Unchained

by J C Ryan

  Rex looked up. The stars were no help. Already the heavens were brightening, making the stars fade from view.

  Time was short.

  He moved to the wall. Unless it attached to any of the outbuildings to impede his progress, following it would eventually lead to the residence.

  Five minutes later, Rex spotted a familiar-looking silhouette in a tree above the wall. Digger?

  He touched the coms unit in his collar. “Digger. Come.”

  The tree rustled, and a black shape oozed out of it. Digger was walking along the top of the wall toward him, maybe unable to see him yet. Then a muffled yelp of pain reached Rex’s ears through his earbuds. “Shit,” he whispered.

  Glass on the walls? Why didn’t I think of that?

  Urgently, he spoke in a low voice again. “Off, boy. Get off the wall.”

  The silhouette disappeared from the top of the wall, and seconds later, Digger almost bowled him over as he jumped at his chest. Rex didn’t have any experience with dogs – just Digger and that long-ago dog that had mauled him. But he was reasonably sure that the frenetic wiggles of the dog’s muscular body were a joyful greeting.

  He took Digger’s big head in his hands and held it while he kissed the top of it. “I’m glad to see you, too, boy! Let’s go get Rehka.”

  Digger’s ears went up at Rehka’s name. Rex had uttered it often enough that it was a familiar word to him. He’d never met her, but Rex had let him sniff the scarf often enough as he said her name that he was certain Digger would know the woman herself when he detected her scent.

  “Find Rehka,” he said while he held the scarf out to him.

  Digger looked at the wall. Rex realized too late what he’d done by commanding Digger to leave the wall. Digger couldn’t get back up. Not from the ground. Not only that, but there was glass at least on part of it. Or was there?

  “Digger, give me your paw.” Rex didn’t know where that had come from. Had he heard Trevor say it? He thought maybe he had. In any case, Digger knew the command. He sat and lifted his right front paw. Rex leaned the AA-12 against the wall, knelt, and gently felt along and between the pads. Nothing. He let go, and Digger immediately lifted the other. Rex repeated the process. There it was. Not glass. A thorn. He plucked it from between Digger’s pads and let go of the paw. Digger reached his head forward and licked Rex’s cheek. “Aw, you’re welcome, buddy.”

  Rex stood. He looked up at the wall, which was between eight and ten feet high. Hard to judge in the dark. He wondered. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He stooped and put his arms around Digger’s body. “Up, boy.”

  He didn’t know if it was the right command, or if there was such a command, but Digger seemed to know what he wanted. The dog allowed himself to be picked up. Sixty pounds of dog was nothing for Rex. He could have lifted twice as much weight, easily. When he stood with Digger balanced in his arms and lifted him as high as he could over his shoulder, Digger dug his back feet into Rex’s chest and leaped for the wall.

  Rex staggered from the powerful thrust of the dog’s takeoff, but Digger had made it. Not for the first time, Rex marveled at his intelligence. Digger was already threading his way along the top of the wall toward the tree where Rex had first spotted him. When he reached it, he dropped out of Rex’s sight.

  Now all Rex had to do was figure out a way to reach the courtyard himself, and from there, how to get the women out. But that would involve scaling that wall and he didn’t yet know how he was going to accomplish that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  REHKA WAS SLEEPING when Digger found her. She’d endured the beating, along with Zoya and Hande. She was sore, but she wasn’t badly injured. The three women expected more punishment to come and eventually they’d be sold or killed, but for now they’d been sent back to the harem. Not to their rooms or their beds, though. They slept as comfortably as they could among a few cushions they’d pulled from the furniture. They’d been told they weren’t allowed to seek the comfort of the chaise lounges, or even the chairs. It was the floor for them.

  They didn’t dare disobey, even when their guards left them alone.

  The restriction was psychological punishment only. It wasn’t even bad, given the number of available cushions. Only the humiliation of being seen by the others in the harem, beaten, dirty, not allowed to bathe or change their torn clothes or use the furniture. It was as if they were mongrel dogs. No one had spoken to them, either. Even the three other women who’d expected to escape with them were silent and avoided them as if they had a contagious disease, fearful that they’d be found out as co-conspirators.

  When Digger found Rehka’s scent, he entered the room cautiously. He ran straight to Rehka’s resting place on the floor and nosed her cheek. She woke, startled, and failed to completely stifle a scream when she saw the big black beast’s face inches from hers. Only the thought that she’d be beaten again kept her from crying out.

  What’s this? Did Mutaib send in this beast to devour us?

  Digger immediately sat down and opened his mouth in his friendly grin and let his tongue hang out.

  Rehka began shaking in fear. The dog’s teeth were enormous!

  She inched away from it, squirming toward Zoya, her new friend. The dog followed, wagging its tail. Rehka didn’t know any dogs except the feral ones back in India, and they were known to be vicious. She didn’t know what a wagging tail meant. When she bumped backwards into Zoya’s sleeping form, it almost startled another scream out of her.

  Zoya woke in the same state of fear.

  “Shh,” Rehka warned. “Dog.”

  Zoya opened her eyes wider and saw Digger. “It is the man’s dog.”

