Chapter 112
The trail climbed through mixed conifers where the air thinned, and the horses’ breath came in visible plumes despite the midday sun. Thomas’s directions had been accurate. The granite formation appeared where he’d drawn it in the dirt, an outcrop that split the trail toward the northwest pass.
They were two days into the route. The settlement at the halfway point had given them shelter for a night, fresh bandages for the gelding’s wound, and confirmation that the cabin valley was still accessible despite SNA presence on the lower highways.
No one had recent news of the settlers there, which Charlotte took as a sign of good news.
The trail narrowed near the tree line. Aspen gave way to stunted spruce, and the ground turned rockier, forcing the horses to pick their way with care.
Jack ranged ahead as he always did, returning at intervals to check on Mason, his coat dark with exertion.
Charlotte was scanning the ridge above them when the first shot cracked.
It struck rock ten feet to her left and sent stone chips singing past her ear.
She turned the mare and got Mason’s gelding moving before the echo faded, driving both horses toward the sparse cover of a deadfall twenty yards downslope.
The second shot came from their right. A third came from ahead, and suddenly, the hillside above the trail was alive with movement.
Figures in green plate descended through the trees with the coordinated efficiency of men who’d been waiting.
They were surrounded before Charlotte could reach the deadfall.
Six soldiers moved in from multiple angles with rifles shouldered and voices calling to each other in Russian.
The language carried the same clipped urgency they’d heard on the radio, but hearing it spoken by living men ten yards away felt different.
She reined the mare to a stop. Mason’s gelding halted beside her, and the boy sat straight in the saddle with his hands visible on the reins.
One of them shouted an order. Charlotte didn’t understand the words, but the meaning was clear.
She complied slowly, keeping her movements visible.
The rifle was in the saddlebag’s outer pocket, inaccessible without turning, and turning would get her shot.
She helped Mason down. He came to stand beside her with Jack pressed against his leg.
They were searched with thorough efficiency.
The saddlebags were emptied, and their contents were sorted into piles.
The soldier searching Charlotte found the knife.
He removed it from its sheath with a nod that carried something close to professional respect, then tucked it into his own gear.
Their hands were bound behind their backs with plastic zip ties.
The restraints were tight, cutting into Charlotte’s wrists.
Mason’s bonds were looser, adjusted for a child’s smaller wrists, but his face had gone still in the way that came before withdrawal.
Other prisoners emerged from the trees. Two men and a woman, similarly bound, were escorted by soldiers toward a clearing where a vehicle waited, a modified civilian truck with a canvas cover over the bed and benches along the sides.
They had been gathering people. Charlotte understood that from the operation’s efficiency, the collection point, and the ease with which the soldiers communicated as they followed procedures they’d clearly carried out before.
One of the prisoners was bleeding from a cut above his eye.
The woman helped him into the truck with bound hands, speaking to him in low Spanish that the soldiers either didn’t understand or didn’t care enough to stop.
Mason climbed into the truck bed under a soldier’s direction.
Charlotte followed, and Jack leaped up after them.
The truck’s engine started. They sat on hard benches facing each other, prisoners and captors packed into the close quarters of a vehicle not designed for either purpose.
At the same time, the mountains receded behind them, and the cabin valley grew more distant with every mile.
The soldiers talked as the truck moved. They sat opposite the prisoners with rifles across their laps and carried on what sounded like a routine conversation in Russian.
Charlotte caught fragments. A place name that might have been coordinates, a word that sounded like village, and another that Mason had identified from the tapes as prisoner or captive.
She watched Mason. His eyes were fixed on the soldiers with the particular attention he brought to language, and she saw his lips move as he formed silent Russian phrases against what he was hearing.
The truck bounced over rough terrain. The canvas cover flapped in the wind, and through the opening at the rear, Charlotte caught glimpses of the mountain route falling away behind them.
They had climbed that trail, and it was one more path interrupted by a war that had found them anyway.
One of the soldiers noticed Mason watching.
He said something to the man beside him, drawing a short laugh, then let his attention drop back to the rifle across his knees with the bored vigilance of someone performing a duty he’d done many times.
Mason’s eyes didn’t leave the soldier’s face.
Whatever he was hearing, whatever patterns he was assembling from the Russian flowing around them, he stored it.
The truck turned onto a better road. The ride smoothed out, and the soldiers’ conversation shifted to a cadence of routine rather than of operation.
They spoke about food, rotation, and a place they were headed that Charlotte couldn’t identify from the fragments.
She closed her eyes. The cabin was still in the mountains, reachable by the route Thomas had drawn in the dirt.
Whether anyone was alive in it remained the question that had carried her across eight states.
Now the answer would have to wait while she sat in the bed of a truck with her hands bound and Mason beside her, listening to the enemy’s language with the quiet intensity of someone who understood that survival sometimes began with listening.