Liberator 1

Morning broke with a lemon line of light along the horizon, and Angel Hardesty knew she had to go. Time had run out on her. Fortunately, the child -- ostensibly her student -- she guarded still slept.
Fifty feet away she could hear the group gathering. She knew Colonel Robertson would not let the prospect of traumatizing her charge interfere with his operations; this particular day's action could seal his ascension to command. Ambitious to the edge of ruthlessness, Robertson had no patience for collateral damage as insignificant as a second-grader's nightmares.
Bonehead, she thought, and swirled a microfleece throw around her charge. The child stirred as she lifted, but Hardesty couldn't wait any longer. Out the French doors, down the rock walk, slow but sure with every step careful to avoid either the crunch of sound or the flicker of movement-shadow, she slipped away from the back of the house. The dogs knew her, knew the boy, walked with them in happy silence except for a little panting; at the edge of the back lawn she slipped a handful of treats out of her pants' pocket and tossed them, causing the dogs to ignore her momentarily. While they busied themselves she punched in the combination to open the gate wide enough for taking out the trash; the gate opened in well-oiled silence. Stepping through, she waited until the gate closed – a matter of a minute or less – before sucking in a deep breath.
Security had its downside. The size of her employer's property let him feel safe. For her, it complicated the mission. She had no vehicle keys, no firearm, no radio; her pockets, despite wearing the nearest thing to field gear she owned, simply didn't stretch that far, especially since she'd had to pack extra for the child in her arms. Not taking the sling-bag purse or the jacket from her room would, she hoped, make it look as if she hadn't departed permanently. That little edge might be all she got.
Fifty yards from the gate, she slipped into the first band of woods and brush. Here her steps slowed, for silence's sake. She had a red-LED keychain light, small enough she hoped it wouldn't draw any attention from the house so soon; she flashed it at the path before her, keeping the beam on the ground. At least one of the game trails she'd scouted in the last few days remained well-traveled. Shifting her grip on the sleeping boy, she quickened her pace as much as she dared.

Ten minutes' walk from the edge of the woods she found the stream she wanted. Heavy trash bags over her shoes and pants, held by rubber bands around her knees, kept her feet dry as she waded, still carrying the boy. The trick might not stop the dogs from following her, if Robertson thought of using them; but it might be worth a little time. She needed all she could get.
The water felt cold through the plastic, and she had to be careful not to slip – or tear the bags, if she could manage that. But she'd brought Taylor here several times. Homeschooling children needn't leave them short on science or natural history, she'd argued; and to her surprise, her employer had agreed. He'd wanted the boy to know something about hiking and camping as well, he'd said. So she'd packed a pair of fanny-packs with very basic, simple gear, right under the bodyguards' gaze. Boneheads.
A hundred yards upstream, and then another; and the banks changed to shoulder-high, almost-solid rock. Another quarter-mile elapsed, and Hardesty tucked her charge into a corner, backing in after him. She slipped the sacks off her feet and shook the water from them.
“Miss Angel?” Taylor's big blue eyes regarded her steadily. He had tow-colored hair and a skinny angel's face and build.
“Good morning, Taylor. Are you hungry?”
“No, but I'm thirsty. Are we going on a hike today?”
“We are,” Hardesty said. “Later. I wanted you to see how the light changes, and which kinds of animals and birds you can see and hear in the very early morning.”
“Okay,” the boy said.
“I have juice and an oatmeal bar for you for breakfast,” she offered.
“Okay.” He drank from the juice box and unwrapped the snack bar. “Is this why I didn't have to put my pajamas on last night?”
“Partly,” Hardesty allowed.
The boy grinned. “So it's an adventure hike.”
She offered him the fanny-pack they'd stocked together: small binoculars, a compass, a water bottle with a filtering straw, a penknife, and a matchbox with some waterproofed matches, a small magnifying glass, some wet wipes, a notebook and pencil and a very small but very good digital camera, a plastic child's poncho, a plastic trowel, and a tube tent – the whole thing weighed about three pounds. Her own sported a first-aid kit, another microfleece, her poncho, more wet wipes, a lighter and a regular flashlight, a second water-bottle, a multi-tool and some food, along with a tiny stove and fuel; it weighed in at nearly seven pounds.
“That's exactly right. Are you ready?”
“I think so,” he said. “Where are we going?”
She finished rolling up the fleece. “Where would you like to go?”
“To see my mom,” he said.
