“I haven’t seen a thing. Should we move to the next hill?” asked Abriella.
“It may take us a good hour in the dark. And we’ll lose our vantage point down in the lower ground in the meantime,” advised Vicky.
Kate pushed them to action, “Holly’s not here and we can’t help her by just staying here. If that’s what we’re going to do, we might as well have just have stayed at the house and not gotten in trouble.”
“We could split up, two of us staying here,” Abriella thought out loud. “That way we wouldn’t miss anything while we relocated.”
There was a long pause while they considered that, but all of them subscribed to the idea of staying together. It was dangerous just being out in the dark and rain, let alone with bad men on the loose. Numbers weren’t just safety; it gave them more options to act. Rescuing the master had taken a coordinated effort by all of them. If they divided prematurely, they could fail. And Kate was right, they were doing no good here.
Elizabeth nodded, “Vicky, lead us off.”
Ginger snorted as he led the line of horses into the broad saddle between the hills. Thankfully the rain had let up for the moment, but it was a cool feeling wind finding its way up their sleeves and the waist of their shirts and jackets. Some lightning flashes lit the way ahead, but Vicky pulled up instead.
“What’s wrong?” called Elizabeth from behind Abriella. “We’re on the saddle and the big hill is straight ahead.”
“So’s a thunderstorm,” declared Kate.
“Kate’s got a point,” admitted Abriella. “That lone old tree up there has accumulated all types of scorch marks over the decades.”
Vicky shared more details, “Master Bartholomew called it the Lightening Tree on the youth hunt but with all the colored leaves I couldn’t see. But a lady told me she’d been up here in the winter and there are black scorch marks on upper branches. Kate’s right. Going up there right now will be downright asking for it. I don’t want to lose Ginger.”
A roll of thunder followed the flashes, declaring the arrival of another wave of weather.
“Okay,” agreed Elizabeth. “But that doesn’t mean giving up. We can fall off the saddle here to the left, and follow around the base of the hill. There’s lot of trees there so it won’t be like we’re hanging out by a giant isolated lightning rod.”
Kate’s eyes widened, “I don’t know. Helmut doesn’t like us out riding if there’s a storm.”
“And always declares horses aren’t baseball when it’s raining and he sees us in the indoor,” nodded Elizabeth. “We can’t get back in time. That storm is going over the top of us. That can be when we’re heading back, but I’d rather it be upon us when pressing forward.”
She took Marder down the hill to the left, and the others fell into line behind her. A long bright bolt, flashing thickly several times between a cloud and the ground, warned of another rumbling wave of thunder. Then there was a ding.
Vicky called out, “Did someone just get a text?”
They all paused, scrambling to take reins in one hand and fish into their pockets for their phones.
Kate answered, “It’s Holly’s phone. And,” she paused as she gathered herself. “I think I saw a bad word in the message.”
“What did it say? Who is it from?” asked Vicky. She reached for the phone, but Ginger wouldn’t cooperate and Kate couldn’t hand it over.
“I can’t tell. I don’t know how to unlock her screen. But I thought I saw the C-word before it went blank. No name. It was a number not in her directory.”
The barrage of thunder finally arrived over them, startling their horses. Not only did Marder almost jump out of his skin, Elizabeth felt his pounding heart between her thighs.
“Later. Let’s get off this open ground.”
Their neat single file line became more a herd as they made the quickest walk down the side of the saddle they could coax from their mounts. It was too black to trot, and the summer baked hard ground was slick with the rolling water of the downpours. Somewhere a cow mooed, and Ginger snorted in reply. Then they were at the line of trees, whose towering branches swayed in the wind.
Elizabeth turned right, the others following without the need for further conversation. They rode, head bowed to the wind, into the face of the storm. After a quarter hour or so the contour of the ground shifted as they left the saddle for the base of the fixture’s middle hill. Scattered scrub maples and cedars, near invisible in the rainy night, checked their progress as they found gaps to weave through. The slope of the ground was their only guide, trying to neither go uphill or down in order to follow around the hill.
