Edge Of Truth
Edge Of Truth
Brynn Kelly
Tensions sizzle in this electrifying novel guaranteed to capture your heart and take your breath away. Fans of Julie Garwood, Suzanne Brockmann and Jayne Ann Krentz will devour this action-packed, emotionally stunning tour de force, where every page reveals another damning secret and daring gamble.Rotting in an African dungeon is the last place journalist Tess Newell expected to find herself. As she's held hostage by the terrorist group she’s investigating, Tess’s salvation—and temptation—arrives in the form of another prisoner. A French Foreign Legionnaire with a sinful smile and too many secrets to be anything but dangerous. Yet she knows he’s her only hope of surviving.The Legion is the only family Flynn has. His sanctuary and his purgatory, after years spent in hell. When a mission goes south and Flynn is captured, it’s not the enemy that worries him, but the brazen, alluring reporter whose prying questions threaten to bring down his world—and the walls he’s built around his heart.Yet after a daring escape, Flynn must risk it all and go on the run with Tess to retrieve the evidence she needs. The chemistry between them threatens to detonate but, with the enemy fast closing in, time is running out to unravel the truth from the lies in this deadly conspiracy…
Tensions sizzle in this electrifying novel guaranteed to capture your heart and take your breath away. Fans of Julie Garwood, Suzanne Brockmann and Jayne Ann Krentz will devour this action-packed, emotionally stunning tour de force, where every page reveals another damning secret and daring gamble.
Rotting in an African dungeon is the last place journalist Tess Newell expected to find herself. As she’s held hostage by the terrorist group she’s investigating, Tess’s salvation—and temptation—arrives in the form of another prisoner. A French Foreign Legionnaire with a sinful smile and too many secrets to be anything but dangerous. Yet she knows he’s her only hope of surviving.
The Legion is the only family Flynn has. His sanctuary and his purgatory, after years spent in hell. When a mission goes south and Flynn is captured, it’s not the enemy that worries him, but the brazen, alluring reporter whose prying questions threaten to bring down his world—and the walls he’s built around his heart.
Yet after a daring escape, Flynn must risk it all and go on the run with Tess to retrieve the evidence she needs. The chemistry between them threatens to detonate but, with the enemy fast closing in, time is running out to unravel the truth from the lies in this deadly conspiracy...
Praise for Edge of Truth (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
“Edge of Truth has it all—danger, desire, and heart-pounding action. Brynn Kelly captures you on page one and doesn’t let go!”
—Laura Griffin, New York Times bestselling author
“Dark and deep—a twisting romantic suspense that will grab you and never let go.”
—Cynthia Eden, New York Times bestselling author
“Edge of Truth is a breathtaking romantic thriller. The characters are so real they leap off the page, the love story is hot and the action never lets up. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Karen Robards, New York Times bestselling author
“Brynn Kelly will capture your heart and leave you breathless in this passionate, harrowing novel of romantic suspense. A must-read!”
—Brenda Novak, New York Times bestselling author
Praise for the novels of Brynn Kelly
“Captivating and cutting edge! Deception Island offers smoldering chemistry, cunning twists, and a whole lot of heart. Brynn Kelly delivers everything I love in a romance.”
—Heather Graham, New York Times bestselling author
“In Deception Island, Brynn Kelly pens a raw, dark, emotional novel of danger and intrigue that will keep readers turning the pages.”
—Kat Martin, New York Times bestselling author
“Intense and exciting...romantic suspense at its best!”
—Carla Neggers, New York Times bestselling author, on Deception Island
About the Author (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
After an award-winning twenty-year career as a journalist, BRYNN KELLY has abandoned fact in favor of her first love, fiction.
She’s delighted that she gets to spend her days in a bubble of delicious words and fiendish plots, turning all those stranger-than-fiction news reports into larger-than-life romantic thrillers.
Brynn has a journalism and communications degree and has won several prestigious writing awards, including the Valerie Parv Award and Pacific Hearts Award. Her acclaimed debut novel, Deception Island, was nominated for a Golden Heart® Award by Romance Writers of America. She’s also the bestselling author of four nonfiction books in her native New Zealand.
Edge of Truth
Brynn Kelly
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
Cover (#u30827fd6-d8c2-5a41-94be-81f6b0d8cdcf)
Back Cover Text (#uf85c1218-aec6-53e6-a73b-102dd64676bc)
Praise (#u3319771a-a75b-5616-98f9-cf89b238a4df)
About the Author (#u2fc74999-c6cf-5eb2-af3b-1901929b5742)
Title Page (#u1f57e097-8896-52c4-9efa-f693997f41f1)
CHAPTER 1 (#u9bc064b3-9318-517a-aab6-6be41f1188e2)
CHAPTER 2 (#u1b831e8c-cb22-53bd-9691-08a4f4267350)
CHAPTER 3 (#u59455937-4ae1-547e-b15e-7296a9671635)
CHAPTER 4 (#u820e67eb-3926-502f-9b16-82477da53129)
CHAPTER 5 (#u50db38cf-4e1b-549e-81f0-c3f709c19478)
CHAPTER 6 (#u89245244-88c7-5ba0-8eda-7996911e3ed1)
CHAPTER 7 (#uc9c97da8-fea0-50be-91dd-26c20955bf6a)
CHAPTER 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Tess clutched the bare mattress and gulped a lungful of stale air, her heart jackhammering against her ribs. A nightmare? No—men were shouting, outside. She widened her eyes, then squinted. Open, closed, open, closed, it made no difference. Black was black was black.
She sat up with a lurch and shuffled back against the damp stone wall to at least get a fix on which way was up. Not a sliver of gray slid between the floorboards above. Had to be night. She’d been asleep? For how long? She laid her palm over her face and blinked, the lashes tickling her skin. Definitely open. This wasn’t the kind of nightmare you got to wake from. As further proof, her big toes throbbed in unison where Hamid’s men had ripped out the nails.
