First, she needed a distraction.
She knew her time was limited, so without hesitating further, she rose from the rugs, screamed frantically and pointed out the open side of the tent. As the fighters all turned to look, she reached high and grabbed the lamp hanging from a tent pole near her. She flung it upside down into the circle of men. With the same forward motion, she lunged for the lamp on the ground that was closest to her, kicked it over, and saw the flame lick out to attach itself to the robe of one of the men.
The one who'd wanted to strip her.
Well, she could only pray that he'd be stripped.
There was no water out here on the dry Sinjar mountain range. They'd have to beat out the fire with their precious rugs.
As shots rang out, she fled into the darkness.
Chapter Two
Declan Moriarty, US Navy SEAL, watched in horror as the burka-clad woman rose from her pile of rugs and pointed straight at him and his men, who were lying prone on the cold ground, ranged in a semi-circle facing the open side of the ISIS tent. His four-man SEAL team had spent hours inching into position, waiting for these hajjis to settle down and sleep so they could attack.
He'd been pleased to positively identify the terrorist who was the target of their mission, one Mohammed Abdul Behaid, a high ranking ISIS fighter known for organizing and managing the system of enslaved Yazidi women and girls used as sex slaves. The original mission of Dec's team had been to get dropped closer to the city of Sinjar, where it was reported Behaid would be checking on one of his brothels. Then intel had reported that Behaid had been spotted with a small group in this isolated area. The decision had been made to drop the four SEALs as near as possible to the hajjis, and try to get Behaid immediately in this remote spot. Bird in the hand, so to speak. And less chance of trouble than in a more populated city.
Although Dec hadn't been told there was a woman with the terrorists, he hadn't expected her to be a problem. She was covered head to toe in one of those enormous burkas so all he could see were her eyes. Those eyes were unusual for a Muslim woman. Not the terror in them. That was normal. But the sheer determination he could see when the candlelight flickered onto her face surprised him. She was going to do something, although he couldn't imagine what.
Then she'd let loose a scream, the kind you never wanted to hear. It scorched Declan's ears. But it was the her finger pointing out of the ISIS tent that galvanized him. It was a true finger of doom, identifying them to their enemies.
And then the damn woman, not satisfied with blowing their cover, reached up like an avenging angel and knocked down the light hung on one of the tent poles. Since the light consisted of a burning candle in a metal, open-sided holder, the flame caught on the long tunic of one of the fighters, and began sizzling up the cloth. The man started to scream and beat at his clothes.
The ferocious woman kicked over one of the lights sitting on the floor of the tent, and that one also gnawed hungrily at the nearby fabric of one of the men sitting in the center of the tent. Dec thought that one might have used kerosene as a source of power, because the flames burst into a small inferno.
Unfortunately, some of the tangos who weren't in immediate danger from the fire, managed to keep their heads. They turned to the open side of the tent and begun firing indiscriminately.
Dec didn't have time to wonder how she'd spotted them. They'd been told to be ghosts on this assignment. As American military, they weren't allowed in Iraq and therefore, they couldn't be found here. That consideration had to outweigh all others.
He hated to retreat. No one became a SEAL who gave up when faced with obstacles. Even insurmountable obstacles. A SEAL team was a combat team. Designed for combat. Honed for combat. Experienced in combat.
Yet, above all else, above all the weaponry and physicality and yes, courage, required to proceed in the face of daunting odds, a SEAL was a thinking man. This was not a life or death situation where they had to accomplish their mission right now, even in the face of certain death. They could withdraw and proceed with their mission on a different day, with better odds.
They'd tried to take advantage of an opening which had appeared before them, but this woman, inexplicably, had managed to blow their cover.
These thoughts raced through his head in a second, as adrenaline flowed, and disaster loomed.
Dec gripped his M4 carbine more firmly, gave the signal to retreat, and slithered backwards, into the darkness, headed for the city of Sinjar.
