Chasing the Lost (12 page)

“Got one on boat,” Kono said.

“We gonna hide the rest of the day?” Gator asked.

Chase was about to reply that Rangers lead the way, when Sarah spoke again. “Walter, are you certain? Absolutely certain?”

Her eyes grew wide, and her knuckles went white at whatever she heard. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”

With a shaking hand, she turned the phone off, and then just dropped it.

“Walter says it’s Karralkov. A FedEx package was just delivered to him in Antigua, originating out of Savannah. Cole’s left pinkie finger was in it. They texted him that was proof of life. And that they just called and told him they shot at me to get his further attention. They say next time, they won’t miss.”

“They’re not going to give him back even if they get paid,” Chase said as Erin put an arm around a stunned Sarah. “Doesn’t matter if Walter does what they want.” He looked at Riley. “You know that, Dave. Cutting off body parts is a road they’re not coming back from.”

Riley sighed, but he nodded in agreement. “We’ve got to get him. Tonight. But we have no real proof they’re holding him on that island.”

“The package came out of FedEx in Savannah,” Chase pointed out. “Which means Cole has to be close. He wouldn’t keep him in his club.”

“We need to do a recon,” Riley said. He nodded toward Kono. “Can you do one?”

Kono nodded.

Chase continued. “But we’re going to need more than our combined brain power”—Erin snorted—“to do this. We need weapons.”

“We might be able to help with that,” Gator said.

“‘We?’” Riley asked.

“Kono and I,” Gator said. “We’ve squirreled away a gun or two for a rainy day.”

“It’s storming,” Riley said.

“We will look at the Russian base, and then get weapons,” Kono said.

“We need to do this right,” Riley said. “We need a team leader.”

Everyone looked at him, and he shook his head. “Chase has more rank than me.”

“Had,” Chase said. “We’re not in the Army anymore. You know the area.”

“Kono knows the area best,” Riley said, but it was a weak protest at best. What was more to the point was experience. “I’ve been a team sergeant and a team XO. You’ve been team leader in both SF and Delta, right?” he asked Chase.

Chase nodded.

“Let’s stick with what we’re comfortable and experienced with,” Riley said. “You’ve got command, I’ve got your back. I’ll be team sergeant.” He looked over at Gator. “You all right with that, Ranger?”

Gator nodded. “Sure thing, top.”

Blood was seeping out of the sutures on Chase’s forehead. “If I’m in charge, then everyone does what I say. Is that clear?”

He looked around the bedroom.

Gator flipped a half-assed salute. “Yes, sir.”

Riley nodded. “It’s for the best.”

Erin was putting a bandage on Sarah’s shoulder. “Sure. I’ve got lots more bandages and sutures.”

Tears stained Sarah’s face, and it was obvious she was in pain from the flesh wound, but she tried to give a brave smile. “Whatever you need. I owe you everything.”

Kono was standing in the corner, arms folded. When Riley looked at him, he nodded. “As long as we kill some Russians, yes, man.”

Chase glanced at his watch. “It’ll be dark in two hours. We’ve got a lot to do.”

And then he began asking questions to get an idea of the capabilities and resources of the team he had just inherited.

He listened, processing the information.

And then he began issuing orders.

* * * * *

A Special Forces A-Team is designed to be the most efficient and flexible combat unit in the world. There are other units that can do specific missions more efficiently; missions they spend all their time training for. But an A-Team can pretty much adapt to any type of mission from direct action, to recon, to rescue ops, to its primary mission of force multiplier. A-Teams also tend to work alone, relying on the B-Team for support, but rarely for actual on-the-ground operations.

Horace Chase didn’t exactly have the classic 12-man A-Team, but he had the rudiments of one. Sort of. Kind of.

He had an experienced team sergeant in Dave Riley who knew the area. Riley also had his Zodiac, giving them an alternate means of water transportation. He also appeared to be a bookie, was years past his prime, was drinking too many beers in the middle of the day, and appeared to have burned his candle pretty far at both ends.

Chase had a weapons and demolitions man in Gator, who claimed to have quite the stash of weapons, ammunition, and other goodies. And obviously was on steroids, and held in check by a pretty strained leash of anger and roid rage.

He had an intelligence sergeant and backup weapons man and water transportation in Kono, who also was a smuggler, and nursed injustices going back generations deep in his heart.

