The air smells so different today.
I made my way to the awaiting Black Hawk. Commander Almen was already impatiently waiting on the tarmac, clapping. “Congratulations, ladies, y’all made it with thirty seconds to spare. Bravo, zulu.”
I smiled knowing that dig was probably directed toward me and my constant tardiness, as of late. The commander went on to give his usual speech, all his familiar playfulness gone as the severity of the impending danger loomed. Although it was deemed a simple mission, in reality, there were never simple missions, as all missions posed a certain amount of danger. We readied our kit, checking over our M4’s and secondary weapons one last time. But even the commander’s pep talk hadn’t garnered any additional excitement from me. I still felt that prickling feeling in the back of my mind, a feeling that had served me well in past missions.
“Any questions or concerns, ladies?” the commander mocked. “And remember, we wanna get home in time to watch Dancing with the Stars, so let’s not get killed today.”
“Hooyah, sir,” the crew barked in unison, then one by one hopped onto the Black Hawk.
The helicopter’s propellers started to spin, kicking up a tornado of dust and pebbles as we took off from the airfield, headed to position itself on a rooftop 500 yards from the drop point. We sat quietly and waited until the heat signature from our thermal imaging binoculars no longer registered movement outside the confines of the dilapidated building that the intel identified as the target’s home.
“Go! Go! Go!” Commander Almen hollered as he vigorously jabbed the pilot’s shoulder.
The loud propeller blades chopped through the ominous, almost eerily calm, sky. As the Black Hawk made its final descent to its hovering position over the building, the spinning propellers kicked up a blinding hurricane of sand and concrete dust, as if the whole city was made of a giant sand castle.
We could do nothing but hold our breaths as we simultaneously repelled onto the roof, waiting for the chopper to fly away. The dust dissipated once the helo disappeared into the night, awaiting the beacon to return for extraction.
“All right, folks, we got about two to three minutes before the entire building is awake and armed with their machine guns. Be ready to shoot and disable anyone that doesn’t look like the three other men staring at you right now,” the commander said as he raised he gun and turned toward the door which led downstairs. “Remember, don’t kill anyone unless we’re sure he’s not the target, otherwise we just took a long ass plane ride for nothing, and someone is going to answer to POTUS with a stripe. And it ain’t gonna be me, bitches.”
We moved in unison, clearing rooms like a well-oiled machine. We had cleared about five rooms when the familiar sounds of ammunition from automatic weapons zipped through the stillness of the night. The bursts of light produced from each armor-piercing incendiary round strobed through the darkness giving away our enemies position. My team fired back, keeping our fingers on the trigger, taking out insurgents as they popped into view. Unfortunately, there were more rebels than were originally expected, and we were quickly outnumbered.
“Take cover!” I yelled as I ducked inside a dimly lit room that was positioned at the end of a long hallway.
We were trapped unless we could somehow shoot our way out. We motioned an improvised plan via hand signals to one another, intending to take out the insurgents in one fell swoop. The insurgents moved slowly toward the room, the old wooden floors creaking underfoot, giving their position away. The commander gave the signal that he would be first up and that he was going ahead with the plan. Unfortunately, the disastrous consequence of what transpired next would be forever engrained into my brain.
As the commander leapt from behind a wall―bang! The commander was the first to take a bullet right to the middle of his forehead. If the bullet had only struck a few inches higher, it would have hit his helmet and possibly ricocheted off. But fate hadn’t been on his side that night, and as he fell backwards, time slowed for me.
“No!” My scream trailed off as I reached my arm out toward his body, which landed on the dirty floor, kicking up a puff of dust around him.
The rebels continued to riddle his body with hundreds of bullets from their automatic weapons. His body convulsed, as though he were having a seizure. His head fell toward me. I looked on in horror, my blood boiling at the sight of my mentor lying on the floor, dead; his eyes still open and staring directly at me.