Thirty minutes later, the team stopped running. In the far distance, they could see the tinge of hell that was the fire, still burning. They hadn't seen the woman. They hadn't been pursued.
Dec threw himself down on the ground. "Fuck," he said. "There's a blown op."
"Too good to be true." Dec's closest friend Zack Druin, dropped down beside him. "How the fuck did that woman know we were out there?"
"That was definitely our target, right? The leader?" Greg Saunders, known as Geek, was the linguist and intellectual on their team. He was a smart man, and always gentle, unless he had a job to do that he believed in. Which included all of his SEAL team missions. Then he'd be as fierce as a tiger. He was a good man to have at your back.
The fourth member of their team, Harp, in outward appearance was the opposite of Geek. While Geek was the tallest, and kind of lanky, Harp was the shortest of them, stocky, with muscles that never quit. His shaved head make him look exactly like the tough man that he was. After a failed marriage to a blonde bimbo, he had absolutely no use for woman other than, as he stated, scratching his itch. Since his last name was Harpo, naturally the guys had nicknamed him Harp. He hated it, which made it all the more delicious.
"Yeah," Dec muttered. "He's our guy. Eye patch, check. Scar under the eye patch, check. Missing pinkie, check. That was Behaid."
He didn't know how Behaid had lost the finger, but he'd heard that his eye was slashed by a Yazidi father who'd tried to fight off the terrorists kidnapping their women and girls. Of course, that Yazidi and every other male in the village had been put to the sword, and the females abducted anyway, but Dec silently saluted the man who tried to defend his family.
Harp grunted his disgust. "You suppose that woman they had was being added to the sex stable?"
"She was Muslim," Geek said, "not Yazidi."
"No fucking difference," Harp muttered. "Underneath all the fabric."
"Big difference if you happen to be one of them," Geek answered. "ISIS feels free to enslave the Yazidis, exactly because they are a different religion."
"That's why we're trying to take him out," Dec reminded them. "Intel says Behaid is one of the ringleaders in this sex slave ring. I spoke to a Yazidi guy at a camp in Turkey. He witnessed his own sisters and other women being dragged away at gunpoint by ISIS in a village here in the Sinjar Mountains."
"What the hell did he do about it?" Harp snapped.
"They had no guns. There was nothing he could do but get himself killed. The guy I was speaking to, Masouf, decided he'd be better off living and trying to get help. He was lucky. In a lot of the villages, the females were captured and the men were all massacred in cold blood, regardless of whether or not they tried to fight back."
Dec could still heard Masouf's soft voice, speaking urgently, begging for help, his accented English excellent.
"When Daesh came to Sinjar, we fled toward the mountains," Masouf had reported, his eyes grim, his hands trembling. "With nothing but the clothes we were wearing. We had no weapons, no way to fight them. We heard tales of atrocities everywhere we went. Within a day, our group was confronted by a group of fighters, Daesh." He spat on the ground, saying the word for the radical Islamists known as ISIS in the West.
Masouf paused, lifted a bottle of water, and took a long drink.
"You don't have to tell me all this," Dec said. "I'm going to capture the ringleader of the slave trade. I promise you that."
"I want you to hear it," Masouf said fiercely. "For me, the trauma of spe
aking is nothing compared to what they might be going through. Not just my sisters, but other girls and women. I must do what I can."
Dec nodded, and Masouf resumed his tale. "They began to separate out the young women and girls. My mother and the other mothers grabbed their daughters and tried to hold them tight. My father began to plead for mercy. They shot my father and one of the mothers. Right there in front of us all.
"Our mother, she went on breathing. But I know she died right there." Masouf laid his hand across his heart. "I don't know the words," he said. "But in here, she died. A few days later, on the mountain, she laid down and that was that.
"She said she couldn't go on, living with the horror of what she feared was happening to her daughters. Of course, no one could reassure her, because the stories were filtering back, worse than we could have imagined, of sex slavery that we never could have believed would happen in the twenty-first century." Masouf shook his head. "And they call us devil-worshippers."
