Thursday, August 15, 2024—7:10 PM
The brown panel truck’s headlights lit up the empty road ahead, making her realize that her SEC and the truck were the only vehicles on this lightly traveled secondary road, and that her single-beam headlamp could easily be seen in the truck’s rear view mirrors and look suspicious. She slowed down to increase the distance between the two vehicles, hoping to reassure the driver that he was not being followed.
The panel truck crossed a narrow bridge, after which the road slowly curved back east toward the coast and turned more rural with occasional curves that caused her to lose sight of her prey. The cat-and-mouse, slow-motion chase was now in a low-lying forest, with trees and brush on both sides. The road was isolated; no other vehicles appeared ahead or behind. She could not allow the driver to become suspicious that her single headlight beam was following him. She considered getting close enough to read off his vehicle tag to Landon for a vehicle search, although she wasn’t sure he could do that. If he contacted the police for a tag search, it might tip off the wrong party. As she debated that idea, she got close enough to the panel truck to read the tag number and discovered another complication. The tag was from Vietnam, not from Pellagore, meaning the Pellagorian police would be reluctant to make an international request without probable cause.
Then she saw something ahead in the truck’s headlight beam that forced a decision. She increased her speed, quickly passed the truck, and disappeared over the hill. A half mile down the road, she veered around a corner, taking note along the way of any potential turn-offs the truck might take behind her. If it did, she’d have to double back. Far enough ahead and out of sight, she pulled off the road and hid her SEC in the brush.
As the truck came around the corner, it came upon a drunken woman staggering in the middle of the road, her clothes askew, revealing more of her feminine attributes than David would approve. The woman staggered about and turned slowly, keeping her head down but her eyes on the approaching truck. Coming close to her, the truck stopped, its headlights brightly revealing the apparently inebriated woman, her face dirty and her long black hair disarrayed.
Two men descended from the truck’s cab and came for the woman. At first, she couldn’t see their faces for the strong backlight of the truck’s headlamps. But she knew they could see her friendly, unsteady gait and lax appearance. When they got close enough, she caught the lustful gleam in their eyes and smiled in reply. The driver was big, almost more around than tall, perhaps Chinese; the wiry, shorter sidekick was perhaps Vietnamese. They smirked at each other, willing to take a chance, not believing their luck.
The woman drunkenly flirted and teased, beckoning them on, even as she stumbled backward over her own boots. Frightened by her instability, she squiggled and giggled at her own clumsiness.
The men laughed and hurried to her side, ostentatiously to help the poor woman from falling and hurting herself, there in the middle of the road, at night, all alone.
Little did they know ...
The skinny man came on to Sabriya first, offering to steady her as she regained her footing. His left hand took her right, pulled her close, and led her in a stumbling, erratic, roundabout waltz while she slurred a discordant but apparently happy tune from her lips.
The fat man, however, was not having anything to do with his partner’s pathetic romantic ritual. Waddling into the fray, he grabbed the outstretched arm of the skinny man and yanked the runt out of competition. Without losing a beat, he tugged the drunken woman into a tight embrace, lowered his face to hers, and tried to kiss her. Except the vast protrusion of his mid-section obstructed the attempted canoodle. That was fine by Sabriya—the man’s rancid breath and pustule-face were sufficient triggers.
Still in the fat man’s grip, Sabriya morphed, came out of her self-imposed stupor, and sharply lifted her right knee, finding the oversized man’s remarkably undersized sack of gonads, brutally crushing them. Instantly, Tubby released his grip, fell onto the roadbed, bounced like an overinflated beach ball, and, groaning voraciously, rolled into the drainage ditch and the dark out of the truck’s headlights. Meanwhile, skinny ran to the truck.
Sabriya pursued the beach ball. As the man tightly crossed his legs bemoaning his condition, she tied the laces of his boots together, removed his custom-length belt, and with it cinched his elbows together behind his back, threading the belt through the laces of his boots, securing the man alive but immobile. As a final touch, she lifted the tail of his shirt and stuffed it into his mouth, preventing him from screaming or calling for help once he stopped sounding like a pig in labor.