He had medical support in Erin, who he apparently hadn’t known at all, but probably knew him better than he knew himself, which was typical with the women in his life.

He had a most willing accomplice in Sarah, but he was uncertain how she was going to play into the op quite yet, although she claimed to know how to use a gun. Still, experience had taught him that passion and commitment to the mission could compensate for a lot. Except he’d only met her twenty-four hours ago, and she was married to a man who ran an illegal online gambling site and had murky connections in the underworld. And her decision-making abilities couldn’t be trusted, given her emotional stakes in this operation.

He didn’t have a communications person, and cell phone coverage in the coastal region was spotty at best, but Kono said he could take care of that problem.

As the team dispersed to follow his orders and prepare for the night’s mission, he realized not only wasn’t it enough, there were quite a few potential problems.

They needed more.

* * * * *

Kono had the
Fina
moving fast through the narrow channel. “To right. There,” he said to Gator.

Lying on his belly on the deck of the boat, Gator was covered with a camouflage net. He had a powerful scope tight against one eye as he scanned the small island, over three quarters of a mile away, the closest Kono dared get to it. As the Google imagery had shown, there was a long walkway extending to deep water. There, buildings set back in the trees.

Gator squinted. Two men were dragging someone between them along the walkway toward the island, but at this distance, it was hard to make out details.

“They’ve got a prisoner,” Gator said. “Can’t make out who.”

He twisted the focus, trying to get a better view, but the two men threw whoever they had been dragging into one of the sheds, and slammed shut the door.

Kono didn’t slow down, not wanting to draw attention. “Was it the boy?”

They turned a corner around another island, and Gator stood. “I’m not sure. But they had someone.”

Kono stared at him. “Was it boy? They won’t be attacking if it ain’t.”

Gator shrugged. “As likely it was the boy as anyone else. Who the hell else would they be dragging?”

Kono nodded and accelerated toward his destination. It took them another fifteen minutes at high speed to make it to another narrow channel and weave their way in among the islands.

He brought the boat to a halt, short of an old dock.

Gator jumped over the bow, waist-deep in the chilly water, and calmly disarmed the tripwire stretched across the narrow inlet. The thin fishing wire was set a few inches below low tide level. Even at high tide, a boat coming up the inlet should hit the wire, but if one had a shallow enough draft and made it over this wire, there were other goodies up ahead.

None of them were fatal or even designed to injure, but there was enough pyrotechnics set to go off that it should discourage most adventurers. More importantly, all the early warning devices were hooked to a hidden, waterproofed cell phone, programmed to dial both Gator’s and Kono’s phones, and warn them their hide was compromised.

Successfully unhooking the line, Gator simply reached up and grabbed the railing on the prow of the
Fina
, allowing Kono to pull him along. The 31-foot long boat looked old and battered and barely functional. It
was
old, but the battered and barely functional was not the product of neglect. Kono went to great lengths to make his boat look shabby, starting with the smudged, flat black paint that covered what appeared to be the old Navy gray, but was actually sealant.

A Vietnam veteran of the ‘brown navy’ would instantly recognize the
Fina
as a stripped-down MK I PBR, which was military-speak for Patrol Boat Riverine. Kono had bought the boat at a government auction, then spent three years rebuilding her. He installed more powerful engines, extra fuel tanks, strengthened the hull, and reconfigured the upper to look innocent but capable of being transformed quickly into a combat vessel.

The boat was only ten and a half feet wide and drew just under two feet, fully loaded. The built-in front turret, where twin .50 caliber M-2 machine guns had been mounted, was covered with a wooden hatch and appeared sealed-up. The mountings for other guns, amidships on both sides, were still in place, looking painted-over and long forgotten, but they were actually well-lubed and ready for action.

Kono throttled back, letting momentum take the boat forward toward an aging, decrepit dock. Several old ‘No Trespassing’ signs were supplemented by a hand-lettered sign that said ‘
Shoot first, feed to gators later
’.

Gator lifted himself out of the water with a burst of muscle, onto the bow of the
Fina
. He glanced back at Kono, who was behind the bullet-resistant windshield surrounding the cockpit, then vaulted from the boat to the dock, landing with a solid thud. If the structure was as weak as it appeared, it would have collapsed.

