******
Ellen felt pretty disheartened. Their attempts at finding the kidnappers by flying over the jungle using IR goggles hadn’t gotten them very far. The goggles worked. They’d found a sounder of wild pigs and a group of Filipinos that might have been subsistence farming or perhaps just on the run from the law. However, they hadn’t covered very much area. Once they’d found the wild pigs, they’d flown over them a few times to evaluate different arrangements of their flying search party. It turned out that to be able to be sure they wouldn’t miss groups of warm bodies they had to be considerably closer together than they’d hoped. This meant that as they flew along, they didn’t search nearly as big an area as they had hoped. Certainly, if they happened to fly directly over the kidnappers and their charges, they’d find them. However, it would be like trying to blacken an entire sheet of paper using the point of a sharp pencil. If they happened to fly over the captives, they’d find them, but the chances were low that they would happen to fly over them in less than 2-3 months—by which time the area that’d need to be covered would have expanded even further.
Now, the sky was beginning to brighten in the east. Once the ground and the vegetation warmed in the sun’s heat, it would be much more difficult to differentiate the heat of warm bodies from their surroundings. Besides, it seemed that even in a sparsely populated area like this, people flying silently through the air would make the news pretty quickly. Since they were in the country illegally, they couldn’t afford to have the authorities coming out to determine what was going on.
MT-1 had just returned and they’d gotten on board to scrounge through their supplies and eat what would be their dinner. Ardis said, “I’m thinking that since it takes so little time, we should go back to the States to sleep through the night in comfort. We can buy some supplies and return here once it’s dark again to do some more searching.”
Myr shook her head. “I just got a message from Dr. Miller. The government’s trying to appropriate MT-1, so he doesn’t want us to risk taking it back home.”
“Oh my God!” Ellen said, “We can’t land here, we can’t land back at home, where can we go?”
“Arlan’s talking to the Canadian government about letting us land there,” Myr said.
Vinn just shrugged his shoulders, “It’s not really a problem. We could hang out in low Earth orbit for months.”
Myr snorted, “Might get kinda hungry if we stayed up there for months.”
“We could drop in somewhere at night to buy food without anyone knowing,” Ardis said. “After all, we’ll be coming back down here to the Philippines every night until we find the kidnappers. One of those trips we could just stop off somewhere and go shopping.”
Vinn said, “I’m going to take us back up to low Earth orbit before the light gets much brighter down here.”
They’d been talking quietly, but now Ardis bellowed, “Brock! Get your ass up.”
Nina frowned, “Why are you waking him up? He hasn’t gotten much sleep.”
“He thrives without sleep.” Ardis said, “I’m a lot more worried about Killer. But, daytime will provide their best opportunity to try following the trail again before it goes completely cold.” He turned to Vinn, “Can you take us back to where we picked Brock up when it was raining?”
Brock had rolled over with a moan. His dog was up, wagging his tail, and looking excited.
Nina said, “I thought the rain was going to wash away any possibility of a scent trail.”
“Yeah, but during the day, Brock should be able to follow the same path that the kidnappers were following. A group that big will have damaged vegetation and torn up the path to give clues.” Ardis winked at Nina, “Even an overgrown, clueless, gorilla like Brock should be able to follow the trail most of the time. Their only problem will be deciding which fork to take if the path splits. Brock’ll probably be pretty good at figuring that out and any help Killer gives will just be gravy.”
Myr stood, “I’ll go with them. If the trail’s that obvious, maybe even I can follow it.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea…” Vinn began.
Myr gave him a sharp look, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to start trying to tell me what to do.”
With a laugh, Vinn raised his hands in surrender, “Yes ma’am.”
Myr had bent over to scrounge through the supplies for granola bars and jerky. She looked up and stared narrow-eyed at Vinn, “And don’t call me ma’am!” She shook her head and grabbed a couple of bottles of water. “We need canteens. Why don’t you make yourself useful and try to find a place to buy some. Or better yet, some of those backpack thingies that carry water.”
