A Soldier's Pledge

All she cared about right now was getting some coffee. Not Walt’s coffee. His wasn’t fit to drink. When she got back, she was heading to the diner. She was going to order a huge plate of ham and eggs and toast and greasy home fries, and a bottomless cup of very strong hot black coffee. Her stomach growled in anticipation. A stiff headwind slowed her progress, but even so she was taxiing up to the dock by 7:20 a.m. Walt came out to tie off the plane.

“You owe me,” she said as she climbed out. “Big time.”

Walt was wearing one of his expressions. “Listen,” he said slowly as they walked down the dock toward the office. “Got a phone call yesterday after you left. It was from that guy’s sister. Lori Tedlow was her name. I couldn’t follow her conversation too good, she started crying, so I told her you’d call her back just as soon as you returned.”

Cameron halted abruptly and rounded on her boss. “What? I have nothing to tell her. She already knows where he is, right? You told her where I dropped him off, right? What more could I add to what she already knows?” She felt another surge of annoyance at this latest development.

“She was upset. Crying. You’re a woman. Women are better at handling stuff like that. She’s waiting for your call.”

“Walt, I’m starving. I haven’t had any coffee, I’m crippled from spending the night in the plane and I want my bonus money.”

“Yeah, I heard you lost a bundle at Ziggy’s, playing pool the other night.”

“Hank cheats. So does Slouch.” Cameron entered the office, tossed her ball cap on the desk, pulled the band from her ponytail and finger combed her dark shoulder-length hair. “One of these days they’ll pay, soon as I figure out how they’re doing it. I’m missing way too many easy shots I could make blindfolded when I was twelve.”

“I won’t be able to get your money till the bank opens. Coffee?” Walt asked, lifting the pot from the hot plate.

“No way. The coffee you make should be banned. I’m going to the diner for a real cup of joe and a big breakfast, and then I’m going to take a long hot shower in my rusty old trailer, and then I’m going to come back here and collect my bonus, so you better have it ready. Bank opens at nine. I’ll be back at nine thirty sharp.”

“If I have your bonus ready, will you make the phone call?” Walt asked hopefully.

“Nope. You talk to the Lone Ranger’s sister. I’m just the pilot who flies the plane. You’re the boss. You get the big bucks for handling all the drama. Tell her he was fine when I left him yesterday. I can’t vouch for how he is today. Wet, probably.” Cameron pulled her hat on and started for the door.

“I know how Hank and Slouch are fouling your shots,” Walt said as she reached for the doorknob. She paused and looked over her shoulder. “If you make that phone call for me, I’ll let you in on their dirty little secret.”

She hesitated just long enough to make Walt squirm before nodding. “Deal.”

* * *

TWO HOURS LATER she was back at the floatplane base, clean, well fed and dialing the number Walt had provided her. A woman’s voice answered on the third ring, and Cameron studied the words she’d carefully drafted on a paper napkin while she ate her breakfast at the diner.

“Mrs. Tedlow?” she said, speaking slowly. “This is Cameron Johnson. I’m a pilot for Walt’s Flying Service, and Walt asked me to call you when I got to the office this morning.” She read the words aloud over the phone to the Lone Ranger’s sister in Montana. Writing her opening had been clever. She had a tendency to get tongue-tied on the phone, so she’d made extensive notes in preparation for this call.

“Thank you so much for getting back to me, Cameron,” the woman replied. “I really appreciate it. I’m afraid I wasn’t very coherent when I called yesterday. I apologize for that. I was just so relieved to have finally located my brother. And please, call me Lori.”

“Walt understands completely how upset you were yesterday.” Cameron shot a glance at Walt, who gave her an encouraging nod and two thumbs up. “He’s a very understanding man.” She scanned her notes and continued reading. “I just wanted to let you know that I saw your brother yesterday afternoon, and he was just fine. He’d set up camp and was going to get a good night’s rest and start his hike today. It’s not raining nearly so hard now, so it won’t be bad going at all.”

“It’s raining up there?”

“First real rain we’ve had all summer, and it was coming down cats and dogs yesterday.”

“Oh no!”

“It’s not a bad thing. We needed the rain. We’ve been fighting a big forest fire up here, and thanks to this downpour it’s just about out.” She was getting way off script. She turned over the napkin and continued reading from her notes. “Your brother told me he was carrying an emergency transmitter, and he’s programmed our number into it. If he gets into any trouble at all, we’ll get him out. We have good search and rescue up here, what with the park being so close to us and all.”

There was a frustrated sound on the other end of the line. “My brother wouldn’t signal for help if he was being eaten by a grizzly. He’s an army ranger, and they all think they’re invincible. Look, Cameron, I’m going to be blunt. He checked himself out of Walter Reed—that’s a military hospital near DC. He was in rehab. He was badly wounded in Afghanistan and needs medical supervision and treatment. He can’t be wandering around in the wilderness. He has to be brought back before he gets into trouble. He could die out there in the shape he’s in.”