Masouf paused for a long moment. "My brother and I were afraid to even look at each other. But the shame of not defending them—I can never get over it. We didn't fight. We couldn't. We thought we'd be gunned down next. We'd heard of it happening. But I told myself that if I could live, I was better off doing so and fighting when I actually had a way of fighting. If I martyred myself, my sisters would have no one trying to save them."
Dec nodded. "A good choice, as hard as it must have been." Not that Dec had ever had a sister who'd been captured by an enemy. But he could identify easily with Masouf's emotional pain and sorrow. He had had a sister.
Masouf shrugged. "In many ways, I'm as dead as my parents. I can never un-live what has happened to all of us, my people. The things I've seen."
"We shoulda just taken Behaid out," Harp said, recalling Dec to the present. "Clean shot. Done."
"Except the brass wants him captured." Dec fished out the satellite radio. "Speaking of which, I gotta call the lieutenant. He's gonna shit a brick when he hears what happened."
Dec knew he'd have to defend his decision to order his men back. If they melted away unseen, the hajjis might conclude that no one had been there and the woman was a hysterical female looking for an escape.
Of course, she had escaped. Dec didn't miss her scramble out of the tent, but no one inside the tent seemed to have noticed.
She'd better not ever cross his path again.
Dawn found Behaid and his remaining men making a hasty breakfast several yards away from their ruined tent. Behaid drew heavily on his unfiltered cigarette. His men were leaving him alone. Which was a damn good thing as he was in a fucking bad mood. He'd been deprived of the pleasure of raping that almond-eyed whore last night, a pleasure he'd rightly earned. No good woman would be wandering around in public with two men who weren't family. Her niqab wouldn't have protected her from him or his men, as she should have known, because she wasn't righteous. The only righteous woman was one who stayed in her house. He'd planned to derive great pleasure from showing her the error of her ways.
But she'd disappeared. He'd sent two of his men after her, with a threat to find her or else. He knew they'd find her soon. How far could she get in these abandoned mountains? But he didn't like waiting even for a few hours. As if all of that weren't bad enough, one of his men had been badly burned by the fire which had somehow erupted in their tent last night. Behaid would have just shot him and been done with the problem—he didn't need weaknesses dragging him down— but the victim was an older son of one of the important tribal chiefs in Mosul. He'd decided the price of disposing of the chief's son was higher than he wanted to pay.
So he'd had to delegate two more of his men to drag the victim back to Mosul where his damn family could do what they wanted with him. Damn waste of manpower, but he'd given the trio Allah's blessing and sent them on their way, along with a less injured man who would just slow them down.
Fuck. He was down to six men. Fortunately, he didn't expect any trouble on the way to Sinjar but you never knew when you might stumble on some of those fucking Kurds.
He flung away his cigarette and glanced around the circle of his remaining men. "Did anyone hear anything about where that whore was going? I'm just itching to get my hands on her."
"Your hands, right," Cutthroat said with an evil laugh.
"One of the Kurds was hollering about taking her to a whorehouse in Sinjar," Faisal offered. "Just before we sent him to Allah."
Behaid swiveled around to stare at Faisal. "The fucking Kurds wouldn't be taking a Muslim woman to—" He broke off and smacked himself in the forehead. "Crap on a camel. She couldn't be—"
"Couldn't be what?" Cutthroat asked. "I don't want to hear that she's really a whore. There won't be any fun in that when we find her."
"Don't worry," Faisal said. "She'll probably be dead when we find her."
Behaid glared at him. "We don't want her dead. Yet. I know some of you will fuck a corpse. But I'd rather have a pussy that puts up a fight. Gives me some action."
Another one of the men laughed. "An unwilling one, you mean."
Behaid shrugged. "Best fuck around. A woman who needs a lesson." His whole body tightened at the thought. And after he had her, he had an entire brothel to choose from when they reached Sinjar.
"But who do you think she is," Cutthroat demanded.
