Diane Jenkins, thank God, told him that a ten-year-old running a blowtorch was not happening, and over his protests she took it from him. When she’d been kidnapped, she’d had her prescription sunglasses around her neck. While not a welding mask, they’d been enough to let her work without going blind.
“You should have seen her, Dad,” Ali said. “She was scared, but once she got it lit, she started cutting like she’d done it all her life. Bottom hinge to top.”
When the top hinge broke free, she turned the torch on the gaps between the holes they’d drilled around the handle and lock. Just as the gas tank was starting to lose pressure, she completed the circle, and Ali hit the area with the hammer.
After fifteen blows, it fell out the other side, and the door dropped after it with a booming clang. In the hall beyond, they spotted the ladder coming out of the ceiling, went to it, and felt the downdraft.
Using the headlamps, they climbed and stumbled around inside Rivers’s doomsday bunker before reaching the roof and finding the same winch cable and rope Sampson and I had used to escape the anthill nearly two weeks before.
Mrs. Jenkins had balked at the idea of rappelling and told Ali she would wait for him to come back with help. He convinced her that M had to be using the rope to get in and out of the bunker and that they should get away from it as fast as possible.
“It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever done in my life, but he just kept talking me through it,” Mrs. Jenkins said.
When they were both at the bottom, they heard a vehicle and turned off their headlamps. Then they saw headlights up near a house and thought it was M returning for them.
They took off running west, crossing the meadow toward the woods. Having no idea where they were, they kept going once they reached the trees and could turn on their headlamps. They walked for an hour and a half and never crossed a road.
The forest got thicker, and the ground started to climb. Though they did not know it at the time, they were well inside Shenandoah National Park when they decided to stop and wait for daylight.
But then they heard our helicopter fly overhead and land in the meadow back toward the anthill. They heard sirens coming a few minutes later.
“We figured that was good, sirens,” Ali said. “So we started back in that direction, except once the sirens died, we couldn’t tell exactly where they’d come from.”
“That’s when the headlamps started to dim and we walked off the side of a cliff,” Mrs. Jenkins said.
I pulled back. “What?”
“Or tumbled down it,” she said. “I guess it was more like a ravine.”
“It was steep,” Ali said. “I sort of remember that.”
Mrs. Jenkins said she hit rocks and boulders in the bottom of the ravine. She felt her arm break and her lower calf smash.
Ali didn’t remember hitting the rock but he’d blacked out for a time.
“I got a new battery into my headlamp and found him,” she said. “There was a lot of blood, but he came around.”
Then it started to rain and our helicopter flew back over them.
“It went almost over our heads,” she said. “We were both yelling, but no one could hear anything.”
I wanted to say that I’d thought I’d heard Ali’s voice, which was impossible. I decided to keep that for later, between me and Ali.
Mrs. Jenkins said they had to keep moving or they’d die of hypothermia.
“Between us we had three legs,” she said.
“And one and a half heads,” Ali said, and he sniggered.
She laughed. “No, you were three-quarters of a head at least.”
They hobbled through the woods, relying on the headlamp until the rain stopped and dawn arrived.
“It got light,” she said. “And there was this rock wall, and on the other side of it, there was a path through the woods, and then the dirt road was just there.”
They hadn’t walked three hundred yards down that road when Dwight Rivers came driving by in his camper truck, heading to the hardware store to get new locks for his anthill.
“He stop right away?” I asked.
“He drove way past us, even when we were waving at him,”
Mrs. Jenkins said. “But then he hit the brakes hard and came fast in reverse.”
My son spoke up. “He said, ‘Are you Ali Cross?’ I said I was. And Mrs. Jenkins told him who she was and asked could we use his phone. He said he gave up cell phones in protest of something, I don’t know. Then he told us to get in the back of the camper, warm up, and sleep a little, and he’d drive us all the way home.”
“End of story,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “Your son is my hero, Dr. Cross.”
“Mine too, Mrs. J.,” I said.
Ali beamed. “When can the hero go home and have ice cream?”
“The doctor will decide about home, but I have a feeling Nana Mama might bring you two or three different kinds when she visits you later on.”
My son looked at Diane Jenkins in a way that spoke of the deep bond they’d formed in captivity. “Do you want to meet the real hashtag-crazy-good-stuff-my-great-grandma-says and eat ice cream?”
She laughed, glanced at me, then said, “I would, Ali. Very much.”
Chapter 110
Eleven weeks later
Jannie looked like her old self when she came bouncing out of the players’ tunnel and onto the track at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
We were all there, even my older son, Damon, who was out on summer break from college. We all jumped to our feet and clapped and whistled for her.
Ali still had a long, livid scar on his scalp, but other than a problem staying asleep and a few harsh mood swings, he seemed back to himself. The stands in the shade were crowded, but we didn’t care. We were all together and giving our girl love on the second day of a USATF invitational meet for high-schoolers.
Ted McDonald, the independent coach who’d first taken an interest in Jannie, described the series of four meets as similar to football combines, where scouts are looking for pros. In this case, the scouts were NCAA Division I coaches, at least fifteen of them, by my count.
Several of the coaches had visited our home already, and we’d heard from most of the rest by telephone or letter sometime in the past year. Though the coaches were there to watch all of the nearly two hundred athletes attending the meet, it was no secret there were lots of eyes on Jannie.
So far, she’d handled the pressure with relative ease. It helped that Coach McDonald had flown out from Texas for the event.
McDonald was there when she qualified for the finals in the four-hundred, her best event, and just missed a slot in the eight-hundred. She’d also competed in javelin for the first time and took eighteenth of twenty-five in the field, which was not bad, considering.
Jannie ignored the college coaches as she jogged past them, then blew kisses at us and grinned like she was having the most fun ever.
“It’s good to see her so relaxed again,” Nana Mama said. “And strong.”
“Thanks to sleep, vitamins, your good food, and the weight training.”
“And Coach McDonald,” I said, seeing him out on the infield, sandy hair, long and lean, talking with one of the officials. “I don’t know how we would have handled all this without him.”
“I like him too,” Bree said, standing. “A lot. He keeps her grounded.”
She went to get us drinks. Damon and Ali walked down by the fence to talk with Jannie before the long jump.
My grandmother started reading her paperback, and I was left with my thoughts.
Despite a massive regional manhunt and a nationwide alert with multiple photographs and video clips of him, the man we knew as M had not surfaced.