Shadows of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel

by Spencer Kope

  * * *

  As we start across the uneven clearing, Nate clings to a darkened spotlight he commandeered from a locker under the seat he’d been sitting in. I don’t know why Bill Gates needs a spotlight, but he’s a genius, so who am I to question?

  The presence of the spotlight, however, gives me a really bad idea and I hiss at Danny, waving for him to return. Taking the light from Nate’s hand, I look for the on switch, but don’t flick it just yet.

  “What is it?” Danny whispers as he crouches beside us, his body just a vague silhouette against the low glow of the burning boat.

  “We can’t come straight at him,” I say quickly and quietly, feeling the urgency of the moment. “He’ll just use Melinda as a shield.”

  “What’s your plan?” Jimmy asks.

  “You two,” I say, pointing at him and Danny, “move off to the right and come at him from the southwest.” Turning to Nate and Jason, I say, “You guys angle around and come in from the northwest. Keep the angles so you don’t end up in a cross fire. I’ll use the spotlight to keep him distracted.”

  “They’re still moving,” Danny argues. “We can’t get in position when the position keeps changing. Let’s just move up and confront him. He’ll have to stop, and yes, he’ll use her as a shield, but he’ll have no choice but to negotiate.”

  I turn to Jimmy. “What are the odds he kills her and then himself?”

  He bobs his head to the left and the right, and then firms it up into a shake. “It’s a risk. I suppose it depends on his opinion of prison.”

  I continue to stare at him, my eyes demanding a better answer.

  “Pretty high,” he concedes.

  That settles it for me and the others, and even Danny seems to back away from a straight-on confrontation. “We need to force him to hold position,” he insists.

  Glancing at the AR-15 slung at his side, I ask, “How’s your aim?”

  His mouth turns up at the corners. “Fair to middling,” he replies.

  * * *

  Two things happen as we execute the plan: one is expected, the other isn’t.

  “Freeze, FBI!” Danny hollers as soon as I light Lorcan up with the spotlight. They’re just words, but they’re good to hear. They bring with them the elemental forces of fire and lightning, and the certainty of cause and purpose.

  As the words cut through the frozen air and into the trees, Lorcan freezes for an instant and then wheels around. Holding his left arm up against the blinding light, he throws his gun hand wildly in our direction and pulls the trigger three times in rapid succession.

  He’s not even close.

  A moment later, when the screaming .223 round from Danny’s AR-15 slams into the tree trunk fifteen feet to Lorcan’s left, striking the exact spot the SWAT commander intended, you can almost see the Onion King loosening his bowels. He springs behind the trunk of the thickest fir tree within leaping distance and tries to drag Melinda with him.

  Sensing her moment, Melinda takes a roundhouse swing at him, misses, and then takes off running. She doesn’t get three steps before he has her by the hair. As he jerks backward, knocking her off her feet, she screams in agony. With unrelenting will, she tries to knee him in the face when he bends to grab her arm.

  This too fails.

  Jerking her to her feet, he takes a hard swing. The sight of his fist is sickening as it connects with her face, and she instantly goes limp, crumpling to the ground. Crouching, and then using her as cover, he drags her rag-doll body behind the tree, his eyes peering over her like a feasting hyena.

  I’m seething.

  Part of me wants to just race into the bastard’s clumsy hail of bullets and end him up close and personal with the Glock. The image of his fist … the sight of Melinda going limp; as I play them over in my head, the evil and injustice of it is almost too much to bear.

  I feel a hand on my shoulder and I jerk. It’s Danny.

  “Well, they’re stopped,” he says quietly, seeming to understand what I’m feeling. “Let’s get this done.” He nods at Jimmy, and the two of them slip off into the darkness to my right. Nate and Jason take that as their cue and move to the left.

  As the teams melt into the night, I turn my attention back to Lorcan, calculating the distance between me and him, between me and the giant fir tree blocking him from my view. It’s not too late. I could just run up and … put an end to him.

  It’s a nice way of saying kill him, I suppose.

