The Hunt

While keeping a wary eye on each other, the four strangers continued to eat their breakfast in silence. After having their fill, they split up to look around. Mark, Jim, and Paco started going through the rest of the stuff that had apparently been left for them, while Jennifer looked for someplace to go the bathroom.

The idea of actually getting something to eat had been so strong that Jim hadn't even given the storage containers piled near their camp more than a quick glance. He could see now that had been a mistake. It also showed him how long he'd been out of the service to have missed something like this.

The cases contained packs. Four of them, looking like military rucksacks without the aluminum frame they are usually fastened to. Pulling one out and opening it up, they found two gallons of water stored in two two-quart canteens and two larger collapsible water bags like you'd get at a camping store.

The pack also contained nine MREs, which were military field rations, and one complete change of clothes right down to the underwear. Jim recognized the camouflage clothing right away as standard Army-issue BDUs and boots; they weren't something he ever wanted to wear again, but they were clean at least. Also in the pack was a full set of Web gear, and attached to that was a holster with a 9mm Glock along with two extra clips.

"Now that's what I'm talking about," Paco said. He quickly pulled the Glock out and with practiced ease cocked the weapon. Finding himself standing beside the now armed gangbanger, Jim was really hoping that his new friend wasn't going to do something stupid.

But just in case, he dropped that pack, reached in for the one he realized (belatedly) had his name on it, and dug out its set of web gear. He had to admit he felt a lot better when he had a weapon of his own in his hands.

Mark, meanwhile, had pulled open another smaller case to find a small handheld radio. He also found a note, which read, "After you've had your breakfast, please turn this radio on and give a call." What the hell? Mark wondered.

"Look at this," he said holding what he had found for the others to see. After reading the note for themselves, they traded a "now what" look.

Squatting off in the bushes, Jennifer was again reminded why she hated camping. Finishing up, she pulled her skirt back into place and, with at least a little dignity, walked back into the clearing to find the others clustered around what looked like overgrown backpacks.

"What's going on?" she asked as she approached.

"We've made a few discoveries," Jim replied, holding up both a gun and a radio.

He showed her the note. Jennifer read it, figuring that since the other three with her had the collective IQ of a houseplant, they must have been waiting for her to take charge. It was something she was very used to doing.

So after deciding to find out just what the hell was going on, she took the radio away from Mark and looked it over for a moment to figure out how to turn it on. "Well, just help yourself," Jim told her as she worked on the radio.

"What?" she replied. "Someone has to be in charge," she told them.

"And you just voted yourself in?" he replied with a fair amount of sarcasm.

"You have someone else in mind?"

"Yeah, me!" Paco told the group. "I'm not taking orders from no woman."

"How very enlightened of you," she said sweetly, her own voice dripping with sarcasm. Paco might not have fully gotten the meaning of everything she had just said, but he knew when he was being insulted and promptly pulled his Glock out of his pants with ever intention of shooting this bitch right on the spot.

While Jim had been amused for a moment at their conversation, he couldn't stand by and watch Miss Ryan get her brains blown out. So he reached out and smacked the gun to the side before Paco could get a shot off.

"That's enough!" he barked. "In case the rest of you hadn't noticed, we're alone out here. Someone, for some reason, has gone to a lot of trouble to bring us here, and I don't think it's for a vacation. So why don't we all just get a grip for a moment."

While still staring daggers at them all, Paco was getting himself under control. Jim looked over at Jennifer and saw that she looked scared. Good, he thought. Maybe a good scare would keep her from doing anything so fucking stupid again. Taking the radio back from Jennifer, who released it with a fight, he switched it on.

"Is there anyone listening?" he said into the radio, not exactly sure what to expect. The response was immediate, as if whoever it was had been watching and knew exactly what they were doing.

"Hello, how good of you to call," a male voice replied. "I was beginning to wonder."

"What do you want with us?" Jim asked, continuing to speak for all of them.

"Why, the four of you are going to be my special guests. You are now on an island approximately five miles off the coast. The three original members and you now, as well, Mr. Stillman, have been selected to take part in a very special undertaking."