It didn’t.

Gator disarmed two more early-warning devices; another tripwire and a pressure sensor eight boards in. Kono tied off the boat. The dock stretched into the forest covering a small island, one of the un-named thousands that dotted the low country. Out of sight of the dock and water was an old cabin, built of seashells and mortar. The roof had collapsed long ago. It was over a hundred and fifty years old, and students from the University would have drooled to be able to excavate it and try to learn its history.

Kono knew its history, because the island had been in his family since 1862. ‘Been in,’ meaning they didn’t have a title or deed, but they’d held the ground for generations, and that torch had been passed to him. ‘Been in,’ meaning that many of those in the generations were buried on the island.

Kono and Gator bypassed the house and walked down a narrow path, worn into the ground long before the first Gullah set foot on the island. It passed under Spanish moss drooping down from limbs stripped bare of leaves for the winter. The two came to a clearing where what appeared to a circular earthen berm, one hundred feet in diameter, enclosed a cemetery. The berm was three feet high and covered in grass. It wasn’t made of dirt, though, but rather hundreds of thousands of oyster, clam, and mussel shells, as well as the bones of deer, fish, and other creatures that hundreds of generations of Native Americans had tossed out of their shelters during their visits to the island.

One of Kono’s cousins had gone to the University in Charleston years ago, and discreetly checked into the history of shell rings. They’d been surprised to learn that the few examples left in the low country that had been examined were dated at over four thousand years old. About the same age as the Great Pyramid. No one knew which tribe visited the islands, but they were nomads, moving with the seasons and with the hunting and fishing. They built shelters out of branches and palm fronds, and lived a life not much different than the first of Kono’s ancestors who escaped to the island in the early days of the Civil War.

The headstones were mostly Gullah, their legacy into the earth itself.

Kono paused, knelt, and crossed himself in front of the newest stone. Gator stood behind him, but he would not bend his knee, because to the Ranger, that would be acknowledging that which he never wanted to: that she was gone. He had promised that he would not mourn until he had vengeance. That vengeance was a dark, burning ball deep inside of Gator, fueled by the steroids he took and his memories.

With a deep sigh, Kono finally stood, turned away, and joined Gator. They went to a stone that was streaked with moss and appeared to have fallen over. They reached under the mossy stone and, with a lot of effort, lifted it and slid it to the side, revealing a steel vault door set facing up. Kono jumped into the ‘grave’ and dialed in the combination. There was a satisfying click. Gator reached in and helped him lift open the heavy door. Nestled inside the spacious, buried hide, a former fallout shelter that had been brought here and buried with great effort and secrecy, was an assortment of weapons cases, crates of ammunition. and other assorted tools of warfare.

Knowing his friend as well as he did, Kono handed him a long, hard-plastic rifle case first. Gator took the case and put it on top of the mossy stone. He knelt and reverently flipped the latches and opened the lid. Nestled inside was the rifle version of Gator: large, and on weapon steroids.

The M82 Barrett had officially been adopted by the Army in 2002 as the Long Range Sniper Rifle Caliber .50, M107. It was developed out of a program called the Special Applications Scoped Rifle which Special Forces had begun way back in the ‘80s, searching for a rifle that not only had long range, but carried sufficient punch that it could be used against material and also as an explosive ordnance ‘disposal’ device. Strange as it might seem to civilians, but totally logical to someone like Gator, the rifle, which fired a half-inch diameter bullet and could reach out over a mile effectively, it was designed more to destroy things than people.

Of course, Gator lumped some people into a category of things he didn’t like, and had as much compunction shooting them as he did a critical component in a parked jet fighter.

Gator ran his hand along the dark metal barrel, almost a lover’s caress. He’d been trained to snipe while a young Spec-4 in the Ranger Battalion at Hunter Army Airfield. He’d then deployed with his battalion to Afghanistan, where he quickly became proficient shooting both objects and people. Despite his normal, high-tension temperament, once he laid down in a hide with the stock of the Barrett to his shoulder, Gator was perfectly calm. He’d once stayed in position with his spotter, along a ridgeline giving cover to a firebase that was being attacked for seventy-two straight hours. Even Gator didn’t know how many insurgents he killed during that period, although he was pretty sure if he ‘touched’ them with one of his bullets, they probably were dead.