Home of the Brave (Raine Stockton Dog Mysteries Book 9) Page 14

  I took a step back, still staring. There were two dozen of them or more, round, green bombs with a lever and a pull pin attached to the brass-capped bottleneck. They were somehow smaller than I had imagined, not that I’d spent a great deal of time imagining what a hand grenade would look like. The ugliness of them all piled together inside the canvas bag was profound. My voice sounded a little hoarse as I said, “But—they can’t be real. What are they doing here?”

  Jolene had turned back to the opening in the rocks, exploring the inside with her flashlight beam. I could tell now that the way the boulders had fallen created a natural cave of sorts that extended four or five feet back to the bank. Someone had disguised the opening by gathering up the smaller stones and wedging them between the boulders. As I looked around, feeling chilled in the bright sunlight, I noticed something else that had only registered with me peripherally before now. The grass had been flattened in long rows leading up to and away from the place we were standing. Those were tire tracks, and they had been made since the rain yesterday.

  What kind of vehicle could traverse this terrain without getting stuck? A tractor. A jeep. An ATV. And only one of those could crisscross this camp at will without anyone giving it a second glance.

  Willie had been standing right beside me when Nike alerted. No, not beside me, almost in back of me. What if it hadn’t been the day-old shell casing that had triggered Nike, but something stronger, more recent …

  Jolene crawled down from the opening in the boulders and stood up, clipping the flashlight back onto her utility belt and brushing off her hands on her pants. “There are half a dozen cases of ammunition in there, and some other things under tarps I can’t see. I need to call this in. We’ll have to evacuate the camp. Go back and let them know.”

  I nodded slowly, my mind whirring, my heart beating slow and hard. “I just don’t understand why—”

  “Raine!” I spun at the sound of Melanie’s voice, and there she was, red-faced, sweating, and looking enormously pleased with herself as she crossed the field from the agility ring, Cisco pulling on the end of the leash. “Cisco tracked you all the way here!” she called happily. “He really did! He didn’t want to go in the ex-pen,” she added.

  It was at this point I found my voice enough to cry, “Melanie, stop! Stay back!”

  She slowed down about a hundred feet away, but didn’t stop. “What’s up?” she called back.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jolene take out her cell phone, but it was at that moment Cisco spotted Nike and lunged toward us with excitement, jerking the leash out of Melanie’s hand. I drew a breath to shout at him, but the words never made it out of my mouth. There was a deafening crack of an explosion. I cried out and staggered back, and when I looked down my tee shirt was spattered with blood.

  Chapter Twenty

  I could see Cisco, a blur of gold and terror, barreling toward me. I could see Melanie right behind him. I could see Jolene on the ground, grasping her arm across her chest, and I realized the blood was hers. Nike stood stiffly at attention, her eyes on something beyond my shoulder. I turned my head and saw a soldier running toward us, rifle in hand and pointed at us.

  All of this registered in less time than it takes to take a breath. Cisco was still running. Melanie was still stumbling toward us. Nike was poised and ready, her eyes on the soldier who was now less than ten feet from us. Jolene shouted hoarsely through gritted teeth, “Nike, Fa—”

  I knew it was the command to attack even though she never finished the syllable. As she spoke, I saw the soldier swing his gun toward Nike and I screamed, “No!” I whirled toward Nike, stumbled and fell to one knee, putting my body between hers and the rifleman’s as I grabbed her collar with one hand and flung my other arm around her neck. “Nike, nein!”

  It was the only German word I knew and I had no real notion that this highly trained police dog would obey my command over her handler’s. Very likely she would not have, but my voice drowned out Jolene’s in that crucial moment and she screamed at me, “Are you crazy? Let her go! Nike—”

