Missing by Darrell Maloney

before they started their mission, but would honor Frank’s request not to do it at or near the compound.
         The colonel chose the small lake where Hannah and Mark took little Markie fishing as their rendezvous point.
         The lake was accessible by a dusty service road which passed within a hundred yards of the lake.
         That was the road Sergeant Smith would lead them down.
         Weiss had placed one of his officers in charge of his operations center temporarily while he went to brief the search team, but was still in radio contact.
         It didn’t hurt his feelings to get out of the compound for a bit.
         The mood had been getting more and more somber by the minute.
         News he’d received earlier that one of the search teams was investigating a couple of warm flashes in the woods south of them turned out to be a false lead.
         The warm flashes represented a family on a two day hunting trip.
         It turned out the family had gotten lost as well, and was happy to see the Army chopper land in a large clearing not far from them. They were overjoyed when troops emerged out of the woods and into their small camp a few minutes later. And even more happy when the troops told them they were only a hundred yards west of a road that connected with a county highway.
         So the search team had done some wayward people a good deed.
         But they still hadn’t found Hilo One or its survivors.
         At the compound, the news hadn’t been taken well.
         Despite Karen’s warnings not to do so, Sami had let her hopes build that they’d found John and Hannah. Weiss could see the anguish on her young face when she learned that wasn’t the case.
         Sami reminded Weiss of his own daughter. His heart went out to her. And he never could stand to see a woman cry. So when there happened to be a lull in the action at his operations center, at the same time his team of volunteers was just a few miles away, he saw that a great opportunity presented itself.
         He’d get out of the ops center for a bit and give his volunteers a pep talk.
         Right on time, the three Army green buses appeared on the horizon, and Sergeant Smith pulled the Plymouth Fury onto the highway.
         Immediately, a voice came cracking over Smith’s radio. It was from the driver of the first bus.
         “I have you in sight, Smitty. Following your lead.”
         Smith led the convoy to the dirt service road which led more or less to the lake and turned north upon it.
         The road was rutted and rough, after eight years of periodic rains and absolutely no maintenance work. But at least it was presently dry. And the troops in the buses wouldn’t complain much about the jarring ride.
         They knew that after being rousted out of bed in the middle of the night and forced to endure a two hour bus ride to God-knows-where, they were almost at the end of the journey.
         And they were ready to get started.
         The search team consisted of all men.
         It wasn’t done that way by design. It just worked out that way. The first two barracks in the battalion the duty sergeants burst into happened to be men’s barracks. By the time they swept through the second one, they had their hundred “volunteers.”
         Had they needed more than a hundred, they’d have gone into the next building in the line, which was the only women’s barracks in the battalion. But as it was, they didn’t need to, so the women got to get a full night’s sleep.
         Rumors travel fast in the United States Army, and they are frequently false.
         A couple of the soldiers overheard two non-coms talking about a helicopter that had gone down in the area and spread the word that they were looking for a crash site and the helicopter’s survivors.
         That’s what all three buses of soldiers were anticipating when they received their inbrief at the