by Cindy Dees
Quietly, Perriman ordered Ford to disable the engine. He lifted the engine cowl and removed a wiring harness. Good choice. The engine wouldn’t run without it, but if the SEALs wanted to render the boat operational again, the wires could be replaced quickly.
Perriman pulled out a set of infrared goggles and scanned the thick undergrowth around them. “No humans or habitations within a hundred meters. Let’s move out.”
Thank God. Bass’s need to be with Carrie and make sure she was safe was almost choking him.
“Bass, take point, but be careful. Take your time. Mick, behind him to help track. Trina and Ford, next. I’ve got the rear.”
Bass nodded, silently acknowledging the wisdom of Perriman’s warning. He scooped up his assault rifle, unlocked the safety, and headed down the boardwalk, moving with catlike stealth. No need to stomp down the thing and announce to everyone in the neighborhood that the cavalry had arrived. On elephants.
He tested each board for soundness and squeak as he put his weight on it. The SEALs behind him would step exactly where he had, ensuring silence for all. He moved swiftly, nonetheless, not liking how exposed they were silhouetted atop the boardwalk.
He was relieved to step ashore. The ground gave way spongily beneath his boot but took his weight with a faint squishing sound. He hoped this island got higher and drier soon, or they were gonna leave big ole’ footprints all over the place, announcing their presence. Of course, there would be only one set of prints since everyone would step in his boot impressions. Still. Folks in these parts were hunters, and even kids could spot and track human footprints.
Speaking of which, he moved far enough ashore that everyone could get off the dock and acclimate themselves to the mushy terrain. He stopped and pulled out a dimmed, tight beam flashlight with a green filter. It was ideal for tracking because it highlighted shapes and shadows. He flashed it in an arc in front of him. Mick touched his sleeve and pointed off to the right just as Bass spotted the tracks too. Four sets of fresh human prints, one set noticeably smaller and shallower than the others.
“There’s an oil refinery off that way about a half mile. Good-sized facility.”
“Active?” Perriman asked.
“It was abandoned a few years back. To my knowledge it’s not in operation.”
Trina murmured, “I’ll have Ops send us a schematic while we move.”
Bass moved off in the direction of the footprints while Mick hand-signaled to the rest of the team that they had a live trail.
Bass paused to look for threads that would tell him what she was wearing and what color and texture of fibers to be on the lookout for going forward. He spied a bit of cotton lint. It appeared white in his night vision goggles but could be any light color. Looked like it came from a sweatshirt. He passed the speck of lint to Mick, who examined it briefly and then nodded. They moved on. Tracking considerably slowed the team’s forward speed, but they still moved fairly quickly through the brush and trees.
Bass jolted as something slithered away from his feet. He paused to let a large, black cottonmouth snake vacate the trail. He’d outfitted everyone in the team with knee-high rubber shin guards for exactly this reason. A snake could strike at any of them and not penetrate the tough leg coverings. He signaled over his shoulder to Mick that he’d spotted a snake.
The Aussie nodded, no doubt understanding the warning. Where there was one snake, there were always others. And out here, there could be nests of dozens or hundreds of others. Rattlesnakes were the worst about nesting, and they were plentiful around here.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t cold enough tonight for the local reptiles to be inactive. At least Carrie’s footprints were moving away from the shore and prime alligator territory.
Mick touched Bass’s sleeve and pointed out another speck of cotton lint on a bramble at about shoulder height for Carrie. His pulse jumped. She’d been here recently. She just had to hang in there a little longer, and then he would save her.
She must be terrified. God knew, he was scared to death. And he knew these woods top to bottom. On top of that, he was most at home in the dark. The wilder the terrain, the better for him and his teammates. But Carrie was no SEAL. She had to be out of her mind with fear.
The footprints he followed started to have a tiny bit of standing water in them. Which meant they were fresh enough not to have drained back into the ground, yet. He pointed out the water to Mick, who signaled back to the others to be on high alert.
A faint swish of cloth behind him was all the indication he got that the rest of the team had brought their weapons up into firing position. From here on out, they would be operating hot. Anything or anyone who moved in a hostile manner toward them was dead.
He took a deep, cleansing breath and released it slowly, forcing himself to drop into the calm state of hair-trigger readiness that was the SEAL’s trademark.
Hang on, Carrie. I’m almost there.
Chapter 14
Carrie swatted at a bug and stumbled again, the soft ground giving way beneath even her slight weight. She moved away from her armed escort a bit, testing how far from him Grange’s man was willing to let her stray.
Lonnie was walking ahead of her, leaving his flunkies to herd her along.
She ducked under a tree branch and straightened, only to run facefirst into what felt like a spiderweb across her whole face. She jumped, flailing her arms in front of her frantically, batting away the sticky silk, which seemed determined to wrap entirely around her head.
“What the—” the guy in behind her complained. “Stop that!”
Carrie jumped left, banging into the guard walking beside her. She shuddered and brushed off her entire body urgently. “Spiderweb,” she gasped.
“Kee-rist, this place is a hellhole,” the guy behind her grumbled. “I’ll take New York City any day over this godforsaken jungle.”
