Beau Read online

  And that just pissed Danica right off.

  As she waited, the wind picked up, and clouds crossed the sun above. She looked up at it and whispered, “Please don’t rain. Please don’t rain.” But no sooner had the words dropped out of her mouth than she could feel a few drops coming down. She groaned. “We don’t need mud in those cages.” She could only hope that nobody was left in them because that would get pretty ugly pretty fast. One more single shot rang out; after that was silence. Dead silence. Not a brush rustled, not a twig broke.

  She waited, her heart pounding. When she heard footsteps, she sucked herself as flat against the tree as she could. It wasn’t until he was right below her that she saw Beau staring up at her.

  “I just took out Mackey,” he said. “Come on down.”

  “Do you think it’s safe?” she asked as she slowly and carefully scrambled down the tree. When she was on the same limb that he had placed her onto, he reached up, caught her in his arms, and turned them around, carrying her again.

  “Yes, the military have secured his weapons as well. Plus, I don’t hear any more shots.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No,” Beau said. “I figured we needed him alive to answer a few questions.” He carried her back toward where the gunfire had been. They were almost instantly surrounded by military, but the men recognized Beau and her and let them pass.

  As they walked up to the front entrance, Mackey was held between two military men, blood streaming from a shoulder wound.

  Mackey glared at Beau. “You didn’t have to shoot me.”

  “You were shooting at the others in your own military team,” he said. “You pick sides every day of your life,” he said, “and, on this day, you picked the wrong one.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” Mackey said. “I didn’t want anything to do with it.”

  “But?”

  “I had to,” he said. “They have all the information to make your life a living hell.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like your address, your phone number, your kids’ birth dates, where they go to school, your bank accounts, who holds your mortgage, everything,” he said bitterly. “And, once I got that phone call, well, I didn’t have much of a choice.”

  “To come up here and do what?” Danica asked in outrage. “It was already over with by then.”

  “I think they were hoping I’d get killed,” he snapped.

  “Well, you better hand over your phone,” she said to Mackey. “Let Beau here check out your numbers and track down the asshole who’s been threatening you.”

  He snorted. “You really think it’s that easy?”

  “It’s not that hard,” she said. “When I think about how much all these women have suffered here, the women who have gone into the system that we would likely never even know about …”

  He nodded. “The only thing I could do was make sure they were as healthy as they were.”

  “You could have called the authorities at any time,” she snapped. “You didn’t have to let even the first woman get on that ship.”

  “Well, if I wanted to keep my daughter safe,” he said, “I did. Otherwise she would join them.”

  Silence greeted them at that, and she realized Beau had his hand out, waiting for the doc’s phone.

  With a groan, Mackey handed it over. “I hope you nail every one of those assholes.”

  “Do you know who those assholes are?” she asked.

  “They were from down south,” he said. “A couple were visiting right now, but I’m sure they had a bolt-hole to get out of here before all the action happened.”

  “Well, four men left on a bush plane earlier,” Beau said.

  Mackey nodded. “That’ll be them. I just got a long-distance call.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Beau said. “The thing is, all four men are in Anchorage in jail right now.”

  Mackey stared at him in shock. “What? Well then, who called me about forty-five minutes ago?”

  Beau was already working on the phone in his hand.

  Beau quickly checked the number, knowing that, if he called it, it wouldn’t necessarily route to the right phone. It could have been forwarded elsewhere. He sent Griffin a message while he stood here, further checking out Mackey’s contacts. When Griffin said, “Go,” Beau hit Redial and waited for a ringing phone. When it happened, it surprised him. He looked around, hearing it close by. Several of the military men checked their phones, looking to see which one of theirs was ringing. The sound went right to another guy standing off to the side.

  Beau headed toward him. The men parted like the Red Sea in front of him. All of them except the corporal, who stepped to his side. When they came up to one of the men who’d driven a military transport truck, his face pale, Beau held out his hand and said, “Give me your phone.”

  The man shook his head.

  At the commander’s orders, two men immediately stepped up and grabbed ahold of the suspect. He was quickly relieved of his phone. And, sure enough, his phone was still ringing.

  “So you ordered Mackey to come here?” Beau asked.

  “I was just following orders too,” the man said.

  “Well, I guess you won’t be following their orders anymore, will you?” He handed Mackey’s and the transport driver’s phones to the corporal. “You got this?”

  “We got this,” he said. Instantly, the man was taken away.

  “You need to work with the authorities,” Beau said to the corporal, his voice hard. “I don’t want anybody sliding through the cracks on this one.”

  “No,” the corporal said. “Nobody will get away on this one.”

  “And if there’s two bad apples …”

  The corporal’s face tightened. “I know. There’ll be a full investigation. If he’s got anybody else in this mess here,” he said, “we’ll make sure that we take them down.”

  “Says you,” Danica said with spirit from behind him.

  Just then came a shout. They turned to see fire curling up from one of the buildings.

  “Shit,” the corporal said. “Anybody know where the remaining cult people are?” The fire grew rapidly.

