Chapter Eleven
Gabriel
“All right, Whiskey,” Gabriel said as he stood. “We’re going on a search so you can show me why Daniel bragged so much about you and your sniffer.”
Dressed in his boxer briefs, Gabriel moved to the bathroom, where he scrubbed his teeth, spat into the bowl, and rinsed his face.
He looked into the mirror, running his hand along his chin, and decided not to use any of his ten-minute time frame to shave.
Gabriel reached into his linen closet and pulled the can of tick spray from the medicine shelf. Stepping into the shower, he dragged the curtain shut and sprayed himself head to foot, coughing as the fumes slid down his throat in a cloud.
He’d always been cautious of ticks, tiny but mighty enemies that could incapacitate or kill. A friend of his went out into the woods on a camping trip and came back out with the lifelong disabling effects of Lyme disease—pain, brain fog, exhaustion.
Exhaustion.
Gabriel didn’t remember anybody talking about the depth of this damned exhaustion.
He knew, though, that as soon as he was out on the mountain, when he smelled the thick richness of the leaf litter, the brightness of the evergreens, and felt the chill on his skin, this blanket that had settled over him would loosen.
“Good deeds are good medicine,” was a maxim he applied when he found himself sinking under the weight of the world.
Opening the bathroom door, Gabriel found Whiskey sitting there with the strange combination of excitement in her eyes and that look of perpetual gloom.
As Gabriel stepped over her to move back into the bedroom, Whiskey sneezed, spraying dog snot on his leg.
“Fair,” Gabriel said as he grabbed a hand towel.
“I know you have a sensitive snoot, and here I smell like a chemical plant. I wonder what Daniel did to protect you from ticks.” He took another go at stepping over Whiskey to get to his room.
“And I wonder if the potency of this tick spray is going to interfere with your search. I’m not going without spray, but I should have asked Reaper while he was on the phone. ”
Whiskey bobbled over to sit beside Gabriel as he picked out the clothes he’d wear for the excursion. Every time he stepped, she stepped. It was as if she were afraid that if she didn’t stay close, she’d get left behind.
He flicked his tactical pants and stepped into them.
Gabriel would dress in layers. He had no idea how high up into the mountains they’d be heading and what the temperatures would be once he got there.
Poor little kids.
Daniel told Gabriel that he didn’t like searching for little kids because they often did things that made perfect survival sense but also made them extra hard to find.
Once, Whiskey found a child under a thick pile of leaves. When Daniel dug into the debris hill, she stopped to sniff at a lifeless hand.
Daniel said his heart was stuck in his throat. It was his job to uncover that child and be the first to discover what had happened.
People always think they’ll call in the helpers, but what if you were the one called in? Then it was all on you. 9-1-1 and their job was done.
In the military, there was always someone to call.
Sure, Gabriel was considered “tip of the spear,” but if he went down, the PJs would fly in, risking their own life and limb to save his.
If his team was ambushed, another team would show up.
But on that day, under those circumstances, Daniel was the top of that food chain.
It was on him to discover.
“You remember the kid in the leaves, Whiskey?” Gabriel tugged a silk underlayer over his head and wrestled it down over his chest. “Daniel was convinced that you’d found a body.
” He tucked the shirt into his pants. “Sleeping.” He reached for a Marino wool shirt and shook the folds free.
“Just sleeping.” He laughed. “To hear Daniel describe it, it was the greatest miracle that ever happened.”
That shirt was pulled into place and tucked in.
“Sleeping,” he said and stopped. His gaze caught on Whiskey’s. “That little kid was snug as a bug in the rug, curled up safe from the cold and the damp under a massive pile of leaves. And it was all because of your nose.”
He threaded a belt made of thick webbing through the waist loops. The buckle was designed to hook onto a rope if the ascent or descent needed a safety step that was quick and effortless.
He paused to reach down and rub Whiskey behind the ears in the sweet spot that made her back leg itch her side. “It sure would be nice if we had an outcome like that.”
