Finding Zach

Copyright

Published by

Dreamspinner Press

4760 Preston Road

Suite 244-149

Frisco, TX 75034

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Finding Zach

Copyright © 2010 by Rowan Speedwell

Cover Art by Catt Ford

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 4760 Preston Road, Suite 244-149, Frisco, TX 75034

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

ISBN: 978-1-61581-446-6

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

May, 2010

eBook edition available

eBook ISBN: 978-1-61581-447-3

Dedication

For my mother,

who always believes in me—

even if I won't let her read what I write.

Chapter 1

“
T
HE
hostages are secure, Captain. All present and accounted for. Perimeter has been secured.”

Captain John Rogers pushed his helmet back a little on his forehead and regarded his subordinate. “Casualties?”

“Jamison took a bullet in the calf; medic’s with him now. Otherwise, no casualties on our side. Three dead, twelve injured on the enemies’ side so far, not including the poor bastard hanging on the whipping post. Shit.”

“What about among the hostages? Any injuries?”

“One of the men has what looks like a couple of broken ribs. Otherwise, bruises, a sprained ankle. Damn lucky.”

“‘Lucky’ has been what this whole operation’s been about, Lieutenant Pritzker.” Rogers sighed.

“You’re not kidding, Captain. It was a plain miracle that one of the Dutchmen had that experimental personal GPS transponder implanted. Best advertisement for his product you could ask for.” The lieutenant pressed his fingers to his headset. “Barracks secured. Last building is apparently the commandant’s headquarters. Had some fire from there earlier, but it’s stopped; either the shooter’s hit or fled.”

“Or holding out for a more effective resistance,” the Captain said cynically. “Everything’s gone entirely too textbook for my liking. I’d like a team to circle around back; approach the building with maximum caution. I don’t trust this luck.” He glanced at the handful of enemy combatants kneeling a few yards away, their hands clasped on their heads. “Ask one of them where the camp commander is.”

Pritzger went to stand in front of the one man that had been unarmed when they’d nailed him. “You. What’s your name?” he asked in Spanish.

“Ernesto Camillo,” he said dully.

“Where is your captain?”

The man jerked his chin at the far structure. “There, last I see of him.”

“Is there anyone else in that building?”

The man laughed, a brief, humorless snort. “Just his little dog.”

“What did he say?” Rogers asked. “I didn’t get that.”

“Perrito,” Pritzger said. “It means ‘little dog’.”

“He’s got a dog in there?”

“If he does, I doubt if it’s little,” Pritzger said dryly. “The camp commander’s probably the type that likes Dobermans or Rottweilers. These paramilitary types usually do.” He indicated the whipping victim, who was even now being eased down onto the ground by a pair of his fellow soldiers, their activities supervised by some of the combined American-Dutch forces who’d spearheaded this operation. “Fucking macho bastard. Let the teams know there’s the possibility of a guard dog….”

The little man laughed and said something. Rogers said, “What? I don’t understand this dialect.”

Pritzger said, “He said it’s not a guard dog.”

“Still,” Rogers said.

They waited until the teams had secured the building, and then went in. It was a simple two-room structure. The main room where they stood was an office; through the open door to the other room, Rogers could see a neatly made bed and another door already standing open from the other team’s entrance a few moments before. The office contained a desk, a laptop computer, file cabinets, a chair, and a wire dog crate—the big kind, made for large dogs like the Rottweilers and Dobermans Pritzger had mentioned. It was empty. Near the window lay a body that Rogers assumed was the commandant; he had fake gold bullion on the shoulders of his uniform, also typical with these paramilitary types. He’d been garroted with a thin strip of leather. It looked like a dog leash. “No one else in the building, Captain,” one of the guys who had been first in said. “Whoever did this must have cut out the back before we got here.”

“Take the laptop and what you can get out of the file cabinets,” Rogers instructed. “They’ll have all kinds of data on funding, activities, links to other groups, contacts…. The boys at Bragg will be short-stroking themselves over this stuff. They love them some paperwork.”

Pritzger nodded and detailed a couple of guys to start on the file cabinets near the desk. He himself moved around the dog crate to the file cabinets behind the cage.

And froze.

Rogers saw it and went on alert. “Lieutenant?”

“Shh,” Pritzger said. “Everybody just… shh….” He moved slowly, going into a crouch.

Rogers shifted the crate and saw what Pritzger was looking at. He held up a hand to indicate that the others in the room should maintain their positions.

