The Far Side (90 page)

“Her fellow workers are positive that Charles was drunk on killing and saw her as just another notch on his rifle.”

“Except that she wasn’t shot,” Helen pointed out calmly.

“I spent weeks with the guy.  You get to know someone pretty well when you’re with them day in and day out and in stressful situations.  He was like me in a lot of ways.  He’d been a sniper in Iraq and swore off of it.  He hinted that he’d kill animals if he had to, but he wasn’t happy with that, either.  He told me he was hoping to get into civil affairs.  That’s not a career path many in the military pursue.

“I suppose he might have gotten angry enough to kill her, but he’d have shot her, knifed her, or maybe even strangled her.  But a garrote?  And you say she was killed from behind?”

“Yes.  It’s possible she never knew what was happening.”

Ezra slammed his fist into his palm.  “Why did Evans run?”

Helen looked at him strangely.

“What?” he asked, seeing her expression.

“What makes you think he left under his own power?  If he didn’t kill her, someone else did.  Suppose it was one of the other groups in Arvala that Kris and Andie talk about?  The Dralka order or the pirates?  Everyone in that town had seen him work that morning or had heard about it.  Andie showed the Arvalans how to make crossbows and now cannons and rifles.  Why not grab someone they would figure could do the same thing -- only for them?”

“I’m an idiot!” Ezra said, very, very angry at himself.  “There was all the talk about Charles killing the woman, and the only thing I thought about was finding a way to show that he didn’t do it!  My God!  You’d think I’d realize that if he didn’t do it, someone else had to have!  How stupid can you get?”

Ezra turned brisk.  “Get word to Kris and Kurt.  I’ll pass the word to Arvala and Andie.  They can get someone back to the town days faster than I can get there, but I’ll be there in three days.”

With that he rushed out, heading back to Arvala.

Ezra spoke to Andie, who in turn called Linda Walsh to the radio as well.

Andie explained to Ezra.  “Linda and Jo are Caltech alumni.  They have some sort of kinship relation I don’t quite get.  Ezra, I told Denise that she shouldn’t fool around with the men at the listening post.  She would have welcomed someone like Charles.  And you’re right; if it was a crime of passion, he wouldn’t have run.  He doesn’t know anyone, he doesn’t speak the language, and he’d have to know that everyone would be hunting him.

“There’s no way to tell for sure who has him, but I’m sure someone does.”

Linda Walsh was blunt.  “I don’t care who it was, or why.  I want whoever did that to Denise dead, do you understand?”

“Ditto,” Andie chimed in.  “I’ve sent a messenger to Collum and Melek, and I’m sure they’ll send a strong party to inquire as well.  This could be a serious problem for them.”

“Except I don’t think Evans has anything like your knowledge base,” Ezra told her.  “He’s not going to be able to tell them squat.”

“In which case,” Andie said roughly, “they’ll either try to get what they can from him or kill him.  Odds are, he’s a dead man unless we can find him quickly.  I had put my UAV project on hold; now I think it’s time to revive it.  I’ll get a couple of birds and we can look north of the road, and my personal favorite -- south or southwest of the Eastern Finger.  The Arvalans have never explored down there... and that one ship headed that way after the Dralka-instigated dralka attack on Arvala.

“Get yourself up to Siran-ista as quickly as you can, then have them come to Arvala and pick up Linda and me.”

“Roger.”

The problem with making a rapid departure was that his cousin Jake, who commanded the American contingent at the rookery, quite rationally pointed out that if a single ATV had been over-flown by five hundred dralka, even if there had been three people aboard, they would have all been killed.

So, while it was easy to organize a single vehicle and two-person convoy quickly, it took more time to organize a convoy of two dozen people and a dozen vehicles.

Worse, they were within a half hour of departure when he was called to return to Earth for a phone call from General Briggs, Kurt Sandusky, and Kris.

“My mother called me,” Kris told him.  “Ezra, you need to slow down a bit.  The Arvalans will have people there, looking for Charles Evans long before you can get there.”

“A day and a half.”

