Adirondack Attack

by Jenna Kernan

  Dalton groaned.

  “Too bad,” said the copilot.

  Alice smiled brightly, standing in a line beside Brian. The only thing missing was the wall to make this a perfect setup for a firing squad. Dalton had a pistol but it would hardly be a match for three armed mercenaries. They’d kill him and, more importantly, they’d kill Erin. So he waited, backing her up with a firm pull on her arm. They now watched through the cover of pine boughs.

  Dalton knew what would happen next. He ran through possibilities of what he could do, if anything, to prevent it.

  “Do something,” whispered Erin.

  “If I do something, they’ll know our position.”

  “They’re going to kill them.”

  “I think so.”

  “So save them.”

  “It will endanger you.”

  “What would you do if I wasn’t here?”

  He glanced at her. “You are here.”

  Dalton watched from his position. “Get behind that tree.” He pointed. “Stay there and when I say run, you run for the kayaks.”

  “Dalton?”

  “Promise me.”

  She met his gaze and nodded, then stepped behind the thick trunk of the pine tree. He moved beside her.

  In the clearing, one of the new arrivals glanced in his direction and then back to Alice.

  “You retrieve anything from the craft before it went down?”

  “Yeah,” said Alice,

  Dalton aimed at the one with the rifle.

  “What exactly?”

  “A red cooler. We have to take it to the FBI,” said Brian.

  “That so? Where is it now, exactly?”

  Brian seemed to have realized that he faced a wolf in sheep’s clothing because he rested a hand on his neck and rubbed before speaking.

  “Back by our tents,” he lied. “I’ll get it for you.” He turned to go.

  The man with the aviator glasses motioned for the pilot to follow. The copilot lifted his hand to signal the shooter. The rifleman raised his weapon and Dalton took his shot, dropping him like a sack of rags.

  By the time Dalton swung his pistol away from the dead man, the copilot had Alice in front of him, using her as a human shield.

  “Come out or she dies,” said their leader.

  He didn’t, and the man shot Merle and Richard in rapid succession. They fell like wheat before the scythe.

  From the brush where Brian had disappeared came the sound of thrashing. Dalton suspected the teen had made a run for it.

  The copilot dragged Alice back toward the chopper, using the nose cone as cover, as he shouted to the pilot. Another shot sounded and Alice fell forward to the ground, shot through the head.

  “Kill whoever is shooting. Then find the sample,” said the copilot.

  “The boy?”

  “No witnesses.”

  Dalton leaned toward Erin and whispered, “When they find that cooler, they’ll kill us. You understand?”

  She nodded.

  “Run!”

  Erin didn’t look back at the carnage. Instead, she fled down the trail toward the river. Dalton had a time trying to keep up.

  At the bank of the Hudson, Erin finally came to a halt. She folded at the waist and gripped her knees with both hands, panting.

  “They killed them. Just shot them down,” she said.

  Dalton thought he’d heard his wife express every emotion possible from elation to fury. But this voice, this high reedy thread of a voice, didn’t seem to belong to Erin.

  “Where’s Brian?”

  He wouldn’t get far with two trained killers on his trail.

  Erin, who had just belayed into a river and rescued a wounded man. Who had led this group here to disaster. Who had just watched three more people die. The first deaths she’d ever witnessed.

  A sharp threat of worry stitched his insides.

  She straightened, and he took in her pale face and bloodless lips. He felt a second jolt of panic. She was going into shock.

  “Erin.” He took a firm hold of both her elbows and gave a little shake. “We have to go now.” Her eyes snapped into focus and she met his gaze. There she was, pale, panting and scared. But she was back.

  “Brian,” she whispered and then shouted. “Brian!” He appeared like a lost puppy, crashing through the brush, holding one bleeding arm with his opposite hand.

  Behind him came the pilot. Dalton squeezed off two shots, sending his pursuer back into cover.