Hardesty felt her heart break. Twenty years in this business, and the protectees never ceased to surprise her. The kid's mother was buried at Arlington. “Well, that's a long hike, Taylor.”
“I know,” he said. She rolled up his blanket, smoothed out the air, and looped the ends of the microfleece through two of the belt-loops of his shorts. From one of her cargo pockets, she produced a pair of baseball caps. “Keep this on. I don't want you to get sunburned.”
He looked at the canopy of leaves and limbs overhead. “Okay.”
“Remember, Taylor,” she began, folding up the wrappers.
“Pack it in, pack it out, leave no trace,” the boy said, automatically. She smiled at him and slipped the trash into her hip pocket, blessing the designer of her cargo-pants. He finished his juice, and put the straw in his pack. She quirked an eyebrow at him and he grinned impishly at her. “I might want that later. Waste not, want not.”
Hardesty smiled. “Okay. I won't ask why.”
“Good,” he said. He took the compass out. “Which way do we want to go?”
“Upstream,” she said.
“Do we walk or wade?”
“Which would you rather?”
“Wade,” he said.
“Maybe later – right now, I'd rather you didn't get too cold.”
“So, after lunch?”
“Sure.”
“On the way home, then,” he said, sounding reluctant.
“Or on the way to camp,” she challenged, and his eyes went round.
“Out overnight?”
“Maybe longer,” she said.
“Then we definitely want to go upstream, so that means west,” Taylor said.
“Sure does,” Hardesty murmured. She didn't add that she hoped going farther into her employer's property, instead of heading for its near edge, would help confuse any pursuit that might arise. After all, Robertson's plans might – maybe – go the way of all plans when confronted with reality; if that happened it could be very late in the day before anyone thought to look for them.

Taylor stopped to ask about new things occasionally, just as he would during any lesson. A shell at the edge of the water surprised him – he had not expected freshwater shellfish. But like any boy, he also ran ahead occasionally, so the pace stayed relatively steady across the day. When he began to really tire, Hardesty called a lunch break.
“What do you want to eat?”
He gestured at the creek. “Fish,” he said firmly. “We caught some here one summer.”
“What kind?”
He struggled with the memory, and finally wriggled his fingers. “Whiskeredy fish.”
She grinned. “Catfish,” she said. “They are good eating, fixed right. But I don't have what I need to fix them with us, I'm afraid.”
“Catfish,” he responded, “Salt and pepper. And pushuppies.”
“Hushpuppies,” she said softly. “Cornmeal, onions, flour, salt, pepper, leavening, eggs and shortening.”
“We don't have that,” he said glumly. “I remember when Mom came out with us. She brought a picnic basket, and we caught the fish. She had pushuppies and a bag of stuff to shake the fish in, and she wrapped them in foil and cooked them on the coals.”
“I bet that tasted good.”
He looked up at her and nodded. “Really good. It was hard to eat, though, without burning my mouth.”
“We'll have to figure out a better way. But right now, we don't have what we need to cook fish.”
“Maybe later,” he said. “What do we have?”
“Crackers and cheese,” she said. “Or crackers and tuna fish.”
“Oh, cheese,” he said. “Tuna fish at suppertime.”
“Okay,” she said, and produced the package. “Look, some of these are peanut-butter.”
He made a face. “Yuck. I don't like those orange crackers.”
“Oh,” she said. “I'm sorry.”
“It's okay,” he answered. “Look, some are just crackers and cheese. Could I have more juice?”
“Umm,” she said. She took a package out of her fanny pack and the bottle of water out of his. “How about milk? It won't be cold.”
“That's okay. Where are we going to get milk?”
“Watch,” she answered, and poured some powder into the water. She put the lid back on and shook the bottle, hard, for nearly a minute. Then she offered him the result. “Milk.”
“It is,” he said, sounding surprised after he tasted it. “Pretty neat.”
“We'll have to rinse the bottle – can you drink it all?”
“Sure,” he said. “We'll keep the bottle to use again.”
“Yep,” she said.
They walked on until almost dark. She slipped the canteen cup off her water bottle and filled it from the creek, then boiled it over the stove; she washed out Taylor's water bottle, then heated more water and made cocoa. Taylor, pleased, drank enthusiastically. He ate tuna salad from a can with crackers; Hardesty thought about it a minute, then washed the can with hot water as well. She made herself tea and ate peanut-butter-and-crackers for the second time that day.
