Flee the Night (37 page)
Susan May Warren recently returned home after serving for eight years with her husband and four children as missionaries in Khabarovsk, Far East Russia. Now writing full-time as her husband runs a lodge on Lake Superior in northern Minnesota, she and her family enjoy hiking and canoeing and being involved in their local church.
Susan holds a BA in mass communications from the University of Minnesota and is a multipublished author of novellas and novels with Tyndale, including
Happily Ever After
, the American Christian Romance Writers’ 2003 Book of the Year and a 2003 Christy Award finalist. Other books in the series include
Tying the Knot
and
The Perfect Match. Flee the Night
is her first book in her new romantic adventure search and rescue series with Tyndale.
Susan invites you to visit her Web site at
www.susanmaywarren.com
. She also welcomes letters by e-mail at [email protected].
TODAY, MORE THAN any other, reporter Will Masterson prayed his lies saved lives. Starting with his partner, Homeland Security Agent Simon Rouss, aka Haviz Tarkan.
Please, God, be on my side today.
Will raced down the two-lane rutted forest service road, cursing his stupidity as well as a few new souvenir bruises. He smelled rain in the air as the wind shivered the trees with a late-season breeze. His nose felt thick and caked with clots.
He should have known that his sympathetic commentaries in the
Moose Bend Journal
toward the recent immigrants flooding over the Canadian border would have drawn blood with the locals. Blood that would hopefully protect Homeland Security Agent Simon Rouss while he embedded deeper into the terrorist cell in the hills.
Because Will knew that the men who’d hijacked him and hauled him into the forest to beat the tar out of him over his recent op-ed piece weren’t actually disgruntled rednecks, but rather international terrorists.
The lie that had just saved Will Masterson’s hide—the lie perpetuated by the boys toting .30-06s and wearing work boots—was the only thing keeping Simon from being brutally murdered.
Which would only be the first in a hundred—maybe a thousand—murders by the Hayata terrorist cell hiding in the northern Minnesota woods.
If only Will hadn’t been ambushed by the double-edged sword sitting in his PO box. A letter from Bonnie. He’d opened it, and the words knifed him through the chest.
Bonnie Strong and Paul Moore invite you to a celebration of life and love in our Lord Jesus Christ.
He should have dropped the invitation to his floorboard and crushed it under his foot. Instead, he’d let the memories, the grief, the failure rush over him and blind him to the three hillbillies lying in wait like a nest of South Dakotan rattlers. A year of undercover work, of slinking around this hick town, praying for a way to destroy the Hayata cell, and it all had to come to a head the same day his mistakes rose from the past to haunt him.
Sorry, Lew.
“Tell Bonnie and the girls I love them.”
Lew’s dying words, hovering in the back of Will’s mind, could still turn his throat raw. If Simon bought it, Will would be sending yet another letter home to the wife and loved ones.
Soldiers had no business getting married.
Will’s breath felt like a razor inside his lungs. A branch clipped him, and blood pooled inside his mouth. Ruts and stone bit into his cowboy boots as he ran, and sweat lined his spine. Overhead, the sky mirrored his despair in the pallor of gray, the clouds heavy with tears. How long had he been unconscious after they’d thrown him off the four-wheeler?
Better question—how much did they guess about his alliance with Simon? Obviously, the good ol’ boys who snatched him as he’d sat in his truck, waiting for his contact and regretting Bonnie’s choices, knew Will’s habits.
Simon’s
habits. They’d found them, despite the fact that he and Simon had picked the backwoods gravel pit for its remoteness. But please—
please
—let them believe Will’s lies…which would mean maybe Simon’s cover hadn’t been blown.
Maybe there wouldn’t be another unnamed star embedded in the wall of honor at Langley.
Thunder rolled overhead just as Will burst from the road onto the gravel pit. Yes, thank you, the thugs/terrorists/angry readers hadn’t damaged his wheels. Probably, however, they thought his 1984 Chevy wasn’t worth their time.
What they didn’t know was that reporter Will Masterson didn’t just spend his time penning controversial editorials and writing the crime beat for the local weekly. Under the hood of this baby, he had a 350 Hemi with a high-lift cam and a four-barrel Edelbrock Thunder carb.
They didn’t call him Wild for nothing. Okay, yes, he’d earned that nickname for different reasons, during a different life. But sometimes the moniker still meant something. Like now, as he hopped in and slammed all three hundred and fifty horses to the floor, spitting gravel behind him as he raced to the Howlin’ Wolf.
Plan B.
Please, Simon, be there.
Or, if Simon had been forced to make a fast exit, let him have taped his latest intel under Will’s favorite table.
After a year of undercover work, they had one chance, one click in time to get it right. One opportunity to avenge the thousands of victims who had died at the hands of terrorists around the globe. Victims like Lew.
Please, Simon, be there.
The late-afternoon drizzle seemed a fitting backdrop to the painful truth that Dannette might have to voice to the crowd of soggy search-and-rescue personnel combing Eagle Mountain.
Fern Humphrey—dementia patient, age eighty-six, grandmother of seven, great-grandmother of fourteen, and recent escapee from the High Pines Rest Center—would return to her family in a body bag.
Please, Lord, don’t let her die alone
.
Dannette crouched beside Missy—her half-shepherd, half-retriever mix—and ran a hand behind the dog’s floppy ear. Missy’s respirations came one on top of another, her stacked breathing a natural alert for the smell of something near or already dead. Although trained in search and rescue, Missy and Dannette had recovered more than their share of casualties, and Dannette read the diminishing potential for success in her animal’s demeanor.
