Valley of Death

by Gloria Skurzynski

  “Hey, kid, pay attention. I nearly ran into you,” the driver shouted.

  At that moment one of the horse’s hooves landed squarely on the radio handset. Jack tried to dive for it, but Leesa held him back. He watched in horror as the wagon’s back wheel crunched the radio’s antenna against the pavement.

  “Oh my gosh! Now I’m really in trouble,” he moaned. He’d just destroyed government property! Not intentionally, but what difference did it make whether it was intentional or not? His own two-way radio set had cost more than a hundred dollars; how much more would this far more complicated military radio cost to replace?

  Fighting the temptation to close his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see how badly the radio was wrecked, he dropped to his knees in the road. When a car approached, Leesa jumped in front of it and waved her arms to make it swerve around Jack.

  “Pick up the pieces,” Leesa told him. “Maybe we can find some glue and fix it.” But from the expression on her face, he could tell she didn’t really believe that.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The radio was in two pieces, held together by wires. All the way back to the room Jack tried to jam the pieces together. At the same time he wondered how many years he’d have to save his allowance, shovel snow in winter, rake leaves in autumn, mow lawns in summer, and get a paper route to pay for this wrecked bit of expensive military equipment.

  “At least you didn’t get hurt,” Leesa told him. “You were heading right in front of that horse. It’s better to have a broken radio than a broken leg.”

  Jack wasn’t so sure.

  The room he shared with his parents, 913, was right next to the one Leesa had shared with Ashley—915. “Like my dad said, lock your door when you get inside,” he told Leesa. “Just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “In case that spy from The Unit might be hanging around—you know, the guy who followed us on the motorcycle? I mean, if he actually was a spy.”

  Jack watched to make sure that Leesa had entered her room and shut the door firmly, then he let himself into his own room and flopped onto the bed. What a terrible day! Could anything else go wrong? His only (very, very tiny) glimmer of hope was that his parents would be too upset about Ashley to worry much about the broken radio handset.

  Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he sat up and began to work on it again, manipulating the parts to see if he could fit them together. When the room phone rang shrilly, he jumped so hard the pieces flew out of his hands.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Jack, it’s Dad. Are you OK?”

  “Uh…yeah.” Jack hesitated, not wanting to blurt out just yet that he’d damaged an expensive military radio even though he knew he’d have to own up to it sooner or later.

  “Is Leesa with you?”

  “No, she’s in her own room.”

  “Fine. Both of you stay put, do you hear? Your mom and I are still here at the hangar, and we won’t be coming back to the room anytime soon. The kidnappers have started talking over the two-way radio that Ashley had with her.”

  “They have? What did they say, Dad?”

  Steven spoke louder, raising his voice to be heard over the din of shouts and calls in the background. “They asked for water to be dropped to them by helicopter.”

  “Are they going to get it? Are the park people going to give them water?”

  “No.” The answer was curt, terse. “They think that if they do, it will just make the standoff last a lot longer.”

  Jack’s mind raced. That meant Ashley would be suffering from thirst, even though the sun had gone down and the desert would be cooling off to nighttime temperatures. He swallowed hard, imagining her thirst, wishing the law enforcement people would just give in and send water.

  “Jack, I want you and Leesa to keep your doors locked until we get there,” Steven told him.

  “OK, we will. Dad—” Jack was about to inform him about the cell of The Unit in Darwin Falls, when Steven broke in.

  “Gotta go now. Something’s happening here.” There was a click, and then a dial tone.

  Feeling useless for the hundredth time that day, Jack picked up the pieces of the radio and once again tried to fit them together. He was startled when he heard voices, faint but understandable.

  “We’ve got things set up here for medical services, plus there’s a fire engine and a couple of ambulances.”

  “Yes, sir, and the two military helicopters from the California Highway Patrol are in the air now.”

  The two voices faded, then another voice came through loud and clear. “Have one of the choppers drop a smoke bomb. We need to identify two things—the location of the fugitives and the direction of the wind. Tell the helicopter to fly high. I don’t want another aircraft to get sniped at.”

