Lost Girls

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The helicopter touched down on the roof of DEA headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia and there was only one person waiting to greet Gant, Neeley and Golden as they exited. A tall man, thin to the point of emaciation, with disheveled gray hair held a hand up to his eyes to block the backwash from the blades as the chopper touched down.

Gant took point, walking up to the man. “Are you up to speed on the situation?”

The man stared at him with dead eyes. “My names Caulkins. Michael Caulkins.”

An image of the girl chained to the tree in Tennessee flashed in front of Gant’s eyes. He paused, not sure what to say. Golden stepped past him. “We’re terribly sorry for your loss.”

Caulkins looked at her with the same dead stare. “Are you?

“Yes.” Golden’s voice got through to Caulkins in some way.

“Why?” he asked.

“I lost a son in a similar way, so I have an idea what you’re feeling.”

Score one for the doc, Gant thought. Caulkins paused, then nodded, indicating for them to follow him. They went in the roof entrance and took an elevator ride down a few floors. Caulkins led them down a carpeted hallway and into a conference room. He shut the door behind them and took the seat at the head of the long table. Gant, Neeley and Golden arrayed themselves around the table.

“What do you want?” Caulkins asked.

Gant pulled out the three personnel folders and slid them across to Caulkins. “Those are the men who killed your daughter.”

Caulkins looked through the folders, then looked up, confused. “They’re soldiers. Why did they do this?”

“They were members of 7^th Special Forces Group based in Panama,” Gant said. “They were running missions for Task Force Six.”

Some degree of comprehension came to Caulkins face.

Gant pushed the information, slapping down photos on the desk. “These are the others they’ve killed.” He rattled off their names and the family members. Before he got to the end, Caulkins was shaking his head.

“I know them now. Those three guys are dead. They died in a helicopter crash during exfiltration.”

Gant glanced at Golden, then back at the Drug Enforcement Agent. He pulled out his digital camera, thumbed through and then showed a picture of the remnants of Sergeant Lutz’s body. “One of them is dead now. Killed this morning in Virginia. He had just killed Lewis Foley of the State Department and his wife. Along with two security men.

“The other two are still out there. They’ve got the daughter of Colonel Cranston and we believe she’s in the same predicament that you daughter was in.”

“Jesus Christ,” Caulkins exclaimed. “Why?”

Gant began collecting the photos. “You said you believed they died in a helicopter crash during exfiltration. Who told you that?”

“I was working the ops desk for the Southern District, Panama,” Caulkins said. “The sniper team — those three guys, I only know their names, never met them— was seconded to us by Southern Command, Spec Ops, Task Force Six.”

“Colonel Cranston?” Golden asked.

Caulkins nodded. “Yes.”

“Who was in overall charge?” Gant asked.

“Technically, I was,” Caulkins said.

Neeley spoke for the first time. “’Technically’?”

“We had what we thought was a high level target. The team was to eliminate the target. Then they called in they had someone with a badge on the site. They thought he was DEA, but I hadn’t been briefed on anyone in that AO. So I called it in to our Central Intelligence Agency liaison. He got back with me almost immediately and told me to stop the mission and exfiltrate the team. That’s what I did, except the chopper crashed during exfiltration.”

Gant leaned back in his chair. “Cranston told us the DEA was the agency that ordered the mission to stop and exfiltration.”

Caulkins shrugged. “I relayed the order to him, so he might have assumed I was the originator of it.”

“Who was the—“ Gant began, but he was interrupted when his Satphone vibrated. He snapped it open, listened for a little bit, then shut it without saying a word. He looked at Golden and Neeley. “Emily Cranston wasn’t at the cache site. She’d been moved. The entire area was laced with mines. Two members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team that went in were killed and three wounded. The site is still not secure.”

“You were right,” Golden said.

Gant ignored the acknowledgement. He stared at Caulkins. “Who was the Agency liaison? Jim Roberts?”

Caulkins nodded. “Yes.”

