by Elle James
After all the little girls were shoved into the building, the men with the guns left, closing the door behind them.
Darkness surrounded them, engulfed them, seeming to swallow them alive.
For a moment, Nora’s heart sank to her knees. How was she to get out of this place when she couldn’t even see her hand in front of her face?
The children huddled closer.
Nora sat on what felt like hardpacked dirt and gathered the girls close. She stroked their heads, crooned to them and promised she would do her best to get them back to their home.
Deep down, she prayed for a miracle.
As she settled onto the dirt, with the girls all lying around her, sleep overtook her, claiming her in the darkness. Her last thought as she closed her eyes was of Rucker.
When his unit got back from their mission, would they come looking for her and the girls? Was one nurse and a group of Afghan orphans worthy of a major rescue attempt?
She really hoped so. The way things were looking, they could use all the help they could get.
Rucker could have kicked himself for not giving Nora one of the GPS tracking devices they had plenty of. If she’d had one when the men had taken her, the Delta Force team would’ve been on their way immediately to retrieve her.
Instead, they waited to hear from Pazir. He had until morning to tell them something.
Rucker paced the operations room. His teammates lay sleeping in their bunks, getting as much rest as they could after laying out all their gear. They could be ready to go in less than ten minutes from the time they were notified to saddle up.
Sleep wasn’t in the cards for Rucker. Nora was out there somewhere. If Akund had her, he was known for selling women and children into the sex trade. If that was their plan for Nora and the little girls, they only had a few hours to work with. Akund wouldn’t sit on them long. He’d sell them and have them delivered as quickly as possible. Possibly to another country. Who knew where?
Another trip to the end of the room and back had Rucker working himself up into a frenzy.
If Pazir waited until morning to let them know where they were holding the hostages, it would be a very long night. And Nora could be that much farther away.
“You need to relax and kick your feet up,” the CO said. “It’s going to be a long night.”
“Sir, I can’t relax. Now while Nor—Lieutenant Michaels and those children are missing.”
“You’ll be of little use rescuing them if you’re so tired you can’t perform the mission.”
“I know that, sir, but I just can’t rest.”
“The lieutenant is a remarkable woman, isn’t she?” his commander said.
“Yes, sir. She is.”
“I imagine she made an impression on you, what with delivering a breech baby and all.”
So many things about the woman had impressed Rucker from the start. “Yes, sir. She’s supposed to redeploy to the States in a couple of days. She should’ve stayed behind the wire for the entire last week of her tour.”
“I understand she’s to be admired for her commitment to the children. She risked her life to make sure they had the proper vaccinations to save their lives.”
Rucker smiled. “She was determined to do that. I asked her to wait until we could escort her.”
“But we had a Taliban leader to capture.”
Rucker’s lips pressed into a tight line. “Which we’ve failed to do now, twice.”
“He’s a slippery bastard. I feel like we’re getting closer.”
“Sir, close only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades.” Rucker spun away and paced the length of the room then spun to face the CO. “Either we catch him, or we don’t. The longer he’s free, the more havoc he spreads. And if I find he’s responsible for the capture of the little girls and Lieutenant Michaels, I will personally make him pay.”
The commander nodded. “He needs to be eliminated one way or another.”
A knock sounded on the door before a uniformed woman pushed it and poked her head inside. “Sir, I have a message for a Sergeant Sloan. The MP who brought it to me at the medical facility said the man who delivered it to the gate guard insisted it be passed to him as quickly as possible.”
Rucker dove for the handwritten sheet of paper in her hand. “Thank you.”
Lance entered the room after the female specialist left. “Hear anything?”
“Just got word.” Rucker tore into the small envelope and removed the single sheet of paper with scrawling on it Rucker could barely read.
The message was written in spidery English.
Abdul Akund takes his product to one of two places to sell. One is in a small village in the Wardak Province. The other is in the heart of the hills west of Kabul. I leave you with the coordinates. Peace be with you.
Rucker fought the urge to crumple the paper and throw it across the room. Two places? He needed a definitive direction. Not two.
His commander read the note and handed it to Lance, the team computer guy. “Scan it and send it to the email address I have written on the pad beside the keyboard.”
Lance scanned it into the computer and emailed the image to the address the CO indicated.
“I have people on standby at Langley,” their commander said. “They’ll pull up any satellite images they can at those coordinates and get back to us ASAP.”
“Do we have to wait?” Rucker asked. “Can’t we send men to both locations?”
“We could, but we only have one helicopter at our disposal at this time. It’s all of the team or none.”
Which meant more waiting.
Rucker had just about worn a path into the floor by the time Langley got back with them.
Lance sat at the desk with the computer, tapping a finger on the mouse, reading the latest news reports and studying the map of Afghanistan and where the coordinates fell.
Rucker stood at his side, wishing he could just get in a helicopter and go to both locations.
