by Cindy Dees
“Women,” her strange captor responded, rolling his eyes.
The other man grunted in commiseration.
A frisson of satisfaction coursed through her. If they wanted to underestimate her because she was a woman, she was totally fine with that. Wait till they figured out she was a trained Special Forces operative. They weren’t going to know what had hit them. Anticipation of the moment when she kicked butts and took names coursed through her.
Patience, Piper. Patience.
Not to worry. She would show them, all in due time.
She considered her captor’s name. She supposed it was possible his name really was Amir, but it had rung false when he said it. He just didn’t seem to own the name the way he would have if it had been his actual name. No, Goldeneyes fitted him better.
They drove for perhaps two more hours, taking back roads exclusively. The next time they stopped, she spied through the windows a tiny town boasting a single flashing red light, one gas station/convenience store/Laundromat and a Baptist church. Goldeneyes was the only man to exit the van. Which made sense if he was the only American in the bunch. He would draw a lot less attention than the others in this rural part of the country where few foreigners visited. He went outside to pump and pay for gas, and escorted her to the restroom again.
She didn’t have a peanut-sized bladder, and in the absence of anything to drink didn’t particularly have to use the restroom, but she still took the chance when offered. Who knew when they would stop again? And it felt good to get up and move around, get some circulation back in her legs. Wary of her captors killing the cashier, she didn’t cause a fuss as Goldeneyes marched her inside.
She did, however, make a point of saying hello to the teen girl behind the counter and making direct eye contact with her. Maybe if this girl saw some sort of news story on a kidnapped woman, she would remember seeing Piper and call the authorities.
Goldeneyes had a painfully tight grip on her elbow as they walked past the store attendant, and Piper didn’t test his unspoken warning to behave herself. There was no telling how far his goodwill would extend, and she’d pushed it pretty hard already.
He deposited her back in the van and went inside once more, returning after a few minutes carrying several grocery bags full of sandwiches and snacks.
Oh, no. That looked like road-trip food. Which meant they still had a ways to go before reaching their final destination.
“Where are we headed?” she tried.
Her captors just stared at her stonily.
The van pulled back out onto the road, and despair washed through her. The next time they stopped, she needed to let someone know she was in trouble and to call the police. But how? With Goldeneyes hovering over her every move and the threat that his teammates would kill innocent bystanders ringing in her ears, it wasn’t like she had a lot of options.
He passed her a bottle of water. Silently, she took it and downed the whole thing. She had to give him credit; he was taking pretty decent care of her, all things considered. For the moment, at least, these men seemed interested in keeping her alive. Thank God.
At least she was able to tell by the setting sun that they were traveling more or less toward the north, and maybe slightly west. By now they had to have left Louisiana, which put them possibly in Arkansas.
They started to go up and down hills—which made sense if they were in the western portion of Arkansas, entering the Ozark Plateau. Which was both good and bad news. Good because it was lush country with plenty of food, water, shelter and cover for her eventual escape. The bad news was that it was isolated country with areas of very sparse population. She might have to evade her captors for days before she found help.
Why in the world had these men gone to all the trouble of kidnapping her just to haul her off on this extended road trip? Why not kill her in or near Houma? Did they plan to ransom her back to the Medusas? Surely they knew the US government adhered to a strict pay-no-ransom policy. And it wasn’t like she had a rich family that would cough up money for her return. Her dad owned a small auto-repair shop and her mom was a preschool teacher.
Her captors took turns napping and driving into the evening, all except for Goldeneyes. He seemed to have appointed himself her personal guard, and the other men seemed to have silently agreed to let him assume all babysitting duties.
A small blessing for which she was grateful. He seemed generally concerned about her comfort and well-being, while the other men looked at her with open contempt as if she were of no more worth or interest than a bug crawling across the floor of the van. Their dismissive attitude would be their undoing if she had anything to say about it.
It had gotten dark outside when she noticed most of the men were dozing. Only the driver and Goldeneyes were awake. His disturbingly beautiful stare was locked on her like it had been for most of the past twelve hours.
“What’s your real name?” she asked in a low voice.
“Amir.”
“Fine. Be that way. I’ll just stick to calling you Goldeneyes in my mind.”
His right eyebrow lifted faintly, but he didn’t show any other reaction.
“My name is Piper.”
He replied firmly, “Your name is Persephone Black.”
“I beg your pardon?” she blurted. He’d asked about a Mrs. Black when he’d first stormed into the school office. Was she a teacher? Why would these men kidnap an elementary school teacher?
“Your name. It’s Persephone Black. You can pretend to be anyone you want. But we know who you really are.”
What on God’s green earth was he talking about? Had they kidnapped the wrong person?
“But...you looked right at me... You said you’d seen my picture...that you knew I was the right person—”
“Quiet,” he bit out low, cutting her off.
She looked away from him and realized that the man who acted like the leader was awake, his eyes barely slitted open. How had “Amir” known the boss was awake? She hadn’t gotten the slightest indication of it—not even a hint of intuition that she was being watched. Wow. Her powers of observation were messed up worse than she’d realized. And his—they were sharp and on point.
