Scorched (2 page)

The boat came alive with lights. A flash of muzzle fire as one of the pirates hosed down the squad. Derek took out the shooter just as a bullet zinged past Gage’s ear.

“Go, go, go!”

Gage’s boots hit the deck. He sprinted for the hatch and slid down the ladder, planting a brutal kick in the face of a man at the base. The man went down like a stone, but he looked unarmed. Gage swiftly zip-cuffed him as Derek leaped over them and kicked open the forward cabin.

“Cabin one clear,” Derek shouted.

Weapon raised, Gage kicked open one of the aft cabins. Pitch dark. He switched on the light attached to his helmet. On the bottom bunk was a bloodied man whose face was a nearly unrecognizable pulp. Looked like Brad Mason had been beaten with the butt of a machine gun.

“Hostage one secured,” Gage said into his radio, as Mike—the team corpsman—quickly moved to check Mason’s pulse. Despite the thunder of boots and the
rattat-tat
of gunfire up on deck, the hostage hadn’t moved.

“Alive,” Mike announced, but Gage was already kicking open the second aft cabin. He aimed his M-4 into the dimly lit space.

Empty bunk.

A low moan, and Gage turned his attention to a lump in the corner. Someone curled in a fetal position. Gage crouched beside her and used his free hand to lift her face. Avery Mason’s blue eyes drifted shut and her head lolled back.

“Hostage two secured,” Gage reported. Her hair was matted with blood. He noted the blood on her shorts and thighs.

“Sitrep on the hostages,” Quinn demanded over the radio.

“Alive but injured. Girl’s got a gash on her head and I think she’s been drugged. Scratch the boat evac. We need the helo back here.”

“Yo, Brewer, up and out.”

He glanced up to see Derek in the doorway with Mason slung over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

Gage scooped up the girl and positioned her limp body over his left shoulder. He moved for the ladder just as a man burst out from one of the cabinets.

Pop!

Pain tore through Gage’s shoulder as he squeezed the trigger. The man dropped. Luke lunged around the corner and put a bullet in his chest, just to be sure.

Gage managed to hang on to his gun as he grabbed the rail with his free hand and hoisted himself up the ladder. On deck he did a quick head count. Three pirates dead, four cuffed—plus one casualty below.

Cursing their crappy intel, Gage eased Avery Mason onto the deck beside Mike, who was briskly bandaging her father’s leg injury.

“Knife?” Gage asked, looking at the nasty wound.

“We need that helo.” Mike glanced up at him. “Shit, you’re hit.”

Gage looked at the patch of blood that was rapidly expanding on his right shoulder. Derek said something to him, but it was drowned out by the
whump-whump
of the approaching chopper, the rescue basket dangling from the hole.

Suddenly the helo lurched right, then left, doing evasive maneuvers. Gage swung around to face the shrimp boat, which was a dim shadow on the now-gray horizon.

“A fucking stinger!” Derek shouted.

Gage’s pulse spiked as a trail of fire arced up from the distant boat. All eyes turned skyward as the pilot shot off tracers to fool the heat-seeking missile, but it was too late. The tail rotor exploded. The helo tipped sideways and cartwheeled into the water with a giant splash.

“Joe!”
Gage dropped his gun and ripped off his flak jacket. His teammates frantically did the same. Water rained down as Gage sprinted across the deck and dove off the boat.

The ocean hit him with an icy slap.

Basilan Island, the Philippines
24 hours later

Kelsey Quinn kneeled on the ground, tapping the sifting screen until the dirt disappeared and the tiny plastic object came into view.

“What is it?” Aaron asked over her shoulder.

Kelsey glanced up at her field assistant, who towered over the four Filipinos clustered around him.

“Tagapayapa,”
a woman muttered in Tagalog.

“What?” Aaron looked at the Filipino anthropologist with puzzlement.

“Pacifier.” Kelsey pulled an evidence bag from one of the pockets of her cargo pants and labeled it with a permanent marker. She dropped the pacifier inside and darted a concerned glance at the woman whose face held a mix of sorrow and resignation.

The anthropologist held out a slender brown hand. “May I?”