He reached for a fleece that he’d put in his pack along with his waterproof windbreaker and a billed cap. Every element of his off-grid uniform was tried and tested under extreme circumstances, and he trusted the performance to keep him actionable.
“Come on, girl.” Gabriel turned and jogged toward the kitchen. “It’s going to be good,” he said. “I can feel it in my bones. We have a couple minutes until Uncle Reaper pulls up. Let’s go get some food in us.”
Gabriel started the coffee pot and laid out travel mugs—one for him and one for Reaper.
He stopped and sent a message to work, saying that he was out on the search and would check in as soon as he was back on grid.
He laid the phone upright on his counter so he’d see when someone from his team sent him a thumbs up.
What he wanted was someone to text back—we got the agent.
Instead, what he saw was that Cathy had texted.
Cath: Daniel was bored lying on the couch, so he taught Whiskey to sing opera. If I was going to haunt your ass, that’s how I’d pull it off. It’s a lot more clever than the trite blinking lights, slamming doors, and pockets of cold air.
A few minutes later, a second text had come through.
Cath: That’s so nice. If Daniel can pull a prank, he must be okay. I think I’ll be able to sleep now. Thank you for that. XOXO Sweet dreams.
Gabriel looked down at Whiskey. “No. We’re not doing that. You are not a means for my brother to stay in touch. Are we straight on that?”
The answer was the sound of a vehicle pulling quietly into his drive.
Gabriel shoved four meal replacement bars into his cargo pocket, slung his pack onto his shoulders, poured out the coffees to drink on the road, and locked the door behind him.
Reaper unfolded from behind his steering wheel and met Gabriel halfway, taking the coffees.
“Black is how I remember you take yours?”
“Black. Thanks for doing this, Gabriel.” Reaper had dressed similarly to Gabriel, but his jacket was the acidic lemon-lime high-vis with reflective tape.
Gabe didn’t have anything like that. “No problem. I was lying there staring at the ceiling. Might as well get out there and be helpful to someone.”
Reaper took Whiskey’s lead and rounded to the back of the SUV to load Whiskey into the dog crate.
“I see you’ve got your kit,” he said as Gabriel dropped the straps of his pack off his shoulders.
“How about you sit in the back seat. I know you’re used to your own gear, but I brought our standard K9 search pack for you.
Why don’t you go through it, ask questions, move the items that you don’t already have with you over to your pack, so you have everything you need,” he said as he opened the door and climbed in.
“Sounds good.” Gabriel rounded to the passenger side so that when he was talking to Reaper, they’d be at a diagonal.
Reaper tapped his map app, backed out of the drive, and headed toward the highway.
“How far?”
“Sweet Gum. Only an hour.”
“You said they already have a team out?”
“Charlie and the first recruits for our newest Team Delta. Charlie was formed up about a year ago. We like them to be out in real-world scenarios when we can. They lend their special ops skill set to operations and build their team at the same time. It’s good for the dogs to work alongside other rescue professionals so they can practice focus and polite behavior. Good for us, good for the community.”
“Win-win.” Gabriel opened the pack, and the first thing to come out was a sizeable first-aid kit. He held it up, so Reaper would see it in the rearview mirror.
Reaper was looking at him through the rearview mirror. “With all your antics around the world that Daniel told me about, I know you have practice as a field medic beyond what you learned in Ranger School. On callouts like these, we’re tasked with finding, stabilizing, and communicating.”
“Got it.” Gabriel unzipped the case and found it was set up like a binder with tabs on each section: Bleeds.
Airway. Breaks. Illness. They organized it in survival order.
If the patient was spurting blood, CPR wasn’t going to keep them alive.
Gabriel liked that. He’d have to get hold of a kit like this for his own field adventures.
“The communicating is sometimes the hardest part of the search,” Reaper said.
“On this callout, we’re not going to have cell connectivity.
Because of the mountains and tree canopy, getting line of sight for radio or satellite is often a hurdle.
