by Cherry Adair
It was time, Kane thought—yeah, maybe it was time. "I doubt if this story will make you happy, but I'll tell you." He dived right in. No point trying to sugarcoat it.
"Six of us inserted covertly into Al Jawf to retrieve three missionaries being held in the prison there." He glanced at her. "You read the reports, didn't you?"
"Yeah, I did. But in your usual chatty way you left out most of the details," she said dryly, slipping her hand into his. The feel of her much smaller hand in his was surprisingly comforting. Kane looked straight ahead before he continued.
"Then you know we got two of them out. They'd killed one woman before we got there," he said, still furious that they'd arrived twenty minutes too late to save her from unspeakable horrors.
"It was a bloodbath before we finally got them out. They begged us to retrieve the other woman's body. But the tangos had taken her off, tortured her in another part of the jail, and there'd been chaos breaking in to retrieve them, then getting out again—we refused to take the time."
Outnumbered twenty to one, each member of the team had a hole in him somewhere—in most cases, several holes. They were collectively bleeding like stuffed pigs.
Adrenaline high, Kane had barely felt it. He and his guys had been deaf to the women's pleas. Their friend was dead. And if the eight of them didn't get out of there immediately, so would they be. The two middle-aged women were barely hanging on themselves. They'd been in those cells for three weeks before anyone knew where they were. They'd been beaten, starved, and then tortured.
"We held off the tangos and got away by a tucking hair. The extraction team was waiting in the jungle, helo blades already spinning when we got there. Everyone was onboard. I was last man in, when one of the women told me the third woman, girl, was her daughter… a child—" Kane scrapped back his hair in remembered frustration.
AJ squeezed his fingers. "Of course you had to go back," she said softly.
"I didn't have to take the whole team in. They were ready to lift off for Christ sake!"
"They would've gone with you, anyway," AJ assured him with utmost confidence.
"No, they were all injured, the chances of finding the child were slim to none—the tangos knew we were there. The whole situation had gone tits up. No way should we have gone back in."
"But you did."
They'd all jumped out of the helo—big, shit-eating grins on their dumb faces—and followed him back in. "Yeah, we did. Because even though I ordered them to stay onboard and leave with the women, they all knew I expected them to follow me into battle." He paused to swallow back his rage. "They trusted me. Trusted that I knew what the fuck I was doing. Trusted that I would get them back home in one piece… Mind if I gloss over the details here?"
She squeezed his hand. "Sure."
"Never found the kid. But the tangos found us. Took us back to that rat-infested hellhole where we'd retrieved the women."
Kane pulled his hand out of AJ's and stuffed both fists in his pockets. Right now he couldn't bear to be touched; his skin crawled with the memories. "We were separately interrogated for weeks. Their methods were… creative." A shudder shook his body. Ah, Jesus…
He saw AJ lift her hand to touch his arm, then think better of it and drop it to her side as they trudged forward. The night was now filled with the screams of his team, the sight of them out in the stinking, muddy courtyard, bare-assed naked as they were whipped and beaten… and eventually shot. One by one.
And then they'd come for him. With whips and knives and small, hot metal pincers…
But by then he'd wished he'd died with the men, his own men, whom he'd killed. And nothing they did to him was worse than looking out into that courtyard every day for two months and seeing the bloody bodies of his men lying there.
There wasn't a night he didn't close his eyes and see them. Smell their decomposing bodies. Feel the agony they'd gone through because they'd trusted him to keep them safe. Yeah, he'd done a fine fucking job.
"Why are you punishing yourself for something you couldn't possibly have prevented?" AJ asked quietly. "You all had to go in and try to retrieve the child. You had to try."
"I should've gone in alone."
"And been killed?"
"And been killed if necessary, yes."
She narrowed her eyes and glared at him. "So you had to do your job, but your equally well-trained, experienced team members were supposed to fly off with the women?"
