Chapter 1

Week one, Day one, Saturday, 0700:

I checked my watch yet again. Then I heard the sound I’d been waiting for. Two minutes later than the previous Saturday morning came the soft thump-thump-thump of her trainers on the hard ground of the path, then she hove into view round the curve. Yep, it was her, not another runner out early. I watched her through the cover of leaves as she got closer to my ambush site, carefully but quickly checking around me one more time for signs of other people or dogs, but seeing and hearing nothing that posed a threat.

I took a deep breath.

Time to fish or cut bait, as my Dad would have said. Last week I’d had to abort the second attempt at the last moment because some guy out walking his dog was approaching; if I’d have gone ahead, he most likely would have seen me and raised the alarm. The week before there’d been another truck in parking lot, meaning there was someone about. Both times I’d stayed in cover and watched as she jogged by.

This week? Go or no go? Looking good. Time to fish.

I went big game fishing. There’s no bigger game than another human being. Okay, so this one was unarmed and hopefully unaware, but she was going to be a very valuable catch once I got her into my keep net.

I pulled on the ski mask to cover my face, and slipped the ether pad out of its baggie. As she got near enough, I leaped out from behind the bush, grabbed her, held the pad over her mouth and nose, and hauled her back behind the cover. She struggled wildly at first, but the ether worked quickly and she collapsed in my arms. I pulled her further into the trees and scrub; even with her height, she wasn’t that heavy, maybe 120 or 130 pounds, and once I’d put the pad back in my pocket and checked twice that neither of us had dropped anything, I could easily pick her up and carry her.

I stuffed my ski mask into my cargo pocket; now it would hopefully look to the casual observer like maybe she’d fainted and I was taking her to safety. That would be my backup story if I did meet someone, but I was intending not to. Even keeping a watchful eye open for other people, I could still move fast. In less than a minute, I got close to where I’d parked my truck, carefully looked around, and put her down again behind a bush to check on her. She was still out of it. I quickly applied the padded handcuffs; I’d decided to risk not gagging her in case the ether made her vomit and choke. I removed her ipod and earphones, and the black box taped to her arm, and searched her to check that there was no cell phone or other possible GPS-enabled tracking device left on her. With her sports bikini and tight running gear, there wasn’t much space to hide anything.

Another negative check for any spectators who might be eye-witnesses, and I bundled her into the passenger foot well of the truck, draped the blanket over to cover her from casual view, shut the door on her, then stood to look and listen yet again. Silence. There was nobody about, it was still too early for most people. It was the dog walkers I had been most worried about, but for once there were none to be seen. My early test rehearsals had been split 50/50 between no-one in the vicinity and a potential witness; I guessed that luck and probability had both smiled on me today. All was quiet and peaceful; you could even hear the birds calling in the trees.

I walked over to the nearby trash bin for dog waste; I pulled off one of the plastic poop sacks provided and the two potentially suspect electronic items went in there, then in another bag to disguise the contents. Not that anyone who wasn’t flying high as a kite on crack cocaine was ever going to rummage through a bin full of dog shit in search of possible valuables. It was only part full, but it stank. What the heck do they put in some of these canned dog foods?

I wanted to be well clear of town before she woke up from the ether and started screaming. I was away from the parking area and driving along the street before I saw the first dog being walked by its owner; if they’d been four minutes earlier out of their house, I’d have had to abort the attempt again. It was possible my truck had been seen parked up, but it’s hardly distinctive. There are any number of similar vehicles around town, so I wasn’t too worried about that possibility. It sure seemed like I had gotten away with the abduction so far.

The girl came back to life some ten minutes later, while we were still on the road back to my cabin, and of course, as I’d feared, promptly threw up over herself. That’s the problem with ether, not that chloroform is a whole lot better. Shit, that stank the cab out, sour and acidic empty-stomach vomit and that cloying chemical smell. It nearly made me heave as well, but I’d been exposed to much more nauseating stenches in Iraq. I wound down my window to get some fresh air and switched the radio on loud to cover the screams and curses, not that there were any vehicles near me. Our road is pretty quiet even at its busiest. Not yet eight on a Saturday morning? We didn’t see a soul. The early risers were already up and away, the other neighbors were most likely still in their beds or maybe sitting out on their porches with the first coffee of the day, thinking about breakfast.