“May I please have some more water?” she asked meekly.
Goldeneyes passed her a bottle of water without comment.
She downed it and added the bottle to the pile of trash growing in the back of the van: food wrappers and soda cans. These men’s discipline clearly did not extend to picking up after themselves. Either that or they planned to ditch the van at some point. Still. There would be fingerprints and DNA all over that trash.
With darkness, the team had taken off their sunglasses and hats, and she’d seen all their faces now. She’d watched them all evening, learning each man’s features from many different angles. The bump on the bridge of a nose, the angle of a jaw, the shape and fullness of lips, even the timbre of their voices.
She was confident she could pick out any of these men from a lineup if it ever came to that. Now she just had to make sure she stayed alive and got away so it could.
All of them except Goldeneyes were black haired, dark eyed, and their skin was caramel toned, in keeping with a Middle Eastern heritage. Two of them looked quite young, in their early twenties.
The other three looked hard as nails and closer to their midthirties in age. The older men reminded her of Gunnar Torsten. They all had the same hardness and cool, lethal confidence as her boss. She made a mental note not to mess with any of the older men.
As for Goldeneyes, he was the odd man out. Besides his fair coloring, he looked about thirty years old, and he carried himself differently than the others. At least, he did now.
When he’d stormed into the school office, he’d exhibited all the deadly confidence of the older men. But now, he slouched in the back of the van, eyes down, shoulders hunched. As if he was trying to make himself
invisible to the other men. Odd. He didn’t strike her as the submissive-follower type. At all. But he was clearly acting like the low man in the pecking order.
The van slowed and turned off the winding two-lane road they’d been following up and down mountainsides for the past hour. It commenced bumping and banging over what was obviously some sort of bad dirt road.
They spent two or three more minutes getting tossed all over the back of the van, and then, just like that, the vehicle stopped. The driver turned off the ignition.
They’d arrived. Wherever that might be.
The silence and stillness were a shock to her system after spending the last twelve hours or so in the rumbling, vibrating van.
“Out,” the one called Mahmoud ordered.
Bijan, one of the young ones, opened the double back doors, and Piper glimpsed the dark silhouette of a decent-sized log cabin with a long porch across its front. Trees—deciduous, she noted—crowded close, and there was no ambient light in the sky to indicate a city of any kind nearby. Yup. These guys had brought her out into the middle of nowhere to hold for whatever dastardly purpose they had in mind for her.
Goldeneyes hopped out of the van in front of her and turned around to help her out. She was tempted to shake off his hand, but her legs were numb, and as she stood on them, they tingled so badly she wasn’t sure they would hold her full weight. She clung to his powerful forearm while circulation returned to her aching limbs. After a few seconds, she let go of his arm.
“Better?” he murmured under his breath.
“Uh-huh,” she muttered back.
He stepped behind her, efficiently twisting her arm behind her, but putting no pressure on it that would be painful. His intention was clear: if she didn’t fight him, he wouldn’t hurt her.
For now, at least. As long as their silent truce held.
She didn’t for a second believe these terrorists had brought her out here solely to enjoy the fresh air. They had some agenda up their sleeves. She just couldn’t fathom what it was.
Which led her back to the same question that had been preoccupying her all day. Why her?
Chapter 4
It didn’t take long after the report of armed men at Southdown Elementary School in Houma hit the news for the Medusas to put two and two together. They were taking a water break in the woods when Rebel, glancing at her cell phone, exclaimed.
Tessa piped up, asking, “Whatcha got, Reb?”
The communications specialist looked up from her phone grimly. “I just got a breaking-news alert. Armed men burst into Southdown Elementary School in Houma this morning and kidnapped an unnamed woman. She’s described as tall, blonde and in her mid-to late twenties.”
Tessa lurched upright from where she’d been lounging on a patch of moss. “That’s got to be Piper!”
Major Torsten cut in. “Where are Captain Ford’s cell phone and class ring locations now?”
Rebel answered, “I’d have to go back to the ops center to answer that, sir.”
“What are you waiting for, then?” Torsten snapped.
Tessa got that he was worried about Piper. But he didn’t have to bite their heads off!
Her train of thought derailed abruptly. Torsten was always tough, but he’d never been this snappish before. She traded worried looks with her fiancé, Beau, and his thoughts clearly mirrored hers. He was worried about the boss, too. Beau had worked for Gunnar Torsten for several years before being asked to help train the new Medusa team. If even Beau was worried about him, something was definitely wrong with Torsten.
When they hustled back to the vehicles to drive back to base, she made a point of climbing in the front passenger seat of the Hummer Torsten was driving.
“What’s up, sir?”
He glanced over at her and bit out, “I’ve got a missing and possibly kidnapped team member.”
“Besides that,” she replied carefully.
“Isn’t that enough?”
“You were way more tense than usual even before we thought anything was wrong with Piper...sir.”
He exhaled hard and turned his eyes back to the road. “I got an intel report last night.”