“And you don’t know who the man with the badge in the village was?”

“No.”

“He wasn’t DEA?” Gant pressed.

“As far I knew, he wasn’t.”

“This is bullshit,” Neeley said.

Everyone turned to her in surprise. Neeley looked at Caulkins. “I’m sorry about your daughter, but everyone has a different story about what happened to these three guys. The only thing everyone agrees on is they thought the guys died in a chopper crash and we know for sure that wasn’t true. Since one of them was killing people this morning and the other two are on the loose.”

“Believe me,” Caulkins said, “I want to know the truth too. I’ve checked as much as I can here and as far as I can tell the DEA did not have an agent in that village. And the decision to abort the mission came from the CIA — I only relayed it.”

“Why did the CIA want you to abort?”

“I don’t really know.”

Gant stood. “Is there anything else you can think of that might help us figure out what these guys are up to?”

Caulkins nodded. “There is something — it was only a rumor and I didn’t think much of it at the time, but in light of what I’ve since learned, there might be more to it.”

Gant waited.

“There was talk among my field agents about the CIA running some sort of black op in Colombia. Lots of money exchanging hands.”

“With who?” Gant asked.

“The cartels of course,” Caulkins said.

“Why?” Gant was getting tired of digging into darkness.

“I don’t know and I’m not likely ever to find out,” Caulkins said. “And neither are you.”

“We’ll see about that,” Gant said.

They walked out of the room and headed for the waiting helicopter. Gant turned to Neeley. “After the chopper drops us at Langley it will take you to the airfield. There will be a jet waiting for you to fly you to Alabama and the cache site.”

“Emily Cranston’s not there,” Neeley said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Get a feel for the site. For the person who did this.”

Neeley reluctantly nodded.

The first conscious thought Emily Cranston had was that she was no longer moving. The next was that she was lying on something hard. She was on her back and she realized that she no longer had the blindfold on.

Still, she didn’t open her eyes. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see where she was now. The air was different. Warmer. Drier.

She could sense she was not in an enclosed space. At least not as enclosed as the van had been.

And the damn shackle was still on her ankle.

Emily opened her eyes and blinked. A clear blue sky was above her, framed by a perfect circle of wood. Emily blinked once more, turning her head. She was surrounded by a wooden wall, perfectly round, eight feet high. She was chained to a bolt set in the very center of the wood floor, the open space about twelve feet in diameter.

Not as tight as the van but still enclosed. So much for her senses.

“What the fuck?” Emily muttered as she struggled to get to her feet.

The wood was old. Bleached by the sun. There was a trace of sand on the floor.

Emily stomped her foot and was surprised to hear an echo. The floor wasn’t solid. She got on her knees and wrapped her hand around the metal bolt that the chain to her shackles was locked to. She pulled as hard as she could but it didn’t budge in the slightest.

She continued to try for several minutes until she was panting. Finally she gave up for the moment and sat down, running a swollen tongue over her parched lips. It had been over two days since she’d had anything to drink other than the scant drops of dew. She was grateful that she had been drinking water in the night-club rather than alcohol.

Thinking that made her realize how long ago that seemed. To be part of the real world, the normal world. Where her largest concern had been not getting asked to dance. When she had worried about the extra weight that was now coming off faster than any diet in the latest fad. Emily would have laughed if her parched throat would have allowed — now she was grateful she’d had that weight on.

Emily looked up at the wooden ring above her head, then at the planks making up the circular wall. She’d never seen anything like this. Had the crazy man built this just to stash her? It didn’t make sense, given that he had simply chained her to a tree at the last place.

She got to her feet and stomped down, listening to the slight echo. That meant there was empty space beneath her. A cellar? But then what had happened to the roof? Had there ever been a roof? And there were no doors. Emily walked to the end of the chain and was just able to touch the wall. The wood was old. Each plank was about eight inches wide. She slapped her hand against one and it felt very solid. She slowly walked the circumference of her new prison, checking each plank, one by one, hoping perhaps that one would be rotted or weak.

