by Toby Neal
Manolo cut the line. “Keep the tension on while I check the other end.”
Lei felt sweat spring out under the restrictive vest. She remembered this from working on the explosives detail with Abe—endless minutes filled with danger. Patience, skill, and calm nerves were required. The bomb squad had not been a good fit.
Manolo traced the other end of the line and it was tied to a small sapling. “Done.”
He cut the line. Lei dropped the clamp back into his kit, exhaling on a whoosh of breath.
“Where we’ve got one booby trap, we may well have more.” Manolo addressed the squad leader. “This is crude, but could have been plenty effective. We need to proceed with extra caution.”
The squad leader gave a brief affirmative nod. “Move out.”
Manolo led the way. Lei followed him, and the rest of the team covered them, constantly checking the area with their weapons while Manolo scanned the path slowly as they proceeded. They arrived at the area of the burned fields. Most of the marijuana had burned down to smoking skeletons of the huge plants Lei had seen, but the smoke was still sharp and potent in her nostrils.
The stream with its waterfall was as beautiful as Lei remembered—and the pit bull’s body lay in the water where it had fallen. Lei gulped bile, harsh and burning, at the sight. Whatever else happened today, she was going to bury that dog.
“Looks like a shelter over here,” Manolo said.
“Yeah, that’s where the kids appeared to be staying.” Lei gestured to that side of the stream. “The boss came from a building on the opposite side. I want to check on the kids’ shelter first.”
“Roger that.” Manolo continued his deliberate progress up the short path to the crude shack built of scrap wood and tin. They were within fifty feet of the shelter when they heard thumping and muffled cries of distress coming from inside.
Lei tightened her grip on her weapon. “Could be the child workers I saw earlier.”
She started to run forward and fling the door open, but Manolo held up a fist, halting them. “Got another line. Across the door.” His handheld light ran back and forth along the transparent filament draped across the doorway. “Window, too. Sergeant Texeira, let’s do a perimeter check around the building.”
“Roger that.” Lei fell in behind Manolo as he circled slowly around the exterior. The captives must have heard them, because the frantic thumps and cries grew louder.
Lei’s heart thundered, and sweat prickled along her hairline. She couldn’t hate Boss Man more, a righteous rage that was hard to control.
But explosives detail was all about control.
She did her relaxation breathing and pulled in close behind Manolo as he ended the search and opened his kit at the door. She holstered her weapon and he handed her a clamp.
“Same deal as before with these. I’ll trace the line, find out what kind of IED they left, and cut it. You keep the tension on.”
“Got it.” Lei placed the clamp he handed her on the window line and held the line’s tension as Manolo traced the strand to another grenade in a box of nails, this one tucked up under one of the roof’s crude rafters. He shook his head as he deactivated the IED and removed it. “This would have really done a number on this little building.”
The front door trip line was the same, but taking it down went faster now that they knew what they were dealing with.
The door was locked with a padlock. “I don’t think they will have more booby traps inside,” Manolo said to Lei and his captain as he got a pair of bolt cutters out of his pack. “These have the look of quick and crude devices. Something rigged to go off from inside takes longer to set up.”
Lei hated to imagine the terror of being restrained and locked inside a shed that was rigged to blow up victims and rescuers alike. “He decided the boys were disposable.”
“Maybe they have intel he didn’t want to get out,” the squad leader said.
Lei hung back as Manolo used his light to carefully check around the lintel of the closed door as he breached it, and then he gave it a tiny push. It creaked open.
Chapter Fifteen
I woke with a sticky feeling in my mouth, a mealy texture, as if the unripe bananas I’d eaten had decided to grow on the walls of my mouth. The light was dim, the sun hiding behind clouds somewhere high above. I sat up slowly, taking inventory. I had aches and pains, most specifically the ruined skin of my feet, but I felt much better than when exhaustion had pulled me under so completely.
Perhaps I was done with withdrawals.
Drawing my knees up, looking out at the dense foliage, I mentally tested the idea of a drink of good single malt.
I looked at the imaginary glass in my hand, filled with a nut-brown liquid that captured light, distilling it in warm sparks. I could feel the smell of it in my nostrils, tingling and smoky. I sipped, feeling a slight numbness on my lips. The taste was a little harsh, peaty and dark, then smooth as it moved down my throat, leaving an initial burn followed by a loosening, a wave of warmth that rippled through my body and brought relaxation.
It still appealed.
I was an alcoholic. Probably inherited the tendency, like they said you did, and the mental shit had set off the addiction. I’d known it for a while and was finally ready to really know it. I was going to have to stay off the sauce permanently. But I wasn’t sick anymore, and that was a damn good thing, given the circumstances. If I could just get home, I’d never drink again.
MacDonald was on watch. “Hey, LT.” His voice was low. Falconer was sleeping curled on his side. He’d covered himself with banana leaves. Kerry was closer to me, sprawled on his back. His face looked young as a teenager’s as soft snores issued from his slack mouth.
“So what do you do for Security Solutions?” I whispered.
“I’m the camp’s coordinator. I put the whole package together.” MacDonald shuffled closer to me so we could talk quietly.