  Erin and Brian crouched on the bank as Erin removed a red bandanna from her pocket and tied it around the bullet wound in the boy’s arm.

  She closed her mouth and scowled as a familiar fierce expression emerged on her face.

  “Those animals are not getting away with this.” She glanced toward the trail. His wife was preparing to fight.

  “Erin, get into your kayak. Now.” He tugged her toward the watercrafts.

  She paused and looked at her pack and the paddle already in place for departure. Then she glanced at him.

  “You knew?”

  “Suspected.”

  She clutched Brian’s good arm. “He can’t paddle with one arm.” She wiped her hand over her mouth. “And you don’t know how to navigate in white water.”

  True enough.

  The kayaks each held only one person. Dalton took another shot to send their attacker back behind the tree.

  “He’ll have to try,” said Dalton.

  “Get in, Brian. I’ll launch you.”

  Tears stained the boy’s pink, hairless cheeks, and blood stained his forearm, but he climbed into a kayak. Erin handed him a paddle and shoved his craft into the river.

  “Now you,” she called to him.

  He knew what would happen when he stopped shooting. They’d be sitting ducks on the river.

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Dalton. No.”

  “You promised,” he said.

  Brian was already in the current, struggling to paddle.

  “Go,” he coaxed, wondering if this was the last time that he’d ever see her.

  She went with a backward glance, calling directions as she pushed the kayak into the Hudson.

  “Get to the center of the river and avoid the logs. Hug the right shore going into the first turn and the left on the second. How far are we going?”

  “Get under cover.” They would be sitting ducks on the river once the chopper was airborne. He needed to kill that pilot.

  “Got it.”

  He moved his position as the pilot left cover to fire at what he assumed was three kayakers.

  Never assume. Dalton took the shot and the man staggered back to cover.

  Body armor, Dalton realized.

  He caught a glimpse of the man darting between the trees in retreat. He took another shot, aiming for his head, and missed. Then he climbed into the kayak. Erin’s graceful departure had made the launch look easy. His efforts included using the paddle to shove himself forward, nearly upending in the process.

  He moved by inches, shocked at how much his abdomen ached as he felt the grass and earth dragging under him. The river snatched him from the shore. He retrieved his double-bladed paddle, glancing forward to catch a glimpse of Erin before she vanished from his view. The pitch and buck of the river seemed a living thing beneath him, and this was the wide, quiet part.

  He used his paddle to steer but did not propel himself forward. The river began to churn with the first set of rapids. He rocketed along, propelled by the hydrodynamics of the surging water.

  Above him, the sky blazed scarlet, reflecting on the dark water like blood. Erin had never seen a dead body. Today she had seen six.

  As if summoned from the twilight by his thoughts, he glimpsed Erin on the far bank, towi
ng Brian’s kayak to shore. He tried and failed to redirect her.

  Erin reached the rocky shore and leaped out, holding both crafts as Brian struggled from his vessel. He didn’t look back as he ran into the woods and vanished.

  Dalton shouted as he slipped past her, using his paddle in an ineffective effort to reverse against the current.

  He still splashed and shouted when Erin appeared again, towing an empty kayak. She darted past him, her paddle flashing silver in the fading light. She took point and he fell in behind her, mirroring her strokes and ignoring the painful tug in his middle that accompanied each pull of the blade through the surging water. She hugged the first turn just as she’d instructed him and he tried to follow, but swept wider and nearly hit the boulder cutting the water like the fin of a tiger shark.

  She glanced back and shouted something inaudible, and they sped through a churning descent that made his stomach pitch as river water splashed into his vessel’s compartment. He could hear nothing past the roar of the white water, and neither could Erin. He knew this because he spotted the second turn in the river at the same moment he caught the flash of the red underbelly of the helicopter.

  Erin’s head lifted as the chopper swept over them and took a position downriver, hovering low and then dropping out of sight. It would be waiting, he knew, low over the water to pick them off when they made the next turn.