A door squealed, and something solid was dragged across the floor overhead. From their nest in the corner of her cell, the mice scratched and squeaked—even they knew something was up. She shakily exhaled. Six days she’d been here, and each night had been heavy with silence until the distant song of a muezzin’s call to prayer. What was different about tonight?
A flashlight beam flickered through the cracks. More voices—instructions, perhaps. A series of clinks, a heavy scrape—they were opening the bunker hatch. Was she to be freed? She swallowed. Or executed?
Fresh air puffed over her face as the hatch lifted. She drew up her knees and hugged them. The flashlight beam tracked around the cell, pausing on a food tray the mice had finished up, and a scattering of empty plastic water bottles. The light flicked to her, scorching her eyes and drilling pain into her brain. She shut them tight and sealed her palms over top. Even then her vision pulsed bloodred.
If they were planning to make another video, or if Hamid was coming to ask again if she was ready for death, the next sound would be the rasp and bump of the rope ladder being lowered. But this early? This felt more like the hour of...
Enough overthinking. She breathed deeply through her mouth—she’d stopped inhaling through her nose days ago, so she couldn’t smell herself rotting.
People had survived years like this. She had to keep believing that the kidnap of a high-profile American TV journalist would prompt a large-scale search, even in East Africa. She had to keep visualizing a company of marines scouring the arid terrain. Or would they be out to get her, too?
Overthinking.
The rasp didn’t come. More scuffles and scrapes. She forced her eyes open. Shadows circled the dirt floor. Above the hatch, figures moved and a man grunted, as if with great effort. Something blocked the square hole, returning the cell to darkness. It wasn’t the hatch cover, so what was—?
The thing dropped. She shrank back as it thudded down a few feet away. A strobe of light flashed on a large curled shape before the hatch thunked shut. Metal scraped on metal—the bolts sliding home. She shivered. Voices and footsteps retreated, a door squealed shut, a key clicked in a lock, leaving the darkness absolute. She let her crown drop back on the cold stone. Not execution, not yet. Maybe they were storing something down here. But at this time of night?
As her shuddering breath subsided and the mice settled, she made out another sound. Air rasping, in and out, in and out. Holy crap. The thing was alive.
“Hello?” Her voice caught. She cleared her throat. “Hello?”
No answer.
She crawled off the mattress and felt her way along the packed dirt. Her right hand hit something warm, covered with smooth fabric. It flinched. Human, at least.
“It’s okay,” she said.
She splayed her fingers. Under the fabric the skin was firm but yielding. A stomach? A groan rose up—a man’s voice. Her left hand touched something hard. Bones—a row of them. He shuddered and arched away. His spine? Which meant her other hand was currently exploring a particularly solid butt. She released her grip.
He muttered something unintelligible. French?
“Are you hurt?” In the cloying silence, the walls whispered back.
A grunt. She’d have to find out for herself. Maybe they’d sedated him with the same drug they’d used on her after they’d dragged her from the Land Rover. She glided her hands over his curved back. No sign of injury—nothing but hard ridges of muscle, under a thick cotton jacket. At his shoulders, her finger caught in a loop. An epaulet. Military? An enemy soldier to Hamid and the al-Thawra network was likely to be an ally to her—and there’d be more where he came from.
Unless his team was dead, as hers might well be. Her cameraman had taken a volley of bullets within seconds of the ambush. Every time she closed her eyes she saw his face—the flicker of disbelief and realization before he slumped, lifeless. Just a young Zimbabwean news junkie who thought working with her would propel him into the big time, and all it got him was... She sucked in air through clenched teeth.
Her translator better still be alive. Last she’d seen him, al-Thawra thugs were dragging him feetfirst along a stony road. He was just an honest, reliable local dad who’d needed the money. Had she been explicit enough about the risk of working for her, about the need for secrecy? He’d been so eager for the job. If she’d got him killed, too...
No. Cling to hope. She’d been the target, not him.
She dipped two fingers under the soldier’s collar and scooped. No dog tag. Thick, corded neck, suede buzz cut. His crown was hot and...sticky. Ugh. She snapped her hand away. Had to be blood. He moaned. A bit of light would be handy—she’d rather not stick her fingers in his brain.
“You’ve got a wound up here. I’m going to check it. Hold still.”
Like he was capable of anything else. She closed her useless eyes and brushed her fingertips over the spot. An inch-long gash gaped over a lump the size of half a tennis ball. Ouch.
“It’s not too bad,” she said. Like she had any idea. “I have a first-aid kit.”
He needed sutures, but alcohol wipes and adhesive strips would have to do. God help him if it got infected down here. He muttered again. She caught a guttural R. Definitely French, maybe from Djibouti—no other army this side of the Congo would speak French. Or L’armée de Terre? But why would a French soldier be out here?
“Is anything else hurting?” Silence. “I’m just going to check.”
She leaned over him, her knees touching his back. Her hair slipped loose. She looped and twisted it into a knot. One benefit of hair that hadn’t seen shampoo in a week—it was greasy enough to tie without a band.
She ran her fingers over his shoulder and a rolled sleeve, down to his right hand. Jesus, the guy had muscles. As she slid her fingertips into his palm, his hand closed. Just a reflex, but she gave in to it, letting the flicker of comfort shoot right up to her chest.
“Merci, madame.”
The deep words came from so low in his throat she could have imagined them—she’d been imagining a lot of crazy things lately. Maybe not a reflex, then? She squeezed back.
“De rien,” she said, her choked R giving away her rusty tourist French. God, was he ever welcome, whoever he was. She shouldn’t be thankful some other luckless schmuck had wound up here.
Reluctantly, she eased her hand from his. He’d be more comfortable on the mattress but first she should make sure moving him wouldn’t worsen any injuries. She patted his stomach, then stroked up. At his chest, hard pecs tightened. Nothing wrong with those reflexes.
