Nadia Nichols - A Soldier's Pledge

“That’s what we figured. Still, we didn’t know. Maybe she got lost, couldn’t figure out where we went, or maybe she was hurt and just lying out there. We waited for two days, looked around as best we could, then left her there. That’s the bottom line. When I told my brother about it in the hospital, he told me to leave. Wouldn’t talk to me, he was so upset. It was awful, the worst moment of my life. The next morning when I went back to see him again, he was gone. They told me he got up in the night, got dressed and walked out.”

“So now he’s up here, searching for a dog that’s probably been dead since last summer,” Cameron said. What a cheerful story, she thought to herself.

“There’s more,” Lori continued amid another round of sniffling, nose blowing and mousey squeaks. “Like I said, my brother got all shot up in Afghanistan. That’s why he was at Walter Reed. He was wounded four times and lost the lower part of his left leg. He spent the last two months in the hospital. At first they weren’t even sure he was going to make it. He was only recently fitted with a prosthesis and had just started physical therapy and rehab.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m not sure how I can help.”

“Don’t you see? He’ll die out there if you don’t go get him!”

“Me? How’m I supposed to rescue someone who doesn’t want to be rescued?”

“He’s depressed. There’s no telling what he’ll do. He probably brought a gun with him, too.” Cameron thought about the rifle in the case. “He could be planning to kill himself. Lots of veterans do. Twenty-two veterans commit suicide every single day, twenty-two, and I don’t want my brother to be one of them. I don’t want him to become a statistic because of something I did. This is all my fault. We shouldn’t have brought Ky on the canoe trip. We should have put her in a boarding kennel.”

“Ky’s the name of the dog?”

“Yes.” Loud sniff. “That’s what he named her because she looks so much like a coyote, but she looks more like a small wolf to me. They have wolves in the mountains of Afghanistan, where he was deployed. He really loved that dog. I mean, she was just a pup when she followed him out of the mountains. She bonded to him, and he got really attached to her.”

Cameron gnawed on what was left of her fingernail. All her fingernails were short and chewed. The past year had been a hard one on her nails. Walt moved into her line of sight, eyebrows raised in question. She shook her head and blew out a sigh. “Look, Lori, I’d like to help, but I don’t know what I can do. He has an emergency GPS with him. He can signal if he gets into trouble. Tell you what. If you come out here, I’ll fly you back to the lake and you could try to catch up with him. He’s probably not traveling very fast.”

“Believe me, I was going to fly up there yesterday but my husband Clive—we got married last August, right after our canoe trip last summer—said he wouldn’t let me go even if I hired a guide because I’m eight months pregnant. I told my brother where the bear came into our camp. It was just above a trapper’s cabin on the north shore of the Wolf. It’s the only cabin on that entire river.”

“Let me guess. You want me to look for your brother there.”

“He can’t make that kind of walk on a prosthetic leg. No way. He’ll die out there. If you could just find him and tell him how sorry I am about his dog and how much he’s needed back home, if you can just bring him back out, I’ll pay you good money.”

“Why don’t we give him the eight days he asked for? If he doesn’t show up, we can go look for him.”

“Because we’re afraid he might be suicidal,” Lori said. “Eight days is way too long to wait, and besides, there’s something else. My mother’s really sick. She didn’t want him to know how sick she was. She didn’t want me to tell him about the cancer. She didn’t want him to worry about her while he was in Afghanistan, and then when he got hurt and was shipped stateside, she made me promise not to tell him, but he really needs to know. He has to come home. You have to find him.”

Cameron gnawed on another fingernail. “What if he won’t come?”

“He will, if you tell him how bad things are with our mother,” Lori said. “Will you do it? I’m begging you.”

“Why didn’t you tell him that his mother was so sick when you saw him at the hospital?”

“I was going to, but he got so mad at me when I told him about his dog. He wouldn’t even look at me. I couldn’t add that awful news to what I’d just told him. I was going to give him time to calm down and tell him when I came to see him the next day, but he’d already gone.”

“I don’t know how much time I can spare,” Cameron hedged. “I have my job to consider.”

“Then consider this,” Lori said, her voice suddenly all steel with no trace of a mousey squeak or sniffle. “My husband Clive and I have some money in our savings account, money we were going to put toward our baby’s college fund, but we’d spend all of it to get Jack back safe and sound. I’ll pay you five thousand for getting him off that river and back to a town where we can pick him up, and a generous bonus if you can find him fast enough so we can get him back to Montana just in case my mother takes a turn for the worse. She’s holding her own right now, but that could change. What do you say? Do we have a deal?”

Cameron glanced out the window at her rusting eighteen-year-old SUV with its bald tires, badly cracked windshield and crumpled front bumper, thought about the leaks in her rusting house trailer rental, the carpet and furniture that reeked of old cigarette smoke and the moldy ceiling tiles that dropped onto the floor when it rained, and wondered how far into the future five grand would carry her. She thought about Johnny Allen’s sexy red Jeep that he’d just listed for sale. She didn’t have to think on it for long. “Okay, I’ll do it.”

After she hung up the phone, she met Walt’s questioning expression with a thoughtful frown. “Looks like our Lone Ranger really is a ranger, an army ranger, and I just went from being a bush pilot to a bounty hunter.”

CHAPTER THREE

THE FOLLOWING MORNING she and Walt were flying the old red-and-white Beaver through a moderate rainfall back to Kawaydin Lake. Strapped to one of the Beaver’s struts was an eighteen-foot beat-up canoe they’d borrowed from one of the villagers. Behind her in the cargo compartment were provisions enough to feed an army for a week. She’d hashed out a reasonable plan for getting the Lone Ranger out to the Mackenzie River where the plane could pick him up. Walt would drop her off at the lake. Cameron would take the canoe down the Wolf River, stopping periodically to check for his tracks, and when she caught up with the wounded soldier, she’d seduce him with the idea of traveling by canoe. She figured he’d be easy to persuade after two days of bushwhacking along the river’s edge in the cold rain. By the time she found him, he’d be all over his depressing search for that long dead dog and be ready to head back to soft beds and civilization.

“They’re a critical part of my strategy,” Cameron explained when Walt questioned the amount of high end foods, including several bottles of decent red wine and three pounds of freshly ground Colombian joe.

“You must’ve shelled out a small fortune on all this fancy food and wine.”

“I only spent what I won last night at the pool hall, after shoring up that rotten section of flooring from underneath. Wish you could’ve seen those two pool sharks trying to make the floor sag and the pool table tilt without being too obvious about it. I skunked ’em in six straight games, made enough for all these groceries and then some.