"And what's that?" Jim asked, though he would have bet just about anything he wasn't going to like the answer, and he would have been right.

"Survival." The group traded a disbelieving look at that news.

"If any of the four of you can survive for the next 48 hours, you will be released and one million dollars will be transferred into a numbered Cayman Islands account which you will have access to."

"What will keep us from just going to the cops?" Jim asked, wondering what the catch was. "You just can't kidnap people, hunt them, and try to kill them without the cops wondering just what the hell is going on."

"What would you tell them, Mr. Stillman?" the voice asked reasonably. "You don't know where you are or how you got here, and if you survive, you won't know how you're going to leave either. Nor do you know who I am. In fact, you really don't know very much of interest to anyone. But let's assume you're right, Mr. Stillman. Let's say the police are interested and start to investigate. Well, in that event, they won't find me, but what they will find is that Mr. Ramirez is suspected in several unsolved murders not to mention drug possession and distribution."

Whoever it was on the other end of that radio almost sounded to Jim like they were reading from a script. Jim wondered for a second if the guy actually was.

"Mr. Anderson isn't as colorful as Mr. Ramirez; he's only a distributer of child pornography on the Internet."

This drew some sick looks from the group. Mark just blushed at getting caught and shrugged; after all what could he say?

"Ms. Ryan, on the other hand, is guilty of embezzlement from her company to the tune of just under two million dollars." Jennifer couldn't believe what she was hearing. Furiously snatching the radio away from the janitor, she looked it over for a second and mashed down on the transmit button.

"That's not true!" she shouted into little radio. "I'm the most honest person in that damn place!"

"That's not what the police will find, I assure you, Miss Ryan," the voice told her calmly.

"Now, Mr. Stillman, since you're the mystery guest, I don't have anything on you yet, but I'm sure that, should you survive, we can come to some kind of understanding."

"I'm sure," Jim replied mockingly after retrieving the radio.

"Excellent," the voice replied, either missing or ignoring Jim's tone. "Now, the rules are simple. Each of you has a pack, and in each one is the exact same equipment: food, water, a change of clothes into something a little more appropriate, a first-aid kit, and a weapon. After all, what fun is it to hunt a defenseless animal, eh? Each of you also has a watch with a count down feature that has been set for 50 hours. I suggest you each get one," the voice said, then fell silent.

Sharing a group shrug, each of them rummaged through a pack till they had found their own watch.

"Are you ready?" the voice called back without being prompted, convincing Jim even more that the owner of the voice was probably watching them through a rifle's scope at this very moment. That realization didn't exactly cause his blood pressure to go down.

"We're ready," Jim replied to him anyway.

"Good. Now I am giving each of you a two-hour head start. You may do whatever you wish in that time, but at the end of it, the hunt will begin and continue until the allotted time has run out or you are all dead. Are there any questions?"

The four of them looked at each other with much the same expression of bewilderment.

Taking their lack of response as a negative the voice on the radio said. "Good. Now your two hours will start on my mark. Ready..... Ready...... Now!" Jim along with the others pushed the button on their watches that activated the countdown.

After that, he couldn't help but just stand there for a moment and watch the seconds tick by, not really sure how to feel or even think about it; it was just too surreal. Meanwhile, whoever it was who was doing this had come back on the radio.

"I wish each of you good luck, and I'll be seeing you in a few hours." With that, the radio went silent in his hand. Dropping the now useless radio to the ground, Jim looked his unlikely partners over.

Mark, for one, looked fairly lost about everything. But Paco looked like he was just sizing things up for a moment before he started to dig into the pile of equipment they had unpacked; after finding his, he grabbed it and moved to take off.

"Where are you going?" Mark asked him.

"I'm getting the hell out of here," was the gangsters no-nonsense reply. That sounded like reasonable advice to Jim, so he grabbed his pack and started looking for his own clothes.

While rummaging around, Jim noticed that Jennifer's reaction was the strangest; she did look scared, which he would expect, but there was something else there as well. It took him a moment before he realized what it was: It was recognition. The executive knew something about whoever this sicko was; Jim was certain of that. Promptly deciding that it was in his own best interest to know everything she knew, he questioned her about it. "What do you know?" Jim asked suddenly, catching her by surprise.