No such luck.

Emily returned to the center and sat down next to the bolt that held her in place. She had thought the tree was bad, but at least there had been things to look at and the feeling of space. Emily felt closed in, more imprisoned than she had before. She had no idea where she was, what was on the other side of the wooden wall.

“Help!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. She repeated the cry several times, but there was only silence, not even an echo of her scream. Which made her miss the sounds of the forest even though those sounds had turned threatening at night. All she had was a uniform wooden wall and the blue sky overhead.

Emily lay on her back and stared up at that sky and felt as if her heart were going to sink through her back, into the floor and keep going down into the earth itself.

It had taken the explosives experts three hours to remove the rest of the mines from the clearing. They were all not only rigged to trip-wires, they have been booby-trapped. Bailey recognized the handiwork and the pattern: it was the way Special Forces demolitions men were trained to prepare an ambush on a potential helicopter landing zone. It had just been pure luck that neither of the insertion choppers had hit a trip wire with a skid. If that had happened there would have been a very high body count and a destroyed chopper — stuff that would have been hard to keep out of the news.

Still, two men were dead and three wounded. Emily wasn’t here, nor was the target. Mister Nero would not be happy. Nor would he be particularly unhappy, Bailey knew. Bailey paused as he walked toward the oak tree as he suddenly remembered it was Ms. Masterson who sat behind the desk now, not Nero. Since joining the Cellar over thirty years ago, Bailey had known no other boss than Nero. In fact, to Bailey, Nero was the Cellar. Ms. Masterson’s placement behind the desk was the most disconcerting thing Bailey had ever experienced and he had seen many strange things in the employ of the Cellar.

Bailey had instructed Special Agent in Charge Bateman to keep her people at the perimeter after the area had been cleared. He wanted to see the site alone and without interference. She had not been pleased — with that or with two dead agents. Lots of paperwork, lots of explaining, lots of sadness over loss of life. Bailey wasn’t into any of the above so he didn’t concern himself.

Bateman had demanded more information, indicating a very strong desire to be ‘in’ on the mission of tracking down the target. Bailey had ignored her requests and told her to do as ordered. He would have thought she would have seen with what had just happened that this was something the FBI could not deal with. The HRT team was the best they had — what did she think they could do for an encore?

He surveyed the area, keeping in mind the site where they had found the Caulkins girl. Gant had found the surveillance position that had been used by one of the targets. Not only in advance of the cache being put in, but based on recent information, also manned while Caulkins slowly dehydrated and starved.

Bailey moved to his right, toward a clump of bushes and a large log. He clambered over the log and saw the carefully constructed surveillance position. It was, as he expected, sterile. Bailey stood where the target had been watching Emily Cranston chained to that tree.

It took a hard man to do that, Bailey knew. He’d served with and fought against many hard men. The closest person to the type of these targets was a man named Racine who the Cellar had used on missions for many years. When the job was particularly nasty, and especially if it involved women, Racine was the man Nero had turned to, even though both he and Bailey had detested the sociopath.

There were dangers to using such men, Bailey reflected as he looked at the oak tree. Unknown to Nero and Bailey, Racine had been doing un-sanctioned freelance work for a United States Senator. Work that had hurt the United States during the debacle in Mogadishu over a decade before. And Racine had eventually become more of a liability over the years, one that was terminated quite efficiently by Ms. Neeley and Ms. Masterson, sort of their final exam before joining the Cellar. And while the US Army and the US government had probably been more than happy with Sergeants Lutz, Forten and Payne and the work they had done over the years in the country’s service, they too were now liabilities. Liabilities with the best training in inflicting death and destruction in the world.

Bailey stepped back over the log and walked toward the tree. He side-stepped a splotch of still wet blood. When he got within ten feet of the tree, he halted once more. There was something white nailed to the tree, about eye-level.

A piece of paper.

Bailey nodded. The next step in the trail.

