Page 60 of Operation: Valiant Angel

By the time the movement stopped, she had come out of the fog and remembered all that had happened. She felt around her immediate area. She knew she was in the trunk of the car. The dark gave way to light when the trunk opened. She found herself staring at Blake’s face.

Without a word, he reached in and pulled her to a sitting position. “Get out,” he said while pulling on her to help lift her from the trunk. She wobbled on her feet, holding onto the car to combat the dizziness she felt. With no words spoken, he pulled her away from the car. They were on a gravel road in a small clearing in the trees. The sky was a dark gray, either it was about to snow, or night was creeping in. She wasn’t sure which.

He pulled her up a little rise, her feet stumbling on the uneven ground. She barely saw the hole in front of her when she felt him push her and she fell forward, down into the deep hole. She landed hard on her right side. She lay there, stunned for a few seconds. She heard the unmistakable sound of a car door closing, a car’s engine turning over, and tires crunching on gravel, growing softer and softer. Then silence.

Shock was what she felt, mostly. Had that just happened? Had Blake just pushed her into a hole in the ground? She stared straight up at the dark gray sky and mentally gauged how different parts of her body felt. She wiggled her toes and then moved her legs. Her right shoulder, which she lay on, was sore. But she wiggled her fingers and then moved her arms. There was no intense pain as she did. She didn’t think she’d hit her head when she landed. She was quite sure her right shoulder and hip absorbed the brunt of the landing. And the ground beneath her appeared to be dirt and the remnants of snow covering grass.

She slowly sat up, paying attention to how her body felt as she did. She was sore and stiff, but she felt no intense pain anyplace. From the seated position, she took in her surroundings. Though the ground beneath her was dirt and grass, the walls of the hole of the perfectly circular eight-foot-wide hole were made of or lined with metal. It was like a metal tube was standing on its end in the hole.

She pulled herself to her feet again, focused on how her body felt as she did. In the back of her mind, she knew she could have been badly injured and could make it worse by moving around too much. She looked up. The hole had to be ten feet deep. What in the hell was this place? How long had she been unconscious? She rubbed her throbbing head. Her hand slid to the back to feel over where it hurt the worst. She wasn’t surprised to feel wetness and stickiness on the back of her head. When she viewed her finger tips, she saw blood. Only then did she let the tears fill her eyes, as they’d been threatening to since she woke in the trunk.

Blake had pushed her into this hole and left her. Was he leaving her there to die? Or would he be back? Leaving Lilly alone in that bedroom was horrible. Pushing her into this hole and leaving her was heartless, truly evil. If he didn’t come back, would someone find her? If not, how would she die? Would it be the cold that got her? Or would it be from starvation or dehydration? She heard the howl of a coyote in the distance. Or would a wild animal fall or jump into the hole and kill her? Eat her alive? That had to be the worst scenario she could think of; the worst way to die, being eaten alive.

She pushed those thoughts from her mind. No! She was not going to die here. It was cold, but she had on a coat. If she kept moving, she should keep herself warm. It wasn’t supposed to be too cold the next few days if she remembered the forecastcorrectly, lows in the upper twenties. So, she shouldn’t freeze to death.

Dehydration was a risk, though. Could she collect her urine and drink it to stay hydrated? Gross. But if it kept her alive until she could be found, she’d have to do it. She glanced around the ground. There wasn’t even anything to collect it in. That was out. There was a little bit of snow on the ground. It would melt in her mouth, but there wasn’t very much of it. Okay, so dehydration was a real risk if she was here too long.

She paced, trying to get her blood pumping to stay warm. “Help! Someone help me!” she yelled as loud as she could about a dozen times. Then she listened hard for any sound. Nothing.

It was getting dark out. It would be pitch black in less than an hour. Reina wrapped her arms around herself, cold, afraid, alone.

Quebec

“Ithink we have something,” Garcia’s voice came through the speaker on Wilson’s phone.