A dazzling bolt of power struck the big tree at the summit with an immediate thunderclap. Ginger and Marder both reared, and then bolted as a limb splintered and crashed from the top reaches. Ollie and Chumpy both chased after, none of the girls regaining control of their mounts until the severed limb was fully on the ground. Some dry branches and leaves were briefly aflame, until drowned in the torrent.
The horses took over from their young riders, spinning their hind quarters to the storm coming out of the north, and lowered their heads into the shelter created by their bodies. Even the weatherproof quarter sheets couldn’t help much, thought Elizabeth, thinking the experience similar to her parent’s massaging showerhead they enjoyed after tennis. Cold rain struck the back of her neck to leave her numb, and then ran down under her collar to make her shiver.
Abriella called out in a hushed voice, “Hey, what’s that down there?”
Elizabeth couldn’t see where her friend was gesturing, but instinctively she turned in the direction of downhill to see a soft glow sneaking around the silhouettes of the scrub trees around the hill’s base. She yanked hard on a rein to turn Marder more sideways, and kicked hard a couple of times to get the beast to move. The herd followed her shift to a better vantage spot.
Down below, in the flooded low ground between the hill and a fold in the ground, was a big pickup truck. Only it’s parking lights were on, dim and hard to see given the driving rain. It was surrounded by runoff, hardly a gap between the surface and the underside of the frame. Out in front of the truck a figure was leading out the winch cable, sloshing around in wet debris which hid his waist down.
Kate declared, “We need to help him!”
“Hold on Kate,” advised Vicky. “What’s he doing out here? Let’s watch a moment.”
The cable only seemed long enough to reach some of the smaller scrub trees, and not the old growth. The figure retreated back toward the truck, to pick a different path after dragging the cable in a big arc. Results were the same. None of the big trees were close enough to attach the cable.
He tried to loop it around as many of the small trees as he could. Initially it was too many, running out of length again. So he unhooked the cable and tried yet again, encircling a more modest cluster. Then he staggered through the deep rushing water trying to keep his footing to reach the front of the truck. The girls heard the clatter and wine of the electric winch motor as it took back in the cable.
They could see the steel cable, the portion nearest the headlights looking silvery, rise out of the water and muck as it became taught. The small trees began to fold over, and the truck shifted as the mud emitted an earthy sucking sound. Then the trunks, stalks really, tore from the sodden ground, their root balls following the upper branches toward the stricken vehicle. The man’s arm made a wide motion and the noise of the winch stopped. He sat down on the front bumper and hung his head.
“Who should we call?” wondered Abriella. “The police are spread thin and need to keep looking for Holly.”
Vicky said, “Why don’t I call the Westburg Hunt’s Kennel Master? He knows the area and has a truck. I know he helps get stuck horse trailers out when there’s bad weather sometimes.”
“Good idea,” declared Elizabeth. “Do you have a number?”
Vicky nodded, “Sort of. When we were at the animal memorial last weekend, one of ou
r pictures has the kennel in the background. There’s a sign on the building with the emergency number. I can call that.”
CHAPTER—29
Arabell’s restful and warm sleep gracefully withdrew before the incessant ringing of her husband’s mobile phone. He sat up beside her, the sheet slipping off her naked shoulder in the process, leaving her soft skin vulnerable to the harshly cold breath of the motel’s humming air conditioner. There had been no vacancies amongst the state park’s cabins.
“Good morning, Frank.”
She smiled to herself, eyes still closed. It was a politician’s voice, cheerful and friendly to everyone. But his wife could hear his annoyance through it. And that the call annoyed him so much, made her feel loved all the more.
“I was getting up anyway.”
Arabell bit her tongue to suppress a giggle. Even an insensitive troll like Frank, the city supervisor, might be picking up on that tone.
“Turning it on, now. Give it a moment.”
