Escape from the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Owen held up his finger, as if calling for attention. “Ah, but trust me, my friend. It is all changing,” he promised. “That’s how it is that I happen to know that Ben Raines is missing.”

  “Missing where?”

  “His plane went down in Alberta, up in Canada’s northwest woods. I doubt they will ever find his ass. You have any idea how wild that country is up there. Hell, last year they found an airplane that crashed on a training flight during World War Two. Can you imagine that? That plane had been there since World War Two, and they didn’t find it until last year.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Roberts said. He walked over to the paper and picked it up.

  “Oh, you won’t find it in there,” Owen told him. “The SUSA doesn’t want the population to panic over the loss of their great leader. They aren’t about to make an announcement that he’s missing and presumed dead.”

  Roberts smiled. “You’re wrong,” he said. “They’ve already made the announcement.” He tapped his finger on the paper. “It is in here.”

  “The hell you say. They announced it in the paper?” Owen asked in surprise. He hurried over for a closer look at the newspaper. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Oh, it’s in the paper, all right,” Roberts said. “You just have to know how to look for it.” He showed Owen the headlines. “Raines City, C.D.,” he said.

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Don’t you get it? They would never name their capital city after Ben Raines if he was still alive. Unlike our own president, he’s not the kind of person who gets off on aggrandizement, whether from self or from others.”

  Owens laughed. That’s a pretty good observation,” he said. “You’re right. Ben Raines is not the kind of person who would let that happen. Now I know why I promoted you.”

  “The dumb assholes don’t want to let it out that their great leader is missing, but they announce that they are renaming Base Camp One after him. That’s the same thing as broadcasting that Raines is dead.”

  “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” Owens agreed. He smiled. “And with Raines out of the way, we can write our own ticket as far as President Claire Osterman is concerned.”

  “What? How so?” Roberts asked.

  “You know many wars she’s fought trying to get the SUSA back into the USA. Well, you and I, my friend, are going to hand Madame President the SUSA on a silver platter. You might say this is our keys to the kingdom.”

  “That’s pretty ambitious, isn’t it?”

  Owen laughed. “Yeah, well, ambition is what this is all about, isn’t it? Come on, we’re catching the next flight to Base Camp One.”

  “We’re going to Base Camp One? Why? What do you have in mind?”

  Owen smiled. “You’ll see.”

  Base Camp One

  As Buddy Raines drove toward his quarters, he wondered where his father was. If the airplane crashed, literally fell out of the sky, then perhaps Ben was dead. Not even his father could survive an accident of such catastrophic proportions.

  But if the plane managed to make a forced landing, and Ben survived the crash, he could still be alive. There would be survival gear on board the plane, and with only the minimum amount of gear, Ben could survive. And Buddy knew that it wouldn’t be a matter of just a few days in the wilds of the northwest woods either. Ben could survive the winter.

  The others were worried, primarily because nobody had yet heard from him. But if the satellite phone was damaged in the crash . . . or even in the crash landing, then Ben would not be able to get word out. But the fact that he couldn’t contact them had no bearing on his condition.

  As Buddy rounded a curve, he saw an overturned car in the road just ahead of him. One man was lying on the pavement, and the other was on his knees, over him.

  “What the hell?” Buddy said, applying his brakes so hard that the car broke into a skid. It was only by skillful manipulation of the steering wheel that he was able to avoid crashing into the overturned car and the two men.

  When the car came to a stop, Buddy hopped out and hurried over to them.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “It’s my brother,” the man on his knees said. “The car, I lost control . . . we turned over. Please help him! I think he may be badly hurt.”

  “Must be internal,” Buddy said. “I don’t see any blood.”

  “Please, see what you can do!” the man on his knees said.

  Buddy got down on one knee, then leaned over to put his ear to the man’s chest to listen for a heartbeat.

  “Well, your friend still has a strong heartbeat. That’s a good sign,” Buddy said. “I don’t think he’s—uhnnh!”