The other guard agreed fervently. They were both big, beefy men, but not diamond hard and battle honed the way Bass was. Please God, let him have gotten her phone message by now. Surely he would come after her.
For once, his possessiveness and tendency to overreact to any perceived threats in her direction was a boon. Although how he was going to find her out here in the literal middle of actual nowhere, she hadn’t the slightest idea.
No wonder the New Orleans police hadn’t caught the slightest whiff in the past week of Uncle Gary’s location if he was hidden out here. There might as well not be any other human beings on the planet, given how isolated this place was.
Panic surged into her throat for about the hundredth time, and she forced it down yet again. But each time it came back, her control of it slipped a little bit more. Soon, it was going to get the best of her, and she was going to fall apart. And then not only would she be dead, but Uncle Gary would be, too.
“How much further?” she asked no one in particular.
“Shut up,” Lonnie snapped.
She looked questioningly at the guy beside her, and he shrugged.
From behind her, the second guard complained, “I didn’t think it was this long a walk.”
“Quit whining,” Lonnie snapped. “We’re almost there.”
Hah. So much for telling her nothing. She’d counted almost a thousand steps, which put them around a half mile inland, if her count was correct. As best she could tell, they were moving south and east. But that was assuming she hadn’t gotten herself all turned around during the winding ride to the boathouse earlier.
At any rate, she had a rough direction of travel for herself and Gary when they made their escape. If he was still alive. And if he was ambulatory. And—biggest if of all—if they got a chance to make a break for it.
Perhaps three more miserable, sticky, bug-infested minutes passed, and a tiny speck of light became visible beneath the trees ahead.
She’d never been so relieved to see
even the tiniest hint of civilization that the light represented. They walked a few more minutes, and the underbrush gave way to a wide-open area paved with weedy old gravel. Two huge cylinders announced this place to be an oil refinery or something similar.
The light was one of those fluorescent affairs that people mounted on barns and that came on automatically at night. It hummed loudly, casting blue light across the refinery yard.
Rust and decay were everywhere. The place must be abandoned. Drat. No workers to recruit to help her.
Lonnie pushed open a gate made of aluminum poles and hurricane fencing and strode toward what looked like a small office. Its walls were wood, gray and weathered, nailed vertically. The roof was made of rusty corrugated metal.
As prison-like as it looked, she was ready to have walls and a roof around her, no matter how crude, as long as they held back the insects and night creatures.
Lonnie threw open the door and waved her inside. She looked around the main room eagerly and frowned. “Where’s Gary?”
“Oh, you thought we were bringing you to him?” Lonnie laughed, an ugly sound.
“That was our deal. Take me hostage and you have to let him go.”
“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to.” He devolved into calling her various names and casting slurs at her, but she tuned them out.
Was Gary somewhere else in this large facility? Lonnie wasn’t a local. Surely he didn’t have multiple hideouts out here in the bayou. Gary must be nearby. If she shouted, would he hear her? Shout back?
One of the guards opened a cooler in the corner and pulled out three bottles of beer, which he shared with Lonnie and the other guard.
Frankly, she found it a bit insulting that they thought they could drink booze while guarding her. Did they really think she was that meek and helpless? She’d successfully evaded Lonnie for years, and the only reason he’d caught up with her now was because he’d dragged her uncle into this mess.
But hey. If they wanted to get sloshed before Bass got here, all the better. She moved cautiously around the small room, trying not to draw attention to herself. She checked out the windows, noting the simple locks and low sills.
“Is there a functional toilet in this building?” she asked.
One of the guards led her down a short hallway to a grungy bathroom that hadn’t seen a good cleaning since the building was new. It had a small window, high up, but she thought she could fit through it if she could reach it.
Making a disgusted face, she asked, “Do you guys have a sponge and some scouring powder? No way am I using this without disinfecting it.”
“I dunno. Look under the sink,” the guy said, unconcerned.
She opened the decrepit cabinet doors and spotted a toilet brush and what turned out to be a fossilized cardboard tube of scouring powder that had turned into a solid block. “I can work with this,” she declared. “Do you have a table knife or a fork I can use to chip off some of the powder?”
The guard disappeared down the hall, and she took a quick moment to check out the lock on the window. It looked broken, and the screen over it barely clung to the window frame.
The guy came back with a plastic spoon, and she rolled her eyes. As a weapon, it was pitiful, but still, it was better than nothing. She scraped at the hardened powder and managed to loosen enough of the stuff to give the sink a vigorous scrub with the toilet brush. She moved over to the toilet and gave it the same treatment. Rust stained the porcelain and made it look awful, but at least it was reasonably sanitary, now.
“Satisfied, Your Highness?” the guard asked.
“Toilet paper?” she responded tartly.
Muttering under his breath, the guy left again and came back in a minute with a handful of tissues. The guy handed it over with rolled eyes and, as she stared him down, backed out of the bathroom to give her privacy. “Two minutes,” he warned her.
Whatever. She wasn’t breaking out of here until Gary joined her, anyway. Even if her old friend, an overwhelming urge to run, was making her jumpy as heck.