She heard a soft plastic click and the static crackle of electrons coming to life. His finger tapped at the rubber remote buttons to surf to the right channel. When the audio caught up and a woman’s voice, a newscaster’s, throwing out facts with an air of suspense, mentioned Fox Ridge School she sat up with a start.
Arabell clawed at the fragments of sleep in her eyes, trying to bring them into focus and recognize the pale orange bricks shown by the security lights as viewed from the Full Cry Road bypass.
“Okay. I got it, Frank. Thanks for the call,” he nodded. “You too. Bye now.”
As they stared intently at the screen, the camera panned to law enforcement vehicles filling the school’s front parking lot, to include a bus from the state police academy. Various colors and styles of fatigue uniforms in the predawn mist marshalled together into loose formations, while some men out front shouted instructions from clipboard notes. After a quarter minute or so, the camera view cut back to the studio.
The morning anchor, a chesty blond speaking with a serious disposition, took up the narration, “If you are just joining us on this early rainy Wednesday morning, we have breaking news out of Westburg. This town, about seventy miles from downtown D.C. is home to Fox Ridge School, an all-girl boarding preparatory. What we know so far is several heavily armed men abducted a student in the middle of the night, and a full manhunt is preparing to get underway at first light. Several people have been shot, although none are reported to be connected with the school. At least two police officers are among the wounded. We’ll share more facts as we learn and confirm them, and hopefully have better pictures this morning when the weather clears for the Channel Five, Eyes A Sky. Now to weather and traffic…”
Justin hit the mute button and turned toward her, “Frank wanted to be sure we knew.”
The camera lens was dotted with rain drops showing the rows of headlights forming about the interstate beltways.
“Abriella is going to be distraught. For once I’m glad she doesn’t live on campus,” and then her eyes lit up. “Who was shot?”
“Frank didn’t say. He may not know any more than us at this point.”
Arabell grasped her phone from the nightstand and scanned the text messages.
“She hasn’t sent us anything. She may not even know yet herself.”
Justin looked down at his phone and scanned the messages.
“I’ve got an emergency alert text from Mrs. Grant. No day students today while they address the special needs of residents and aide law enforcement in their investigation. Usual blurbs about safety of our students is paramount, will share more when we know it.”
“I’ll let Abriella know,” she said and dialed her first speed dial key. In truth, she seldom called, but somehow that position was symbolic. She hadn’t the heart to tell Justin that he’d been relegated to number two, a demotion below every boyfriend she’d ever had in the cellphone era. The phone rang without answer. “She’s not picking up. Probably cleaning Indy’s stall after he was in all night. I’ll text her.”
Quickly she pounded out a “no school today message” and asked for a call when her daughter could.
“I suppose we should head home then,” Justin ventured resignedly.
“The river and hiking trails will be flooded anyway,” she consoled. “But I did enjoy our little surprise trip. So thank you, Dear.”
“Tempt you with breakfast? It’s been awhile since we’ve been to the old hunt lodge. And once I get to the office, lord knows when I’ll be home.”
She smiled, and blushed with some memories of long ago.
Kelton Jager breathed hard, carrying his pack and carbine as fast as he was able in the dark, trying to overtake Holly’s abductors. The poncho had kept him from being rain soaked, but his clothes underneath were damp with the exertion in extreme humidity. Azrael pursued the quarry with the drive his breed is known for, the scent trail clear enough that he no longer needed to keep his nose close to the ground to follow it. They were getting close; which was good, since time was running out. Despite the thick clouds and drizzly skies, a sliver of light showed in the east to make the horizon visible. Soon he could be the one who was hunted.
He watched Azrael return his nose to the ground for the first time in an hour, and then downed. He went prone beside his dog, keeping the carbine pointed off to the side. Somewhere ahead, a teenage girl was downrange. It was too dark to see, and he didn’t have night vision goggles like he did patrolling during the war. So he listened instead. If honest with himself, all that filled his ears was his own heart beating.
