With his hand raised to block the blowing snow, Teplov brought the battered SUV to a halt beside the destroyed speeder. Grabbing his AK, he jumped from the vehicle, ran over to the side of the speeder, and pulled open the side door. Thrusting his weapon inside, he expected Mitchell to be there waiting for him. Instead, all he saw was Jen lying face down on the dash, slowly being covered by the snow blowing in through the destroyed front end of the vehicle.
“Get her and put her in the car,” said Teplov to the last surviving thug with him. Gripping his AK tight in his hands, Teplov moved to the front of the speeder and looked around for Mitchell. The wind had picked up, making it hard for him to see more than a few meters in front of his face. Looking down, he could not find any tracks leading away from the destroyed speeder. If Mitchell had survived the impact, he was long gone, reasoned Teplov. Turning around, he ran back and helped Jen into the back of their SUV. Covering her with a blanket, he jumped into the driver’s seat and then turned the vehicle towards the shoreline. Minutes later, they were on the road heading back towards Palmer, where he intended to steal another vehicle and then make their way to Anchorage where a private jet awaited his return. It had been a costly venture, but Teplov had obtained the woman for his employer. With this one act, his tarnished reputation was restored. Now, an even more challenging mission lay ahead for him in the deserts of West Africa.
A numbing cold filled Mitchell’s body. Lying there, he saw the impact repeatedly in his mind. He tried to move, but found that he was pinned underneath something. Forcing his near-frozen eyelids open, he saw that his feet had come to rest under a bench that had sunk into the snow, pinning him to the ice. Out of the corner of his eye, a dark shape appeared. It seemed to hover over him for a moment, before reaching down for him. With a painful tug, Mitchell felt his legs being pulled free. He tried to speak, but found that his vision was narrowing. A second or two later, he blacked out.
14
Jen was bleeding. Reaching over, Mitchell found himself unable to reach her. Slowly, she began to drift further and further away from him. No matter how hard he tried, he could not reach her. He began to panic. Suddenly, Mitchell sat straight up. Opening his eyes, he saw that he was lying on a bed inside a small log cabin. The small room was lit by a couple of old oil hurricane lamps that reminded Mitchell of his uncle’s old cottage on Lake Michigan. He could feel the welcoming heat coming from an aged lead-belly stove on the far side of the room. The smell of percolating coffee filled the air.
“Good evening there, young fella,” said an unfamiliar voice.
Slowly turning his head, Mitchell saw a man with bright blue eyes and a caring face with a long white beard, wearing a faded red sweater, sitting on a chair beside the bed smiling at him.
“Let me guess, I’m at the North Pole and you’re Santa Claus,” said Mitchell weakly.
The man let out a deep laugh. “No, Mister Mitchell, you’re not in the North Pole, and if you ever heard my wife talk about me, you would know that I’m far from Santa Claus,” said the man as he ran his hand through his thick beard.
Taking a deep breath to clear his aching head, Mitchell looked down and saw that his arms were covered in fresh bandages. His mind went back to the crash. Instantly, his heart began to race.
“There was a woman with me, did you find her as well?” asked Mitchell.
“Sorry, I only found you lying out there in the snow,” replied the man. “There were tire tracks leading away from your demolished speeder. Perhaps she took a ride to the hospital with those people?”
“Yeah, perhaps,” said Mitchell, knowing that Jen had been taken hostage by whoever had attacked them and was probably out of the country by now.
“You’re damned lucky that I was up here doing some ice fishing, or you would have frozen to death out there, Mister Mitchell. I heard a loud crash and decided to see what happened, that’s when I stumbled across you.”
“Thanks,” replied Mitchell earnestly. “How come you know my name?”
“When I stripped you down to warm you up, I checked your wallet and found your ID. I’ve already called your work to let them know that you’re all right. They told me to pass on that a Mister Jackson would be up here in the next day or so to take you back home to New York,” said the man.
“So, sir, what do I call you?” asked Mitchell.
“Oh, you can use my first name. Please call me Chris,” replied the man with a broad smile as he offered Mitchell his hand.
Mitchell shook Chris’ hand and then tried sitting up, only to find his vision blur.
“Whoa there, you need to lie down, son,” said Chris, helping Mitchell to lie back on the bed. “You’ve probably got a concussion, so you need your rest,” he said as he pulled up the sheets.
Mitchell was too tired to resist. A minute later, he was fast asleep, his mind searching for answers: where was Jen and why did they want her? These were questions, for the moment, that had no answers, but before long, they would be answered in blood.
15
Jen paced back and forth inside her locked cabin, as if she were a tigress kept in a cage far too small for her. She was dressed in a loose-fitting teal blue jumpsuit and wore a pair of leather sandals on her feet. When she had awoken from her drug-induced sleep, Jen had yelled and screamed to be set free, but found that her pleas went unanswered. Her cabin was her prison cell. Meals were brought to her by a pair of armed men who were constantly on guard outside of her room. The same questions kept running through Jen’s mind: why would someone go to such great lengths to kidnap her, and why was she onboard a ship?
Just as Jen was about to lose her cool and lash out at the nearest piece of furniture, the door suddenly opened; a stone-faced guard motioned for her to follow him.
Jen’s stomach clenched in a knot; she had wanted to be set free, but now that the door was open, Jen was not so sure that she wanted to leave her room. Nervously nodding her head, she stepped out into the corridor and fell in behind the hulking guard. They walked in silence down a long carpeted corridor until they came to a set of metal stairs leading up to the next deck. Jen could smell the warm salt air as they climbed up until they arrived on the main deck, where they walked out into the open. The bright sunlight was hard on Jen’s eyes. She raised a hand to block the sun as she looked around. Jen was amazed to see that she was being held on a multi-leveled luxury yacht, not some rundown rust bucket as she had half-imagined in her mind. The guard led her to the stern of the yacht where a tall man dressed in khaki pants and a light-blue shirt stood looking over the railing at another ship anchored a few hundred meters away.
None of what was happening made any sense whatsoever to her.
The guard stopped short of the man, then told Jen to take a seat on a white leather seat looking out over the warm, deep-blue Atlantic Ocean.
Sitting there, with her arms crossed, she looked at the other ship anchored nearby. It looked to her like a high-tech catamaran on steroids. On the aft deck, it looked as though men were preparing a dirty orange painted sea container to be moved. Jen began to wonder what was going on, when the loud rhythmic sound of a powerful helicopter’s blades beating through the air filled her ears. Looking up, Jen saw a large camouflaged military helicopter fly right over their ship and maneuver itself into position, hovering just above the catamaran. A man with a pair of paddles guided the noisy helicopter down until it seemed to hang effortlessly in the air just over the sea container. Ever so slowly, the helicopter descended until it was no more than a couple of meters above the container. Right away two men jumped up, grabbed the chains secured to the sea container, and then latched them onto a hook on the bottom of the helicopter, before jumping down from the container. Barely a second later, the helicopter took up the slack, and then, with its engines revving for all they were worth, the helicopter and the container steadily rose up into the cloudless sky. Jen watched with rapt fascination as the helicopter and its cargo seemed to leisurely bank over, then pick up speed as it headed away from the catamaran, flying towards the sandy shore in the distance.