Utopian Day (28 page)

Victor was waiting at the airport when Nick and
company de-planed. Once they had rented the SUVs and exited the
airport grounds, Victor told them to pull over next to a mini-van
taxi that was waiting on the side of the road. The five other men
from his team exited the taxi and loaded several large black duffel
bags into the back of the SUVs. Victor got in the vehicle with
Nick, Mia, and J.T.

The caravan took off, following a route that Nick
had already laid out to their destination. He had printed off a map
on the printer while they were flying, just in case the GPS on the
SUV malfunctioned for some reason. He was leaving nothing to
chance.

Victor turned to J.T. and held out a small black box
with some wires extending out of it.

“
This is a two-way radio
transmitter. I’m going to put it on you so we can communicate while
you make the drop. This piece goes in your ear so we can talk to
you, and this piece will be positioned near your collar so that we
can pick up anything you say.”

“
O.k.,” J.T. replied as he watched
Victor hold up the various parts of the device.

“
Now take off your shirt so I can
tape everything in place.”

J.T. removed his shirt and Victor began securing the
various wires and the box with a special type of tape. He placed
the earbud in J.T.’s ear and worked the wire into place so that it
was less visible. After he was done, he flipped a switch on the
black box, and then he put on his headset and told J.T. to say
something.

“
Check, check,” J.T. said into the
microphone.

“
That’s good,” Victor said. “I’m
going to tap on this microphone; tell me if you hear it in your
earpiece.”

Victor tapped on the microphone and J.T. heard the
soft tap-tap sound in his earpiece.

“
I hear it,” he
replied.

“
O.k., when you walk down the
street into town, speak out anything that might seem out of the
ordinary, anything that seems out of place. We may not be able to
get eyes on you, depending on where we are positioned. If things go
bad and you need us to come in after you, just let us know over the
mic,” Victor concluded.

It was one hundred and thirty miles from Roanoke to
Toakama. The winding mountain roads slowed down their average speed
to around forty-five miles an hour. It was almost twelve when they
approached the bridge that crossed in to Toakama. Victor instructed
Nick to pull off the road right before the bridge. He had studied
the aerial photographs available on the internet and seen that,
after crossing the bridge, the road took a sharp turn left. They
would then be inside the town limits.

“
We go on foot from here,” Victor
said. “Be quiet when we get out of the car, we don’t want them to
think we came in with this many people. Let’s hope they don’t have
eyes on us already.”

Once they exited the vehicles, Victor turned to his
team and gave them hand signals indicating they should switch on
their two-way radios and stay silent. The men quietly complied. Two
men opened up the duffle bags and began handing out the weapons
they had brought along, including two sniper rifles. They all put
on camouflage hats and face paint. The team assembled next to
Victor near the lead SUV at 11:57 a.m. Two of the commandos
unloaded the cooler with the ten million dollars and put it beside
J.T.

Victor handed Nick, Mia, James, and Laura two-way
radios so that they could all communicate. He told them to leave
the radios on so that they could hear if he needed them to bring
the SUVs up to their position quickly. Nick walked over and handed
J.T. his phone.

“
Take this. The kidnapper said you
should have it for the drop. Be careful out there, J.T.; Sasha is
counting on you.”

J.T. nodded his head, then picked up the handle and
began pulling the two-wheeled cooler behind him as he approached
the bridge. Three commandos followed on one side of the road, three
on the other. Nick, Mia, Laura, and James all stayed behind in the
SUVs so they could quickly drive into town should they be
needed.

The bridge was barely a hundred feet long. The frame
was made of steel, with wooden cross-planks that served as the road
surface. The steel was rusted with patches of the original red
paint still visible here and there. The wood looked sturdy enough
in most places, but J.T. noticed several spots where it had begun
to rot. The cool mountain air and the sound of the stream running
under the bridge provided a peaceful setting, but J.T. was sweating
nervously as he stepped off of the bridge and began walking slowly
around the corner.