An hour passed and nothing.
Then Lance leaned forward. “Got something.”
He tapped the mouse and brought up a satellite video of a building nestled in the hills with a truck parked beside it. Green heat signatures indicated people moving around outside of the building.
“Holy hell, look how little some of the heat signatures are.”
“Children,” Rucker said. “They’re unloading children from the truck and moving them into that building.” He spun and headed for the door. “Time to saddle up. We have our target. I’ll gather the team.”
“I’ll notify the helicopter pilot,” the commander said.
Rucker hurried to the buildings where his teammates slept, pounded on their doors and flung them open. “Moving out,” he said as the men leaped out of their beds, strapped on their body armor and grabbed their weapons.
By the time the team assembled at the helicopter pad, the pilot had the engine humming and the blades turning.
Rucker prayed they’d arrive in time to keep Akund from moving them, again.
Hang in there, Nora. The cavalry is on its way.
Chapter 10
An hour into the darkness, the night cooled. Nora shrugged out of her uniform jacket and covered a couple of the little girls who couldn’t quite make it close enough to her to share her body heat.
Most of them had fallen asleep, their little sobs breaking Nora’s heart.
She wanted to make these men pay for being so callous with the lives of innocent children. Hadn’t they been through enough after having lost their parents?
As she lay surrounded by little girls, a cool draft lifted the hairs that had worked free of the once neat bun at the nape of her neck. She brushed the hair aside and shivered in her T-shirt.
Then it hit her. Where there was a draft, there was an opening.
Nora untangled herself from the pile of children and crawled along the floor in the direction she remembered the door was located.
When she bumped softly i
nto the corrugated door, she sat up and ran her hands across the cool metal surface until she found the gap between the door and the wall. Running her fingers upward, she found where hinges held the door onto the side of the building. Those hinges were on the outside of the structure. She couldn’t work them free. Cool air edged through the gaps but not enough to account for the breeze floating across the middle of the warehouse floor. Moving as quickly as possible, she worked her way to one corner, and started moving along the next wall.
Crawling along the floor, she searched for that breeze until she finally found it in the middle of the second wall. A gap between the floor and the wall caught the wind and funneled it into the room. It wasn’t much of a gap, but the floor was dirt. With some effort, she might make it big enough to get the children through and, maybe, herself.
Using her fingernails, she scraped at the dirt. It was hardpacked and not moving quickly enough. What she needed was a tool of some kind. In her crawling, she hadn’t run across anything she could use as a shovel. All she had was what she’d arrived in. Her uniform.
She patted down her pockets and found her ID card and dog tags. They weren’t much, but they were better than nothing. Using her ID card, she scraped at the dirt, making little progress. Digging the corner of her card into the ground, she attempted to loosen larger chunks. The card bent. The ground was really hard.
Switching to her dog tags, she worked at the edges of the gap and slowly scraped dirt and dust away, shifting it to the side and spreading it out so that it wouldn’t draw attention.
Hope grew with each inch she opened in the gap. Soon, she could get her arm through to the outside. The side she worked on was the side away from where the men had parked the vehicles. They shouldn’t be paying as much attention to this side. Nora prayed she was right.
Time passed. An hour went by based on the dial on her watch. Still, she didn’t have quite enough dirt removed to get the largest child through the opening. Definitely not enough to get herself through. She’d have to dig a lot more and faster if she planned to get out before sunup.
Engine noise sounded outside as if someone was driving up to the building.
Nora felt her way back across the floor and gathered the little girls around her. She’d just settled onto the floor when the big door opened, and a flashlight beam swept across her and the little girls.
She blinked, the light blinding her after being entombed in pitch black.
A man wearing the loose clothing of the Afghans and a black turban with a red-checkered band woven through it held the light. A taller man, wearing western trousers, a brown leather jacket and a wide-brimmed safari hat pulled down low over his face stepped in beside the Afghan.
“I didn’t ask for adults,” the man said in English with an American accent.
“She was with them when we collected them. It was take her or kill her. Her golden hair will bring top dollar.”
“And the fact she’s a missing soldier and a female one at that will have every military unit searching for her.”
The man in the black turban raised his other hand. In it was a pistol. “We will hide the body.”
Nora tensed and shoved Taara out of her arms. She crab-walked backward, away from the children and pushed to her feet.
The American placed his hand on the Afghan’s arm. “No. I’ll take her with the rest. But we have to move them quickly. I have a truck on its way. It will be here in the next hour.”
“We would move them in our truck, but one of the tires is now flat. We are waiting for another to arrive before we can leave.”
“No. I’d rather take them in my own transport, which will arrive soon. When it does, have them loaded quickly. The longer they remain here, the more chance there is of them being found.”
When the flashlight beam started around the sides of the building, Nora tensed. She couldn’t let them see the hole she’d worked so hard to dig. “You won’t get away with this,” she blurted.
