The Abduction

by Mark Gimenez

  Ben gave Bubba the biggest smile he could muster.

  “Bubba, nothing more I’d rather do than meet your boys. How about another shot there, podna?”

  11:03 P.M.

  John was driving the Land Rover. Ben was in the back seat with the big dude from Rusty’s; his given name was Archie, but he went by Bubba. He was puking out the window.

  Bubba had been totally shit-faced when they had finally left Rusty’s. Ben had poured a bottle of tequila down Bubba but had never so much as licked his fingers himself. Bubba had no place to sleep other than the bar, so Ben had suggested he stay with them. Bubba had accepted and climbed into the Rover.

  Bubba pulled his head back inside and said, “Fuck me,” then his head fell back, his mouth gaped open, and he started snoring.

  An hour later, they arrived at the Moyie River Bridge spanning the deep gorge they had seen that morning from the helicopter, where Dicky had flown in circles for five minutes, bringing John dang close to barfing his guts up.

  “Pull over,” Ben said.

  John stopped the Rover and cut the engine. No other traffic was on the road at that time of night. Ben got out and walked around to Bubba’s side and opened the door. He slapped Bubba semi-conscious and yanked him out.

  “We there?” Bubba asked.

  “Gotta hit the head,” Ben said. “How about you?”

  Bubba grunted. John went around to their side of the car while Ben helped Bubba over to the bridge rail. Bubba leaned against the low railing, found himself, and starting peeing on his foot. He let out a groan of relief. Down below, white water crashing over rocks was visible in the moonlight.

  “What doin’ … out here?”

  The cold air was reviving what was left of Bubba’s brain.

  “Bubba, what kind of weapons you boys got at the camp?” Ben asked.

  “Stingers … grenade launchers … napalm …”

  Bubba’s words came out slurred and slow, and he was swaying slightly as he spoke.

  “How’s the perimeter booby trapped?”

  Bubba’s head rolled around, and he laughed. “Explosives … trip wire …”

  “Girl at your camp, does she have blonde hair?”

  “Unh-hunh … pretty little thing.”

  “Why does Junior want her?”

  “Says she … belongs with him … Says she's his …” Bubba was finishing his business. “But she’s … just pussy.” He let out a drunken laugh. “Tried to get me some, too … li’l bitch kicked me right in the … goddamn balls.” He turned around, his eyes only slits in his fat face but his mouth grinning and his penis in his hands. “Junior, he wants her for himself, but ol’ Bubba’s gonna get some of her, sure enough.”

  “I don’t think so, Bubba.”

  In a sudden, sharp movement, Ben drove his fist into Bubba’s Adam’s apple and knocked him back into the rail. Bubba gagged and his hands flew up to his throat. Ben grabbed Bubba’s legs and lifted hard, flipping Bubba over the rail. John’s mouth fell open as he watched Bubba’s big body drop four hundred fifty feet and disappear into the gorge below. He couldn’t believe what he had just witnessed.

  “Cripes, Ben! You freaking killed him!”

  Ben was looking down; he nodded. “Unless he bounces real good.”

  “We gotta call the FBI!”

  “We get the law involved, John, and those men will kill her. Or the FBI will kill her trying to kill them.” Ben looked up from the gorge and at John. “Son, the law’s not gonna save Gracie. We are.”

  12:31 A.M.

  Thirty minutes later, they were stopped on the side of the highway again; they were searching the area around a dirt road leading up the mountain. John didn’t have a dang clue what they were looking for. Ben was up the road, far enough that John could only see the light of Ben’s flashlight. Ben’s light suddenly came bouncing toward him at a fast pace. Then Ben came into view.

  “This is it,” Ben said.

  “How do you know?”

  Ben held his hand out. John shone his flashlight on Ben’s palm, on a small white object, tubular, a single word printed on the wrapping: Tampax.

  “I told you. She’s a smart girl.”

  1:18 A.M.

  The moonlight reflecting off the snow provided sufficient visibility for Ben and John to work their way up the steep mountain; they were crisscrossing at angles to the slope through a thick forest of tall pine trees, large boulders, and deep ravines.

