Chapter 1

They came for me during a department review meeting at Archmere Automation. It was a Thursday, I recall, shortly after lunch. There were eight of them, four soldiers and four ... I’m not really sure what they were. Federal agents, I suppose, though they never identified themselves. They barged past the security desk in the lobby and burst into the conference room, scaring my team half to death.

“Which one of you is Jamie Berk?” a fit woman in a black pantsuit asked, her severe ponytail whipping back and forth as she scanned the room. When all eyes turned to look at me, she pointed her radio. “Grab him.”

“W-wait, what’s going on?” I asked, as a pair of soldiers gripped my arms and ripped me from my chair, nearly lifting me off the ground.

With a soldier leading the way and one bringing up the rear, they dragged me down the side stairwell, out the lobby door, and tossed me into the back of a black Suburban, which sat parked between a pair of Humvees. Two of the agents crowded in on either side of me and the other two climbed up front. We were soon flying down the highway at eighty miles per hour, picking up a police escort along the way. It was one thirty in the afternoon and there wasn’t a single car travelling on our side of the interstate. Just lines of commuter vehicles pinned to the shoulder by highway patrol.

One of the agents relieved me of my cell phone when I pulled it out to respond to a flurry of frantic text messages and tossed it out the window. A few interchanges and ten or so miles later, we exited the highway with a squeal of tires and drove onto an Air National Guard base. Or armory. Or airfield. Or whatever it’s called. On the tarmac sat a squat, gray, almost cherubic airplane with four turboprops that reminded me of a beached dolphin. The words U.S. Air Force adorned the side. A C-130.

I didn’t know what it was called at the time, I asked about it later, but it looked impressive despite resembling a cetacean. The rear loading ramp was down, and some airmen in green flight suits and gray helmets stood waiting for us. The four agents manhandled me out of the Suburban and up the ramp. After giving my name to one of the aircrew, whose chest patch read TSGT Alli Davis, the agents tossed me down onto a red jump seat, one of several lining both sides of the plane, and buckled me in. I said nothing. I’d stopped asking questions about what was happening several miles back.

A pale, auburn-haired woman in a white coat, who looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties, sat across from me looking equally perturbed. Bloom Fertility Institute was stenciled over the right breast of her lab coat and her name over the left. Stephanie L. Ainslie, M.D., and, below that, OB/Gyn.

The agents exchanged a few words with the aircrew and then departed down the ramp, which lifted behind them. Even before the loading ramp fully closed, sealing us inside the plane, the turboprops throttled up and we taxied to the runway. TSGT Davis, Alli, sat in a jump seat near the cockpit, along with another woman, SMSGT Autumn Vanderhall. Too far away for me to talk to them. Less than a minute later, we took off.

“Do you know what’s going on?” I shouted to the doctor across from me once we were airborne.

She looked at me but said nothing. Either she couldn’t hear me over the roar of the turboprops, howling airflow, and structural vibrations, or she had simply ignored the question. On the off chance it was the former, I unbuckled myself and lurched across the empty cargo hold, falling into the seat next to her. She leaned away.

“I asked if you know what’s going on,” I said in a more conversational voice.

“I heard you.”

“Oh.” I didn’t feel like moving back to the other side of the plane so I buckled myself in. “Are we in trouble?”

She appraised me with suspicious hazel eyes and responded with a head shake and a shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Jamie Berk,” I said, sticking out my hand.

She hesitated before taking it and said, “Stephanie.”

I pointed to the name embroidered on her coat and asked, “Did they snatch you from your work too?”

She looked down and scrunched her brow, nodding. “Yeah.” She reappraised me. “Are you a doctor?”

“No,” I said with a shake of my head. “Engineer.” Her disappointment couldn’t have been more plain. I unclipped my company swipe badge from the retractable reel on my belt and handed it to her.

“Archmere Automation,” she said, reading the badge. “What do you do there?”

“I’m a systems integration engineer.”

“I don’t know what that means,” she said, handing it back.

“I develop and integrate PLC systems,” I explained, but, when I saw her blank reaction, I shook my head. “I’m good with my hands.”

She didn’t seem to be in a talkative mood, so we huddled into our seats against the chilly air inside the cargo hold and flew in silence for a while. I considered going forward to inquire with Alli and Autumn about what was happening but decided against it, figuring they probably wouldn’t talk to me anyway.

Underneath her lab coat, Stephanie wore unflattering maroon scrubs, but her impressive and abundant figure was evident nonetheless. She was quite shapely, and not merely pretty but stunning. On more than one occasion, I caught myself staring at her and had to tear my eyes away.

After what felt like an hour, the pitch of the engines lowered and my stomach lifted. There were surprisingly few windows in the cargo hold, and Stephanie and I found our way to the same one. The plane descended through the clouds into a very hilly region. Up ahead was an airport, just beyond a small narrow city hugging a river, but I had no clue where we were. All I knew was that we weren’t in Atlanta anymore. Autumn yanked us down into the seats we were kneeling on and buckled us back in, but, by craning our necks, we could just see out the window.

We touched down and taxied away from the airport’s small commercial terminal, where jets from the major airlines sat parked in front of a handful of jetways, and headed toward a cluster of buildings at the edge of the airport where five more C-130s sat parked on the tarmac, two with their props spinning. Written above a set of hangar doors were the words Montani Semper Liberi, with the translation below, Mountaineers are Always Free. Next to that was a clue to our location. 130th Airlift Wing, West Virgina Air National Guard.

