Fear drove him past the kitchen island to the slice of light at the far door. He stopped at a two-step landing into the garage, hoping to God, Meredith was still there. He’d found four stalls. One limited edition Bugatti Veyron. A bright red Shelby Mustang. A black Hummer. One empty stall. But not one damned clue as to where Meredith was.
Hunter dragged his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, not like that helped. He had no bars. Packing enough adrenaline-laced frustration to give him a heart attack, he backtracked through the home, searching for a landline to contact Alex. There wasn’t one. No wonder Meredith hadn’t answered his calls.
Back in his car, Hunter left Welch’s mansion in the dust. He pushed the SUV, squealing its tires around corners as he approached the interstate. More acid pinched his gut. It was damned odd that Eddy Welch didn’t have any kind of phone coverage at such a plush estate. He was rich enough.
Hunter’s cell phone rang. Tucking it to his shoulder, he snapped, “Talk to me.”
“Where have you been?” Mother snapped back at him. “I’ve been trying to reach you for nearly an hour!”
There wasn’t time for lengthy explanations. “I was at Welch’s. Meredith’s not there. Where should I be?”
“You mean to tell me Welch doesn’t have cell service?”
“I don’t have time for this, Mother. Tell me where he is.” Where Meredith is.
With a huff, she settled down. “Hook onto I-95 the first chance you get. Go north toward Baltimore. That’s the direction Welch is headed right now.”
Hunter floored the gas pedal, daring Maryland’s finest to pull him over. The interstate on ramp was just ahead. “Don’t lose track of him.”
“Not happening,” she promised. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I know more. Of all the nerve, no phone service…”
Hunter disconnected in the middle of her rant. He could barely catch a decent breath knowing Meredith’s ex was behind everything that had happened in Brazil. He cursed traffic and road construction, but mostly, he cursed himself for jumping to the wrong conclusion years ago.
He was cruising through Baltimore when Mother rang again. “He just turned onto Maryland 543, south. It looks like he’s going to Aberdeen Proving Ground. Listen to this. Ember’s been digging through every property and business Welch owns. Two and a half years ago, he took over Barclay Enterprises, a private company that detoxifies federal landfills and contaminated wells. The Army contracted them to detox and manage prolonged containment of all the wells on Aberdeen. You’re closing in on him. He’s only got a half-hour lead.”
Hunter hung up. Aberdeen was a sprawling facility of more than one hundred square miles. It might as well have been the moon.
CHAPTER FORTY
Meredith peered through heavy eyelids at the blur of gray light outside her window. It was raining. Maybe.
Eddy kept talking about weather and sailing. He’d covered her with a blanket, only she wasn’t cold. If anything she was burning from the flame in her gut. The alcohol had done its best to render her unconscious, but she’d fought blacking out.
“Courtney,” she breathed. “Where’s... Courtney?”
No answer came back to her. Only a sickening buzz in her head and stomach. Her door opened, nearly dropping her to the ground. Some guy pushed her upright. Oh. Eddy. She chuckled to herself, sure she was losing her mind. Eddy always did pop up in the most unlikely places.
He knelt at her side and patted her cheek like she was an imbecile. “Come on now. Wake up. You can do this. There you go.”
Eddy had three heads and four faces. They kept bobbing back and forth until she closed her eyes to make it stop. Pink elephants couldn’t have convinced her any better. She was way over the legal limit.
But not yet. She had to save Courtney.
Eddy pulled her bare feet to the side and onto the gravel shoulder, but when she tilted forward to get to her feet, he pushed her back. “You don’t need to get out. You just need to see.”
She blinked the fuzziness away, trying to focus. “W-what you sayin’?”
“I said sit. Stay. Watch. Enjoy the show if you can. It’ll be fun, you’ll see.” He flicked her chin with a snap of his index finger. “Hell, you might even learn something today.”
“’Kay,” she mumbled. Sounded easy enough.
Something thumped from way back in the car. A little boy screamed, “Mama!”
Meredith snapped out of the dead zone she’d slipped into. Courtney!
He screamed again, his voice ragged with terror.
