Trevor sank into the chair beside the bed. “Sierra understands. She might be free of the militia’s influence now, but none of us will rest easy until Boone Fowler and his men are back in prison where they belong.”
Cameron rubbed at the scruff of beard that had sprouted along his jaw in the days since barely surviving a chemical bomb attack by the Montana Militia for a Free America at a nearby mall. Though he’d suffered critical burns and some temporary damage to his lungs, there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with his intellectual capabilities or leadership skills. “Tell me what we know.”
Trevor picked up the grainy black-and-white photographs he’d brought in to show his boss. “An army search-and-rescue team found one deceased soldier down in Swamp Lejeune at the ambush site. Michael Clark,” a fellow bounty hunter whose background in army intelligence made him an expert detective, “dates the second photo about a week after the initial capture. The army ID’d the victim as one of theirs, but it’s too dark to get any kind of fix on the location.”
“What about where the photos were processed?”
Trevor shook his head. “Clark’s still trying to trace the source. It passed through a lot of hands before reaching us.”
“And there’s no way to track them from the ambush site?”
“Lombardi and Cook are in North Carolina now. But Lejeune training base covers thousands of acres over a variety of terrain. They found some heavy-vehicle tracks, but the trail went cold at the New River. Fowler’s men could have choppered out, taken a boat, landed a seaplane. They could be camped out next door or halfway around the world.”
Cameron crumpled the sheet and blanket inside his fist. “Fowler’s on American soil, I guarantee it.”
“Both his victims were military, both were part of the covert strike team that was running training ops for an intel incursion into Lukinburg. The executed prisoner photo was delivered in Washington, D.C., with Fowler’s usual demand—if the UN insists on sending our men into Lukinburg, then he’ll find a way to stop them.”
“By killing off hostages one by one?” Cameron shook his head. “Terrorist tactics aren’t going to change the government’s mind.”
Folding his long, olive-skinned fingers together, Trevor leaned forward. “He’s probably sending a subtle message to you, too. What he’s doing to these soldiers, he intends to do to your bounty hunters.”
The bad blood between Cameron Murphy and Boone Fowler went back a long way. “Dammit, Blackhaw—Fowler murdered my sister for his cause. How many other innocent lives has he erased in the name of what he calls patriotism? He’s taken potshots at every one of us—hit us where it hurts the most. Why can’t we get this creep?”
“We will. Campbell, Powell, the sarge, Riley Watson, Brown and the others—we’ve all sworn to end this bastard’s reign of terror. Fowler’s the one who made this war personal. But we intend to finish it. I promise you that.”
A painful breath rasped through Cameron’s lungs. Though his dark eyes remained sharply focused, his battered body was fading toward much-needed sleep. “How are we gonna do that if we can’t find him?”
“I’ve activated every contact we have around the country. There’s a Special Forces unit waiting to assist us the minute we know anything. Don’t think for one minute your men—the men we fought with down in San Ysidro and in Africa and the men you hand-picked to work for you now—are sitting in a cell somewhere twiddling their thumbs.” Trevor tucked the graphic photos inside his jacket and stood. “If I know Sergeant Martin and the others, they’ll find a way to contact us.”
Cameron nodded. “Then let’s be ready to roll.”
TASIYA SMOOTHED HER PALMS down the length of her cream-colored sweater and steadied her nerves before slipping the elastic band of keys Marcus had given her around her wrist. Then she unlocked the wheels of her stainless steel cart and pushed it out of the kitchen into the breezeway that separated the refurbished quarters housing the militia members from the prison section of the compound.
She passed back through centuries of time as she unlocked a thick wooden door and entered the long passageway that housed the prisoners. In this part of the stronghold, little had been done to reclaim it from its colonial past. The uneven settling of the stones paving the floor created an uneven, repetitive clanking sound that chafed her nerves as her cart bounced over bumps and into ruts.
With no central heating and few covered windows, the chilly night air off the ocean drifted in and caught in the dark, dank corners. The breeze swirled her skirt around her knees. She’d brought one pair of denim jeans with her, which she suspected were going to become her new uniform if she couldn’t shake the damp chill that permeated her skin.
Behind locked doors she could hear the hum of generators and other machinery, which she supposed had something to do with the island’s alarm system. Driven more by survival than curiosity, she didn’t test her keys in any door until she reached the rusted iron monstrosity Marcus Smith had shown her earlier. After unlatching a modern steel padlock, she scraped the dead bolt across its hinge. The door itself groaned from weight and age as she shoved it open and entered the prison proper.
Foul, musty air stung her nostrils and made her eyes water. It was inhumane to keep a man in these conditions, but then she supposed kindness and compassion weren’t on Boone Fowler’s list of virtues.
Besides the padlock she’d slipped into her pocket to keep from being trapped inside herself, the only visible hint of technology was the single electric wire that ran the length of the stone walls to illuminate a bare lightbulb every twenty feet or so. And she suspected that had more to do with security than with the prisoners’ comfort.
Unintelligible snippets of conversation teased her ears and bounced along the walls, but the prisoners fell silent as she approached the steel bars that separated her from the men she was feeding. They all watched her with assessing, unfriendly eyes. Three soldiers in one cell. Four in another. Then three and three more.
They took the small loaves of bread and cups of water she poured for them with a variety of comments at seeing a woman, and a few jeers as they mistook her for a member of Fowler’s militia. But hunger quickly overrode their defiance, and they sat down to eat with a pitiful gusto that reminded her of some of the poor families she’d seen in Lukinburg.
Another key unlocked a second iron door. In this long, twisting catacomb, there were four isolated cells, each one separated from the other by thick stone walls and steel bars.
Here the men sat, bound by leg irons and wrist manacles, one to each cell like condemned murderers. These men didn’t wear uniforms like the others, but civilian clothing.
The first one had unusual blue-green eyes that looked right through her without blinking. She idly wondered if the blood on his torn shirt was his own or someone else’s. He never moved until she had passed on by. The next one stood up when she approached. Despite the bruising and swelling around one eye, he was a handsome man. He nodded a silent thank-you, then watched her every move until she’d rounded the corner out of sight. The third was deep in his own thoughts. And pain, she suspected, noting a dozen or so cuts across his roughly shaved head. Tasiya quickly set the bread and cup of water just outside the bars on the floor in front of his cell and moved on.
When she turned the corner to the last, most isolated of all the chambers, Tasiya hesitated. The lightbulb here had burned out, leaving the only illumination to the bulb twenty feet behind her, and the moonlight that streamed in from what must be the cell itself.
Tasiya silently cursed her luck. She could either travel all the way back to the kitchen for a flashlight, or she could swallow her fear of the unknown enemy around the corner and follow the wall with her hand until it opened up onto the cell itself.
Weighing the options