Kelsey gave her the bag and watched as she squared her petite shoulders and trekked across the campsite to the intake tent, where this latest bit of evidence would be labeled properly and entered into the computer. Kelsey sighed. As a forensic anthropologist, she had traveled the world unearthing tragedy, and it amazed her how people who had seen the most suffering always seemed to have the capacity to deal with more.

Kelsey got to her feet and dusted off her kneepads. Her legs and shoulders ached from being on screen duty all morning.

“Ready for a break?” Aaron asked.

“Think I’ll wait till noon.” She checked her watch and realized her mental clock was about two hours behind.

“You’re doing it again, Doc.” Aaron passed her his water bottle and watched reproachfully as she took a gulp.

“Can’t be helped.” She handed the bottle back and repositioned her San Diego Padres cap on her head. “We’ve only got ten days left. There’s no way we’ll
finish the second grave site in that amount of time. What’d you hear about those klieg lights?”

“Nothing yet.”

“Dr. Quinn? Need your eyes over here.”

Kelsey glanced across the campground at the doctor standing beside the radiography tent. It was a welcome interruption. She could tell Aaron was about to launch into one of his lectures, and she was too tired to argue with him.

“Get me an update on those lights,” she told Aaron, then remembered to smile. “Please.” She jogged across the camp and ducked into the largest tent, which was blessedly cool because of the giant fan they used to keep the expensive equipment from overheating. Dr. Manny Villarreal, a short man who happened to be a giant in his field, was seated at a computer with his usual bandanna tied over his bald head. Today’s selection was army green to match his scrubs.

Kelsey zipped the tent door shut. She tilted her head back and stood for a few moments, letting the decadent eighty-degree air swirl around her.

“When you’re done slacking off . . . ?”

“Sorry. What’s up?” Kelsey joined him at a computer, where the X-ray of a skull appeared on the screen.

“Victim thirty-two,” Manny said. “She came out of intake this morning.”

“She?”

He gave her a dark look. “Irene recovered a pink headband.”

Kelsey glanced across the tent at Irene, whose unenviable job it was to painstakingly disentangle every
set of bones from the accompanying clothing and personal items. After being separated from the bones, each item had to be photographed and cataloged before being examined by investigators.

“You’re the expert,” Manny continued, “but I’m guessing the profile comes back as a four- to five-year-old female, about thirty-eight inches tall, based on the femur. In addition to the headband, Irene cataloged a pair of white sandals. What we didn’t find were any bullets or signs of bone trauma.”

“What about lead wipe?” Kelsey asked. The opaque specks typically showed up on X-ray after a bullet crashed through a human skull.

“None,” Manny replied. “And as I said, no broken bones. So no obvious cause of death.” He leaned back in his chair and gazed up at Kelsey, and a bleak understanding passed between them.

If this child hadn’t been marched to the edge of a pit and shot to death, like the rest of the people in the grave with her, then she’d died by other means. Most likely, she’d been buried alive and suffocated.

Kelsey’s chest tightened and she looked away.

“I— Excuse me. I have to get some water.”

With that completely transparent excuse she ducked out of the tent and stood in the blazing tropical sun. She felt light-headed. Her stomach churned, and she knew Aaron was right. She needed a break—a Coke at least, or a PowerBar to get her energy up before she did something embarrassing like faint in the middle of camp.

Lead from the front,
her uncle always said, and he was right. Uncle Joe commanded Navy SEALs for a living,
and he knew a thing or two about leadership. Kelsey needed to work hard, yes, but she also needed to set a good example for the six members of her team who had been toiling in the heat for weeks in the name of human rights. Kelsey was spearheading this mission on behalf of an international human-rights group with backing from her home research lab—the prestigious Delphi Center in central Texas. She needed to be sharp and in charge, not passed out from exhaustion. She was young to be managing such a big job, and she knew more than a few people were expecting her to fail—maybe even hoping for it. She needed to prove them wrong.

Kelsey wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her grimy arm. She traipsed across the camp and rummaged through a plastic food bin until she found a granola bar.

“Ma’am Kelsey?”

She turned to see one of her team members, Juan Ocampo, emerging from the jungle with his metal detector and his shaggy brown dog. Milo aspired to be a cadaver dog, but in reality was simply a well-trained mutt who went everywhere with Juan. Kelsey didn’t mind the pup. She liked him, in fact; he was good for morale.

