Ransom (Dead Man's Ink Series Book 3) (12 page)

By the time everyone has their kit on and the straps of their M4s slung over their necks, my men are wide away and ready to fuck shit up. They live for this stuff. More often than not, they’re sitting around, trying not to cook in the Afghan heat. Being called out on a mission is the most exciting thing that can happen any day of the week. Being called out on a mission in the middle of the night is even better.
 

Normally we’d load up into transports and burn rubber out of base, speeding toward the location of our targets, but this time we’re on foot. The hillside that flanks the base was considered a major security risk by the higher ups when they were considering where to plant our three-thousand-strong camp, but in the end their concerns were overruled by General Lockwood, who felt the location—close to four hotspots in the near by vicinity, along with the fact that it is only a ninety minute drive to Camp Leatherneck—out weighed the risk that it would be on lower ground and subject to an increased chance of attack.
 

The knife-edge sharp ridgeline to the west rises up into the night. It’s clear, no cloud cover, and neither the light coming from the base behind us or the fire beyond can dampen the blanket of stars suspended over our heads, shining bright. Cade’s a reasonably tall guy, is only a couple inches shorter than me, and he’s a broad motherfucker, yet as we navigate our way around the back of the ridge, ducked low to the ground, trying to stay out of sight, the guy doesn’t make a goddamn sound. None of my men do. For a brief, twisted moment I’m proud that they’re such well trained killing machines.
 

The slog up the four hundred meter slope shouldn’t take us as long as it does, but our cover will be blown if we don’t tread carefully at this point. When we come close to topping the hill, I send the newest, youngest recruit, Atherton, up ahead to scope out the situation. The rest of us crouch in the dark, breathing quietly, the warmed metal of our guns pressed against our chests, listening to the sound of our hearts slamming in our chests as we wait for him to return and tell us what he’s seen.
 

Three minutes pass by. Below us, a loud splintering, cracking sound rips through the night, and a ball of fire boils up toward the sky, casting long shadows behind us as it flares. “The
fuck
was that?” Cade hisses.
 

I stare down at the camp, narrowing my eyes, trying to figure that out for myself. The swell of flames from the initial explosion dies back, and it’s clear to see it originated on the other side of the camp’s fencing, where the Afghani women and children were camped out. Not our fuel supplies then. But whoever sparked that thing must have had access to a huge quantity of accelerant. How the fuck did they manage to get that through the checkpoint? And was it meant to blow inside the refugee camp, or inside
our
camp?

Cade shakes his head, chewing on something between his front teeth. “This is absolute bullshit. Those people came to us for help. They were camped right next to us, for fuck’s sake. How could this happen?”

I keep my mouth shut. I’m about to tell him to do the same but Atherton emerges out of the darkness, face as white as a sheet, and my focus turns to him. “Well? Who’s up there?”

Atherton shakes his head. “No one. Well, four men, but they’re all dead. Their hands…” He shivers. “Their hands have been glued to their rifles. Their eyelids are glued open too. They’ve all been shot in the head. They’re…they’re
ours
.”

“Ours?” My stomach dips, like I’m on a rollercoaster and I’ve just been rocketed down a steep drop. “US soldiers?”
 

Atherton nods. He looks like he’s about to pass the fuck out. “I don’t recognize them. I haven’t been here long, though. Could be they’re from our platoon. Could be they’re from another camp.”

“We have to get up there,” Cade snaps. A rumble of agreement goes around the other men.
 

“We can’t.”

Cade looks horrified. “What do you mean,
we
can’t
? They’re our men. Our
brothers
. We can’t just leave them there.”

“Why would they leave them up on the ridgeline with their hands glued to their weapons and their eyes glued open, Cade? There’s only one reason: they left them there for us to find. They know we patrol this hillside religiously. Daily.
Hourly
sometimes. I have no idea why they want us up there at the top of the hill, but they’re trying to draw us there.”

“If it were a trap, why wouldn’t they have killed me when I just went up there to recon the area?” Atherton asks.

