Ginny Weller startled up from the darkness, squinting, hands up defensively, starting to scream. She had backed herself into the corner. Her tank top was soiled, as were her arms and legs. An advancing shadow fell across her face, blacking out her image. Joe Reed’s cold, clipped voice gave direction in the background:
Ginny put up a fight and Dale had to wrap her in his thick arms and smother her down. He jabbed her with one of those pens. The picture ended.
Dale turned and spoke in a bland voice, “I couldn’t stand to touch her when she was all squirmy and sweaty and dirty. The thing was, she wasn’t ready for me. So, the way it worked out, I had to prepare her.”
Prior to 9/11, Nina traveled back and forth between her posting in Lucca and the Joint Special Ops Task Force in Sarajevo. JSOTF targeted Serbs wanted by The Hague, and some of the pickup raids required covert female operators. During these operations she became acquainted with a Ranger captain named Jeremy Stahl. They had in common that both were the same age and both were going through career-related strife in their marriages. They were alone and attempting not to be lonely. Their flirtation was chaste and did not go beyond a few good-night kisses.
One early fall evening they went to a bar in Measle Alley. The street took its nickname from the Bosnian practice of commemorating their dead by painting red dots the size of large dinner plates on the street or sidewalk where they had died from shell or sniper fire. It was hard to walk a straight line anywhere down Measle Alley without stepping on a dot.
They drank beer in a bombed tavern that was missing most of its roof. They could watch the stars come out as they ate bad Bosnian pizza.
Jeremy was a beautiful man, much as Nina imagined Broker must have been when he was young, still in uniform, and standing in the close shadow of death.
Shawing more bravado than good sense, they drank and discussed the worst things in the world. What had she said? Something about never seeing her daughter again.
Christ. What good were words or thoughts? Nothing got you ready for this.
Ginny Weller lay on a white sheet that spread like a puddle of clean snow in the grubby basement. Her chest rose and fell softly. Drugged. Except now she was nude. She had been washed clean of dirt. The white bikini patches of her breasts and crotch gleamed against her smooth tan.
Dale’s shadow preceded him as he approached the mattress. He performed an awkward shuffle, some personal dance of discovery and joy in his nakedness.
He knelt, then got on all fours. Nina watched the limp spiral of Ginny’s arms and legs as Dale tried to position her beneath him.
Nina forced herself to watch everything. He might reveal a pattern, a weakness. The flicker from the screen clubbed her steady eyes. After his second toadlike orgasm, Dale crawled beside the still figure and experimented with touching. Caresses. A kiss.
Helpless, Nina found herself sinking into a corner of perfect grief and hatred. No escaping the single thought that smashed her again and again:
Seven years old. She didn’t know things like this waited out in the world, in the shadows. Just that single thought crashing down like a bludgeon, over and over.
Dale paused the video and explained: “I must’ve got the dosage wrong, or maybe she had a lot to eat before we took her. Because she aspirated-that’s what they call it-threw up and choked her airway. Got a little snuffy there toward the end.” He hit the play button.
His last robotic climax was complicated by the onset of his victim’s rigor mortis. When it was over, Dale rewound the tape and opened the curtains. Just as the daylight flooded in, a fist slammed the side of the camper, echoing deep through Nina’s body.
“C’mon, for Christ sake,” George Khari yelled. “Finish up in there.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dale yelled back. Then he turned to Nina and grinned. “I’m going to be real careful with you, so you last all the way to Florida.”
“C’mon, Dale, we gotta get on the road,” George yelled again.
“Coming,” Dale said, moving forward. He stopped as he pulled the curtain aside, turned, threw her a last exultant grin, and held up his right hand, like in a Boy Scout salute-thumb to little finger, three fingers extended. “You see that? Three times. I bet even Ace couldn’t do it three times in a row.”
Chapter Forty-one
Point to point, the distance from Langdon to Lake Elmo stretched the outside limits for the Black Hawk’s fuel range, even adding in its emergency thirty-minute reserve. The pilots arranged for a refueling stop at the Minnesota National Guard training ground at Camp Ripley, just outside of Brainerd.
The flight plan took them over the Red River Valley, then south toward the Twin Cities. Estimated flight time: two and a half hours. That would put them on the ground in Minnesota between 3:30 and 4:00 in the afternoon.
Broker had never flown in the Black Hawk. Times had changed. As soon as he climbed in, he saw that this bird was special. None of the old noise, or death-on-the-highway reek of av gas, or exposed raw electrical circuits that he remembered from the bare-bones Vietnam Hueys. The cabin was carpeted and lined with two rows of bucket seats that faced in, like a conference room. There were even pockets for drinks in the chairs. Fabric dressed the walls to cover the soundproofing. The pilot and copilot were screened off behind a cockpit door. The crew chief tried his best to make himself invisible, squirreled back in a forward nook.
After they were airborne, Holly talked briefly on a headset, then pulled it down around his neck. “The crew is not happy, but they’ll get us there.” He leaned on his elbows over a complex communications console and rubbed his eyes.
“This is all pretty fancy,” Broker said.
“It’s the MDW.” Holly allowed himself a grin. “Military District of Washington model. Got the VIP package. Everything but a shower. Probably one of the reasons they’re pissed at me. Technically, this bird is a little over my pay grade, but I took it anyway.”
Yeager pointed to the radio. “Who can you talk to on that?”
“Anyone in the world,” Holly said. “But we ain’t breaking radio silence, because if we do, somebody is going to tell us to like, ah, land immediately.” Then he pointed to the cell phone on Yeager’s hip. “Keep trying to reach Fuller.”
Yeager tried again, got the machine. They settled in and waited. Broker realized that with the doors closed, they could carry on a normal conversation. But right now nobody felt like talking. An hour went by that way. Off to the northeast Broker spotted the triple puddle of Leech Lake, Cass Lake, and Lake Winnibigoshish.
Should he call his folks and tell them about Nina’s disappearance? Should they discuss the tactics and timing of telling Kit that her mommy was missing?
Another part of his mind counseled that this pursuit of Dale Shuster was pure denial. According to this part of his mind, he should be getting ready to identify a corpse and make funeral arrangements.
Yeager tried the Fuller number again, with the same result. The machine. He tried directory assistance for construction firms in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area with “Fuller” in their name. No luck. They sat and stared. The steady whack of the rotors torqued up the tension. Holly especially seemed to be getting wound tighter and tighter.
“Pretty smart,” Holly finally said. “Using a piece of construction equipment as a delivery system. Hell, we’re used to seeing them sitting all over the place. Drive right by, never give it a second thought.”
“We gotta wait and see,” Broker cautioned.
“Bullshit. Why go to all the trouble to mill out solid cast iron?” Holly’s voice trailed off as his eyes drifted out the windows. “I just worry we’ll be too late.”
Yeager sat calmly and listened. He had the look of an A student playing hookey; amazed pressure was
