One Way Out: Scout Ledger Thriller Read online

  ONE WAY OUT

  Scout Ledger Thriller

  Elleby Harper

  Copyright 2021 Elleby Harper

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Disclaimer and Terms of Use

  This book is a work of fiction. All the characters, incidents and dialogue in it are fictitious and drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any trademarks, product names, or named features are only used for reference and are assumed to be property of their respective owners.

  * * *

  For any inquiries regarding this book, please email

  [email protected]

  Also by Elleby Harper

  Scout Ledger Thrillers

  One Way Out

  Dead Witness

  * * *

  Bram Carver Thrillers

  Second Chance

  Hunt for Justice

  * * *

  Detective Bex Wynter Files

  Driven to Death

  Stolen Girls

  Courting Death

  Death for Sale

  Blood Lines

  Killing Time

  Girl Last Seen

  Bury the Past

  See Him Die

  * * *

  Steampunk Cozy Mystery

  The Undertaker’s Daughter

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Bosnia, 1996

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Want more thrillers from Elleby Harper?

  About Elleby Harper

  Connecting with Elleby Harper

  Acknowledgments

  With special thanks to my wonderful advanced reader, Shari.

  A title is one of the most important components of any book.

  Without Shari’s input this book would not have the title it deserves.

  * * *

  To all my advanced readers, my gratitude for your eagle-eyed feedback

  and enthusiastic encouragement to continue with Scout Ledger stories.

  A massive thank you because

  you have become an integral part of my writing process.

  Bosnia, 1996

  Captain Gene Ledger was fifty-three minutes into a routine patrol when the bomb exploded. It was 14:53 hours on Christmas Day.

  The army’s predeployment chasing down mines and booby traps had been intense from the time US forces crossed into Bosnia. As far as Gene knew the stretch between Tuzla and Gajevi was clean. Of course it was all a matter of perspective. He also knew from talking to army engineers that the country was criss-crossed with at least thirty types of antitank and antipersonnel mines. Maps and signage were almost nonexistent. The engineers had told him their best estimate was that over three quarters of a million of mines dotted the countryside.

  Gene had four troops with him. They formed part of NATO’s Operation Joint Endeavor squad belonging to the First Brigade, quartered at Tuzla, in the American sector of command. They were patrolling the road heading towards Gajevi. Their mission was to root out any fighting that might start between the Bosnian Muslims and the Serbs inside Boznia’s zone of separation.

  Gene rode in relative comfort in the front of the refurbished M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Its 38 tons traveled down the bituminized road with its tank tracks squealing and clanking, its turbines droning. With a power to weight ratio of 20 horsepower per ton, it sped along at a decent 35 miles per hour. Gene thought of the Bradley’s racket as the signature sound of NATO’s Implementation Force. It was a sound he loved.

  From the turret, Corporal Justin Henderson, his gunner, was the first to spot trouble. He relayed the problem to his commander. Gene used the periscope to sight the situation.

  Up ahead lay the ruins of the burnt-out settlement. Rubbled walls and the wooden skeletons of former homes. More than likely the village was still populated by the country’s displaced inhabitants. Bosnia was around the size of Arkansas, and with a similar sized population. Peace had supposedly been declared a year ago with the signing of the General Framework Agreement in Paris, but for locals the war persisted. It occurred in static bursts. From fixed positions of entangled barbed wire entrenchments in the midst of destroyed buildings where crumbling walls and broken framework provided cover for random gunfire or ambush advantages.

  Two scrapping gangs had taken control of the road as they fought against each other. Fists lashed out. Feet kicked. Bloodied noses flowed red. Even from two hundred yards away it was obvious these fighters were barely into their teens. Plenty of enthusiasm but no weapons in sight.

  Gene ordered Matias Lopez, the driver, to come to a halt.

  “Let’s head out and break up this skirmish.” Gene issued the command with the quiet confidence of a man who had been in the army for two decades and knew his men would follow his lead.

  The M3 was a scout vehicle. As well as Gene, Justin and Matias, it carried two additional crew members, Roy Howell and Juan Pablo, or JP, Escobar. Leaving Justin in charge of the tank, he and the three others shouldered their M16 rifles and climbed outside. Gene could feel the ground rumbling underfoot from the power of the tank’s still running diesel engine. Behind the vehicle two lines of tracks from the grousers were etched in the snow.

  It was a risk leaving the tank’s protective shell of aluminum covering and laminated armor. But as gunner, Justin would cover their on-foot progress. He had anti-tank missiles and machine guns at his disposal if they were needed.

  As the soldiers spread across the road in single file, Gene surveyed his men, glad to see they were relaxed but alert.

