Chapter 56
Chapter 56
W ielding a pistol, the man rose from the water like a torpedo, turned toward me, and was in the process of pulling the trigger when my CZ rang out. I didn’t count the percussions, as they were rapid, but when I looked up, Ashley was kneeling over me and the barrel of my CZ was smoking, the slide locked back. Meaning, he’d emptied nineteen rounds. Without taking his eyes off the red spot in the water, he dropped the magazine with his right thumb while reaching into my vest with his left and removing a loaded magazine, which he then inserted into the CZ, dropping the slide. Camp, Ashley, and I sat staring several seconds, wondering if Aquaman was going to reemerge. When he did not, we began belly-crawling off the ice where Bill and some other agents had already wrapped Ruth and Miriam in blankets and were carrying them back to the cabin, warm clothes, and the fireplace.
I made it to solid ground and rolled over on my back, still enjoying the amount of air filling my lungs, then tapped Camp on the shoulder. He, too, was struggling to breathe. “You got a tourniquet?”
He slid the tourniquet from the back of his vest and then knelt to determine why I would ask. Evidently he’d not seen the tomato puree I was spreading across the snow. Examining my wound, he nodded while tightening the tourniquet. “Pass-through. No bones. No femoral contact.” He smiled while also trying to catch his breath. “You’ll live to drown another day.”
I laughed. It was all I could do. Being wet, we had about three minutes before I froze to death, so the three of us stood and limped back to the cabin. Camp on my left, Ashley on my right. When we climbed the stairs leading into the great room, the girls, now clothed, ran to their dad.
I sat there watching them cry on his shoulder and him, one of the most powerful men in the world, cry on theirs. It was a beautiful moment. One I needed to see. A reminder of why we do what we do. Because in my pain I had forgotten. Grief and loss had clouded my purpose. And maybe that was Bones’s last lesson. Maybe that was why he showed up in the water. Pain is a thief and fear a liar. Always have been.
The room was buzzing with Secret Service personnel wanting to check the vice president, but he wasn’t having it. He just pointed to his girls. “Not me. Them.” In the distance, I heard the sound of a large helicopter growing closer. The cavalry no doubt. With the shivers growing almost uncontrollable, I knelt in front of the fire and pulled off my wet clothes down to my shorts. Someone wrapped an emergency blanket around my shoulders, and I inched as close as I could without actually getting inside the stove. The heat felt better than good.
Interestingly, while my head still pounded from the percussion, the ringing in my ears had almost totally subsided. No idea how. Maybe the cold. Camp knelt next to me, hovering over two mugs of hot chocolate. “I wasn’t sure if you liked marshmallows.”
My mug was spilling over. A half bag at least. It was the best hot chocolate I’d ever drunk in my life. Then, in one of the most heart-satisfying moments I’d known in a long time, I got to watch as Aaron called Esther. He was seated in a chair. Phone in one hand. Head in the other. When she picked up after half a ring, he tried to speak and couldn’t. Then tried again. “We got ’em.”
I wouldn’t soon forget the sound she made in response.
As the cabin filled with more Secret Service and law enforcement personnel, the truth of their abduction became clearer. Despite our hopes, the girls had not escaped unscathed. Not only had their captors been given free rein over hour-long intervals, but the three separate rooms in which they were held all contained a series of ropes and pulleys controlled by small, powerful motors mounted along the walls. Each room also contained eight cameras controlled by precision, medical-grade motors that could extend into any area of the room. From one millimeter to ten meters. At any angle. Someone else had violated the girls from a distance.
I wanted to throw up.
We returned to Anchorage aboard a massive helicopter rented by the US government and flanked by three others spilling over with agents along with several F-35s offering cover from 43,000 feet. I’d never felt safer in my entire life. As we hovered over the hangar, I could see that a media circus had preceded us. Maybe a hundred reporters and camera operators were running toward the landing pad. They looked like ants en route to a snow-covered food source.
Ashley spoke through the headset. “Murph?”
“Sir.”
One arm around Sadie, the other around both Ruth and Miriam, he shot a glance at me. “Find ’em.”
I stared out across the earth’s white face, knowing that evil lurked just beneath the surface. And the only way to find it was to shine a light in dark places. “Yes, sir.”