  Hug the right shore on the first turn and the left on the second. That was what she had told him, but his wife was very clearly making a path to the right on this second turn.

  Dalton struggled to follow against the pull of the river that tried to drag him left. On the turn he saw the reason for her warning. There before him loomed the largest logjam of downed trees he’d ever seen, and it rushed right at them. Waves hit the barrier and soared ten feet in the air, soaking the logs that choked the right bank of the turn. The pile of debris seemed injected with towering pillars of rock.

  It occurred to him then why most groups did not run this section of the river and never after a release from the dam.

  Erin performed a neat half turn, riding a wave partially up the natural dam as the second kayak flipped. The river dropped her back and she pulled until she grasped a branch near the shore. She held on as the river tore the empty craft from hers. The empty vessel bobbed up beyond the logs and sped downriver as Erin struggled to keep hers from being dragged under the web of branches.

  He tried to mimic her maneuver but instead rammed bow-first into the nest of branches. The water lifted the back of his kayak while forcing the bow down and under the debris.

  “Grab hold,” Erin yelled.

  He did, managing to grip the slimy, lichen-covered limb as the kayak continued its path downward and into the debris. He used both feet to snag the shoulder straps of his pack as his watercraft vanished beneath him. His stomach burned and he knew he could hold his pack or the limb, but not both. His current physical weakness infuriated him, but he dropped his pack. It fell to his seat in front of the red cooler decoy. Both his gear and the kayak were pulled under.

  He hauled himself farther up on the debris as his kayak resurfaced beyond the fallen tree limb where he clung and his craft was whisked away.

  He sighed at the loss, but with his feet free he could now climb to a spot above where Erin was snagged. He help move the nose of her craft back and clear of a branch. Then she dragged and pulled herself toward the shore. Just a little farther and the current calmed. Erin shoved with her paddle and reached the shallows as he scrambled beside the log dam.

  How many seconds until the chopper realized they were no longer on the river?

  Chapter Five

  Erin clambered onto shore, pausing only to tug her backpack from the inner compartment. Dalton dropped from the brush pile to land in the shallows beside her and dragged her kayak off the shore and well into the cover of the pines before halting to look back at the river.

  No one ran that portion of the river on the day of a planned release. The water was too deep and too fast. She was shocked she hadn’t rolled under the mass of twisted branches. Even experienced paddlers could be pinned by rolling water or submerged obstacles.

  She looked back at the river now thirty feet behind them. The sound of rushing water abated. The roar lessened to a churning tumble, like a waterfall.

  By slow degrees, the sound changed to something mechanical. The whirling of the chopper blades, she realized.

  The killers had waited long enough. They were coming upriver.

  Erin shouldered the second strap of her pack and crouched down as the helicopter swept low over the water, heading upriver. Dalton paused for its passing, then grabbed the towrope and hauled the kayak farther back into the woods until he and her vessel disappeared.

  The helicopter raced past again and then hovered over the brush pile. Could they see Dalton’s pack or his kayak? They definitely saw something.

  How was this even happening?

  Was Brian all right? He couldn’t paddle with his wounded arm and she knew she’d never navigate the rapids towing him. The choice was hard, but leaving him gave him his best chance. They wouldn’t know where or on which side of the river to find him. His wound was serious but he could walk, run actually.

  Run and hide. When they’re gone, when you’re certain, you can find the river trail. The blue trail. Follow it upriver to the road.

  He’d understood, she was sure, but with his pale cheeks and the shock, she didn’t know if he could make it to safety.

  “Please let him be all right,” she whispered.

  If her muscles didn’t ache and her teeth weren’t chattering, she’d try to chalk this up as some bad dream. Instead, it was a full-fledged nightmare. A waking one.

  Her mind flashed on an image of Carol Walton, her stomach torn open by a soulless piece of debris that could have struck any one of them. Erin covered her eyes, but the image remained, emblazoned in her mind. That flying metal could have killed Dalton just as easily as Carol. And then she’d be dead in that meadow with her entire outdoor adventure group. Erin’s shoulders shook.

