“You’re one hundred percent right,” I say, wiping my fingers clean, and she gives me a wave, drives off, and it just hits me.
Denise and Tom.
That evil voice inside of me, once more.
You know what always happens to most kidnap victims…they may already be dead.
“Shut up,” I whisper, and I clean the trash off my Wrangler’s hood and get back to my mission.
CHAPTER 41
TOM CORNWALL’S catalog and memory of pain is pretty thin, ranging from a broken collarbone while playing high school football to having a jerk of a medical intern putting in two stitches without benefit of anesthesia to fix a cut finger to a piece of shrapnel that nicked him in the ribs in Syria two years back.
So he sees with horror the steady, hot flame of the hand-held torch that Pelayo Abboud is confidently holding in his right hand, and he thinks, It’ll be over soon, it’ll be over soon, knowing the pain that is coming his way will be the worst he’s ever felt in his life, and with the terror coursing through him as the strong man holds his wrist steady, another voice inside of him says: Be strong for Denise. Be strong for Denise. Don’t traumatize her any more. Be strong for Denise.
Then Pelayo lowers his clenched hand with the torch down and—
A lick of flame from the surface of the sun reaches out and laps his arm.
He screams in absolute and bone-crushing pain.
He’s on the floor, sobbing, crying, holding his left arm, shaking all over, his arm shaking the worst, like an exposed tree limb being hit by a strong breeze. He hears another scream and it’s his daughter, and in a sluggish way he thinks, Little girl, what are you screaming about? I’m the one who’s just been burnt.
There’s an acrid smell in the room, of burnt hair and flesh, and he grits his teeth, howling, still holding his wrist up, and then rolls over and vomits up his last meal, whatever the hell that was. Through a fog he hears voices and he’s being moved around and checked and probed, and his little girl is still screaming, and in the thickness of it all, he wants to shout out, Go away! All of you, go away!
He’s picked up and dropped on the other bed. His vision is gray, and his mouth tastes like old nickels, and his arm, his arm, oh my God, his arm, and a man grabs his hair and tugs him back, and Pelayo says slowly and carefully, “You’ve learned a lesson, my friend. Don’t try to escape again. Don’t try to fight me. Don’t try to resist. Don’t make me repeat this lesson, for if I do, your little girl will be the one receiving it.”
Voices, then he hears the distant click of a door being opened, and then the sound of metal hitting metal as the door is slammed shut. He grits his teeth again as the pain continues to throb along his wrist and forearm and right to the base of his brain, one big throb at a time, like a slow wave of hot lava, moving like it’s controlled by the tides.
“Daddy, Daddy,” Denise says, sobbing, and now the guilt collapses over him and he takes a deep breath, and another, and he rolls over, trying to hide his wrist from his little girl, and in a shaky voice says, “You just stay there, all right? Don’t come over here. Just stay there.”
She sobs again. “Daddy, what can I do? What can I do?”
He closes his eyes. His girl is still one brave cookie, bless her.
The pain grows and grows along his forearm, and he lets out a low, heavy moan.
Tom grits his teeth. “Stay brave, hon. Stay brave. Do that for me…and your mother. All right?”
She sobs for another moment, and says, “Daddy?”
“Yes, hon?” God, the pain, the pain…
“I want Mommy to kill him.”
He almost smiles at the determined voice of his young sweetie.
“Me, too, hon. Me, too.”
CHAPTER 42
SPECIAL AGENT Rosaria Vasquez steps out of her car as she sees the young Army officer, Lieutenant Preston Baker, walk away from his rusted red Nissan Sentra to the front door of the apartment complex he lives in, nearly an hour away from Fort Belvoir. Scanning the sad-looking two-story structure that has its siblings scattered around beyond distant parking lots, she sees the entire story of the place. The house was slapped up in a hurry when Fort Belvoir expanded years ago, meeting minimum building codes and using cheap lumber and materials, and the roof is now peeling shingles, the clapboards are warped and shedding paint, and the front lawns—which should have been maintained over the years by the property owners—are merely trampled-down dirt decorated with swing sets, barbecue stations, and broken toys.
