Tracks (5 page)

Shortly after the ruling, when
the father, escorted by county sheriffs, came by to claim his son, the two,
mother and son, had disappeared.  The cult people pleaded ignorance,
claiming she escaped on her own.  Statewide and federal searches came up
empty and after six futile months, the matter was turned to Black Jack’s task
force, LMC
.

The case had made national
headlines for some time and several eyebrows were raised when Black Jack put
Sam in charge of the investigation.  Sam’s one and only direction was a
24-hour surveillance clamp on the cult’s retreat including the trailing of anyone
leaving the compound
.

The operation was demanding
and expensive with agents spending weeks clamped on their stomachs on hard
ground keeping watch on the compound from different vantage points, trailing
cult people to the nearest grocery store or flea market.  And there were
those who began to question Sam’s relentless tactics.  At one point, even
Black Jack had summoned him to question his tactics. But Sam was convinced the
cult people knew where the mother was and would eventually lead them to her
.

After six demanding weeks, his
hunches proved true.  An agent photographed the mother inside the
compound.  Enlarged and enhanced, there were those who claimed it not
conclusive.  Sam, eager to find the boy and afraid they would lose their
opportunity, thought they should raid right away but it was not until she was
photographed a second time that it was deemed conclusive
.

The agents raided at dawn,
finding the hiding place but not the mother who was apprehended with her son
riding a small motorbike on a hidden dirt road some five miles away from the
compound.  It was Sam who guessed the escape route and had assigned two
agents to watch the road
.

As it turned out, the compound
had a cellar tucked away under one of the bunks with concealed entries from
both inside the bunk and a tunnel that led to a dry creek hidden a few hundred
yards out in the woods.  Mother and child were hidden there for nearly
eight months before Sam’s agents spotted her. The little scooter bike was kept
at the entrance to the tunnel
.

Mother and cult leader were
sent to prison for kidnapping.  Few of the members remained at the
compound but the cult was dismantled, most members returning to their former
lives.  Sam had kept in touch with the father and son, monitoring their progress. 
There were no winners in such sagas for the child needed his mother and missed
her terribly.  Their first year was arranged around exhausting visits to
the penitentiary. Then, slowly, it became more bearable until the child
adjusted.  Two years later, the father remarried, found a new job and the
family relocated to Seattle.  Sam considered the outcome partial
success.  He still felt sorry for the mother
.

The LMC Task Force survived
six turbulent years of Capitol Hill funding wars. In the end, law enforcement appropriations
committees who could not agree on a source for the money cut off funding. 
Sam was a member of LMC five of those six years, the last three as section
leader for the western United States. Part of a section head’s job was to lobby
for money, stand in front of Capitol Hill staffers and plead their case for
LMC.  Though in the end they were not successful in keeping LMC afloat,
Sam had managed to draw attention to his cause and gather quite a few
supporters who would eventually help him finance his own Center for Missing
Children
.

He learned that it was simpler
to approach and sway philanthropic organizations and private people who agendas
were obscured from the public eye than official bodies who had the
responsibility of fighting for every available public dollar.  No cause,
be it saving missing children or procuring standoff missiles, was deemed more
or less important than any other. What seemed crucially important to one seemed
less so to another.  The deciding factor on a particular budget request
was, in the end, simple politics, or, the strength of lobbyists to sway the
committees to adopt their cause.  The LMC failed to secure budgets because
none of the influential committee members adopted their cause.  There were
a million causes fighting for money and LMC got lost in the shuffle
.

CHAPTER
TWO

It took Sam a year to
establish his own crew to continue the fight for missing children, most of them
from the former LMC.  He pleaded his case and won support from private organizations,
trust funds, and wealthy individuals he and his people had managed to
persuade.  The Center was officially opened on March 19, 1992, Sammy’s
eighth birthday.  The ceremony was televised on local New York stations
featuring a host of celebrities, from state and federal politicians to law
enforcement figures to movie stars, all out to get their photo plastered for a
worthwhile cause.  Among them, shying away from the spotlight were the
real money people who backed the Center.  People like George Metzger and
Annie Green whose own personal tragedies convinced them to dedicate funds from
which the Center could draw monthly to pay its bills.  George Metzger was
a self-made billionaire in the shipping business whose grandson was kidnapped
but eventually returned for a five million dollar ransom.  The kidnappers
were never caught.  He took to Sam instantly when Sam was introduced to
him at a Washington function.  The experience had greatly affected Metzger
who now vowed to fight such adversity henceforth.  Metzger involved Annie
Green who had lost a granddaughter to a lunatic who assaulted a Vermont school,
holding hostage a second grade class for two days killing
himself
and four children in the process.  Metzger and Annie Green, whose family
owned a chain of do-it-yourself stores across the Eastern United States, put up
nearly a million dollars a year to help finance the Center’s activity. 
They were the two main contributors, with others possessing considerably less
financial resources but by no means less enthusiasm.  The rest contributed
a fair share which amounted to another million dollars a year, keeping Sam’s
six-person operation afloat with salaries, rent, capital equipment, travel, and
numerous other expenses such as surveillance services, contracted information
and even bribes, to name just a few
.

