Double Team
Chapter 204
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
—John Keats, Letters of John Keats
I STOOD STARING AT MY WIFE.
“Is it really you? How did you find me?”
“It’s me. Who is that you just tried to kill?”
“The boss. He leads a fake National Service team that was put together to discredit me and make people think the President’s poster boy deserted,” I said. He moaned and I pulled zip ties out of my backpack, quickly lashing his wrists and feet together while Nanette checked his pulse and looked in his eyes.
“Nice blow. Knocked him out cleanly.”
“Lucky. I have to get in that locked cage. My guitar, my papers, my clothes are all locked in there.” I picked up the rock and the club again.
“Doesn’t he have a key?” I looked at Nan in disbelief and then searched the boss’s pockets. Sure enough there was a single key. I hugged Nan and turned to the locker. The lock popped open.
“We need to go before the team gets here. I’m sure he has them out looking for me. I just escaped last night. How did you find me?”
“I tracked your guitar. Come on. The car’s about a mile from here. Is there anything else you need?” she asked.
“I’ll find you,” the boss mumbled. I looked at him. “I’ll find you and put you in the ground, kid.” I snatched his phone out of his pocket and dialed 911.
“9-1-1. State the nature of your emergency.”
“There’s been an accident up in the mountains at these coordinates. A guy attempted to break into a cabin and was injured by the resident. Looks like he has a broken jaw. He has no ID and has been prowling around up here with a bunch of kids pretending to be in National Service. Better send both an ambulance and police.” I thumbed off the phone without waiting for a response when the boss started to yell for help. “I’ll see you in hell,” I said as I spun away from him, pushing Nan out of the cabin. I had my backpack on and my duffle in one hand and my guitar in the other.
“This way,” Nan said, heading down the forest road we’d arrived on a month ago.
“I have no idea where I am or how to get home, so lead on, my knight in shining armor.”
“You’ve put on some muscle,” she said, grabbing my duffle from me and slinging it over her shoulder.
“We’ve been in hard physical training for a month or so. I don’t even have an idea what the date is. He brought us up here and told us this was a new NSO program to train us for survival, search, and rescue. It’s been brutal.”
“You just came here with him? Why didn’t you go to basic with the others? We’ve been worried sick.”
“I was sick. Remember? They found me in the bathroom and gave me some drug. I don’t remember much after that. I just know I woke up on the bus with eleven others and they let us off here. All our gear was locked in that cage and we were told there was no cell signal up here.”
Nanette wasn’t running but she set a good pace and we reached Livy’s Wrangler in about twenty minutes.
“That’s Livy’s car.”
“We got terrain maps when we found where you were hiding. It didn’t take long to decide the Wrangler was a better choice of vehicle than my VW. Make sure your equipment is strapped in. It’s a bumpy road back down.” Nanette started the jeep and we were moving before I was completely settled in the passenger seat.
“I’m so glad to see you. I didn’t have any plan for after I got my gear from the cage. I was just going to head down this road and hope I got someplace before they caught me.”
“It’s a long way to anyplace,” Nanette said. “Do you need anything? Food? Water?”
“I’ve lived out of this kit for a month. I can last another day,” I said. “When we get someplace safe, I’d like to change out of this jumpsuit and into clothes. This is all any of us have worn since we got here.” We bounced down the mountain track with Nanette grinding gears as we twisted with the road. “I still don’t understand how you found me.”
“It took us a long time to figure it out. I’m sorry. We’re not that smart, I guess. Last week I went to Indiana to visit your parents. When I got the call from Beca that you hadn’t arrived at basic with them, we all panicked. Then Rachel said there was a buzz around the OCS that you’d run instead of serving. I finally decided I needed to talk to your folks and tell them you were officially missing. It wasn’t until I said you’d left without a trace, your cellphone was off, and you took your duffle and your guitar with you that your Dad got some papers. When you got this guitar, the insurance company had you attach a Lo-Jack tracking device in it. There’s one in each of your guitars, the viol, and your mandolin. Anything that’s listed on the rider. When we contacted them, it only took a few minutes to get coordinates of where it was located.”
“Good old guitar. I haven’t touched it in a month. My hands are a mess from rock climbing and scrambling. I don’t know if I can even play anymore. I just kept looking at the case through the cage and thinking one day I’d get my hands on it again.” The road was rough and I was being bounced around in the seat but my eyes were crossing and blurring. I’d had only an hour’s uncomfortable sleep under a tree all night. Since yesterday morning, I figured I’d walked and run about forty miles. I faded off into restless sleep.
“Kidnapped,” Nanette was saying. She’d pulled into a Forest Service campground soon after we’d reached a paved road. I woke up hearing her voice talking on the phone. “We need the security footage from the induction center the day they all signed in. Can Joan hack into it?” There was a pause. “He looks a little rough around the edges, but nothing that a hot shower and a hot meal won’t cure. And some love. He looks… a little haunted.” She listened intently. “Love you, too. We’ll be back this evening.”
