. He had been shot only a few weeks ago, had survived a terrible ordeal, yet here he was crawling and climbing and squeezing through impossibly tight spaces to find her son.

  She pressed trembling lingers to her chest, to the ache spreading there. How could she have ever though him hard and unfeeling, toughened by his job?

  "He assured me over and over he was ready to be back on the job," Agent McKinnon continued. "When I got the call about Cameron and realized the urgency here in finding him, I decided to overlook my own misgivings. There's no other man in the entire agency I would want on board when it comes to finding missing children. But I have to admit, I'm wondering now if he needed another week or two of recovery time. I certainly never expected him to be the point man in an underground rescue effort."

  She didn't know what to say, how to ever thank these men for trying to find her son.

  She couldn't honestly tell McKinnon she was sorry Caleb had returned to duty in time to work this case. It was completely selfish of her, but she couldn't regret his presence, especially through the long, terrible night. He had sustained her through those dark hours, and she wasn't completely sure she would have made it through without him.

  The conditions inside the mine must be full of hazards she couldn't begin to imagine. As an experienced climber and caver, Cale had to have known what he would face. He had gone inside anyway, even with a half-healed gunshot wound. All for a child he had never met.

  She was humbled and deeply, deeply moved.

  It sucked to feel so close but still so desperately far away.

  After two hours underground, Cale knew they were on the right track. They had to be. He had found undeniable evidence someone had been this way recently, and he would bet his life it was Cameron. Besides the evidence of more small shoeprints in the dirt, they found a couple of granola bar wrappers, a discarded battery, and occasional chalk marks on the walls that seemed to grow increasingly wobbly.

  Working in five two-person teams, the cave rescue units from across the state had spread out throughout the vast labyrinth, each exploring a different shaft to its end point.

  Cale knew and liked his partner, Ben Lucero, a paramedic with the Salt Lake County search and rescue unit. They had worked together on some Homeland Security Iraining exercises, and he found the man smart, fast and completely trustworthy on the other end of a rope.

  Together they had cleared and marked three tunnels that ended blindly before they found this one that had obvious signs someone had been here recently. This was the most encouraging sign any of the teams had encountered but it was long, exhausting work, especially when he couldn't shake the conviction time was running out.

  Now they were at an intersection, trying to look for evidence that would indicate which direction Cameron might have taken.

  "I don't see anything obvious. I say we go left," Cale said.

  Lucero agreed. "How the hell deep is this mine? We could be here for weeks."

  "We won't be. We're close. I can feel it."

  "This kid doesn't even have double digits to his age. How did he make it this far on his own?"

  "He's a tough little monkey." Cale paused to take a drink from his water bottle, ignoring the pain in his shoulder as he lifted it to his mouth.

  Still, he was aware of Lucero watching him carefully. "You doing okay?" the other man asked for about the nine hundredth time.

  "Ask me that again and I'm shoving this water bottle down your throat," he growled. "I'm fine."

  Lucero laughed, unoffended by his threat. "Just doing my job. I promised McKinnon I'd keep an eye on you in here. Make sure you don't overdo it."

  "You girls don't have anything better to talk about?"

  "What's more interesting to talk about than an FBI agent throwing his career away while he tries to save the world?"

  Not the world. Just one kid.

  "I'm not throwing away anything. I'm doing my job."

  "I understand you disobeyed a direct order by staying in here."

  He sighed. As predicted, the acting special agent in charge hadn't been thrilled to learn about Cale's direct involvement in the search. Curtis had ordered him out immediately. That had been about two hours ago.

  "Didn't McKinnon tell you when he was giving you the babysitting instructions? This is off the clock. I'm not acting in an official capacity here, I'm strictly a volunteer searcher."

  Lucero laughed. "Good luck with that one. Let me know if your boss buys it."

  Cale didn't care about the acting SAC throwing a temper tantrum. He might get a censure on his record but Moyer, his real boss, wouldn't let him be fired over this, not with his record and years of service to the Bureau.

  What the hell did a censure matter? The only thing he cared about right now was finding Cameron Vance.

  The earth suddenly rumbled around them, another hiccup like the ones they'd been experiencing for the last two hours; up ahead about fifteen feet, dirt and nicks tumbled down.

  Both of them crouched, covering their heads, until the rumbling stopped.

  "Shit. That was clpse," Lucero exclaimed. "We're all betting our damn lives in here with these rotting timbers."

  "Shut up," Cale snapped.