My eyes blurred with tears at the loss of a man I considered to be a father. I turned toward the rest of the team, who were equally stunned that the decorated war vet with over forty missions under his belt had been taken out so easily by a random piece of metal careening through the air. The loss didn’t bode well for the rest of the mission.
I motioned for them to lie down in order to take out the rebels from below. When the bullets stopped perforating the commander’s body, I took the opportunity to kick my feet off the wall, propelling myself over the bullet-riddled floor toward the commander’s lifeless body, shooting at anything that moved. I wanted to kill every last muthafucker out there. They all had to pay for his death.
The bullets stopped flying, and when the air cleared of smoke, I saw the rebels lying dead in a heap of bloodied flesh at the end of the hallway. The team rushed over to tend to the commander, shaking his body, calling out his name, trying as best they could to resuscitate him, and even though everything in our training told us he was already gone, none of us wanted to accept it.
The sounds of footsteps and yelling ascending the staircase filled the room. The men gathered the ammunition and extra magazines from the commander’s body as they dragged him away from the doorway, once again taking cover behind the walls. The footsteps got closer as the sound of gunfire ensued, the bullets whizzed through the door, hitting the adjacent wall. We readied ourselves for the fight, cocking our weapons and adjusting our night vision goggles. Oliver even pulled out his crucifix from behind his Kevlar vest and kissed it as he said a quiet prayer to himself.
We held our breath for the battle to come. Silence once again filled the room. It was the calm before the storm, and in this case, the storm was the distinct sound of metal hitting the floor and rolling toward the room.
I instinctively knew what the sound was, and yelled, “Grenade!”
We made a mad dash for the one window in the room.
I was the first one out, jamming my knee into the glass to break it. I held my arms up to my face to block the shattering shards of glass from cutting me or getting into my eyes. Erik and Oliver followed closely behind, the grenade going off right as I was halfway between the second floor of the building and the street. The blast propelled me even faster onto the ground, making my impact feel as though I had fallen from a five story building instead of only two.
My body smacked against the ground. I could taste the dirt in my mouth, and feel the heat wave from the blast burning my skin, singeing my delicate lungs as I lay still on the ground, gasping for air. Still dazed from the impact, and my cheek planted firmly against the dirt, my eyes widened when I caught sight of Oliver’s body smashed flat on top of an old beat up Pinto. The collision crumpled in the entire roof of the car onto the seats below, triggering the glass to explode outwards onto the street. His body lay limp, his arms and legs were sprawled out over the hood and trunk.
I tried to reach out my arm, but my battered and bruised body was in no shape to help anyone at that point; I couldn’t even help myself. The rebels’ shoes kicked up dirt as they ran past me to inspect the fallen and contorted bodies of my crew.
With the last of my strength, I reached for my emergency beacon, and with all my might, I pressed the button to signal that I needed extraction. My hand fell back to the ground as I heard voices speaking over me and felt hands patting me down, all of which slowly faded away into the background. As my eyesight blurred, a set of worn, dusty black boots stopped in front of me, kicking dirt and debris into my eyes and mouth. I coughed as my lids fluttered
shut and the world went black.
“Wake up, asshole,” a voice pierced through the darkness of my slumber, followed by a jostling hand.
I came to, restrained to a wooden chair, with an imposing black-haired man standing over me.
“He’s awake,” he alerted the insurgents standing around the dirty room.
Fuck, where am I?
A few moments later, a short Asian man with small, rectangular glasses, dressed in a light gray suit, walked in.
“Welcome, Mr. Black. I am Ethan Cheng,” the man greeted as he placed his glasses in his breast pocket.
“How do you know my name?” I asked in a crackling voice, struggling against the metal handcuffs.
“Your dog tags, of course. Seems you had a little accident. My men here found you. If you think about it, they saved your life. Some might say you owe us.” He leaned in.
“Who would say that?” I asked in a tight voice.
“Many. I think many would say that,” he replied, nodding an inch away from my face. “Don’t you guys think he owes you a thank you?”