  “I’ll convey that order, sir.”

  The radio couldn’t be damaged too badly because Jack was still able to hear incoming messages. They were weak but audible. If he couldn’t fix it, someone who knew more about electronics might be able to. Time passed—he wasn’t sure just how much—before he heard another communique:

  “Our troops are about 200 feet to the east of the kidnappers. We’re moving forward in stealth mode, flat on the ground.”

  “Go to 150 feet and stop. No sudden movements. Remember—our strategy is to confine and contain.”

  Jack found the talk button and pressed it. “Anybody out there? Can anybody hear me?” but it wouldn’t work—no surprise. “Rats!” he muttered. There was no way for him to send a radio message, and his dad hadn’t given him a telephone number where he could reach the command post at the hangar. He tried to talk into the handset for a while longer, then gave up.

  Stacked on the dresser were several Death Valley publications including another map, larger and more detailed than the one they’d had in the Cruiser.

  Jack unfolded it and spread it out on the bed. He turned on every light in the room so he could read the map better.

  For a long time he studied it, mulling over the worrisome idea he’d had when he was in the Cruiser. If members of The Unit had started out from Darwin Falls, they could drive along Route 190 past Stovepipe Wells, then park their vehicles off road and cross the desert on foot. Heading south, under cover of darkness, they might be able to reach the kidnappers. And coming from that direction, it was unlikely they’d be noticed by the SWAT teams, which were deployed to the east of the barricade where Ashley was being held prisoner. That much he’d learned from the short blasts of speech coming over the broken handset.

  By now it was completely dark outside, so Jack thought he’d better close the drapes on the sliding glass doors that led to the patio outside his room. As he walked toward the doors his heart lurched. Someone was out there, looking through the glass at him. “Geez!” he yelled.

  Scratching the glass with her fingernails, Leesa mouthed, “Let me in!”

  Leesa! What was she doing out there on the patio? After rolling back the sliding door, Jack demanded, “Why’d you come this way? You nearly scared the spit out of me. You could have knocked on the door from the hall, and I’d have let you in.”

  “I was going to, but when I looked through that little glass hole in my door, I saw a man standing there. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you first, so I came around the patio side.”

  “A man?” As Jack went to his own hall door and peered through the peephole, he wondered what she meant by “first”? Then he said, “There’s no one there.”

  “There was!”

  “I think you’re just spooked,” he told her.

  Leesa took a deep breath. “I don’t care whether you believe me about the man being in the hall, but I want you to listen to what I have to say. I’ve been thinking and thinking, rolling it around in my head ever since I got in my room….” She paused then, glancing nervously at him, appearing uncertain.

  “And?” Jack prompted.

  “I want to give myself up. To The Unit.”

  Now it was Jac
k’s turn to take a deep breath. “Sit down,” he told her, gesturing to one of the twin beds. He sat on the other one, facing her. “You already said that once to my mother, and she told you it wasn’t an option. So why are you bringing it up again?”

  The distance between the beds wasn’t that large, and when Leesa leaned forward, her big, dark eyes stared straight into Jack’s. “She’s your parent, not mine. You have to do what she tells you, but I don’t. If I go to the men who have Ashley, they’ll let her go. They’re not killers, they’re not terrorists, they just have their own beliefs about how the U.S. government is destroying our way of life. If I turn myself over to them, they won’t hurt Ashley. They’ll just let her go, honest. I’m sure of that.”

  She made it sound so simple. Even reasonable. But it wasn’t. “What are you planning to do?” he asked. “Just walk from here to the place where the kidnappers are barricaded in the desert? It’s miles away, and it’s dark outside. Even if you managed to hitch a ride with someone and you got as far as the Old Harmony Borax Works, the rangers would stop you. The road will be blocked off from that point on.”