“They’ll turn out the entire Wall Guard force there, Ezra.  If this is the Dralka or Rangar again, it is as much of a catastrophe for them as it is for us.  What I want you to do for now is go south to the headland as fast as you can go and use binoculars and anything else you can think of to observe the ocean.  Lay low and don’t let yourself be seen.  The odds are, if it’s Rangar, they’ll round the headland in a day or two, close enough inshore to be seen.”

“What if they are the Dralka order and are going north?”

“If you think about it for a second, you’ll realize that’s the least likely scenario,” General Briggs told him.

“Pardon?” Ezra said, startled.

“Ezra, we know the Dralka left people behind -- spies.  They have to have a bunch of those in Arvala.  Those spies would be able to get a lot of information about muskets and cannon, about steel-making, and a dozen other topics without the risks involved in kidnapping someone.  Moreover, Cadet Evans doesn’t speak the language, and there are only a few Arvalans who speak English -- all of whom are in Arvala.

“I’m pretty sure it’s Rangar,” Kris concluded.

“And I’m here running around in circles, screwing up,” Ezra said bitterly.

“Ezra, everyone understands, and no one faults you for what you’ve done.  You did the right thing bringing Denise Courtland’s body back to the Far Side door for forensics,” Kurt told him.  “Now, we have to be smart, to see what we can do for Cadet Evans, and above all to once and for all put the fear of the long arm of Andie Schulz and Kris Boyle into every God damn bad guy on the planet.

“We’re sending you someone -- Pete Sharp,” General Briggs continued smoothly.  “He is boarding a G6 even as we speak and will be there in four hours.  Go south, watch on the headland.  Get with Dick Haines; we’ll be shipping some building supplies through in the next few hours as well.  We want a permanent, secret observation post for the headland.  It’s going to have to be made of concrete and will undoubtedly take some time to build.

“But right now, we need you out on the headland, ASAP,” the general concluded.

“Okay, we’ll be there within a couple of hours,” he told them.  “Sorry, guys.”

“Don’t be, Ezra,” Kris told him.  “Also, tell Andie that the delivery of her UAV project is going to start the first thing tomorrow.  At first it’s going to be a short-ranged Israeli vehicle that we’ll want to fly off the headland.  There are four Israeli Defense Force technicians with it.  In a week or so there will be two more techs and a longer-ranged vehicle.  For the purposes of Arvala, they are stealthed -- they fly at fifteen thousand feet and except on take-offs and landings, they will be too high to see.

“Get with Jake; he’s headed back right away.  The larger UAV is going to need a relatively flat, five hundred foot runway, preferably not within easy view of the coast.”

“We have that little bulldozer that the railroad people brought through.  They’ll scream, but we can borrow it from them for a few days,” Ezra told her.

General Briggs was direct.  “We’ve never had a cadet kidnapped before.  The board has authorized a million dollars of contingency funds to pay for costs involved in the rescue.  We’ll have another dozer there in a few days.”

“We’ve been operating from fifty-five gallon drums of gasoline and diesel,” Ezra told them.  “We’re going to need a lot more.”

Kris laughed.  “Get in touch with Andie -- she’s been advising the Arvalans on a coal-fired steam-powered dozer.  Trying to rebuild the road south is taking too long.  They know they need a better way to get quickly south, and so she’s gotten together with the train folks, and they’re working on a coal-fired steam engine that they can put into a heavy dozer.  As usual, the major problem is that they just don’t have the steel capacity ramped up yet.  I’m not sure that Andie can get them working any faster on it -- it’s already a top priority.”

“Okay,” Ezra told them.  “Let me get some people south at once.  We can do that safely enough.  I can talk to Captain Milan, the commander of the Arvalan fort, and get some additional guards.”

“Just remember it would be a really good idea if they don’t see you,” Kris reminded him.

“They won’t!” Ezra promised.

After the call he spent five minutes in the bathroom doing nothing but staring at himself in the mirror.  He’d messed up with the search for Evans, he knew.  Even if the others were too polite to mention it, he should have known that Evans wouldn’t do what he’d been accused of.  He’d known it himself -- if Cadet Evans was around, he’d ream the young man out -- Evans had gone to the party that evening without his personal weapon.  If he’d have killed the girl, his first stop would have been to pick up that weapon.  That the Barrett had been missing should have been a red flag -- instead he thought some Arvalan had stolen it as souvenir.  As one of them undoubtedly had.

