by Cat Connor
All I could see was sandy dirt and dust and almost-dried muddy puddles. “Between reality and a dream.”
“Keep the cell phone turned on; we’re trying to get a fix on your position.”
Yeah, great, good luck with that.
I wondered if anyone had noticed I was missing. Had that woman called to say what happened? Where was Mac? Where was Lee? What happened to Sam? I never went anywhere without one of them. Even seeing Praskovya would have been comforting about now. In front of me, there was a car. It looked like my car. I couldn’t see the tags. The phone beeped. I glanced at it. Low battery. It slipped from my hand as I struggled to my feet. Once erect I knew I couldn’t pick it up again and I left it on the ground. With my right arm cradled against my body, I walked carefully. I leaned on the driver’s door and peered into the closed window. That was my jacket on the passenger seat. The doors were unlocked. I opened the door and eased into the driver’s seat. My brain kicked in. I had GPS; all was not lost.
I will be okay.
The keys were in the ignition. I turned the key, bringing the onboard computer to life. There it was on the screen, my coordinates, even the name of the road. I hit the central locking button on the driver’s door, then locked my door. Why didn’t my driver’s door automatically lock like the other doors? The car phone sat idly in its cradle on the dash, watching me. Finally I registered that the little blue light was flickering. My phone was on standby waiting for instructions. I stared at it then remembered the voice tags and heard mom’s voice loudly in my head. “Call Mac!” I said, hoping my voice was stronger than it felt.
I wrapped my left hand around the wound on my right arm. It didn’t help much.
Mac answered on the fourth ring, “Ellie?”
“I made a 911 call but I have my car now and I know where I am.”
“Jesus.” I pictured him running his free hand through his hair. “Where are you?”
My lips had stuck together, making speech difficult, “Will send directions to your truck and to EMS.”
There was a long sigh from Mac. I’m sure he didn’t want to hear the EMS bit.
“I’m on Deakyne Road, Fort Belvoir.”
I let go of my arm. It throbbed. I sent the directions then opened the glove compartment and fumbled out a bottle of water. I took small sips of the warmish liquid but could hardly swallow. My throat hurt. “Please hurry, Mac.”
My shirt was stuck to my back in places. I leaned forward; it stayed stuck but didn’t hurt. I decided it was sweat and refused to pursue any alternative lines of thought.
The man I’d killed was not either of the men who had abducted me. Where the hell were they? I thought back and remembered the woman and the children on the side of the road. Why take me? How had anyone known where I was going? I was supposed to meet McNab. It was a trap. Was the dead person something to do with the case? If this was our Unsub, why was I still alive? From the relative security of the car, I could see a half-full bottle of bourbon lying not far from the marks I’d made in the gravelly sand. The sight of the bottle sent a chill up my spine. I looked at my bloodied forearm. I reached under the seat and dragged out the first-aid kit. I heard Lee’s voice, as if he were there, telling me to apply pressure, so I lay a thick pad of as many wound dressings as I could on the gash and bound it tightly with gauze. Not a bad field-dressing attempt. Blood began seeping through almost immediately. I scrabbled one-handed in the first-aid kit looking for the telltale foil hemostatic sponge packets and found one. I ripped it open with my teeth, removed the soaked, now dripping, bandages and shoved the sponge into the wound.
With a roll of hemostatic gauze, I wrapped the entire site, applying as much pressure as I could. Then took a triangle bandage and made a sling. My theory was if I could hold my arm against my body with my hand up on my shoulder it might help. It certainly helped with the throbbing. For the second time in a week I was pleased that we had decent first-aid kits and that the government had sprung for QuikClot trauma packs. I reclined my seat a little, making it harder to see me. Just in case there was someone else around.
Whoever the man was, he’d been talking to someone before I interrupted him. The number popped back into my head. I dialed it on the car phone. It was the best way I could think of to keep it safe. A man with a Russian accent answered. I hung up. Another Russian? I was starting to feel that we lived in Eastern Europe, not Northern Virginia. I felt safe in the knowledge that my car phone number was permanently withheld and confidential. It would not show up even with caller ID. Wouldn’t even show on his phone if he tried to call me back.
