Wounded Earth (32 page)

He scanned the group of prisoners. One of them was special. He was supposed to hold her, alive and unharmed, until he heard from the boss. It shouldn't be hard to find her. There was only a handful of women.

The last few prisoners were escorted through the door. He hadn't seen any women that fit the description—petite, dark-haired, twenty-something.

“Is everyone here?” he demanded. He didn't have to shout over the nattering of his assault team. His voice had the authority that only life experience could provide. “Is there a woman named Cynthia Parker here?”

The prisoners looked around them and shook their heads.

“Lying would be stupid at this point. If you're lying, I'll know soon enough.”

He checked the restrooms and showers, entering each room gunfirst, then he looked into the decontamination room. No luck. When he went into the equipment room and saw the back door open, he knew where his quarry was. Within a minute, One-Eye and three of his men were in pursuit of Cynthia Parker and anyone stupid enough to be with her.

Babykiller
had treated Larabeth to a long drive deep into the countryside surrounding the Savannah River Site. She'd seen no sign of human habitation in half an hour. If this was the end—if he killed her out here—would anyone ever find her body?

She hardly cared. It was unpleasant to think of her body decaying, melting into the earth, providing food for carrion-eaters and worms, but at least the pain would be past. She would be beyond the fear for Cynthia that had dogged her like a hungry animal. She would be out of Babykiller's reach forever. And she would never have to face the bleak emptiness of life without J.D. She'd had only a day to feel complete in his love, but it was enough. She was ready to die.

But she couldn't even give herself the peace that comes with accepting death, not yet. All her life, she'd heard the ghost stories about spirits trapped on earth by their unfinished business and now she understood them. If she died now, if she left Cynthia alone in the world with Babykiller, she would be leaving her most pressing business unfinished. Better to die later, when her only baby was safe.

Now that she had decided against dying, she would have to figure out how to survive. She had no weapons and she had no idea what kind of weapons he might have. If she broke away from him on foot, she might be hours away from help. She had only one advantage over Babykiller. When he rose from his desk to escort her to the car, she had noticed a decided limp. She could outrun him if she had the chance.

She liked that idea for a minute, before remembering that she would never have the chance to run away from Babykiller. She was bound to him until the end, because he had Cynthia.

She considered his profile. She could see that he knew she was studying him, but he just flicked her a knowing look, then kept his eyes on the road.

She knew his face. There was something about the line of his jaw, the high forehead, the aquiline nose. A deep-buried memory tickled some vestigial part of her brain and all of her oldest defensive reflexes kicked in. She shivered and hunched forward, unconsciously protecting her internal organs. She watched pale gooseflesh erupt over her forearms. Her body remembered something that she didn't. What was it?

He cast another long glance her way. Driving with his left hand, he loosened his tie and pulled it off. After he'd undone his collar button, he shrugged, as if to relax. He rested his right arm across the top of the front seat, almost touching the back of her neck. Then he leaned his upper body toward her, very slightly.

Any other woman would have taken his actions to be a sexual advance, and maybe they were, but she sensed that Babykiller had something else in mind. By exposing his neck, he let her see precisely what he had in mind.

The tracheotomy scar had healed well. It was a neat, pale mark barely distinguishable by untrained eyes. Yes. The age was right. The branch of the military was right. How stupid of her.

“Lieutenant Doe,” she said. “It's been a very long time.”

Tending the patients on the neurological ward had been the hardest part of her time in Vietnam. The guys with head wounds had lain, stiff, with their dilated eyes fixed on the ceiling. The ones with spinal injuries were strapped into the frames that stabilized their ruined vertebrae. She'd spent a lot of time massaging muscles that would never hear from a brain again.

So few of her patients had kept enough consciousness, enough personality, to touch her. She remembered very few of them by name. It was ironic that she had bonded with Lieutenant Doe without ever knowing his name.

The rescue squad had found Lieutenant Doe in the wreckage of a cargo plane, the only survivor. His dog tags had been torn away and destroyed. Every crew member listed in the flight records was dead. Was he a stowaway? He couldn't have told them his name if he had wanted. His injuries left him incapable of speech.

The Air Force checked the records of every man listed as missing-in-action, killed-in-action, or prisoner-of-war, or away-without-leave. If they ever identified Lieutenant Doe, it was later, when Larabeth was recuperating in a hospital bed of her own.

The hospital staff thought he'd been smuggling something, probably drugs. A cargo plane staffed with crooks could move a lot of contraband along with its legitimate goods. Perhaps he had removed his dog tags on purpose, to keep his identity secret from his fellow smugglers.

Larabeth had ignored their suspicions. Lieutenant Doe was special. Unlike most of her patients, he'd had a good shot at getting better. His spinal cord had been battered when the cargo plane went down, but it wasn't severed. He had a tracheotomy, so machines could help him breathe while the swelling went down. That meant he couldn't talk, but Larabeth had talked to him. She had held his hand and told him that he was going to get well.

She had confided in him how much it hurt her to see the soldiers suffer, while she washed his helpless body. Sometimes she had spent her breaks with Lieutenant Doe, just talking. He'd watched her talk and she'd wanted to believe he enjoyed her company, but sometimes she had wondered what was behind those still gray eyes.

Lieutenant Doe was on the ward when she was attacked. She had felt his eyes on her when she lay bleeding on the floor. His impotence was complete. He couldn't help her. He couldn't call for help. The spinal patients hanging from their frames had made enough noise to attract attention, and then she'd been carried away to surgery and to the trauma ward. She'd never seen Lieutenant Doe again and she hadn't thought of him in years. Not until today. And she'd never heard his voice before. Not until a few days ago.

And now he sat beside her. His body had healed better than she could have hoped. What had happened to his soul?