  "Come on. You know as well as I do that these abandoned mines are nothing but unstable death traps."

  "Shut up," he repeated, more urgently this time.

  To his relief, something in his intensity got through to the other man. He drew his mouth closed, and they both listened closely. Cale thought at first he was imag-ining things. Then, above the sound of rocks and dirt settling, he
heard it again.

  A tiny moan.

  He knew sounds could be deceiving underground, but he thought it was coming from somewhere past the rockfall.

  "Cameron?" he called. He waited for a response as his cry echoed through the tunnel, but all he heard was another small moan.

  "This way," he said. They both took off fast, climbing through the unstable rock pile and throwing big stones out of the way so they could get through. On the other side, the tunnel widened so they could stand shoulder to shoulder. The combined force of their headlamps picked up a slight movement and a flash of reflected light. Cale heard another moan.

  They moved forward, half running. After another five feet, they saw him, a tiny, battered form curled up on the ground under a reflective survival blanket.

  He experienced a wild burst of relief and gratitude, so powerful it made him sway.

  "Cameron? Hey, bud, we're here to help you."

  He and Lucero knelt down, pulling away the blanket, but the relief didn't last long.

  "He's seizing." Lucero stated the obvious. The boy's limbs jerked in convulsive movements and his head twitched to one side. His eyes were open, but the pupils barely reacted to the glare of their headlamps.

  "Can you stop it?"

  "I don't know. I've got Diastat in my bag, but—"

  Before Lucero could finish the thought, the shaft rumbled again and more rocks tumbled down in the direction they had come.

  Both he and Lucero bent their bodies over Cameron's to protect the convulsing boy.

  "We've got to get out now," Cale yelled. "This whole damn tunnel is coming down."

  "Right," Lucero said grimly.

  More rocks and dirt showered down, and he was afraid they would all be trapped. When the shower of earth stopped, Cale picked up the boy, trying fiercely not to think about the last time he had held a young, fragile life in his hands, and how disastrously that had ended.

  "Go on ahead. I'll bring the boy."

  "No way. We're a team. I'm not leaving you."

  He didn't waste time arguing, he just headed back the way they had come, his shoulder pulling at even so slight a burden. They ran hard as the tunnel continued lo shake, just like the child in his arms.

  They had just reached the T-bone intersection when (he entire tunnel where Cameron had been lying collapsed behind them, sending dust and debris flying in every direction.

  Lucero gasped out a choked curse. "Man, that was close. Five more minutes and this place would have been a tomb for all three of us."

  "Come on. Let's get out of here."

  He had to admit he was grateful to have Lucero leading the way to help through the tight spots and move larger rocks out of his path as they hurried toward a more stable section of the mine.

  "I think we're okay to stop here," Cale finally said. It was only about six or seven minutes after they had found Cameron, but it seemed like an eternity. He laid the boy carefully on the ground, pillowing his head with his own fleece jacket.

  "He's in bad shape," Lucero said grimly, reaching into his pack full of first aid supplies to treat the boy. "Who knows how long he's been seizing? No doubt he's dehydrated and possibly hypothermia."

  But he was alive. Cale knew that would have to be enough. They had him and he was alive.

  While the paramedic worked quickly to try to stop the seizure, Cale finally picked up the field telephone to report, hoping the wires hadn't been damaged beyond repair by the cave-in.

  "We've got the boy," he told the voice on the other end of the line after he had identified their team.

  He heard an exultant cry go out from those who must have been in the room, and his throat felt tight imagining how Megan would react when she heard the news. "He's breathing but unconscious and needs medical attention immediately."

  "Do you want a litter?"

  "There's no time to wait for a team to bring one. We'll start bringing him out, and they can meet us on the way. Have a medical team and an ambulance standing by."

  The journey out of the labyrinth would forever live in his memory as some of the most desperate moments of his life. Cameron still didn't respond to either him or Ben, though the boy appeared to have stopped convulsing. At least the terrible shudders were no longer racking his body, though Cam seemed frail and insubstantial in his arms.

  They were still some way from the entrance when they encountered the incoming team with the litter.

  Only after Cale had lowered the boy into it and relinquished his care to the other rescuers did he realize that every muscle in his body ached and that his shoulder throbbed as if somebody had shoved a frigging branding iron through it.

  He didn't care. Cameron Vance was alive, and right now that was the only thing that mattered.