Cade answers on my behalf. He looks like he’s seen the truth in my logic now. “Because you’re one guy. If they pick you off, then the rest of us head back down and report what’s happened. If you come back here, tell us what you’ve seen, rile us all up and we go charging up there to get our men, they can pull the trigger and kill twelve of us. They’re playing it smart.”

This reasoning isn’t enough to stop my men from wanting to barrel up there to get our guys back, even though they know it’s the truth. Most of them develop hard, stony-faced expressions as I order them to march back down to camp. Halfway there, I radio back to Richter and tell him what we found. I can hear the rage coloring his voice. He tells me fifty-three of the Afghani women are dead, along with thirteen of the kids. As we approach the camp, we can see their lifeless bodies lined up in rows along the fence line. Worse, we can
smell
their bodies.
 

In the morning, the sun, white and cold somehow, peeks over distant mountains much steeper and foreboding than our little hill. A team of marines from Leatherneck report four of their men are missing, and at oh eight hundred hours, an IED blows the top of the ridgeline, creating a crater sixty meters across, sending rocks and boulders raining down on the camp and into the valley.
 

They obviously grew tired of waiting for us to go up there.

CHAPTER NINE

REBEL

I wake up in the night, sweating. Sophia is already awake, staring at the ceiling, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. I’m hardly surprised. She’s so wound up right now that I’d be shocked if she’s slept at all. I don’t know if she’s realized I’m conscious yet. She just lies there, staring up at the ceiling, not fidgeting or moving an inch. I blow out a deep breath, shifting over onto my side.
 

“You were having a bad dream,” she whispers.
 

“Yeah,” I whisper back.
 

She says nothing more about the fact that I must have been tossing and turning, which I love her for. I don’t really feel like talking about Afghanistan. I especially don’t want to talk about that night, when it seemed like the whole world was enveloped in death.
 

“Cade was in prison,” she says.

I’m mildly shocked by this statement. “He was. For nine months.”

“Nine months isn’t very long. What did he do?”

“
Nothing
.” The word is heavy on my tongue, weighty and painful, and also true. Cade didn’t do anything to land himself in Chino, but he took the time and did it without complaining. I will always owe him a debt for that. “This isn’t the first time the club’s been watched by a federal agency. The ATF were interested in us once before, a couple of years back, but they couldn’t pin anything on us so they picked up Cade for possession of an unlicensed weapon. It was stupid.
I
was the one carrying the gun. We were in a car, and they pulled us over. Cade grabbed the thing from me before I could stop him. We were on our way to meet an informant who claimed they had information about Laura, and Cade told me I had to go. I had to make the meeting, otherwise the guy would be in the wind and we’d never find out if his information was legit. So they arrested him, took him in, and I couldn’t do a fucking thing about it. Took my uncle nine months to get him out of that place. The wardens were trying to make him talk on the inside. They locked away in the SHU for months on end. Refused to let him have visitors or talk to his lawyers. Eventually they couldn’t keep hold of him, though. They let him go, and Cade came home.”

Those were hard months. Knowing that he was shut away because of me was fucking shitty, but knowing that the information had lead to a dead end and he was serving time for no reason was a bitter pill to swallow. Next to me, Sophia cups her hands over something on her stomach, something round and shiny—one of my snow globes. I don’t need to ask which one it is; I already know it’s the one from Chicago. Has to be. I reach out, skimming my fingers over the cool surface of the glass globe. Sophia’s never asked me about my snow globes—this one in particular—though I know it plays on her mind. She’s too smart; she knows there’s a story there, given the fact that I keep it separate on its own on my desk. I’m not ready to offer that story up voluntarily yet, however, so I take the plastic and glass from her and set it down on the bedside table next to her. Tiny flakes of white swirl inside the globe, falling silently on the Willis Tower, 900 North Michigan and the Lake Point Tower, barely visible in the thick darkness of the room.
 

After a while, she asks, “Who’s Zeth Mayfair?”

In all honesty, I haven’t thought about that name in a long time. Cade’s mentioned him a number of times since he got out of jail, but he’s been a peripheral player, someone who hasn’t affected our daily lives here in New Mexico. “He’s a friend of Cade’s. Kind of. He works for a guy in Seattle, a guy we suspect has started to trade in women.”