Nanette turned to me and caught me staring at her. I guess I had tears running down my dirty cheeks. I must have looked a mess. A little haunted? Yeah. Wait till I tell them the rest of the story. She pointed at the little building in front of us where she’d parked.
“Shower. Change clothes. Let’s go.”
I hadn’t bathed except in the pond in forever, it seemed. We’d been issued two disposable razors a week and I’d dry shaved, but it was spotty. Nanette came straight into the shower with me and carefully shaved my face as she scrubbed the various bug bites on my back and legs. I just wanted to wrap her in my arms and hold her under the water. I was still missing some of the basics. Shampoo. I was thinking Jo might get her wish for me to have short hair once I could get to a barber shop. Dana had hacked off most of her Afro with my help. All we had was our bar of soap and cold pond water for washing it. I felt bad for her.
Then I was filled with uncontrollable rage. I had no sympathy for the bitch. She was part of it all.
“The bastards!” I yelled. “Who the hell did this? I’ll kill them!”
“Shh. Shh. Jacob, it’s over. Let’s get dressed and get home. Home, love. Home to your wives who love you.”
I pulled my jeans on and a polo shirt, skipping the niceties of underwear. There were clean socks and a lightweight pair of shoes in my duffle. Everything else was slightly damp since the only towel I had was a square of microfiber we used for everything. It got most of the water off Nanette and me. Then we got back in the Jeep and headed for DC. It was a long trip. I had no idea yet where we’d been.
“Where the hell was I, anyway?” I asked.
“In the Great Smoky Mountains near the Tennessee/North Carolina border,” Nan said. “We’ll be on I-81 soon and then it’s cruising speed for 350 miles.”
“I love you, Nanette. I would never have made it home without you.” The enormity of trying to find my way out of the Smoky Mountains and four hundred miles to DC was overwhelming. My five days of supplies wouldn’t have lasted. I doubted now that I’d have been captured and returned to the cabin, but I’d have died out there eventually. And all their reports would have looked real. It would have looked like I abandoned the service and got lost.
“Rest, Jacob. There’s a Cracker Barrel at the Roanoke exit. We’ll have hot food for lunch.”
“What a dream,” I said.
Nanette had nearly the endurance of Emily when it came to driving at exactly the seventy-five-mile-an-hour speed limit on the freeway. Even with the stop for lunch and fuel, and the slow-down for rush-hour traffic into DC, we pulled into the parking area behind our house at a few minutes before six.
I took a deep breath and let it out, both anticipating and dreading the reunion with my wives. I wasn’t a returning hero. I was the guy who abandoned them. How could I face them?
I didn’t have time to contemplate any further. I’d no more than turned from getting my gear from the Jeep than all my wives came out the back door by the hot tub and rushed to me. It was too much. I tried to hug them all, to kiss them all, and suddenly my eyes were filled with tears and my legs crumpled beneath me.
“Back off!” Beca shouted. “It’s too much. Let him breathe.” They moved a step away and I looked up at her.
“Beca? Aren’t you in basic training? What are you doing here? Cindy? Desi? Brittany?”
“It’s the weekend. We just need to be back in our dorms by midnight.”
“It is? I don’t know what day it is. Or the date. I don’t know how long I’ve actually been gone. What’s going to happen to me now? I just don’t know.”
“What’s going to happen right now is that you’ll come in the house for dinner. Brittany and Sophie made Picadillo,” Rachel said. My beloved girl. I opened my arms and she pulled me up from the ground to hug me. “Yes, my love. I’m here. We’re all here and we love you.”
“I thought… thought the service had betrayed us. That everything was a lie. And that I’d have two solid months of training without being able to even call and tell you I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I led you all into this.”
“We’ve been fine,” Desi said. “Everything was exactly like they said it would be except you weren’t there. A lot of people are looking for you. And not all of them are friendly.”
“For now, we’re keeping your return under wraps until we can meet at the OCS Monday,” Rachel said. “For the weekend, there is just you and us.”
“Let’s get inside,” Donna said. “That’s the best way to be sure it stays just us.”
“Dad’s working on getting the security footage from the induction center the day we all signed our papers,” Joan said. “That’s beyond my skillset and if I tried, I could get in severe trouble at work.”
“I just remember being sick as a dog and rushing to the bathroom. These guys helped me get me cleaned up. They gave me something. Said it was Zofran to cure my nausea. Might have been, but I think they gave me something else, too. All my memories from then until I woke up the next morning in that cabin are just a foggy haze,” I said.
“It shouldn’t be too hard to spot a dozen guys in green jumpsuits,” Joan said. “I remember seeing some get off a bus and assumed they were just arriving from training somewhere and would be heading out. When the girls boarded the bus, we had to hustle to get to our new jobs for orientation. None of us were around to see that you never got on the bus.”
