Lost Girls Read online

  ALSO BY GEORGE D. SHUMAN

  LAST BREATH

  18 SECONDS

  Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by George Shuman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shuman, George D., 1952–

  Lost girls: a Sherry Moore novel/George D. Shuman.

  p. cm.

  1. Human trafficking—Fiction. 2. Psychics—Fiction. 3. Blind women—Fiction. 4. Caribbean Area—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.H86L67 2008

  813'.6—dc22 2008006957

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8048-5

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-8048-4

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  This book is dedicated to Elizabeth M. Shuman,

  a most incredibly gifted woman.

  Your boundless energy, intelligence, compassion, and

  creativity have touched far more people than you may

  ever know. You are truly one of God’s home runs.

  Thank you, Mom, for whatever fraction of yourself

  was passed on to me.

  FOREWORD

  EXCERPTS FROM

  Trafficking in Women and Children:

  The U.S. and International Response

  Updated March 26, 2004

  Congressional Research Service

  Francis T. Miko

  Specialist in International Relations

  Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division

  Traffickers acquire their victims in a number of ways. Sometimes women are kidnapped outright in one country and taken forcibly to another. In other cases, victims are lured with phony job offers. Traffickers entice victims to migrate voluntarily with false promises of well-paying jobs in foreign countries as au pairs, models, dancers, domestic workers, etc. Traffickers advertise these “jobs” as well as marriage opportunities abroad in local newspapers…. The largest numbers of victims trafficked annually from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe come from Russia and Ukraine.

  While there is no single victim stereotype, a majority of trafficked women are under the age of twenty-five, with many in their mid-to late teens. The fear of infection with HIV and AIDS among sex tourism customers has driven traffickers to recruit younger women and girls, some as young as seven, erroneously perceived by customers as being too young to have been infected.

  Trafficking victims are often subjected to cruel mental and physical abuse in order to keep them in servitude, including beating, rape, starvation, forced drug use, confinement, and seclusion. Once victims are brought into destination countries, their passports are often confiscated. Victims are forced to have sex, often unprotected, with large numbers of partners, and to work unsustainably long hours. Many victims suffer mental breakdowns and are exposed to sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV and AIDS. They are often denied medical care and those who become ill are sometimes even killed.

  The presence of sex tourists from Europe, North America, and Australia (in Latin America and the Caribbean) has significantly contributed to the trafficking of women and children. A growing number of sex tourists are going to Latin America, partly as a result of recent restrictions placed on sex tourism in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and other Asian countries. Favored sex tourism destinations are Brazil, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, Trinidad, and Tobago. Brazil has one of the worst child prostitution problems in the world.

  1

  DENALI, ALASKA

  Raw winds hailed lacerating ice, stinging earlobes and ruddy cheeks beneath the climbers’ black snow goggles. The storm had an under-growl that suggested it was both alive and malevolent.

  It came out of nowhere as polar storms do, the clockwise rotation of Pacific highs meeting counterclockwise Siberian lows, fusing to form a cyclone in ancient cauldrons of granite and glacier. Mountains the size of Denali virtually produce their own weather.

  Allison Metcalf descended the headwall below the summit clipped to a fixed line, testing the ice with crampons on the toes of her boots. The well-trod western approach was quickly vanishing under their feet, transmuting into an alien environment of wind-sculpted ice. She took another step and then another, trying to quell the rise of panic. Only three hours ago they had stood on top of the Western Hemisphere. Now they were in a race for their lives to get beneath it.

  The spatial world was no more. There were no more ups and downs, no rights or lefts. One could reach out an arm and not see the glove beyond the wrist. If any of the climbers were to unclip from the fixed line, even for a moment, it was doubtful they would find it again; more likely they would wander off the side of the mountain or fall into one of the hundreds of bottomless crevices of prehistoric ice.

  “You okay?” Sergio’s voice caught faintly on the wind. He was below her, but still close, only a dozen feet away. Was he straggling to look out for her?

  “Okay,” she yelled, but the words evaporated with a blast of chilled air. She tugged gently on the line tethered between them and a moment later she felt his acknowledgment. It felt good, this tangible connection to another human being.

  If they could at least descend to high camp at 17,000 feet, they might survive the night in the uppermost cradle of the summit. The poor buggers above Archdeacon’s Tower had yet to negotiate an exposed knife-edged ridge. They would not be so lucky, would not last an hour when the sun dropped below the horizon and windchills plummeted below minus sixty degrees. Allison could not imagine a night of terror in subzero hurricane winds, tethered to four other people in the open, any of whom might panic and make an error fatal for all of them.

  Allison had met only two of the other climbers from the teams still up at the summit, both of them women from British Columbia. They’d shared stories of climbs in the Canadian Rockies and a stove for soup this morning as the sun began to rise. One of them was also named Allison. They’d laughed about the chances of that, but now she found that other woman’s face etched upon her mind, could not dispel it.