  But then the soldier was upon her, drawing back his booted foot and slamming it into her head. Her body jerked violently with the impact and was still. I made a sound; I pressed my face into Nike’s shoulders, tightening a fist in her fur. In a blur of motion, the soldier wrested Jolene’s firearm from its holster, then tore a strip of duct tape from the roll on his own belt and pressed it over her mouth. He jerked her bloody hand behind her back and bound it to the other one with another strip of tape. Everything was etched in slow-motion detail, but it all happened so fast my brain couldn’t register what my senses took in. There was blood on the ground, blood on Jolene’s clothes, blood on me. The sound of hysterical barking bore down on me as Cisco’s claws tore up clods of earth in his frantic race to reach me. Melanie was so close now I could hear her gasping breaths, and I wanted to scream Melanie, no! Run the other way! Go back! but if I did, would the soldier swing his rifle on her? Nike strained against my grip and Melanie and Cisco were close, closer, and it was too late to scream now, too late to stop them, I couldn’t even draw in a breath. The soldier shoved Jolene’s gun into his waistband and tore the radio off her belt, then kicked away the remnants of her cell phone that had been shot from her hand. I thought he would shoot her then, but instead he swung the rifle toward Cisco, who was bearing down on us in a fury of terrified barking.

  I screamed, “Cisco, down!”

  For three years we had practiced the emergency down with the same religious fervor with which we had practiced the emergency come. The thing about an emergency command is that you never know how effective your training has been until it has been tested in an emergency, and then there is no room for error. It will either save your dog’s life, or it won’t.

  This time it did.

  Cisco took one or two more galloping steps, just enough time for the command to reach him and register in his brain, and then he slid to the ground a half dozen yards in front of me, panting. Melanie stumbled toward me and I opened an arm for her, drawing her close and holding on tight to Nike’s collar with the other hand, thinking, Cisco, stay, stay, stay, please just stay … and ducking my head involuntarily as the soldier jerked his rifle toward me. Melanie’s quick hot breath hissed in my ear and her tee shirt was damp with sweat; I could feel the rabbit-fast pounding of her heart, or maybe it was my own. She gasped, big-eyed, “Is that real blood? Is that lady … is she dead?”

  I understood then that Melanie, so comfortable in the world of television violence and video games, must have thought until this moment that this was all part of the demonstration, a drama staged to entertain the children and her only concern was that she not be left out. Maybe it was the blood, or maybe it was my wet face and shuddering breaths, but only now was she beginning to suspect this might not be a game. I whispered, “No. She—she’s not dead.” I did not know that to be true. I hoped it was. But I didn’t know. “Be still, Mel. Just, just be real—be really still, okay?”

  The soldier was wearing a half-face respirator mask with filters on either side and full goggles with a polarized tint that hid his eyes. His head was covered by a billed cap of the same camouflage material that comprised his shirt and pants. His chest was rising and falling rapidly and I could hear his breath, but the rifle that was trained on us was steady and unwavering.

  “Is that a real soldier?” asked Melanie. Her voice was quiet with awe. “Is there a war?”

  I swallowed hard. My eyes were on Cisco. Please, please, please … “I don’t know,” I managed. I found her hand and squeezed it. Nike shifted her weight, straining forward. My fingers were growing numb around her collar. “I don’t … know.”

  There was a sudden crackling sound that made us all jump. Cisco’s ears swiveled forward, and I realized the sound was coming from a small radio clipped to the soldier’s collar. A tinny voice said, “North sentry, report.”

  “Two adult females, one child, two canines.” The soldier’s
voice was muffled by the respirator, but chillingly audible. “Situation secure. Request instructions re: disposition.”

  “Hold your position. Mission accelerated. Repeat: mission accelerated. ETA on reinforcements, sixty seconds.”

  It was all like something out of a really bad movie. Except that it wasn’t.

  “You.” The soldier jerked his head at me. “Get leashes on those dogs. You try anything funny and I’ll shoot them.”

  I said, “I won’t do anything dumb, really.” I got unsteadily to my feet, still gripping Nike’s collar. “Don’t shoot them. They’re pets. They won’t hurt anybody. They’re good dogs.”

  “Raine?” Melanie’s voice had a high, tight quality to it and she wouldn’t let go of my hand as I tried to move away to retrieve Nike’s leash. Her eyes were fixed upon the barrel of the gun that was still pointed at her.

  I said unsteadily, “It’s okay. Stay here. I’m just going to get Nike’s leash.” I shifted my eyes toward the leash, which Jolene had draped around her neck and which had become half-pinned by her body when she fell. I said deliberately to the soldier, “Okay?”