“You mean the physical camp we arrived at? Trifecta?”
“Yeah. I’m the manager. I get everything from the tents to the menus lined up. Keep supplies moving. Run everything.”
“So the army doesn’t have anything to do with that?”
“They provide most of the actual supplies and support staff. But I work with them, order shit, et cetera. They provided the security detail that was with us. We’re doing a specialized service for them—training the MPs. In return, they pay for the services and provide infrastructure.”
“Did you notice all the American supplies at the camp where they were holding us?”
“I didn’t get much of a chance, between the pit and the wooden shelter. But yeah, I noticed the weapons were American.”
“A lot more than that. The camp commander was even eating MREs.” I contemplated my ruined feet. “How did the kidnappers know where we were? And who to take?”
MacDonald shrugged, but he looked down. He knew something.
“You work for Security Solutions. Think they have a leak?” I asked.
“Maybe.” He still had his eyes down. “Could also be someone in the army brass.”
“So why’d they take you?”
“All Security Solutions employees carry the same insurance you do.”
“If that’s the case, why isn’t Security Solutions negotiating for our release?”
“That I don’t know. Could be the army interfering. They’d have policy changes and we were often the last to know. Right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, all that.”
I leaned closer and caught his eye. Devan MacDonald had the soft jaw and waistline of a man who spent a good deal of time behind a desk, though our recent hardship had caused a collapse of his plump cheeks. “You sure that’s all that’s going on there?”
“I don’t know anything worth anything. But I heard something from one of the guards at the camp. I speak Spanish, so they used me as an interpreter with the other men a little bit. Anyway, it seems like there might have been a dirty army officer involved. Someone wa
s getting a kickback from the kidnappers.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, for them to be able to nail us so completely. But I can’t imagine Forsythe being in on it.” The polished major had made no bones about how much he disliked the location and the assignment, but he’d seemed like the kind of straight-arrow officer who was an army lifer.
“No. Not likely Forsythe. Maybe one of the sergeants.” There had been Forsythe, two sergeants, and our camp’s security detail.
“Think the Hondurans were in on it? The trainees?”
“Naw.” MacDonald shook his head. “They were freaking the hell out when we were hit.”
“Doesn’t mean they weren’t scared shitless for a reason. Their people were pulling off the raid. They’re a trigger-happy bunch. But if the army decided they were terrorists, that would make the negotiations a lot harder.”
“I just don’t know, LT. There were casualties when they took us, and who knows what the kidnappers told the army when they asked for the ransom.”
I wondered what the people at home had been told, too. I longed for the satellite phone I’d left that day on the charger back in the Trifecta tent. Just to be able to hear Lei’s voice—she must be going crazy.
My stomach tightened. She wouldn’t come over here and try to get me out, would she? I already knew the answer to that, and it almost made me retch. God forbid the army gave her any information. But she wouldn’t come after me. That other time she’d gone off the reservation had cost us more than either of us wanted to admit, and she wouldn’t leave Kiet.
My wife was a warrior, but she was a mother, too. She wouldn’t leave our son.
The best thing I could do for both of them was to survive this and get home, sober and right in the head. But I’d settle for just surviving, at this point.
I reached into my pocket and took out the third banana. My belly should be able to deal with it after digesting the other two. I took extra time chewing, hoping to break it down more in my mouth. Falconer woke up, rustling up from under his banana leaves, and that woke Kerry.
“Think we’ll be ready to get moving soon?” Kerry sat up on his elbows.
“We can’t go back into that water.” Falconer gestured to my feet. “Stevens’s feet will go septic.”
“Would be great to let our clothes and socks dry out before we got moving.” I grabbed my socks off the frond they’d been draped over. They were still damp. “We have no idea how close the hostiles are, do we?”
Falconer shook his head and lifted his dark face to the sky. As if to demonstrate how helpless we were, rain began plinking down. “Shit. We can get moving, or we can make a shelter with these banana leaves and wait this out.”
“Shelter. Wait for it to pass,” Kerry voted, raising a hand. MacDonald nodded in agreement.
“Probably should have made the shelter first thing, but we didn’t know how long we’d be here.” Falconer stood and stretched, his muscular body imposing. I was damn glad he was with us. “I’ll cut some leaves. Let’s use the walking sticks for the frame.”
In a remarkably short time Falconer had directed the erection of a fairly functional lean-to shelter, with room for us to all lie inside. The banana leaves, layered on top of each other, did a good job of sloughing the rainwater off.
The patter became a downpour, and we huddled close. I slept again.
The door creaked open. A path of light illuminated the three young boys Lei had seen working the fields. They were restrained and gagged with duct tape. One of them had lost control of his bladder, and the smell of urine stung Lei’s nose as she moved forward into the room, weapon drawn, and knelt beside the nearest child.
“You’re okay now. We’re going to help you. This will hurt a bit.” The boy whimpered as Lei pulled the gag off the boy’s mouth and the ultra-sticky tape pulled the sensitive skin of his face and lips. “Are there any other booby traps we should know about?” She squatted beside him, pulling her knife to cut the tape binding his wrists behind his back as Manolo freed the others.