The skinny man was of a different caliber. Evidently, the pinnacle shape of his head made him the gang’s ballistics expert. While Sabriya was busy tending to Fatso in the ditch, Skinny had retreated to the truck and returned with a Russian-inspired submachine gun (a PP-19 Bizon), with a 55-round 9mm magazine protruding from the rear of the barrel as a second handhold.
When Sabriya first saw Skinny, he was on the dance floor spinning aimlessly, pointing the submachine gun in a wide arc, searching for something or someone to shoot. He looked like a desperate, wannabe gangster with a baby submachine gun. Sabriya hid in the shadows behind the fat man’s bulk out of the truck’s headlights, while the musketeer was night-blinded by them.
Annoyed at a loss of targets, the gunslinger fired off a couple of rounds into the air, trying to flush his prey into the open. Instead, Sabriya used the cover of the gun’s barrage to stay low and scamper through the brush to the back of the truck, behind the bright lights. If Skinny turned to face her, he’d be blinded by the headlights. Although the truck’s motor created some background noise, Skinny heard his heavyset partner moaning some meters away into the dark. But just where the stilted gunman could not tell. With his back to the truck, he stared into the night, shielding his eyes, straining and yelling, “Silas, where you at?”
Grunts and thrashes emanated from the ditch.
But before Skinny could discern just where Silas had rolled off to, he heard the revving of the truck’s engine and the spinning of its tires. He turned, stepped aside, raised the submachine gun, and tried in vain to thread his finger into the trigger guard. But it was too late. The truck turned toward him, ran him down, and knocked the gun away. The tires crushed his lower legs, his blood pressure dropped, and he fell unconscious.
Sabriya jumped from the truck’s cab, used the man’s belt to again tie his elbows behind his back, gagged his mouth with his own shirt, and dragged him to the opposite draining ditch from his obese partner.
For Sabriya, her heart and blood ran fast, for while these two men first needed to be incapacitated, her soul was in the back of the truck where she expected to find her daughter ... alive ... and safe.
With the truck turned off and the keys out of the ignition, Sabriya rushed to the back of the van and unlocked the doors. Inside, she found five drugged young teens, four girls and a boy, all 12 to 15 years of age. Sabriya’s heart raced, her eyes searched frantically, then deep breaths and a furrowed brow—Jia was not here. Obviously, this was valuable and fragile cargo, but not the right one. Where’s Jia?
Exiting the truck, she kept a lookout, triggered the encrypted radio link on her tactical earplugs, and called in. “Landon? Have you been tracking me?”
“Sure have. We have your location. David and Jack are here. What’s going on?”
“I found the van, ambushed the drivers. They’re alive but tied up. In the panel truck are five teens, four girls, and one boy. We need to get them someplace safe. They’re drugged, out of it, can’t take any of them.
“We can call the local police ...”
“We’ve been through that,” she interrupted. “Don’t. Have Hannah and Anya come here in the car, get these poor kids.”
“Sabriya, this is Jack. It may be too late for that. We’ve been monitoring the police bands. For some reason, they’re onto you and know your approximate location. You need to get out of there.”
“Not without these kids, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Hide them nearby,” said David. To Landon, he said, “Can we track where she hides them?”
“Sabriya, this is Jack. Take the kids as far as you can into the bush, a clearing, but away from the truck. Are they unconscious or nearly so?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Find a place and when they’re all together, walk in a big circle around them. We can track that and find them. We have maps of the area. It looks like there is another secondary road about two-tenths of a klick west of you. Can you take them in that direction?”
“I can try.”
“Time is the essence. Hurry.”
But Sabriya had another idea. In the truck’s cab she
found a cipher radio, a cell phone, and a road map folded as if it were being used to guide the truck en route. She checked the cell phone’s recent calls, memorizing the last number, and called it.
A gruff man answered, “Silas. What?”
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