Cold River Resurrection Read Online Free PDF Page A

Let’s brief and show the teams where he said he last saw her. Some of them will want to go out tonight, set up portable radio repeaters. Computer map the area. Let’s get started.”
     
    Jennifer’s water bottle was long gone, lost in her wandering, stumbling journey.  She worked her way down through thick brush; thirst pushed her toward the sound of water in a wooden, stiff -legged march.  She stood at the edge of a fast-moving stream, holding her hand out on a large rock, and she settled down, then leaned forward to drink.  She carefully placed Nanna beside her, and used both hands to scoop water from the stream.  When she finished she picked up her doll and held Nanna close and rocked back and forth, thinking she should get up and clean her apartment.
    Maybe I’ll wait here just a little while longer.
     
    The necessity and practical side of SAR operations was to find a lost person, and in some cases, to recover a body. The executive part of SAR, Smokey knew, was that one such operation could eat more of an annual budget than two or three homicide investigations.  The logistics to provide food, equipment, overtime, fuel, and the sheer numbers of people needed was staggering.  A homicide investigation could be scaled down.  A search could be, but not before using thousands of hours of search time, sometimes tens of thousands of hours, and occasionally to no avail.
    There was no way of knowing when a search might end. On the rez it ended with the location of the person or their remains. 
    There were fifty people at the briefing Smokey gave at the incident command trailer.  If we go into tomorrow, he knew, there would easily be double the number of searchers.
    “We’ll have a helicopter up in an hour,” Nathan said. Smokey heard the unmistakable rotor sounds coming from the north. He stopped his presentation and watched as two small objects in the sky came toward them, became larger, and slowed as they reached the meadow. The  Blackhawks overflew their location, and then came in from the west, flared, and landed across the road. When the rotors shut down and he could be heard again, Smokey said, “Two Blackhawks from the 939 th Air Rescue out of the Oregon Air National Guard from Portland. They will stage here.”
    As they waited for the pilots and crew to join them, Smokey looked over the assembled group, noting teams from Wasco County SAR, Hood River Crag Rats Mountain Rescue Group, and a K-9 team from Tigard. If she wasn’t found today, there would be more groups arriving tonight for a new and expanded search tomorrow morning.
    Smokey finished with the assignments. The searchers left the meeting to assemble their teams. Some would drive back to Cold River, and then make the long drive to the other side of the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness area, to coordinate a search from the Bigfoot Expedition camp.
    Hope we find her soon, he thought.
    “Lieutenant.”
    Smokey turned and smiled at Sergeant Nathan Green. Green had been his mentor many years before, a man who was his uncle, his older brother, his best friend in one. Green was short and squat, a power lifter. A few criminals in federal prison had mistaken his short stature for weakness. If anything, Green’s hair was longer than Smokey’s. A long single ponytail was braided with leather.
    “What’s up, Big Brother, or as Laurel says, s’up?”
    Green laughed. “Lieutenant, detectives want to know whether or not to stand down from the search warrant.”
    Smokey looked at his watch. Four-thirty. “No, let’s help them with it. Get it over with. We may need them tomorrow if this goes badly.” He followed Green to his car.
    I sure hope we find you soon, Jennifer Kruger.
    Smokey had been on a lot of successful searches over the years, but he had an uneasy feeling about this one, and he tried to shake it off as he drove back to the Agency. The last time he had had this bad of a feeling, he lost most of his platoon on a bare mountainside in Afghanistan. He