It’s a familiar place, bringing back memories of when she briefly resided in such buildings, as a young ward of the state of Maryland.
She briskly walks forward, wanting to catch up with Lieutenant Baker before he passes through the lobby area. He’s slim and freckle-faced, has short red hair, and is wearing the standard ACUs. She knows why he’s here, so far from base. Better to be on your own off-property than to be known around your station as a “base rat,” one who refuses to leave the base boundaries.
He notices her and Rosaria flashes her badge. “Lieutenant Baker? Special Agent Vasquez, CID. I need a few minutes of your time.”
He just nods and his shoulders sag a bit, like he had always anticipated this happening, a CID agent wanting to talk to him.
“Sure,” he says. “Right this way.”
The inside of his small apartment surprises her, for it’s neat and tidy. The furniture is old and dented, no doubt salvaged from Goodwill or the Salvation Army, but the old carpet looks like it’s been freshly vacuumed, and there’s a small TV and homemade bookshelves, lengths of wood and concrete blocks jammed full of paperback books. Rosaria has spent enough time on previous interviews with male service personnel, wading through ankle-deep piles of trash—porn magazines, empty pizza boxes, crushed takeout containers—that this is a nice change of pace.
She sits across from him, and he answers her initial questions with ease and no sign of the earlier concern. Born in Washington, local schools, community college. One day, on a 9/11 anniversary, he spent hours glued to the television, seeing the old footage of the collapsing towers, the burning Pentagon, and the smoking hole in the ground in Pennsylvania.
So he enlisted and eventually entered the military’s famed language school in Monterey, learned Pashto, and after additional intelligence training, was sent off to Afghanistan.
“I was assigned to be with Captain Cornwall,” he says, his pale, freckled hands holding his Army cover between his knees. “We were at FOB Healy in Kunduz Province…the place was named after a Navy SEAL hero who died a number of years back. You ever been at a forward operating base, ma’am?”
“No, I haven’t,” she says. “What’s it like?”
“Like…you’re on the surface of the moon. Desolate for klicks and klicks in every direction—rock and sand and scrub brush. Rough mountains where the Taliban would set up mortar positions and drop rounds on us every now and then. A handful of villages off in each direction. Week to week, you never knew which village supported the government or the Taliban. It was…like nothing I’ve ever seen. Nothing. Reinforcements and supplies came in by chopper. We were entirely cut off.”
Even in this safe living room in Virginia, Rosaria could sense the fear and memories coming forth from the young lieutenant. “What was your MOS?”
“Zero-nine-lima, ma’am,” he says, “translator for whatever prisoners came our way, either captured by our patrols or the government forces. I was with Captain Cornwall when she was doing her interrogations.”
“Interesting work?”
He shakes his head. “Most times it was goat herders or poppy farmers who said they weren’t Taliban, that they was just carrying AK-47s for personal protection, stuff like that. Most of the time we just took their photos, fingerprints, DNA swabs, and either sent them on their way or gave ’em back to the government forces.”
Rosaria looks down at the thin file that contains the notes and paperwork for the Cornwall investigation. “But there was one
prisoner that stood out, am I right?”
He quickly nods. “That’s right, ma’am. This guy…his name was Mohammed Something-or-another. He was different.”
“Different how?”
“He was older, that’s what. Maybe in his forties, fifties. Pretty well-dressed, in good health…I mean, some of these villages, you see a guy that looks like a grandpa who’s been smoking cigars and eating raw sugar all his life, and you find out he’s only thirty. It’s a hard place. But this guy looked okay. And he spoke English.”
Rosaria pauses. That wasn’t in the initial investigative report. “Really? How well did he speak it?”
Baker smiles. “Crap, better than me. Almost an English accent, like he went to some fancy school in Britain or someplace like that.”
“Why was he picked up?”