AJ stopped walking and grabbed his sleeve. She punched him in the arm. Hard. "You arrogant, elitist son of a bitch. Who made you God? All six of you were there to do your jobs. All six of you knew the risks. All six of you had brains and reasoning power, for God's sake. How dare you think that they died because of you. They died fighting for what all T-FLAC operatives fight for. Freedom. Democracy. Liberty—all the rest of it." She punched him again. "You are such an… ass!"
Kane spun around in the sand to stare down at her. She was, quite literally, hopping mad. "It was my—"
She slugged him in the stomach. "Get over yourself, would you?" She reached up and grabbed his ears between her fingers.
Christ, was she going to head-butt him?
Eyes glittering fiercely in the moonlight, AJ pulled his head down. "You did your job. They did theirs." Her fingers lost their grip on his ears, thank God, and slid through his hair as she lifted her face. "Let it go. Just let it go, so they can rest in peace." She brushed her mouth against his.
"You're still my hero, Kane Wright." And she kissed him until he couldn't recall how the conversation had started in the first place.
Distances were deceptive in the desert, the clear atmosphere made objects appear closer than they really were. And there were precious few objects out there. Just dunes of various shapes and sizes. Multiplying the visual estimation of the distance by three gave Kane a pretty accurate idea of how far away they were. Perhaps four miles. They'd walk another hour.
Which was good. He still felt raw after purging himself to AJ. He felt as though he'd just run a marathon, only to realize the finish line was a mile behind him. Wrung out emotionally, he rubbed his thumb over the back of AJ's hand which he held between them.
She looked up. "Okay?"
"Yeah." He nearly was, thanks to her aggressive treatment of the patient. The shrinks hadn't said anything different than AJ had. But their method of delivery was not quite as—confrontational as AJ's. He bit back a smile. "Ready for a break?"
She stumbled and pulled herself upright. "Getting there."
He'd insist they rest again when they reached their goal. AJ was sensible, but still new enough to want a pissing contest every time a decision had to be made. She wouldn't stop until he called it.
His calf muscles pulled and ached from striding in the soft sand, but the air had cooled to chilly, which felt good on his slightly sweat-dampened skin. Moonlight, as bright as day, shone on the sand ahead of them. The silence was absolute. No breeze, animals, or insects, just the soft huff and puff of their breath and the occasional squeak of their booted feet on the sand.
"Hang tough, Abominable Jabberwocky," he said quietly, almost unwilling to shatter the otherworldly stillness. "Almost there."
"With you, chief."
As they approached the first of three close-together dunes, AJ was ready for a break. Everything ached. "We made it." AJ hadn't been entirely sure she would, though she would have forced herself to belly crawl if she'd had to to keep up with Kane.
She was so tired, all her muscles aching, that she was ready to collapse. The only thing that prevented her from falling against that moonlit, so comfy-looking dune was the fact that beside her, Kane Wright was still upright and had a spring in his step. Damn him.
Was he an android or someth—What the hell was that sme—
"Smell that?" he asked unnecessarily.
"Yes." She slapped a palm over her nose. The stench was unmistakable. And pungently more noticeable after hours of smelling nothing but fresh air and sand. "Uh-oh
."
A man's legs were sprawled from behind the biggest dune. Moonlight glittered down on him, but there was no disguising death. They continued walking. The smell got stronger.
AJ blinked and squinted to make out the details in the moonlight.
Oh, God. It was a bloodbath.
It was hard to tell where one mutilated body stopped and the next started. The corpses were joined in death by the blood-soaked sand between their bodies.
"Now, here's a way to break the monotony." Kane stepped closer, skirting the area.
"Yeah," AJ said dryly, wrinkling her nose at the sweet, rank reek of decomposing flesh. The desert sun had already baked the bodies. "A clump of corpses certainly does that, all right."
She breathed through her mouth as they moved closer to the dead men sprawled awkwardly in bloody sand. Bile rose in the back of her throat at the carnage. There was no point checking to see if any of them were still alive. They weren't.