His neck and jaw were rough with stubble—almost a beard—rising up to a sharp, smooth cheekbone and speed bumps of tiny wrinkles beside his right eye. His forehead was unlined, though a little rough and peeling. The skin between his eyes was bunched into two crevasses. Was this how blind people built a picture of someone? The bones were in the right places, though the nose felt wonky. He didn’t recoil when she skated her fingertips along it, and there was no open wound. An old break, perhaps.
“Can you roll onto your back?”
He sighed, and seemed to understand, shifting and resettling and—she guessed from the sound of rubbing fabric—straightening his legs. He was moving freely enough. She checked his other arm. A gravelly graze on his elbow but otherwise okay. The fingers of that hand didn’t curl around hers. Which was fine.
She skipped the business part of his trousers—nothing much she could do about that if it wasn’t working, and she already knew there wasn’t a thing wrong with his butt. His legs felt fine. Very fine—powerful thighs slid into long, strong calves. His trousers—combat pants, presumably, given the number of pockets—were tucked into socks. His boots were intact. Best leave them on—in this filth, his feet were better off contained.
“Back in a sec,” she murmured.
She felt her way to the mattress and found her backpack, which had been ransacked for everything but her first-aid kit and a few toiletries. No phone, no laptop, no documents, no notes—little more than Band-Aids, sunscreen and lip gloss. I need you to stay pretty for my videos, Hamid had said, shoving the backpack into Tess’s stomach.
Hamid had stood there, a few feet from where Tess now sat, flicking through her notebook. You’ve been trying to find my base. Congratulations, my friend. You succeeded. If I’d known you were so keen to drop in, I would have invited you much sooner.
How did you find me? Tess had demanded.
The same way I usually find people. The same way I found your whistle-blower, the traitor Latif. Hamid held up Tess’s phone. With the help of America’s very useful National Security Agency. My job is a bit like yours, you know. It’s all about the contacts.
That’s impossible. I was careful. She hadn’t been online in a fortnight. She’d been using burner phones, contacting no one she knew. We were all careful.
Not all, Hamid said. Not all. Your translator texted his wife several times.
Tess’s face went cold, all over again. She removed the first-aid kit from her backpack. She could do nothing for her crew now but she could help this soldier. Returning to him, she coaxed his head onto her lap, cradling his shoulders with her thighs while keeping her bandaged feet clear.
What had this guy done to incur al-Thawra’s wrath? Or was Hamid trying to draw France into their phony conflict?
“I’m going to clean the cut on your head. It might sting a little.”
At his solid weight, a memory flashed up of her final weekend with Kurt, when he’d taken leave and met her in Cairo. Ugh. Turned out even a Medal of Honor didn’t make a man honorable—even if half of America swooned over him. No more military heroes for her.
Next time she’d go for a dependable small-town accountant whose chief attribute was loyalty. Someone who could be relied on to come home after work—alive, and not smelling of another woman. Charm and bravado spelled trouble. She frowned. That was if she got a chance at a next time and didn’t end up in two pieces like the last unfortunate American kidnapped by Hamid.
She ripped open an alcohol wipe and ran it over her hands. Working on feel and guesswork, she smoothed the next few wipes over the lump, wringing out the alcohol so it dripped on the wound. He hissed, his shoulders tensing against her.
That’d have to do—she was low on wipes, and she might need to change the dressing in a day or two, if they both lasted that long. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to send the message to her other senses that they were on their own, as she held the wound closed with one hand and pressed on the suture strips with the other. Several times the strips tangled and she had to start over. She finished by winding a bandage around his head. Better than nothing.
Would twice the people be looking for al-Thawra and their hostages now? Soldiers were full of no-man-left-behind macho crap. At least they’d be a whole lot more enthusiastic about looking for one of their own than for a pain-in-the-ass reporter. More than a few American politicians and military brass would be greatly relieved to pay their respects at Tess’s funeral.
“Done,” she whispered. Now, how the hell would she move him? His head felt heavier, suddenly. “Monsieur?”
He groaned. “Oh.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh.” She heard him swallow, with effort. “Water.”
“Of course. Hang on.” Duh—he was saying “eau,” not “oh.” No kidding he’d be thirsty. The air out here was so dry it felt like you’d swallowed a cup of salt. She eased his head off her lap and crawled to the mattress, waving her arm as if she were divining the water. She knocked over a bottle and caught it before it rolled away.
“Here,” she said, scrambling back. “Can you sit up?”
No answer. Unconscious, again. Crap, how was she going to do this? She heaved him upright, cradling his back against her chest. She sensed his head slumping, and caught him as he tipped sideways. Her foot grazed his thigh, searing pain up her leg. She adjusted under his weight, her arm muscles burning as she guided his head back onto her shoulder. Man, he had to weigh two hundred pounds. Help me out here, buddy.
Grunting with effort, she closed her arms around his torso and twisted the cap off the bottle. It couldn’t be a good idea to pour liquid down his throat. She splashed a little water into her palm and lifted it to where she guessed his mouth was. She got his prickly chin, instead. She tried again, a little higher. When her palm touched his dry lips, she eased the water into his mouth. He moaned and straightened a little, relieving the pressure on her muscles. On her next attempt he darted out his tongue and licked her palm, shooting fissures of awareness up her arm.
Well, if he was strong enough to do that... She brought the neck of the bottle to his lips and raised it. Water trickled down her arm but his throat made swallowing sounds. She flinched as something warm and rough closed over her fingers—his hand, guiding the bottle to a better angle. She couldn’t bring herself to extract her hand. Maybe he was a hallucination—her isolation and fear playing on her subconscious—but whatever he was, whoever he was, calm spread through her for the first time since her translator had slowed for that damn roadblock near Hargeisa. Hell, she’d take any relief she could get.
He released her hand. “Beaut,” he gasped.
