Will You Love Me 'Til I Die? Ch. 16

We all wrapped our hands in plastic bags and began searching the bodies and the other van once we got the girls out. We found four cell phones in the van. All were phones you could buy at a kiosk for temporary use, burners Vitesha called them. The girls had backpacks and we found them behind the front seats. Their cell phones had been taken apart completely with the chip, the battery and the case all thrown into a river. One of the girls said she heard the men talking about it when they stopped to do it. David carefully looked at the information on the burners and deleted the pictures they had taken of the girls. Luckily they had not called anybody in the last hour nor had they received any calls.

I asked Vitesha, "Why aren't we calling the police?"

"Prem, the tattoo on their arms and the Arabic writing are badges for membership in a very dangerous terrorist organization. I was shown a lot of these when I was in Iraq. When I saw it at the gas station I knew we were dealing with serious motherfuckers. Kidnapping girls to be sold as sex slaves is one of the ways they train new recruits to become familiar with the territory they are currently working in. These organizations have contacts and infiltrators in the police."

"Calling the cops would be like calling some of the numbers in those phones and just telling these bastards to come get us. We can't do anything to get identified with what happened here today. That's why I didn't shoot the driver. A gunshot wound means somebody else was involved. Nobody who can identify us can be left alive. We're going to push this van over the side of the mountain. Hopefully their head wounds will look like they happened in a wreck. With any luck, when the cops do investigate this they'll just put it down as an accident and not look any further into it."

Vitesha walked stealthily toward the edge of the mountain to see what was down below. She came back and said she'd need to move the van a little before we put the bad guys back in it so it would roll off at the best point to go over. She got in and repositioned it to aim straight at the trajectory she wanted it to take.

We quickly put the bodies in the front seats and put the cell phones back in the console where we found them. She took the gun she had picked up and wiped it carefully to get her fingerprints off it then put it in the glove compartment. She walked over to the other side of the road and retrieved the gun the second one had thrown down and brought it back and put it in the center console.

"Don't put the seatbelts on them. Make it look like they were too macho to use them. This will let them bounce around in the vehicle a lot more so the head wounds look more believable. With any luck they'll both go through the windshield."

With her hand still wrapped in the plastic bag she reached over and started the engine. Then took a final look around to see if we'd missed anything and reached for the gearshift lever and pulled it back into drive. She jumped back and slammed the door as the van rolled forward and over the edge. "Stay here, I'm going to go see where it landed." She crept to the edge of the drop off and looked over. "Perfect. It went right into some thick trees without breaking any big limbs. It's completely covered. You can't see anything from here. It's got to be at least four hundred feet down."

She went over to the other side of the road and got a branch with some leaves still on it then came back and brushed over where she had walked to the edge and the tire tracks of the van just in case somebody saw them and got to snooping around. They'd probably get washed away in the first rain but she was leaving nothing to chance.

Finally we looked around to make sure nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Satisfied that everything appeared to be OK we cut the straps on the girls' wrists and helped them get into our van. Alysse told them again not to remove the blindfolds for their own protection and helped them fasten their seatbelts. She then asked them where they wanted to be taken.

They had all been snatched within a few miles of each other back toward Zurich. We drove back down the mountain thanking the stars that nobody had come along while this incident was taking place. As we got to where each of them wanted to be let out Suvarna put a thousand Swiss Francs in each girl's pocket and told Alysse to tell them it was for a new phone and anything else they needed to put this behind them.

She told them to go to a salon and have their hair colored and restyled just in case their pictures got sent to somebody. Then she told each one to leave the blindfold on for at least a minute so we could drive away and under no circumstances were they to ever tell anybody about what happened to them even if the police came.

As we pulled away from where we dropped the last girl I looked at the time. It had only been a little over an hour and a half since we pulled into the plaza to get gas. It suddenly dawned on me what had really happened. While it was happening it had all seemed like a TV show. Now I realized Vitesha had saved all our lives. They might have kept Janelle and Genevieve but the rest of us would have been the ones going over the side of the mountain; with or without bullet holes in us.

"Mitra what do you think about all this? Is Vitesha going to incur a heavy debt of Karma for killing those men?"

"Prem life is full of choices. If she had not acted, all nine of us would be dead now along with the three girls in the van who eventually would die from an overdose of heroin in a filthy little room when they were no longer capable of being whores sixteen hours a day. Vitesha did not intend to commit this action. She was defending herself and us. I congratulate her on her efficiency and her grace under pressure. We should all just put this little unpleasant episode out of our minds and go on as if nothing has happened."

We headed back toward Sargans then turned north and drove through most of Liechtenstein crossing into Austria to pick up the Arlberg Schnellstrasse east of Feldkirch. From there it was a pretty straight shot through magnificent alpine scenery to Innsbruck.