“Courtney! I’m here. I’m coming!” Lurching out the door, she landed face-first on the gravel, bound hand and foot. Sharp edges cut her cheek and chin as the world turned into a tilt-a-whirl, but she didn’t care. She had to move. To run!
“Give him to... to… me,” she ordered. “Don’t h-h-urt him!”
Eddy didn’t answer, just shouldered Courtney and marched into the short grass, growing smaller and smaller until he stopped a hundred miles away. She watched through tears, fighting delirium. Crouching to one knee, he lifted a very large gray dish, then dropped it to its side. Maybe a satellite dish? She couldn’t tell. Nothing made sense.
The gravel under her nose smelled sweet and damp with rain and tears.
“Courtney!” she called to her baby.
“Mama!” he got one last ear-piercing scream off, but then—he was gone.
She couldn’t see Eddy for a moment, but then he popped up out of the ground like a rabbit. A very ugly, mean rabbit. With four ears.
“It looks like Welch has parked.”
“Where?”
Mother sent the coordinates inside Aberdeen. “The guards at the gate won’t give you any trouble. Alex already greased the skids, but listen. Aberdeen has multiple contaminated areas. Be careful. Welch’s car is at one of them.”
“Copy that,” Hunter said.
Aberdeen Proving Ground. Not good. The Army facility, infamously known for producing tons of mustard gas and other toxic gases during World War I, was now home to extensive tracts of contaminated land, water, and buildings, not to mention significant amounts of buried ordnance. The Environmental Protection Agency listed APG as the most serious uncontrolled hazardous waste site in the country. What was Welch up to?
At the gate, two armed soldiers stopped Hunter, but after he explained who he was, they waved him through. Barely mid-morning, the day was sunny and pleasantly warm, a nice shift from the intense heat of the jungle. A light shower spattered his windows while worry radiated down his leg and into the accelerator. Hunter stepped on the gas. It didn’t matter. By the time Hunter made it to the designated coordinates, he’d missed rescuing Meredith again.
“Fuck!” Welch’s car was gone.
Scrambling to his feet, Hunter glared at the vacant fields stretched out on both sides of this gravel road. He walked a quick circle around his SUV, then expanded it by twenty feet. Then forty. At sixty, he cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed, “Meredith! Can you hear me?”
Nothing but the breeze whispering through the grass came back to him. Pissed, he widened his search. Welch hadn’t come all this way for nothing.
Out of nowhere, a whimper had just sounded. Hunter stilled like a mannequin. Within minutes, another soft cry drifted to him from the east.
He cocked his head to hear better. The breeze also carried the salty odor of the nearby Chesapeake to his nose. A jet engine sounded high overhead. The partly clouding sky let loose another smattering of raindrops, but Hunter tuned everything out, striving to hear that one particular sound again, that child-like whimper of distress.
“Talk to me,” he whispered to it—or her. “Say it again, Merry. I’m here. Help me find you.”
Another wisp of a cry, and Hunter’s thigh muscles bunched as he exploded off the balls of his feet and ran. He saw it in the distance then, some kind of a concrete cap setting askance at the lip of a metal ring the size of a rusted Hula-Hoop sticking out of the ground. The yellow sign above t
he ring declared: Danger. Ground Water Radiation Site. No Entry.
Hunter pulled up short of the well and peered over the edge. He hadn’t found Meredith, but there in the bottom of the twenty-foot deep, concrete-lined hole, was a very young boy. Curled in a fetal position with his knees tight to his chest, he cried.
Hunter’s heart melted. “Courtney?”
The child lifted to his knees, but there was no way he was Meredith’s son. This little guy had sad almond-shaped eyes. “My name is Bradley,” he said, his face shiny wet and barely visible down there in the dark. “Are you with... him?”
“Am I with who?” Hunter asked, his mind back at the twenty-foot tow strap in the rear of his SUV. It might be long enough to reach this frightened boy. There was still time to find Meredith.
“With M-Master?”
“I don’t know who Master is,” Hunter explained gently, “but I’m getting you out of this hole. I’ll be right back.” He stopped his big mouth from automatically saying, ‘wait here.’