Beaut? Was that French? Something about the accent was familiar—something that didn’t fit this picture. When he’d said “water” in English, he hadn’t used the French R. He’d trailed off with no R at all.
“Can’t...see. Eyes...”
Definitely not a French accent. Was he English? But why the French words earlier? A multilingual local? Or maybe his accent was just messed up after too many years away from home, like hers.
“Nothing wrong with your eyes. It’s pitch-black down here—I can’t see anything, either.”
His back collapsed against her chest and she fought to catch him. Conked out again? She laid him down and extracted herself. She found the graze on his elbow and dabbed and dressed it. It couldn’t be healthy to leave him on the dirt—at night the cold seeped up through it. The mattress was filthy and scratchy but it provided a couple of inches of insulation and comfort.
Well, if she couldn’t take him to the mattress... She felt her way across the cell and shoved the squab up against him. Screwing up her face, she rolled him onto it. He shuffled and settled, with a sigh that might have been gratitude. After checking he was lying clear of his wound and breathing okay, she let her shoulders slump. God, it felt good to not be alone. The chances of him being a psycho killer had to be low, right? This compound already contained more than its fair share.
So where would she spend the night? No way was she taking the floor, not when there’d be a little space right in front of him she could just fit into. If he was sedated he was likely to sleep soundly, and she probably wouldn’t sleep at all—she’d dozed off only a few times in the long days and nights she’d been locked up. By the time he returned to his senses in a few hours she’d have disentangled herself. In his current state, he was no threat to her—or anyone else, unfortunately.
After gulping some water, she crept to the top of the mattress and slipped down into his outstretched arms as if sliding into a sleeping bag. One heavy forearm weighed down her waist. She wriggled until his other biceps pillowed her head. Was this a little creepy of her? He’d understand, surely.
Arrested by a thought, she trailed her fingers down his rough, corded left arm and over his knuckles. No ring. Not that that proved anything—plenty of married military guys didn’t wear them, much less abide by them—but at least she might not be taking advantage of another woman’s semiconscious husband. Just a regular semiconscious guy. She curled her legs around his bent ones. He mumbled and pulled her closer, burying his face in her hair and sliding a hand down her outer thigh. Uh-oh—he wasn’t about to have some drug-addled wet dream, was he?
She held her breath but in seconds he relaxed—with her firmly in his grip. And, hell, that felt good. She dared to press her nose to his arm and inhale. Gravelly. Tangy. Real. His sweat probably smelled a damn sight fresher than hers.
Still no dusty beam of gray spilled through the cracks overhead—she couldn’t even see the boards. Dawn had to be hours away. She yawned. If these were the last hours of her life, at least they’d be comfortable ones—even if the relief was stolen from an unwitting stranger.
Don’t you dare die on me, soldier.
* * *
Flynn leaped to his feet, blinking to clear the fuzz from his brain. What the fuck? A dim bunker. No door, no window. Underground? A woman, pushing herself up from a mattress—not naked, at least. Christ, his head thumped like a drum solo. He brought his hand up to it. Bandaged. Not a hangover, then.
“What the fuck?” They were the only words he could get his mouth around. He cleared his throat. It felt stuffed with acacia thorns.
The woman straightened to full height, which wasn’t much, palms upright as if calming a snorting bull. Her face registered somewhere deep in his mind—young, hot, in a pointy-jaw tough-girl way. Even in near darkness her eyes shone blue. Was he delirious?
“You’re okay,” she said.
“This doesn’t look like okay.” Except for her. She was a damn sight more than okay.
She shrugged. “Relatively.”
“What is this?” He swept an arm around, blinking moisture into his eyes. This, meaning: What the hell was this place, what the hell was he doing here and who the hell was she? He patted his pockets. Empty. No holster, no pistol, no knife, no tac vest, no utility belt. No helmet—had he been wearing one?
“You’re Australian?”
“You’re American.” He swore as his brain caught up. “You’re that missing journalist.”
So this was what deep shit looked like. He shut his eyes tight and pinched the top of his nose. The dressing pulled at his scalp. Think. His unit got ambushed, right? The last memory his brain could locate was of running through a village—goats scattering ahead of them, Angelito shouting commands, the thuck-thuck-thuck of enemy fire. They dropped back behind a concrete hut. Levanne went down, in the open. Flynn dashed out to help him. Then, a crunch—hot pain in his skull, bullets zipping around, fabric smothering his face. No, no helmet—just his useless beret. He’d been chucked onto a truck bed or something, fighting to breathe, retching on a chemical smell.
He gagged at the thought. He’d been captured—by al-Thawra, seeing as he was with the reporter. What was her name—Newell, right? Tess Newell. A big deal in the States—her kidnapping had been all over CNN. She didn’t look it now, with blond hair pulled back and dirt smearing her face. Pain twisted behind his eyes. He winced, which made it worse. What’d happened to Angelito and the others? So much for their routine patrol.
“I have painkillers.” She limped past him and unzipped a bag. “Only over-the-counter stuff, but it might take the edge off. Here.”
He took the offered trays and popped out four, for starters. She zipped away her first-aid kit and passed him a fresh water bottle from a plastic-wrapped stash in the corner. He slugged back the pills.
“You fixed me up,” he said, pointing to his head. As she nodded, a memory filtered in. More like a feeling—of relief, of knowing he was looked after, of surrendering the fight to stay awake, to stay alive. Hell, how far had he lowered his guard?
“You know where this place is?” he said. “What this place is?”
“A compound of some sort, somewhere remote.”
He swallowed another mouthful of water. “Narrows it down.” Remote described 95 percent of the Horn of Africa—assuming they were still in Africa. They could have crossed over to the Middle East. Hell, they could be in the Bahamas. “You were sedated when they brought you here?”
“Yes... So you’re Australian?”
“French,” he corrected, automatically.
“You don’t sound French.”