Once we got to my turn-off, I got out and very quickly checked my tell-tales on the track before moving on and pulling up in front of the cabin. I pulled the ski mask from my pocket and back over my head, opened the passenger door and hauled her out onto the ground before unrolling her from the blanket. Jeez, she’d made a real mess of the blanket, but it had protected much of her lower body. Man, the upper part was in one heck of a state. There was vomit and snot all over her chest, and her struggles had managed to transfer it to her shoulders, hair, and upper back.

She was cursing wildly as she shuffled into a crouching defensive position, glaring hatefully at me. If looks could kill – but I’d had much more visceral receptions from some of the craziest of the Iraqi detainees, some of whom were said to have carried out truly despicable and inhumane crimes that almost beggared belief. So I could look at her calmly. With her hands cuffed in front of her she could have tried to strike me a two-fisted blow, but I was counting on her not working that one out. I’d figured that she would be too helpless with hands secured behind her back, because I wanted her to be able to drink while cuffed, just in case she didn’t see sense for a while. On my own without backup, I had to be realistic about the risks of getting myself hurt if I had to physically subdue her, although the techniques I’d been trained in were more than effective. Same reason I hadn’t hooded her – you really need at least two of you to guide someone with a bag over their head, one gripping each arm, and somebody else to open and relock the doors. In Iraq, we’d always done it as a squad, which was why we’d never had any problems, even with the wildest insurgents, who struggled to break free as if your touch defiled or burned them.

Back in the real world, I bundled up the soiled blanket and put it out of the way on the grass behind me, then waited until she finally paused for breath.

“I’m going to unlock your hands so that you can wash, dry and change clothes. If you try to attack me, the cuffs will go back on and you’ll be in stinking wet clothes for a while. Gonna play fair?”

“Fuck you, you bastard! You touch me and I’ll fucking kill you!”

I shrugged.

“Okay, sweetie, if that’s how you want to do it, that’s your choice.”

I brought over a bucket of water I had standing ready on the porch and sluiced the top part of her down; that earned me even more screams and curses. Got rid of the worst of the mess from her chest, though it did spread it some. I fetched out another blanket, rolled her into it, and carried the struggling fighting mass into the room that was about to become her cell. I dumped her down on the floor and locked the door behind me, then briefly observed through the spy-hole as she wriggled free from the blanket and looked around her. My, she looked pissed. She’d have scratched my eyes out if I’d been anywhere within reach. I’d have to watch her; she was in pretty good condition, and she was plenty mad at me.

I pulled off the ski mask and went to make myself a coffee. A couple of months earlier, I’d finally given in to temptation and gotten myself a twelve-volt coffee maker; it pulled a hefty ten amps out of the batteries and through my cables, but it was a sight easier than setting up the camping stove and watching it as the coffee percolated through. I tended to make only two cups worth; the machine kept the jug warm, but there was no sense in stewing coffee I wasn’t going to drink.

It smelt real good after the sourness of the ether and acid vomit, and tasted great too. Then I decided that I’d earned a second breakfast sandwich, so I got the stove going, made myself another one and settled down outside in the morning mid-August sunshine to enjoy it with the second mug of coffee. It was turning into a real nice day.

Four months earlier...

How the heck did I get to this point, where I had abducted a young woman and was holding her prisoner in my cabin?

Well, it’s a long and complicated story, but here goes.

Let’s say that my name is Grey McKinley. That’s correct, Grey with an ‘e’. It’s an old family name, I’m of Scottish descent. We came over in the 1840’s, my ancestor knew how to build steam engines for pumping water and running machinery, and he saw the potential in a new country. I’m 26, six foot two, and I weigh two hundred ten pounds. I work in construction, so my weight is most all bone and muscle. I had thought I was happily married with a really cute three-year-old daughter, but when I got back from three months National Guard special support duty in the sandbox, I found out that I wasn’t. I guess that the lack of anything for me at mail call might have given me a clue, but Kasey had never been a great letter writer anyway, so I hadn’t expected to receive anything. We’d talked a couple of times the first month I was away, but I hadn’t been near enough civilization since then to be able to call home. I’d written her once a week, but there wasn’t a whole lot to tell.