The flashlight returned to her face, blinding her.
Nora held her hand up to block the light from reaching her eyes. “My unit will be looking for me. When they find me, your operation will be blown apart.”
“You are one female,” the man in the black turban said in heavily accented English. “They will not care.”
The man with the hat shook his head. “They will,” he disagreed. “Thus the need to move the assets quickly.”
“We’re not assets,” Nora said. “We’re not cattle, and we’re not products to be bought or sold to the highest bidder. Not only is what you’re doing against every law in the world, it’s against humanity.”
“If she doesn’t shut up, you can stuff a rag in her mouth,” the American said. “If she gives you any trouble, my people have drugs to handle her.”
Nora’s breath caught in her throat. She’d read the articles, seen the reports and knew how human trafficking worked.
They captured the women, drugged them into a stupor and used them until they were worn out or died of overdoses. The women didn’t fight back because they couldn’t. The drugs took the fight out of them and left them limp and lethargic.
If they got the drugs into her, she wouldn’t have a chance of getting the little girls away from these monsters.
At that point, she prayed they’d leave her and the girls alone in the dark so that she could get back to work digging the way out of their prison. With less than an hour to work with, she had to get going.
The American glanced at her one more time, his eyes narrowing. “On second thought, if she gives you any trouble, you will be better off shooting her.”
His words should’ve frightened Nora. But all they did was make her angry. So angry she wanted to succeed in her effort to break free of her captors and show them that she wasn’t afraid, nor was she playing the part of a victim. Then she’d find the traitor American and…
Well, she hoped he’d rot in hell one way or another. He didn’t deserve to live. Nor did the Afghan who’d gathered the victims to sell. They were lower than pond scum as far as Nora was concerned. Hell, pond scum had more redeeming qualities than those two men.
The men turned and left the building, taking the light with them.
As they left, Nora scanned the interior while there was still a little light left before they closed the door.
As she suspected, there wasn’t any other tool she could use to dig the hole she needed to get out of the structure. After hugging the girls and telling them it would be all right, she found her way back to the hole she’d worked on and dropped to her knees. After a few minutes, one of the older girls crawled up to where she was and felt around for what she was doing.
Nora guided her hand to the hole in the floor like the blind leading the blind and showed her through her motions what she’d been working on.
She handed her the dog tags and went back to work on one side of the depression, digging deeper, as fast as she could, praying the ID card held up long enough to do the job.
The girl worked as hard on her side with the dog tags. It was like digging a trench with a spoon. It could be done, but it took time.
When her fingers started cramping and her knees went numb, she kept going. The girls needed her to get them out of there. She couldn’t let a little pain stop her, so she dug deeper, calling on the last reserves of energy she could muster.
A sliver of starlight shone through the hole, growing bigger the more they dug.
As the light grew, the girls moved closer and helped by digging with their hands.
Nora and the older girl loosened the soil, the littler girls moved it out of the way.
Finally, Nora put out her hand to stop them all. She lay flat on her back and scooted under the wall. When she had her head out enough to see, she looked around.
As she’d suspected, there weren’t any guards on that side of the building, but there was one at each corner. They’d have to be careful not to make too much noise or movement while the guards were looking t
heir direction. Getting all the little girls past the guards would be risky, but then, staying in the building wasn’t an option.
Nora slid back inside and dug faster and harder. She could literally see the light at the end of the tunnel, and she couldn’t stop until she got the girls out.
Between her and the orphans, they dug the hole deep enough for Nora to get her head and shoulders through it. She came back inside and pressed a finger to her lips, hoping the children could see her in the little bit of light filtering inside the hut.
They nodded as one.
Nora pointed to the small children. “Little ones first.”
Again, the kids nodded.
Nora poked her head beneath the wall and looked for the guards at the corners. One was in sight, with his back to the front wall and to her.
The other was nowhere to be seen.
She shimmied through the hole, almost getting hung up when she got to her hips. Her belt caught the metal wall, making a clanking sound.
Nora lay still, watching the guard leaning against the wall up front. He didn’t move, and his head appeared to be tipped toward his chest.
She hoped that meant he was asleep.
After she unhooked her belt from the wall, she wiggled and scooched and finally got her boots out as well.
She lay flat on the ground and very still until she was sure the other guard was still gone and the one on the front still slept. Then she reached back into the hole.
Little hands caught hers, and she pulled the first child through. It was Taara.
Nora almost cried in relief. She picked her up and carried her over to a stand of brush several yards away from the building. She sat her on the ground and pointed to her. “Stay here.”
She wasn’t sure Taara understood her words, but she hoped she would understand her meaning.
Then Nora looked both ways and ran back to the hole and reached inside.
One by one, she pulled the little girls free and hid them in the bushes.
She counted each one as she freed them and didn’t stop until she had moved each child through the gap.