“Eees zees betterrrr, mademoiselle?” Dickhead. Nine years of faking a French accent whenever he spoke English to strangers, and he chooses a hotshot journalist to slip up to? “I was taught English by an Australian. It comes out in the accent sometimes.” Not a lie. He’d learned English from a whole town of Australians—the shit heap where he’d grown up.
“Wow, that’s a strong influence. So you’re—what?—French Army?”
He patted the Tricolore on his left arm. She squinted, her gaze drifting up to the legion patch. With luck she wouldn’t know what it meant.
“‘Légion Étrangère,’” she read awkwardly. “You’re Foreign Legion.”
Bloody hell.
“But aren’t their soldiers foreign—hence the name?”
“Not all,” he said quickly. Several Frenchmen in his company had masqueraded as Canadians or Belgians to get a new identity, but he wasn’t about to tell a journalist that. “Anyway, I’m a lieutenant—officers are drawn from regular army.” Usually. They’d made an exception for him and Angelito. He went to shove his fingers through his hair, but hit the bandage and stopped, clenching his teeth. “Too many questions, lady. What is this—60 Minutes?”
She started. “Sorry—habit.” Her tone softened. “I’ve had a while longer to get my head around this.”
And there was that feeling again. It was her voice—quiet and husky. That voice had filtered through the haze last night like some angel’s prayer. At his fuzziest he’d wondered how a reprobate like him had made the cut for heaven. Lucky he hadn’t been able to see her—he’d have immediately sold his soul to the nearest deity, even if her clothes looked like they’d been washed in mud. The stench of mouse piss should have been a giveaway that this was nowhere close to heaven.
He checked his watch. Nearly 0800. Late. Angelito would be going apeshit—if he was alive. He’d better bloody be alive. Tu n’abandonnes jamais ni tes morts, ni tes blessés. You never abandon your dead, your wounded. Angelito would have risked everything to save Flynn—they all would have.
She tilted her head. “Have we met? There’s something about you...”
No. Anything but that. “Believe me, I’d remember. I just have one of those faces, that’s all...” Deflect, soldier. “Have they hurt you?” No obvious injuries, but he couldn’t see jack in this hole.
“Nothing too bad. Hamid wants me looking pretty for the execution.”
“Son of a bitch—Hamid Nabil Hassan is here, in person?” Shit was getting worse. The man at the top of every terrorist watch list, here. “Is this al-Thawra’s headquarters? What country are we even in?” Think. His brain clunked over. “Intel has you being held in Somalia.”
“I wouldn’t trust it. But that’s possible.”
Something clattered—a key in a lock—and a door squealed. Footsteps thumped above. Metal clunked. She grabbed his wrist with a cold hand and pulled him clear of a square hatch cut into the boards overhead, a few inches above his six-three height. Lucky he hadn’t smacked his head on the roof when he’d leaped off the bed. Bed. Hell. Somehow he’d wound up curled up in bed with the Tess Newell—spooning the Tess Newell.
Above them men spoke—and a woman. He caught a breathy “eshi”—okay, in Amharic. So maybe this was Ethiopia? “It’s Hamid,” Tess hissed.
Flynn pulled her behind his back. She was half the size she looked on TV—he could hide two of her.
The hatch shifted, releasing square-cut blades of light. Someone grunted, and it lifted. They were in a dugout under a concrete-block building, by the look of it. An M16 barrel poked into the hole. “Do not move, soldier,” said a thickly accented voice. A rope ladder dropped down.
As the rifle eyed Flynn, two men in camo gear jumped through the hole, landing with knees bent and barrels aimed. One looked Middle Eastern, maybe Ethiopian. The other was darker skinned and taller—Somali? They fanned out as a figure descended the ladder, his shape masked by a robe. Tess sucked in a breath and stepped out from behind Flynn, drawing away one of the rifle barrels. Her face was set in the don’t-feed-me-bullshit expression he knew from TV. A mask, probably, but bravery usually was. If you weren’t scared shitless in a situation like this, you were a fool.
The robed man touched the floor, spun and pushed back his hood. Her hood. Holy shit. A column of dusty light revealed a woman—witch-thin and only a few inches shorter than Flynn. She was backlit, so he couldn’t get a fix on her face. Nothing in the intel had suggested a woman was high up in al-Thawra.
“Bonjour, soldat,” she said, stepping forward. “J’espère que tu as bien dormi?” She arched thin eyebrows toward Tess. She wasn’t a native French speaker but he couldn’t pick the accent. She was maybe fifty, tanned, a pale blue scarf tied around her hair. In France you’d call her une femme d’un certain âge. In Australia a MILF. Not what he’d expected.
“With the drugs you lot gave me, I didn’t have a choice but to sleep well.” He answered in English, for Tess’s benefit, with his adopted singsong Corsican accent. Tess would wonder what’d happened to his Australian twang, but she’d become threat number two. Until he figured out how much the terrorists knew about him, he was safer playing to expectation. “Who are you?”
The woman raked her gaze up his body as if checking out livestock. As she reached his face, her kohl-rimmed brown eyes lit with a challenge. “I am the one you know as Hamid Nabil Hassan. The most wanted man in the world.”
CHAPTER 2 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Flynn ground his heels into the dirt. This was the man America had been hunting since the Los Angeles terror attacks? “You don’t look like a Hamid.”
She laughed, the sound dull and harsh in the thick air. “You don’t think a woman can be a powerful adversary?”
Oh, he knew all about how dangerous women were. “You’re American?” Bloody hell, their intelligence really...wasn’t. “You’re supposed to be Somali. And a man.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “In the twenty-first century we no longer need to be defined by lines on a map or the accident of our birth. I am a person of the world, as you are. I am defined by the things I can control, not those I can’t. Gender, age, lineage, provenance—these are outdated concepts.”
“You forgot to mention religion,” said Tess, sounding like she was clenching her teeth.
“Oh no,” the woman—Hamid—said, her heavy eyes drifting to the bearded soldier next to her. “Religion can still be very useful.”