  They wore black knit caps, black greasepaint on their faces, black gloves, and black thermal overalls; they could stand still and blend in with the trees. The sniper’s rifle was slung over Ben’s shoulder; a .45-caliber pistol was strapped to one leg and the Bowie knife to the other. His backpack was loaded with ammo, the Starlight Scope, and a power pack, an enclosed car battery used as a portable jump-starter that he had transferred from the Jeep to the new Land Rover in Albuquerque. John was carrying a sleeping bag.

  Ben’s eyes searched the ground, but his thoughts were of an American soldier, nineteen years old, drafted right out of high school, walking patrol in a Vietnam jungle and thinking about his sweetheart back home instead of the ground in front of him. He swings his foot forward as he steps and just as he realizes he has tripped a wire hidden in the undergrowth, he learns his fate: a bamboo mace swinging down into him with great force; a crossbow directly in front of him discharging an arrow aimed at his chest; boards studded with fecal-infected nails springing up and slamming into his face; or a huge spiked log rigged up high in the trees hurtling down on him.

  Ben spotted the trip wire fifty meters outside the security perimeter. Normally, the wire would have been all but impossible to see in the woods; but it stood out against the white snow.

  “Sit,” Ben whispered to John, who immediately dropped to the ground. “Don’t move. I’ve got some work to do.”

  Ben left his son and followed the trip wire through the trees.

  2:17 A.M.

  The seven dead Vietnamese Communists are laid out in a neat row like sardines in a can; a clean black V has been burned into their foreheads with the red-hot branding iron. Lieutenant Ben Brice will never forget the smell of burning human flesh.

  Ben now had the same branding iron in the cross hairs of the Starlight Scope: employing ambient night light, a battery-powered intensifier produced an image seventy-five thousand times brighter than the human eye. A sniper could detect enemy movement up to six hundred meters away. Once Starlight Scopes were deployed in Vietnam, the night no longer belonged to Charlie.

  John had buried himself in the sleeping bag; he was exhausted after the two-hour hike and freezing in the zero-degree temperature. Ben was standing behind a tree, using the scope to scan the camp and to locate the best shooting position. A white SUV was parked outside the main cabin. The branding iron hung on the door of the next cabin over. Two old pickup trucks sat in front of the other cabins, blocking his line of fire to the cabin doors from his present position. Tree cover was available on the east, west, and north sides of the camp.

  Satisfied with the layout of the camp, Ben swept the scope up and searched the area above the camp on both sides. A ridge about five hundred meters west of the camp would be the ideal sniping position if sniping were his only mission; but this was a rescue mission. He needed to be closer to the camp. He was about to put the scope down when he noticed something on that ridge: a movement. Not noticeable to the naked eye, but noticeable through a Starlight Scope. Maybe an animal. He focused in on the location again.

  That was no animal.

  Pete O’Brien was pissed off.

  Low man on this totem pole meant Saturday nights on the mountain. Shit rolls downhill in the Bureau and nowhere faster than in HRT. He put the night-vision binoculars to his eyes.

  Pete O’Brien, a five-year man with the FBI but the rookie operator on this seven-man sniper team, had caught the overnight shift again. The team leader and the senior operators had taken the Humvee down to Coeur d’Alene for the nig
ht; at that moment, they were sleeping in warm beds next to strange women, while Pete was up here on this damn mountain freezing his ass off. At least the wind had died down. The night was so still and quiet he could hear his heart beating. If anything moved on this mountain, he would know it.

  Pete thought of the girl.

  And he thought of HRT’s motto: Servare vitas. To save lives. And of HRT’s mission: to rescue U.S. persons held by hostile forces. If he had a daughter and some hostile asshole abducted her, he’d damn sure expect the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team to save her life or die trying, not to take pictures while she was being raped or killed. But Pete O’Brien was under strict orders to conduct visual surveillance of the “crisis site,” i.e., the cluster of cabins, and shoot 35-millimeter black-and-whites instead of .308-caliber slugs at the bad guys holding the girl.