I have an extendable antenna in my pack.
But it only goes up so far.” He glanced back. “You’ll find a sat phone in there.”
“I have a satellite communicator in my pack. It makes calls, sends texts, puts up a beacon.”
“Good enough, but go ahead and take the one from that pack I handed you as a backup,” Reaper said. “It goes right to our headquarters. They can patch us through to the emergency manager’s command tent. The bonus is Iniquus has a doctor on standby who can come in and talk us through anything.”
“All right.”
“Team Charlie is reporting fog pooling around the trees. That makes any kind of connection piss poor. Often what happens is someone stays and tends, and someone else hikes to a clearing.”
“It’ll be just the two of us?”
“Three counting Whiskey,” Reaper said. “Whiskey works best when she doesn’t have a whole team at her heels.”
“What else did Charlie say? They took their dogs to the trailer?”
“Those K9s mostly train on air scent and find all manner of things from electronics to weapons to live and cadaver finds. Whiskey is exclusively trained on ground scent where she’s tracking a specific human.”
“Got it.”
“Their team lead, Halo, said there was too much churn from all the people who got involved. By the time the teams got their dogs on the scene, there just wasn’t anything for them to catch hold of.
That’s when Emergency Management called to see if Whiskey would come.
They all know the circumstances around Daniel’s recent death. They didn’t want to ask but—”
Gabriel turned his head toward the back to see Whiskey relaxing in the crate. “Of course, we’d show up. Glad to be here.”
Reaper looked into the mirror, caught Gabriel’s eye, then focused back on the road. “Sleep comes hard at this point of a loss.”
Gabriel faced forward again. “Yeah. Well. I’ve lost family before.
I thought I knew what to expect. But this hits different.
” He curved his fingers into the fabric of his tactical pants and gripped tightly.
“My family was appreciative of all the people from Cerberus who showed up for Daniel’s funeral.
Cathy talked about how proud she was that people with such dignity and standing were there to show their respect. That show of support was meaningful.”
“Daniel was a good man. We enjoyed training and working with him. It hit us hard when we found out about his diagnosis.”
Gabriel looked out the side window at the roadside memorial to someone’s beloved who died on the side of the highway. The trees that stood there as someone died still stood, still watched.
It was odd how a soul could be removed, and life could go on. It was like taking a bucket of seawater from the shore. It really didn’t matter to the ocean.
That loss sure as hell meant something to him.
“I had a teammate who passed a year ago because a piece of shrapnel that his doctor left in him dislodged and killed him,” Reaper said.
“He’d been away from the SEALs for ten years.
Ten years. He thought he was golden. He told me so about a week before he died.
‘I went to war, and I swore I’d die,’ he said on repeat.
He said that coming home was one of the most astonishing things that had happened to him in this life.
Next thing you know, he’s got a sobbing widow and a bunch of kids who now have more dads than they know what to do with.
The Team is rallying around to make sure everything’s taken care of for them.
They won’t want for love and attention.”
“They’ll still want for their dad. Man, that’s tough.”
“Daniel said you had some shrapnel floating around in you. It must be something you think about from time to time.”
“Mostly, I think about it on stormy days. When it rains, I ache. I try to put it to good use. My momento mori.”
“How are you feeling right now?”
“Shrapnel-wise? I’ve got a sting, nothing that’s going to hold me back on the mountain. I’m squared away.”
“No, Gabriel, I’m asking how your emotions are doing right now.
I’m sure you know this already. Daniel would have told you his stories, but it’s more likely than not that it’s going to be Whiskey who finds those kids.
And they might not be found in good condition.
I’m going to lay it flat out: there are bears and wild hogs in this part of the mountains. ”
“Ah, that’s why you wanted me to bring my gun?”
“You thought we might need to kill a bad guy?” Reaper asked.
“Maybe just intimidate them.” Gabriel let his gaze sweep the horizon, then focused out the side window at the woods, rushing past. “But yeah. I’d go to prison to save a kid.”