She and Tess looked like they were about to shoot lasers out of their eyes at each other.
“Why am I here?” Flynn said.
Hamid didn’t take her eyes off Tess. “Because my captive here was lonely and I like to play matchmaker. She’s pretty, don’t you think? You are well suited.”
“My government will not pay a ransom for a lowly soldier.”
Hamid tilted her head, assessing him again. “I would pay a good deal of money for a man like you. But, yes, I’m counting on that.”
He fisted his hands against his thighs. “Then why?” Like he didn’t know what was about to happen.
“I requested a pretty French soldier and my men did not disappoint.”
She stepped forward, lifting her hand to the square patch sewn on the chest of his jacket and tracing her fingertips over its twin stripes. “And an officer. Even better.” She glanced at Tess. “The French lieutenant’s woman—it has a certain allure, right?” She hooked a finger under the thin red foulard looped around his shoulder and tugged it. “And what does this mean? This scarf?”
“It means it’s dusty out there.” He resisted the urge to swallow. If she didn’t know he was legion, she’d figure it out when she saw his patch. Once she knew how expendable he was to France he’d be worth less. And it wasn’t like Australia would give a damn.
Her fingers grazed his cheek. One movement and he could have his hands around the throat of the psycho who’d ordered the deaths of thousands of civilians.
“Yes. My men chose well. The world will be twice as incensed by the brutal execution of two beautiful people as they would by the deaths of regular people. Unfair, yes? You will look handsome indeed on television, next to your new friend. I think we will kill you first and make her watch. Maybe she will cry for you—people love that kind of thing.” She flipped her hand and slid the backs of her fingers down to his jaw, lowering her voice. “Did you make the first move last night, or did she? And was it as good as I was imagining?”
“You are Hamid?”
“It depends who’s asking, and what story fits your worldview.” She spoke just above a whisper. “To the Western world, yes, I am that shadow from their worst nightmares, the one who could invade their comfortable lives and blow them up any second.” She clicked her fingers, right next to his ear, the snap echoing off the walls. “Your supermarket, your cinema, your school. I can be anywhere, take any form. A former soldier driven mad by war. A frustrated immigrant whose dream of a new life never came true.” She rested her palm on his chest, her breath smelling of coffee and toothpaste. “If you are poor and powerless and from this side of the world, I am a rallying call, a raison d’être in an otherwise disenfranchised life. No, not a raison d’être. A reason for dying.” She smiled.
He made a point of eyeballing her. “You expect me to believe that a mob of jihadists would take orders from an American woman?”
She trailed her hand across to his shoulder, sliding a sideways look at the goon next to her. “You mean these people?” Her lashes were so thick with mascara he was surprised she could keep her eyes open. “Oh, they think I am Hamid’s jihadi bride, and if they play nice little jihadists I will introduce them to the oracle. I make them call me Mrs. Hamid. You see? Different things to different people. I am whatever you want me to be.” She stroked one side of his neck. “And what would you like me to be, Lieutenant?”
He swallowed, drawing her focus to his throat. She laughed. “I make you nervous. Don’t worry. I make everyone nervous.”
Flynn’s gaze flicked to the nearest weapon. If he tried to strangle “Hamid” he’d be dead before her heart stopped and she’d be revivable. Breaking her neck would be quicker and more permanent. He unclenched and clenched his fists. Taking out a mass murderer would be a fitting end to his life—and better to die with his secrets safe than have his face broadcast in one of al-Thawra’s snuff videos.
“But why are you telling me all this?” He made his words come out slow and halting, like he was settling into a long speech. “Aren’t you worried that—?”
He sprang to her midsentence, spun her and caught her in a headlock with his left arm. Shouts bounced around. One chance. As his right hand gripped her jaw and yanked sideways, pain slammed into his skull. The room twisted. His crown exploded with heat.
A force grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him backward, as Hamid scrambled away—gasping but alive, fuck it. The silhouette of a sidearm rose above him. The pricks had pistol-whipped his wound. He bit down on his cheeks, internalizing the pain pinballing through his head.
A female soldier leaped down in front of him, a reinforcement from above. Flynn pulled at his captor—captors, now, one pinning each shoulder. They bore down as he dragged them across the dirt toward Hamid. He tossed forward to flip them but the reinforcement launched a boot to his gut. His breath yelped out.
“Don’t touch his face,” spit Hamid as she repositioned her scarf and hood. “The rest of him is yours.”
The woman pulled out a cable tie and sprang round back of Flynn as the other goons pinned him. It clicked as it tightened around his wrists. Warm liquid dribbled down his forehead and into his eye. Blood. He blinked to clear it but a filmy smear remained, coloring the room red.
Damn sedative must have slowed him. No point fighting now. Better to concede and hope they didn’t take it out on the journalist. Light flashed in his face. A phone camera. Taking his picture for their press release? His vision swam in blues and reds.
At least with a dirty face, a bandaged head, an eye socket running with blood and a scruffy half beard he’d be unrecognizable from the teenager Australia remembered. A soldier shoved him to the floor face-first. Something smashed into his lower back. A knee? He inhaled through the pain. In his peripheral vision, the woman stepped back and leveled her rifle. One chance and he’d screwed it up.
“We’ll take a more attractive photo once we get you cleaned up,” said Hamid, her voice ironed smooth. “Maybe I’ll shave you myself. And now, my other pretty one, you must write a note for me.”
With his cheek rammed into the dirt, Flynn watched Hamid tower over Tess. Tess lifted her gaze, defiant, her fists clutching her cargoes. Hamid snapped a command—in Amharic?—and something small pelted through the hole. A soldier passed it to Hamid. Baby wipes.
“Clean your hands first,” hissed Hamid, handing them to Tess. “You’re filthy and I don’t want the paper smudged.”
“A note?” said Tess, with a hint of challenge.
