Fire in the Stars

by Barbara Fradkin

  As if he sensed her worry, Mahmoud nodded toward the woods. “Fazil say he was in Syrian army. He train this, learn how … survive. He will find his way.”

  Amanda heard the doubt in his words. In the flickering orange firelight, his features were grim and worried.

  “Did you know him back in Syria?”

  Mahmoud shook his head. “Ghader talk about him sometimes. He drive a tank, but in Syrian army, everything — tanks, guns, trucks — old from Russians. DAESH steal better from Iraq army. And they are killing everybody with guns, knife, even the children and soldiers … bap, bap, bap!” He mimicked the action of machine-gun fire and his mouth drew down in disapproval. “Fazil not fight back, he run away.”

  She flinched as if the pain of memory were physical. Sometimes not fighting back is not a choice, but an instinct, she thought. A reaction driven by panic and self-preservation, which steamrolls over conscious will. How often she had wondered whether her own reaction on that fateful night would have been different, had the children been her own. “No one ever knows what they will do when they face danger,” Amanda said. “Soldiers see terrible things. They have to do terrible things too.”

  Mahmoud shrugged. “Everybody see terrible things. Assad bomb homes, gas children, and when DAESH come, they do …” His voice faded as his English failed him. “You can’t even imagine. I feel bad. I am here, my country is there, my sisters are there. I run away, too.”

  “But dying on the street over there doesn’t do any good, either. From here, you can try to rescue your family.” It was a rationale she’d trotted out before, for her own behaviour on that fateful night, and it rang just as hollow now.

  He poked the fire angrily, sending sparks spitting into the dark. “You can’t understand. You never have war here on your own land.”

  A dozen retorts rose to her lips, but she stifled them. She was too worn out and worried to debate the guilt and blessings of privilege, or to tell him that she understood far more than he imagined.

  Instead she laid a hand on his arm. “Let’s be thankful for that and save our strength for tomorrow. Tomorrow we’re going to get ourselves out of here.”

  Growling woke her with a start. She bolted upright to see Kaylee standing at the edge of the clearing, staring into the woods. Her hackles were raised and a soft whine bubbled up in her throat.

  Amanda took rapid inventory. The fire was out, Tyler and Mahmoud were asleep, but a pale pre-dawn light washed the sky above. The fog was retreating, clinging in tendrils to the trees, but allowing glimpses of the wooded slope beyond. The forest sparkled with dew, promising a freshly washed day.

  Kaylee uttered a single, sharp bark.

  “Sh-h!” Amanda lunged for her collar, but her fingers slipped uselessly through fur as the dog bolted for the trees. Instinctively Amanda shouted, but Kaylee didn’t even break her stride. She’ll come back, Amanda told herself. Let’s hope she spotted a rabbit or a squirrel that will serve as her breakfast.

  The moments crawled by without sound or sight of Kaylee. Wakened by the commotion, the others began preparations for the day. Amanda built up the fire while Mahmoud went in search of water for the berry tea that had become their staple. Dawn had brought hope.

  Amanda kept a worried eye on the woods, which had come alive with the twitter of birds and the scrabble of small animals. Suddenly the woods erupted in furious barking, thrashing, and crashing.

  “There’s someone out there,” Tyler said as it grew louder.

  Amanda stifled her own alarm. “Probably Kaylee freaked out by a moose.”

  “I think it’s a person.”

  Amanda gripped the fish knife and scanned the woods. The barking had died as abruptly as it began, but leaves rustled and twigs snapped as the footsteps came closer. Too large and heavy to be Kaylee. She glimpsed a figure slipping through the trees, hunched low as if to hide.

  “Fazil?” she called.

  A flash of orange danced through the woods and for a moment Kaylee was visible through the leaves, her tail waving in delight as she barked at the figure. She was smiling as only a Toller can, proud of her prize.

  “Fazil!” Mahmoud shouted something in Kurdish.