The men littering the room spouted off in agreement.
“What do you want?” I asked, moving my arms away from the splintering wood.
“We want what all men want…a hot meal at the end of the day and a soft woman to lie next to at night,” he said, rubbing his clean shaven chin.
“And how am I supposed to help with that?” I asked, staring at the crumbling ceiling.
“We will see if your government would be willing to pay for you. Until then, you will stay here. I hope the accommodations are to your liking?” He chuckled.
“They aren’t going to pay.”
“You better hope they do, or you have some useful information for me.”
“I ain’t saying shit. Fuck you.”
He clenched his fist and planted it right across my jaw.
“You’re gonna sing, and you’re gonna make it pretty,” Cheng demanded.
I spat a mixture of blood and saliva in his face. “Fuck you!”
“Fuck me?” he echoed, taking another swing.
My face lurched to the right, the searing pain reverberated along my jaw.
“I don’t fuckin’ know anything, you son of a bitch!”
“Stop lying to me,” he said, taking the knife out of his pocket and stabbing me in the thigh with it.
I gritted my teeth to hold back any groans that would give him any sense of pleasure.
“Americans are pretty funny. You have this sense of loyalty that I never understood,” he said as he paced around my chair.
“Then kill me, you muthafucker.”
“Now, now, now. Don’t be rash. Just because they aren’t going to save you, does not mean you can’t save yourself.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“You know what I mean. Don’t act dumb. Or is it an act? You are an American, after all. Just fuckin’ tell me what you know of the ground movement of the U.S. forces in the Afghani region,” he said, sounding annoyed by the conversation.
“Don’t you understand? I don’t know shit! I’m a fuckin’ grunt. I just do what I’m told.”
“I don’t believe that for a second. Your rank says different, and I’m not an idiot. Do I look like an idiot to you?” he asked calmly.
I didn’t reply.
He let off half a smile before his lips turned down, divulging his true feelings. Cocking his fist back, he belted out a long wail as he propelled it into my already churning gut.
Blood shot out of my mouth and on to the concrete floor as I coughed. “Like I said…you’re going to sing, and you’re going to make it pretty.” He shook his hand out, rubbing his knuckles.
“You hit like a little pussy,” I said, spitting more blood on the floor.
He chuckled. “A pussy, huh?”
“Well, maybe a pussy was too kind…is there something less than hittin’ like a pussy?”
He pulled his .380 ACP from his brown leather shoulder holster and pressed the cold metal of muzzle to my temple.
“Just do it,” I cajoled.
He chuckled. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“No, but I’m sure you would.”
“You won’t see me again, but just know that my second in command will know just how unhelpful you have been to me!” he said, belting the butt of the gun at the base of my skull.
I felt the pain careen through my head before the world went black.
THE SECOND DAY
My eyes cracked open slowly to survey my new accommodations. I was no longer in the room, cuffed to the chair with Mr. Cheng hovering over me. The gray concrete floor and walls seemed to bleed together losing their respective borders.
My lungs, still charred from the grenade blast, burned as I coughed and tried to take shorter breaths in order to accommodate the pain. The agonizing screams coming from a room not too far from mine, judging by the decibel, were the wails of a man obviously undergoing extreme amounts of torture.
Where the fuck am I now?
The pungent aroma of urine and blood wafted through my cell and straight into my nose. I was unable to clearly discern where it was coming from.
I looked down to inspect my body, and as I tried to feel for any wounds, my action was hindered by the steel metal chains that restrained my wrists to the concrete wall. Shifting my gaze above my head, I saw that the chains had been screwed in via a metal plate and two one inch thick screws per chain. I strained my muscles as I tried to wrench the chains from the wall, but to no avail. All I managed to do was damage the skin around my already sore wrists.
As I assessed my body for the damage the fall might have caused, I noticed that my socks and boots were missing, along with my belt, BDU shirt, and dog tags. Basically, I was stripped of anything identifiable, and anything that could assist me in an escape. The only property my captors had left me with were my military issued olive green undershirt and my BDU camouflage pants.