“Some tribal leader from one of the villages, he narked him. Said this Mohammed didn’t belong, was from far away, was from the Taliban. But Mohammed said that wasn’t true. He said he was a simple farmer…was just passing through to visit relatives in some other village.”
“Did Cornwall believe him?”
“No,” Baker says.
“Why?”
“Because of his feet.”
Rosaria says, “His feet?”
Another slight smile. “Yeah, his feet. He claimed that he was a simple, poor farmer, did a lot of walking and riding on horses or mules, but Captain Cornwall, she made him take his boots off. And his feet was nice and soft. Not covered with calluses and thick skin like you’d expect.”
“What happened next?”
“The old guy, he kept on smiling. But he shut up. And he was put in one of the cages…and came out the next day for another go-around, and kept his mouth shut, and then another day…and Captain Cornwall, she was getting a lot of calls from up the chain. Demanding answers. Leads. Like I said, this guy didn’t fit in. A farmer? His hands were almost as smooth as his feet. The captain’s superiors…they thought he was a real catch. She was under a lot of pressure to break him.”
Those last two words, break him, catch her attention. “Did she do that, then? Break him?”
“Well…”
“Lieutenant, need I remind you of your responsibility here, to answer my questions fully and faithfully?”
Baker just nods at that, swallowing hard. “It’s like this…she got really pissed and said she was going to his cage, to talk to him, one-on-one, to get what she needed…and then a while later, the call came out. Medics were brought in. The guy…they hauled him out in a wire basket, and I caught a look. His face was bruised, there was blood coming out of his mouth, and his eyes were wide open, staring up.”
Rosaria waits, and then Baker says one more sentence.
“Ma’am,” Baker says, “Captain Cornwall, she killed that prisoner.”
CHAPTER 43
I CHECK my watch, see I have two hours to make my phone call to the kidnapper of my beloveds, and I’m only an hour away from Three Rivers, Texas. That gives me sixty minutes to scope out the address, do a brief surveillance, and then get the job done—freeing a prisoner from that house and taking him…well, taking him to the criminal who took my Tom and my Denise.
I allow myself a brief moment of satisfaction. The drive down from Alabama through Mississippi, Louisiana, and now Texas has been grueling. I was able to stop and sleep for a while, but there’s not much on the interstate to break up the monotony but flat farmland, swampland, and industrial landscapes clouding up the horizon. Somewhere along the way I also stopped off at a huge Walmart Supercenter to steal and switch out license plates. Not much of a camouflage, but it’s the best I can do. Twice road construction has slowed me down, but I’ve been able to make up the time without getting the attention of any law enforcement.
Now I’ve passed through the high-rise obscenity that’s Houston, and I’m on US Highway 59, heading southwest through heavy rain. Earlier I spotted the anvil shapes of heavy thunderstorm clouds racing across the flat fields, and the torrential rain has been pacing me for at least twenty minutes, the flashes of lightning in the near-black clouds reminding me of those long, dark nights at FOB Healy in Afghanistan, seeing tracer rounds emerge from the nearby rocks and ravines, as the Taliban continued their daily quest to eject the newest invaders from their homeland.
As I hear the booming thunder, I try to suppress the memories of the rocket and mortar attacks, the explosive rounds dropping in and exploding while I huddled in the bomb shelter with the other noncombatants.
The traffic has been light in the past hour or so, but now it starts to thicken. I sit up and try to stretch my aching back.
Up ahead, more taillights flickering red.
I don’t like it.
I see my speed start dropping, from seventy miles per hour to sixty to fifty and now in the forties, and I really don’t like it.
What the hell is going on?
I try to peer to the side and just see the traffic slowing down even more, the taillights flickering red and then staying steady red.
The Wrangler’s speed continues to drop.
Thirty-two.
Twenty-nine.
Twenty.
Ten.
Three.
Full stop.
Damn it!
Horns around me blare, and I just squeeze the steering wheel hard, knowing honking my horn won’t do a damn thing.
But I honk it anyway.