“You think he might know something about Laura? The guy he works for?”

“No. Charlie Holsan’s only just starting to dip his toes into that shit. Cade thinks it might be a good idea to talk to his friend, though, see if we can convince him to question his boss about any girls he might have heard about going missing a few years back.”

“And you don’t think it’s a good idea?”

I shake my head. “My cousin works for this guy, too. It’s messy. We went to see Michael a while back and stormed over there to Charlie’s place but he managed to talk us down. We didn’t end up seeing him. Since then I’ve had time to look into Holsan. He’s fucking crazy, a real nasty piece of work. It would be a mistake to confront him about selling girls. And this Zeth guy doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that side of Holsan’s business, so it’s unlikely he can get information from him anyway. Better to just watch and wait, see what happens.”

Sophia makes a soft,
mmhhh
ing sound. “Cade obviously feels differently. That’s why he has a whole dossier on the guy in your office?”

“Yeah. Maybe.” I could explain to her that Cade’s just going through the motions now, but it’s too painful to admit out loud, even to myself. Laura’s been gone for so long that the possibility of ever finding her and bringing her home seems remote. I’m nearly positive that Cade thinks his sister is dead. It’s easier for him to believe that. If she’s dead, she’s not being raped repeatedly, over and over again. She’s not being abused and tortured. She’s not in pain and suffering because we can’t fucking find her anywhere on the surface of this godforsaken planet.
 

Sophia rolls onto her side, facing me. “I’ve been lying here for the past few hours, trying to decide if I should call the cops,” she says quietly. “If the police got involved, if they knew Ramirez has my father, they could storm the farmhouse and get him out of there before they could do anything to harm him.”

“
God
, Sophia—”

“But then I realized that there’s no way to get the authorities involved without implicating you in my kidnapping. They’d dig and discover something about the Widow Makers that would land you or Cade in trouble, not to mention the other guys. So I just lay here in the dark, trying to think of a way out of this situation, trying not to resent you because of it, and I’ve been so angry, Jamie. So fucking angry, I could taste it, and I didn’t like how it made me feel.”

She has every right to be angry. It would be a fucking miracle if she wasn’t. I asked her to stay here to help put Ramirez away; I asked her to testify, but Hector turning up on our doorstep, moving himself and his whole goddamn crew into town, less than four miles away, really threw a spanner in the works. He made it fucking personal. He threatened her, and the time for legal justice came and went. Instead, I’ve been holding my breath, waiting for Ramirez to make the first move, and that hasn’t done anyone any favors. “And what about now?” I whisper. “Are you still angry?”

She nods, tears welling in her eyes. “Yes. But I don’t want to be. I just want it to go away. I want my dad to be safe and sound back in Seattle. I want somehow for this all to be okay. Can you tell me that it will? Can you ease my mind? Because right now I’m teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and I’m pretty sure I’m about to lose my balance.”

Slowly, I brush the loose strands of hair out of her face that have escaped her messy ponytail. She closes her eyes, her eyelashes nothing more than the suggestion of black smudges against her cheeks in the darkness. “I can’t promise you anything, sugar. I wish I could, but I can’t. It would be unfair to lie. What I can tell you is that I’m going to do absolutely everything I can to make sure this doesn’t end in disaster. I’ll sacrifice everything I have to make sure your father gets back to Seattle, and I’ll bury anyone who tries to prevent that from happening. All I can promise you is my best. And in case you haven’t noticed—” I place a feather-light kiss on the end of her nose, “—I’m kind of a badass. So don’t fret yourself, beautiful girl.” I let the Louisiana creep into my voice as I speak, and a tiny smile plays over Sophia’s lips.
 

“You
are
kind of a badass. But you’re also a jerk,” she informs me.

I slide my hand underneath her head so I can wrap my arm around her, pulling her to me. “Do you love me?” I whisper.
 

She speaks so softly. So quietly. Like she’s almost afraid I might hear her. “Yes. I love you so much.”

I kiss her temple. “Good.”