by Ladew, Lisa
Uncle Kevin crossed the room slowly, his steps sounding strange and dragging. She looked over her shoulder and saw he was walking sideways so he could still see JT. Oh, he is careful and crafty, she thought, her hope and faith that she would get out of this alive crumbling.
He yanked the gun from the holster along her back and she heard her magazine drop to the ground. She turned back around in time to see him pull something from his pocket and lay it on the desk. He walked sideways again, till he was behind JT. “Pick up the black strap on the desk.” He nodded as she did it. “Now come over here and put that strap on him. Pull his arms out from underneath him and strap his wrists together behind him.”
Dani picked up the strap. It was black canvas, 2 inches wide, with loops at each end that could be cinched down. Just fancy cloth handcuffs. She took it to JT and did what Uncle Kevin told her. JT’s arms felt dead and heavy. Dead weight, rang in her mind. She watched his chest and was relieved to see he was breathing. She tried to leave as much room as possible around his wrists.
“Go back to the window. Slowly. Don’t turn around.”
She walked to the window, hearing Uncle Kevin move behind her. She chanced a look over her shoulder and saw him tightening the wrist loops that she had left loose. She stood facing the window, her ears trying desperately to decipher every movement behind her. Is this it? Is this where my life ends?
Uncle Kevin approached her. “Hold your left hand behind you.” His voice still sounded sad, tired, heavy, and old. Like he was the one about to die, not her.
Dani’s left hand didn’t want to move. She couldn’t stand the thought of being handcuffed again. Her brain gave the command to put her arm behind her, but her body rebelled. The arm stole across her body in the front, its hand grasping her other hand and squeezing, as if for comfort. She heard a low refusal coming from her throat.
“Goddammit Daniela, don’t cross me little girl. You fucking do what I tell you or you’ll be fucking sorry.” He had put some steel into his voice, but it wasn’t the steel he used when talking to JT. It was how he had talked to her when she was 6 and she had found a can of paint in the garage and had spent a happy half an hour painting his motorcycle.
Dani heard and believed the threat in his voice and knew she was going to pay for her refusal, but she still couldn’t do it. Suddenly she wished she could take back putting it on JT. If she was going to refuse, why hadn’t she refused that? Her body tensed, full of guilt and fear, and she looked around wildly for a way out. She clawed the drapes aside and revealed a dirty window that covered the entire wall, but with no way to open it. Jump? Try to force her way through the glass and possibly be cut to shreds or even shot on the way out? That would be better than being handcuffed again. Thoughts flashed through Dani’s mind in a split second, leaving no time for contemplation. She knew Uncle Kevin was directly behind her, which left no room for a running start. She knew she was going to do it though. Or do something. She wasn’t going to just let him handcuff her. She was going to force him to shoot her. And even then, she was going down fighting.
Adrenaline spilled into her bloodstream, wiring her muscles for action. Her hands moved on their own, scrabbling towards the table on her right. In an instant she grabbed up the heavy rotary phone, a relic in America, but apparently just perfect in this tiny Egyptian town, and heaved it at the window. A wide spiral of cracks split the clean lines of the glass. Her next move was to jump at it, or perhaps hammer it again, but she was stopped short, again by her uncle gripping her hair tightly and pulling her by it. She felt no pain, but her body pitched backwards, led by her head. Dani tried to keep herself from falling and almost brained herself in the face with the bulky phone. She shrieked in pent-up rage and fear and thrust the phone over her head at her uncle instead. She caught him in the shoulder, hard by the sound of the grunt that whooshed out of him.
Her body slammed to the ground and the phone dropped with her. Uncle Kevin bent and pulled at the phone with his left hand. His right hand still held the gun, but it wasn’t pointed at her. She held on to the phone, curling it to her body like a football. It was all she had.
“Let it go,” Clarkson grunted, and punctuated the command with a kick to Dani’s ribs. Dani curled and tried to protect her side with the phone. Tiny drops of water fell on her face.
“Stop it. Kick her again and I’ll kill you.”
JT! Dani looked up, exposing her throat but not caring. JT struggled to his feet, his arms tied behind his back, his face deadly.
“I’ll do it with my teeth if I have to Clarkson.”
Uncle Kevin raised the gun and pointed it at JT, a sick, sad smile on his face.
Dani threw the phone under the bed. “I dropped it!” She shot to her feet, jumping between JT and the gun. “I dropped it! Don’t - please don’t shoot him Uncle Kevin!”
Dani heard JT gasp lightly behind her. Oh God, she thought. Will he ever forgive me?
Tears stood in Uncle Kevin’s sunken red eyes, and damp tracks wet his cheeks. Dani felt that maybe she really was insane. Surely she was imagining the tears she saw.
Uncle Kevin’s eyes flicked to the items on the bed, then back to Dani. His face crumpled and hardened at the same time, and she saw a heartbroken resolution in his eyes. The gun’s merciless eye marked her chest, and suddenly she knew that was where the bullet would violate her, tearing through her and ending her life. Her muscles constricted in anticipation of the shot, but as she heard it she was slammed aside onto the bed.