I wait.
All right.
Maybe a traffic accident, or a jackknifed truck, or a sinkhole in the road.
Something.
Check my watch.
Five minutes have passed. That means I’m already five miles behind.
We stay stock-still.
Then the Subaru station wagon ahead of me with a DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS bumper sticker moves ahead a few feet and stops.
More waiting.
I lower the driver’s-side window, stick my head out, get drenched.
All I see ahead of me are the line of cars and the red taillights.
Another five minutes slip by.
Another five miles lost.
I roll up the window, lean over to the passenger’s seat, take out my atlas and a road map of this part of Texas that I got from a service station an hour ago. There’s got to be another way out of here. With my four-wheel drive I could scoot across the grass median, get on the highway heading northeast, find a state road that will at least get me headed in the right direction.
Somebody hammers at my window.
I yelp in surprise, drop the maps, thrust my hand into my open leather bag, and grab my revolver.
CHAPTER 44
A HISPANIC male, thin mustache, black hair flattened down by the rain, eyes wide with fear or terror, wearing a soaked checked shirt and blue jeans, slams both hands again on my window.
“Por favor!” he yells. “Please! Mi familia! My family! They’re drowning!”
I roll down the window, keeping the other hand with the revolver hidden. “What?”
He points down at the length of stalled cars. “Mi familia! They are in my car! Por favor! Help me rescue them! Your Jeep! Please!”
My first thought is brutally honest and real. Sucks to be you, I immediately think, because I need to get moving to rescue my Tom and Denise. A few hours ago I almost murdered an innocent Tennessee police officer, up close and personal. It wouldn’t take much to abandon this terrified father and husband.
Then, just as quickly, I’m ashamed of what just went through my mind, and a calmer voice makes an appearance: Help this guy out right now, you can get the traffic moving, it’ll be faster than trying to puzzle out the maps to find an alternate route.
I shout, “Get in!” and I toss the maps in the back, along with my revolver, now in my leather bag. He runs past the front of my Wrangler, gets into the passenger’s side, soaking everything, and he says, “Hurry! ¡Rápido! ¡Rápido! Please!”
I put the Jeep into reverse, slam it into first, start dri
ving down the side of the road, half of the Wrangler on pavement, the other half on the muddy median. Up ahead two pickup trucks have pulled over and I roll up, and there are a couple of men there, in cowboy hats and long yellow rain slickers, and they wave me on, past torn-up grass and dirt where it looks like a vehicle has skidded off the highway.
As I slow down, my passenger jumps out and I put the Jeep into park, step out.
The rain’s heavier.
I take in the scene in one long, hard glance.
To the right is a plain concrete bridge, two-lane, spanning what was probably a trickling stream, but not today. It’s a roaring, racing river, with torrents and whitecaps and sprays of spume, and down the muddy grass embankment, there are a line of people, holding hands, trying to get to an overturned red Chevrolet in the rapids.
The would-be rescuers are not going to make it.
The water’s moving too fast, too hard. It will knock all of them off their feet.
I get back into my Jeep, make a muddy U-turn, and back my way down the embankment, looking at the rearview mirror and side mirror, trying to gauge where I am.
I brake hard, get out, and go to the tailgate, slam it open.
Nestled under an old blanket, a fire extinguisher, and a toolbox is a length of chain. I always keep a chain in my Jeep for those few times each winter when an inch of snow causes Virginia to collapse in chaos, with cars and trucks off the freeway.
I hook the chain onto the trailer hitch, and the Hispanic man, eager to help, grabs the other end of the chain, goes down to the overturned car, fastens it to the rear axle.
He waves at me. “¡Rápido! Please!”
I get back into the Wrangler, shift it into low, and then look at the side-view mirror, get a glimpse of the chain, and see it move up and get taut.
Now.
I hit the accelerator, the wheels churn and spin, and I make a few feet of progress. I look up again and the Chevrolet is moving. It’s moving.
The Cornwalls Are Gone Page 11