I surveyed the room for any other occupants, or any possible routes of escape. It was, at best guess, a five foot by seven foot cell. Cold and stark, it had one dirty white bucket taking up residence in the corner, and one light bulb that hung precariously from the ceiling by a piece of wire. Again, I tried to tug at the chains, hoping to feel them budge even a millimeter, but they remained firm. I exhaled and closed my eyes. My head was still a little foggy.
Why the fuck didn’t I listen to myself? I knew I should have had those fuckin’ papers signed, maybe the commander would be alive, and I certainly would be sittin’ on the fuckin’ beach right about now, and not in this muthafuckin’ shithole.
My thoughts drifted off to my team, wondering if any of them had made it, and if they had, were they being tortured as well? I hung my head between my shoulders in despair at the thought of my brothers being beaten only a few feet away from me, and I was unable to do anything but take up real estate in this God forsaken cell.
Then the image of the commander lying on the floor flashed before my eyes. His eyes open, staring directly at me. The sense of loss I felt at that moment superseded any pain my body was experiencing. My only comfort was in knowing that he was finally at peace, and with his wife. I could still hear his voice calling her his sweet darlin’ whenever they chatted over the phone.
My ears perked up, when for the very first time, but certainly not the last, I heard the footsteps and the jangling of the keys. As they neared, the adrenaline already coursing through my veins began to pump even faster. The looming danger lurking right around the corner released the caged animal within as I struggled against the chains. The door flung open, revealing a tall, lanky black man with crooked, bright yellow teeth and large, sunken eyes. He was dressed in a pair of faded black jeans and my almost brand new military boots.
“Good morning, Lieutenant Elijah Black. I’m Amadi, Mr. Cheng’s second in command,” he said around the lit cigar hanging from his mouth.
I stayed silent but my glare could have launched
a thousand daggers aimed straight at his heart.
Amadi laughed. “You all start out the same way, don’t you? It’s that good American training. But you all also end the same way,” he said as he inhaled the cigar, holding in the smoke, then pulling it out of his mouth to look at the tip.
He blew the plume of smoke toward the ceiling, rolling the cigar in between his index finger and thumb, and then inhaled another large puff. The tension in the room was thick. I didn’t know what to expect from Amadi, only that it would probably be painful and agonizing. Amadi lunged at me, stopping only inches from my face, and forcefully blew a stream of smoke into my nostrils, making me cough and gasp for air. His high pitched laugh sounded like a hyena as he jammed the smoldering end of the cigar into the innermost vulnerable portion of my bicep. The aroma of burning flesh emanated from the site. I endured the searing pain, not willing to give him the satisfaction of a single groan.
“Oh! You’re one of those,” he said with a slight tinge of excitement in his voice. “This is my lucky day.”
I turned away from him and stared off into the corner of the room, eyeing the dingy bucket that was probably there to serve as my commode. Employing all of my training, I let the world around me melt away, and focused on the bucket. Amadi smacked me in the face, my head jolting to one side, but the pain did not faze me and only added to my focus.
“It’s okay; the real fun starts in a little while. I will see you later, princess,” Amadi said as he patted me on my freshly acquired cigar wound, and then headed toward the door.
I watched as he walked away, and in the sliver between his skinny body and the door frame, stood a woman fully clad in her traditional long black dress and head scarf, with only her eyes peering through. She had been standing at the doorway, motionless, watching the whole scene unfold. I made eye contact with her, and she quickly shifted her eyes to the ground. Amadi shoved her out of his way as he walked through the threshold of the door.
“Close it!” he hollered at her.
She glanced over at me as she grabbed the doorknob and closed it gently behind her. Instantly, I began to formulate plans in my head for an escape. Granted, I would have to at least be unchained, which was going to pose a problem, since I didn’t know if that would ever happen.
Unleashed (Mr. Black Series Book 1) Page 3