  ***

  DIGGER SMELLED THEIR fear. He didn’t want to hurt them. His alpha, the new one, used to fear him. When he made a sound like barking and showed his teeth, then he was happy, and he didn’t fear anymore. Digger decided to make the women show their teeth, bark, and be happy.

  He rolled over and showed them his belly, wagging his tail slowly. They watched him, but they still feared. He twisted and snapped at the wagging tail, pretending to try to catch it. The humans weren’t showing their teeth or barking. He rolled back onto his feet and sat, then lifted his upper body and folded his forelegs. He always got a treat when he did that.

  One human female lifted the corners of her mouth and showed her teeth. He smiled back at her.

  When she spoke to the other one, her smell of fear had diminished.

  Then the other one lifted her mouth and showed her teeth.

  The first female raised to her rear legs and shuffled to a third, who was still sleeping. The third woman woke up and saw him, and she said something he didn’t understood and something he understood — his name “Digger.”

  He grinned wider and went to her.

  She stroked his head.

  He was so pleased that he rolled over and showed this one his belly. She patted it. He liked this one. The first woman he’d woken stopped fearing. Rehka. That was Rehka. His alpha wanted him to bring her to the wall.

  Digger stood and took Rehka’s foreleg covering gently in his mouth and tugged. All three females got up. One, the one who’d said his name, left the room, but Rehka and the other one followed him to the place with the tree by the wall.

  ***

  REHKA AND ZOYA followed the dog obediently. Hande had told them he’d take them to the courtyard. She’d said it was later than agreed, but she was sure the dog was there to take them to Rex. She would gather the other women and meet them there.

  Hande hurried to the rooms of the others. Two were reluctant to follow, now that they’d seen what happened to Hande, Zoya, and Rehka. One was not in her room. It was the one with the little daughter who reasoned that this would be her only chance to save her child from her own fate. She went with Hande to give the other two one more chance.

  By that time, those two had made their final decisions. One had been summoned to the prince’s room, a rare but not unheard-of
dawn obligation. She wept, but they all knew if she didn’t go they’d be discovered. She promised to keep their secret and begged them to come back for her someday.

  “You must tell the world what we suffer. Perhaps the rulers of our countries will force the Saudi government to punish the prince and set us free.”

  Hande promised that if they survived and managed to escape and get back to their countries, they would do everything they could to get her out. She also promised to convey the message to Rex, and quickly left before the escorts came to the room. It was heartbreaking to leave her, but if she didn’t go to Mutaib as ordered but was found missing, the escape would be discovered, and she and they would be dead in any case. The only way she would stay alive and would have a chance, remote as it might have been, to be free one day, was for her to go.

  The other woman would go with them. Hande, the two women she’d gone to fetch, and the five-year-old girl made their way through the maze of the harem quarters to the courtyard. Fearfully, they peeked outside, to find Rehka and Zoya waiting alone.

  Where was the man who would rescue them? Could he really do it?

  Rehka and Zoya had doubts of their own. The last time they’d seen the man, he was shackled to a chair in the private prison where Mutaib kept his enemies while extracting all information they had before killing them. The building was the stuff of fearful legend for the pleasure wives. As new women came to the harem, those who’d been there before them whispered of others who’d disappeared and those who had been beaten and told tales of atrocities they’d seen while they were there.

  Finding the courtyard empty when they got there immediately raised their hackles. How had the dog known to come to them, if its master was still imprisoned? But if he was not in custody, then why was he not where he was supposed to meet them? How was it even possible that he could have escaped?

  As the minutes passed, fear and doubt settled in. Had they’d made a grave mistake by following the dog?

  When the others arrived, they communicated the fear, and they were all ready to flee back to the harem and make peace with their lot when the dog did something they would not have believed if they had not seen it.

  The courtyard had beautiful gardens around the walls, including stunted trees that no grown person could have climbed without breaking the higher branches. As they whispered their fears to each other, one of the women said, “Look!” She pointed toward the wall.

  The dog had climbed into one of the trees and was balanced on its highest sturdy branch. As they watched, he gathered his muscles and leaped to the top of the wall. Once there, he ran along the wall to a tree that grew outside it and overhung it and disappeared into its branches. The women stared after the dog in shock.

  Were they supposed to follow the dog’s route? Impossible!

  Zoya and Rehka turned to Hande, a question on their faces. She shrugged. In answer to their unspoken question, she addressed the entire group.

  “I do not know what we should do now. If I had to guess, I’d say the man is commanding the dog in some way. Maybe he has escaped the prison but is unable to join us here. If you are fearful for your safety, return to your rooms. That way you might stay alive. But I am going to stay here. I would rather die than remain in this place.”

  The others murmured among themselves, arguing the pros and cons of staying here as dawn broke, and being found in the courtyard trying to escape.

  Then a whisper from the tree outside the wall reached their ears. “I’m here. Is there any way for you to climb over?”

  Hande moved closer. “No, we cannot. How will you reach us?”

  “Leave that to me but be ready. We don’t have much time.”

  Rehka said something Rex couldn’t hear, and he asked Hande to repeat it.

  “She spoke in Hindi.”