  The figure glanced around, then straightened and headed toward them. Twigs and leaves clung to his clothes and hair. Amanda felt a flood of relief as she recognized their lost companion. He stepped into the clearing with a sheepish smile on his face and hurried to the warmth of the fire, ignoring Mahmoud’s running tirade in Kurdish.

  “What happened to you?” Amanda interjected.

  Fazil reached over to ruffle Kaylee’s fur. “I get lost. The dog find me. Cold night. Thank you, dog.”

  “We calling you,” Mahmoud said. To Amanda’s surprise, he was scowling, relief having quickly given way to accusation.

  “I hear. But not know where.”

  “Well, at least you’re here, and the fog seems to be lifting,” Amanda said. “The search teams will be out looking again.”

  “Yes!” Fazil’s eyes lit. “And I find a road. Not big —”

  Amanda’s hopes soared. “A road road? With cars?”

  “Not cars.” Fazil laughed. “Small, but maybe, God willing, it go …” With his English failing him, he gestured excitedly into the distance.

  “Can you find it again?”

  “Yes, yes! Over the hill.”

  Amanda started stomping out the fire. “Drink your tea and grab your stuff. We’re on our way!”

  This time when Chris opened his eyes, a faint blush of lavender lightened the sky. The fog had lifted! He unfolded his chilled, stiff limbs cautiously. Judging from his restless sleep and the crick in his neck, his life jacket had proved an inadequate pillow and the tarp, although it had kept out the dampness, had been no great success as a mattress.

  The Zodiac team had spent a more comfortable, albeit cramped, night in their tent, and they still seemed fast asleep. Now that dawn was near, however, Chris was anxious to get on with the search. He’d lain awake half the night wondering and worrying about Amanda’s cryptic notes, and, in the blackness, the answer had come to him. He smiled with relief. Amanda was not losing her mind or becoming delirious. She was trying to send a message that only certain people would understand. The key was in the idiom. Almost any native English speaker, especially one familiar with local geography, would probably guess the word Croque from the first riddle, whereas a non-English speaker probably wouldn’t. She wanted to tip off the search-and-rescue teams to where she was without tipping off whoever was after her.

  Which meant her pursuers were not English-speaking. Maybe not the trawler captain after all, but the fugitives!

  The second riddle was less clear. Maybe she just wanted him to know they were still alive and travelling on foot to Croque, but later, in his pre-dawn sleeplessness, he thought of another, more sinister significance to her choice of words. Frogmarched. What if she meant forced? Compelled to move?

  As in at gunpoint?

  In an instant, his excitement turned to dread. What if she and Tyler were captives, forced to follow whatever erratic, desperate path the fugitives chose. Would she hold any sway over them? Could she persuade them to continue on to Croque, and toward the ERT officers who would soon be converging there?

  He threw his supplies into his boat, woke the search team to explain his plans, and shoved out into the bay. The ocean was dead calm. Mist still curled off the water into the lacy hills beyond, but the thick fog had retreated to a sullen bank out on the open sea. Finally, Chris thought with a silent cheer.

  As he aimed his boat inland, he searched the shadowy shoreline for signs of movement. A series of long finger bays slowed his progress and as he rounded a steep, rocky point, he was finally able to connect with Incident Command. To his surprise, Noseworthy herself answered. Grudging respect rose within him. Had the woman slept at all?

 
Probably as much as I did, he thought. For both of them, there would be time enough for sleep when Amanda and Tyler were safe and sound.

  He explained his theory that the two were being held by the foreign fugitives. “I know it sounds farfetched, ma’am —”

  “No worse than any other theory, Tymko,” Noseworthy muttered, her voice even hoarser than usual. He wondered if she’d been subsisting entirely on cigarettes and coffee. “That boatload of illegals is still on the loose, that much the security guys have condescended to tell me.”

  “I’m heading down the bay toward Croque —”

  “Fuck, Tymko! I told you to stay put!”

  “But the ERT backup is not here yet, and Croque is Amanda’s last known destination.”