  She got up and walked to the door. “I told you I saw a man in the hall.” For a long minute she squinted through the peephole, having to stand on her toes because it was too high in the door, and she wasn’t very tall. “They make these holes so that you can only see what’s straight ahead of you, not what’s on either side. But he’s probably still out there.” Turning again to face Jack, she said, “I think he’s someone sent by The Unit. That’s why I decided to give myself up. All I have to do is walk out this door and tell him I’m willing to go back.”

  Maybe Leesa was right, and that would solve everything, Jack thought. But should she be allowed to make that decision without any adults around? What would his parents say if she left after they’d been ordered to stay in their rooms? How was he going to stop her, if that’s what she decided to do? He couldn’t contact his parents on the broken two-way radio, and he didn’t know how to reach them by phone. If Leesa opened his door right that minute and walked into the hall, what was he supposed to do—tackle her?

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said.

  “It’s not up to you.”

  She was right. He had no right to interfere with her life. All he could do was try to persuade her. “Look, Leesa,” he began, “you said those men aren’t killers or terrorists. But your dad and your brother beat up Aaron pretty bad, didn’t they? What if they’d killed him? I’ve heard about guys getting into fights where someone got knocked down and hit his head and died, and the guy who hit him was arrested for manslaughter. Even though it was just a fistfight.”

  Leesa stood with her hand on the doorknob, her eyes cast down.

  “Just how bad was Aaron hurt, anyway?” he asked her.

  “Pretty bad.”

  “And he got beat up just because he sent a note asking you to a movie.”

  She moved away from the door before answering, “There was more to it, but I don’t know whether my father knew about it. One of the kids from The Unit who goes to my high school caught me with Aaron in the orchestra room. We were kissing.” Moving across the room toward the dresser, she said, “Jack, I’m going to borrow your hooded sweatshirt, OK? It’s chilly out there now, and I don’t want to go back to my room for a sweater. I promise I’ll return it.”

  “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” Jack waved his hands. “Oh, I don’t mean about the sweatshirt. Take it. But if you’re going anywhere, I’m going with you. You can’t run out into the night all by yourself.” He didn’t know why he was offering to do this when it would make him a collaborator in her crazy scheme. But he couldn’t just let her fling herself into danger. Not all alone.

  She frowned at him, then said, “I guess I can’t stop you any more than you can stop me.”

  “Let me go first.” Jack opened the door a crack to peer into the hall. If his dad knew what he was doing, Jack would be in the most major trouble of his life.

  The part of the hall he could see through the crack looked empty. He inched the door a little wider. Behind him, Leesa reached out to push it, swinging it open all the way.

  Nothing. There was no one in the hall.

  “See? What did I tell you?” Jack asked. “It’s your imagination. So come back in the room, and we’ll lock the door.”

  Abruptly, Leesa said, “Forget that. You made a good suggestion in there when you said I could hitch a ride. If I can just get close enough to where they’re keeping Ashley, I’ll sneak past the rangers and run across the desert.”

  Grabbing her arm, Jack demanded, “Did you ever try to run through sand? I did, this afternoon. Your feet sink in, and it’s hard to keep your balance. Believe me, you can’t go fast enough out there to outrun anyone. And those law-enforcement people have big spot-lights—do you think they won’t see you? You’d get about 20 feet is all, and they’d catch you and bring you back. So what good would that do for Ashley?”

  “Let me go, Jack.” She said it quietly, but the look she gave him made him loosen his grip on her. It was a look he recognized—the same one Ashley had worn when she was determined to learn to skate. Stubbornness. Determination. That “nothing’s going to stop me so get out of my way” look. “I have to do this,” she insisted. “I couldn’t stand it if Ashley got hurt because I just stayed here and didn’t even try to help her.”

  Shaking herself free of him, Leesa started down the hall toward the double doors. Those doors led to the side of the motel, not the front, so there was no one Jack could turn to for help, no desk clerk who could tell him how to reach his parents at the hangar, and no guard who could demand that she stop. Nine o’clock at night, and everything was quiet as a tomb.