"They were on foot," she observed, looking in the direction of the prints the men had left behind. She pointed at the sign of camel tracks veering in from the right. "That's the direction of their assassins. They came in right behind them."
"Probably the same guys who tried for us." Kane crouched to search the pockets of the man closest to him. "Looks like this happened several hours after Raazaq passed here. See how their footsteps are layered over the ones made by his camels?"
"They were doing what we're doing. In reverse. Following him out."
"Yeah. Sorry bastards were stopped before they could reach hel—Christ." He sucked in a gulp of air. "Check this out."
AJ took the small leather folder from him. Her eyebrows shot up. "Her Majesty's Secret Service?"
Kane went to the next man. He closed the guy's eyes before reaching into the top pocket of his shirt. "So's this guy."
The hair on the back of AJ's neck stood up. One of the Royals must be nearby. It seemed highly unlikely, though.
"On vacation?" she thought out loud. "Here?" It didn't make any sense whatsoever that these guys were out here. None. "Look at this," she said, the back of her neck prickling again while her stomach did a slow slide toward real panic. "This one's U.S. Secret Service."
"Jesus," Kane muttered. "This guy's DSS. Try that one."
She looked at him, wide-eyed. "Diplomatic Secret Service?" She quickly searched the next man's pockets. Opened his wallet. A wife and two blond children smiled for the camera. God. She searched for I.D.
"French Secret Service." AJ's palms felt damp as she added his I.D. to the others she held. "British Royalty. American… What? Senator? The President? And French diplomats, their president? God, Kane."
"Yeah. The shit just took a decidedly hard hit to the proverbial fan," Kane said, his gaze sweeping over the men who'd died trying to protect their charges. "And now we know the reason Raazaq's out here in the middle of nowhere."
"But what is he up to? What?" AJ slowly stood, shifting her gaze to Kane's. "Worse, are we too late to stop whatever it is he's doing?"
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
« ^ »
There was no way—and God only knew, no time—to bury the bodies. Kane pocketed the dead men's I.D.s and gave them a mental salute. He hated to leave them all lying here in the open, but there was no choice. They'd have to be retrieved later. If the desert hadn't already buried them. Chances were good that within a couple of days, the constantly shifting sands of the desert would bury the bodies and leave no sign behind. And maybe, Kane thought, that was only right. To lie where they'd fallen. It was the most any professional warrior could hope for.
With regret, AJ and Kane left the scene of carnage and started off across the desert again.
"They must've tried to walk out. With communications blocked, they'd have had no other options," AJ speculated.
"And they got stopped before they could get help."
"Violently." She shuddered at the images burned into her brain of the eviscerated bodies lying in a pale wash of moonlight. "Whoever did that enjoyed their work. A lot."
"Raazaq's people, for sure," Kane said through gritted teeth. "And you were right about the discovery of the pyramid. They're headed in the right direction, and it's the only structure within three hundred miles. Gotta be."
"Who were those guys here to protect? That's the burning question."
"Somebody big. Maybe several somebodies." Kane picked up the pace to just this side of a jog. Clearly, he felt the same hair-raising urgency AJ did. And while it was great to know her instincts were good, it scared the hell out of her knowing they were correct and that Kane felt the same way.
All the training in the world hadn't prepared her for this. And every intuition, both learned and gut, told her to hurry. Hurry. Hurry.
"There could be a Secret Service convention at the newly discovered pyramid," AJ offered half in jest. While her feet could only move so fast, her insides seemed to want to race ahead. Her stomach whirled and churned and her brain jumped into overdrive. She wanted to be in the middle of the action. Neutralize Raazaq. Do something, damn it.
"Unlikely. Let's hit this systematically." Kane swigged from his bottle, not slowing a step. "What do we have?"
"A known, class-one terrorist in possession of a highly contagious viral agent."
"Headed south."
"South," AJ added, "directly toward a newly discovered dig."
"Which was suddenly taken off the public's radar."
"Right." AJ uncapped her bottle and took a slug. The water tasted like nectar from the gods, even lukewarm and plastic-flavored.