Cameron shot Walt an exaggerated frown. “I guess I’m not following you. You expect us to find your brother and bring him back? That’s not our job.”

“I know that, but you have to understand, this is all my fault. I’m to blame. This has to do with his dog.”

“This is about a dog?”

“I should have told him about his dog last summer after it happened, but I didn’t want him to freak out or be distracted when he was still deployed and doing dangerous soldiering stuff. I knew he’d be really angry at me, so I just kept putting it off. I kept lying to him and telling him everything was fine, and then when I went to see him in the hospital last week, I told him what happened and he just...” Her voice squeezed off and ended in a high pitched, mouse-like squeak.

Cameron waited a few moments for the woman to collect herself. She covered the phone and mouthed to Walt, “I bet she’s a blonde.”

“I’m sorry,” Lori continued shakily.

“No need to apologize, Lori. I think I understand the situation. You were taking care of your brother’s dog while he was deployed and something bad happened to it, and when you finally told him, he freaked out and took off.”

“It’s worse than that.” She paused, and the sound of her blowing her nose came over the line. “This wasn’t just any dog. This dog saved his life in Afghanistan. Twice. They featured the story on the national news down here in the States. We held fund-raisers to get the dog home because Jack was so attached to her. It took forever and three thousand dollars, but we finally got her flown back here a year ago last June.

“My fiancé and I had been planning for two years to do this paddling trek in Northwest Territories last July. My mother offered to take care of the dog, but she was really sick from her chemo treatments, so we thought we’d just bring the dog along with us rather than put her in a boarding kennel, you know? She’d gotten to know us and was well behaved. We traveled up where you are to take a canoe trip down the Wolf River to the Mackenzie, and then to Norman Wells.” There was a snuffling noise, another squeak or two, and then Lori resumed. “Everything went fine until a huge bear came into our camp on the second night. It walked right in while we were cooking dinner. The dog chased the bear off and she never came back. We waited there awhile, then moved a short distance downriver to get away from our cooking spot and stayed for two days hoping she’d return.”

“The bear probably killed her,” Cameron said. “Bears don’t like dogs very much.”

“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.

“This is going to be the easiest money I ever earned,” she told Walt. “In four days, I’ll have this soldier roped, tied and delivered to his sister and that five grand will be in my bank account.”

“Better not spend it all before you earn it,” Walt advised her at the lake while helping her load the heavy cooler into the canoe in a cold dreary rain. “You might not find him, and even if you do, he might not want to come out with you.”

“Oh, I’ll find him, and I’m pretty sure he’ll jump at the chance to travel with me.” She held up two bottles of wine. “In my experience, men only care about two things. Food and sex, and wine goes good with both.”

“Did you bring handcuffs in case your strategy doesn’t work?” Walt asked.

“Duct tape,” Cameron said, stashing one bottle inside her tent bag, the other inside her sleeping bag duffel, then tucking both into the tight folds to protect them from the river’s tossing. “Duct tape works for everything. There’s a lot of money riding on this, Walt. You can count on hearing from me in four days.”

* * *

WITHIN THE HOUR the tethered canoe was loaded, and she was ready to set off. She helped Walt push the plane away from shore, waited while he taxied out onto the lake and then watched him take off and head south into a wet overcast. It was 4:00 p.m. If she started paddling now, she might overshoot the Lone Ranger before dark. Her travel time would be much faster than his, just drifting with the current down the river. The smartest thing might be to spend the night where he had first pitched his tent, then get on the river by dawn before he had a chance to break camp. He’d be easy to spot that way. His tent fly was blue and highly visible, assuming he was camped right at the river’s edge. But setting up camp right away would mean just sitting there for hours while the rain came down, waiting for the bears to find her cooler full of goodies and rip it apart.

Maybe she should just plan on deliberately overshooting the Lone Ranger and wait for him to catch up to her. If she spotted him stumbling along the shore while she was drifting effortlessly by, all the better; she’d put ashore slightly downriver of his position to give herself enough time to tidy up, get pretty and pry the cork out of one of the bottles of wine.

Then again, she’d spent a late night at the pool hall, fleecing those cheats Hank and Slouch out of all the money they’d taken from her. Hitting the sack early and drifting off to the soothing sounds of the rushing river and the rain pattering on her tent had a certain appeal. She could always haul her food up into a tree to keep it from the bears.

Whatever she decided to do, the Lone Ranger would eventually drag his bruised and battered body into her cozy comfortable camp, and she’d have him. That much was certain.