"About what?" she answered.

"About whoever is holding us here?" Both Paco and Mark stopped what they were doing and traded an unknowing look; since neither of them had seen what Jim had, they had no reason to suspect anything.

"What makes you think I know anything?"

"Because it's written all over your face. When we were talking to the guy on the radio, you recognized his voice, didn't you?" Jim said, guessing what was going on.

"What!" Mark said shocked. "You know this guy?"

Looking at each of them, Jennifer decided not to lie to her fellow travelers; after all, she was very likely going to need their help if she was going to make it out of here alive. "I think I recognized the voice," she told them, finally admitting defeat.

"Who is it?" Jim asked.

Looking him in the eye, Jennifer replied, "You know him too."

"I do?" he replied, shocked, not understanding what she was talking about.

"Yes, you work for him the same as I do. It's Eli Walsh." That information startled Jim. Everyone in the company knew the story of Eli Walsh, the poor kid who went to collage after Vietnam and started his own little electronics company and was now one of the richest men in the world.

"According to the rumor mill," Jim said to her, almost feeling the pieces fall into place in his mind, "Walsh is supposed to be some kind of big game hunter."

"Yes, he was. He told me once that it was the only thing after Vietnam that made him feel alive."

"So what are we doing here?" Paco asked.

"Yeah, if he wants to go shoot a rhino or something, more power to him. Why can't he leave us alone?" Mark added.

"From what I heard," Jennifer told them, continuing as if she hadn't been interrupted, "he couldn't go big game hunting anymore, because of the new restrictions on endangered species or something like that. He even offered to buy and run a game preserve at his own expense, but no one would go for it. After that, we all thought that he'd given up, maybe even gone into semi-retirement, since he was gone from the office so much."

Looking around at the situation they were in, she said, "But it seems that he went and found something else to hunt."

"Yeah, and there's plenty of people out there for him to shoot at," Paco commented sourly to the group.

Thinking over what Jennifer had said, Jim spoke up. "Looking at how well he has this organized, it would seem that he's done it quite a few times."

"But why us?" Mark asked.

"I'm not sure," Jim told them honestly. He'd thought about that a lot in the last few minutes, and was just starting to wrap his brain around what was happening.

"With the exception of Jennifer here," he said getting a kick out of seeing her bristle at his causal use of her first name, "it would seem that the two of you were chosen because you wouldn't be missed by anyone, at least not for a while."

"We're nobody special, there's lots of people out there just like us," Mark said, continuing Jim's thought out loud. "Speak for yourself," Paco told the group before going on, "but that idea doesn't fit for Miss Hot Pants here," he said, turning to Jennifer.

Jim didn't like what he'd said, but he had to admit that the gangbanger had a point.

"He's right; you are going to be missed, and soon too." Why would Walsh risk grabbing someone from his own company, Jim wondered?

"He grabbed two people," Mark reminded him.

"Yeah, that's true, but like I said, I think that I'm here by accident," Jim told him.

"That may be true or it may not be, but it still leaves the question of just what she's up to," Paco said to them, clearly not buying everything he was hearing.

"What do you mean?" Jennifer replied, getting worried with the turn this conversation had taken.

"Maybe you're in on it with him. Maybe your idea of a hot date is watching your boyfriend shoot a bunch of people that you've never even met." Jennifer covered her surprise at being accused with an icy glare she directed back at her accuser.

Jim thought over what Paco had said. To be honest, he hadn't considered it before. But after a moment, he shook his head. He'd been there when she'd been grabbed. If that had been staged for some bizarre reason, it sure had been an elaborate ploy.

No, he didn't think that she was in on it, but the question still remained. Why was she here? After all, she didn't seem to fit the obvious pattern of them being mostly anonymous people -- the sort that could disappear and, other than a cursory police search if they were lucky, not much would happen. Even he slid right into that category, Jim knew, if he wanted to be honest with himself. After watching her for a moment, though, Jim began to suspect that she at least suspected why she was here and decided that now was the time to get the truth out of her. So Jim just asked her straight up. "Are you going to tell us what you know?"