  Beau snarled and said, “That hall needs to be opened up immediately. It’s full of women and children now, I believe.” He grabbed two men, turned to Danica, and said, “Stay here.” To the men, he said, “Come on. We have to get the other women out of the sick bay in the basement.” And, with that, the men split up and took off in all directions.

  Beau barreled back inside and down to the basement, but it took him several doorways to find the one he wanted because he hadn’t come out this way. Finally he was downstairs and with the men. They quickly carried out the two pregnant women and another one he had missed before. A child was lying in a bed, like she was feverish. With everyone else carried out by now, Beau walked to the bed where Nania, the injured woman, was.

  She stared up at him. “I’m dying anyway,” she said. “Just let me die.”

  “You’re not dying on my watch,” he said.

  “I can’t be moved,” she whispered. “The pain.”

  “Then, as soon as the pain hits,” he said reassuringly, “you should be knocked out.”

  He checked to see if she was chained, and, sure enough, she was. Smoke soon filled this room too. He swore, but suddenly two men were at his side. One had cutters and snapped the bolts that had her chained. The two men each grabbed an end of the mattress and took her out.

  He headed back down the tunnel toward the armed woman with her children. He kicked open every door as he went, telling everybody, “Get out! Get out! The place is on fire! Move, move, move!” He didn’t know if anybody was even around to hear him, but he wanted to make sure that nobody was left behind who wanted a chance at freedom.

  When he came to the door he suspected they were behind, it was locked. He could hear children crying inside, so he reared back and kicked it hard.

  The woman was in a corner, hugging them close.
She stared at him, terrified.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go, let’s go. The place is on fire.”

  She raced toward him, four children wrapped around her. She had the smallest in her arms and the oldest holding her hand. He reached down, snagged up the other two, and said, “Follow me,” and he raced back toward the stairs. Halfway up, he met another soldier coming down. He handed off one of the children and then the other. He reached down and grabbed the woman and said, “Let’s go. You’re moving too slowly.” But looking at her closer, he realized that she was pregnant, heavily pregnant.

  He took the other two children from her and handed them up. The men moved the children quickly out of the front of the tunnel to the yard. He reached down to the mother and said, “Come on.” He could see the smoke from the building as the fire crackled all around them. She was coughing and gasping, so he bent, grabbed underneath her at the back of her knees, picked her up, and carried her up the stairs just as the building tumbled. Men screamed and shouted at him, but Beau barreled through the front door as the tinder-dry wood flamed into an inferno around him. He raced out the door as the timbers came down behind him. Outside, the mother was carefully taken from his arms to join her children. He looked around and asked, “What about the hall in the back?”

  The corporal showed him the long line of women and children racing toward the road.

  He stopped and nodded. “The ten cult men left on duty?”

  “They’re prisoners,” he said. The corporal smacked Beau hard on the shoulder. “We’ve done what we can. If anybody else is left inside, well, I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”

  Beau looked back to see the top of the building come crashing down. The hall itself had just caught fire too. All the buildings were so close. Several military men moved a large group of animals into the back corner of the property, goats and maybe even chickens, he couldn’t really see in the light with the smoke from the fires too. But, as long as they weren’t part of the roast, he was fine with that.

  They stood here in awe as the place burned, the flames shooting high. “We’ll have to watch for the trees close by,” the corporal said. “If any of them catch, we’ll have one hell of a forest fire here.”

  “I’ve already called in a bomber,” Beau said. “It’ll be pretty hard to contain this any other way.”

  Even as they watched, several of the trees caught fire. And it would just get worse.

  He looked to see Danica sitting on a big rock. She stared up at the fire, and tears were in her eyes. He crouched in front of her. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “You got everybody out.” She said, “I’m so damn grateful to know that everybody’s safe.”

  “We got everybody we could find,” he corrected. “I have no way to know if we got them all.”

  “Understood,” she said. “We got who we could. That’s what matters. Now we need to catch the other assholes trying to squeak free of this net.”

  “The locals are on it.” He stood, looked around, and said, “But I haven’t seen Asher.”

  She pointed. “He’s the one who let the women and children out of the hall.”

  Sure enough, Asher stood completely surrounded by what had to be thirtysomething people. He lifted a hand in greeting and tapped something into Beau’s intercom. “I can hardly hear your taps,” Beau said, speaking out loud now into his comm.

  “Yeah, a ton of crying and screaming is going on around me,” Asher said simply. “So many women and so many children. So much wailing.”

  “Well, they’ve just lost their home and their lifestyle,” Beau said. “So I guess a little bit of crying is okay.”

  “Yeah, but I’m hearing more about Thank God, we’re free now than anything,” Asher said. “If nothing else, this was an act of mercy for most of them.”

  “What about the leader? Where the hell is he?”

  “Not sure,” Asher said.

  Just then a face appeared in one of the windows on an upper floor of another building.

  Danica grabbed his hand and pointed. “Look. We missed somebody.”