  The thought settles over me and after a moment I sigh. Who am I kidding? I killed Pat McCourt three years ago in self-defense and it haunts me still.

  “Focus,” I whisper to no one.

  When the teams are fifty feet away and widening the gap, I call out toward the trees. “You’ve got nowhere to go, Lorcan,” I yell. “We have a team to the north and another one just pulled up on the beach east of you.” The lie comes easily. Any thought the Onion King had of making a run to the north or east just became more consequential. Right now he’s weighing his options.

  I don’t think surrender is one of them.

  “Talk to me, Lorcan,” I shout. “How do we resolve this? You have to be cold and exhausted after that boat ride.” Then, just because I can, I say, “Our helicopter ride was nice and warm, no bouncing up and down in the elements like you were doing. I’m perfectly comfortable staying out here all night if I have to.”

  I’m freezing my ass off.

  If we don’t wrap this up soon I’m going to have frostbite.

  “Walk away or I kill her!” Lorcan yells. His voice is higher pitched than I imagined it would be. I don’t know if it’s out of desperation, or if that’s just his voice.

  Glancing to the right, I see that Jimmy and Danny have worked their way across the clearing to within a hundred feet of the fir tree. On the north side, Nate and Jason are almost as close.

  Danny has a handheld night-vision monocular that he puts to his eye every minute or so to check the position of the other team. Marty continues to hover high overhead, the steady wump wump wump of the helicopter ever-present, but not distracting or deafening. It provides enough background noise that the teams can use their communications gear to coordinate in whispered voices as they draw closer to the target.

  “Tell me, Lorcan,” I call out, continuing my efforts to distract, “was it hard shooting Murphy Cotton? I mean, he was your wingman, right? The guy who did the dirty work that you didn’t have the stomach for.”

  That pisses him off: I can tell from the sound of the bullet flying over my head.

  Sure, it’s twenty or thirty feet over my head, but I can sense the angst as it passes. The good news is Lorcan is a bad shot; he’s demonstrated that twice now.

  As the scene in the woods crawls toward a final confrontation, I spot something moving behind Lorcan—two somethings. Two glow sticks. Jimmy and Danny are still off to my right, Lorcan and Melinda are in the middle, and Nate and Jason are off to the left. There should be six bodies lit up with shine, but I count eight.

  “Please don’t be hunters, please don’t be hunters,” I whisper into the dark. The new arrivals grow larger as they approach, so I call out and distract Lorcan again, risking another lousy shot and high-flying bullet.

  “So, what’s the deal, Lorcan?” I yell. “Why do you smell your victims?” I stretch out the word smell until it’s almost obscene. “That’s a bit weird, don’t you think? Kind of creeps girls out. Hard to get a date when you do stuff like that. But hey, who am I to judge? If that’s your fetish—”

  The next bullet is only ten feet over my head.

  He’s getting better; I guess practice does make perfect.

  When I lift my head again, I see that the new arrivals are right behind Lorcan, maybe twenty feet away, though the distance is hard to judge from this angle. They’re using a tree for cover, but I see them clearly in the light of the spotlight: it’s the crew from Utah.

  All Lorcan has to do is turn around and he’ll see them, but he’s too focused on m
e, expecting the threat to come from my direction.

  It’s perfect.

  He’s hemmed in on four sides. There are a thousand ways this can still go wrong, but one thing is now certain: the damn Onion King is not walking out of here a free man.

  The air crew can’t see the two teams converging on the target, but the teams see them in the glow of the spotlight. I glance over quickly as Danny and Jimmy close the distance.

  There might be an opportunity here.

  “Lorcan,” I call again, “it’s finished. This is it; last chance to walk out of here. Release Melinda and put your hands on the back of your head.” As I speak, a member of the flight crew steps out a little farther from the tree, his gun leveled at Lorcan’s back. As he places his right foot carefully on the snow, something changes.

  I don’t know if a branch snaps or leaves rustle or metal clinks on metal, but Lorcan hears something behind him that shouldn’t be there. He wheels around with frightening speed, and his gun is extended at chest height when the shot rings out.