Jennifer looked up at him in surprise once again. She hadn't thought that her thoughts had been that obvious. But this guy who should've had a mop in his hands seemed to be able to look right through her; that made him dangerous to her.

Thinking furiously for a moment before she answered them, she finally said, "I think I'm here because I turned Eli Walsh down for a date."

Of all the things Jim expected her to say, that wasn't one of them. Glancing at the others, Jim could see that they were as surprised as he was. "You mean that this guy wants to kill you because you didn't want to go out with him?"

"That's about the size of it."

"Oh come on!" Paco said disbelievingly. "You've got to be kidding."

Jennifer wished to God that she was. "It started during a trip to Japan a couple of years ago. We had been hard at it for days working on a new contract, when he started asking me about my personal life and things like that. When he finally asked me out, it surprised me too much at first to say anything. But finally I had to tell him no." Elaborating, she went on, "I've risen to the level of V.P. through hard work and dedication. I'm not one of those women you hear about who sleeps their way to the top, and I wasn't about to change now. The problem with that idea was that Eli Walsh doesn't like the word no very much. At first, Walsh tried to change my mind with gifts, flowers; he offered to take me on trips to anywhere I wanted to go -- anything and everything, but I'd made up my mind. When he finally got the message, he became extremely angry and told me that I'd regret my decision."

"Why didn't he just fire you?" Mark asked. "Why all this?" Jennifer shook her head. "If he fired me, he knew that I could sue on the grounds of sexual harassment."

"But if you just disappeared, his hands would be clean," Jim finished for her.

"That's right."

Checking his watch, Mark asked, "I hate to point this out, but the clock is running here. What are we going to do?"

Quickly making up his mind, Jim told them, "I don't know about the rest of you, but I think that I'm going to have some more to eat." Promptly getting himself another plate, he looked over what was left of the food that had been left for them and started to fill it up.

"You're going to eat now?" Mark asked him, not believing what he was seeing.

"You bet," Jim replied, his voice full of practicality. "This is going to be the last hot meal we could be having for the next few days, so we might as well enjoy it."

The rest of the group couldn't believe it. This guy was going to eat at a time like this. Paco watched in amazement as the crazy gringo had himself another plate full of food. With time running out on them, Paco decided that he'd waited long enough to put some distance between himself and the rest of these suckers, so hoisting his pack over his shoulder and making sure that Mr. 9mm was safe in his belt, he picked a direction and started walking.

"You still going?" Mark asked him.

"Damn straight," Paco replied. "That crazy bastard only gave us a two-hour head start, and I'm not going to waste any more of it sitting around here."

Mark hadn't really wanted to wait either, but Jim seemed to know what he was doing, at least he'd thought so, till the guy started calmly eating a second round of breakfast without a seeming care in the world.

Making his decision, Mark told Paco to wait for him. "You coming," he asked the hot lady executive. Being some kind of corporate big shot, she'd need them, he figured, to protect her.

Jennifer hesitated. Like the others, she didn't want to wait around here, but she really didn't want to wander off into the woods surrounding their small clearing with two men she'd never seen before either. Pragmatically deciding that the devil you knew is better than the devil you don't, she made her choice. "No, I'm staying here."

Mark wanted to argue with her, but seeing Paco already turning away, he didn't have time. He simply told her good luck and, after getting a nod in return, headed off into the trees and was quickly lost from view.

Since Jennifer didn't really feel like eating anything, she spent the time she had to wait looking through the stuff in her pack.

After filling his plate, Jim sat down and tried to get comfortable on the still-cold ground. He had indeed wanted to have something else to eat before he left the clearing, since he sincerely doubted he'd be back, but he also wanted to take a moment to think about what he wanted to do.

Assuming that it was really Walsh who had brought them here, Jim concluded that the older man could never let them go. Walsh couldn't take the chance that Jennifer would rat him out, even if she survived the next couple of days. So Jim decided he could just forget about trying to hide for a couple of days and then coming out for the ride back to Seattle from wherever they were. That, of course, brought up another thought. Both from the weather and the terrain, he figured that they weren't too far from home. Could they be on one of the islands in Puget Sound?