* * *

Cynthia kneeled in the dirt of a bluff rising high over a fast-moving creek. She dabbed gently at the blood on her fellow prisoner's shoulder, trying to get a better look at his wound. In retrospect, their escape attempt had been ill-conceived. They had dashed into the woods, only a few hundred feet ahead of trained soldiers armed with automatic weapons. Those guys could have peppered the air with enough lead to bring down trees. If they had, there would have been nothing left of her and Jackson Sellers (whoever he was) but scattered bloody pieces.

She understood now why they had limited themselves to the single shot that had pierced Mr. Sellers' shoulder and broken his collarbone in the process. They were apparently under orders to keep her alive, no matter what. She had no idea when she became so important.

She was enjoying the fruits of her importance at the moment. The terrorists' leader, a scar-faced beast known as One-Eye, had ordered one of his underlings to take the wounded prisoner into the woods and shoot him with his own gun. She had begged and pleaded, even thrown her body across his semi-conscious form and One-Eye had relented.

“He can live. For now.”

After One-Eye commuted the death sentence, she demanded BioHeal's first aid kit. She knew its contents; she had written the health and safety plan. She knew that it was intended to treat poison ivy and muscle strains, not gunshot wounds. Still, she'd been able to clean the wound and she had bandages and a sling ready to use once she got the bleeding stopped.

She'd been talking nonsense to her patient, discussing the heat and bemoaning the humidity, just to keep him conscious, but she wanted to talk about other things. Their guard had moved a few steps away. He was still within point-blank gunshot range, but he was just out of earshot, if she whispered.

She wanted to know what he knew about their captors. Knowing who they were and what they wanted wouldn't help her situation much, but she was curious. Besides, even if it was callous and selfish, she wasn't about to let this man die while he was keeping secrets she had a right to hear.

“So, Mr. Sellers, tell me how you know my mother,” she said.

He lay still and spoke without opening his eyes. “It's not Sellers. It's Hatten. J.D. Hatten. And I'm not an environmental technician. I'm a private detective.”

“Nice to meet you, but I didn't ask for another one of your aliases. I asked how you knew my mother.”

“Well, the alias was her idea.”

She kept dabbing blood, repeating, “I asked about my mother.”

“How do I know your mother? I think that falls under the heading of things she should tell you herself.”

Taking another tack, she asked, “Who are these thugs trying to kill us? And how did you get advance warning about the attack?”

J.D. opened one eye to make sure their guard still couldn't hear. “Your mother's been getting calls from a lunatic named Babykiller. He threatened her, he threatened you, he threatened all of Washington and South Carolina.” He stopped to draw a ragged breath. The words were coming slower, but he seemed to have a lot to say before….while he was still able.

"I'm certain he was behind the Hanford bombing and these guys are surely his personal terrorists. The FBI wasn't much help, so we took matters into our own hands. Things went wrong and here youo and I are.”

“My mother hired you to risk your life this way?”

“For information on your mother, you'll have to talk with your mother.” His voice was fading and his lips were going blue. Anyone could see that he was going into shock.

Wishing for a blanket, she remembered that she was wearing excess clothing. Slipping off her protective jumpsuit and spreading it over him, she said, “Pardon me if I have a hard time picturing my mother spending big bucks on private eyes. I always thought of her as a sad-eyed waif who gave her baby away because she had no other choice.”

J.D. didn't speak for awhile, and it was just as well. Their guard had noticed her covering J.D. with her jumpsuit and was coming to see what his prisoners were up to.

Cynthia was watching the thug approach and she nearly missed J.D.'s final quiet words on the subject of her mother. “You're wrong. Your mother is not spending big bucks on a private eye. I'm doing this for free. No, not for free. For love.”

He closed his eyes. Except for the quiet sound of J.D.'s breathing, Cynthia was alone with her captors.

* * *

J.D. found the ground to be comfortable—a little too cool, a little too hard for his battered body, but definitely better than standing up. Better even than sitting down. If he could just lie still, his heart might be able to get some blood to his brain. Then the nausea and the dizziness and the just plain weird feeling in his head might settle down.

He'd been seeing black spots in front of his eyes for a while, but they were starting to run together now. He was pretty sure that the person talking to him, stroking his brow, holding his good hand, was Cynthia, but she looked like Larabeth and sounded like her and he was too weak to concentrate on the face above him.

Whoever it was, Cynthia or Larabeth, should leave him and save herself. It would be okay to leave him here. The bad guys might not even notice him and, even if they did, they were probably used to corpses. That was his plan. If the bad guys came, he would just lie real still and pretend to be dead.

* * *

One-Eye only disobeyed orders when he had good reason and, technically, he hadn't disobeyed any orders yet. It hadn't taken him long to determine who his male prisoner was. Somehow, the New Orleans-dwelling detective that the boss wanted dead had found his way to the swampy woods of South Carolina.

A quick call to Gerald confirmed his suspicions. One-Eye had no qualms about killing either of his prisoners, but his instructions were clear. The man must die, but the woman must be delivered alive and unharmed or One-Eye would pay with his own life.

The situation presented One-Eye with an interesting hostage-management problem. In his experience, it was often necessary to use pain to control prisoners, but he wasn't allowed to harm the woman. She seemed sharp enough to figure out, sooner or later, that she paid no price for her disobedience.

In this case, keeping the man alive, but only temporarily, seemed to One-Eye to be the best course of action. Keeping a spare hostage gave him the means to keep the woman in line, without hurting her directly. If she misbehaved, her fellow prisoner suffered another gunshot wound to another expendable body part. A knee. A hand. Whatever.

Then, when the man's usefulness had played itself out, One-Eye would have him killed. Because One-Eye only disobeyed orders when he had good reason.