  Major General William L Nash would not be impressed if Gene let this brawl get out of control. Trampling over the fighters in the armored vehicle or shooting at them with the tank’s 25 mm cannon wouldn’t win the Major General’s praise either. Successful peacekeeping would be credited to the operation’s commanders and so every non-lethal means of securing that outcome was encouraged. Gene was a career soldier. He had enlisted at twenty. He was now forty-four and staring down the barrel of retirement. He was an armored division man and there was no place for sentimentality in the army. He didn’t give a damn about Nash’s glowing career, but he knew he wasn’t going to risk an ignominious end to his own.

  He and his men were closing the gap to the fight. The four of them were spread across the road, marching in quick strides. It made a show of force Gene hoped would intimidate the group more than the NATO-approved M16s they carried. Not that the weapons weren’t menacing. They carried a full load of 30 rounds that could be expended in burst fire of three shot rounds that would be lethal if triggered by any one of his squad.

  To Gene the fight looked like a spontaneous occurrence. He hoped it was an isolated incident. Probably the two groups had come upon each other by accident and tensions had boiled over. It was his job to predict if it was the prelude to something significant. Something that could lead to an international episode triggering the resurgence of the war.


  At one hundred fifty yards distant, he could clearly discern that the group being beaten into the ground were composed of women wearing men’s clothes, their hair cropped short. In the start they had been giving as good as they got. But they didn’t have the physical stamina of their opponents. Now two women were curled into fetal positions on the ground while their attackers kicked them methodically. Hip. Back. Head. Repeat.

  Justin and Roy were on his right and JP was on his left. The three men were in their mid to late twenties. They were loose-limbed and battle-honed, buzz cuts hidden under helmets, experienced soldiers comfortable with their weapons. Gene spared a quick glance in both directions.

  “The hell?” he said. “What kind of heroes beat the crap out of women?”

  Gene broke into a jog. His men followed.

  He watched a woman make a break for it. Arms pumping. Snow scattering from under her pounding feet. Twenty yards away she veered from the road. And stepped on a landmine.

  When the bomb exploded, Gene’s first thought was of his wife, Autumn.

  If he died now she would be all alone.

  He had been married for nineteen years and after five years together they had discovered that, despite their best efforts, they were never going to have children.

  Autumn never blamed him for shooting blanks. She decided it was easier to put her Harvard degree to work while he convinced himself he enjoyed being married to an overachiever. She was five years older than him, but because she’d poured energy into securing her masters, they entered the workforce in the same year. He made steady progress in the army while she raced up the financial career ladder of Wall Street.

  “You are the brains and I’m the brawn in this outfit,” he told her.

  She would smile at him because it was true.

  He said the words often, both to her and to their friends. He said them as a compliment. He said them to assuage the guilt he felt at not giving her a chance to be a mother.

  When the landmine exploded, the four soldiers dived into the scrubby bushes lining the edge of the road. The leaves were bowed with snow, the dirt was frozen. Gene felt the impact in his bones as 190 pounds of man and 32 pounds of battle dress uniform and equipment skidded across ground as unyielding as concrete.

  He grunted. He was at least fifteen years older than his men and his body didn’t flex as easily as it used to. His mind was already racing ahead, working on the effects from the explosion.

  Gene raised his head and looked forward. The two groups of fighters were flattened. Limbs were scattered in bloody heaps. Shrapnel melted pockets in the snow. He guessed the explosion had come from a fragmentation mine because of its deadly effect within the thirty-yard radius covering the warring groups. The fragments would have exploded five feet in the air, distributed in a full 360 degrees rotation.

  In the aftermath a dull keening ululated through the air. A group of townspeople approached from the village’s outskirts, picking through the wreckage of bodies.

  Gene and his men stood and moved forward until they reached the scene. Ignoring the grief-stricken mothers weeping over the fallen, they swept through the debris, checking for signs of life. He counted 15 smashed and damaged bodies. He broke away from the group to walk towards the remains of the woman who had detonated the mine.

  It looked as though she had stepped off the road to head towards a pile of rubble that had once been a set of buildings, probably homes. A flash of bright red caught his eye. Low to the ground. Too bright a color to be an animal. He turned, swiftly but not fast enough to see anything. It was foolhardy to step where this young woman had. If there was one landmine, there could be others off the beaten path.

  He brought his M16 to his shoulder and sighted along the grooved top which lined up with the groove in front of the sight. The M16 could penetrate a helmeted head at five hundred yards, so Gene had no doubt he had the firepower to overcome whatever was lurking in the wreckage in front of him.

  Peering ahead, his eyes strained to see the color against the dirty mush of snow covering the area, flicking and scanning over the broken brickwork that had once housed people.