Wedged in between the far side of the file cabinets and the wall, beneath a shelf, in a space that should have been too small for it, was a bony, naked human figure with a thick mop of tangled black hair. It was curled up with its face hidden, its back arched, the spine and ribs sharply delineated and slashed with scarring. It was worse than thin; it looked like a skeleton with skin. Rogers wondered how long the body had been there—not long, he supposed, since there wasn’t any smell of decay….

Then he saw the ribs expand in a tentative breath, and he realized the thing was alive.

“Shit,” he murmured.

Pritzger said in Spanish, “Who are you? It’s okay—we’re not going to hurt you.”

The thing made a sound. It sounded like a dog’s whine. A dog….

Rogers looked back at the cage. “Fuck,” he breathed. “Fuck, Lieutenant. The dog. The commandant’s
dog
….”

The tangled mass of hair lifted. A gaunt, pale face looked up and whined again. Then it gave a soft bark and tried to cram itself deeper into the corner. “Jesus,” Pritzger murmured, then, again, still in Spanish, “We’re not going to hurt you. Who are you? What’s your name?” He put out a hand; the creature flinched but made no move to bite or resist, even when Pritzger put his hand on its shoulder. “Come on, come out. We aren’t going to hurt you.”

“Is that a
human
?” one of the men behind the desk asked in disbelief. The creature’s eyes flicked in his direction. In the shadows, Rogers couldn’t tell what color they were, but by the reaction, he saw that he understood.

“He speaks English,” Rogers said flatly. The thing looked at him, a strangely steady, empty look. It was the look of someone who’d long ago forgotten how to care. “He understands English and I’ll bet my left nut he’s the one that killed the commandant.”

“I doubt if he could strangle an overripe banana,” Pritzger objected.

“Never underestimate the power of hate-fueled adrenaline, Lieutenant.”

The thing sighed and put its head back down on the floor. Rogers touched his headset. “Randy?” he said to the medic. “I need you in here. Jamison okay?”

“Yeah,” Randy said in his ear. “What’s happened in there?”

Rogers looked down at the figure on the floor. “You are not going to believe this….”

T
HEY
found a pair of sweatpants with a drawstring waist; the legs were too short, but the man couldn’t stand up straight for more than a couple minutes anyway. He squatted in the dirt of the compound, his arms wrapped around his knees, staring into space. The T-shirt the medic had put on him hung in draped folds around his emaciated arms. Rogers had seen pictures of people like him coming out of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen after the liberation of the concentration camps in the forties. Pritzger knelt beside the kid, cutting off the studded collar with a pair of shears someone’d dug up. The buckle had been soldered shut. “I’d put his age at twentyish,” Randy Josten said, making notes on his clipboard. “American or European—good nutrition in childhood, luckily for him—healthy bones, teeth loose from malnutrition but all still there, and signs of past dental care. Camillo says he’s been here about five years, give or take. Once we’re back at Bragg we can go through missing persons reports from about then and see if we can figure out who he is.”

“Still not talking?”

“Barks. Whines.” Randy frowned. “Kid’s physically and mentally traumatized, Captain. He’s a fucking basket case. He’s been beaten; a couple of his ribs have been broken and healed badly; from what I can tell, he can’t take a deep breath without it hurting. Had a couple of fingers broken, his wrist, and God knows what else. And,” he said, taking a breath, “he’s been raped. I don’t know how often, but given that the last time was about an hour ago, I’d say pretty damn regularly. He’s got scars all over his legs and ass from the damn wire of that fucking cage, and you can see yourself he can’t even stand up.”

“So figure he’s been in that cage pretty much continuously for the last five years. Fuck.” Rogers shook his head. “Let’s get him back to Bragg and into the hands of the docs there; let the Dutch contingent handle cleanup of the remaining personnel. They know what’s going on and have better contacts than we do locally. Load the kid with the hostages and the computer and stuff we took from the office on the first chopper out of here.”

“Yes sir,” Randy said. Then, “What?” at Rogers’s suddenly arrested expression.

“Something,” Rogers said. “Something about computers. Did you say five years?”

“Yeah, that’s what Camillo said.”

Rogers stalked across the compound to the kid. Crouching in front of him, he tilted up the kid’s face to study it, narrow-eyed. Out of the dimness of the building where he’d been held, the eyes that looked back at him were a cold, crystal blue, their expression hard and wary. “Zach?” he asked.