Twilight threaded gray fingers around the trees, through the brambled forest and around shaggy pines and spindly poplars. A crisp, postwinter breeze, dredged up from the still-soaked earth, whistled against Dannette’s Gore-tex jacket hood. She felt chapped, hungry, and worn birch-bark thin. With night encroaching, hope had dwindled with the sunshine to a meager shadow.
She drew out a water bottle, set down a collapsible bowl, and filled it. Missy rose and lapped greedily.
Fifty feet away, she heard the echo of Kelly’s call to her dog, Kirby. The younger SAR shepherd, out on his first real trial, probably hadn’t yet picked up the scent cone or Kelly would be radioing Dannette for advice.
The overpowering smell of death scared most dogs. Then again, it didn’t exactly warm Dannette’s insides with a happy feeling.
Dannette rose and let Missy finish her water. Maybe Missy was wrong. She wasn’t Super Dog, although Dannette had to admit that following Missy’s instincts often led them to crannies and hideouts unthinkable even to the most keen SAR personnel. And Missy was an air-scent dog, which meant she followed the smells left by the scraping of skin on rocks, trees, and bushes. Sadly, Missy’s abilities decreased as the day worsened.
If only it hadn’t taken the nursing-home staff an hour after Fern turned up missing at morning breakfast to call the sheriff’s office and two more hours and the urging of the mayor—Fern’s desperate son—to finally call Kelly, their nearly certified K-9 handler. Not only had a late-morning shower diffused the scent cone left by Mrs. Humphrey, but the variable winds and temperatures had scattered the scent and confused Missy. They’d walked the perimeter in a hasty search for two more hours before Missy caught the scent and alerted to Mrs. Humphrey’s trail.
As usual, Dannette found that the dementia patient didn’t stick to the deer trails or clearings. Mrs. Humphrey had pushed through honeysuckle and raspberry bushes, climbed over downed birch, crossed a stream, and ascended a hill that should have put her in traction. Even dementia patients who struggled to move in ordinary circumstances proved they still had gumption when some errant impulse revved up their synapses. But Mrs. Humphrey had lived a stout life, ran a farm until her husband’s death a few years ago, and would probably be still milking her Jersey if her mind hadn’t decided to betray her. The woman could easily be a mile from here or sitting atop Eagle Mountain.
Or injured.
Or, if Dannette read her dog correctly, dead.
Missy sat on her haunches and licked her lips. Water dripped off her jowls.
Dannette emptied the bowl and shoved it back into her backpack. “Okay, ready?”
Missy tilted her head.
“I know, sweetheart. But if it makes you feel any better, I’m glad you’re here. You handle death so much better than Sherlock. He’d have his hackles up and be cowering under that white pine.” She stepped away from Missy, changed her tone. “Find.”
They’d been working on a free search all afternoon, after Missy’s first alert. With Kelly and Kirby twenty-five feet to the west, Dannette let Missy run twenty-five feet or more ahead, quartering the wind for scent debris. Dannette checked her GPS with her map, pinpointed her position, and radioed the incident commander.
“10-4, Search 1,” replied Sheriff Fadden. Dannette pictured the guy as she’d left him, wearing his black, lined Windbreaker, his stomach rebelling against the snaps, using a blow horn to direct traffic. Just what Fern Humphrey’s loved ones needed while they watched the chaos.
And to add to their pain, Dannette had seen two news reporters from the local rags already lurking, smelling blood.
The leeches.
“Just heard from Search 2,” Fadden continued. “Kirby alerted to scent and Kelly is tracking north, toward Eagle Cliff.” He had a flattened Midwestern accent, although nothing else about him could be labeled flat. Including his ego. One month of working with or around him with the local SAR crew told her that she’d have better luck trying to reason with a bull moose. Dannette held no doubts that if Fadden could get away with it, he’d drop-kick her and her SAR dog into the next state.
But he needed her, and they both knew it. On hand to help Kelly and her K-9 Kirby pass their SAR K-9 certification, Dannette and Missy were the only K-9 unit within two states with the teaching hours and credits to certify the team. Said certification would qualify the sheriff’s department for a healthy government grant for rural SAR, an end goal that Fadden never failed to keep in the forefront of Dannette’s purpose in Moose Bend. Sadly, in his mind, that goal didn’t warrant tapping his force for live-victim-search training or scooping from the currently dwindling county SAR fund for K-9 training scents and devices.
The Fadden types in the world didn’t put stock in the successes of the canine SAR community, and in fact they stirred up false hopes with their unrealistic, all-or-nothing attitudes. One failure and the entire SAR K-9 reputation suffered. One success and they were heralded as heroes.
It left little room for the long, dark afternoons that defined SAR K-9 work. If she and Kelly failed to locate Mrs. Humphrey, Dannette knew Sheriff Fadden would push what buttons he could to shut down her K-9 training course and send her back to Iowa. Which meant more people, like Mrs. Humphrey and five-year-old Ashley Lundeen, would perish, alone and afraid.
This is not about Ashley
. Dannette’s thoughts recoiled against the familiar stampede of memories, and she shook herself back to the search at hand. “10-4,” Dannette said as she checked her topo map, noted Kelly’s sector and direction. She frowned, checked again. “Search 1 to Search 2, please confirm location.”
Kelly’s voice came over the line, young and just breathless enough to indicate she was following Kirby at a fast clip. “Crossing Devil’s Creek, about one hundred yards from Eagle Cliff.”
“10-4,” Dannette acknowledged, her heart thumping. If Kirby had
also
alerted, perhaps Mrs. Humphrey still lived and had simply holed up in a location that emitted a putrid odor, a cave with guano or even the remains of a dead animal. Dannette folded up the map, her heart lightening.