No, hers was lighter.
Could be he had her confused with another fresh-faced Scandinavian girl. He’d seen hundreds in his travels to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Admired their beauty, especially their delicate, perfect skin and smooth features. Like pale pink roses, he thought. Magnificent at the moment of bloom.
“Beauty is unbearable,” Camus wrote, “…offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”
Men wanted to possess things, for the power they thought it gave them. But there were boundaries of right and wrong that had to be maintained.
Beautiful young women disappeared all the time. He’d heard stories. Like the FBI friend of his who had helped rescue an American girl of South Korean descent named Suzie. The sixteen-year-old was snatched right in front of her house in Washington DC by some slick dude in a Jaguar.
After being beaten, gang-raped, and locked in a small room for three weeks, Suzie was forced to be an escort to wealthy businessmen and lobbyists in her hometown. Five hours with her went for $15,000. Often she was sold three times a day to different clients.
After months of serving as a sexual plaything, she was informed that she was being sold to a Japanese businessman in Tokyo for $2.2 million. On the way to the airport, she and her female captor stopped at a diner to get something to eat. Realizing this was her last chance, Suzie wrote, “Help! Call Mom!” and her mother’s cell-phone number on a napkin while her captor wasn’t looking. Then she dropped it on the floor.
A waitress picked up the napkin and called the number. Suzie was rescued-what was left of her.
The general public didn’t understand the scope of the problem. Trafficking in young women didn’t just happen in Third World countries. It took place in Japan, France, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Germany, even the United States.
They were kidnapped while shopping at upscale malls, traveling with their parents, walking down the street to school. The kids who managed to escape had to overcome enormous physical and psychological problems. Those who didn’t get away were used up, then murdered.
It pissed Crocker off.
He thought of his own teenage daughter shopping, walking home from school, going to the movies-unaware of how vulnerable she was to predators.
Sheep and wolves.
Animals who kidnapped, then abused and sold young women, had to be stopped, thrown in jail to rot, or, better yet, made to die a slow and painful death.
Crocker carried his anger out into the brilliant sun, then into a nearby tent, where he found the Germans packing their gear.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“How are you feeling?” one of the German men asked back, as he reached for a kettle to pour the American a cup of green tea.
“Like I was tossed out of a speeding car and fell off a bridge onto a bed of nails, then run over by a steamroller.”
The German laughed. “You’re a lucky man.”
As he sipped the tea and looked around the tent, Crocker willed himself to focus on the present. “Where’s Akil?”
“Where do you think? Up into you-know-who’s business.”
The taller of the two Germans glanced at his watch. “He and Edyta left about two hours ago to set some ropes.”
“They think they’re climbing farther?”
“Ja.”
“What about Davis?”
“He’s outside somewhere, waiting for you.”
He handed back the cup. “Thanks.”
The taller of the two Germans announced, “The conditions are too perilous to climb farther, so we’ve decided to return to the Concordia. We’re leaving in an hour.”
“Oh.”
“You’re welcome to join us.”
“I might take you up on that.”
Mention of returning to the Concordia brought back memories of Holly and Jenny. He wondered how they were getting along without him and what new challenges lay ahead.
The two Americans stood shoulder to shoulder, looking up at the slope. What had once been swatches of ice and snow interrupted by rocky cliffs was now a soft, undulating sheet of white. The wind blew over it with a gentle hiss and slapped the sides of the tents behind them.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Davis asked.
“It’s so pure and pristine, it’s almost unreal,” Crocker answered.
Again he thought of Malie, Jenny, and other young girls and boys.
It’s our job to protect them…
A whistle in front of them announced a larger gust of wind that twisted the new snow into curlicues of spinning powder as it passed. They started to climb slowly. Postholing, following the trail in the powder created by Edyta and Akil.
The mountain turned quiet. Crocker stopped to check that the loops of the gaiters on his snowpants were connected to the laces of his boots. It was important to keep your feet and ankles dry because frostbite was a constant danger.
“This reminds me of a story,” Davis said, the sun glinting off his orange-tinted goggles.
“What’s that?”
“There was an Indian chief out west named Two Eagles who was being interviewed by a U.S. government official.”
“Yeah.”
“And the government official asked him: ‘You’ve been observing the white man for ninety years. You’ve seen his technological advances, the progress he’s made and the damage he’s done. What do you make of it?’
“The chief stared at the official a long time. Then said: ‘When white men find this land, Indians were running it. No taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water, women did all the work, medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing, all night having sex.’
“Then the chief leaned back and smiled. He said: ‘Only white man dumb enough to think he could improve a system like that.’ ”
Crocker laughed. “What made you think of that?”
“The beauty of this, I guess.”
“You feeling guilty for being a white man?”
“No. But sometimes I get the feeling that we’re not supposed to be here.”
“My dad said: Only a fool forgets to live in awe of nature.”
“He was right.”
Crocker started to climb again.
Sometimes he felt that all the reading Davis did made him a little morose. Crocker wasn’t a student of history to the extent that the young SEAL was, but he knew enough to understand that mankind had a tremendous capacity for destruction and a frustrating tendency to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Pausing, he turned to Davis and said, “We should be able to see them from the top of that ridge.”
He pointed his trekking pole to a crest in the snow two hundred yards ahead. It tapered gently to the right, then ended abruptly in a phantasmagoria of deep blue sky painted with wisps of white.
“When’s your wife expecting?”
“In about three weeks.”
“Does she know what it’s going to be?”
“No, but I’m hoping for a boy. Little girls are so delicate. They kind of scare me.”
“It’s exciting, either way,” Crocker said.
Since the air was dramatically thinner, they had to stop to catch their breath every fourth or fifth step.
As they continued climbing, Crocker thought about how his concern for his daughter and his efforts to protect her had sometimes gone too far. Like the night last summer when he sat up past two waiting for her to return home. His little angel had promised to be back by ten, and Crocker was getting sicker with worry with every minute that passed. Unable to stay still anymore, he climbed into his car and started driving all over town looking for her.
After an hour of increasing anxiety and frustration, he spotted an old Ford Mustang weaving down a local road. He saw the driver, a teenage boy, leaning across the seat with Jenny beside him.
Crocker turned off his headlights and tailed the Mustang into his neighborhood. When the old Mustang stopped in front of his own house, Crocker made a hard right and came within inches of crashing into the driver’s side of the car. Then he jumped out and pulled the boy from his car.