  Something warm touched her arm and she jumped. Dalton squeezed and she rolled into the familiar comfort of his embrace. She forgot the imminent doom of the men on the helicopter lurking just a few yards from where she wept in her husband’s arms. He let her go after a few minutes, rubbed her shoulders briskly and drew back.

  “We have to go,” he said.

  She nodded and sniffed. “Will they think we’re dead?”

  “Here’s hoping. Will your kayak hold two?”

  “No. We’d swamp in rough water.”

  “Then we go on foot.”

  “Where?”

  “As far from here as possible.”

  She nodded and then looked around.

  “They’re gone?” she asked.

  “For now.”

  Under the cover of the trees it seemed that night had already fallen, until you glanced at the purple sky visible through the gaps in the foliage.

  Where was Brian?

  “Do you think they’ll catch him?” Erin could not keep the tears from coming as she spoke. “I had to get him to shore. I couldn’t...he couldn’t...”

  Dalton gathered her in.

  “It was the right choice. The boy has a better chance away from us.”

  “I was afraid he’d upend and drown. I told him to hide and then how to walk out, but he’s bleeding and scared.”

  “He’s young and strong.” Dalton released her. “He’ll make it.”

  Was he just telling her what she needed to hear? She didn’t know, but if Brian survived, it was because Dalton did as she asked. His remaining at her request had saved the boy, at least. Or it might have.

  “Which way?” he asked.

  “Well,” she said, adjusting her pack. “We should head downriver. That’s t
he closest place to find help.”

  “Then they’ll expect us to head that way.” Dalton looked in the opposite direction. “What’s upriver?”

  “Brian, I hope, and the dead.”

  He turned back to her, and she knew that the tears still rolled down her damp cheeks.

  “I’m sorry about them, Erin. If we are lucky and smart, you’ll have time to process this and grieve. But right now we must get clear of this spot. We need full cover, and the more difficult it is to follow us the better.”

  “Maybe we should head west awhile. There isn’t much in that direction. Not a destination. Then we can turn either to Indian Lake or Lake Abanakee. There are vacation cottages on both. Golf courses, some camping.” She turned in a full circle tapping her index finger on the small indentation between her upper lip and nose.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You know, they’ll expect us on this shore.”

  “Because they saw my gear on the jam.”

  “Yes, so what if we cross the river?”

  He frowned, really not wanting to get back into that sucking vortex of death.

  “How?” he asked.

  “I’ll cross with the towrope tied to my kayak. You keep hold of the throw ball until I’m ashore. Then, you can haul back my kayak and use it to follow me.”

  “What if it tips on the way back? Then you’re over there and I’m over here.”

  “Won’t matter if it tips. It won’t sink.”

  “Then we go together.”

  “The kayak won’t sink, but it will be floating beneath the surface. We’ll be swept out.”

  He nodded. “All right. One at a time. You first.”

  She gave him an impatient smirk for repeating her plan back to her, only this time taking credit, and then gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Good plan. Let’s do it your way.”

  He flushed as she sat to wait out their pursuers. The chopper continued to circle them like a shark smelling blood. Finally, their pursuers flew up and out of sight. Erin and Dalton waited for full dark so their crossing would not be noted.

  Then she tumped the kayak, carrying it upside down on her head over the stretch they could not paddle. Dalton tried to take it, but the pain of stretching his arms too far above his head made it impossible. Erin carried the craft a quarter mile downriver to a spot beyond the turn. After that, he helped load her pack and held on to the thin cordage as she pushed off and flew out of his sight. He marked her progress by the line that slipped over his palms. He eyed the diminishing line, worrying that she would not reach the opposite shore before he reached the end of the towline. He wasn’t sure that she’d calculated how far downriver the current would carry her before she could reach the opposite bank.