Azrael panted alongside him as he fished out his electronic ear muffs. Shooters loved them because they not only provided hearing protection but allowed you to have a conversation in a normal tone of voice. By turning up the volume, the user can amplify tiny sounds. But louder sounds, such as those caused by a gunshot, were filtered from the internal speakers so it served as hearing protection. The electronics were also good at not passing through the noise of wind rushing over the microphones. Most sporting goods stores carried them, retailing for about a hundred bucks. Kelton took a long pause, letting his senses settle. Now, if someone would make a module to eliminate breathing dog noises, that would be something.
Somewhere up ahead, a cow called out and others answered. Kelton rose to a crouch and Azrael heeled alongside as they crept forward. Then on the wind he heard a man’s voice, amplified by the headphones. Azrael heard it too, rotating his head with a gleam in his eye and Kelton made sure to close his hand firmly about the tracking lead. Then, he heard another man’s voice. He couldn’t make out their words, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the meandering track through the rolling pastureland and timber tracks had come to an end.
He could just make out where the thinning trees he hid in blended into ascending grassland. If they were talking, he reckoned, they must be stopped for a rest. Perhaps before they climbed the unrelenting slope? Kelton stepped carefully around to his left, moving slow in his coyote brown poncho amongst the scraggly trees and weeds. The voices were intermittent, but sounded sharp and terse when he heard them.
Then he saw them. Three black shadows, with no hard definition, slowly floating up the grade. He froze, relying on stillness to remain invisible, despite being fairly certain he was at their backs. Where was the girl? Had she escaped? No, then his dog would have taken him somewhere else. There just wasn’t enough light to see what he needed to see.
So he followed them, going by sight instead of scent, with Azrael’s ivory fangs glowing in bleak daybreak. The ground was soft, and running water gurgled in the earth’s folds. He opted for short dashes from cover to cover, picking out a tree and sprinting to it on achy legs, then picking out his next destination.
He got closer, and the light steadily improved. The three shadows took form, growing heads and arms. Legs became distinct. And finally, he saw the blond hair and the tiny white bare legs before the last figure in line. There were four of them.
The midd
le one didn’t carry a carbine, and the last was too close to the girl. He raised the captured weapon, looking through the glass lens to place the glowing red dot between the first man’s shoulder blades.
Kelton realized he wasn’t sure where the bullet would really go. It wasn’t his zero on the rifle. These weren’t soldiers, but thugs. The degree of care used when mounting the site was suspect. The weapon had looked brand new in the light of the cottage, with neither scratches or dust. Even the brass deflector, a black coated steel projection near the rear mouth of the ejection port which sent hot spent cases to the ground instead of into a person standing next to the shooter, didn’t have many marks on it. Possibly, all from tonight. Which made him think that whoever had mounted the sight, hadn’t sighted in the weapon. Hadn’t used live firing to see where the bullets really went when the site was on target, and used a screwdriver to turn the adjustment knobs for windage and elevation to make those two points the same.
There were other ways to accomplish that. Most weapons had “iron sights”, a ring and post arrangement to align the rifle with the target. Adjusting the red dot so it aimed at the same place as the irons, if they were sighted in, was one way. There were also brass cases, filled with batteries and a laser instead of gunpowder and a bullet. Loaded into the bore, they projected a beam on the path a bullet would travel. The shooter could then adjust the dot of the sight to align with the laser coming from the bore. The bottom line of all this being, even if the weapon hadn’t been fired much, the sights could still be accurate. But he wouldn’t stake his life and that of the girl on it.
He set the carbine down on the ground and drew his pistol. Its reflex sight was dead on, and more than adequate for the close range. And with the hostage, extreme accuracy was at a premium. Kelton unclipped Azrael’s tracking leash.
“Voraus,” Kelton whispered, gesturing with his off hand down the thinning line of trees to his left. Azrael bounded across the ground, the splashing foot falls causing the men ahead to pause and look over their shoulders.
By Dog Alone: A Kelton Jager Adventure Book 2 Page 27