Where had my charming abductors gone? When did the dead guy arrive? I had no memory, not even a glimmer that explained those things.
A low-flying Apache helicopter stirred the water in the bay, whipped up sand and rocked the car. For a second, I thought it was the cavalry coming to save me but it flew on over. My eyes wanted to close. I needed to take a nap, just a little one. I checked the door locks again.
I forced my eyes to remain open just long enough to look around the area. Two bunker-type structures: I’d seen them before. No sign of life. I thought back to the reason I’d set off from Washington alone.
I was supposed to meet someone at Tulley: McNab. Had he set me up? Was this what was so damned important? Setting me up?
I knew I needed a pass to get onto the base but I hadn’t planned on being on the base until after the meeting, and had intended to use Tulley Gate, like all visitors. Yet I knew whoever had brought me here used a different gate and the other car had a Department of Defense decal.
My everything hurt. I turned my attention back to the outside and surrounding area.
What could I see? Another car but not the car I’d seen when we’d first arrived here. The body of the man. A bottle of bourbon. I couldn’t see anyone else and as my eyes closed I wondered how long it would be before the person on the other end of the phone turned up to find out what happened. The need to know the identity of the Marine who drove the other car gnawed at me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I Get A Rush
A loud bang jerked me awake. My vision was still slightly blurry. Someone was banging on the car window: a dark-haired male. I blinked. I heard my name. The door unlocked before I was conscious of actually unlocking it.
“Come on.” Mac helped me out. “You okay?”
I knew I smiled as I said, “Yeah, I’m okay.” Tired but I think I’m okay. No, better not to think, just be okay.
“Let’s get you out of here.” Mac’s arm slipped around my shoulders. I was safe.
Lee yelled, “We got company coming!” He was facing away from us, down the road. “Two cars maybe.”
I couldn’t see anything but a cloud of dust.
“Could it be EMS?” I asked.
“They’re not on base yet; they’re waiting for our okay.”
I did a mental head slap. Of course, they’d secure the area first. Mac and Lee would have overridden my EMS call until everything was secure. “Hey, wait a minute, this base has a hospital.” I swallowed a surge of panic; I didn’t want to be trapped anywhere within the base. “Do not let them take me to the base hospital. We need to get out of here.”
“I won’t.”
Mac steered me towards a Ford Expedition parked twenty feet away. The familiar black-tinted windows and shiny black exterior was a comforting sight. A loud engine noise from behind made us both turn. I knew instantly it was too late. Mac turned back to the truck and in that split second something whizzed past my head. I looked around and Mac was gone. He lay sprawled face down in the muddy sand.
Lee yelled from my right, his voice grew louder as he came closer. “Do not do this, Mac. Cowboy – the fuck up! Do you hear me?”
I heard him. Mac lay motionless. I doubt he heard him.
“We gotta get out of here, Ellie.”
I heard him. I grabbed Mac’s shoulder with my good arm and shook him hard. “Wake up!” My knees sank in the mud, my
hand slipped on his muddy shirt. “Mac, get up!”
Large hands dragged me up and stood me on my feet. Those same hands stopped me from reaching Mac.
“Praskovya, take her.” I felt my body move quickly backwards. Another set of hands grabbed me and pulled me close.
A shot rang out. The bullet ricocheted off a metal door ahead of us and again, I was in the mud. It was dark and hot under Praskovya’s body. His cologne removed all traces of the bourbon smell from the ground. I knew the scent. A heady musky aroma; Mac wore the same one. From under Praskovya’s arm, I could see Lee shielding Mac with his body. More gunfire erupted. This time the bullets hit the ground, little puffs of sand and dirt jumped as the rounds hit, moving closer and closer to Lee.
Lee spoke over his shoulder, “On my mark.”