  Buddy grunted as the knife slipped in between his ribs. He looked down at the man on the ground and saw that it was he who had wielded the knife. The man’s eyes were open, and he was glaring at Buddy with more hate than he had ever seen.

  Fighting the pain, Buddy tried to get up, but as he did, the man twisted the knife, then drew it all the way across Buddy’s belly, effectively disemboweling him.

  “Who . . . who are you?” Buddy gasped.

  “My name is Derek Owen,” Owen said, sliding quickly to one side to avoid the blood and viscera that were now pouring from Buddy’s wound. “And you are the first casualty of the New War of Unification.”

  It didn’t take a lot of detective work for Coop and Jersey to figure out what happened. The overturned car told the story. Buddy’s car wasn’t here, but it seemed obvious that he had seen the overturned car and stopped to administer aid. A close examination of the overturned car showed that it had not been a violent roll. In fact, the car had gone over as gently as if someone had merely pushed it over.

  “He was set up,” Jersey said angrily. “The low-life bastards turned the car over, knowing Buddy would stop to help, and when he did, they killed him.”

  “I have to admit, that’s what it looks like,” Coop said as he examined the scene.

  “Oh, Coop, you know what this means, don’t you?” Jersey asked.

  “What?”

  “It means we have let Ben down. He left Buddy in our care, and we failed him.”

  “I feel bad about it, Jersey, but I wouldn’t say that Buddy was left in our care. He was a grown man, after all, and quite capable of taking care of himself.”

  “Yes, well, the point is, Ben is in Canada, we are here, and Buddy is dead.”

  “There is no getting around that,” Coop admitted.

  “If I get my hands on them . . . well, you know what I’d do to them,” Jersey said.

  “Yeah, I know exactly what you would do to them,” Coop replied.

  Coop recalled an incident from their past:

  Coop and Jersey stood over the bodies strewn about the jungle path. Jersey reached over with her foot and kicked Garza in the mouth. “That’ll teach you to kill innocent women and children, you bastard!” she growled.

  Coop glanced at her. He’d never seen her so furious. “You want to scalp the son of a bitch too?” he asked.

  She started to give a sarcastic answer, then hesitated, a thoughtful look on her face. “You know, Coop. Every now and then you come up with a pretty good idea, even if it is by accident.”

  Jersey took out her K-Bar and squatted over Garza’s body.

  “Hey, wait a minute, Jersey. I was just kidding. . . .”

  She looked up at him. “I’m not.” She bent and with a quick slash of the K-Bar, made a circular incision around the top of Garza’s skull, then grabbed his hair and yanked a full scalp lock off in one squishy jerk.

  “Damn!” Coop said, almost gagging at the horrible sight.

  “Listen, Coop,” Jersey said, pausing to wipe her bloody hands on Garza’s shirt. “We’re stuck out here in the middle of a jungle, surrounded by hostiles, with no transportation and no way to phone home.”

  “We can take one of these . . .” Coop started to say, pointing to the Jeeps in the path, until he saw bullet holes in all the hoods and steam comi
ng from each and every motor.

  “Good thought, Sherlock. Wanna try again?” Jersey asked.

  “So, what does that have to do with scalping our enemies?”

  “The only chance we have to survive is to put some fear in our opposition. The more barbaric and crazy we can seem, the fewer men who are going to be witting to come into the jungle after us.”

  “You really think taking a few scalps will scare off men like these?” he asked, pointing to the dead lying around them.

  “Not just scalping, but I have a few more ideas. Remember, I’m part Apache.”

  Coop took a deep breath as he took his own K-Bar from his belt. “Okay, Pocahontas, show me the way.”*

  *Tyranny in the Ashes

  SIXTEEN

  The northwest woods

  Ben was lying on top of a flat boulder, watching as a dozen hunter-trackers worked their way up the trail. They were determined bastards, Ben had to give them that. And they really wanted him bad.