  The night explodes in front of me.

  A second shot; a third; a fourth, a fifth, a sixth.

  Bodies drop.

  Leaping to my feet, the spotlight in one hand and the Glock in the other, I race across the field and into the trees, closing the distance in seconds. To my left and right I sense movement but ignore it and push on.

  The fresh white snow is stained red where Lorcan lies on the ground, thrashing about in agony. “Don’t move!” I bark, leveling my gun at his head. It’s all I can do not to kick him into oblivion.

  He’s bleeding from an exit wound high in the chest, high enough that it missed his heart and probably his lung, which is a shame. He’s also bleeding from a gut wound, but again, the hole is in a place suggesting that vital organs were spared.

  Some criminals are like cockroaches: they just won’t die.

  Jimmy and Danny are on him a moment later, checking for weapons and then rolling him over roughly so that he’s facedown in the snow. When he’s handcuffed, they roll him onto his side and Danny tends to him while Jimmy joins the flight crew.

  The pilot—his name tag says HANSON—was the one stepping out when Lorcan whirled on him. He’s bleeding from the thigh and is having difficulty catching his breath. Checking him for wounds, Jimmy finds a spent round flattened against his body armor. He’s probably got a broken rib or two, but he’s alive.

  Without the vest, the shot would have been fatal.

  * * *

  They’ll piece it all together later.

  A gun check will show that Danny fired one shot, Lorcan fired three, and Hanson fired two: six shots for four wounds. As close-quartered as the gunfight was, it’s amazing no one is dead.

  We know that Danny fired the shot that staggered Lorcan as he was whirling around to shoot Hanson. The .223 round punched him hard in the upper back and dropped him to his knees. He still managed to fire off three rounds, hitting Hanson twice. Almost simultaneously, the air interdiction agent pulled his trigger twice as he watched Lorcan’s gun rise up on him from a dozen feet away. One round hit Lorcan in the stomach and finished dropping him to the ground, but not before two of the killer’s three rounds found Hanson.

  * * *

  Melinda lies motionless on the ground.

  She’s wearing nothing but a pair of denim jeans and a thin T-shirt, the clothes she’d been wearing when Lorcan snatched her from her cell and rushed her from his underground lair.

  Kneeling next to her, I begin to search for wounds. Her face is so white I convince myself that she’s bleeding internally, dying in front of me. My search becomes more frantic, but I find nothing. No punctured clothing, no gaping exit wounds, no wet fabric red with expiring life.

  Her face is a mess, swollen and ugly where Lorcan punched her.

  I check for a pulse first at the wrist, then at the neck. I start to panic—but then I find it, steady, but weak. Stripping my coat off, I wrap it around her freezing frame. Then, sitting next to her with my back propped up against the fir tree, I lift her off the cold hard ground and cradle her in my arms. If I could stand and hold her I would, but I just don’t have the strength, so the frozen ground will have to do.

  “Help is on the way,” I whisper to her over and over again. “Help is on the way.”

  * * *

  Waiting is the hard part.

  I’m so cold.

  It seeps into me until the world becomes a fog. I hear voices around me, but I can’t tell which belongs to whom. The voices tell me that Navy search and rescue is on the way, so is the Coast Guard, Air Marine Operations, and the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office. Pretty soon I find a blanket wrapped around me. It feels good. It helps.

  A face floats in front of me and I realize that it’s Marty. He tells me they landed when the shooting started, and something about finding an emergency kit, but not in Bill Gates’s helicopter; apparently it was inside Utah.

  My mind struggles with the words and I wonder what Bill Gates is doing in Utah.

  They realize hypothermia is taking me when my teeth begin to chatter and my body shivers with such intensity that my bones start to ache. Still I hold Melinda, willing what warmth I have left into her limp body. I try to speak to Marty, but the words come out stilted and slurred. He has a grave look on his face now, and tells me to save my strength, that they’ll have me out of here in no time.