The gunshot echoed in her ear and she felt the pain take her high in the chest. But that was a mistake, she wasn’t shot. There was no pain. Until she jumped up and saw JT stagger and fall forward, blood squirting from his own chest, almost exactly where he’d been hit by the gun butt for daring to talk to her in the terrorist camp.
“JT!” she screamed. He staggered another step forward, his arms still tied behind him, then slammed his weight into Clarkson’s chest, driving the hand with the gun towards the ceiling. Dani saw JT piston his legs against the floor to pitch her uncle into the window. As they both fell into it, the spiral crack in the pane exploded outward and shards of glass flew, twinkling in the morning sun. JT kept pushing with his legs, trying to crack the window further and push Uncle Kevin through it. Grunts of exertion and pain filled the room.
Clarkson brought the gun down and tried to aim it at JT’s head. Dani screamed a warning and JT head butted Clarkson, hard enough to daze them both. Dani’s eyes searched frantically for the two guns they had brought in the room. She saw the magazines on the floor, but didn’t see the guns. She could hear her own breathing, ragged and frenzied. She whipped her eyes back to the two men fighting at the window, afraid a gunshot would crash again while she wasn’t looking.
The gun sagged in her uncle’s hand as he shook his head, his eyes still dazed. She could grab the gun! She scrambled over the bed toward him but realization hit her full in the stomach as she did. She would never be able to shoot him. Even if he walked up to her and tore the gun from her hand. And she bet he knew that too. He had known her since she was born, after all. But she couldn’t let him shoot JT. Her hands touched something unyielding. She looked down and saw the monster knife. She snatched it up and unsheathed it as she rolled off the bed and took the two steps that would bring her into the fray. Without thinking what she was doing, she sliced the knife downward hard. The blade flashed colors as it divided JT’s canvas handcuffs.
His arms fell forward. His right hand dangled at his side, but his left seized the gun and wrenched it out of her uncle’s grip. JT backed up and pointed the gun at Uncle Kevin’s head.
“Don’t move,” JT said, his voice calm but quiet. Dani’s eyes flew to his wound and then his face. The skin there was pale and flaccid under his desert tan.
Dani ran to the phone on the little table and snatched it up, hearing the dial tone in her ear. She searched her mind for the Arabic word for ambulance. Would there even be something like that in this town? She he
ard JT say “Don’t do it,” behind her and whipped her head back over her shoulder in time to see her uncle grab for something at his belt. The guns. He had both of them shoved in his waistband.
She opened her mouth to yell to JT that they might still fire without the magazine - some guns did - but he knew that already. JT fired before her uncle had a chance. Gunfire crashed in the room one more time, and Dani squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to see the end of her uncle’s life.
A sob ripped from her throat. Apparently she didn’t completely hate him after everything he’d done after all.
JT dropped his left hand as if it weighed a thousand pounds. His muscular body shrunk, somehow and he took another step backwards, leaning on the bed.
Dani whirled back to the telephone and punched zero, her vision doubling and trebling with her tears.
Chapter 29
The ringing inside the phone handset seemed to come from far away. Dani’s tears threatened to come faster and harder, and her body twitched and shook out the stress of the moment. “Come on, come on!” she chanted into the phone. Thuds and yells sounded in the corridor outside the door. Dani heard a woman’s voice. Sara!
She sprinted to the door and ripped it open. Sara stood there, hunched slightly, her hands around her own gun, which was pointed at the floor. Her eyes were wide and already searching the room. “JT’s shot!” Dani cried.
Sara rushed inside the room. “Lock the door,” she told Dani.
She passed JT, who was still on the bed and went right for the man slumped against the broken window. “Is this Clarkson?” she asked, as she pressed two fingers to his neck.
“Yes,” Dani said, feeling too wrung out to cry anymore, even as more tears threatened to spill.
Sara holstered her gun and went to JT. “Can you walk, JT?” His head was down and he seemed to be struggling to breathe.
“Yeah,” he said and tried to stand. Sara slipped an arm around him and pulled his hand onto her shoulder. “Dani, come help. We don’t have to go far. I’ve got evac just downstairs. We do have to hurry though. The town is in an uproar and they must have heard the gunshots. If the Marines heard and come in from the helicopter … well, that could go badly for us if they don’t know Clarkson orchestrated all of this.” She took the gun out of JT’s hand. “Is this Clarkson’s?” Dani nodded.
JT leaned heavily on them and they rushed out the door to the waiting car below. Dani could hear its engine rumbling as soon as they left the door. It sounded strange in a place that liked small Japanese-made cars that normally just whispered.
JT’s skin seemed fever-hot, hot enough to burn her. They made it to the bottom of the stairs without falling. A small, almost mousy man waited there with the back door open. He shifted his weight from foot to foot nervously and tried to look in all directions at once. Behind him, an Egyptian man dressed in American clothes gaped at them from the driver’s seat. “Mitch, Mitch no, Mitch he is injured — bloody,” the Egyptian man said in heavily accented English. The mousy man didn’t even look at him, but said “I’ll pay you three times what I promised you. He needs help.” Dani felt a surge of gratitude. She didn’t know who this small, compact man was, but he seemed efficient, and on their side. Dani hadn’t felt that very many people were on her side in the last week. The Egyptian man’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped into an almost comical ‘O’. He seemed to recover and ran to his trunk, pulling out a blanket and a quite-large first aid kid with the big red cross stamped on it. He shook the blanket out into the back seat, and laid the first aid kit on the floor, then got back behind the wheel. Dani heard the big car thunk into gear and marveled that she noticed such an unimportant noise. She and Sara helped a groaning JT into the back seat, then climbed in after. The front passenger door slammed after the other man climbed in, and then they were spitting sand behind them as the big sedan climbed to a cruising speed down the only road out of town.
