Page 70 of Operation Rescue
Rafe had seen something or… Erin had.
When he got close to the rally point they’d left, he found Rafe watching for him. The moment he spotted him the sniper swept his arm in the direction Erin had gone, and started that way. Blaine moved as fast as he could without risking too much noise, and followed.
He spotted Cutter first, and the always alert dog looked as if he were vibrating, he was so intent. When he neared the top of the rise Erin had chosen, Rafe already had the binoculars to his eyes. He wasn’t scanning, but was holding them fixed on one spot. Blaine looked in that direction, toward a small cluster of live oaks…with a tent pitched beneath them.
Erin was at his side in the moment Rafe lowered the binoculars, and she threw her arms around him. “He’s there,” she whispered excitedly. “I saw him, Blaine, he’s there and he’s okay.”
He hugged her back, but his gaze was fixed on Rafe, who had finally lowered the binoculars. He just looked over at him and nodded to confirm Erin’s words. Then he gestured them back down the way they had come. Blaine guessed to keep the slight hill between them and the makeshift campsite. Once they were below the crest he stopped.
“The one with the blue baseball cap on backward. He’s armed,” Rafe whispered. “Semiauto pistol. Chrome. No holster, just stuffed in his belt.”
Blaine’s jaw tightened, but he only nodded. Then Rafe handed him the field glasses and told him to sneak back and watch for a minute, to assess Ethan’s state of mind as best he could. Erin started to speak, but stopped when Rafe held up a hand.
“We need another assessment from someone who knows him,” Rafe whispered, and she went silent again and nodded.
Blaine wasn’t sure he qualified anymore, but he went. Slowly, carefully, a difficult task given his every instinct was screaming at him to charge this place, grab Ethan and get him out of there. When he was in the same spot Rafe had been, he lifted the binoculars.
Every muscle he had tightened the moment he spotted the boy sitting on a rock just outside the tent. His head was in his hands and all Blaine could really see was that his hair was the right color, the same sandy blond as his mother’s. He wore a stained hoodie sweatshirt, and jeans that had a hole in one knee and were a bit ragged around the bottom edges. He felt a ripple of an emotion he couldn’t name when he saw the boots the boy had on.
The lace-up, military-style boots he’d bought the boy for his fourteenth birthday just a few months ago. They were the only thing he wanted, Ethan had told him. Boots like his.
He tried to swallow past the sudden, constricting tightness of his throat. It really was Ethan. It had to be. And then the boy looked up, to his left, and Blaine saw his face, which confirmed it.
But seeing his son’s face confirmed something else. And this was what Rafe had wanted, he knew. There was no mistaking the slumped posture, the hunched shoulders. But even if he hadn’t been certain, the way the boy took a sudden swipe at his eyes told him what he’d sensed in his gut was true.
Ethan was miserable.
Another person, a bigger kid Blaine immediately recognized as the boy with the temper from the robbery video, came around the back of the tent, followed by the other, younger boy who had helped stage the distracting fight. Ethan watched both of them warily, and the bigger kid said something to him that made him lower his gaze, to his knees apparently, judging by the way he started picking at the hole in his jeans.
And Blaine did not like the way the apparent leader was looking at his son. He wondered if the guy was perceptive enough to have noticed Ethan’s unhappiness, his restlessness. If maybe he guessed the boy wanted to bail.
There were a couple of other kids back farther under the trees, apparently collecting firewood, who looked about Ethan’s age or even younger. And they were close enough to mess things up unless they played this right.
Ethan said something, and the leader cuffed him on the side of the head. Every muscle in Blaine’s body tensed, and it was all he could do not to go racing down the slope and put the guy on his ass. But he could see the butt of the handgun the older boy had stuck into his belt, and stopped himself.
The bigger guy—funny how he didn’t seem much like a kid now, after that—shoved Ethan into the tent and said something to him. Through the binoculars Blaine could almost read his lips, and thought he’d said “—and stay there!”
He’d seen enough. He made his way silently down the rise to where Erin, Rafe and the amazing Cutter were waiting. Rafe lifted a brow at him silently.
Keeping his voice as low as he could he said, “Five of them, total. The older one with the gun, two more about Ethan’s age, and one younger.” He looked at Erin. “He’s scared, just like the clerk said. And he’s miserable.”
“Yes,” Erin said instantly, confirming she, who would know better than he, had seen the same thing.
Rafe nodded. “Then he won’t fight you. That’s what we needed to know.”
“And,” Blaine added by way of warning, “I don’t like the way the leader’s treating him.”
“He’s watching him really carefully,” Erin agreed.
“Like he doesn’t trust him?” Rafe asked.
Blaine nodded. “And he just slapped him, and ordered him into the tent.”
Erin tensed even more, but didn’t speak.
“Time to move, then.” Rafe began to slide off his backpack.
They had discussed on the way here what would happen at this point, and while Erin hadn’t been happy, she’d understood. Both of them, he knew, would risk anything to get their boy out of this. It had been a tough call, but she had agreed she was out of it, because while she would appear less threatening to the kid with the handgun, even she admitted—painfully—that if Ethan saw her he was likely to be uncooperative. And Rafe was many things, but easy to overlook or take casually wasn’t one of them.