A few minutes later Myr, Killer, and Brock had unloaded and MT-1 was shooting back up through the upper atmosphere.
******
Staff Sergeant Kimball turned and said, “Lieutenant?” After Lt. Baker looked up, Kimball continued, “We’ve got another one of those radar returns that’s going to cross over Alaska.”
Baker sighed, “Same kind of return?”
Kimball nodded. “Same cross-section, same hundred-kilometer altitude, same freaking unbelievable velocity. This time it’s coming from the direction of the Philippines—which is only to be expected since last time it was going that direction.”
Baker looked down at his screen and muttered, “I think we got sent something about this…” He looked up, “DIA wants to know where it’s going so let’s get a good track on it.”
******
Millie sat in John’s 4 x 4 truck out at the edge of the parking lot for Calgary’s Bass Pro Shop. She was pissed. John was supposedly taking her out to dinner for their anniversary, but he just had to stop in at the Bass Pro shop to look at… Well, Millie wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He’d told her, but she just didn’t care about the kind of crap he bought there.
Other than for how much money he spent on it, that is.
He’d sworn it would only take five minutes. Of course, that wouldn’t be counting the five minutes it’d taken him to walk from the edge of the uncrowded parking lot to the store. Lord knows, he couldn’t possibly park his 4 x 4 close to the store for fear someone might put a dent in it. How the man could worry about the paint job on a 4 x 4 he claimed to have bought for off-roading was a mystery to Millie.
He’d been in the store for thirty-five minutes so far and Millie was fuming.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the damnedest thing. Some people floated in over the trees at the edge of the parking lot. It was getting dark, so it was hard to see, but either she was hallucinating, or people were flying. They weren’t rocketing along horizontally like Superman or anything. They were pretty much upright and moving at about the speed of someone jogging. Just after they’d crossed the trees, they floated down to the ground, landed, and started walking toward the store as if nothing at all bizarre had been going on.
Millie rolled down her window and stuck her head out to watch, but there was nothing crazy to see any more. Just three people in camo with little backpacks. She was pretty sure two of them were women! Her eyes tracked them all the way to the store. As they were going in, John came back out.
Millie thought about mentioning the flying people to John when he got in the truck. Then she could ask him whether he noticed anything about them when he passed them as he came out of the store.
But talking to him about that would’ve conflicted with ripping him a new one over the time he’d spent in the store, so…
Chapter 7
Nina sat with Ardis and Brock. She, Ardis and Ellen had gone into the huge sporting goods store in Calgary and bought an astonishing array of equipment and camping food on Ellen’s dime. Then they’d gone to a grocery store on the edge of town and bought regular food for the little kitchen in the spacecraft. Vinn had flown them back around the world while they tried to get some sleep in preparation for another night flying through the sky and peering down on the jungles of the Philippines with IR.<
br />
They’d just come down in the sudden tropical dusk and picked up Brock. Now Vinn was flying somewhere else to pick up Myr. “Why isn’t she with you?” Ardis asked Brock.
Brock shook his massive head as if in awe. “She’s a freaking iron woman! She trotted along beside me for a while as I pointed out the path and various signs that a large group had hiked it recently. With sixteen people tearing up the trail, even after the rain it wasn’t too hard to recognize. The previous night, while I was trying to follow the trail using Killer’s nose, with me looking through my low-light goggles just to keep from tripping, I hadn’t noticed the trail was so visible.” He shrugged, “I mean, not really. I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t have been able to see the signs, but you know how it is after you’ve done this for a while?” At Ardis’s nod, he went on with his tale, “That woman picked up how to follow a trail faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. Then, when she said, ‘You mind if I trot on ahead a little ways to see if I can follow the trail without your help?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ thinking she’d move ahead twenty or thirty yards, but in a few minutes she was completely out of sight!”
“Why didn’t you just catch up to her?”
Brock snorted, “I tried. The woman’s a running machine!”