Behair lit up another cigarette, evaluating whether or not he'd tell them what he suspected. Hell, why not. "I've been importing Muslim women to manage our whorehouses. She just might be one of them," he said. "So let's get a move on. I intend to wait for her at the Kalkan Pass. We can't outrun her sitting on our asses."
"What about the two guys you sent after her?" Faisal asked.
"Can't reach 'em. There's no fucking cell service out here in this fucking wasteland." Behaid glared at the sun rising in all its pink glory. "But if they show up without her, they're dead men walking."
Chapter Three
"Zack." Declan used the toe of his military grade boot to poke his teammate who was dozing in the in the partial hide they'd dug in a slight fold of the rocky mountainside. The ground was too rocky to dig a real hole, but they'd scooped out a body length depression that kept them hidden well enough, given the lack of human presence on these mountains.
Unless someone stumbled directly upon them.
Which this woman was about to do.
"We've got a mystery woman at 12 o'clock," Dec said.
Zack instantly came to an alert position, down on one knee, his M4 rifle ready in his hand. "What the fuck? I thought these mountains were deserted."
Declan quartered the land due west of them with his binoculars. "Fucking woman in a burka. Coming right at us."
Zack looked through his rifle sight.
"You can't shoot," Declan pointed out. "It's a woman."
"We don't what the fuck is under the burka," Zack argued. "Could be anything."
"You know the rules of engagement. We can't fire unless we're under a direct threat."
"If she stumbles upon us, our presence will be discovered, and that's a direct threat if ever there was one." Zack tightened his grip on his gun. "She comes from somewhere, and it's not too far away since she's on foot and alone."
Without discussion, they both knew what had to be done. The hide, shallow as it was, had to disappear. Which was annoying as fuck, because they'd just settled down for a rest and all their work would be wasted. It was strange to see a lone woman out here in a barren landscape where they hadn't seen anyone but fighting men since they'd arrived two days ago.
Except—
"Better not be that Muslimah from last night who destroyed our best chance to take out Behaid," Dec muttered to Zack.
"How would she be behind us?" Zack dug out his own binoculars without losing his grip on his rifle. "We would have had to pass her."
Dec shrugged. They could have easily passed her last night because they only stopped for four hours at night and she probably stopped for more. It didn't matter though
. Regardless of who she was, they wouldn't mess with her.
But they had to deal with her.
Now that they'd missed their chance to capture Behaid, they'd received orders to make their way to the city of Sinjar, and set up a plan for another mission attempt, one that had to succeed. Dec was still smarting from their aborted attempt the previous evening. All thanks to some stupid woman who had somehow spotted them, and used them as a distraction to achieve her own escape.
The orders given to their four-man SEAL team were to get into the town of Sinjar, accomplish their mission, and get out without discovery. Since they weren't officially in Iraq, and their mission could never be publicly sanctioned, they absolutely had to remain undiscovered. Evasion was their best tactic whenever they saw someone.
The woman wasn't yet visible to their naked eyes so they took a few seconds to knock down the blind. They tumbled the ever-present rocks down into the depression they'd dug to hide three of their four-man team. One of the four of them would always be on guard duty.
Their original intel had told them that Behaid was traveling to Sinjar to 'visit' his operations. Since he was known as the man who'd established, and now ran, the system of brothels staffed by enslaved female captives, mostly Yazidi women and girls, the SEALs' mission was to find him and take him out. Hopefully, they'd capture him so they could use him for intel, but no one would mourn if he died in a firefight. Declan could only hope that the "working girls" were voluntarily doing the work, and not enslaved, as some of the reports that were filtering out into the world alleged.
Meanwhile, they had this lone woman to deal with. Zack grabbed a branch of a mulberry bush they'd broken off for this very reason and rubbed out their tracks. Declan hoisted his hundred-pound backpack, and grabbed his rifle while Zack scraped the branch over the blind, obliterating signs of their occupancy.
Field Stripped: 15 Steamy Military Romances Page 108