No, he’d simply screwed up.  He stared at himself in the mirror.  He knew Andie and Kris were smarter than he was, and he’d long since made his peace with that.  They’d wanted someone to play nursemaid to the three Norwich cadets on their visit and he’d volunteered, thinking it was a simple task.

He’d admired Charles Evans’ easy familiarity with the big sniper rifle and had been dumbfounded by what the cadet had done to stop the dralka.  Evans had been a killing machine, shooting far faster than Ezra had thought humanly possible.  Sure, he missed some shots, but he’d scored a lot more than he missed!

Nearly four hundred bone-hammering shots in a half hour, he was sure.  The value of having a prepared firing position had been clear from the first.  Ezra had seen any number of examples of how important it was to dig a shelter, and he’d forgotten that fact in the year and a half since he’d left the army.

He squared his shoulders.  There wasn’t much chance of getting Charles Evans back alive, no matter who had him.  But he was going to do it, if it could be done.

Chapter 34 :: Kidnapped, or Two Lifetimes Before the Mast

Charles hadn’t had many choices since he’d been captured.  His captors had undoubtedly not thought through what they wanted from him with any degree of intelligence.

He took nearly an hour of repeated beatings, leaving him with several loose teeth, with blood streaming from his mouth and nose.  They didn’t realize it, but the blood was dripping onto his skin, to mix with Denise’s blood.  There wasn’t anything they could have done to him that could have stiffened his resistance more.

The leader had stood back watching him carefully, never saying anything to him, just watching his minions beat Charles over and over again.

Finally the Barrett was shoved into his chest and there was an imperious demand that he was quite sure was to show them how the weapon worked -- or die.

He laughed and wiggled his bound shoulders, then spat at the man’s feet.  How could he show anything with his hands tied behind him?  The leader said two words, and one of his men untied his hands, and then looped rope around them, giving him some freedom of movement, but not much.  His feet remained tied.

The Barrett was again shoved into his chest.  He took it, pulled the bolt back and pointed at the empty chamber.  He held the weapon one-handed and mimed fitting something into the chamber.  There was a grunt from the leader and he said something to the man who’d been beating on Charles.

The man said something and produced one of the empty cartridges.  That brought a solid punch in the gut from the leader, into the man’s gut.  The leader kicked the other man as he sank to his knees and while Charles didn’t know the words, he knew the other was getting reamed out good.

One of the others handed the empty cartridge to Charles.  He laughed, and pointed to a table a few feet away, and a container of water or some other fluid.  He mimed filling the cartridge up.

The leader’s eyes furrowed in concentration, then he barked a command and the cartridge was taken from Charles, filled with water and handed back to him.

He simply turned the cartridge upside down and whatever it was ran out on the filthy floor of the compartment.  “Empty!” Charles told them.  “It’s empty!  It doesn’t work anymore!”

The leader gestured for him to put it in the Barrett.  Charles didn’t think that boded well for him -- the man was smart.  Still, he did as he was told, working the bolt and inserting the empty cartridge.

Then, with a move long-honed from entirely too much practice, he slammed the bolt shut, jerked the rifle from the grasp of one of them who had written Charles off as no threat.  Charles pointed the Barrett at the leader and pulled the trigger.

The dry metallic click was followed by blows and someone grabbing the rifle away from him.  When they finally stopped pounding on him, he gave the leader a finger.  “If I could have killed you, asshole, I would have.  But, you dumb stupid shit, the rifle is empty!  It doesn’t work!”

The English words must have made an impression, because even though the others were ready to beat on Charles some more, the leader stopped them.  He spoke to two of the others and they left and Charles was frog-marched to a table and forced to sit on a bench.

The men returned in a few minutes with a box full of metal scrap.  It took Charles a few blows and a few minutes to realize they wanted him to make the rifle work.  He remembered Kris Boyle’s description of Andie Schulz making a crossbow from leftovers in the trash.  These people had obviously heard about that!