Hunter knew what to look for now. On his run back to the SUV, he noted five more yellow danger signs in the immediate vicinity. He called Mother, his temper up. “Get Aberdeen’s installation commander on the line.”
“Why?” she asked softly.
“Because Welch’s a flaming bastard!” Hunter snapped, but damn! People who hurt children were the lowest of the low.
If Welch was Master, and Hunter knew damned well he was...
If he’d put that little boy in the ground like a piece of meat…
If he’d committed the despicable act Hunter suspected…
Son-of-a-bitch! Hunter kicked the grassy stubble underfoot, as angry as he’d ever been.
“Mother,” he ground out, fighting for control as he scanned the grassy field. “There’s a kid in a contaminated well out here. I can see five more wells from where I’m standing, all of ’em uncapped, but there might be more. If Welch’s done this, if he’s stashed kids in each of these wells… Shit!”
This kind of brutality brought back every emotion Hunter had suppressed through all the deployments, firefights, and battles in far off countries. It was no wonder his heart now needed three stents to keep him alive. It was the only tender part left of him, and this kind of depravity—this!—was killing it.
“I need all base MPs and ambulances and, hell. I need everyone out here, Mother. This is so bad.”
“They’re on their way, Hunt, but is Meredith there?”
“I don’t know.” He glanced over his shoulder, hoping she was but thinking of that desperate boy asking if he was with Master. Had Eddy brought other men with him when he’d visited that poor little guy? Exactly how long had he been in that well? “I need the whole damned Army, and I need ’em now.”
“They’re on their way,” she promised before the phone went dead in his hand.
He jerked open the tailgate of his SUV and was back at the first well within minutes, the sturdy tow strap over his shoulder. But he didn’t dare move the child. He couldn’t save him. Not yet. As much as he wanted to help poor Bradley, evidence of this horrendous crime scene needed to be preserved or Welch would never get what he deserved—at least not in a court of law.
Hunter peered over the edge at the awful pit where a child waited. “Bradley,” he said as evenly as he could manage. “When was Master here last?”
“Today,” the boy said, his neck craned upward and his bare feet shifting back and forth. “But he didn’t want to play. Can I go home? Please, mister. Can you take me home? Please... please don’t leave me down here.”
The hysteria billowing up from the well from that little guy stopped Hunter cold. Play? Was that what this poor kid had been forced to believe abduction and assault was called? Was that what Welch had told him?
The poor kid stood on concrete that glistened, which meant there was water in the hole. Dressed only in what looked like a simple white T-shirt and swimming shorts, he clutched his arms. And he was thin. He had to be on the verge of hypothermia. Maybe starvation. Hunter didn’t want to imagine what else. “Bradley, I’m not leaving you, buddy, but I need you to be brave for me while I check the other wells. There might be more kids here. I’ll hurry. Can you do that for me?”
“There... there are more wells? More kids? Like me?”
The boy was crying, and damn. Hunter brushed his bicep over his face. “Yes, and I need to help them, too. Be brave, Bradley, just a little longer, because I’m not leaving without you. The police are coming. Will you trust me?”
“Y-yes,” the terrified little guy replied. “I can be brave, but please don’t… don’t forget to come back. Okay?”
“I promise. I’ll be right back.” Hunter blinked as he stepped away. What kind of monster could do this?
He flew from one hole to the next. In each, a frightened, skinny young boy looked up at him with the bleakest, saddest eyes. Finally, well number five yielded his first clue as to Meredith: a small pair of clean little boy jeans off to the side. They looked the right size for a three-year-old. Maybe Courtney and Meredith were down in this well.
Hope unfurled in his chest until Hunter peered over the edge. Only a little blond-haired boy stood at the bottom looking up. He had to be Courtney.
“Hey, little guy.” Hunter spoke softly so he didn’t scare him. “Are you ready to get out of there and go home?”
All of the other boys had been quiet, but his little guy stamped his feet and shrieked, “I want my mama! He’s hurtin’ her!”
“It’s okay. I’m here to take you home. Are you Courtney Flynn?”
“I not telling you nuthin’! I want Mama!”