  Until they pushed through the door. They’d barely reached the parking lot when a man’s voice rang out from the shadows, “Leesa Sherman! Look over here!”

  As the man came into full view, Jack saw that he was pointing something at them. “Leesa, drop!” he yelled. “He’s got a gun!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Not even thinking, moving entirely by instinct, Jack rolled over on the concrete and pulled Leesa with him to crouch behind a parked car. But the man kept coming—coming toward them. Jack tried to shield Leesa with his own body, but what good would that do if the man started shooting? They’d both be dead!

  And then the man was standing right above them, shouting. Finally Jack’s mind connected to what he was saying: “Hey, you guys, chill out. This isn’t a gun. It’s a camcorder.”

  Yeah, sure. Not believing, Jack stared at the shiny black object in the man’s hand. In the dim light from above the motel door, all he could focus on was the dark circle that looked like the muzzle of a gun. It was pointed straight at Leesa. Jack was panting. Sweat stung his eyes. He knew—he knew—he was going to die. Several long seconds passed before his brain clicked in to what he was actually seeing—an object five inches high, four inches deep, one inch thick, with a gleaming round hole that was not the muzzle of a gun but happened to be the lens of a very small camcorder. Handheld. Hand-size. Jack had never seen anything like it.

  Ignoring Jack, the man said, “Let me help you up, Leesa.” He pulled her to her feet, brushing bits of dirt and tiny twigs from her back.

  “How did you know I was Leesa?” she asked, trying to control her voice. She was shaking so hard it trembled. “And who are you?”

  “I saw your picture on television. You were on the evening news. My name’s Jesse Hererra—I’m a student at UNLV, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jack said. Pulling Leesa aside, he whispered into her ear, “Why should you believe him? He might be a member of The Unit.”

  “With a name like Jesse Hererra? No way,” she whispered back. “He’s a Latino—one of the so-called mongrels The Unit says are destroying the purity of the Aryan race.”

  Even though Jack knew that Leesa no longer believed that hate-group propaganda, the words still sounded
shocking enough to make him cringe. “Well, if you’re sure he’s OK,” he murmured.

  “Look at him, Jack. He looks like Ricky Martin.”

  Jesse had pulled a card out of his wallet and was holding it in front of their eyes, even though in the dark they couldn’t see much except a stamp-size photo of Jesse with his name underneath. “See, Jesse Hererra. I’m a TV reporter. This is my press card.”

  “I thought you said you were a student,” Jack challenged him.

  “I am. I’m a communications major at UNLV. Maybe I’m not all the way a full-time TV reporter, but I’m working on it. Look around you—do you see any other reporters? I was the only one smart enough to track down Leesa, and I recorded you guys on video tape. It’ll make great footage with the two of you hitting the ground like you did.”

  “Hey, that’s not fair!” Jack cried. “Are you going to show that on TV? I’ll look stupid.”

  Leesa had been standing a little apart, eyeing Jesse. Now she moved forward and said, “That ID you just showed us—does that get you into places where other people can’t go?”

  “Yes. And I have a bigger press ID sign in my Jeep that I clip to the sun visor when I’m on my way to a story.”

  “Would it get you through police barricades?” she asked.

  “Mmmm….” Jesse rubbed his chin. “Depends on how strict the cops are.”

  Taking Jesse’s arm, Leesa said, “All right, Jesse Hererra, if you want a real story, get me through the barricades. On the way I’ll tell you everything that happened. You’ll have a real scoop.”

  Even in the dark Jack could see Jesse’s eyes light up. “You got it!” he cried. “But I want an exclusive. No other reporters, right?”

  Still suspicious, Jack asked, “Just who do you work for? Which television station?”

  Jesse didn’t answer that right away. Pointing to Jack, he said, “This guy must be Jack Landon, the brother of the girl who’s been kidnapped, am I right?” When Leesa nodded, Jesse went on, “Well, actually, I don’t really work for any particular station—I’m a freelance journalist. I get the story, and I sell it to the networks.” Pointing to Jack, he asked, “Is he going with us?”