  Soon the trees begin to move darkly overhead; the world moves, passing me by. I’m lying on my back. Melinda was just here, but now she’s gone. My mind drifts back to another snowy night so long ago, to a time when I got lost in a storm and died. They found my eight-year-old body and revived me, and I came back with … something. It’s that something that found Melinda tonight.

  Am I blessed or cursed?

  In almost twenty years, I still haven’t been able to answer that question. I suppose it’s a little of both.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  No one sleeps well in hospitals.

  When they brought me in six hours ago, I was cold and lethargic. It should have been easy to sleep, but when someone’s coming in every five minutes to check your fluids or your temperature, sleep becomes an impossible dream over a distant horizon.

  Here’s something I didn’t know: it seems when you arrive at the hospital with hypothermia, they need to get your core temperature up before they can start warming the extremities. While I’ve had experience with hypothermia—the whole thing in the woods when I was eight—I don’t remember anything about warming blankets or blood flow to the extremities. The fact that I was dead for part of that earlier episode probably plays a part in my faulty memory.

  The important takeaway from all this is the way they measure your core temperature. No ordinary oral thermometer will do, because your core is basically your torso. That requires a rectal thermometer—or so they say. My rectal thermometer guy is Tug. I’m sure that’s just a nickname … or he has cruel parents.

  One moment Tug is making small talk, and then—wham!

  They should have called him Push and Tug.

  Heather finds it all amusing but has the courtesy to look away before each probe. When she slips off to the cafeteria for coffee, I try to recruit Jimmy to aid in my escape. A minor distraction is all I need, a couple minutes to grab my clothes and make a run for it. I’ll text Heather and tell her I was just released—a minor lie in the larger scheme of lies—and to meet me out front. After that I’m home free.

  It’s a good plan, but Jimmy’s not having any of it. He assures me that we’ll be out of here soon enough. Easy to say when you’re not lying in bed waiting for the next visit from Tug.

  “Flash your badge and tell them it’s a national security matter,” I finally suggest.

  “I’m not going to badge them,” he says, giving me a disappointed look.

  “Seriously, Jimmy, you’ve got to get me out of here. If Pokémon comes at me with that thermometer one more time, I’m going to make him eat it.”

>   Jimmy chuckles at that, and then stands and stretches.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I just want to see if they’re finished with surgery.” He glances at his watch. “They should be out by now.”

  I wave him away as he abandons me to my misery.

  When he returns a half hour later, Heather is back from the cafeteria and desperately trying to convince me that the green cubes in my cup are actually Jell-O.

  “Lorcan made it through surgery,” Jimmy announces, betraying neither joy nor sorrow.

  I have to admit that the Onion King’s short-term outlook had me torn. On the one hand, I wasn’t going to shed a tear for the guy if he bought it on the operating table. It would be justice both earned and deserved. On the other hand, the thought of Lorcan rotting away in a federal prison for the rest of his life is rather enjoyable.

  “It was touch-and-go with Melinda,” Jimmy continues. “She’s doing better now, but they’re going to keep her for a few days. She wants to see you before you’re released.” He studies me for a moment, an odd look on his face—almost proud.

  “What?” I ask, suddenly uncomfortable.

  He glances at Heather and then back to me. “The doctor said she wouldn’t have made it if you hadn’t done what you did. She was already in the early stages of hypothermia when Lorcan dragged her off the boat.” I feel Heather’s hand on my arm, warm and caressing.

  I don’t do well with praise, so before he can say anything else, I ask, “How’s the pilot?”

  He nods and smiles, understanding the diversion.

  “Hanson’s doing better,” he says after a moment. “No broken ribs, but he’s got some blunt-force trauma to the chest that’s going to hurt for the next week or two. He doesn’t recommend getting shot at close range.” Throwing a thumb over his shoulder, he says, “If you want to visit, he’s just three rooms down.”

  “What about his leg?”

  “Bullet went right through. There’s some muscle damage, but all things considered, it patched up nicely. He’s eating ice cream and watching football reruns.”