  She’s a hostage!

  And we’re the Hostage Rescue Team! Not the Hostage Photography Team! Not the Hostage Hope You Get Out Team! Not the Hostage is Probably Being Raped but We Got More Important Shit to Worry About Team!

  This is bullshit!

  What could be more important than that little girl’s life? We ought to blow the door to that cabin and save her life! Or die trying.

  Pete was pissed!

  Pete O’Brien had signed on to save lives. But after killing a mother at Ruby Ridge and letting those children die at Mount Carmel in Waco, HRT had been cut off at the knees. They couldn’t take a shot or a shit without an okay from a suit at Headquarters. And then the World Trade Towers dealt a body blow to the Hostage Rescue Team: HRT had been created for the specific purpose of rescuing airplane passengers held hostage by terrorist hijackers. But if the terrorist hijackers were willing to fly the plane, themselves, and their hostages right into office buildings, what the hell good was HRT? That realization had sent morale to such depths that highly trained and high-testosterone snipers were chasing pussy instead of shooting bad guys on a Saturday night.

  And that was what graveled Pete’s butt. HRT was better trained, better equipped, and better funded than any other civilian law enforcement unit in America—we fly around the country in our own C-130 transport, for God’s sake!—but we never shoot anyone! We never rescue anyone! We never do anything!

  Pete O’Brien was really pissed!

  We wear our cammies and face paint and body armor and pack MP-5s and M-16s and 9-millimeter semis but we don’t do a goddamned thing! We got Bradley armored vehicles and helicopters, we got night-vision goggles and binoculars and scopes, we got flash-bang grenades and explosives to blow doors, we got black paramilitary outfits and polypropylene panties, we got .50-caliber rifles with bullets that’ll blow your head clean off—but we got no balls.

  We’re a bunch of goddamned career bureaucrats scared shitless of fucking up and facing an administrative review or a criminal investigation or a Congressional hearing and losing our jobs and our pensions instead of doing the right thing: taking a chance and saving lives.

  This is wrong!

  Pete O’Brien touched the rifle beside him. He was a trained FBI sniper, qualified at the Marine Sniper School, although he had yet to pull the trigger with the cross hairs on a human being. Sniper School had taught him to stalk a target without detection, to lie in wait for days if necessary for a shot opportunity, to camouflage himself so that to the world he was the mud, the swamp, the trees, the bush, anything but an FBI sniper, to wait for that one moment when the target presented himself, to take the shot, to kill the bad guy, and to save lives. All Pete O’Brien wanted was a chance to do what he was trained to do better than anyone else in the world.

  He felt something cold against his cheek, cold like steel. Like the barrel of a gun.

  3:30 A.M.

  “That’s her,” the FBI agent said.

  Agent O’Brien was looking at the photo of Gracie illuminated by Ben’s flashlight. Ben turned the light on the agent’s map of the camp. The agent pointed at the main cabin with both hands, which Ben had bound with duct tape. He never left home without duct tape.

  “She’s in that cabin, last we saw her.”

  “When was that?”

  “Seventeen hundred hours, day before yesterday. She tried to escape. She didn’t make it.”

  “You people didn’t help her?”

  The agent sighed. “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Orders from the top. The very top.”

  “How many men?”

  “Eleven, all tucked in for the night. Couple of the men got into a fight yesterday, one left, never came back. We don’t know what happened to him.”

  “We do. Agent, why does the FBI want these men bad enough to sacrifice a ten-year-old girl?”

  The young agent shook his head. “Honest to God, I don’t know. Need-to-know basis, and I guess I don’t need to know. But they’ve stockpiled enough weapons in the main cabin to start a war. And they look like real soldiers.” He shook his head. “Whatever they’re up to, it must be something real important.”

  Ben doused the flashlight.

  “Son, there’s nothing more important in the world than getting my granddaughter out alive.”

  5:30 A.M.

  “Eugene, she’s alive!”

  “Who?”

  “Gracie! I called eight times yesterday to your cell phone.”