He looked at the leader, waved at the trash, held his belly and laughed.  He was hit again, but instead, he wrested the Barrett away from the one who held it.  The man struggled with him, but the leader said a word, and the man let go.

Charles sat down at the table and field stripped the Barrett.  He held up one piece after another and compared it to the junk that they’d brought him, trying to show how hard he was laughing.

The result wasn’t what he expected.  The leader spoke a command and the junk was removed, and so were the pieces of the Barrett.  He wished them luck putting it back together again.

Instead, the leader planted himself in front of Charles, pulled a knife from his belt and putting the blade to Charles’ throat.  Charles gulped.  Well, he’d done his best to show just how useless he was.  He steeled himself for the thrust, but the other just pressed a little, not even enough to break the skin.  Not that the threat wasn’t clear enough.

Then the knife went back into its sheath.  The man made a talking motion with one hand and pointed at Charles.  Charles talk, was the simple translation, Charles thought.  The man then pointed in a direction, swept his hand over his head, then straight down and then back to the original direction.  The leader spat out a word that Charles was sure meant “a day.”

He nodded and the man grinned evilly.  He did the circular motion again, and then held up one finger.  A second sweep and a second finger.  Then, finger after finger, until he reached six.  He folded them up and held up one finger again and said another word.

“Week,” Charles said, hoping that he was right.

One finger, two fingers, three fingers and then a fourth, followed by the talking motion.  The man used both hands to make talking motions again, pointing to Charles and himself.  Then the knife was again at Charles’ throat.

Charles heard the man bark a couple of words as a question.  Odds were that meant, “Do you understand?”  Arbitrarily he picked the longest word and repeated it as best as he could as a statement instead of a question.  Hopefully he’d told the man that he understood.

He was tied securely again, and then hauled from the room.  It was mid-day, he learned, and there was land a couple of miles away to his right as he faced forward.  He was hustled into a small, stinking hole and tied securely in place.  One of them men mimed eating and pointed in the direction that was west.

Charles grimaced.  Dinner at sunset!   How wonderful!  His stomach growled in protest, and the guard kicked him painfully in the shin, laughing.

It was, Charles thought, absurd.  How was he going to learn to speak a language if none of the bastards spoke to him?

The answer to that was the second worst thing that had ever happened to him in his life.  Maybe a half hour later a man came in with a tool box.  He took a metal device from the box and measured it against Charles’ neck, shook his head and tried another.

Charles realized it was an iron collar.  There was a heavy ring on it and in one crystal instant all of Kris Boyle’s talk of slavery came crashing down on him.  The second collar fit, and the man closed it around Charles’ neck, and then hammered a pin into it.  Charles saw that the pin was heavy iron and tapered.

When the man finished, he undid Charles’ bonds and stepped back, grinning.  He kicked Charles, laughed, and then went back to the tool box.  He pulled out a short piece of chain, perhaps three feet long.  One link was hammered into place on the collar, and the other end looped through a ring on the floor of the compartment, and then something like a padlock was used to lock him in place.

The man kicked Charles hard once again, reached into the tool box and took out a rag, tossed it to Charles, laughed and walked out.

Charles spent a minute or two exploring the collar and chain, but he was pretty sure that these people knew exactly what they were doing.  The rag was actually a minimalist pair of shorts.

A moment later the leader appeared in the doorway to the compartment, walked over to Charles and made the talking sign.  Charles nodded.  Then the man made some odd motions with his hips, laughed and left.

A second later a woman about thirty years old or so, he thought, was brought in.  She was chained about six feet away from him, and looked at him with fear.  The leader came back and spoke to her, putting his knife to her throat as well.  He made the hip gesture to her, laughed and turned to Charles, made the talking motion, then at the woman, then the hip gesture.  Then he laughed so hard he seemed to be having a fit.

With casual violence, he hauled the woman to her feet and raped her right in front of Charles.  He laughed one more time and left.

My God, Charles thought!  He was miming I should make love to the woman!  That was never going to happen!  Belatedly he realized what the laughter was about.  He had about two feet of movement and she had about two feet of movement.  The might be able to brush their fingertips together, but there wasn’t going to be any sex.