  He nodded curtly and I pulled my hand away from Melanie’s grip. Cisco watched me with anxious, impatient eyes. Please, boy, please my good dog, please just a few more minutes. The long down in an AKC obedience trial was three minutes. Cisco had never made it.

  I stretched across the distance between us, holding on to Nike’s collar, and knelt beside Jolene. I heard her muffled moan as I gently tugged the handle of the leather leash from beneath her hip. I could see, now that I was this close, that the blood was coming from her hand, and it was a mangled mess. But you couldn’t die from a bullet wound to the hand. Could you? The side of her jaw was swollen and red from the imprint of the boot, and a trickle of blood ran from her ear. But she moved her head, and her eyes seemed to flutter behind closed lids. She was alive. And there was nothing I could do for her except to try my best to keep her that way.

  I stepped quickly back to Melanie and snapped the leash onto Nike’s collar, winding it tight around my hand. I took a breath, straightened my shoulders and called as matter of factly as I was able, “Cisco, come.”

  Cisco was not fooled. He knew perfectly well there was nothing matter of fact about the situation, the gun, the man with the mask, the blood and smell of fear that must have been radiating off of me and Melanie in waves. But my good dog stood up, tail wagging low and trailing his leash, and trotted over to me. I started breathing again when I took his leash in my hand.

  The soldier said, “Take off your pack. Toss it over here.”

  I transferred both leashes to one hand, but my fingers were shaking so badly it took three tries to release the catch on my fanny pack. I tossed it underhanded toward him. It landed at his feet and he left it there.

  “Turn out your pockets,” he said.

  I did. Cisco watched me, looking for treats. Nike never took her eyes off the soldier.

  He said, “The kid too.”

  Melanie looked at me and I nodded. She pulled the white lining of her shorts’ pockets outward. Then she unclipped the bait pouch from her belt loop and held it out to him in open hand. “You want this too?” Her voice was small, her eyes big behind the glasses. “It’s just dog treats.”

  “Toss it over here.”

  She did. The little pouch landed a few feet short of my pack, and he let it lie there. An amateur would have bent to pick them both up. This guy had training.

  I clenched my muscles in dread as I heard the ATV engine chugging up the rise, not knowing whether I should be relieved or horrified to see Willie at its helm. If I was wrong about him, he could be coming to our rescue. But if I was right …

  But it turned out it didn’t matter. The man behind the wheel was not Willie but another soldier, dressed in combat gear and wearing the same half-face respirator mask, goggles and bill cap as was the first man. He swung out of the vehicle and turned a rifle on us while the first soldier searched my pack. He removed my cell phone and radio and pocketed them, then opened Melanie’s pouch. Finding nothing, he tossed both onto the floorboard of the ATV’s wagon. He jerked his gun toward Jolene, who was still on the ground, though semiconscious now and moaning.

  “What are our orders?”

  “Take her with us,” said the other man. “Command thinks she might be useful.”

  “What about the dogs?”

  The way he said it, the way he turned his rifle so casually toward Cisco and Nike, made my blood run cold. Melanie leaned into me.

  The other man said, “Secure them with the others. This is not our mission.”

  One of the soldiers pulled Jolene to her feet. Nike’s head swiveled toward her handler and I held onto her leash so tightly my arm trembled. The soldier pushed Jolene into the wagon, but she couldn’t sit with her hands bound behind her and she fell to her knees on the floorboard. I saw the whites of her eyes as they rolled back in pain. The soldier jerked her upright again. The other man pointed his gun at me. “Get in,” he commanded.

  Melanie climbed in before me. Cisco jumped into the cart immediately and sat at Melanie’s feet, panting heavily, but Nike balked when I took her collar and tried to urge her in. The soldier jerked his rifle toward her impatiently. I said, “Hup!” only hoping it was the command she had been trained to, and it was. Nike climbed in beside Cisco and I followed quickly. I picked up my fanny pack and strapped it around my waist; I don’t know why. I remember thinking it had my driver’s license in it, like that mattered, and twenty dollars for the camp store. You do strange things when the whole world suddenly spins crazily out of control in front of your eyes.