The four other members of the
Center, besides Black Jack and Sam, were all investigators, all top of their
profession, all working for a cause which had personally affected each of them.
There was no peripheral help at the Center.  They had no budget for
secretaries or any other help.  Everyone pitched in, typing their own
letters, sending their own faxes, making their own airline and hotel
reservations, and taking turns running the office errands.  Sam was the
appointed accountant and phones were answered by whoever was available. 
Priorities were determined at a weekly staff meeting and cases were assigned to
whomever
seemed most suitable or in most cases least
busy
.

Natasha Usher was a tall, five
foot ten inch, striking blonde, who at the age of eight had fled Russia with
her mother, requesting asylum at the Finnish border, having escaped a distance
of fifteen hundred miles chased by her raving alcoholic father who was also a
member of the KGB. Years of abuse and molestation had finally convinced
Natasha’s mother the only solution was to defect to the West; the consequences
could not have been worse than what she and her daughter had been
suffering.  They escaped Moscow to St. Petersburg on a train one night,
changing trains and buses until they reached Sortavala and walked the final
fifteen kilometers to the Finnish border, narrowly escaping a KGB team sent to
fetch them. Upon realizing his girls had jumped ship, the father had dispatched
several KGB units in pursuit.  The terrified mother and daughter just
managed to make the border and plead with the Finns who became sympathetic to
the striking Russian woman, whose face had been badly bruised by the father
just two days prior. Natasha could still recall her mother treading through the
snow those last dreadful miles around Russian checkpoints, carrying her in her
arms, sobbing but determined not to falter
.

They eventually migrated to
the States, taking residence in the Bronx with distant relatives. 
Several years later, when Natasha was twelve and well immersed in
American society, her father had attempted to kidnap her back to Russia.
 
Two masked men had grabbed her on the street, attempting to stuff her into a
waiting car.  She would have been forced back to her lunatic father but
for a random NYPD patrol
who
happened on the scene
just in time to witness the girl being hustled into the waiting car seconds
after stepping off her school bus.  The policeman driving the squad car
rammed into the front of the car disabling it instantly.  The two masked
men dropped the girl in the car and disappeared into an alley.  The driver
had been hurt by the impact and was easily apprehended by the officers. 
He confessed to the kidnap attempt, shedding light on what would have been
Natasha’s fate.  The plan was simple.  Drive her to JFK and hoist her
on to an Aeroflot cargo jet carrying diplomatic mail to Moscow. It was learned
that the Russian flight engineer was involved for a considerable sum of
money.  Under the cover story that he was doing a favor for a distant
cousin, bringing her home to mother Russia for a visit, she was to be drugged
for the journey.  The father was to be waiting at the Moscow cargo
terminal
.

Natasha and her mother
relocated to Queens but further attempts to take her were never made.  She
would forever consider herself in debt of the NYPD.  After high school she
took Criminology at John Jay University in New York and joined the force as an
intelligence specialist; being fluent in Russian was useful with Eastern Bloc
crime on the rise.  She assisted Black Jack and Sam with several cases
involving Russian children then joined LMC as a full member.  After LMC
was dismantled, Natasha went back to her old intelligence job for a year then
quit to join Sam at the Center
.

Jose Luis Ortega, nicknamed El
Chino, or The Chinese, was a short, stocky Spaniard who joined Sam’s operation
following the Ricardo affair.  In three years of operation, the Center, as
the organization was commonly referred to, had its share of setbacks, with just
a few bright spots keeping everyone hopeful. Their biggest and most notorious
success to date, which happened early, was tracking down and releasing a
kidnapped boy smuggled from New York on a passenger plane to Madrid, Spain. 
He was to be driven to Gibraltar and sent to Morocco on a ferry boat in the
trunk of a car,
then
he was to be driven to Marrakech
and from there through the Sahara to Algiers.  The father, an Algerian
national, had divorced a Bronx woman to whom he had been married for four years
and had borne him two boys. The mother, a postal worker with contacts in the
NYPD, contacted Black Jack a few days before the kidnapping, forewarning of her
ex-husband’s intentions.  Black Jack ordered the two boys, Tomas and Ricardo,
tailed, but while the attempt on nine-year-old Tomas was thwarted at a small
playground near the family’s apartment building, eleven-year-old Ricardo was
not so lucky.  The tail team lost him for a few crucial moments at a video
arcade when he stepped into the toilet and did not reappear
.

The abductors had managed to
ship the boy on a flight to Barajas Airport near Madrid where he was loaded in
the trunk of a car on its way to Gibraltar
.