Still, the leader’s orders were clear -- learn the language or they would both die.  He touched his chest.  “Charles.”

Her eyes were cast down, her voice dull.  “Melea.”

Well, mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow, he thought.

* * *

Ezra had been stunned when less than two hours after they’d taken position, he’d seen the sail to the east.

He called for the others to take cover and found a convenient rock to obscure him.  Jake had arrived only a few minutes before, and he’d bellied down next to Ezra.  “Deja vu,” Jake said.  “Too bad we didn’t bring the mortars.”

“They’re too far offshore.  I think they heard about that.  They’re about an hour from rounding the headland and it’ll be dark by then.”

“That’s a pisser,” his cousin told Ezra.  “Unless they show a light, we’re not going to have a clue which way they go from here.  And if they’re going to do it in the dark, why would they show a light?”

Ezra nodded abstractedly.  “I’ve seen pictures of frigates, ships of the line and schooners,” he told Jake.  “This doesn’t look like any of them.  It looks more like the bastard rig Andie put together for the
Golden Bough
.”

“Melek said that they’d learned that Rangar had been a fisherman who had figured out how to sail upwind.  The man they questioned only knew that Rangar had a base to the south, and that’s a lot of territory.  The man had no idea how far, which direction or how large,” Jake reported.

“Yeah, I heard that too,” Ezra told his cousin.  “And they were pretty sure the guy was telling all he knew.”  The man had been tortured within an inch of his life.

The Arvalans were smarter about such things than Americans.  They didn’t like torture and it was forbidden -- unless ordered by the King.  The King, Collum, had ordered it for the man, because they were sure he was a confederate of Rangar or whoever it was who was using the title these days.

The light slowly faded, and the ship stayed well offshore.  It made no attempt to turn north, instead it barely turned, Ezra thought.  It was hard to tell in the fading light.

Then, a spark appeared towards the stern of the ship just as the ship vanished into the sea-haze.  After a few seconds, Ezra laughed.  “The light twinkles!” he exclaimed.

“I see that,” Jake told him.  “Tell me what that means, little cousin?”

“Take your eyes away from it, and look again.”

Jake did and exclaimed.  “It looks like a star just above the horizon!  But it’s moving!”

“It’s moving slowly,” Ezra corrected him.  “That’s probably a special lantern that wiggles so that it looks like it’s twinkling.  So the helmsman can see to keep a steady course.  Unless you looked close, you wouldn’t see the motion.  It’s just one more star out on the horizon.”

“Bearing a little west of south,” Jake said pragmatically.

“I figure that too, and I think we’re looking at only two or three knots -- they are running at almost right angles to the wind.”

There was a series of jerks from the light and Ezra exclaimed.  “There, they’ve tacked!”

“Headed more south, not more west,” Jake observed.

“Jake, you need to get back to the rookery.  Tell them to hustle that UAV.  I know it’s supposed to be the short range version, but as I recall it could go out fifty miles and return.  With luck we can spot that ship in the morning and figure out the base course.”

“Ezra, it’s a huge ocean out there.  The Pacific is a puddle in comparison.”

“Maybe, but they rounded this cape.  They have to use it as a navigational device.  It’s worth it.  Get going, Cuz!”

Jacob got going.  He was back a little after midnight.  “How long could you see it?”

“About two more hours.  They tacked at least once more.  Towards the end I was having a hard time keeping the ship in sight -- the light was just barely above the horizon.”

“Well, it’s nighttime back home, too.  They’ll have the crew for the UAV here by first light, our time.  There are four of them, a ground crewman, two mechanics/electricians and the pilot.”

“Fine,” Ezra said distractedly, hoping that Charles Evans had been on that ship and was still alive.

“I’ve talked to Captain Milan at the fort and he’ll have a half dozen crossbowmen here at first light, and I’ve assigned Sergeant Feliz to be the site NCOIC for us.  We’ll have six more of our men here by dawn as well.  There’ll be a guy from the Army Corps of Engineers here by noon; he’ll talk to us and Dick Haines about building the observation post.”

“Right, thanks.”

Jacob put his hand on his cousin’s shoulder.  “Ezra, don’t kill yourself over this.  There was nothing you could have done.”