  “Corporal Vu has two teams already en route to Croque. ETA one hour. So we’ll be prepared for the bastards if they show up. I don’t want you in the way.” Papers rustled and he heard her cursing. “To keep you busy, I want you to check on Corporal Maloney’s whereabouts. We need to verify if that trawler captain’s truck is still there and to disable it if it is. You and Maloney are the only ones who know its location, but Maloney is not answering his radio. He’s been out of touch since yesterday afternoon, and his shift replacement at the roadblock last night reported he wasn’t there.”

  Chris frowned in surprise. Jason was a by-the-book cop with a watchful eye on his career, so it wasn’t like him to disregard orders. “He was there yesterday afternoon when Corporal Willington and I passed through the roadblock. In fact he was talking to someone in his truck. Willington said it looked like a woman.”

  “Any description?”

  “The vehicle was a white, old-model Chevy Cavalier. I didn’t give it much thought.” Except to wonder whether Jason was putting the moves on her, Chris thought, but he kept that to himself.

  “Hmmm.” Noseworthy broke off for a deep, rumbling cough. When she resumed, her voice sounded like chains dragged along the ground. “Mrs. Cousins, the victim’s wife, drives a white Cavalier. She’s been in and out of here every hour or so since she arrived, demanding updates on the search for her son. Do you know if she knows Maloney?”

  Chris swallowed his astonishment as he cast about for a safe answer. “Well, they’re both from Grand Falls, ma’am.”

  “That likely explains it. She probably figured she’d get more info out of him than I’m giving her.” Noseworthy was being positively chatty, probably punch-drunk from not enough sleep and too much solitude, Chris suspected. Now she seemed to remember that he was a pain in the ass. “Anyway, Corporal, report in on Maloney one way or the other. And disable that damn truck.”

  Chris signed off with a nagging sense of unease. It made sense that Sheri would try to get inside information out of Jason, but Jason’s subsequent disappearance and failure to report lent an ominous implication to the meeting. What the hell was the man up to?

  Twenty minutes later, when Chris turned into yet one more narrow finger bay, he finally spotted the little red stages of Croque propped along the shore. Once he got ashore, however, he was disconcerted to find not a soul in the place. The ERT reinforcements had not yet arrived, Willington had presumably gone back to Roddickton, and there was no sign of Jason or his red truck. He retrieved his own truck, and as he drove back up through the scattered houses, he reassured himself that behind the scenes, the troops would soon be closing in. Some, led by the K9 unit, would be following the trail over land from the sunken boat, while others would be combing the bush and logging roads around Croque.

  Driving up the Croque road, he found the ATV trail without difficulty. A hundred feet in, still hidden by the screen of trees, was the captain’s truck, looking exactly as Chris and Jason had left it. The captain’s cab door was still unlocked and the keys still in the ignition. At a quick glance, nothing appeared to be disturbed, as if the captain had not returned.

  Chris took the keys, locked the truck, and then left his own truck at the entrance to the trail, facing out to facilitate a quick departure while at the same time blocking the exit of the other truck. After updating Noseworthy and giving her the coordinates of the truck, he stood on the trail to consider his next move. Restlessness and unease thrummed through him. As he weighed the wisdom of violating more orders, he noticed that the trail looked more trampled than before. A new set of fat, wide tire tracks had churned up the mud and crushed the small shrubs in two lines leading down the trail into the bush beyond the point of the Captain’s truck.

  Someone had driven a larger vehicle along this road after the ATV. Jason? If so, how far would he go? It was a challenging road for any vehicle, overhung with branches and littered with rocks and holes. Chris had no intention of subjecting his brand-new truck’s undercarriage and suspension to such a punishing ride, but perhaps Jason had less attachment to his own older truck.

  Or more at stake.

  After retrieving his hunting rifle from his truck, he began to walk along the track, keeping to the side in order to preserve the tread marks. He had gone less than a kilometre when he rounded a curve and came face to face with Jason’s truck, facing toward him, but half off the road and mired deep in a mud hole. It was abandoned. He felt the hood, which was cold. Dew lay heavy on the windshield, suggesting the truck hadn’t been driven since at least the dead of night.