  Mackey, still standing close by, said, “That’s Joshua, the nutty religious leader of all this mess. He’s the figurehead, and the rest were just using him and his cult. Figures that he’d still be in there.”

  Unfortunately he wasn’t alone. Several women stood beside him.

  Beau, Asher, Danica and the others gathered here all briefly saw the four people before the center of the building collapsed, and they went down with it.

  Danica stared at Beau. “Everyone saw them die, and, all this time, we didn’t even know anybody was up there.”

  “No,” Beau said. “I was so focused on going into the tunnels. I thought others were checking out the buildings aboveground.”

  The corporal said, “One cult guy wanted to stay with the building. He kept firing at the door, making sure nobody could go in.”

  “Well, that seems to have been their leader, Joshua. It was his decision then,” Beau said briskly, “but he didn’t need to take any of the women with him.”

  “I don’t think they planned on going anywhere but down with him,” the corporal said.

  Danica nodded. “That’s the thing about a cult. Somehow the leaders get everybody sucked into believing that they are the one and only person who’s important in their life. All the other women were locked up in the hall, so those other women would have been his inner circle.”

  “Well, there’s no inner circle now,” the corporal said, turning to view the chaos around him. “Now we have to make sure this fire doesn’t take off and burn down acres of land.”

  “I’d like to be a long way away before it gets that bad,” Danica said. Beau looked down at her. She reached up and put her arms around his neck. “Any chance I can get a ride someplace away from here? The smoke is deadly.”

  The inferno was taking off, and explosions boomed inside one of the buildings.

  “That’s the armory going. Get everybody back. Fall back, fall back,” Beau screamed.

  A gust of wind kicked up the flames and sent them surging behind the hall and the outbuildings. Trees caught fire; brush picked it up, and the grass fires ran everywhere, like the many legs of a spider. Instantly everybody moved as fast as they could to their vehicles and pulled farther back, giving the fire a much wider margin.

  Beau turned, looked at the road, and said, “Screw this.” He picked up Danica and tapped Asher a message. The fire’ll cut off the road. Fall back, fall back.

  He looked to see Asher leading the women and children down the road, trying to get them past where the fire was burning before they got caught and were burned to a crisp themselves. With Danica in his arms, Beau started to run.

  “Damn,” she said. “You must have been a sprinter in high school.”

  “High school was a hell of a long time ago,” he said, “but I was one of the best sprinters in the military.”

  “I believe it,” she said as she was bounced hard in his arms. He tried to hold her close to minimize the impact, but it was almost impossible. He finally broke through to the road, and she pointed to where the medic vehicle was. He nodded and raced over to it. She hopped into the passenger side; he turned on the engine and then went around to unlock the back. He backed up to where Asher and the women and children were gathered, with other military vehicles racing around the corner. They had the prisoners, but, with thirtysomething women and children from the cult, it would be hard to get everybody out of here in time.

  He loaded up a dozen kids in the back of the medic’s truck, packing them in as tightly as he could with one woman to look after them. Asher moved the remaining women to several of the other military vehicles. Still more military vehicles came down the road to join them.

  Realizing that they probably had enough transport room now, Beau hopped into the medic’s vehicle, looked at her, and said, “Now we’ll get you into town.” And he took off, heading for Anchorage.

  As he l
ooked up, he could see the first of the bombers coming in the direction of the fire. “Thank God for that,” he said, pointing it out.

  She peered up and said, “Fire bombers. Good. This is taking off like crazy.”

  Black smoke gusted around them as the wind picked up. Beau led the way, moving as fast as he could away from the fire area. Now that it had jumped to the trees, it would turn most of the neighboring area into ash in no time. Anybody caught on the other side of that fire wouldn’t survive. He wanted to make damn sure that Danica made it to the other side. He could see the other military vehicles pulling in line behind him. “It looks like the convoy is moving.”

  As a matter of fact, they were racing away as fast as they could. He pulled over and let several military vehicles run past him.

  She frowned at him.

  “When so many vehicles are so near the fire zone, you let the fastest ones go first, so they make room for the slowest ones to move out.” That was what was happening—ten vehicles raced past him, and the ones ahead were still picking up the rest of the people on foot. Finally Beau slid into place around the fifteenth vehicle.

  She sighed. “Is it over now?”

  “Well, it is for the moment,” he said. He looked at her. “Are you okay?”

  “I will be,” she said. “After a shower, a meal, and some sleep, I’ll be just fine.” She looked at him and whispered, “Thank you.”

  “No thanks necessary,” he said. “I still want to scream at you for coming back.”

  “Not my finest hour or my best decision,” she admitted. “When it occurred to me that they must have somebody local working with them, and that likely meant military, the doctor made the most sense, particularly after I heard his phone call.” She smiled at Beau. “I couldn’t just let you get ambushed, could I?”

  Chapter 17

  By the time they made it into town and headed to the hospital, Beau was much more distant, as if detaching himself from a nearly completed mission. She hated it. And when she finally had enough of it, she said, “It’s not working, you know.”