Finding Zach

  Copyright

  Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  4760 Preston Road

  Suite 244-149

  Frisco, TX 75034

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Finding Zach

  Copyright © 2010 by Rowan Speedwell

  Cover Art by Catt Ford

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 4760 Preston Road, Suite 244-149, Frisco, TX 75034

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  ISBN: 978-1-61581-446-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  May, 2010

  eBook edition available

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61581-447-3

  Dedication

  For my mother,

  who always believes in me—

  even if I won't let her read what I write.

  Chapter 1

  “THE hostages are secure, Captain. All present and accounted for. Perimeter has been secured.”

  Captain John Rogers pushed his helmet back a little on his forehead and regarded his subordinate. “Casualties?”

  “Jamison took a bullet in the calf; medic’s with him now. Otherwise, no casualties on our side. Three dead, twelve injured on the enemies’ side so far, not including the poor bastard hanging on the whipping post. Shit.”

  “What about among the hostages? Any injuries?”

  “One of the men has what looks like a couple of broken ribs. Otherwise, bruises, a sprained ankle. Damn lucky.”

  “‘Lucky’ has been what this whole operation’s been about, Lieutenant Pritzker.” Rogers sighed.

  “You’re not kidding, Captain. It was a plain miracle that one of the Dutchmen had that experimental personal GPS transponder implanted. Best advertisement for his product you could ask for.” The lieutenant pressed his fingers to his headset. “Barracks secured. Last building is apparently the commandant’s headquarters. Had some fire from there earlier, but it’s stopped; either the shooter’s hit or fled.”

  “Or holding out for a more effective resistance,” the Captain said cynically. “Everything’s gone entirely too textbook for my liking. I’d like a team to circle around back; approach the building with maximum caution. I don’t trust this luck.” He glanced at the handful of enemy combatants kneeling a few yards away, their hands clasped on their heads. “Ask one of them where the camp commander is.”

  Pritzger went to stand in front of the one man that had been unarmed when they’d nailed him. “You. What’s your name?” he asked in Spanish.

  “Ernesto Camillo,” he said dully.

  “Where is your captain?”

  The man jerked his chin at the far structure. “There, last I see of him.”

  “Is there anyone else in that building?”

  The man laughed, a brief, humorless snort. “Just his little dog.”

  “What did he say?” Rogers asked. “I didn’t get that.”

  “Perrito,” Pritzger said. “It means ‘little dog’.”

  “He’s got a dog in there?”

  “If he does, I doubt if it’s little,” Pritzger said dryly. “The camp commander’s probably the type that likes Dobermans or Rottweilers. These paramilitary types usually do.” He indicated the whipping victim, who was even now being eased down onto the ground by a pair of his fellow soldiers, their activities supervised by some of the combined American-Dutch forces who’d spearheaded this operation. “Fucking macho bastard. Let the teams know there’s the possibility of a guard dog….”

  The little man laughed and said something. Rogers said, “What? I don’t understand this dialect.”

  Pritzger said, “He said it’s not a guard dog.”

  “Still,” Rogers said.

  They waited until the teams had secured the building, and then went in. It was a simple two-room structure. The main room where they stood was an office; through the open door to the other room, Rogers could see a neatly made bed and another door already standing open from the other team’s entrance a few moments before. The office contained a desk, a laptop computer, file cabinets, a chair, and a wire dog crate—the big kind, made for large dogs like the Rottweilers and Dobermans Pritzger had mentioned. It was empty. Near the window lay a body that Rogers assumed was the commandant; he had fake gold bullion on the shoulders of his uniform, also typical with these paramilitary types. He’d been garroted with a thin strip of leather. It looked like a dog leash. “No one else in the building, Captain,” one of the guys who had been first in said. “Whoever did this must have cut out the back before we got here.”

  “Take the laptop and what you can get out of the file cabinets,” Rogers instructed. “They’ll have all kinds of data on funding, activities, links to other groups, contacts…. The boys at Bragg will be short-stroking themselves over this stuff. They love them some paperwork.”