Victor and his men had quietly slipped off of the
road and into the woods as J.T. rounded the corner and the first
buildings came in to view. The sign on the side of the road read,
Welcome to Toakama, population 312
.

“
Just keep walking down the center
of the road slowly. We’ll keep eyes on you from here,” J.T. heard
Victor say through the earpiece in his ear.

J.T.’s heart was beating faster as he continued
walking down the road into Toakama, and he wondered what was going
to happen next.

Chapter Forty-Four

Silas saw J.T. Thornbacker through his binoculars as
he rounded the corner from the bridge to Toakama at 12:03 p.m. He
appeared to be alone and pulling the cooler filled with cash, but
Silas knew better than to think that Nick didn’t have some hired
guns nearby. Fortunately for Silas, he was prepared for such an
eventuality.

It took J.T. the better part of five minutes to walk
the entire length of the street and arrive at the cul-de-sac at the
end. When he arrived there, he saw a chair with a note taped to it
and a cable with a hook on the end which led off to the right-hand
side, through an alleyway and behind a building. The note read:
Hook the cable to the handle of the cooler, then back away from
the chair ten paces and wait for further instructions.

J.T. read the note out loud for the benefit of the
listeners on the other end of the two-way radio, and then he took
the rope and tied it to the cooler as indicated, backing off ten
paces as instructed when he was done. Once he began backing away
from the cooler, he heard a distant whining sound and the cable
grew taught as the cooler began moving along the ground and down
the alleyway, out of sight from where J.T. was now standing. About
a minute later, the whining stopped.

Silas un-hooked the cooler from the winch and cut
the tape so that he could open the lid. He smiled as he saw bundles
of one hundred dollar bills. He took one out and examined it more
closely to make certain that it was a genuine one hundred dollar
bill. He was no treasury agent, but he had gotten pretty good as a
cop in telling the genuine article from a counterfeit. Satisfied it
was the real thing, he re-taped the cooler top closed and pushed it
up into the back of the Jeep via the ply-wood ramp he had
constructed, securing it with several elastic tie-downs for safety.
He glanced down the alleyway to ensure that no one was there before
he got into the Jeep and started the engine. He reached over to
where Sasha was seated in the passenger’s seat and cut loose the
duct-tape from her feet. Then he cut her hands loose from the tape
that held them to a bar that ran along the side of the doorframe of
the jeep.

“
Get out and go down the alleyway;
your father is waiting for you,” Silas ordered.

Sasha got out of the car and began running down the
alleyway, tearing the tape away from her mouth as she ran, and
yelling, “I’m here! I’m down here!”

Silas gunned the engine of the Jeep and headed up
the old mining road, out of town and in the opposite direction from
where Sasha was running.

When J.T. heard Sasha calling out, he ran towards
the alleyway and towards Sasha. He immediately recognized her from
the pictures he had seen. “Sasha!” he cried as he reached her and
hugged her in his arms. She had recognized him from the pictures
Nick had shown her and didn’t resist as J.T. embraced her.

“
She’s safe!” he said into the
two-way radio microphone.

As soon as he had uttered the words, he heard Victor
respond. “Bring the SUVs up now!” Nick hit the accelerator on the
lead SUV and the wheels spun wildly as the vehicle sped forward,
closely followed by James and Laura in the other two SUVs. They
rounded the corner into town to see Victor and the rest of the
commandos quickly working their way along opposite sides of the
street, clearing each alleyway and moving towards Sasha and J.T.
Nick roared past the commandos and came to a quick stop, pulling up
alongside Sasha. Mia and Nick jumped out of the vehicle and
embraced Sasha.

Victor ran over to where they were standing. “Are
you o.k.?” he said to Sasha.

“
Yes, I’m fine,” she
responded.

“
I heard a vehicle drive off;
which way did it go?” Victor asked.

Sasha turned and pointed down the alleyway. “Down
there is an old road leading up into the mountains.”