“No more. Just the window and the door.” The boy’s voice was rusty and dry, and she gestured for one of the SWAT members to bring his canteen forward.
“Are you boys okay? Did he do anything to you?” Lei asked.
The one she’d freed nodded his head. “We’re okay.” But all of them were shaky and tear-streaked as they sat up and sipped from the canteen, passing it back and forth.
“We’re going to check the other building,” Manolo said. “We’ll leave a couple of men here with you.”
Lei nodded, and the two SWAT members took up stations beside the door.
Lei didn’t want to overwhelm the kids with questions. “I’m going to record you, okay? So you don’t have to go through the story so often.” She took her phone out and thumbed on the recording feature. “What are your names?” Lei asked.
“Danny,” the boy she’d freed said. “And this is Kekoa and Dexter.” She asked for their last names and wrote those down, too.
“So tell me who the boss man is.”
“Will he—will he be back?” Danny’s eyes were huge and hollow with fear.
“He’s long gone. But we need more information to catch him.”
“He only let us call him Uncle,” the middle boy, Kekoa, said. He was the smallest and slenderest of the three. “We’re foster kids. He’s our foster dad.”
Lei’s stomach clenched as faces of kids she’d put into the system flashed in front of her eyes. How many of them might have ended up in a situation like this?
“So how did that work?” She kept her voice soft with an effort. The other narco detective with their team returned. His partner was still looking at the fields, but the detective, a long-boned, balding man named Shepherd, came in and flipped a mattress behind the boys. A comic book fluttered from beneath it. She frowned at him.
“Can we leave that for a minute, Detective?”
The man gave a brief nod and squatted beside her. “Hey, guys. I’m Detective Shepherd. We need to know everything we can about what was going on out here.”
“I don’t know nothing.” Dexter, the tallest kid, finally spoke. He looked a little older than the others, with peach fuzz on his upper lip. He was the one who’d lost control of his bladder, and he hunched over to hide his wet shorts.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning? How you came to be here.” Lei scribbled her old pen on the spiral notebook she used to take notes.
“We’re fosters,” the middle boy, Kekoa, repeated. “We came at different times. But we all lived in Kahului before. And we came to Hana to go to Aunty Selina’s foster home. Selina Tahua.” Lei wrote the name down. “So Aunty Selina, she meets the social worker and picks us up. Then she drives us out here. And Uncle, he put us in here, and we work.” He shrugged thin shoulders under a filthy shirt.
“Who else was out here?”
“Two men stay with Uncle sometimes. Eddie and Akira. Two more come and help move the weed,” Kekoa said.
“And Uncle, he had a helper. Tony was one of us. But he’d been out here so long, he came like he was Uncle’s son.” There was an envious note in Dexter’s voice as he spoke. Tony must be the teen she’d left bound in the woods.
“Tell us what happened today,” Lei said.
“You came.” Danny pointed at her. “And you shot Killah.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. I love dogs.” Lei firmed her mouth to keep it from trembling. “I told Uncle to call his dog. I didn’t want to hurt him.”
“Killah was only Uncle’s dog. He wasn’t nice. One time Uncle he told Killah to stop me when I tried to run away.” Danny lifted one leg of his dirty shorts. A ragged scar was visible on his thigh. “I got sick from Killah biting me. But they nevah take me fo’ go hospital.” As the boy talked, his pidgin grew broader. “He’d have killed you if he could.”
Lei sighed, still conflicted. “Would you boys help me bury the dog after we’re done talking? I don’t want to leave him in the river.”
“So we need names,” Shepherd said. “Names of anyone who came down here that you might have heard or picked up.” He was able to get four names from Danny and Kekoa, including that of the chopper pilot and a description of the bird used to transport the raw marijuana.
“So what did you boys do out here when you weren’t working?” Lei asked. “Did they keep you locked in this shed?”
“Yeah,” Danny said. “Uncle would bring food down once a day and a jug of water.” He gestured to the gallon jug in the corner. “Once we were done working, he locked us in. We had a flashlight, but we usually fell asleep once it was dark.”
“We had video games.” Dexter reached in his pocket and brought out a handheld battery-operated game. “If we worked hard and got a lot done, Uncle would let us watch TV at his place.” He gestured to the other bunkhouse across the stream. Stockholm syndrome, that pattern of attachment to a captor, appeared to be affecting Dexter the most.
“So I have a hard question for you boys,” Lei said. “I came up this valley because I found a skull that had washed down the stream to the beach, and someone found it there. Do you know if there were any other kids, who…?” She thought of how to phrase it. “Might have disappeared?”
The boys shook their heads. “We weren’t the only ones to work here,” Danny said. “I mean, we were the ones working here, but we knew there were others before us. Because of Tony.”
“Yes. Tony.” Lei could well remember the teen she’d beaten with his rifle and left tied with his belt. Now that she saw what had happened to the other boys, she needed to have an officer go check on his location. She’d assumed Boss Man had freed him and taken the teen with him, but now she wasn’t so sure. “Was Tony one of you, working?”