No one had come to find them yet. Maybe Robertson's plan hadn't succeeded after all.

Morning dawned gray and smelled wet, and Hardesty sighed. Today would be hard. Small boys and rainy weather seldom led anywhere happy. She boiled more water, in the can as well as her cup, and made instant oatmeal for breakfast. Another cup of tea seemed insubstantial; she broke out a paper tube of instant coffee, and added an envelope of sugar and a shake of powdered milk to her hot water. A gourmet drink it wasn't, but she enjoyed it anyway.
“Umm,” Taylor said. “I have to go.”
“What?”
“You know – to the bathroom.”
“Oh,” she said. “Didn't you need to yesterday?”
“Not like this. I need to ... sit.”
“Ah,” she said. “Still got that trowel in your fanny pack?”
“Ye-es,” he said.
She nodded. “Okay. What we want is ...” and she led him away from the water, looking for a place where the ground would yield to the trowel.
“You make a hole in the ground,” and she scooped out, with practiced ease, a hole about six inches deep, “and you sit over it, on top. When you're done you fill the hole back in and pack the dirt with your foot. Be sure you bury everything.”
“Oh,” he said. “Then what?”
“Come back to camp,” she said. “You can find it, right?”
“Sure,” he answered, pointing. “Downhill to the water, downstream to the camp.”
“See you there,” she said, “in a few minutes.” She didn't tell him that she had her own pit stop to make. Instead, she headed for the creek, but doubled back – not to watch; she had her own business to attend. She did check on his burial technique afterward; it wasn't bad, but she kicked some leaves and dirt over the spot anyway, as she had her own.
He had finished rolling up his blanket when she got back to camp. “Where were you?”
“Bathroom,” she answered.
“Oh,” he said. Then he said, “what about taking a bath?”
“Maybe we'll go swimming, this afternoon. Will that do?”
He grinned. “Sure.”
That afternoon she watched him from the bank while he swam, and when he tired she made a pallet for him. They had a rock overhang and a cutbank for shelter; while he slept, she took a chance and spent her own ten minutes in the water, coming out to wrap herself in the microfleece. She washed both their shirts and hung them over branches in the sun to dry, next to her cargo pants. He hadn't said anything about being tired or hungry, and she wondered if he would. Taylor didn't seem the complaining type, really. Must be something he got from his mother ... once the clothes were dry, she pulled hers back on and spread Taylor's shirt over him. He must really be worn out ...

The scraping sound woke her in time to see the rifle stick down over the rock; without thinking, she grabbed the barrel and twisted, yanking sideways. As the body attached to the rifle fell, she gathered the weapon in, then swung it like a club to knock out the man who'd been about to capture her. He didn't yell, or scream; but the repeated noises woke Taylor, who sat up wide-eyed.
“Miss Angel?”
“Taylor,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I think so. Who is that man?”
She didn't know. “I haven't seen him before.”
“Why did he have a gun?”
“I think he was out here poaching,” she said truthfully. He hadn't been carrying the sort of gun one of Robertson's people would have. She examined it more carefully: wooden stock, iron sights, lever action, not a carbine but a rifle, and not new. She couldn't tell the caliber by looking; it might have been a .30-06 or a .30-30.
He wore a belt and a sling for the rifle, as well as a vest with many pockets. She bit her lip, then checked all his pockets. Wallet, hunting knife, duct tape and nylon rope, a string-net hammock, a full box of shells for the rifle, another of shotgun shells and several glow-in-the-dark trail markers. He had a water filter and bottle in another, a mess kit in a different one, a flashlight and flares in yet another; in the biggest vest-pocket he had equipment to field-dress a deer. In another she found a two-way radio, and in the last pocket two MREs. She strung his hammock out between a pair of rocks, and with Taylor's help rolled him into it; then with the nylon strings from his tall boots, she laced the hammock shut around him. She put a piece of duct tape over his mouth, left the radio in his hand, and took the rifle, its shells, the MREs and the mess-kit.
“We have to go, Taylor. He might have friends nearby.”
Taylor nodded. They slipped away along the creek, as quick and quiet as a pair of ghosts. Unlike the previous day, she didn't stop at twilight; instead they pushed on, using her little red LED light to check their footing. When Taylor finally complained of being tired, she estimated how far they had come.
“It's too soon to stop,” she said quietly.
Taylor, uncharacteristically, whined. “I'm hungry, and my foot hurts.”