Juan stopped beside her. His blue International Forensic Anthropology Foundation T-shirt was soaked through with sweat and his face was dripping.

“You need to come with me,” he said, and the low tone of his voice told her he didn’t want the others to know about whatever he’d found.

Kelsey shoved the rest of her granola bar into her back pocket and followed him into the jungle. A route
had been cut through the dense tangle of trees and vines, but the terrain was steep and uneven. Kelsey was glad for her sturdy hiking boots as she made her way down the path she and so many workers had traversed for weeks now. That’s how long it had taken her team to recover the remains of dozens of civilians whose bus had been hijacked by a death squad working for a local politician. Aboard the bus had been a rival politician’s family on their way to file nominating papers for the upcoming election. Each member of the family had been bound, tortured, and shot. The other passengers had been mowed down with machine guns and left in a shallow grave.

Kelsey swatted at mosquitoes as she neared the first burial site, where a pair of local police officers stood guard over the workers. Like most policemen in the Philippines, they carried assault rifles rather than handguns—yet another cultural difference she’d found unnerving when she’d first arrived in this country.

To Kelsey’s surprise, Juan walked right past the grave site. He veered onto a barely visible path through the thicket of trees. Milo trotted out in front of him.

Kelsey’s nerves fluttered as she tromped down the hill. He couldn’t have found another pit. They’d counted fifty-three victims already, the exact number of passengers that local townspeople believed had been on the bus when it went missing during last year’s election season. If there was another group of victims, surely her team would have heard something during their interviews with local families.

“You find gold in them thar hills?” Kelsey used her best John Wayne voice in a lame attempt to lighten the
mood. Juan glanced back at her. He’d once told her he’d been named after the American actor and loved all his movies.

“I was out here this morning, ma’am, walking Milo.” Juan’s formal tone said this was no time for jokes.

Please not another death pit.

“I had the metal detector on, and it started beeping.”

Kelsey glanced at the device in Juan’s hand—one of their most useful pieces of equipment. It detected not only bullets and shell casings—which were valuable evidence—but also belt buckles, jewelry, and other personal objects.

“Look what I found.” He stopped beside a ravine, and Milo stood beside him, wagging his tail. Juan shifted a branch and nodded at the ground.

Human remains, fully skeletonized. Kelsey crouched beside them, feeling a familiar mix of dread and curiosity.

“Male,” she conjectured aloud. “Five-eleven, maybe six feet.”

The height was unusual for a native Filipino. She studied the rotting clothing. Denim and synthetic fabrics withstood the elements better than soft tissue, and it looked as though this man had died wearing only a pair of jeans. She glanced around for shoes but didn’t see any.

“What’d you hit on?” She nodded at the metal detector.

“Something under his head. I think there is a bullet, but I did not want to move anything.”

“Good call.” She frowned down at the remains.

“Do you think he tried to run?”

“Different postmortem interval from the others, I’m almost sure of it.” She glanced up at him. “He’s been here longer.”

Kelsey dug a latex glove from one of her pockets and pulled it on. She took out her digital camera and snapped a photograph before carefully moving a leafy branch away from the cranium. She stared down at the skull, and it took her a moment to realize what she was seeing.

“I’ll be damned,” she muttered, leaning closer.

On the road above them, the hum of a motorcycle. The noise grew louder, then halted, and she and Juan traded looks. Kelsey surveyed the trees lining the highway—the same highway the bus had been on when it was hijacked. Branches rustled. Kelsey stood and Juan reached for the pistol at his hip.

“Ma’am Kelsey!”

A boy stepped into view. Roberto. Kelsey breathed a sigh of relief and shoved her KA-BAR knife back in its sheath.

“Phone call, ma’am.” He scrambled down the steep hillside and emerged, grinning, from a wall of leaves. Roberto had appointed himself the camp errand boy and spent his days zipping back and forth to town, fetching supplies for the workers in exchange for tips. He reached into his backpack and produced the satellite phone that usually lived in Manny’s tent. The boy looked proud to be entrusted with such an important piece of equipment, and Kelsey handed him some pesos.