Praskovya moved an arm. I heard a click, as he chambered a round. An indefinable calm settled over me as it occurred to me that Mac and I were with the best two people to keep us safe. I trusted my instincts that told me Mac was alive. I’d have known if he wasn’t. I would just know.
“Mark.”
Praskovya rolled, dragging me with him. Mud and Lee’s boots flashed past my face. There was a loud clang. Then silence.
I found myself suddenly propelled into a dark and dank space. I blinked and squinted, trying to adjust my eyes as quickly as possible. Slowly, in their own time, my eyes allowed me to see. I stood in the middle of a room. It smelled as if the sun had never reached it. Lee propped Mac against a far wall. The hands that restrained me earlier dropped away. I was free to go to Mac.
Guilt flooded forth as I leaned down a little and tried to wipe the mud from his face with part of my shirt. I smeared more than I cleaned, but it was the best I could do.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered in his ear.
His eyes flickered. A smile crept onto his dirt-streaked face. His voice croaked, “You’re okay.”
“So are you.”
“Concrete head, you know that.” He blinked a few times. “Dark … where are we?”
I straightened up and ran my good hand through his hair looking for an injury. It was too dark to see where he’d been hurt. My fingers searched his scalp, finally settling on a wound about three finger-widths long and one wide. “Found it.”
“Found what?” Lee asked.
“Head laceration, I think a bullet skimmed Mac’s head; it cut a fairly deep trail as it went.”
“That’s going to look messy later,” Lee commented. He seemed to be a long way from us. I guessed he was by a door and listening for activity outside.
“Where are we?” Mac asked again. His hand followed the path my fingers took, as he felt the wound in his head.
“I think it’s an old ammunition bunker, or something similar.”
Mac grabbed for my hand but missed and got my leg. “Are you hurt?” he asked, struggling to his feet.
“Hurt?”
“Injured, Ellie,” Mac spoke slowly, “Did he hurt you?”
“Who?”
“The dead guy we found?”
“Nope, no idea who the hell he was but he called someone who sounded Russian. He wasn’t one of the two who snatched me.”
“Are you hurt?”
“My arm.”
Lee spoke, “It’s a defensive wound, Mac.”
I heard what Lee said but had no desire to elaborate on the fight I’d had with the Marine. I was struggling with what I thought I knew. A Marine? It was so wrong and it didn’t sit at all well in my gut. Every time I moved, my shirt didn’t; it was really starting to annoy me. I wished we were in my car and I had a clean, dry shirt.
I heard Lee speak again, this time it was to me, “You hurt anywhere else, Chicky?”
A volley of gunfire hit our shelter. I didn’t have time to answer, which was a good thing because I didn’t know what to say.
“They’re not going to give up,” Mac said.
Lee’s cell buzzed. He answered quickly, “We’re under fire here, Caine. We need some support.”
For a second I thought he was going to call in an air strike. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had. I listened to his conversation, one-sided though it was.
“We are in some kind of bunker at the end of Deakyne Road, right inside the military reservation.”
As soon as he said that, I flashed back to my childhood. Funny I hadn’t made the connection before; I was sure this was where we had played as kids.
“Someone got a light?”
“Yeah, in the SUV along with my backpack,” Mac replied, “Wanna go get it?”
“I’ll pass, smartass.”
Praskovya threw me a Zippo. It bounced, sparking across the concrete floor.
“Thanks.”
I lit it and carefully began searching along the back wall. Mac joined me.
“What are we looking for?”
“We really did play hide and go seek here.”
“Here, here?”
“We’re by the bay aren’t we?”
“Yep.”
“Then yes: here, here.”
“Don’t tell me there is another secret tunnel.”
I have a thing about tunnels. I love tunnels, always have. Once before, my love of tunnels enabled Mac and me to slip in and out of Washington, D.C. undetected. This time I hoped it’d get us out of harm’s way.
“I remember a bunker joined to another bunker via an underground, well, tunnel.”
“Tunnel?” Lee asked.