“And?”
“It indicates that Abu Haddad may not be dead.”
“What?” she and Beau squawked simultaneously. The two of them had by a hair escaped dying in the explosion that had killed Haddad last year. The international, and very illegal, arms dealer, had to be dead! His entire yacht—and everyone on it—had been blown into bits not much larger than her finger. Beau had set the charges himself.
Torsten replied heavily, “We never did get a confirmation of death.”
Beau leaned forward from the back seat and ground out, “That’s because nothing but matchsticks and the occasional chunk of meat were left when I was done blowing up that bastard’s yacht.”
Tessa frowned at their boss. “Why does someone think Haddad may be alive?”
Torsten huffed, clearly as unhappy as she and Beau were. “A rumor has surfaced that the Haddad network may be doing some sort of big secret deal with a Middle Eastern nation. The source apparently has it on good authority that Haddad himself is expected to close the deal. It’s possible that one of his flunkies has taken over the business. But there’s also a very small chance that the bastard is back.”
“What country is this deal with?” she asked.
“Rumor places the deal in Iran.”
“For what kind of weapons?” Beau asked quickly.
Tessa wasn’t sure that mattered. The Iranians were dangerous enough with the weaponry they already had. Although she supposed the last thing anyone needed was for that country’s leaders to get their hands on something high-tech and truly deadly.
“No idea,” Torsten replied.
“It’s not like we have a ton of human information sources on the ground in Tehran,” she commented. “If someone outside its borders could figure out who’s making the sale and what the cargo is, we’d have a better chance of finding out what the Iranians are getting their hands on.”
Appearing to give himself a mental shake, the major replied, “Not our problem, today. Right now, I need us to focus on finding Piper.”
“Of course, sir.” But curiosity about what a dead arms dealer was selling to a country like Iran continued to niggle at the back of Tessa’s mind.
They parked in front of the one-story building that was their communications facility and operational headquarters for Training Site Vanessa, named for Brigadier General Vanessa Blake, the founder of the Medusas over a decade ago.
Their headquarters squatted on stilts and looked like every other ramshackle fishing shack in this part of Terrebonne Parish. Notable only was the building’s lack of windows, and the unusually bulky storage shed under the center of the building.
In reality, that shed disguised the elevator shaft down into the underground/underwater bunker that housed the heart of their ops center. The aboveground building mainly disguised antennae and receivers for the equipment below.
They piled into the elevator and stood in silence as it whooshed them down into the bunker. The door opened into the perpetual twilight of a room crammed with computers and monitors.
Rebel sat at her communication console and typed quickly. In just a few seconds, she reported without looking up from her screen, “Piper’s phone is still at the elementary school where it was this morning.”
“And her backup locator signal?” Torsten asked.
“It appears stationary about fifty miles west of here,” she reported. “Reporters are saying a group of masked men were seen coming out of a white air-conditioning company van and heading into the elementary school. They left in the same vehicle. Presumably with Piper in tow.”
Major Torsten left Rebel to man the ops center in case Piper called in, and loaded Tessa and Beau into his Humme
r. They drove west, paralleling the murky waters of Bayou Black to the GPS coordinates Rebel had given them for Piper’s backup locator signal. It turned out to be coming from a crappy little 1950s-era gas station in the middle of nowhere.
The gray-haired Cajun man inside the station swore he hadn’t seen any woman fitting Piper’s description all day. When Tessa showed him a picture of Piper on her cell phone, the attendant declared her hot, but again denied having seen her. Tessa was inclined to believe him.
Torsten called Rebel to confirm they were at the right place, and she was adamant that their position locators were literally on top of Piper’s. And it was still pinging.
They fanned out to search the area, and after a minute or so, Tessa spotted a glint in the gravel at the corner of the building. She bent down and picked up Piper’s West Point class ring. The one with the locator in it.
“I found her ring!” she called out.
“Don’t move!” Torsten ordered immediately. He knelt down, examining the dirt between himself and Tessa. After a moment, he moved off to his right, toward the side of the building. Using his finger, he drew a rectangle on the ground. “Tire track. Recent,” he commented, continuing to stare at the dusty clay.
Beau moved forward to join him in staring at the ground. He had a sniper’s outstanding eyesight and was the best tracker of all of them.
“Looks like three men,” he murmured. “They milled around beside the vehicle.”
Torsten nodded. “And one walked over there to the corner of the building and back, close to where the ring was.”
“Did he drop it, maybe?” Tessa asked.
Beau answered grimly, “I don’t see any tracks small or narrow enough to be Piper’s. These are all men in boots.”
“Agreed,” Torsten muttered. “I don’t think she dropped it as a bread crumb for us.”
“Either way,” Tessa commented, “we know she was headed west a couple hours ago.”
Beau crouched and studied the dirt a bit more, adding, “It looks like some of the tracks lead over to this burn barrel.”
Tessa detoured around the footprints to stare into the rusty container at the pile of light gray ashes inside. It didn’t look like it would hold any clues to Piper’s whereabouts.