As we rolled to a stop, a tan bus approached, only to disappear behind the plane’s tail. Autumn and Alli stood to open the rear cargo door.

“Stay in your seats,” Autumn warned, just as I unbuckled myself. “We’re taking on additional passengers.”

When the ramp touched the ground, we saw three armed soldiers and a quartet of agents, not my kidnappers but different ones, exit the bus. With urgent movements, they waved the passengers out. One by one, young girls descended onto the tarmac. Twenty-two in all. Before they had a chance to get their bearing, they were quickly hustled up the ramp by the agents and soldiers.

“Come on, come on! Move it!” one of the agents shouted.

The girls, all young teens, looked scared and several cried as they were herded like cattle onto the plane. Alli asked each girl her name as they came aboard, checking against some kind of digital manifest on her rugged tablet. Then the agents pushed them down into assigned jump seats and buckle them in. When the last girl was checked in, Alli approached one of the agents.

“There’s supposed to be forty!” she shouted. “Where’s the rest?”

The agent emphatically shook his head. “This is it! Just get them airborne! There’s no time!”

Alli’s demeanor changed and her expression made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I saw fear on her face. She quickly tapped her tablet’s screen and then began to redistribute the girls, presumably to balance the load. She pushed a terrified brown-haired girl with trembling pale lips into the seat next to me.

“What did he mean, there’s no time? No time for what?” I shouted to Alli, but she only glanced at me while she buckled the girl into her seat. “Can you at least tell me where we’re going?”

She moved on to the next passenger, the next kidnap victim, without answering. I regarded the trembling young girl next to me. Her vivid blue eyes were wide and she hugged herself to keep her frightful shivering under control. She was dressed as if pulled straight from a classroom. A short white denim skirt and a gray cotton blouse. At the ends of her long, tan legs she wore white sneakers. Pink plastic bracelets adorned her wrists. The only thing missing was her backpack.

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“B-bella.”

She said it so quietly, I could barely hear her. I shook my head.

“No. I meant, why are you here?”

Her face compressed into a grimace and tears flooded her eyes. “I don’t know...,” she cried, shaking her head.

What the hell is going on? While Alli finished buckling in the last of the girls, Autumn went to a control panel to close the loading ramp then spoke into her helmet’s headset. Almost immediately, the turboprops throttled up and we were moving again, turning around to taxi back to the runway. There were no delays. No waiting for clearance from the tower. We swung straight out onto the runway and picked up speed. I hadn’t been paying attention, but I would have bet money that all commercial air traffic in and out of the airport had been halted while we made our pickup.

I don’t know for how long we flew. Three or four hours at least, maybe longer. We stayed over land the entire time. By the position of the sun, I estimated our direction of travel to be northerly. The girl beside me, Bella, sat hunched over, hugging herself. It was frigid inside the cargo hold and she shivered violently. When Alli came past, I asked her for something to cover the poor girl and she brought me a thin gray blanket, which I draped over her back.

There was very little discussion among the girls, who all seemed to be as disoriented and scared as Bella about their predicament and fate. They were all very close in age. So close, in fact, that I assumed they must all know each other, but from what little conversation I overheard they were complete strangers, as much to each other as they were to me and Stephanie.

As I observed them, something registered in my analytical brain. They were all specimens of health and beauty, their flawless skin smooth and clear, and their hair full and glossy. I didn’t see a single set of braces on any of them. They all had perfect teeth, which seemed highly improbable. They were all a healthy weight, ranging from thin to curvy, but none was too skinny or too overweight. And, like Bella, they were all incredibly cute. The kind of young girls who would be among the most popular at their school and probably on the JV cheer squad.

Stephanie opened up to me a bit during the long flight. I learned that she was a physician, triple board certified in reproductive endocrinology and infertility, maternal-fetal medicine, and obstetrics and gynecology. She’d been in the middle of a consult with a young couple trying for their first child when they came for her at her clinic in Memphis. We speculated about why the twenty-four of us were on that plane.

“What if it’s world war three?” she fretted.

“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “I haven’t heard about anything too serious going on in the world lately, but I don’t follow the news much, so who knows.”

“Me neither.”

“Why would we all be on this plane together?” I wondered aloud. “What do a fertility doctor from Memphis, an automation engineer from Atlanta, and twenty-two teenage girls from West Virginia all have in common?”

Nothing, was the answer. We had nothing in common. Nothing obvious, at least.

It was dim inside the cargo hold and several girls slumped down in their seats to nap, including Bella, who ended up with her head resting against my shoulder. I didn’t have kids of my own, so it was a new experience to have a girl that young pressed against me. At one point, she wrapped her arms around mine. She was still cold, shivering under the thin blanket, so I put my arm over her shoulder and she snuggled up against my chest for warmth.

When we started to descend again, that’s when my worry and alarm turned to panic. From horizon to horizon, I saw nothing but arboreal forest out the window. The sun, now low in the sky, sparkled off hundreds of streams and small lakes like bowls of diamonds. We were in the middle of nowhere. Deep wilderness, unlike any I’d ever seen before.