  Seconds ticked past. He counted them off in his head. Thirteen. Fourteen. Then he caught the movement. A flash against the rubble. It was a child scrambling over the stones. No, more accurately, a toddler. The kid stopped running to gaze at him. Gene relaxed his gun from his shoulder.

  A red hooded jacket over a pair of brown corduroy legs. The pants were short, stopping just above the ankles, and the feet were jammed into dirty sneakers. The child was about ten feet away, close enough he could see the shoes were untied. Was this the reason the woman had been running? To get to the child?

  A face smeared with mud was shadowed by the hood. Solemn eyes stared back from under a thick mop of matted curls. It was the hair that made him think the toddler was a girl.

  “Hello!” he called. “Zdravo!”

  The child regarded him gravely. He couldn’t tell the color of her eyes from this distance.

  “Zdravo!” he called again.

  The child held a finger to her lips and shook her head. Then she ducked down behind what was left of a brick wall. Attached to it was a tarpaulin sheet, stretched taut and anchored to the bare concrete slab by large stones. It was some sort of makeshift home.

  She couldn’t see him so she assumed he couldn’t see her. She believed she was hidden from his view. Only her shadow spilled out of the tent’s opening, giving away her position. She had no doubt been told to wait quietly until her mother came back for her. Lying quietly behind the crumbled walls was what had saved her from the savagery of the explosion.

  He heard footsteps crunch behind him. It was JP.

  “Did you figure out what’s going on?” Gene asked.

  JP was the linguist in the squad. He had picked up some basic Serbian phrases during their peacekeeping stint.

  “Looks like the townsfolk turned on the women because they’re a Romani tribe. The town didn’t want them. A group of youths decided to run them off. They don’t want gypsies coming here stealing what little food they have. They said the women should have gone to a displaced persons camp instead of setting up home on their doorstep.”

  “Were there any survivors?”

  “No. Not from that blast.”

  “There’s a child over there. We can’t leave her. These people don’t sound like they’d welcome her into their homes. I’m guessing everyone she knows is now dead.”

  A dog padded over to them, guarded and scrawny. From a safe distance it cocked its head and sniffed. Seemingly satisfied, it then melted back into the crowd of people shifting along the road.

  “They’ve brought an ambulance of sorts,” JP reported. “They intend to take away the remains of the kids they know. They’re recognizable only by their clothes. I don’t know what will happen to the women’s bodies.”

  Gene thought of the hungry dog. No doubt there were more like him roaming the streets.

  “I’ll talk to someone in authority. The women should be given a burial, even if it’s only an unmarked grave,” he said. Then he turned his attention back to the dull green tarpaulin. It was strung between the V created by two abutting walls. He had a decision to make. The girl must have crawled further inside because he could no longer see her shadow. “I’ve got to get that child out of here. How do I tell her I won’t hurt her in Serbian?”

  “Tell her you’re friendly. Ja sam prijatelj.”

  Gene practiced the words in his head.

  Between the road where he was standing and the remains of the buildings where the child camped, the earth had been blown apart leaving jagged edges in a rough circle. Loose stones, small rocks and clods of frozen earth littered the snow.

  “Could be another landmine hiding there,” JP said.

  “Could be,” Gene answered.

  He chose to tread close to the exposed exploded mine site in the hope that whoever had laid the bombs wouldn’t have put them on top of each other. It
was only a stretch of ten feet he had to cross. He spanned the uneven, bumpy ground with one foot cautiously placed in front of the other. Then he stepped up onto the concrete slab and approached the girl’s makeshift home.

  “Zdravo. Ja sam prijatelj.” He crooned the words softly as he approached. He wasn’t sure she would understand. If she was a Romani child she might only speak her mother’s language. He knelt at the entrance and lifted the tarp.

  The space was empty. As he rocked back on his haunches a tiny missile launched at him from behind. A stone clunked against his helmet. His helmet was Kevlar and the stone merely bounced off. He whirled to find the child standing just beyond his reach. In her tiny fist she held two more solid-looking rocks. She regarded him with total bravado.

  “You’ve got a good arm on you,” Gene said with a smile. He mock-rubbed his helmet as though she had hurt him and watched her crack a delighted smile. He held his hands up and out in the universal gesture of surrender. She had laid a crude ambush for him to protect her home, to scare him away. It was a stark reminder that she was a child who had been born into war and raised in a time of uncertainty and chaos. “You’re a good little scout, kid. It’s a deadly job and you’ve got to be brave to do it. Now, I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to make sure you’re safe.” He changed his gesture into a beckoning welcome, urging her forward. “Prijatelj.”

  She tilted her head. “American?”

  The word was so heavily accented it took him a few seconds to grasp its significance.