“But it isn’t safe for her to be out in the jungle by herself! You should have just called her back.”
“By the time I thought to do that, she’d outrun the range of our AIs’ direct comms.” Brock glanced at Ardis and lifted an eyebrow, “And you’d taken the repeater on MT-1 around the world to buy groceries.”
Ardis sighed, “Well, she must be on the wrong trail. She’s seventeen miles off to the east. I guess we’ll just have to start our IR search going north from where we picked you up.”
Brock shook his head, “The trail turned east about a mile back. I’ll bet she’s on it. Remember, they’d been moving east almost the entire time up till their escape.”
When they landed Nina was surprised to see that Myr didn’t look exhausted like you would’ve expected of someone who’d run nearly 25 miles through the jungle that day.
Ellen said a little suspiciously, “What’ve you been drinking? You’ve been out running all day, and I remember you only took two bottles of water.”
Myr laughed, “That’s not a desert down there. There’s plenty of water in the streams and rivers.”
Ellen frowned, “You drank unpurified water?!”
Myr grinned at her, “I think you worry too much,” but she pulled out her flashlight sized proton field generator. “But even though I think the water’s probably fine, I did happen to have a water purifier with me.”
Myr turned to the others, “I’m pretty sure I’m still on the right trail. Someone in the group has been dragging a foot that makes pretty obvious marks wherever the soil’s soft.” They’d heard on the news that the anti-kidnapping task force had broken off the search that afternoon, claiming they’d lost the trail. She shrugged, “You don’t always see it. I’m assuming sometimes the scuffing must get covered by the footprints of the people behind, but usually you can find it every so often—as if the person making it had been purposefully walking along the edge of the trail to scuff where it’d be obvious and not get walked over by the people behind.” She looked around at the others, “So I’m thinking it’s one of our people trying to help us find them and that I’m still following the kidnappers and their victims. I’m certainly following a fairly large group by the way they’re breaking branches, ripping leaves and tearing up the moss on the path. The question is whether it’s the kidnappers or not.” She turned to Brock, “Can Killer tell if it’s them by their scent?”
Brock dubiously shook his head, “He doesn’t talk so I can’t ask him. He looks pretty excited, but it might be that he’s just happy being out of the ship and running around down on the ground. Remember, back when we started tracking, we were not only tracking the victims and the kidnappers, but we were also following the people from the anti-kidnapping task force and their dogs. The scent picture has to have changed.”
Ardis turned to Myr, “How do you know you aren’t just following the trail of the anti-kidnapping people after they lost the trail of the people we’re really after?”
“Well,” Myr said, “first of all, there’s still the scuffing on this trail where somebody’s dragging their foot. Presumably the task force doesn’t have anybody who’s limping. Second, the trail did split about eight miles back. One trail had dog paw prints; presumably the animals they were using for tracking. The trail I followed had the shoe scuffing. I did follow the one with the paw prints a little ways, but it only went about hundred yards then stopped at a road.” She glanced at Ellen and Nina with a little wince as she said, “I don’t think they really lost the track. I think they just got tired of tracking and decided to go home as long as they were near a road.”
It was too dark for Ardis or Brock to try to evaluate Myr’s claim that she was on the right trail by visible evidence and Brock decided he couldn’t really tell whether Killer thought they were on the right trail either. After some discussion, they decided to try trailing by IR from where it’d gotten too dark for Myr to track any more. They’d go east from there. Brock said, “These trails are pretty rough. I think the kidnappers would be lucky, especially pushing their victims, to make as much as ten miles a night, so if Myr’s really been following the right trail, having done twenty-five miles in one day she might nearly have caught up to them.”
