Lost Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

and windowless, the floors were dirt except for a small round wooden platform. There was a floor-to-ceiling pole in the middle of it with leather hand restraints near the top, there were a dozen women circled around it, facing it, stripped of their clothes and kneeling. The uniformed men stood behind them with automatic weapons pointed at their heads. Others, Caucasian and Latino men, crowded forward to see. He backed away from them all, followed a dark corridor toward a pale pink light behind a partially open door. He looked inside and the walls, like the floor and ceiling, were painted blood red. There was an examination chair with stirrups in the middle of the room, a young blond woman was strapped to it, face immobilized by a clamp over her head, her left hand and foot were wrapped in bloody bandages. She was facing a large television screen that was playing a video. The video was of a woman sitting in the same chair, a naked black man with white face paint was standing between her legs, he was penetrating her, his skin broken in bleeding lesions and secreting ulcers, his eyes were dead as if he were in a trance.
    On a stainless-steel instrument table next to the woman were bolt cutters…
    He was off the side of a mountain, canister of dye aimed at the rock wall, wind spiraling him as he fumbled with the clips on his harness, he reached down, trying to undo them…then he was upside down, watching the snow fall, as if from heaven….
    “Sherry?”
    She jerked her head toward the voice.
    “Sherry?”
    “Okay,” she said shakily. “I’m okay.”
    “What did you see?”
    “Numbers.” She nodded. “I saw the arrow he was making, but there were numbers on a compass, I think.”
    “It wasn’t an arrow,” Metcalf said matter-of-factly. His arms still around Sherry’s waist, he was using his free hand to work a safety line through the dead man’s climbing harness, securing it to the fixed-line pitons anchored in the granite wall. “They’re numbers,” Metcalf said. “The canister shoots a single stream of dye. He was leaving us the team’s position in degrees. He must have been getting tossed around because they’re not pretty. The nine is lying at a forty-five-degree angle on top of the one. If you weren’t thinking about numbers, you might see an arrow with a circle on top of it.” Metcalf finished tying the safety line off and let the body go.
    “Something happened before he could finish it, maybe the wind was banging him around and he dropped the canister or maybe the line broke or released and he got upended. We know he wasn’t finished writing because nineteen degrees points out there”—he nodded over his shoulder—“into space.”
    “The one and nine were followed by another one,” Sherry said.
    Metcalf broke another chemical pack and placed it in Sherry’s hand. “Hold this,” he said. “I’ll help you with that glove in a minute.”
    He took the mike to his handset. “North Sickle, this is Sandstorm, over.”
    There was a crackle of static. “Go ahead, Sandstorm.”
    “Bearing one, nine, one, do you copy?”
    “Copy, that’s one, nine, one degrees, Commander?”
    “Affirmative,” Metcalf answered, then helped her with her glove.
    “Are you ready?” he asked.
    She nodded, thinking the moment would have seemed anticlimactic except for what she had seen in that castle and the red room.
    “You did good, Miss Moore. You did very good.”
    “What will they do now?” she asked.
    “This fellow’s not going anywhere, I clipped on a safety line to make sure. We’ll come back for him when the storms have passed through. My men up above will use the compass coordinates to search for snowbanks. You build snow caves into the side of an existing bank, not underneath it. Every bank on the compass line, they’ll probe with avalanche sticks. Find something hollow and they’ll dig.”
    “Why are the coordinates so important?”
    “There’s twenty acres up there. A three-degree