  FBI Special Agent Jan Jorgenson had finally reached Agent Devereaux at his Des Moines hotel on a land line.

  “Just a second,” Eugene said. Then: “Shit, the battery on the cell’s dead. We worked late, got our man up here. All right, now what’s this about Gracie?”

  “She’s alive.”

  “Start at the beginning.”

  “Okay. After Major Walker was discharged from the Army—”

  “Stop. You went ahead with the search on Walker?”

  “Eugene, I had a bad feeling.”

  “All right, Jan. I’ve had those feelings, too.”

  “Anyway, he holed up on a mountain in Idaho, got married, had a son. He was plotting a military coup. We received an anonymous videotape twelve years ago. We got lucky, apprehended him in Idaho ten years ago. Top secret.”

  “Must be why I never heard about it.”

  “Must be. Anyway, before he could be tried—oh, Elizabeth Brice was one of the Justice Department prosecutors on his case—his followers took a hostage and threatened to return her in pieces unless Walker was released.”

  “Let me guess—Elizabeth Brice was the hostage.”

  “Yep. So McCoy released Walker, and Walker released her.”

  “And what happened to Walker?”

  “Died in Mexico. Heart attack. Probably precipitated by a few CIA bullets.”

  “Probably. Point is, he’s history.”

  “Except he had a son, fourteen at the time, makes him twenty-four today. Blond hair, blue eyes. We captured Walker when he took the boy to a hospital. They had to amputate his right index finger, spider bite. After Walker was arrested, the boy disappeared. Doctor assumed he died up in the mountains.”

  “From a spider bite?”

  “Hobo spider, like the brown recluse. It can be fatal if untreated.”

  “Did you run a search on him?”

  “Nothing. But there’s more. Every person involved with Walker’s prosecution—the judge, three Justice lawyers, including your friend, James Kelly, and two agents—are dead. Everyone, Eugene, except—”

  “Elizabeth Brice and Larry McCoy.”

  “Yep.”

  “Jesus.”

  “There’s more.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “Our ID on the abductor, Gracie’s soccer coach, remembered something about the abductor that he didn’t disclose after Jennings hung himself.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The abductor was missing his right index finger.”

  “Damn.”

  “There’s more. The call-in from Idaho Falls positively ID’d Gracie in a white SUV with two men, one with
a Viper tattoo.”

  “Stop. I had an agent in Boise—”

  “Dan Curry.”

  “Yeah, Curry. He went to that source and showed him the blowups. His 302 said the guy could not ID Gracie or the men or the tattoo.”

  “That’s what his 302 says, Eugene. But I called the source. Curry never visited him.”

  Eugene was silent for a moment. “I smell a rat.”

  “You got a bad feeling?”

  “Yeah, I got a bad feeling. We’re officially reopening the Gracie Ann Brice investigation—and if they took her across state lines, that gives us federal jurisdiction. It’s my case now. I’ll notify Washington, right after I call Stan.”

  “The director?”

  “The one and only. What else?”

  “Colonel Brice and the father have tracked these men to northern Idaho, a mountain called Red Ridge outside Bonners Ferry. Place is a national campground for these Aryan Nations types and militias and other assorted wackos. That’s real close to Ruby Ridge.”

  “Great. Two things, Jan: First, if Walker’s son is killing everyone he figures is responsible for his father’s death, is he after the president?”

  “Agent Curry didn’t suppress evidence in a kidnapping case on his own.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Eugene, if they’re after McCoy and we know it, we’d have that mountain under round-the-clock surveillance, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “With HRT?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s the second thing?” Jan asked.

  “Why’d they take Gracie?”

  DAY TEN

  6:00 A.M.

  Four years before he will become President of the United States of America, FBI Director Laurence McCoy is having breakfast in the Senate Dining Room with the Majority Leader, trying to convince the senator that the Bureau’s budget should be increased despite the FBI sniper killing that woman at Ruby Ridge. An aide hurries over and whispers in his ear. McCoy excuses himself. A situation has arisen.