18. Chuck
18
CHUCK
I look this way and that along the road, ears pricked for any sound, but there’s nothing. Dead silence. I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck pricking up, waiting for something, anything to happen, but just like the rest of this evening, all I can hear is quiet in every direction.
I pull my walkie-talkie from my pocket and buzz in to Callum and Dax.
“You guys alright?”
“Fine,” Dax fires back, and Callum confirms the same thing a second later.
“Any sign of anyone?” I ask.
“Nothing yet.”
“Yeah, nothing,” Dax agrees.
I grimace. I know patience is the name of the game here—we can’t lose hope just because things haven’t gone exactly as they were meant to within the first couple days of us laying out these traps. But the longer this goes on, the more I start to wonder if they’ve found some other way to pull this off, some way to catch us off guard before we can get our bearings.
I hook the walkie-talkie back over the edge of my jeans, and pull back among the trees. I’ve been crouching out here for a few hours now, keeping watch on the trap we’ve set over the roads—a run of spikes, small enough that you can’t see them from inside a car, but lethal to the rubber on their tires. Dax and Callum are positioned at the other lanes that lead into the forest—we’ve got to cover all our bases. Any approach they take, we need to be ready to shut them down.
But for the last day or so, since we’ve laid down these spikes, there’s been nothing. No sound or sign from anyone trying to get into or out of the forest. Which should be a good thing—silence, at least, means nobody is on the hunt for Charli. But I find it hard to believe that this man would give up so easily, especially after everything Charli has told us about him and his father…
Suddenly, something catches my attention. It takes me a second to register it, after so much quiet, but it’s an engine. A car engine. Heading up toward me—must be coming through from the nearest town, though I can’t imagine why anyone would bother with making their way down here unless they were looking for something specific.
Or someone.
I reach for the knife I’ve stashed in the holster at my side. No guns. Too loud. Can’t attract more attention than we need to. We have them locked up at the cabin, but the last thing I want is to pull firearms into it. We need whoever comes up here alive—need them for information, as much as we can get about the man they’re working for and everything he has planned for us.
Sure enough, the purr of the engine draws in closer and closer, until finally, the sunlight bounces off the hood of a car emerging over the hill. I pull back into the tree line, making certain they can’t see me. And then it hits me. This car, it’s the same one that drove by when we were moving Charli’s crashed vehicle a few weeks ago. Whoever this is, they’ve come back to follow up on what they saw…
But they’re not going to have much of a chance to get any closer. I grit my teeth in the second before they hit the spike trap, and an explosion of deafening pops bursts into the air as the tires break and split, the car skidding to the left and nearly sliding straight into a ditch by the side of the road.
“Shit!” A man’s voice cuts through the air, accompanied by the hissing of the tires losing pressure. He springs out of the vehicle and drops down to his haunches to inspect the damage, muttering more curses under his breath as he does so. Before he has a chance to lift his head and look around to see who caused this harm to his car, I’m on him, cutting silently through the trees and emerging out onto the road.
“What the fuck—” he exclaims, and he scrabbles at his side for a gun as he sees me approaching. I don’t give him a chance to pull it out, knocking it beneath the car with a kick before he can even get to his feet.
I might have spent most of my time in the SEALs in comms, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have plenty of training of my own in how to handle conflict. I grab the man’s arm and twist it up his back, pinning him to the ground, but before I can plant my knee on his back to keep him there, he squirms loose and dives toward the car where I kicked his gun.
“Get the fuck away from me!” he yells, his hands scrabbling at the frigid tarmac as he tries to grab hold of the weapon. I pull my knife and drop down in front of him, grabbing him by the collar and yanking him toward me so he’s got no choice but to look me in the eye. Pressing the blade to his throat, I see the blood drain from his face as he realizes just how much trouble he’s in, his body going limp in my grasp.
“Give it up,” I order him. “You’re coming with me.”
“Who the fuck are you?” he asks, though his voice is weak—he knows he’s not going to walk away from this with a win, no matter how much he wants to. Does he have a tracker on him? Maybe. I reach into his pockets, keeping the knife pressed to his throat, and pull out a phone, tossing it to the ground beneath the car. I can come back and get it later, maybe dispose of it somewhere far away so they’ll go looking for it there—if they don’t already know what’s happened to him by then.
I flash him a grin.
“Oh, you’ll find out,” I tell him, and I reach into my pocket to pull out the walkie-talkie. “Dax, Callum? Come meet me at the west entrance. I have someone you’ll want to see.”