Ever Hayes - Emergency Exit

Wes lamented not having put a camera out on a buoy in the lake. “If only I’d have known,” he said.

“If you would’ve known, you wouldn’t have been here,” I said with a smile.

“None of us would be.” I heard Kate say quietly behind me.

The smile faded quickly from my face. Those five words spoke volumes for all of us. True. Very true.

The fire raged through the night. As ordered, the cabins and the entire nature preserve on this side of the lake were burnt to the ground. Captain Eddie and his troops remained outside the burn lines, monitoring with their tracking equipment. They did flush out a couple of hunters who had been holed up beneath the floor of one of the cabins, and several hibernating animals that had somehow also escaped the chemicals, but Eddie was convinced he had not yet solved the problem. Eddie caught and interrogated the two hunters, but they gave him nothing he didn’t already know. They had never been here before, didn’t know any of the neighbors, and clearly weren’t the ones who had killed his men. They knew nothing of a woman named Suzanne—as the caller ID had read—and hadn’t spoken to the fat American whose phone Eddie had traced here from Grand Forks. None of it was adding up. There had to be more.

Eddie knew the man with the cell phone had been their best bet. His knowledge would have been both abundant and useful, but the bullet through the throat had ruined that. He couldn’t fault his men for their eager trigger fingers. They wanted American blood as much as he did. They also wanted to avenge their families. He understood, but he didn’t like it. It was sloppy. It was juvenile. It was the equivalent of the rite-of-passage pig hunts back in Africa. Young men were always so eager to prove themselves, to get that first kill fast, that they’d kill the baby boar instead of waiting out the much more valuable parent. At age fifteen, Eddie had taken his inaugural hunt. He’d found the baby, but he’d gotten the boar. Eddie’s men had killed the baby here. Eddie wanted the boar.

But his patience was wearing thin. He was already down to seventy-three men, in just two days. He stomped his foot in anger and kicked a chair across the tent. The killers were still out here, and they had to be close. As the sun peeked over the hills of blowing smoke, he gazed at the aftermath. Nothing but ash and ember. If the people he was looking for hadn’t already fled, they had to be dead. Nothing could have survived the blaze. He rounded up his troops and ordered them to search the area one last time. He had finished packing up all the surveillance equipment when one of his men radioed in. “Sir, you need to come see this.”

He drove his jeep to the coordinates he was given and joined his men adjacent a small enclave on the lakeshore. There stood three mud-lathered trucks with Minnesota license plates. Their camouflaging was brilliant, clearly by a military mind, and had they not been the only things to withstand the scorching flames, his men probably would never have discovered them. So where had the occupants gone? Had the fire killed them all somehow? He looked around at the remains of the cabins. There was nowhere else to hide, and if they left their vehicles here, they had to still be somewhere nearby, dead or alive.

A sudden thought prompted a self-directed, verbal tongue-lashing. His men looked at him in confusion, and he shook his head. They had searched the bunker the two hunters had come from, but they hadn’t checked the ruins of the other cabins. It had never occurred to him to search below the other buildings as well. They didn’t have basements in Libya. He’d knocked here and there on the floors, but a proper bunker would have been built far more than a thin layer below the ground. If people were still here, that’s where they would be.

He wouldn’t be able to find the entry now, with all the cabins burnt to the ground, so he’d have to have his men dig up each of the floors. Deciding against waiting for heavy digging equipment, he ordered his men to divide up into groups of fifteen and begin digging up the foundation of each of the five cabins.

Below the demolished lodge, Wes was trying to activate as many cameras as he could. He managed to get some form of feed from five of them, but only one blurry camera allowed us to see the area near us. It was enough. It showed a dozen or so soldiers digging up the foundation of an adjacent cabin. That told us what was probably taking place above us, too. They were digging up the floors. They hadn’t left. If the fire hadn’t convinced them we were dead or gone, they had to have found the trucks. They had to know someone was still here. They just didn’t yet know where.

The men dug for several hours before they hit the ceiling of the bunker. It was close to four in the afternoon when they had cleared enough to know for certain what they’d found. In response, Captain Eddie ordered several of his men to bring in explosives and mining machinery from a nearby construction site. They arrived slightly before six and spent a half hour clearing the rest of the dirt off the surface of the main bunker room. Eddie continued to use his radar and heat equipment to try to find signs of life, but there were none. Surely he would have found something! Unless, of course, they’d been cooked by the fire.

Eddie nodded. That was probably it. He’d find out for sure soon enough. His men continued the demolition prep for nearly two more hours, carefully packing the entire surface with explosives. Eddie ordered in spotlights and prepared to blow it up right then, but Lazzo reasoned with him to wait, “so they could see better in the daylight.” It made sense. It was already close to nine at this point, and there still had been no signs of life. His men had earned some intermittent rest. If it were as he suspected, the people in the bunker would still be dead in the morning.

Nonetheless, on the off chance he was wrong, he set up a half-mile perimeter around the bunker, with his men in active patrol around it. They would keep watch throughout the night, just in case. This would guarantee no one escaped before dawn. After verifying the existence and identities of the bodies, he’d be comfortable continuing their assigned loop through North Dakota. Captain Eddie went back to the tent where he’d set up the enhanced THIRST system—combining two systems increased the range and power by 50 percent. He looked at the screen and saw nothing. That seemed reasonable now. They’d wiped out the entire area. There was only one place the people could still be, and dead bodies wouldn’t show up on the screen. He shut the system off and lay down on his cot. A few hours of sleep would do him good. No one would need him before morning anyway.

The five remaining cameras confirmed our fears. We were surrounded well beyond the boulder exit. As far as I knew there was no way out.

I stared at a family photo on the wall, of Sam, Isaac, and their wives, the six grandkids, Wes and a beautiful young woman on his arm. He had clearly robbed the cradle. His wife looked no older than me, which explained the youth of his sons. I felt bad for Wes and his boys. They had already lost a lot in this and definitely didn’t have to step out and bring us here. If we’d have tried to run or refused to come here he wouldn’t be in this situation now. I felt like I needed to apologize to them.

Wes would have none of it. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Ryan. We’re all in this together. We made a choice,” He motioned to his sons. “And all three of us believe it was the right one.” His boys nodded.