A little while later, Vinn was flying MT-1 along the slightly north of east direction that the kidnappers had mostly been following since they’d grabbed their victims. Of concern was the fact that they were getting close to the ocean and if the terrorists met a boat it’d be nearly impossible to keep tracking them. Ardis and Ellen were flying parallel to the ship on one side while Brock and Nina paralleled it on the other side. Vinn and Myr were watching the screens inside the ship where the displays from the high-end FLIR systems were located. At first Nina’d worried that Vinn would be busy flying the ship, but he reassured her that its flight was almost entirely automated. Then she’d worried that Myr would be falling asleep after an exhausting day running trails which had followed little sleep the night before, but Myr had waved it off as inconsequential. “If only you knew how little sleep I got in college,” she’d said.
They’d only been flying for an hour when Nina noticed some warm spots directly ahead in her path. They were flickering in and out of view as she glimpsed them through the canopy of leaves. For a moment or two she wondered if she saw what she thought she did. Finally convinced, she called a halt and the whole group floated over the area to look.
Deciding that the density of the signal was about right, the spaceship, Nina and Ellen fell back a little bit while Ardis and Brock slowly dropped in through the tree canopy to reconnoiter. About the time Nina’s head was ready to explode from the tension, Ardis and Brock slowly floated back up out of the trees. Ardis’s voice came in her ear bud, “It’s them.”
Ellen and Nina surged ahead, Ellen saying, “Let’s go!”
Ardis grabbed her as she tried to surge past him, “Whoa, whoa. Charging in there could get your brother killed. Let’s go back in the ship and work on some kind of plan.”
Gathered on the main deck of the ship, they all looked at the IR image Ardis had cast up onto one of the big screens. He said, “We think the four people walking here in the center are ours. That means there’s five of the kidnappers in front and five behind.
Myr said, “And you think that they’ve kind of surrounded our people to make it harder for them to escape?”
“No doubt.”
“What do you suggest we do?”
“Well, just in case you’re wondering, with our IR gear there’s a pretty good chance that Brock and I could shoot all those guys in the dark. But, there’s also a pretty good chance they’d start blasting away right after we do. They might purposefully or accidentally shoot some of the hostages.”
/> “Okaay,” Myr said slowly. “I’m hoping that you’re not just going to tell us how bad the situation is. Hopefully you also have a plan for what we can do?”
Ardis grimaced, “I do, but I was also hoping to get some suggestions from the rest of you before I put forth my plan. I’m not wanting you to just accept my professional recommendation when you might have some great ideas of your own.”
Ellen said, “Do you think you can use the tanglers somehow?”
Myr and Vinn looked at one another, “Tanglers?”
Ellen turned to them, “my own little invention. They’re just flyers with some changes to their settings. If we project a high strength proton field at knee height and somebody walks into it, it’ll stick their knees to that spot in space. Typically their knees get bound together and they fall down.”
Ardis shrugged, “It seems like we ought to be able to use tanglers somehow, but that’d mean trying to attack the kidnappers while they’re marching along the trail. That’s why Brock stayed out to scout ahead on the trail they’re following. He’s looking for terrain that would favor using the tanglers. Our primary concern needs to be protecting the kidnap victims. I’m worried that knocking the kidnappers down while they have guns in their hands might not accomplish that.”
Sounding reluctant, Myr said, “Um, I’ve got another weapon…”
Mark stumbled again. It was another freaking trek, staggering through the Stygian darkness of a moonless tropical night. There were some stars but the night was partly overcast. Five of the Abus led, then Mark, then Linda and Penny, with Greg the last of the captives. Five more Abus followed them. The Abus had their red cellophane covered flashlights, but they didn’t shine them in a direction that’d help the captives see what they were walking on except by accident. For really dark nights like this, the four captives had come on the trick of carrying a long stick that joined the left hands of the four captives. Mark had some idea of the path ahead from what he could dimly see in the red light of the flashlight carried by the Abu in front of him. The other three captives were truly walking in the dark, but through the stick they could feel when Mark slowed or sped up. He lifted it a little when he had to step over something and, of course, he jerked it when he stumbled. These movements seemed to help those behind him by giving them at least a little warning.
Lifter: Proton Field #2 Page 23