My days were pretty repetitive, and the exciting ones were when we were being shot at, and I didn’t want her to worry that I was constantly in danger – I wasn’t. Just sometimes. Days of boredom, a few seconds of terror and excitement, almost gone before the adrenaline rush kicked in. Little point in following up, the shooter would be gone, possibly with the route or the firing point booby-trapped. A quick check on everyone, then back to the boredom of the patrol, a little more wary for a while, then down to normal levels of suspicion, trying to keep our minds on the job in hand rather than anything more distracting. There was no logic to their insurgency, our task was to stay alive ourselves, and reduce their numbers and resources every chance we got.

Our tour of duty completed, we had rotated back from Iraq as planned. No last minute extension, much to everyone’s relief. We were out-processed at Fort Lewis, put on another plane to our ‘local’ (250 miles!) military air base, in-processed and fed, and then put on buses for an overnight trip back to our unit Armory.

We got in at six, stiff from sleeping on bench seats during the long ride home, and, wonder of wonders, found the cooks from another unit waiting for our arrival to start on breakfast. I signed for receipt of my sealed envelope with the key to my locker, opened it up and pulled out my phone to call home; the battery was not quite dead enough to prevent me seeing that I had no service. I cursed and put it on charge. We cleaned and checked all our equipment, handed it in, ate breakfast and mustered out.

We showered and changed into civilian clothes; I tried again to call my wife but still had no service. I carried my kitbag over to my truck in the car park (giving it a really good inspection after all that time sitting there), and headed for home, real glad to be back.

I live about forty miles from the city; our town is in a valley where the road crosses the river that runs from the wooded hills. It’s a beautiful place all year round, lush and green; it looked doubly beautiful after the hot, dusty and rocky deserts, or beaten-up hot dusty concrete-strewn towns I’d been in for the last three months. I was going to sit on our porch with my baby girl on my lap and my arm around my wife beside me, just enjoying the clean sweet-smelling air of home once again, feasting my eyes on the May display of flowers and young foliage.

Only I found I no longer had a home, or a family.

There was a different name on our mailbox, a strange truck in our driveway, and a couple living there who I didn’t know from Adam and Eve. They said that they’d bought the place six weeks earlier from a single mom, a Miss Costin. Jeez! That was Kasey’s maiden name! What the fuck was going on? When I told them my name, they did recognize it, though; they had an envelope with ‘Mr McKinley’ written on it ‘that the previous owner left in case you called by’.

I opened it. No explanatory note, just a sheaf of legal papers.

My ex, may she rot in hell for eternity, had filed for, and somehow gotten, a divorce on the grounds of desertion, and had used the power of attorney I had left with her to sell our house.

Now, I had naturally assumed, if I’d ever even given it a thought, that there wasn’t a court in the land that would take service to your country as ‘desertion’, but it seems that one Judge Walter Cormell Gregson wanted to be the exception that proved the rule. Well, that was the name on the documents that said I was now divorced. The settlement list attached stated that, because of my deserting the family, not responding to the petition for divorce, and being deemed impossible to locate, the family home, savings, property and all other assets of the marriage were awarded 100% to the wife in lieu of child support and marital support, and that because there was a minor child involved, the court documents were sealed and the identity and location of the plaintiffs was not to be revealed. Oh, and just to add to my misery, I was not to approach within 300 feet of my wife and child.

Jesus H Christ!

What a stinking pile of shit!

I read those papers over three times before all of it finally sank in.

