Tactical Rescue

“I’m really sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything more than I have.” He turned around and climbed back over the rocks toward his motorcycle.

“But are we still in danger from him?”

He paused, his feet balancing on the crushing rocks that she’d feared just moments ago would bury her alive. His eyes glanced at the sky, his head shook and his lips moved as though he was praying. Then he looked at her head-on, with a look so raw and unflinching she blinked. “I don’t honestly know if we’re in danger or not. But trust me, Rebecca, I’ll do everything in my power to keep you safe. And I wish I could tell you more about what’s going on. I really do.”

He grabbed a green shoulder bag and moved his bike off the road. They walked to her camper. Neither of them spoke. He’d already made it clear he wasn’t about to answer any of her questions, and random small talk had never been something she’d been good at. Eventually they reached the small break in the trees that was the unpaved, overgrown entrance to her property. It was a nice chunk of forest actually. But it was hard to reach and very overgrown. Terrible for building on. But not bad for a hideaway.

“Welcome to my home.” She waved a hand toward the vintage aluminum camper now hitched to the back of a large black pickup truck. It was the same camper she’d lived in before her mom married the General, one of the few things she’d inherited. “Not much to look at, but it has all my video equipment inside. I travel a lot, so all I really need is a place to park my life when I’m not on the road. Feel free to dump your stuff in the front seat.”

“Thank you. Can I charge my phone in your truck? My battery’s almost dead, and I promised my CO I’d call him back.”

“No problem.” She tossed him her keys. He caught them smoothly. “My minilaptop computer is plugged in there, but you can just stick it in the glove compartment. I’ve also got a portable generator running in the camper, if you’d rather.”

“Thanks. I think I’ll go with the truck. It’ll get us on the road faster.” He slid one hand into the front pocket of his jeans as if checking to make sure something was there. “Hey, this might sound like an odd request, but would it be okay if I checked something on your laptop?”

She shrugged. “Be my guest. But it’s really small and it won’t connect to the internet.”

Rebecca walked to her camper. For a moment she debated simply unhitching her truck and leaving the camper in the woods. But depending on how long things took at the police station, she might just as well spend the night at a campsite in Timmins. Small and portable, with four wheels, it might not be everyone’s idea of home. But for her, it was perfect. A narrow single bunk lay at the front end of the camper. A tiny kitchenette with a fold-down table filled the center of the space. At the back end, the second bunk had been converted into a long, makeshift desk and video-editing space.

Her eyes rose to the computer monitors at the end of the camper. She’d left them running on the generator. One was broadcasting a feed from the tiny camera mounted inside of her truck. Clipped just inside of the sun visor, she used the tiny, temperamental spy camera to film either herself or the road ahead when her project called for her to narrate something while driving. Right now, it showed the mysterious Sergeant Keats. He plugged a memory stick into her laptop computer. Then he opened his bag on the seat beside him. She crossed the camper to turn off the feed. His phone rang again. He answered.

“Hello?” he said. “Yeah. Sorry we got cut off. Yeah, I’m with her. No, I haven’t told her anything. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have a clue.”

A shiver ran down her spine. She shouldn’t be eavesdropping. But he was talking about her and keeping something from her. Why should she trust him?

“Yeah, I’ve got it. I’m using her laptop to check the contents now. But it seems to be automatically downloading onto her machine.” He stuck the phone between his ear and his shoulder, picked up her laptop. “I don’t know. Something weird’s going on. I’ll call back when I’ve got something to report. But yeah, I’ve got Rebecca.” He set the laptop back down. “Don’t worry. I know what I need to do here! I’m not about to let anything get in the way of doing it. Fair enough? I’ll find out what she knows, if she knows anything, and I’ll bring her in.”

She froze.

He was talking like she was his target. No, it was worse than that. She was a Canadian citizen standing on home soil. He wasn’t the police. He didn’t have a warrant or any legal right to question her or take her anywhere. But he was talking as if she was his prisoner.

“No, Rebecca doesn’t know anything!” Zack seemed to be searching his bag for something. His voice sounded almost exasperated. “She’s completely clueless. She’s completely in the dark. She doesn’t even know who I am.”

He reached for the sun visor and tilted the rearview mirror to look behind him, bumping the tiny camera. The camera’s view shifted to the side of the passenger seat. The audio feed cut out entirely. She could barely see a thing inside the cab now and couldn’t hear another word he said.

He waved his hand through the camera’s gaze and suddenly she could see what he’d been searching for.

Her hand rose to her lips.

It was a pair of handcuffs.

* * *

Zack tucked the handcuffs into his belt and his SIG semiautomatic into his holster. Next time he ran into Seth, he’d be ready for him. The two Glocks he’d taken off Seth now lay disassembled in the bottom of his bag. He did not want to know what kind of friends Seth had been making that he managed to get ahold of not only two illegal handguns, but also an IED. Hopefully, he was just a really good thief.

Either way, frustration coursed through Zack’s shoulders. Stonewalling Rebecca like that had been almost physically painful. But she hadn’t seemed to recognize him. He’d been trying to figure out what to say when Seth had opened fire again. He’d sorted that, and then his phone had rung with a call from his own CO, Major Jeff Lyons, field commander of Zack’s special ops unit. And Jeff had opened with the line, Please tell me you’re nowhere near Rebecca Miles right now.

Zack blew out a hard breath. Yes, it was no secret that he had an old Remi base newspaper clipping inside his footlocker with a picture of Rebecca at seventeen and a story about how she’d won the martial arts trophy. Or that he sometimes got a bit of good-natured ribbing from the other guys about having a crush on General Arthur Miles’s stepdaughter whenever the General’s face was on TV. Even though he’d never personally met the man, even back when he and Rebecca were teenagers.