  Pritzger nodded and detailed a couple of guys to start on the file cabinets near the desk. He himself moved around the dog crate to the file cabinets behind the cage.

  And froze.

  Rogers saw it and went on alert. “Lieutenant?”

  “Shh,” Pritzger said. “Everybody just… shh….” He moved slowly, going into a crouch.

  Rogers shifted the crate and saw what Pritzger was looking at. He held up a hand to indicate that the others in the room should maintain their positions.

  Wedged in between the far side of the file cabinets and the wall, beneath a shelf, in a space that should have been too small for it, was a bony, naked human figure with a thick mop of tangled black hair. It was curled up with its face hidden, its back arched, the spine and ribs sharply delineated and slashed with scarring. It was worse than thin; it looked like a skeleton with skin. Rogers wondered how long the body had been there—not long, he supposed, since there wasn’t any smell of decay….

  Then he saw the ribs expand in a tentative breath, and he realized the thing was alive.

  “Shit,” he murmured.

  Pritzger said in Spanish, “Who are you? It’s okay—we’re not going to hurt you.”

  The thing made a sound. It sounded like a dog’s whine. A dog….

  Rogers looked back at the cage. “Fuck,” he breathed. “Fuck, Lieutenant. The dog. The commandant’s dog….”

  The tangled mass of hair lifted. A gaunt, pale face looked up and whined again. Then it gave a soft bark and tried to cram itself deeper into the corner. “Jesus,” Pritzger murmured, then, again, still in Spanish, “We’re not going to hurt you. Who are you? What’s your name?” He put out a hand; the creature flinched but made no move to bite or resist, even when Pritzger put his hand on its shoulder. “Come on, come out. We aren’t going to hurt you.”

  “Is that a human?” one of the men behind the desk asked in disbelief. The creature’s eyes flicked in his direction. In the shadows, Rogers couldn’t tell what color they were, but by the reaction, he saw that he understood.

  “He speaks English,” Rogers said flatly. The thing looked at him, a strangely steady, empty look. It was the look of someone who’d long ago forgotten how to care. “He understands English and I’ll bet my left nut he’s the one that killed the commandant.”

  “I doubt if he could
strangle an overripe banana,” Pritzger objected.

  “Never underestimate the power of hate-fueled adrenaline, Lieutenant.”

  The thing sighed and put its head back down on the floor. Rogers touched his headset. “Randy?” he said to the medic. “I need you in here. Jamison okay?”

  “Yeah,” Randy said in his ear. “What’s happened in there?”

  Rogers looked down at the figure on the floor. “You are not going to believe this….”

  THEY found a pair of sweatpants with a drawstring waist; the legs were too short, but the man couldn’t stand up straight for more than a couple minutes anyway. He squatted in the dirt of the compound, his arms wrapped around his knees, staring into space. The T-shirt the medic had put on him hung in draped folds around his emaciated arms. Rogers had seen pictures of people like him coming out of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen after the liberation of the concentration camps in the forties. Pritzger knelt beside the kid, cutting off the studded collar with a pair of shears someone’d dug up. The buckle had been soldered shut. “I’d put his age at twentyish,” Randy Josten said, making notes on his clipboard. “American or European—good nutrition in childhood, luckily for him—healthy bones, teeth loose from malnutrition but all still there, and signs of past dental care. Camillo says he’s been here about five years, give or take. Once we’re back at Bragg we can go through missing persons reports from about then and see if we can figure out who he is.”

  “Still not talking?”

  “Barks. Whines.” Randy frowned. “Kid’s physically and mentally traumatized, Captain. He’s a fucking basket case. He’s been beaten; a couple of his ribs have been broken and healed badly; from what I can tell, he can’t take a deep breath without it hurting. Had a couple of fingers broken, his wrist, and God knows what else. And,” he said, taking a breath, “he’s been raped. I don’t know how often, but given that the last time was about an hour ago, I’d say pretty damn regularly. He’s got scars all over his legs and ass from the damn wire of that fucking cage, and you can see yourself he can’t even stand up.”