"Let's say dignitaries, accompanied by their bodyguards and various branches of their own country's secret services, from all over the world, were invited to come and see this amazing find," AJ mused. "And stay where? Other than the pyramid and dig, which presumably has tents or something, there's nothing else out here." She considered it. "I can't quite see the Queen of England sleeping in a tent or on a sarcophagus, can you?"
Kane snorted a laugh. "It's a little known fact that Liz likes nothing better than a nice toasty s'more around a campfire."
AJ paused a second and then gave him a small smile. "Yeah, now that I think about it, I can picture that. Queen Lizzie. With her little empty, patent-leather purse clutched on her stomach, and wearing a pretty, blue-flowered hat to match her pretty blue suit, holding a marshmallow on a coat hanger over a fire. Possible." She smiled. "But not likely."
"No." Kane didn't smile. "Not likely. Let's say we have half a dozen dignitaries from around the world. Staying somewhere close by. To see the pyramid. To have a vacation. To do whatever. Communications are mysteriously shut down. What's the first thing that would happen from inside?"
"They would know PDQ that their communications were down. And that it had little or nothing to do with the khamsin?"
Kane nodded. "They're in possession of too many high-tech, high-powered communications devices. Something would work, even if satellite communications were knocked out. Hell, yeah. They know something's up by now. They'd want to talk to someone outside. If they still couldn't make some sort of communication, they'd walk out."
He glanced at her. Teacher to student. "What would happen from outside?"
"If outside didn't hear from inside at regular intervals, they'd send in air power." AJ chewed on her lower lip. "And if that didn't work, they'd send in teams. SEALs, Rangers, Recon—not to mention specialized units from the other countries." She narrowed her gaze on him. "They'd mobilize immediately. Everyone would activate their own emergency plans. Satellite pictures also down, do you think?"
"Christ, I don't know." He squinted off into the distance as if he could see their goal already. "Considering everything else, more than likely."
"Jesus," she muttered. "This is huge. As we speak, there must be aircraft poised for take off all over the world…"
"T-FLAC, the Secret Service, the Mosad, and various other countries' elite services would have been on red alert the second the systems went
down," Kane agreed grimly, giving AJ a faint, very faint, sense of security that there were hundreds, probably thousands of people ready to back them up the second they could. "They'll have pinpointed the location by the area blocked."
Heck, they were all probably marching on that pyramid right now, coming in from every corner of the desert.
Kane swiped at the sweat on his face with his bandanna. "They'd know immediately such a blanket blackout wasn't caused by the winds. For the last twelve hours or so they've been doing anything and everything in an attempt to get to where their people are. Nobody's going to care at this point who gets in first. They'll all have the same objective."
"Except nothing can fly overhead." AJ shot a look at the night sky as if hoping somehow to see a flotilla of Blackhawk helicopters racing in. "Not for hundreds of miles. No vehicle can breach the block. Hell, even our wristwatches are inoperable. Doesn't matter how much they want to be wherever their people are. They won't be able to… They're walking in. Like we're doing, or if they can muster that many, riding camels in."
"Right."
AJ glanced over her left shoulder, almost expecting to see troops marching up over the last rise. Cavalry to the rescue. A moment passed, then two. She'd really love to see some help coming up that rise. No such luck. Their two sets of footprints looked pretty damn lonely and frail stretching out behind them for miles.
"We're going at a pretty good clip," Kane said. "Maybe three, three and a half miles an hour. Let's say they can march in full battle gear at something similar… They're at least six to eight hours behind us."
AJ grimaced. "Guess we shouldn't wait for them, then, huh?"
"What if we don't get there in time?" AJ demanded. Her voice sounded croaky and thick. They were rapidly getting more and more exhausted. The sun was up again and unrelenting. Dazzles of heat inspired little white dots floating in formation in front of her eyes and she had to blink to make them disappear. While they still had adequate water, thank God, their supply of sunscreen was running out.