Jose Luis Ortega, nicknamed El
Chino by his Spanish police mates because of his height, a mere five foot five
inches tall, and his slightly slanted eyes which gave his face an oriental
look, was the police sergeant on duty at Barajas Airport when the call from
Madrid headquarters was received.  Assuming the kid was, as the mother had
warned, on his way to Spain, Black Jack had quickly informed the US Embassy in
Madrid who contacted the Spanish authorities who alerted El Chino at Barajas
Airport.  Ortega quickly ordered full searches of every cargo plane
arriving from the US that day but the search produced nothing.  Baffled by
the situation, his pride slightly wounded, El Chino vowed to find the boy and
that he did with a major break and a little
help
from
a friend
.

After a demanding eighteen
hours of searching airplanes, he stepped into a small bar where airport
personnel and crew members often gathered.  The talk of the day was, of
course, El Chino’s search and when he stepped in for a café con
leche
- coffee with milk - an Iberia flight attendant, just
in from New York, approached him with a concern about a boy she noticed on her
flight that fit the description of the boy he was looking for.  Most of
the passengers of that Iberia flight had already left the terminal by the time
El Chino and his band of policemen and women stormed the Arrivals
Terminal.  A woman friend at the Avis car lot thought she saw a boy being
hauled into one of the cars she had rented that morning, though she could not
recall which car it was.  Now they had several car descriptions and
license plate numbers, which were quickly distributed over the net
.

Black Jack arrived late that
morning with British Airways, on a flight through London Heathrow.  He was
introduced to Ortega and immediately felt a connection with the energetic
Spaniard who quickly briefed him on the status.  El Chino’s makeshift
operations center was the tiny radio room at Airport Police offices where he
and Black Jack sat waiting for word on the Avis cars being pursued
.

Of the six Avis cars rented
that morning, the one, a Renault minivan, traveling south on interstate N-IV,
was spotted approximately three hours following Black Jack’s arrival.  Two
of the five other cars were stopped and searched at various locations around
Madrid, producing no kidnapped American boy.  El Chino ordered additional
police backup in pursuit of the minivan while he and Black Jack boarded a
police helicopter
.

When they arrived on the
scene, they found the boy, Ricardo, safe and sound sitting in the back of a
squad car, looking tired and confused, but noticeably relieved.  The two
abductors, a woman, who had traveled with the boy from New York on the Iberia
flight, and a man of Arab descent, were cuffed in the back of another squad
car, looking quite bruised from the collision with two Spanish police cars and
the ensuing foot chase
.

Ricardo was safely returned to
his mother in a well-televised event at JFK, which brought the Center great
publicity and additional funding.  El Chino and Black Jack became best
friends.  After a year of back and forth discussions and contemplation, El
Chino took a year off from his job and moved to New York to join his
friend.  The Ricardo affair had a profound effect on his life and, being a
religious man, he decided to dedicate himself to finding missing children, at
least until the Barajas airport police chief asked him to return to his airport
duties.  Two years later, he was still in New York working with Black Jack
.

 
Mai-Li was a high school history teacher,
specializing in Chinese history.  She was a slender-framed, somewhat
vulnerable looking, twenty-six year old Chinese-American, with short black hair
and delicate oriental features who spoke so softly one had to pay close
attention to what she was saying.  Her parents had migrated from China as
children in the late fifties, both settling in Manhattan’s China Town where
they met and married in 1969.  Mai-Li was the first of two children. Her
younger brother Sing-Yan, two years her junior, had been caught, at the age of
twelve, in a crossfire during a shootout between rival gangs in the Bowery,
taking a bullet to the spine, paralyzing him from the waist down.  So
devastated were her parents from their misfortune they had stopped functioning
properly, her father taking to drinking and her mother subject to fits of anger
and depression.  Their life had changed dramatically, the burden of a
crippled child weighing heavy on their conduct.  Mai-Li found
herself
almost alone in the daily battle of caring not only
for her crippled brother but also for her dysfunctional parents who kept
working but could not deal with their son’s condition.  So, aside from her
own school responsibilities, she had to care for the small  
apartment they all shared, cramped with everything they owned and too small for
Sing-Yan to maneuver his wheelchair.  To avoid dealing with their problem
her mother and father remained at their workplace for as long as it was
possible, returning home sometimes as late as midnight. Mai-Li was left with
preparing lunch and dinner for herself and her brother, looking after his
needs, assisting him with challenging toileting, showering him, making sure he
performed his physiotherapy, and tutoring him.  Her parents did provide a
sitter for the time Mai-Li was at school, but the brunt of the responsibility
fell on her young shoulders
.

Despite his misfortune,
Sing-Yan did not drown in misery.  After a year of adjusting to his new
condition both physically and mentally, he began doing the things a person in
his condition would do. He began to draw, play chess, build model airplanes,
and take guitar lessons.  Their favorite time together was when Mai-Li
would wheel him across the busy streets to the hospital for physiotherapy, to
his guitar instructor for lessons and later to the music studio where he
rehearsed with his band.  The two of them would spend hours traversing the
streets of lower Manhattan stopping now and then for a bite to eat and a drink,
absorbing themselves in the busy city, taking in the sights and sounds, smelling
the air, immersing in with the crowds, feeling the potential of endless
possibilities, away from their cramped apartment, away from their despondent
parents
.