  “So figure he’s been in that cage pretty much continuously for the last five years. Fuck.” Rogers shook his head. “Let’s get him back to Bragg and into the hands of the docs there; let the Dutch contingent handle cleanup of the remaining personnel. They know what’s going on and have better contacts than we do locally. Load the kid with the hostages and the computer and stuff we took from the office on the first chopper out of here.”

  “Yes sir,” Randy said. Then, “What?” at Rogers’s suddenly arrested expression.

  “Something,” Rogers said. “Something about computers. Did you say five years?”

  “Yeah, that’s what Camillo said.”

  Rogers stalked across the compound to the kid. Crouching in front of him, he tilted up the kid’s face to study it, narrow-eyed. Out of the dimness of the building where he’d been held, the eyes that looked back at him were a cold, crystal blue, their expression hard and wary. “Zach?” he asked.

  “What?” Randy had followed him. “Do you know who he is?”

  “Zach? Is that you?” Rogers asked the kid again. “Zach Tyler?”

  The kid… barked. “Fuck,” Rogers said. “It is. Zach Tyler.”

  “Holy shit,” Randy said. “Tyler Technologies? But Tyler’s kid got kidnapped from fucking Costa Rica. We’re in eastern Venezuela—a couple thousand miles from there!”

  “So tangos can’t travel?” Rogers asked sarcastically. “But it’s him. I remember the description, the pictures—hell, it was all over the TV, particularly after they paid the ransom and didn’t get him back. Five years. Shit.”

  Zach whined. Rogers looked down at him and released his chin. “You said it, kid. You said a fucking mouthful.”

  I HAVE forgotten what kindness is. I keep waiting for something to happen, for me to wake up from this oh-so-pleasant dream, but I don’t wake up. It can’t be reality; I know reality—it’s a cage, and table scraps and beatings and pain and rape and hunger. For so long I’ve known exactly what to expect; I’ve kept my sanity by being hard inside, meeting cruelty with indifference when I can, and hatred when I can’t. I haven’t had a lot to be proud of, but every day I was still alive after five years of Esteban gave me a kind of strength to keep going. Hate can make you strong; I know it did me.

  But people who give me food and water, who are gentle when they put clothes on me and lift me and carry me to sit in a cushioned chair and even buckle me into my seat confuse me, and I don’t know how to deal with them. This is not reality. It scares me, even if it’s kind of nice.

  When they first put the sweats on me, I finger the fabric endlessly, and rub my cheek on my knee. It’s so soft, and clean. It smells as good as it feels.

  I don’t like the helicopter ride. I don’t like the noise, or the vibrations, or the way it lurches in the air. It scares me, and I haven’t been scared for a really long time. I’m out of practice. There are other people on the helicopter ride, the other freed hostages and the soldiers to protect them, but they’re mostly excited and happy. I don’t know what to think about them. They don’t know what to think about me, either. A couple of them stare, like they think I’m some kind of animal. I lift my lip and snarl at them softly, just to let them know they’re right.

  It seems like I’m scared forever, but finally the helicopter touches down at an airport, then there’s more noise and confusion, but there’s also more of the unexpected gentleness, and pretty soon I’m sitting in the cabin of an airplane.

  Again, I’m scared—not because I’m afraid to fly, I’ve been in planes lots before, but all I can remember is that last terrible flight to Costa Rica, landing and walking off the plane and looking for the driver my aunt would have sent to meet me and then nothing until I wake up in the jungle and Esteban is looking at me. I break out in a cold sweat and one of the soldiers nearby asks if I’m okay. I don’t answer him, of course.