“To your producer. You will write exactly what I tell you.” Hamid’s robe swished as she lifted something from it. “Use this.”
“My notebook.” Tess said it like an accusation.
“Date it a week ago, exactly. Write, ‘Quan. There’s nothing in the story linking al-Thawra with Denniston Corporation. Hyland’s clean.’”
Tess scoffed, a tick from the back of her throat. “Let me guess. Quan will receive this after my death?”
“Write it or I’ll remove your hand and write it for you. And no tricks—I know your handwriting.”
Shaking her head, Tess pulled a pen out of the notebook’s spiral top and began writing.
“Good,” said Hamid, peering over her shoulder. “Now add, ‘I can’t trust using a phone, so I’m posting you this.’”
The pen rolled over the pad.
“Sign it with ‘Ciao’ and two small Xs. And now a T, with a full stop.”
Tess looked up, her forehead creased. “You’ve been reading my emails.”
“Do it.”
Biting her bottom lip, Tess returned to the note. When she was finished, Hamid snatched it, smiled and stomped on Tess’s right foot. Tess yelped. The pen skidded onto the dirt by Flynn’s nose. Hamid ground in her heel a couple of seconds before releasing. Tess crumpled to her knees, air scraping into her lungs. Jesus. Flynn bucked against his guards but all it got him was a smack on the head.
Hamid stepped back, sniffing. “Oh, and thanks to the information on your laptop, I’ve discovered the identity of your other whistle-blower. She will soon meet the same fate as the first. Nice and tidy.”
A cry squeaked out of Tess.
“It’s over.”
“Never,” Tess breathed, raising her chin. “If I found out the truth about al-Thawra, someone else will, too. They’ll take you down, along with Denniston and Senator Hyland.”
Wait—Senator Hyland? He was in on this? Shit, Flynn was even more dead.
“No. You have kindly revealed a crack in this organization and I am fixing it. I am going through your so-called evidence piece by piece to ensure there will be no more lapses.”
Tess pushed to her feet with a slight grunt. “You can’t win this.”
“I already have and your death will seal it. In a matter of days, the US and its allies will announce war on Somalia. Very soon, the senator will be president.”
“With you behind the scenes doing his dirty work.” If Tess was scared, she hid it well. Wrap it up, sunshine. This ain’t comfortable.
“You say that as if you think it is he who is in charge of me,” Hamid said, brushing a streak of dirt from her robe.
“He’s got you believing you hold the power here? You know that sucking people in and spitting them out is what he does best? You’re his pawn, as much as these people.”
“Oh, I am looking forward to the hour I get to spit you out.”
A swishing noise. Hamid was climbing the ladder. The pressure on Flynn’s lower back released. More scrambling marked one soldier’s departure, followed by another. The one remaining guy rubbed Flynn’s face in the dirt and let go.
Flynn inhaled dust, pain stabbing his chest. A cracked rib? The hatch clonked shut, sucking up the beam of light.
“I have nail scissors,” Tess said weakly, nodding to his bound hands. “You took me by surprise with that move on Hamid. I should have done something, tried to grab a gun, or...”
“You couldn’t have done anything. And for future reference, don’t try. I can look out for myself. You should, too.”
In a minute she’d snipped off the ties. He rolled onto his back with a groan and pressed his fingers into his ribs.
“It was worth a shot,” she said. “Broken?”
“Don’t think so.” Hope not. He hoisted himself onto his elbows, suppressing a wince, and wiped his eye clear with his jacket sleeve. “Your foot...”
Tess swept her leg around in front of her. Even in the gray light a scarlet bloodstain stood out, spreading over the toe of her sock, following the path of a darker stain like fresh lava over old. The sock was stuffed with something—a bandage?
“They ripped out your toenails.” The pricks. As torture went, it was old-fashioned but painful as hell, by all accounts. At least nails grew back—given the chance. “What did they torture you for?”
“A dossier of the evidence I have on them—they wanted to know whether there were copies and where they were.”
“Did you tell them?”
“Everything.” Her answer was strangely short.
“There’s some shit going down here, isn’t there?”
“Oh yeah.”
He caught her other leg and trailed his hand down to the foot. More blood, but dry. She pulled both feet away.
“Hamid’s a psychopath, in case you hadn’t worked that out,” she said.
“Hamid’s a woman.”
“You noticed. I’d better take a look at your head—I might have to close the wound again.”
“And an American. What’s with that?”
She pushed to her feet and unrolled his bandage. “Yep. Born and raised in Chicago. Ex-marines, ex-CIA. Her real name is Sara Hawthorn.”
“Sara. The most wanted man in the world is a hot Chicago cougar called Sara.”
“Hey, if she’s your type, you have problems.”
“A woman heading a jihad?”
“Al-Thawra is no jihadist group, despite what their thugs believe.”
“Really? They kind of give it away with all the ‘death to the infidels’ shit.”
“That’s what Hamid—Sara—wants people in the West to believe,” she said, her voice cut with bitterness. “Hell, it’s what we’re quick to believe, isn’t it? That we’re under attack from whacked-out extremists from the other side of the world? It’s harder to understand if the cracks are in your own country.”
“Now you’re sounding like her.”
Featherlight fingers drew through his scalp. He bit down on his cheeks.
“This doesn’t look too bad—the strips have held.” She knelt in front of him, her knees and legs splayed awkwardly. To protect her toes? With a finger under his chin, she raised his head so his eyes were level with her chest. What could he do but explore the hint of cleavage diving into her T-shirt? Sure, he could shut his eyes, but he was no monk, and hey, this could be his last happy moment.
He inhaled. Earthy and musky. He shouldn’t find that sexy, but...damn. He’d never been into women who reeked of perfume—or worse, tasted of it.
Crap, she was talking. Mind out of the cleavage, mate.