  Suddenly Allison’s feet went out from under her and she began to backslide, frantically grabbing for the ice ax on her belt. Just before she went head over heels, she wielded the ax two-handed, driving its pick into the side of the mountain to break her fall. She hung there a moment on her side, both arms extended, hanging on to the handle, but then the ax let loose and she began to spiral away, chin raking the ice-sheathed granite until her boots struck something solid.

  She tried to blink away the snow that covered her eyes, to see through the hail of white wind, and there was Sergio’s purple snowsuit. He wrapped his arms around her waist and put his face to hers and it was cold.

  “You okay?”

  She tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. Her mouth was filling with warm blood, her eyes welling with tears.

  He helped her to stand, neither able to see the other’s expression through the dark lenses of their goggles. She put a gloved hand over his heart and held it there and he nodded. Then he gave her his ice ax, turned and pointed down and grabbed the line, descending into the whiteout. Allison nodded as he disappeared. There was no time to reflect.
/>   But Allison did reflect. She had spent last night in Sergio’s sleeping bag. It was the first and only time since they had met—eight days before in the village of Talkeetna, where solo climbers came to buddy up with summiting teams—that he had even spoken more than a dozen words to her. Allison thought him arrogant at first, one of those handsome playboy types with infinite time and money on his hands. She had even goaded him about it on the mountain, trying to provoke a reaction until in an unguarded moment in their tent she saw an unmistakable look of despair on his face. It was then she realized there was more to Sergio than met the eye. He hadn’t come to Denali to conquer the mountain. He had come here to run away. But from what—a lost love, a failed marriage, some deep incomprehensible disappointment in his life?

  They never got to talk about it and perhaps, she thought, they never would.

  She remembered his lips pressed to the side of her neck in the cocoon of that sleeping bag last night. He had actually cried after they made love. He did not want to leave the mountain, he’d told her. His warm tears had been wet on her neck; he’d told her he did not want to return to who he was.

  DENALI NATIONAL PARK

  FIVE DAYS LATER

  Harsh sunlight glinted off the big blades of the HH-60 Pave Hawk, creating strobe-like effects inside the helicopter’s cargo bay. Captain Metcalf, sitting opposite Sherry Moore, shielded his eyes from the rapid-fire bars of white light deflecting off her snow goggles.

  “Glaciers.” He leaned toward the edge of her helmet. “We’re almost there.”

  Sherry nodded, her stomach queasy as the craft began to tilt on its side, darting toward the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. Sherry was no stranger to helicopters. She’d spent much of her life being whisked from one place to another, knew the crew seats of the big corporate Bells and Hueys and Sikorskys, even the fleet of luxury VH-3Ds designated Marine One when the president of the United States was on board. But the Pave Hawk was like nothing she had experienced before; it was the difference between riding a flea and a bumblebee.

  “Is it clear? The summit?” she asked.

  “Blue skies. Hard to take your eyes away,” Metcalf said absently. She felt him looking at her just then, knowing he was regretting the offhanded reference to sight.

  Her own images of the mountain were formed from books she’d listened to on tape or disk, of blinding white snow and black granite walls, of ice-blue glaciers and bottomless crevices.

  “I can imagine,” she said softly.

  The Alaskans called the mountain by its Indian name, Denali, meaning “the great one,” though U.S. geological maps still call it Mount McKinley. It towered four miles above five glaciers, with more vertical face than Mount Everest, high enough to be seen from Anchorage, a hundred and thirty miles away, on a good day.

  There were no climbers on the summit of Denali today. No colorful string of snowsuits negotiating the Denali pass or the notorious ridge or the turn called Windy Corner.

  All of the climbers known to have survived the storm had been found below 14,000 feet, near basin camp, where National Guard Chinooks were evacuating them as fast as they could assemble.

  Above 14,000 feet, conditions were simply indescribable, or, as one Denali ranger told reporters, a wasteland of flash-frozen cornices. Of valleys pitted with hidden fissures wide enough to swallow rescue teams or helicopters.

  The storm was the result of a low-pressure system that had inserted itself on the mountain last Sunday, generating what was known as a polar cyclone. The system laid upon Denali for five days, producing a dozen feet of new snow in gusts of wind exceeding 100 miles per hour. The storm virtually resculpted the upper third of the mountain.

  Now it was Friday and twelve people were still missing above basin camp. One expedition of four had summited the morning of the storm and was making their way back to high camp when the storm hit. Their last FRS radio transmission before the communications system went down due to the storm was from the Denali pass, 800 feet above high camp. They had every chance of making it then, but five days later they could not be reached, and it was impossible to know where they had finally dug in to weather the storm. It was also unlikely their supplies had been sufficient to sustain them.

  Other expeditions, one from Thailand and one from British Columbia, were only nearing the summit when the storm suddenly developed. Their last reports indicated they were going forward, only a few hundred feet to the top, before they would turn around.