  I shouldn’t be feeling this way, shouldn’t be remembering like this, because I’m in an Army troop transport, not first class in a luxury jet. The other hostages aren’t on this plane. Just me and a bunch of soldiers; not the same ones as before except the lieutenant who cut the dog collar off back in the compound. He’s standing up near the front of the plane, talking to one of the pilots.

  My legs hurt, and my back. I rub my thighs through the grey sweats. It hurts, and I try to hold back a whimper. I’ve had lots of practice at keeping quiet, but for some reason this time I don’t succeed.

  “Hey, lieutenant,” the guy who’d asked if I was okay calls. “Your passenger here’s upset about something.”

  The lieutenant turns and comes back down the aisle. He smiles at me. “Hey, you doin’ okay, Zach?” He hesitates a little before he says my name, like he’s not sure if it’s right. I’m not quite sure, either.

  I rub my thighs again. He frowns, and then says, “You aren’t comfortable in the seat, are you, kid?” He’s more comfortable with “kid.” “Bet your muscles are all wonky from that cage.” He straightens, glances around, then goes in the back of the plane where I can’t see him. A minute later, he comes back and unbuckles me. “It ain’t exactly protocol, but I think you’ll feel better here,” he says, and lifts me out of my seat. “Damn, kid, you can’t weigh a hundred pounds soakin’ wet.” He carries me back a few rows to where he’s folded up some seats on the half-empty transport and put the cushions on the floor. He sets me down on the cushions. “There you are. Is that better?”

  I look up at him, meet his eyes for the first time. They’re brown. I feel my lips move, twist, and realize I’m smiling. I don’t think it’s a snarl because he grins back at me.

  I curl up on the cushions, so soft and comfortable, and sleep for the rest of the trip. When I open my eyes again, it’s to the lieutenant shaking my shoulder. “We’re about to land, kid, and you gotta be buckled in for that. Sorry.”

  I experiment with that smile again and lift my arms for him to pick me
up. He does so, laughing. “I got a little nephew does that, but he’s three. What’s your excuse?”

  I rest my head on his shoulder. He’s kind, and he smells good. I don’t even mind him waking me from the first good sleep I’ve had in years. I didn’t even know you could sleep in dreams.

  He buckles me in and I wait for the plane to land, and stop, and for him to come and fetch me again. This time he only carries me to the front of the plane, where a couple of men in white are waiting with a stretcher. They put me on the stretcher, but when they start to move away, I reach out and grab his sleeve, and whine. He pats my shoulder and says, “I’ll see you at the hospital, kid. Don’t worry.”

  His smile is warm and makes me want to trust him. He’s the only one so far, but I trust him. I let the stretcher men carry me away to the waiting ambulance, but now I’m scared again. I don’t know what’s waiting anymore. I knew, with Esteban, what was waiting, but I don’t anymore, and I’m scared. I remember a saying: “Better the devil you know….” but Esteban wasn’t better. Just… familiar.

  Nothing is familiar anymore, and I’m scared.

  RICHARD TYLER picked up the ringing phone on the desk in his cubicle. The number on the phone’s screen was the receptionist’s. “Tyler,” he said absently, his attention on the computer in front of him.

  “Rich, there are a couple of people here from the State Department,” Abby said. Her voice trembled.

  Richard’s stomach dropped. This was it: the news he’d been expecting since the ten-million dollar ransom had vanished into the jungles of Central America five years ago. Numbly he replied, “Put them in the small conference room. I’ll be right there.” He set down the phone and stared at it a moment.

  It could be just another one of the interminable interviews that he’d sat through off and on throughout the last half-decade, State Department suits looking for things that might lead to capture of the terrorists that had kidnapped Zach from the airport in Costa Rica, supposedly one of the safest spots in Central America. The abduction had shaken the business world and tightened up security in the little tourist-friendly country, but it had come too late for Zachary. Richard rubbed his forehead and took a deep breath. This time, though, it felt different, and Richard suspected he knew why. This was it. The end of the waiting. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t expected it. Best to get it over with. He closed down the program he was working on and left his cubicle.