“
How many people were there in
all?” Victor continued.

“
It was just one man,” she
responded.

Victor turned and pointed to two of his men, “You
two stay here with them. The rest of you come with me.”

He motioned to James with his thumb, indicating he
should exit the SUV he was driving. As soon as James was out of the
seat, Victor jumped in. Once his men were in, he hit the gas and
tore down the alleyway and up the old mountain road, following the
path Silas’ Jeep had taken. Victor took a tracking device out of
one of the utility pouches on his uniform and turned it on. A
blinking dot appeared towards the edge of the screen. He knew he
had to keep that dot within a two-mile radius or the transmitter
that he had put in the bottom of the cooler would be out of
range.

Silas stopped the Jeep and got out. He probably only
had a few minutes head start before some of Nick Bartonovich’s
hired guns would be storming up the mountain to hunt him down. He
walked to the uphill side of the road, to a large pile of logs that
were being held in place by three upright posts supported by a rope
tied between two large trees. Silas took out his knife and quickly
sawed through the rope, making sure to stand behind the tree and
out of the way of the soon-to-be rolling logs as he did.

Once the rope was severed, the mass of logs quickly
rolled down onto the road below Silas’ Jeep, hopelessly blocking
the road for any following vehicles. Silas jumped back in the Jeep
and drove away. He wanted to be long gone when his pursuers
arrived. While they couldn’t pass this point with a vehicle, they
could still shoot him if he didn’t make it around the next bend in
the winding road first.

The SUV Victor was driving lurched up the
mountainous road at a speed almost too high for safety, tearing
around the corners and on up the next incline in an effort to gain
on the man they were pursuing. As Victor rounded the next bend, he
saw the mass of logs up ahead and brought the vehicle to a stop
about twenty yards away. He peered through the window, looking
around to see if there was someone positioned nearby to ambush
them.

“
You two take the upper side;
Miles and I will take the lower side,” he ordered.

The men exited the vehicle with their weapons drawn,
immediately taking cover behind the available trees as they worked
their way forward and beyond the pile of logs that blockaded the
roadway. Once they had ascertained there was no one waiting in
ambush, they re-grouped on the far-side of the log jam from where
they had parked their vehicle.

Victor looked down at the mass of logs, estimating
several of the logs weighed in at four or five hundred pounds each.
There was no way they were going to move them quickly, especially
since their SUVs didn’t come equipped with winches. The forest
above and below the road was too steep and forested to drive around
the log jam. He spoke into his two-way radio.

“
Tommy, is everything stable back
down there?” he asked.

“
Yes. We’ve searched practically
the whole town. No one else is here but us,” he replied.

“
Good. You and Vlad get up here
ASAP. We need to move some logs that our man blocked the road
with.”

“
O.k., we’re on our
way.”

Forty-five minutes later, Victor’s team was finished
clearing the road so that the SUVs could pass. The exhausted team
re-entered their vehicles and continued the search for the
kidnapper. Victor periodically checked the tracking device on the
off chance that the kidnapper’s location would re-appear on the
screen. After about thirty minutes of driving, a blip suddenly
appeared.

“
We’ve got our target on the
tracking screen, a little over two klicks out,” he said to the rest
of the team.

As they approached the target, Victor began to slow
down. He and his men were scanning the surrounding areas, trying to
get a visual on the target. They were practically on top of the
signal, but still they could see nothing. Victor stopped the car
and said into his microphone, “Fan out and find this scum bag.
We’re practically on top of the transmitter.”

The team exited the vehicles and fanned out in
practiced fashion, with three men sweeping uphill and three down.
They located the cooler in a few minutes, discarded and empty on
the downhill side of the road. They quickly re-entered their
vehicles and resumed the drive along the mountain road, which had
leveled off and begun to descend slightly. Around the next bend,
the road intersected a paved road. Victor slammed his fist down on
the dashboard of the SUV, realizing that their chances of finding
the kidnapper had just plummeted.