“I screamed when the bus pulled away and you weren’t on it,” Cindy said.
“We tried to get the driver to stop but he said there would be another run later in the day and you’d catch that bus. Since the training center was only a few miles away and the day was just orientation and getting settled, there wouldn’t be any problems. And we couldn’t call because they had us turn off our cellphones when we signed in,” Desi said.
“It wasn’t until the next day when we still hadn’t seen you that we began to panic,” Beca said. “We met with the camp director and he started making calls.”
“That’s when we first knew you were missing,” Donna said. “The girls said you were sick, so he wanted to know if you’d come back home. When we said no, he started calling hospitals.”
“A call went out to the other camp locations that had buses leaving that day to see if you’d been picked up by the wrong one. Everyone reported negative,” Rachel said.
“That’s when things started getting nasty,” Sophie said. “Dr. D called me to her office on Monday and asked where you were, as if I would have information we were withholding from the school or OCS. She really drilled me. I hadn’t even started teaching any classes yet and she was almost hysterical. She demanded if I knew how important you were to the fall campaign and how serious it was that you disappeared.”
“I suggested a kidnapping and was almost laughed out of the OCS office,” Em said. “They said it would be impossible for anyone to be kidnapped from an induction office without a special forces team.”
“Hmm. Maybe that’s it,” I said. “I was completely convinced that I had been separated for special SSR training. I believed they had all lied to me and we’d all been separated and sent to different basic training camps without any pre-selection. He had a dossier on me that went back to getting hit by the bus. It just didn’t mention any of my music or political info.”
“How did you discover you’d been had,” Brittany asked. I blushed.
“I had a buddy on the team. We each had buddies. Mine happened to be the only female in camp. She helped me through the first day or two I was sick and we stuck close together. Um… I sort of… we had sex after about two weeks in camp. I woke up in the middle of the night because I thought I heard voices talking and then she just crawled in bed with me. We did it a lot for the next week or so.”
“There’s no reason to be embarrassed about that, Jacob,” Rachel said. “Remember? It was a founding principle of the pod. We knew we’d have other relationships but we’d always come back together.”
“Yeah. At first it was okay,” I said. “Then I woke up one night and heard a conversation outside the cabin. The boss was on his phone and smoking a cigarette. He was assuring someone that everything was under control and I wouldn’t be a threat much longer. He said the whore was working out perfectly and before long he’d have evidence that the President’s poster boy dodged service to run off with a black whore and no one would take me seriously again.”
“She was a prostitute?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to think she was as much a dupe in the whole game as I was, but now I don’t know about any of them. They played along with everything the boss said, but it seemed like they all had a lot of specialized training before they got to the cabin. We each had our specialties. I worked with the whole team on improving their running and endurance. Now I wonder if they were National Service members or mercenaries the boss hired.”
“Gee! Did you ever find out his name?” Donna asked.
“No. He was never called by name and didn’t use any of our names. He’d just point and give an order. That was it,” I said.
“It’s going to be hard to prove any of this,” Nanette said. “I saw the guy and have his picture. I also have pictures I took around and in the cabin before Jacob arrived. Frankly, I’m glad he got there before this boss man did. The dude was scary.”
Rachel and Nanette slept cuddled to my side that night in the master suite. Beca, Desi, Cindy, and Brittany had to return to their dorm by midnight. But the good news was they only had a week left of the combined basic and NSO training.
“I’m so glad you found me,” I said, kissing Nan again. “I’m so sorry I’ve caused so much trouble,” I whispered as I turned to Rachel.
“Jacob, listen to me. Things have been tense here. There were a lot of questions. We were worried. The one thing that never happened… This is important, Jacob… Your wives never lost faith in you. We never stopped loving you. We never stopped looking. And we will never stop trying to bring the culprits to justice.”
“It’s obvious from your story that the boss was acting as an agent for someone,” Nanette said. “This wasn’t his idea. What we need to find out is who wanted you out of the way and discredited so you couldn’t speak on behalf of the National Service.”
“That’s easy,” I said. “Every anti-reform incumbent running for reelection in the country.”
“That’s the right place to start, but we also need to consider the big businesses who are raking in profits by keeping the service as it is. So, if it is someone running for office, we need to look for connections to those businesses,” Rachel said. “It won’t be easy, but we’ll find them.”
“Will anyone even believe me?” I sighed. “It seems so impossible.”
“We’re all going to be gathering evidence,” Nanette said. “If Ray can get the security footage that shows you being led out, that will give us a big step up in credibility.”
“Tomorrow afternoon, I’m sending out a meeting notice to our team, Will Forsythe, and Dr. D. I’ll simply say it is to discuss urgent new information regarding a missing service member. They’ll be there Monday morning and so will you. We’ll get the investigation started right.”
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