Sara pulled a knife out of a holster on her body and sliced JT’s shirt down the middle, making a clucking noise with her tongue as first his monster, radiating bruise was revealed, and then the small, red, weeping hole just under his collarbone. “Mitch, we need the closest military base. I don’t know if we can make it to Camp Patriot, and we don’t dare chance a local hospital.”
The man in the front seat already had a phone at his ear. “I’m on it. There’s an Australian Army base on the border.”
“Will they help us?”
“I’m betting they will. They offered to send me out a helicopter yesterday if I hadn’t found a place to stay. But Khalid here took me in and that was better - closer.” He nodded at their driver.
“Thank you Khalid,” Sara said.
Khalid nodded, a wide-eyed look of concentration and terror on his face. The car turned a corner and sped down a lonely highway through painted desert on both sides.
Mitch’s phone opened a line with someone and he began talking. Sara turned her attention back to JT’s injury.
Dani couldn’t believe she wasn’t screaming. Couldn’t believe normal words were being spoken. Why was the world not sitting still and watching this horror show of Uncle Kevin dead in the room and JT suffering in the back of this little car. She chanced a look at JT’s face to see if he was still conscious.
He was. His skin was white as fallen snow, so white that only his eyes seemed alive. They eyes burned into her. His face spoke volumes. It said why? It said betrayal. It said how could you? Dani’s cheeks flooded with heat and she glanced down.
“You should have told me,” JT said, his voice low and husky. Dani’s insane memory shot her back to the last time she’d heard it like that. He’d kissed her. He’d touched her. He’d told her she was beautiful. He’d claimed her and she’d welcomed it. She’d given what she had to give. And then he’d rejected it. Just like he was rejecting her now.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I just …” she fell silent, unable to express how badly she wished she could do it over. How much she wished it wasn’t true.
“Why did he do it? Why did he kill my best friend? And my squad? And almost me?” His eyes flashed in anger, and then he said something she never imagined she would hear from his mouth. “Is this some sort of a story for you?”
Dani squeezed her eyes shut. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. JT doesn’t really think I know anything about this does he? JT didn’t just accuse me of being kidnapped for an inside scoop, did he?
“She should have told you what?” Sara asked, her voice suggesting she already knew.
“Clarkson is her uncle,” JT spit out.
Dani felt Sara’s gaze land on her. Judging. Sentencing. She didn’t look up. She didn’t want to see the verdict. Her brain was full of a feverish mix of shame, grief, shock, and outrage. The emotions bounced around inside her and threatened to burst through as words, splashing vitriol over all of them.
Mitch turned from the front seat and said, “We have a helicopter inbound. It will meet us in 10 minutes. They have a doctor and blood on board. They say they can take us to Camp Patriot.”
“Perfect,” Sara breathed. “JT, hang in there.”
“Hanging,” JT said, his voice no more than a whisper.
Dani wanted to look at his face to see how he was. She also wanted to jump out of the car and never see him again. Her heart tore itself in half. Even the men who weren’t supposed to ever hurt you, hurt you, it said.
“Do you have a line to the President, Mitch? I need to talk to him. He’s not going to be very happy to find out one of his Marine Colonels set this up, and that Marine is now dead in a St. Marin hotel room. This situation is going to need a lot of damage control.”
“What the actual eff-word?” Mitch said from the front seat.
Sara smiled in spite of herself. “Yep. That’s the sad story. Can you get me the President? I’d like to explain it to him before we get on the helicopter.
Dani listened with half an ear to Sara’s conversation. She heard her last name, then
her first name bounce around in the conversation a few times. She heard Sara say, “No, she hasn’t been interviewed yet,” and knew she was in for more interrogation once they got to Camp Patriot. She wondered if Sara believed she had been in on it too. She pushed herself over toward the door as far as possible in the big back seat, not wanting to touch JT, not knowing how to make any of it better.
When the helicopter set down in the desert and she watched the Australian Soldiers carry JT to it, starting an emergency IV as they went, she wished for her father and mother in a way she hadn’t since childhood. She’d never felt so alone in her life.
Chapter 30
JT opened his eyes, not totally sure where he was. But as the thumping noise and floating sensations flooded into him, it became obvious. A helicopter. He was on a helicopter. He looked up and saw a bag filled with red fluid above him. A tube from it snaked down to an IV in his arm. He was getting blood. His entire right shoulder felt like a throbbing tooth. But his head was starting to clear again. He looked around and saw soldiers in strange uniforms, one of them holding something on his shoulder. A doctor, he thought. Although he couldn’t say how he knew that.