But he’d never imagined that as news of Seth Miles’s treason and crimes spread like wildfire through both official and unofficial channels, someone in his unit would suddenly hope that Zack hadn’t gone to try to talk to Seth’s sister. Or that his own CO would then give him a friendly call just to suggest that as Rebecca was now wanted for police questioning, it might be a good idea that Zack stay away from her.

Too late for that.

“Again, I can’t assess what was on the memory stick.” Zack looked at the laptop. “Whatever it was, it appears to have now leaped from the memory stick to the laptop, and scrubbed the memory stick clean of any trace on the way out. Now the laptop’s completely locked down and appears to be asking for a password in Cyrillic script. So one of the Slavic languages. Don’t think it’s Russian. Could be either another Eastern European or a North Asian language.”

He could think of at least four different organized crime groups his task force had tangled with in various parts of the world that used Cyrillic script in their communications. He’d personally gone into Eastern Europe a few months ago to safely extract a brilliant young woman from the clutches of one such group. And I really hope whatever this is, it’s not connected to that. Because the idea that Seth Miles could’ve just hacked around the government database, looking for something to steal, and found something significant to an active special forces operation was unthinkable.

“Bring it in. Bring Rebecca Miles in. Walk away,” Jeff said. “I’ll report up the chain of command how fortunate we are that one of our top recon guys just happened to stumble upon Seth Miles’s current location and might’ve retrieved what he stole. I’ll try to play it as such great news that hopefully it won’t come back and bite you.”

“I’m on leave,” Zack said. “It was a personal errand. I simply saw her face on the news, and decided to pop by and see how she was. I was hardly expecting to run into Seth.”

“Oh, I know. You don’t need to convince me of anything,” the major said. “This isn’t an order and we’re not officially having this conversation. But as your friend, Zack, my advice is to get as far away from this mess as possible. And fast. The last thing we want is for our whole unit to be grounded from deployment because one of our top guys is being questioned in connection to an open treason investigation. The RCMP are heading the investigation, in conjunction with the Canadian Department of National Defence, and we haven’t been called in. But I can tell you that once word got out a member of our unit had a personal relationship with Seth Miles’s sister, it raised some serious flags as to where the break in security could’ve come from. We’re already worried that we can’t seem to stem the leak of Canadian equipment ending up in the hands of Slavic organized crime. If someone from the RCMP sits down to interview Miss Miles and she so much as mentions your name it won’t look good. Not for you. Not for us. As a friend, I would hate to see this unit function without you. But you know we can’t afford to be pulled from deployment because there’s a shadow hanging over one guy.”

Okay, okay. He got all that. Even though he didn’t like it. Maybe coming to check in on Rebecca had been the wrong call. It had been twenty years since Zack’d let his heart have any say in his decision making, and it had probably been a mistake to start now. But still...

“The Rebecca I knew was a reasonable person with a good heart,” he said. “I know you’ve advised me to keep her in the dark, and I understand why. But I’m not convinced it’ll jeopardize the investigation by telling her who I am and why I’m here. Honestly, she’ll go squirrelly if I’m not straight with her.”

Rebecca’s tenacity could be pretty unrelenting. Considering how hard she’d hammered him for information on the road, he could just imagine how the truck ride to Timmins would go.

“When in doubt,” Jeff said, “imagine explaining every single call you make in the next hour, in a long, drawn-out, extremely uncomfortable tribunal on this whole Seth Miles mess, and answering the question why a solider who’s withstood intense questioning by foreign militants couldn’t withstand the badgering of a cute girl with pretty eyes.”

Zack snorted. “She’s more than cute. But point taken. We’ll be in Timmins in a little over an hour.”

Then, sometime after his next deployment, he’d write her a nice long letter, apologizing for not being straight with her, not to mention infecting her laptop with some kind of Slavic virus. Hopefully, she’d forgive him.

“And you’re convinced she’s not complicit in her brother’s crimes?” Jeff asked.

“One hundred percent.”

“Okay. I hope for your sake you’re right. Just don’t let Rebecca or that laptop out of your sight. If you see Seth, don’t engage unless you have no other option. Again, I can’t authorize you for a mission, because it’s not our investigation, and I can’t dictate what you do with your personal leave. As your friend, feel free to call me anytime. But if this escalates, I’m going to have to get involved as your commanding officer. Got it?”

“Got it.” Zack ran one hand over the back of his neck. “I’m sorry for giving you an extra headache and I won’t do anything that brings the unit into disrepute.”

“You’re the only man I know who could go on leave, to the middle of nowhere in Northern Ontario, and land in the middle of a major international crisis.”

“Ha, ha,” Zack said. “Thanks for calling. I mean it.”

“Anytime. See you back at base.”

The call ended. He put the laptop back into its hard case, zipped it up and then slid it into the truck’s glove compartment, happy to see she’d had the smarts to install a combination lock on it. He shoved his bag deep under the passenger seat and then got out of the truck. The door to Rebecca’s camper was closed. He strode toward it.

He had to admit, he kind of hated how all this was unfolding. If only Rebecca had recognized him. But a woman like her had probably been approached by so many male suitors in the past twenty years that one shy guy from when she was a teenager would have been long forgotten.

Lord, help me handle this situation honorably, honestly and with a whole lot of wisdom.

He wouldn’t disclose what he couldn’t disclose. But he also wouldn’t lie. And if that led to being barraged by questions for the whole truck ride to Timmins, so be it. He knocked on the door.

“Hey, Rebecca, you about ready to go?”