By then, the MP’s mobile-command unit was on scene, along with scores of soldiers ready to assist. Dog handlers and their K-9s commenced canvassing the area while rescuers were lowered into the wells.
Hunter waved a pair of first responders over to him. “Here! I’m going after this one!” In no time, he was geared up and anxious. It’d been a while since he’d rappelled. Backing over the lip of the well, he began his descent. “Courtney, I’m coming down. Make room for me okay?”
The frightened boy drew back against the opposite wall. Wearing only cotton briefs and socks, his hands clenched open and closed at his sides as Hunter made a quick descent.
When he touched down into the five-inch deep puddle, Hunter coiled the rope and took better stock of the boy’s condition. Courtney’s upper lip was swollen and bloody. An obvious handprint blazed high on his left cheek, and his chest heaved. “Stay ’way!” he shrilled, stamping his stocking feet in the water. “Stay ’way! Don’t touch me!”
Hunter crouched where he landed and extended a gloved hand. “It’s cold down here. Come on. Let’s go.”
In his scant playbook on childcare, that should’ve been enough to entice the kid to come forward, but Courtney hunkered into the opposite wall, his left shoulder jutting between them. The poor little guy shivered, too scared to move.
Hunter backed up as far as he could, but kept one hand extended. “I know who you are, son. You’re Courtney Flynn. I’m Hunter Christian, your mother’s friend, and I’m here to take you home. Let’s go.”
The child whined, his lower lip quivering but his feet firmly planted. “But I want Mama.”
“And your mama wants you,” Hunter said softly, his heart breaking for the little guy.
Courtney’s nose was red and running as his slender throat worked a tremendous swallow. “You know Mister Seff?”
“You mean Seth?” Hunter asked, not sure where that came from “Yes, I know Seth. He’s a good friend and I work with him. He’s your mama’s friend too.”
“He gived me money.” More tears streamed down the little guy’s cheeks and that brave chin quivered. “But I lost it.”
Hunter choked back the need to gather him into his arms. “It’s okay. Seth’s a real good guy. He’ll understand, Courtney. Heck, he’s probably got more where that money came from. Should we go find him, too?”
&
nbsp; “And I lost Bear,” Courtney squeaked, but why the little guy wouldn’t take his hand concerned Hunter.
He dropped to one knee, wanting to be whatever this scared little boy needed in order to trust an adult male again. Cold water rippled across the six-foot gap between them, lapping up the poor boy’s ankles and chilling Hunter’s leg. So be it. The guys holding the strap and hoist topside would understand. “Who’s Bear? Do we need to find him, too?”
Courtney’s head bobbed. “Uh-huh. Pweeze.”
“It sounds like you and me got some work to do, tough guy.” Hunter opened his palm and curled his fingers.
“I ain’t tough,” Courtney whispered, his head shaking. “I just widdle.”
Hunter coughed, fighting tears, damn it. “No, Courtney. You might be little, but you’re the toughest man I’ve met in a long time, and I’m going to need your help to find your mother and Bear.”
Just that fast, Courtney barreled into him. Clinging to his neck, he climbed up into Hunter’s lap, his wet feet in Hunter’s lap and his nose in the hollow of Hunter’s throat. “He hurted me, and he hurted Mama, and he’s scary.”
The feel of that little body wrenched with sobs shredded every heartstring Hunter had left. He dared place a hand to the boy’s back, cradling his head with the other. Courtney was so cold.
“Mama’s lost,” the tyke breathed a shuddering breath.
“Does she have Bear?”
Courtney hiccupped. “Nah-uh. My mean daddy took him.”
Hunter wrapped his big arms around the tiny little guy, content to just sit there until Courtney was warm. “That mean guy’s not your daddy,” he explained gently. “Daddies don’t hurt their children. They take extra special care of them and their mamas.”
The saddest blue eyes scrolled up to meet his gaze. “And Bear?”
Hunter’s breath caught. No doubt about it. This was Meredith’s son. He had her same blue eyes. “Absolutely. Hang on. Let’s get out of here.”
Hunter signaled the guys topside. Not once did Courtney whine on the way up. He didn’t let go either, and that was fine.
Hunter (In the Company of Snipers Book 14) Page 34