  Megan sat in her kitchen, her hands folded tightly in her lap, and waited and wailed and waited. She felt as if she had been sitting here forever, that her skin and bones had fused with the chair.

  Cale had been in the mine for nearly three hours, and she didn't know how much more of this agony she could endure. She also wasn't sure which was more difficult—the endless night of uncertainty when she had no idea where her son might be, or this, knowing where Cameron probably was but being forced to wait here while others looked for him.

  It didn't help that now she worried about two people—her son and an FBI agent she hadn't even known forty-eight hours earlier.

  She couldn't seem to stop thinking about Cale Davis and his wounded eyes and his fierce determination to find her son.

  She might be able to endure this endless vigil if only someone would tell her something—anything. But be-tween the search and rescue operation for Cameron and the investigation into the drug lab and the dead body found in the mine, all the law enforcement personnel seemed far too busy to remember she was there.

  She supposed she would rather have them all ignore her, if it meant they were focusing all their energies on finding her son.

  Suddenly, her cell phone rang. Her nerves were so frayed that she jumped and nearly fell out of her chair. With trembling hands, she picked it up, then flipped it open when she recognized Molly's number.

  "Hello?"

  "What's going on up there? Have they found him?" Molly sounded as tense and as worried as Megan. "Scott's listening to the scanner, and he said they just called for an ambulance."

  An ambulance! Megan jumped up and hurried to the kitchen window, as if she could see anything from here up on the mountainside. "I don't know. No one has said."

  The words were barely out of her mouth before Gage McKinnon hurried into the room.

  His expression was closed but she immediately picked up something different about him, a strange, tense energy vibrating off of him.

  She drew in a shaky breath, not daring to acknowl-edge the bright, wild wings of hope flapping inside her.

  "What's happened?" she asked him urgently.

  "You need to come with.me."

  She heard Molly's sharp gasp in her ear but couldn't focus on anything but Agent McKinnon's hard blue eyes. "Did they find my son?"

  He nodded, his features carefully impassive. "The conditions in there are very unstable. Cameron was almost caught in a cave-in, but Cale and his search partner were able to extract him just before the tunnel collapsed completely. They're bringing him out now."

  "Oh, praise God. Praise God," Molly sobbed in her ear as Megan swayed and gripped the edge of the counter.

  "How is he?"

  "I have to be honest, at last report his condition was very guarded. He was seizing when Cale and his partner found him. They had to get him to a safe place before they could administer meds to stop the seizure. That's all I know at this point."

  She rushed for the door without any conscious idea of her actions, driven only by the need to see her son, to touch his face, to hold him close and feel him breathe.

  "I'll take you up, Mrs. Vance. I've got an ATV standing by."

  She nodded and let Cale's partner lead the way.
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  Chapter 11

  Cale had learned early in his time with the FBI—long before then, really, during his tense, miserable childhood—how to bury his emotions deep down, so far down he sometimes forgot they were there.

  He couldn't do that on this case, no matter how hard he tried. As he carried the back end of the litter holding Cameron Vance out, a storm of emotions seemed to pour through him, and he didn't know quite how to sort them out.

  There was definite relief they had found the boy, gratitude they had been in the right place at the right time to rescue him just before the chamber collapsed.

  Coupled with that relief was a deep fear for the boy's health since Cameron still hadn't regained consciousness—though he seemed to have stopped convulsing and his breathing was stable.

  Those were enough to contend with. But somehow finding Cameron seemed to have weathered away the flimsy barrier he had constructed around his psyche to keep what had happened two weeks earlier from consum-ing him. The two events had somehow come to mesh in his mind and he found himself reliving in gruesome detail those horrible moments after shooting Andy Decker, when he had stumbled into that cabin and found the girls.

  He tried to block those images out, the long moments of trying to resuscitate the girls, but they seemed to come faster and faster.

  The only way he could keep it together was to focus on the job at hand, on the tricky process of moving one boot in front of the other through the dark, uneven terrain and keeping the litter stabilized as they maneuvered through the labyrinth.

  "One more left turn in about twenty feet, and then the entrance should be straight ahead," the rescuer in the lead said.

  "You sure you don't want me to take over?" Lucero asked Cale.

  "I've got it," he said. "You just keep doing your medic thing."

  He had to see this through to the end. Cameron had come to mean far more to him than a case and he wanted to be there when the boy emerged from the hole into the sunlight, even if he was unconscious and didn't know the difference.

  "How's he doing?" one of the other rescuers asked Lucero.