“Maybe,” I said. No sense getting all excited yet. Might be I hadn’t remembered it correctly, or this wasn’t the right bunker.
Another volley hit the exterior wall.
Drums and wooden crates were stacked five or so deep and three high in the furthermost back corner. It was starting to feel like a prison cell in a third world country. Mac pointed out scuffmarks on the floor. The crates and drums hadn’t always been there, maybe even placed there recently.
“What if we aren’t the only ones who know about this?” Lee said. “They were out here for a reason, why would anyone come way the hell out here?”
“You want to wait and find out? Sooner or later they’re going to try and blow that door.” I replied, inspecting the drums and crates for something usable. Time to cowboy up. “We’re going to have to move this out of the way.”
“Step aside, Miss Ellie. Let us menfolk handle the heavy work,” Mac said, mock-tugging his forelock and bowing. Blood dripped down his face.
“Not you, sunshine. Praskovya and Lee can handle this.”
Mac grinned. In the dim light, the flame from the lighter made his eyes seem more gold-flecked than normal.
The dirt streaks down his face were a mixture of blood, sweat and mud. In the flickering light he looked as though he belonged in an old war movie. I guessed that I would look more at home in a Wes Craven horror flick. Gunfire periodically hit the walls outside, a nice reminder that they weren’t going to give up. I watched Lee and Praskovya move everything out of the way. When they finished they stood staring at a small door.
“Who is going through that?” Lee asked.
“We are,” I replied. It was smaller than I remembered – a lot smaller than I remembered. Funny how things seemed bigger when you were a kid.
“This is white rabbit territory,” Mac commented. “Real people won’t fit.”
“Just open the door.”
I could hear the rabbit. I could even see him running for the door saying, ‘I’m late! I’m late!’ I kept that to myself.
Praskovya moved back to the main door. We could hear voices every now and then. Lee worked on opening the small door. No amount of brute force made a scrap of difference. It was stuck fast.
“Next?” he puffed, sliding down the wall.
“Go out the front?” I replied. Yeah, that was really an option.
“Any ideas that won’t get us killed?”
Raised voices outside interrupted our discussion.
I turned to Praskovya. “Cavalry?”
“Nyet,” he replied. “Dissension in the ranks, they’re arguing about us.”
“Saying?”
“The Russian wants to blow the door. The Americans say it will attract too much attention.”
“Good, let’s hope they dissuade the Russian.”
“How many out there, Praskovya?”
“I don’t know, more than three … I have the impression there is someone out there who is not speaking.” Praskovya hurried across the room to Lee. “We need to open this door.”
“Any ideas?”
Both men crouched by the door, inspecting it. Lee called me over and asked, “What is in the crates?”
“I saw a lot of packing material, but nothing else.”
“We need something to use as a fulcrum.”
Mac was already poking through the crates, pulling out packing material by the handful. “Shovels!” he called out. “There are shovels in here.”
Praskovya joined him and removed one of the shovels. “Here’s your fulcrum,” he said, handing a shovel to Lee.
“Thank you very much.” Lee set to work opening enough of a gap in the small doorway to wedge the shovel in.
I took the opportunity to talk to Lee quietly as he worked. “Lee, whoever drove my car onto the base works here. Could even be an officer. The guard at the gate – and I don’t know which gate, but it wasn’t Tulley – knew him, called him ‘sir’. He let him through without the DOD decal. Someone else drove another car into the same gate, and that car had a decal. He could be a Marine.”
“You were kidnapped by military personnel?”
“Yes.”
“Those idiots outside, trying to get in here … maybe active military?”
“I tussled with a Marine – or with someone wearing a current Marine desert-camouflage uniform.”
“Seem to be a lot of military connections surfacing.”
Those words rolled around my head while Lee jimmied the door. I went back to Mac. With Lee and Praskovya working on the door, it didn’t seem to take long to pry the thing open. Light suddenly flooded in. My heart sank and all thoughts of the military connection fell from my mind. If it went straight to the outside, it meant trouble and gunfire. Not to mention imminent death.