The compound was set on an island in the middle of a lake in Northern Maine. The island wasn’t large, barely four acres, but it was thickly covered with trees, which mostly hid the six buildings. The perimeter of the island was patrolled by guards, two in a small boat that circled the island in a random pattern and a shift of four on the land itself, set in small watch towers positioned to cover the entire shoreline.

The inhabitants of the compound lived in a limbo between prison and protection. It was debatable whether the guards where there to protect them or keep them from leaving. It was also debatable how many of the two dozen inhabitants had any desire to leave given their life expectancy would probably be hours, at best days, if they were spotted by the wrong people out in the real world. The wrong people being those they had betrayed in order to save their own hides.

The compound was under the control of the CIA although the guards were contracted from private security firms, mostly ex-Special Operations Forces types. It was considered plush duty, beating work in Iraq or Afghanistan, where most of them had spent several tours of duty. The CIA used these contractors not only because its own ranks were stretched thin, but for deniability in case the compound was ever exposed in the media. In the same manner the CIA had gotten the Army to take the fall for Abu Gharif in Iraq.

This was because the compound was quite illegal as none of the twenty-four people being held there had ever been charged with a crime and had been secretly brought into the country. The compound did not ‘officially’ exist on paper. It was funded by the multi-billion dollar Black Budget that saw little government over-sight. The same budget that funded the Cellar.

Spotter was on the top of a mountain on the shoreline three quarters of a mile from the island. He and the Sniper had checked out the area extensively during their mission preparation. They’d spent three months getting ready before snatching the first girl, carefully preparing their primary plan and the numerous contingencies. Things were moving fast now. The lack of an after-action report from the Security in Virginia meant he was most likely dead.

This did not bother Spotter. Indeed, it had been anticipated that they would lose at least one of their number by now. The plan would still go forward. And death was preferable to what they had experienced in Colombia. And even more so for what they had experienced when they came back to the States.

He had a large spotting scope set up on a tripod in front of his field chair and had been using it to survey the island for the past twenty-four hours after arriving here from the Gulf Coast. The guards were good, rotating their patrol so that there was no distinguishable or predictable pattern to it. Also, one of the guards was on a small knoll on the north end of the island, the highest point on it, armed with a sniper rifle with which he could cover the entire island.

Frankly, though, Spotter didn’t care about the guards. He was more concerned with the people being held there. One in particular. This was the man who the scope was trained on as he sat at a small table, reading a book.

Spotter knew the man’s face intimately.

The small radio earplug in Spotter’s ear crackled with a brief break of squelch and he pulled his eye back from the scope and looked in the other direction, downhill. Within a minute the Sniper appeared, striding up the slope, a backpack over his shoulder and his black metal case containing his rifle in one hand.

The Sniper nodded as he came up next to Spotter, putting the case down and taking the backpack off. “Any change?”

“No.” Spotter vacated the seat. “He’s in the scope.”

The Sniper took the chair and put his eye to the spotting scope. He remained still for a long time, then pulled back. “You pin down where he sleeps?”

“Third building, second window. He’s the only one in the room.”

“Good.”

“Do you know what happened in Virginia?” Spotter asked.

The Sniper shook his head. “No after-action report, so I assume he’s dead. I wasn’t able to pick up much information. They’re not making it public, that’s for certain.”

“And the girl?”

“She’s in position.”

“The video?”

“En route with further instructions.” The Sniper leaned over and opened up the metal case, extracting the rifle. A thermal scope was mounted on top and a bulky suppressor graced the end of the barrel. He removed the spotting scope from the tripod and replaced it with the rifle.

“We should make him suffer first,” Spotter suddenly said, earning him a surprised look from the Sniper.

“We agreed. That’s not the plan. Too dangerous.”

“He’ll never know it was us,” Spotter argued. “He’ll die not knowing.”

“We’ll know,” the Sniper said. “That’s the important thing. And he’s only a bonus hit.” He tightened down the bolt holding the rifle in place. “Come sun-down, he dies.”