Chapter 34
Chapter 34
B y day twenty-six, I was pacing. Coming out of my skin. But not as much as Aaron and Esther.
I was sipping coffee just prior to 5:00 a.m. when Stackhouse texted me, You’re gonna want to see this. I clicked on the news to see Ashley standing at a podium. Jeans. Hadn’t slept. Haggard. Three-day stubble. No notes. Cameras clicked at fifteen frames per second, attempting to memorialize his pain-riddled face. For the last four weeks, the news had covered his girls’ disappearance. Weeks one and two were rather kind. Empathetic even. By week three the tone started to change. Questions surfaced. “Our investigators have uncovered surprising evidence of lax security measures.” Now they blamed him. Personally. One outlet asked, “How could he fail his daughters? He had one job.”
Ashley cleared his throat and stared into and beyond the cameras. The room fell eerily silent as even the cameras quit clicking. After a long pause, Ashley spoke. “Twenty-six days, eleven hours, and thirteen minutes ago, six deviant reprobates entered my house and took Miriam, Ruth, and Sadie.” Aaron held up a family picture with his and Esther’s arms wrapped around their laughing daughters. A beautiful family moment. “Now, some four weeks later, I am not able to perform the job for which I have been elected—which is not good for this country. When I was first elected to the House, I made a promise to help keep you safe. You and your kids. Throughout my career, I’ve worked hard to do just that. But when it mattered most, I failed to keep that promise. And as much as I love this country, I love my daughters more. They are my country. When they needed me, I wasn’t there. I cannot—”
Ashley broke off. While he was in excruciating pain, there was an undercurrent I’d not seen coming. Ashley was using this press conference to stoke the fire. He was picking a fight. Taking it to the enemy. Up to now, the ransom note had not come, but I wondered what effect this would have. He cleared his throat. “I am considering not seeking or accepting my party’s nomination for president.” Ashley’s voice cracked as he fought to maintain his composure. A vein popped on his right temple. “To my girls, I love you and... I’m coming.” Another pause. His eyes were steel. Locked. Cold. And penetrating. “And to the men who hold them... this earth is not big enough.”
With that, Ashley turned and walked away as reporters shouted questions, which I doubt he heard.
I wanted to call him. Offer some encouraging word, but I had none. In terms of a percentage, our chances of recovery were low. Single digits. Feeling helpless, I did the only thing I knew to do. I laced on my boots, and Gunner and I walked into the basement. I opened the safe intending to grab Jolene—my Bergara .300 Win Mag with which Bones and I dispatched the barge captain at a little over a mile—but for some reason I felt the tug to go old school. So I slung Maggie over my shoulder, and Gunner and I began climbing to the Eagle’s Nest, setting out in the snow under the fading moonlight. I ran hard, pulling with my arms as much as my legs. Willing my lungs to eat more and more air. I had grown angry and exasperated and needed to cleanse my body of the emotional toxins that simmering rage had produced so that my mind, and heart, could think clearly. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw two images I could not process. Three abducted girls and one dead man.
One of my favorite ways to clear the fog was to give my mind something else to think about. A problem to solve. Climbing hard and then shooting long range did that. Hitting a target at a thousand yards, or maybe two, could be a rather complicated math equation. In a relatively short amount of time, the shooter would have to take into account distance, wind, speed and weight of projectile, ballistic coefficient, stationary or moving target, elevation, suppression or lack thereof. If the target was far enough away, you even had to account for the Coriolis effect—the effect of the earth’s rotation on the flight of the bullet.
Summer told me that my habit of naming my guns with feminine names was weird and I should rethink it. She said it was like I was cheating on her. I told her they weren’t all female. I had a shotgun named Bruce Lee because every time I pulled the trigger, he thumped me in the face. She laughed. Really, though, naming the weapon came from long hours spent behind it. Staring through the optics, I’d begin to view life through that lens. Those of us who hunted wolves often found ourselves clinging to our weapon when hunted by the pack, because what we did, we often did alone, and a companion was a comfort. Especially when we knew our weapon by name, because it meant we’d been here before. So... we named them.
Bones and I had placed steel targets throughout the mountains at distances from a few hundred yards to well over a mile. Actually, I carried them, some as heavy as a hundred pounds, while Bones pointed. “Put it there.” He was management. I was labor. Steel targets were helpful because they gave the shooter an auditory response. A sound. Paper targets couldn’t do that for obvious reasons. Paper targets often required up-close inspection because they didn’t show holes well, but up-close inspection could be difficult when they were a mile and a half away. Getting to the target and back could take an hour, maybe more, depending on the terrain. So steel let me know whether I’d hit it or not. The gong told me.
Maggie was a Ruger 1 chambered in .30–06. That description alone should give you some history. It was a single shot rifle. Meaning, I loaded one round at a time through the breach. It was an extremely strong receiver, a design initially used in tanks and larger weapons, then downsized for human hands and designed to hunt elephants and dangerous game in Africa because of the mechanism’s ability to withstand extreme pressure. Given its rock-solid success and reliable track record of going “boom” when called upon, it was brought back to the States a hundred years ago and chambered in smaller calibers. The venerable .30–06 (thirty-aught-six) was maybe the most storied cartridge in the history of the world. Some gun pundits argued this, but they were simply wrong. Given more modern technology and a growing population of shooters who pushed the limits looking for bigger, stronger, faster, quieter, and with less recoil, the .30–06 had grown out of fashion in recent years, but it was quite possible more animals and people had been killed with it than any other caliber. Created in 1906, it cut its teeth in two world wars and served faithfully in Vietnam and Korea. It was highly probable the .30–06 was the most tried and true cartridge ever placed in a chamber. As a cartridge, a .30-caliber projectile sat atop fifty-five to fifty-seven grains of powder, which produced an average muzzle velocity of 2,700 to 2,800 feet per second when pushing a 165- to 180-grain bullet. These were averages, as the case would hold sixty-seven grains of powder, but as I’d aged, I’d come to appreciate a rifle whose recoil didn’t bruise my shoulder. And Maggie did not. Not to mention, with the right optics, barrel, and trigger—which she had—she was good out past a mile.