  Ben slid down from the back of the rock and started on up the hill. As he scrambled up the trail, he left footprints in the soft soil, and his body, passing through the thick undergrowth, broke twigs and branches to make his passage.

  Ben was aware of the fact that he was leaving a trail that a blind Cub Scout could follow, but he made no effort to cover his tracks. He wanted them to follow him.

  Miner Cain held up his hand. “Hold it!” he called, and the group stopped behind him.

  “What is it?” Fowler asked, coming up to join him.

  “Nothing,” Cain said. He unzipped his trousers. “I just wanted to take a piss, is all.”

  “Jesus, I thought you’d found something . . . maybe a trail or something.”

  As Cain stood there relieving himself, he looked dispassionately at Fowler. “Do you mean to tell me you haven’t seen the trail?”

  “What trail?”

  “Holy shit, Fowler, use your goddamned eyes, will you?” Cain pointed to the trail, and when Fowler still didn’t see, Cain snorted.

  “Oh,” Fowler said, finally noticing, for the first time, the bent weeds and broken twigs. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

  “What I don’t understand is how someone this dumb has managed to elude us for so long,” Cain said. “Shit, he may as well have put up a sign saying, ‘Here I am, come get me.’ I guess it just proves the old saying: ‘If you want something done right, do it yourself.’”

  Ben put twenty rounds into the little sack, then hung it suspended over a small fire. The sack was held up by a piece of wet rawhide, and the rawhide passed through the flames. The idea was that the flame would dry out the rawhide, then burn through it, dropping the sack of bullets into the fire. Ben figured it would take about forty seconds for that to happen, and another fifteen to twenty seconds before the bullets would cook off.

  Ben waited until he saw the pursuit party again, then he lit the fire. The fire was just to the south of the trail. Once it was burning, Ben moved quickly to get into position on the north side.

  He had selected his spot carefully. From this position there would be nothing to impede his field of fire. He watched them approach.

  Across the trail from Ben, the fire began doing its work. The flames licked at the rawhide strip that held the little sack, dried out the strip, then began eating into it the little strip of rawhide smoked, smoldered, then caught on fire.

  The burning rawhide strip parted, and the sack of bullets fell into the flames. The sack was quickly burned away and the bullets began to heat up.

  “Hey,” Fowler said. “Do you smell something burning?”

  “Like what?”

  Fowler laughed. “Damn me if I don’t think that dumb son of a bitch is smoking a cigarette.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “I can smell it!” Fowler insisted.

  Suddenly, the bullets began to cook off, not quite as rapidly as a machine gun on full automatic, but rapidly enough to indicate that someone was maximizing the rifle’s semiautomatic capability.

  “Return fire!” Cain shouted, firing toward the sound.

  Cain’s men turned their weapons toward the sound, and the little whiff of smoke coming up from behind a bush, and began firing.

  The woods reverberated with the sound of weapons being fired . . . Cain and his men, and Ben.

  As Cain saw his men dropping around him, he began screaming in fury, and concentrated his fire on where he thought Ben was.

  “Kill him!” he shouted. “Kill the son of a bitch!”

  It wasn’t until everyone around him was down that Cain realized the shooting wasn’t coming from the bush. It was coming from behind him.

  “What the hell?” he shouted. He spun around just in time to see the muzzle flash of Ben’s rifle. He didn’t live long enough beyond that moment for surprise to turn to fear.

  “Wait! Wait! Circle back!” Greg Merrill shouted as he adjusted the binoculars.

  Dr. Prescott put the airplane into a steep right turn, which took them back, but also dropped the wing down so that Merrill couldn’t see what he thought he had seen. Merrill waited patiently until the turn was completed, and the wing lifted.

  “There!” he shouted. There it is, right there on that high ledge, between the stream and the drop-off.”

  They had passed over this same place three times yesterday, and this was the second time today, but this was the first time the wreckage had been spotted.