  One soldier started the engine and turned the vehicle back toward the lodge. The other stood on the running board, his rifle trained on us and unwavering. I held the dogs’ leashes tightly in one hand and Melanie’s hand in the other, just as tightly. No one spoke a word or dared to move the entire way back.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  If there was one thing Buck had learned about being a good leader it was the importance of knowing your strengths. His strengths were not research, or computer analysis, or studying smart screen projections until his eyes bled. The FBI was good at that. He left them to it and did what he did best: solving problems.

  As far he could tell, the most urgent problem was finding out what, if anything, the insurgents planned to blow up on the Fourth of July. And the fastest way to do that was to talk to somebody on the inside. And the fastest way to do that was to find out who murdered Carl Brunner. So far the only lead in that case had been Reggie Connor.

  But then, in the process of cleaning out his in-box that morning, which was something he tried to do every four or five days whether it needed it or not, he came across a complaint filed Thursday night by a resident of Camelback Road, a dirt switchback in the middle of nowhere that boasted precisely two taxpaying residents: Abe Kale and Henry Middleton. The taxpaying part was what Abe Kale took pains to emphasize when he complained about all the cars barreling down the road toward his neighbor’s house, blowing up dust into his henhouse and upsetting his laying hens. The officer who took the report reminded Abe that there was no law against a fellow having company to which Abe replied that there ought to be a law about how many cars should be allowed to park in one fellow’s yard because there must’ve been twenty or thirty of them down at Henry Middleton’s house. The officer did his duty by driving down to the end of the road where the Middleton property was and reported no cars in the yard and only one—license plate belonging to Henry Middleton—in the driveway.

  That was the first thing that struck Buck. The complaint had been called in at eight thirty. The report had been filed at ten-oh-five. Generally if a man was having a party with twenty or thirty guests it lasted more than an hour. The second thing that caught his interest was that Henry Middleton was Reggie Connor’s cousin.

  The FBI had asked them to keep an eye out for unauthorized assemblies and, even though the order had m
ade his skin crawl when he first heard it, reeking as it did of edicts issued by every dictator from Hitler to Hussein, he dutifully copied the report and e-mailed it to Manahan. He then decided to have a talk with Henry Middleton himself.

  That was what he was on his way to do when the radio crackled and Wyn’s voice reported, “This is Unit Six. We have a visual on a red oh-three Jeep Wrangler NC license PAT0845. Vehicle is parked outside Banks’ General Store on Indian Drum Mountain Road.”

  That was Reggie Connor’s plate. Before he could respond, Lyle Reston’s voice broke in, “Unit Two, ETA ten minutes.”

  He was closer than Buck was, so Buck said, “Silent approach, Unit Two. Keep the vehicle under surveillance. Unit One en route, ETA twenty.”

  “Roger,” Wyn said. Then, “Say, Buck, doesn’t Willie usually open on Saturdays this time of year?”

  Buck replied, “Last I heard.”

  She said, “The Closed sign is in the window.”

  Buck frowned, but couldn’t explain it anymore than she could. He punched on the flasher bar and accelerated to eighty.

  I tried to count the soldiers I saw as we pulled up in front of the Rec Hall but I couldn’t. Ten? Fifteen? All I could see were the assault rifles, the gas masks, the combat boots. Melanie whispered, “Maybe they’re making a movie.”

  But I think even she finally understood that whatever was going on was desperately real when the two soldiers escorted us at gunpoint up the steps and into the Rec Hall. One of the soldiers held on to Jolene’s arm to keep her upright.

  The door opened upon a cacophony of barking dogs and crying children. The five adults and three teenage counselors were sitting on the floor against the wall while a soldier stood in front of them with his feet planted and his gun leveled at them. The children were against the opposite wall, although I noticed the soldier who guarded them stood in the arms-at-rest position, which, while it was no less terrifying, was at least not quite as much a direct threat. One little boy cried, “I’m not afraid of you! My daddy will beat you up!” and then he burst into tears. “Don’t hurt Panda! Don’t hurt my dog!”