Where was Bass? Did he know she was gone yet? He must be furious with her for leaving without him. But it wasn’t as if she had any choice. She had to take the offer to save her uncle. Gary hadn’t done anything to merit Lonnie Grange’s ire, other than be related to her by blood.
Lonnie hadn’t changed one bit. The garlic smell of his breath. The yellowing of his teeth from smoking. The truculent arrogance. The way he’d gelled his hair to disguise how it was thinning.
One thing had changed, though. She was determined to fight him to the bitter end, this time around.
Blessedly, she remembered nothing of his attack on her. The bastard had drugged her and snuck into her bedroom when she’d been spending the night with Shelly. She’d woken up sore and naked the next morning and put two and two together. But even hypnosis had failed to recover any memory of the actual attack. Which honestly was fine with her.
Just living with the knowledge that it had happened had been almost more than she could deal with. It had taken years for her to make peace with the fact that she hadn’t been a tease or done anything at all to deserve what Lonnie had done to her. He was a criminal, and she the victim of a violent crime. End of discussion.
If Gary wasn’t here, she might even entertain the idea of getting even with Lonnie somehow. She could think of a few pertinent body parts of his that she would love to maim or sever.
Memories of Shelly and her mother, both outgoing, fun people and how the light had gone out of both of them while living with Lonnie passed through her mind. He’d been rich, and Mrs. Baker had been lured by the promise of financial security at long last for herself and her daughter. She’d never dreamed what the price of it would be.
The old fear came flooding back, certainty that Lonnie would kill her, too, given the chance.
Of course, he’d conveniently been in Miami and loaded up with airtight alibis for the time in and around Shelly and Mrs. B’s disappearance. The crime had never been pinned on him, but Carrie had no doubts. He’d had his thugs kill them both.
Had one of the men in the main room killed her best friend? Her breathing accelerated and her chest tightened until she thought she might faint.
What had she done? She’d voluntarily handed herself over to the very people who’d killed Shelly! She’d been so focused on getting Gary back, on running away from Bass, on fleeing his offer of safety and permanence—which was nothing more than smoke and mirrors at the end of the day—that she had run right into the arms of killers.
She was an idiot.
She deserved to die. For real.
A fine sheen of sweat broke out on her forehead, although whether it was from her silent panic attack or the muggy humidity hanging in the air, she couldn’t tell.
She had to get away from here. Go back to New Orleans. Find Bass. Lead him back here. She’d suffered from temporary insanity in thinking she could handle this herself. As usual, she’d acted first and got around to thinking a distant second.
A fist pounded on the door. “Open up or I’m coming in!”
She flung open the door and followed the guard back into the office. Lonnie was gone. “Where’d Lonnie go?” she asked.
“None of your damned business.”
She sat in the chair one of the guards pushed in her direction but not before pulling it over to one side a bit, placing it squarely in front of a window. If Bass found this place, he ought to be able to spot her now.
Surely, someone would find her eventually. The way Bass described it, these waters were far from deserted and a lot of people lived and fished in the low country. Someone would spot her and say something to someone else. It wasn’t great as escape plans went, but it was better than nothing.
She had no idea what time it was and didn’t want to pull out her cell phone to check. They hadn’t confiscated
it from her, and she planned to keep it that way. When she’d gone to the bathroom earlier, she’d tucked it inside her bra where the guards were less likely to find it if they frisked her. Her cleavage wasn’t anything to write home about, but it was substantial enough to cover up the presence of her cell phone.
All she had to do was stay calm, be patient and wait for her captors to make a mistake. And then she would find Gary and run like the wind.
* * *
Bass spotted an opening in the trees first. Then a petroleum storage tank. He slowed to an even stealthier pace and crept forward step by cautious step.
The team stopped, crouching at the edge of the clearing about twenty yards from a hurricane fence surrounding the facility.
Perriman used infrared optical devices to determine that three heat signatures were clustered in an office building. No one else was visible. But it was a big place with plenty of spots to hide behind thick metal that would mask heat signatures.
Perriman murmured, “Trina, Ford, set up a couple of shooting positions to cover all possible approaches to that office. Mick, I need you to scout the area. Bass, start working your way up to the office. If you can’t look in directly, get me an audio feed.”
Bass nodded and moved out on his belly, low-crawling toward the fence, rifle across his forearms, using clumps of weeds for cover. Hang on, baby. I’m coming.
He’d barely made it to the fence when Mick breathed, “Problem. I’ve got a tanker truck full of liquid oxygen parked behind the office.”
Bass froze. A bullet into a tanker of LOX would cause an explosion big enough to fry the office building and anyone in it.
“Can we move the truck?” Perriman asked.
Ford interjected, “It’s going to have GPS in it. Move a truck full of hazardous materials, and it’ll trigger alarms. We’ll have the sheriff out here in no time.”
Perriman replied, “I can call the sheriff. Tell him to keep his men away.”
Bass muttered low, “As soon as you call him, he’ll tell all his guys a bunch of SEALs are out here pulling off a rescue. All his deputies will show up, along with any civilians who happen to have their police band radios on. We’ll have a damned audience for this op.”