I guess I sat in my truck, outside that house that used to be my home, for nigh on an hour before I recovered enough to go and consult an attorney. He took one look at the papers, confirmed my own feeling that I’d been screwed without lube, and told me that my only recourse, if I could afford it, was to try and get a Federal judge to overturn the whole thing on the grounds that I had been on active service overseas. If I had the money to engage a real smart City lawyer who could handle these things. Potential cost? The guy reckoned, ballpark figure, that with gathering evidence, having to petition a higher court to unseal the records, and all the investigation and argument needed, I’d be looking at laying out north of a hundred grand, and I might not get any of it back even if I won – which wasn’t guaranteed. Kasey was the care-giver for Aggie, and the courts were almost certain to keep my daughter living with her mother, and charge me child support while they were at it. The guy said he was real sorry about my situation, and advised me to do a whole lot of thinking before I took any action at all. He even warned me about trying to find out where they were now living, saying that would most probably lead to an even harsher restraining order which would severely mess up my freedom of movement in a town the size of ours.

I thanked him and left his office, heading down the street to my bank, only to find that I didn’t have an account there any longer. Jeez! She’d also taken over the bank accounts and cleaned me out. The Guard pay I’d earned with my sweat and tears in the sandbox had gone into an account that I now couldn’t access? The manager was real sympathetic, but he couldn’t refuse a court order that said none of it was mine. My name wasn’t currently on any accounts, therefore I had no right to any information about them, even if he personally had received my pay check to be paid into that account many times in the past, and had greeted me by name when he saw me. He was apologetic, but he couldn’t do anything for me.

I drove the forty miles straight back to the Armory, luckily finding the admin staff still there finishing up the last of the paperwork. I showed my envelope and its contents to the pay guy, explained what had happened at the bank, and he was just able to cancel my final direct deposit payment and arrange to hold it until I had a new account.

I slept in my truck that night. I’d had much worse beds recently – steel armor plate has absolutely no give in it – and although my truck was pretty beaten up, the seat upholstery was better than that.

The next morning, I went and got myself a new account at a different bank, and took the details back to the Armory. I was able to get a hardship payment in cash, and I still had a little left in my billfold from our last field payment. I wasn’t going to starve quite this week; I was just so glad that I hadn’t blown my cash on gadgets at the Fort Lewis PX. Jesus, three months in the sandbox and two-thirds of my pay had been stolen from me. Thanks a fucking lot, Uncle Sugar.

I’d had just one secret I’d kept from my wife, and that was only because I’d wanted to give her a real nice surprise to show how much I loved her. I’d been scrimping and saving to buy us a fifth anniversary gift, and just under a year earlier, I’d found us a run-down cabin on a quarter section of woodland to be our weekend and vacation place while the kids grew up. I’d gotten it for pretty much just the back taxes, and my boss had let me take waste and surplus construction materials that would have otherwise been dumped to help me make the place livable again. To keep it a surprise, the deeds had been in my locker back in the Armory, along with my truck papers, and hence the bitch hadn’t been able to get her thieving hands on them, or I’m betting that they’d have gone too.

Next up was going over to see my boss, Henry Hallett, to check that HE was obeying the law and had kept my job open for me. Yeah, he most certainly had, and he welcomed me back as if he’d actually missed me. That was some good news at last. I asked him if he could spare me some uninterrupted time later, and he suggested I come back at six when everyone else would have knocked off.

I drove over to the cabin to check that it was still there. Knowing my current run of luck, it had probably been taken over by a gang of moonshiners, criminal bikers or drug traffickers, so I approached the final bit very cautiously. I almost ran past the entrance, it was so well hidden now. Three months of undisturbed growth meant that the driveway was more than three feet high in grass and weeds; I guessed from the lack of any tracks that no-one had been anywhere near the place since I’d closed it up. After checking on foot that the entrance was clear of any hidden obstacle – I couldn’t afford to damage my truck on a dumped fridge or something – I climbed back in the truck and headed cautiously up the drive. Mother Nature had clearly had a ball in my absence; a domestic weed whacker was never going to touch the new growth, not without buying a whole case of cutting cord. Still, I had a plain old-fashioned scythe somewhere in the barn, and that would at least make a start without costing me anything but time and labor. I’d done it before, when I’d first bought the property, so I guessed I could do it again. Honest toil sweat in my own place would beat heat-related sweat in the sandbox any day of the week.