She stopped immediately and said, “Let me look.”
He had a blister; more importantly, he'd walked on a blister until it broke and blistered again, and broke the second time. Now the quarter-sized open sore must make walking very painful.
“Okay,” she said. “We'll stop – let's find a place where we can hide.”
“Weren't we hidden when the man came?”
“We need a better place.”
He pointed. “What about that?” She followed the direction of his stretched finger and saw a dead tree, broken off shoulder-high; the top had come down at an angle to the remainder of the trunk and formed a lean-to of sorts.
“Don't you think about anybody who saw that would look inside for us?”
“I dunno,” Taylor said. “Maybe.”
“Okay,” she answered. “Let's try this.” She led him a few more feet, pushing through the outside branches of an evergreen. Next to the trunk, an open space carpeted with needles offered shelter and, even better, a soft place for sleeping. Taylor barely made it through a cup of water and an oatmeal bar before his eyes closed and he slid sideways. She'd never heard him snore before. She laid out one microfleece and settled him on it, then covered him with the other. He sighed and stopped snoring. She doubted she could have waked him. She growled at herself, but she couldn't stay awake either.
She woke up before daylight; what had wakened her she didn't know, so she stayed very still, listening. Taylor, a couple of feet away, didn't move or open his eyes.
“Long gone by now. That chick's somethin' else, I tell ya,” said a voice that made her feel, suddenly, cold as ice.
“And if you're wrong about where they went?”
“I'm not. She's a backpacker. She knows the woods, she's not afraid of the woods, and she could con the kid into thinking this is an adventure,” her ex-supervisor said. “She worked the Detail for Chelsea Clinton for two years. Her bugout plan was a fanny pack and a five-minute head start, anywhere between the White House and the Mississippi. She used to do dry runs around Camp David on her days off.”
“The dogs didn't find any scent,” the other voice, a female, argued.
“Not with that creek for her to cut through,” Bill Waddell said. “I told you. She's not afraid of the woods.”
“But she's not carrying,” the female said.
“That we know of,” Waddell corrected flatly. “She's two days out. Maybe she had something cached.”
“Or maybe you misjudged her and they're on a bus right now,” the female answered.
“If The Colonel didn't think I knew my job he wouldn't have sent me,” Waddell answered. “So we're out here looking for her trail. She's good, but she's got a green kid with her and no support in the field. She left her wallet behind; how would she pay for a bus ticket, let alone two?”
Hardesty closed her eyes and breathed, slowly and carefully, out. Robertson had won, then; must have won, or Bill Waddell, whose five years with the Presidential Protection Detail had come to an end when Angela caught him selling clandestine photographs of the President's daughter to a tabloid, wouldn't have a paying job. Unless he'd volunteered, for old times' sake; she could almost see him doing that.
“Maybe she had something cached,” the female spat back.

Taylor's eyes came wide open, but he jammed his fist in his mouth almost instantly. Following his gaze, Hardesty saw two pairs of camis through a gap in the branches; one belonged to Bill Waddell, but she had no idea who the woman with him might be.
She caught Taylor's eye, put a finger to her lips and motioned with one hand, 'be still.' He gave her the faintest of nods – in the best old-Western TV gunfighter manner – and she relaxed fractionally as the camis started to walk away.
“In her place, what would you have cached?” Waddell asked.
“A Ferrarri,” the female voice answered. “Weren't there half a dozen to pick from at the house?”
“In this terrain you'd get more use out of a screen door on a submarine,” Waddell drawled. “I'd've cached a trail bike, if it were me.”
Why didn't I think of that? Hardesty listened to the diminishing sounds of the searchers' steps, then looked at Taylor. She made an OK sign with one hand and raised her eyebrows. He took his fist out of his mouth and nodded.
She raised up on an elbow and a knee, careful not to brush the branches sheltering her against the tree trunk. Taylor's eyes remained as big as saucers. Hardesty crawled close enough to let his lips nearly touch her ear.
“That man is the one my Dad told me to be afraid of,” he whispered.
“Your Dad is very smart,” she whispered back.
“Do you think Dad's okay?”
Robertson would have killed the Vice President if he could. She didn't want to tell the boy that about his dad, though. Not now.
“How about we find out?”
What was I thinking? Hardesty felt the first shuddering acknowledgment of her own fallibility. Cut off from the outside world, surrounded by hostile searchers, what should she do next?