  The cyclone hadn’t been predicted, but that was the nature of Denali. The sheer mass of the mountain created its own weather. Any beautiful morning could end with an afternoon storm and a climbing disaster.

  Meteorologists, as always, wasted no time getting their warning out, but those on the upper third of the mountain needed days, not hours to make their descent, and that was under optimal conditions. Anyone above basin camp last Friday was there to stay.

  From the television on board the private jet taking Sherry to Alaska, Sherry learned there was little hope for climbers above 16,000 feet. Teams attempting the summit would have cached much of their equipment and food below, leaving them light for the final two-day ascent to the top of the mountain. Which meant that time was their greatest enemy. Even if they managed to reach high camp, there would be little food and fuel for heat, certainly not five days’ worth.

  The park rangers set up a triage area in the permanent medical station on basin camp, doctors from Anchorage and Fairbanks dividing their attention between cases of frostbite and acute mountain sickness. There was no small number of broken bones too, and a tent was set aside for bodies retrieved from a rescue in the gully below the vertical headwall under Camp 6. Three had fallen to their deaths.

  A fourth body, photographed by search planes, was dangling off that headwall by a line wrapped around his boot. He was hanging just below the 16,000-foot mark and his jacket, once bright purple, showed faint lavender under a sheath of heavy ice. Perhaps a carabiner or ascender broke, releasing him to the gale-force winds. Perhaps the winds themselves upended him and tangled the rope around his boot? Whatever the case, exposed to the elements as he was, he managed to make a signal mark with luminescent paint on the granite wall. The mark appeared to look like an arrow pointing upward with a circle on top. He was obviously trying to leave a message. To show rescuers there were survivors above the ledge. By altitude, he could only have been one of the team of four who had radioed they were trying to reach high camp the day the storm set in on the summit of Denali. Apparently they had descended to Camp 6 over the next two days, where they would have had to dig out a snow cave, but where above the ledge and under all that new snow should the rescuers look? Any original sign of a cave would have disappeared an hour after it was built, and finding it now, under new snow, was fairly impossible.

  A spokesperson for the National Park Service announced they would not be committing teams to a random search above basin camp. It would pose too great a risk for the people and equipment it would take to get them there. More than a hundred people were on Denali when it hit, all but twelve having had time to descend to the ranger station at basin camp, or they were already below it. But even this group suffered countless casualties.

  Landing zones above basin camp could no longer be presumed safe; it was late in the climbing season and glaciers were beginning to fracture, forming bottomless crevices, some as wide as a house. New snow above them presented the constant threat of avalanche and last, but hardly least, another storm was forming off the Bering Strait that would be upon them by midnight, obliterating the mountain in yet another whiteout. Rescue teams made it clear they would make no attempt to search the upper third of the mountain without clear evidence of life. The endeavor was not only risky but would divert badly needed personnel and helicopters already committed to evacuating known survivors. As for the body hanging from the ridge, his team was probably already dead. The marking he had made on the side of the mountain was not a sign of life, they reminded. It was
only a sign, and how many days old?

  It was all a little hard to digest, Sherry thought. She’d been following news of the disaster on Denali throughout the week. There was a sad recap of the story every evening as the storm prevented rescuers from getting to the mountain. But a mountain in Alaska was far removed in time and place from her living room in Philadelphia. She could not imagine a relationship to it.

  Then, this morning, Garland Brigham, her neighbor and best friend, knocked on her door. It was six A.M. He had been awakened by a call from Washington state senator Metcalf. The senator’s only daughter, Allison, had been with the team of four believed to have survived the first day of the storm.

  There had been a break in the weather. Rescuers were gearing up to reach the survivors. Metcalf wanted to know if Brigham’s famous friend would fly to the mountain and attempt to learn if there had been any radio contact between the survivors and his daughter’s team before the communications systems went down. Sherry, he said, would be given access to the bodies of the fallen climbers. Could any of them have seen his daughter descending when the storm hit? He was grabbing at straws, Brigham said, and the senator well knew it. Still, it was only two A.M. in Alaska. She could be on Denali before noon if she left right away.

  Sherry Moore would do anything for Garland Brigham, even if only to make a demonstration of compassion. By 6:30 A.M. she was in a military police car speeding for Philadelphia International. At 6:50 she climbed the carpeted stairs of a luxury Gulf-stream jet and was handed a mug of coffee. She was the only passenger flying at .85 mach across the country.

  She knew from what Brigham had told her that the rescuers had daylight in their favor. The Alaskan sun wouldn’t set until midnight, providing nineteen hours of light. She also knew that the senator’s son, U.S. Navy SEAL captain Brian Metcalf, would be meeting her in Anchorage, where she would transfer to a privately contracted helicopter from Washington State that would take them to Denali National Park and basin camp.