  “Damn, wonder why we didn’t see it before,” Prescott said. “It’s sticking out down there like a sore thumb.” He checked his chart. “Well, we were a little north on our last pass. Maybe that’s why we missed it.”

  “Do a three-sixty,” Merrill said. “I want a good, long look.”

  “You’ve got it,” Prescott answered, complying with Merrill’s request.

  Merrill examined what was left of the airplane. “It looks to be pretty much in one piece,” he said.

  “Except for the nose. That looks pretty smashed up.”

  “That’s true,” Merrill said. “And there’s a lot of residue along the crash path. When there is that much left behind, that means the impact was pretty severe.”

  Prescott started his second orbit of the site. “Any sign of Gerald or Ed?” he asked.

  “No,” Merrill replied. “No sign at all.” He dropped the binoculars.

  “It doesn’t look good, does it?” Prescott said.

  “No, it doesn’t. You think you could put down here?”

  “Sure,” Prescott replied, “if you don’t mind winding up just like them.”

  “Yeah, I was sort of afraid of that. We’re going to need a helicopter to get down there, aren’t we?”

  “You got that right.”

  “Well, we won’t get that from Port Hardy. What do you say we put in at Edson and give our report?”

  “All right,” Prescott agreed.

  Port Hardy

  Paul Kingsley groaned quietly when he looked up from his desk and saw Carrie’s Jeep park in front of the Operations Building. It wasn’t that he didn’t welcome her company. Who wouldn’t welcome her company, as pretty and smart as she was?

  And it wasn’t that she was making a pest of herself trying to determine the fate of her brothers either. In fact, under the circumstances, she had been very understanding about it. But Kingsley had no news to report and he hated having to disappoint her.

  “Hi, Paul,” Carrie said as she came into the office. She was carrying a plate, covered with aluminum foil, and she set it on the counter.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a Bundt cake,” she said. “I thought maybe you could put it over by the coffeepot for the pilots when they come in.”

  “They will appreciate it, I’m sure,” Kingsley said. At that moment the phone rang, and Kingsley answered it. “Port Hardy FBO,” he said.

  The expression on his face changed, and he looked tellingly toward Carrie. “Yes, thank you,” he said. “Please keep me informed.” He hung up an
d stared at the phone for a long, silent moment. He didn’t have to speak. The expression on his face told her everything.

  “That was about my brothers, wasn’t it?”

  Kingsley nodded. “Yes,” he said. He didn’t elaborate.

  “Well?”

  “They have sighted the plane,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Near Maligne Lake.”

  “Any sign of life?”

  “Nothing that they could see from the air,” Kingsley said. “They’re going to try and get a helicopter in tomorrow to make certain.”

  “What do you mean, tomorrow? Why are they waiting? They should do it now.”

  “It’s the same thing I told you earlier,” Kingsley said. “We don’t have that many assets. We are trying to locate a helicopter now.”

  “You said they were close to Lake Maligne. Can’t they land a floatplane?”

  Kingsley shook his head. “Since the big blizzard last year, the lake is filled with logs and underwater obstacles. If someone tried to land there right now, they could wind up ripping out the belly of the plane. Then we’d have two rescue missions under way.”

  “In the meantime, if my brothers are injured and unable to take care of themselves, they have to spend one more night out there,” Carrie said. “Paul, they’ve been out there for three nights now. One more night of exposure could mean the difference between life and death.”

  “Unfortunately, that is true,” Kingsley said. “Believe me, Carrie, if there was anything I could do, I would do it.”

  There is something you can do,” Carrie said.

  “What? You tell me what it is, and I’ll do it,” Kingsley said.

  “You can take me there.”

  “You mean fly over it so you can see the site?”

  “No, I mean put me on the ground there.”

  “How would I do that? I just told you that—”

  “I’ll jump,” Carrie said.

  “What?”

  “I’m an experienced sky diver,” Carrie said. “All I need you to do is get me to the area. I’ll jump.”