  Looking down the track ahead, he noticed that the wide tire treads continued, trampling the grass and digging into the soft soil. It looked as if Jason had driven the truck even farther into the bush and was on his way out when he got stuck in the mud. If so, where was he? Why hadn’t Chris come across him already?

  His scalp prickled with unease. He listened to the woods, which were eerily silent for this time of year, when the distant clamour of chainsaws, axes, and ATVs usually filled the air. Where was Jason, and what was he doing? Playing Lone Ranger to the rescue, against an unknown and unseen enemy?

  He debated the wisdom of shouting Jason’s name, but he didn’t know where Amanda and her captors were, or indeed where the captain was. He didn’t want to give away his position or alert them to his presence. Instead, he crept forward along the logging road, trying to keep out of sight under cover of the shrubs along the edge.

  Steep bluffs rose on either side, blocking out all radio and satellite signals. The logging road twisted and turned as it snaked deeper into the bush. This is folly, he thought as he panted his way up yet another steep rise. Cresting the top, he startled a magnificent cow moose and her calf, who were grazing on the tender shoots in the middle of the road. He froze, as did they, their heads raised and their eyes riveted on him. He edged carefully behind a tree to wait. The mother twitched, flattened her ears, and stared at him in challenge for a long moment. Neither moved, until abruptly she wheeled around and bolted into the trees on the other side. Her calf scrambled to follow.

  Chris waited for his nerves to settle, for a cow moose protecting her young could be a formidable enemy. He wondered whether he should return to Croque to wait for ERT. As he was debating, he saw what had spooked the moose.

  A dishevelled, mud-caked apparition was coming down the middle of the road toward him, staggering and weaving like a man long past the legal limit. Chris registered the bloody hair and face before he recognized the RCMP field jacket. He rushed forward.

  “Jesus H! Jason!”

  The man sagged into his arms and Chris eased him down against a tree trunk. “I’m all right,” Jason muttered, struggling to rise. “I’m all right.”

  “Hold still, for Pete’s sake! Let me look at you!” He bent over to probe Jason’s body. Blood was thick and sticky from an open wound on his crown, and Jason jerked away with a curse when Chris touched it.

  “Are you hurt anywhere else besides your head?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you know where you are? Who I am?”

  “Don’t play fucking doctor, Tymko. I’m all right. It
’s him you should be going after!”

  “Who? What the hell happened?”

  “I don’t know. It was dark, and I couldn’t see a thing in the fog. Whoever it was sneaked up on my truck. All I remember is the door opening. When I came to, my truck was gone and I was face down on the road, feeling like I’d gone ten rounds with Mohammed Ali.”

  “Did you get any description at all? Tall, short, skin colour?”

  Jason was shaking his head. “Strong. In shape.”

  “He knew exactly where to hit you too. Did he say anything?”

  Jason groaned. “Not a word. He appeared out of nowhere like a stealth bomber and dragged me out of the truck.” He began to shiver.

  “Here.” Chris took off his jacket and draped it around the man’s shoulders. He offered him water, which Jason drank eagerly. “It looks like he was trying to escape in your truck, but it got stuck. We’ll need to go back to my truck.”

  Jason shook his head back and forth before yelping aloud in pain. “No! I’m all right! I can make it back on my own. You go after him. You have to stop him!”

  “Stop him from what?”

  “How the hell should I know? But the bastard took my radio and my 9mm, so I’m betting he’s up to something bad.”

  Chris took out his own radio. “You need help and we need backup.”

  “You forget the fucking radios don’t work around here. You got your sat phone? I’ll phone once I get out to the main road. I’m good to go that far.”

  Chris sat back on his heels, trying to decide the best course. Jason looked as if he’d been through a wheat combine. Beneath the blood and dirt, his face was ghostly pale and he was shivering. The first rule of policing was to ensure the safety of yourself and your fellow officers before all else. On the other hand, at least one dangerous assailant, whose identity and motives were unknown, was wandering around the woods armed with a police radio as well as a service pistol. Jason was coherent and he had proved he could walk. Even superficial head wounds bled like a bitch.