* * *

WAKING UP WAS the hardest thing; those first few moments between sleep and full consciousness, when reality came back with a sickening rush. Mornings meant remembering over and over again, on a daily basis, all the bad things that had ever happened to him. Mornings meant losing his friends all over again. Mornings meant losing his leg all over again. Mornings meant looking at that alien contraption that now substituted for his lower left leg, lying within arm’s reach on the damp tent floor. Mornings meant fitting the socket carefully over the liner and socks covering the stump of his left leg, those eight inches remaining below the knee. Mornings meant pain. The stump was raw and inflamed from yesterday’s long struggle, and even after adjusting the number of socks over the liner, the suspension socket went on hard. It was a routine he’d never once imagined would be a part of every morning for the rest of his life, but he knew he was one of the lucky ones. He’d seen plenty of soldiers less fortunate.

He could hear the river rushing past, the light drumming of rain on the tent’s fly. He could smell the damp earth and the resiny tang of spruce, the wetness of his gear. The rain would keep the insects down, but a few more days of it and his gear would be moldering. He lay back on his sleeping bag until his breathing and heart rate had steadied. Then he did sit-ups. Fifty of them. Numbering each one under his breath. He used to do one hundred effortlessly. Now he could barely manage fifty. He needed to get fit because he was going back to Afghanistan, and he was going back as a fully functioning soldier. When he was done with the sit-ups, he rolled over and did push-ups.

The pain was everywhere. There was no place he didn’t hurt, but he had learned to ignore it, to live with it. They’d given him drugs for the pain at Walter Reed, but the drugs had messed up his head. He preferred the pain. It kept him focused. He needed to stay focused on his mission.

He had to find Ky because he knew she was alive. He knew this as surely as he knew that he was alive, even though by all rights they should both be dead. He’d allotted himself eight days to find her, but he’d take twice that if he had to. He wasn’t going to leave here without her.

He rolled over, sat up, reached for his pack and dragged it toward him. Inside were his provisions, and they were minimal. Dried food, first aid and personal supplies, spare clothing, tool kit, his four-pound spare prosthesis. He pulled out a protein bar and ate it, drank the water he’d purified last night. Shifted enough to open the tent door so he could see the river. Yesterday’s progress had been slow. The water levels were high from the rain, and any shoreline he might have been able to walk on was underwater. He’d had to bushwhack inland, away from the choking tangle of alder and willow that grew along the river. Each step was a conscious effort, a struggle. He’d only recently been fitted with his prosthesis. The specialist at the rehab center had told him he’d need weeks of physical therapy to learn to use it properly.

He much preferred the physical therapy of the wilderness. If he hadn’t learned to use the damn thing after eighty miles of rough walking, they could have it back and he’d whittle himself a peg leg. He figured he’d barely made three miles yesterday, three long hard and painful miles, which left seventy-seven more ahead of him, but he wasn’t going to look that far ahead.

One step at a time was the measure of all journeys.

Breakfast over, he zipped on his left pant leg, laced the leather hiking boot on his right foot and called himself fully dressed. The cargo pants with removable legs had been a good investment. They were made of a lightweight, tough and fast-drying cloth. He could get the prosthesis off easily at day’s end, and even if he slept in the rain-wet pants, they dried quickly. Taking his kit, he crawled out of the tent and into the drizzle. He made his way to the river’s edge, crouched and splashed water on his face, washed his hands, brushed his teeth, finger combed his close-cropped hair. Didn’t bother to shave. Nobody to scare with his five o’clock shadow. Stuffing everything back into his kit, he was about to return to camp when movement on the river caught his eye.

A canoe came around the bend from upriver, a battered red canoe with one person seated in the stern, using the paddle as a rudder.

For a moment he could scarcely credit what he was seeing, because this early in the morning and in this wilderness setting he shouldn’t be seeing anything even remotely human. But as the canoe drew closer, he knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the person in the stern was that same girl who’d flown him out to the lake. The girl who’d looked too young to be driving a car, let alone flying a big bush plane in the far north. There was no mistaking that Aussie hat and the slender boyish figure that not even the orange life jacket could hide.

Before he could rise to his feet she spotted him, and he caught the flash of a smile. “Good morning!” Her cheerful greeting floated loud and clear over the rush of the river and the patter of rain. “Fancy meeting you here!”

She ferried the canoe across the strong, swift current like a voyageur, paddling with short strokes from the waist and using her upper body for leverage. It was pretty obvious she knew what she was doing in a canoe. She came toward him at a good clip, and was almost to shore when the canoe fetched up hard against a hidden rock, swung broadside to the current, spun backward in a tight arc around the submerged rock, backed hard into the downstream eddy and pitched sideways, spilling her into the river with a loud, undignified squawk.