off would accomplish nothing.
Instead, Ryan said, “I’m sorry. I’m just really, really scared right now. If people come down there and find…” He hesitated to avoid mentioning the dead body, and covered with, “… that I’m missing, they’re going to go ape sh… they’re going to be angry. God only knows what they’ll do then.”
“These people who captured you,” Neen said. “What do you know about them?”
“I know they’re weird. They call everybody brother and sister, and they like to wear hoods. They’ve got lots of guns. They shot up a bridge on the night they took us. Killed a lot of people. I think they’re all about killing people. I think they’re terrorists.”
The sheriff turned onto a better-paved road. “For all these guns and all this violence, they just let you climb out a window and escape?”
“They didn’t let me do anything,” Ryan said. “I snuck out.”
“How?”
“What do you mean, how?” He sensed that the sheriff knew he was holding back, but Ryan didn’t want to give up the business about killing Brother Stephen. Sure, it was an accident, and it was the truth, but the truth hadn’t been working for him so far with this guy.
The road led to the end of what appeared to be a long driveway. The sheriff gunned the engine and they started climbing the hill. “I mean, how does it happen, when you’re in a locked room, that there’s an open window in the first place? And while we’re at it, with armed guards all around, how do you grow a set big enough to escape in the middle of the night?”
“I told you that we were being held prisoner. My mom still is.”
“And how did you get past the guard?” Up ahead, at the top of the hill, a mansion loomed large. Built of white stone with tall white pillars in the front, this looked a lot like the White House. It looked a lot like the house he’d skirted when he was first running away. Could it be the same one after all this driving?
And how had he missed the guards the first time around? They wore black uniforms and carried rifles.
They were the same uniforms and rifles he’d seen in the compound.
Something dissolved in Ryan’s gut, and tears rushed to his eyes.
“Might as well tell me now, son,” Neen said.
Panic shot like electricity up Ryan’s spine as he scoured his universe for options that did not exist. If he tried to fight the sheriff, he’d never have a chance. The guy was huge. If he tried to run, they’d just shoot him down. If he “Ryan Nasbe,” Neen said, “I’m afraid that your bad day is about to get a lot worse.”
Please, God, protect Ryan. Let him find safety. Let him send help. Please.
Christyne wasn’t much into prayer. With a husband who made his living in perpetual harm’s way, prayer grew exhausting after a while. And having watched far too many flag-draped caskets being wept over by wives and children who no doubt prayed for their loved ones’ safe returns, she’d grown a kind of fatalistic outer shell about God and His plans for people. If He wanted them to live, they’d live; if He wanted otherwise, otherwise would happen.
She never admitted her fatalism aloud, of course-especially not among the other Unit wives, who often were fiercely religious-but it brought her an odd sense of peace to entrust all of it to God without her presumptuous interference. Who was Christyne Nasbe to presume that she could know more about the Grand Plan than the divine architect Himself? By placing the fate of her family in His hands, she freed herself to live her life in the present, prepared to accept the good or bad that the future might hold for her while embracing her powerlessness to influence any of it.
When it came to Ryan, though-her frustrating, attitude-filled, beautiful, flawless Ryan-none of that rationalization meant anything.
She needed God’s intervention, and she needed it now.
It felt as if he’d been gone for hours. Surely there had been enough time for him to find help. Enough time for him to find safety. It had to be true simply because the alternative was unthinkable.
Here in the dark and the cold, surrounded by the pall of death, Christyne told herself again that it had been right to let Ryan go for help. She told herself that she wouldn’t have been able to stop him no matter what she did.
How would she ever know whether she’d made the right decision? How can anyone plan for something like this? Later, when all this was over and either they were free or their bodies were discovered somewhere, people would judge for themselves whether she’d been a good mom or a bad one.
She could almost hear the questions she’d be asked by the morning television hosts: Why didn’t you stay at Fort Bragg, where you have friends to support you and your child? Do you think it was wise to let a sixteen-year-old wander out into the night by himself? Wouldn’t it have been better for the two of you to stay together? How does it feel to have killed a man so young, one who was barely older than your own son?
She could hear the questions because they were always the questions that were asked after the fact. In today’s news media, everything bad that happened to children was always the fault of the parent. That her husband was in the military would only cause them to question that more closely.
Boomer, where are you?
This was never the way it was supposed to have been. Christyne was never supposed to have been the crisis decision maker. She’d married a warrior, for God’s sake. One of the most elite in the world. He was supposed to protect her. That’s what she’d thought when they first married, but that was before the reality hit her. In military families, the trained protector was forever protecting someone else. On the home front, crisis control rested squarely on the shoulders of the spouses, everything from broken bones to broken hearts, leaking water heaters to car repair.
Why, then, shouldn’t it fall to her to deal with carjackings and kidnappings? One day, when all of this Something moved outside the door to her cell.
The door burst open, and people flooded into the tiny space. At first they were invisible in the darkness, but then the darkness erupted in white as brilliant flashlights found her eyes and gouged her retinas.
“Take her,” someone said.
Something hit her hard on her cheek. It ignited a flash of purple.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As the whisper-quiet Agusta Westland helicopter flared to land, Jonathan looked at his watch. Six-fifty-eight. From the ground, darkness still ruled, but on their approach, he noted the redness of the horizon, a harbinger of a beautiful day that would arrive far too soon.
He rode in the back of the chopper, with Gail on his right, and as Boxers went through the shutdown procedures, she shot him a look.
“He really is good, isn’t he?” It was her first time on an op with them, and she seemed genuinely surprised by the professionalism.
Jonathan took the comment more seriously than he probably should have. “Do yourself a favor,” he said. “Never doubt the Big Guy.” His words came out sharply, almost angrily. He’d come to think of it as Boxers’ curse: Big Guy’s size and abrasive manner projected oafishness to some people, a general lack of intelligence. They could not have been more wrong. In Jonathan’s experience his good friend was a brilliant technician and tactician who happened to be larger than most monuments. Fearless and intensely loyal, Boxers had pulled Jonathan’s ass out of the fire-both literally and figuratively-too many times to count.
“I need to go get us some wheels,” Jonathan said when it was quiet enough to be heard.
Boxers gave a splayed five-finger bye-bye wave over his shoulder, like something an infant might do. “Go,” he said. “Gunslinger and I can take care of things here until you get back.” Gunslinger had become Gail’s radio moniker after she shot down a helicopter a few months ago using only a rifle. She had rejected two previous handles that Boxers had tried to inflict on her: G-Girl and Triple-A, for anti-aircraft artillery.
“It shouldn’t take me too long,” Jonathan said. Like his colleagues, he wore woodland camouflage clothing, in part for its utilitarian use in blending with the surroundings, but also to blend in socially. This was deer-hunting season, and as in any rural community, half of the people they encountered today were likely to be wearing