  “Tell her to come closer and tell me. I can speak Hindi.”

  Hande repeated his words to Rehka, pushing her closer to the wall.

  Rex spoke reassuringly to Rehka, who seemed surprised that he spoke in her language. A flood of Hindi poured out of her.

  “You saw how they beat us. How could you have come to give us hope and then fail us in that way? Now we will be killed if you do not help us quickly. The sun will rise soon. Your escape will be discovered, or they will find us here. I do not wish to die.”

  Rex understood her anxiety. “They didn’t discover it from me. One of you betrayed the plot. Ask the others who it was if you must, but that isn’t important now. Its critical now that you stay calm, and I’ll have you out soon.”

  Rehka turned to Hande. “Who was it? Who betrayed us?”

  Hande barely understood her broken Arabic, but for the first time, she took stock of who was there and remembered there were two missing. One had refused to come. She hadn’t found the other. “Where is Aliya?”

  Zoya said, “Didn’t you bring her? Where is Rania?”

  “Rania would not come. She was too afraid after we were beaten. Aliya was not in her room.”

  “Perhaps she was with the prince?”

  One of the others heard and spoke up. “No. She is with child. She has been excused from her duties until the child is born. The foolish woman thinks the prince will marry her.”

  Hande and Zoya stared at each other. “It was Aliya.”

  Rehka understood the simple statement. “Tell him I will come. He must wait. I will go and kill her.” She turned quickly, as if she’d run to do what she’d threatened.

  Zoya grabbed her arm. “No! You must not. The child will die. The child is innocent.”

  Somehow the message crossed the language barrier. “Then she must face her karma in the future,” Rehka hissed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  REX REALIZED HIS reconnaissance had been interrupted and there was now no time to plan for the women to escape the compound. They couldn’t scale the wall, and neither could he. But his capture and subsequent escape had one silver lining. He now had enough weaponry to abandon his original desire to spirit them away by stealth. He could now fulfill his vow to exterminate the vermin who’d beaten and degraded his charges.

  He now understood that the original plan would have been problematic if not impossible without a ladder anyway.

  As soon as he’d persuaded Rehka to trust him and persuaded them all to calm down and wait for him, he made his way around the walls that surrounded the compound. With Digger at his side, he felt bolstered.

  Dawn was rapidly approaching, so he used the techniques to avoid discovery that were second nature to him, crouch-running from cover to cover when the coast was clear, waiting in the shadows if a vehicle passed when he reached the street side, surveying the visibility of his next move carefully before he made it, and always watching for enemy patrols.

  One more example of the lax security was that there were clumps of landscaping, leafy bushes and other forms of visual entertainment to soften the line of the walls, every few yards along them. And as far as he could tell, no patrols outside the walls. There hadn’t been any inside, either.

  If I’d overseen his security, all this would never have been allowed. Aren’t there any cat burglars in Dammam?

  Mutaib must have thought himself untouchable. He was about to find out how wrong he’d been.

  Rex and Digger made it to the front of the compound where he’d been brought as an honored guest, a little more than thirty hours previously. The gates were closed and locked, of course. A small guardhouse near them contained a sleepy guard, whose attention was on the street and gates. Rex observed him for several minutes. The guard had a pattern – he looked through the glass window directly ahead at the street, but never very far to his right, where Rex was concealed behind a large urn holding a palm tree and Digger behind a bush next to it.

  The guard never turned his head all the way to his right side to look through that window. Then he’d look to his left and over his shoulder, through the open side of the guardhouse, at the gates. Finally, he’d lower his chin to his ch
est, apparently taking micro-naps. Every few minutes he’d repeat the pattern.

  After watching for about ten minutes, Rex was confident of his approach. The next time the guard lifted his head and looked straight ahead, Rex was standing in front of the guardhouse, the shotgun pointed at him. And Digger started snarling in the doorway to the guard shack. Rex saw him open his eyes and gestured upward with the shotgun in the universal signal for ‘hands up’.

  The guard’s eyes grew round as skeet targets and his hands shot toward the ceiling. He tracked Rex as he walked around to join Digger.

  “Unlock the gates. One wrong move, and you disintegrate. That means don’t touch the alarm.”

  Rex thought he’d disabled the entire alarm system, but he couldn’t be sure. Before he started World War Three in the compound, which he fully intended to do, he had to gather everyone who would come running at the sound of gunfire or shouts. This guy was the key to the first salvo.

  When the gates swung open, Rex told the guard to get out and show him where the others were. As they walked to the gates, the guard still holding his hands in the air, Rex asked him how many men were in the compound.

  “Iskandar, maybe six others. There were more, but some were injured in a fight yesterday. They haven’t yet been replaced. The prince, of course. The eunuch who oversees the harem.”

  “Ten, counting you and the eunuch,” Rex said. The sound of the final word made his stomach lurch. He didn’t think he’d ever had occasion to speak that word aloud.

  “He won’t present a threat to you,” the guard said. His tone indicated contempt, and his arms started to sag. Rex nudged him in the back with the shotgun and the arms quickly shot up again.

  They’d reached the front door. Rex shook his head when the guard simply opened it. It hadn’t been locked.