The Digital Team had been working around the clock. The license plate number Reina had read to them turned out to be a rental out of the Des Moines International Airport. It was rented by a man whose ID said his name was Garret Jeffries. The ID was fake, but they got his picture from the ID and the lobby camera. St. Vincent ran it by the FBI Agents who’d worked Stella Adams case. The man was a coconspirator, named Blake Henning. He had been in the wind for the five years Stella Adams had been in the program.

Next, the Digital Team pulled the camera footage available from all cameras in a five-mile circumference of the accident site where Reina’s car had been found. They looked at all the black SUVs. If they couldn’t see the plate, they tracked the car as far as they could until either the plate was seen, the vehicle was lost, or its’ occupants were clearly seen to be ruled out as being Henning, Adams, or Reina Ellis.

It took longer, but even as they reviewed camera footage, Caleb Smith and Cameron Woods also spent time trying to remotely hack into the onboard SatNav System on Henning’s rental car. It took time, but they finally succeeded.

The team had been on the ground for three and a half days.

Garcia had something, alright. The current location of the rental car and every place it had been since it was rented. It was currently in a very remote location at the end of a dead-end gravel road in rural Iowa, miles from any Podunk little town. It was the perfect place to hide if you needed to lie low from law enforcement and the perfect place to keep a hostage. The thought crept into Wilson’s mind that it could also be the perfect place to bury a body in a shallow grave. He pushed that thought from his mind.

The team geared up and drove towards that location, chasing the setting sun, in the two vehicles Angel had arranged for them. Night had fallen before they reached the long gravel driveway off the remote gravel road. When they were less than a mile out, they launched a drone. The drone provided night vision graphics as it flew over the trees devoid of leaves and the clear path of the winding driveway. Finally, a clearing with a small two-story house that was butted up to the trees came into view. And parked right in front of the house was the black SUV. The drone also transmitted thermal imaging, showing only one heat source in the house, one occupant. Lights were on in one room on the first floor and in one room on the second. The sole adult-sized occupant was in the room on the first floor.

The team donned their night vision goggles and made their way through the trees. Once near the house, Lambchop and Mother circled to the north side of the house, where windows were on the room with the lights on. Sloan and Sherman went with them, but continued to the back of the house, where a back door was. Wilson and Jackson approached the front of the house. First, they looked inside the SUV through the front, un-tinted window. They saw no one inside. The doors were locked, and the hood was cold. They slinked up alongside the front door.

Once everyone communicated in the affirmative that they were in position, Lambchop gave the shortest of prayers. “Dear Father, let us find Reina safe, Amen. Hit it in three, two, one,” he counted down. “Go, go, go!”

At the front door, Jackson kicked the door in. As soon as it burst open, Wilson rushed in, his Sig leading the way. At the same time, Mother used a tool to crash through one of the windows in the room their Tango was in. Lambchop breached the room an instant later, his M4 in his grasp. At the back door, Sherman used a pry bar to crack open the back door. Sloan went in first, immediately followed by Sherman.

The man who’d been sitting in front of a laptop jumped up at the sounds of the assault on the house. His gaze darted to the two men coming through the window first, followed by snapping his head to view the two men entering from the front of the house. His pistol in its shoulder holster lay on the table across the room. He knew he couldn’t reach it, and all these men were packing some serious heat. If they were cops, they wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man. He ran towards the kitchen only to see two more men coming towards him from that direction.

Wilson pounced on the man attempting to flee. He tackled him to the ground. It wasn’t Henning. The man struggled. “Where do you think you’re going?” Wilson demanded. He had the man subdued, his knee pressing down hard in the middle of his back. “Six to one odds are not great.”

“One Tango subdued,” Lambchop transmitted to Ops who listened in. He then pointed at Mother, Sloan, and Sherman. “Clear the rest of the house.”

The three men mounted the stairs as Jackson moved in to secure this unknown man’s hands behind his back in zip ties. Theyhelped him up and seated him in one of the living room chairs before securing his feet in zip ties as well.

“Where are they?” Wilson demanded.

“Who?” the man asked.

Through comms, Wilson, Jackson, and Lambchop could hear the voices of the three men upstairs declare, “Clear, clear, clear,” as they checked out each room.

“Wrong answer,” Wilson said in a calm voice accompanied by a death stare that was even scarier than had he yelled.

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