“...goons are mostly Muslim, answering the call to jihad, but they’re being fooled as much as anyone. It’s all a cover.” She bent slightly to get something from her bag, bringing her cleavage within millimeters of his nose.
Focus. “A cover for what?”
She snipped something—surgical tape?—and pressed it on his wound, shooting sparks through his skull. He forced himself to imagine what was under that T-shirt, seeing as he didn’t have a real anesthetic...
Man, he was screwed up.
Like he didn’t already know that.
“Long story.” She wound the bandage on, sat on the mattress and removed a wipe from the packet Hamid had left. She ran it across her forehead, leaving a pale streak.
“So you said. We have time.”
She scrubbed her cheeks like she wanted to erase them. “God, I hope you’re right.”
She studied the wipe, now the same dusty gray as the floor. How long had she been here—a week? In solitary, under threat of death, with a couple of rounds of interrogation and torture. Enough to send a commando berko but she seemed calm. Tougher than she looked, maybe. Or just good at hiding the damage.
Dirt—technically mud, now—was swirled over her face, mixed with scoured pink streaks. He itched to lean over and finish the job, so he could stare at something beautiful for a minute. He hadn’t seen much of that in a long time.
Not that he was about to hit on Tess Newell. Hell, no. Journalists cared about headlines, not people, no matter how much they pretended otherwise. He wouldn’t fall into that trap again, just in case these weren’t his last days.
“Hold still.” She leaned forward and smoothed a clean wipe over his forehead and around his eye. “So,” she said, sitting back and hugging her knees. “Interesting times to be a soldier. Where have you served?”
Changing the subject? “Classified.”
She sighed. “And here’s me thinking it might be nice to have someone to talk to.”
You want polite conversation, you got the wrong cell mate. He dragged his sorry arse along the floor and sat on the mattress cross-legged, a hair short of touching her. So the warm, pliant body he’d woken up pressed against was hers. He’d thought it was a soldier from his commando unit. Pity he hadn’t figured out the truth before he’d panicked and leaped up—or maybe just as well.
Ah, crap, her guilt trip was working—she looked genuinely bummed by his brush-off. He could give the woman some company without going into details. “You don’t last long in this business without seeing a bit of action. I’ve served in a lot of places. Too many. One dusty, pointless conflict after another.”
“What had you expected?”
He shrugged, shamelessly watching as she drew out another wipe and attacked a cheek. At least talking gave him an excuse to stare. “I didn’t get into it to be noble, if that’s what you mean.” Even at twenty, when he’d signed up, he hadn’t been naive enough to think it was all exercises and hard drinking—though that would’ve suited him fine. But he hadn’t counted on seeing so much death and misery in so many places. Like he hadn’t lived through enough of that growing up. He scratched his elbow and found a Band-Aid on it. Did she do that last night, too?
She closed her eyes and ran the wipe over them. It felt weirdly intimate, watching a woman clean her face—the kind of thing you only usually saw if you were screwing her. And this was not a woman he’d be screwing.
“Why did you get into it?” she said.
Deflect attention, a-sap. “You said al-Thawra’s a cover—for what?”
“You tell me. Who benefits from those conflicts you’ve been sucked into?”
“No one,” he spit out. Pain stabbed his torso, where that bitch had kicked him.
“Really?”
“No one I’ve seen,” he gasped, clutching his side.
“Maybe I should take a look at your ches—I mean check your ribs.”
He held up a palm. If he could survive broken ribs without medical help as a kid, he could survive them now. Anyway, if his ribs were cracked, a Band-Aid and nail scissors wouldn’t do shit. And the last thing he needed was those pretty fingers skating all over his chest. “Just bruised.”
A pause. “But someone benefits, right?”
“From war? Yeah, journalists.”
“You think?”
He shuffled back to rest against the cool stone wall, buying himself a few inches of space. “Gives you a job, doesn’t it?”
“I could say the same about you.”
“I’m guessing your job pays better than mine.”
“But there are easier and safer ways for both of us to make a living, right?” She stretched her legs out, angling them awkwardly to avoid his. “If the US and its allies invade Somalia tomorrow, to crush the supposed threat from al-Thawra, who benefits?”
“Supposed threat? That’s a whacked comment coming from a woman sitting on jihadist death row—or whatever kind of death row you think this is. Who benefits? How about the people who don’t get blown up in the next terrorist attack?”
“Oh, come on—you don’t believe the PR about war making us safer?”
“Ah, crap, really? I’m stuck in a hole in I-don’t-know-the-hell-where, about to have my head sliced off, having some philosophical debate with...” With a woman who was getting more attractive—and formidable—by the second. He swallowed. “With some lefto greenie...tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy-theory crusader.”
“Power and money, right?” She bulldozed on, but with a hint of a smile. “That’s what it’s about—what it’s always about.”
“Not from where I’m looking. You missed survival and the fact that some of us actually like defending innocent people.” God, now he sounded like he was on 60 Minutes, or whatever self-righteous program she worked for.
“Yeah, but you’re looking at the foot soldiers, right? And the victims—the poor people just trying to keep their goats and children alive. Who benefits from a war in Somalia?”
“Ah. That would be no one.”
“No one in Somalia, sure. But how about in America? In the UK, in France, in Australia, in every other country al-Thawra’s trying to provoke?”
“Sunshine, my brain’s too fuzzy to decode your conspiracy theory. And I’m guessing you’ve had no one to lecture for an entire week, so how about you lay it all out for me?” At least she wasn’t interrogating him about his yo-yoing Australian-French accent.
She smiled again, the pale light catching her eyes. He could get used to looking at a face like that. Pity he wouldn’t get a chance. “What about the good old-fashioned war profiteers? In the Civil War they were the carpetbaggers. In World War II, the industrialists. Now they’re the contractors and suppliers.”
“Bloody hell, I’m gonna need more painkillers—you’re saying al-Thawra’s a military contractor?”
“Not directly, but I have—I had—a paper trail proving that al-Thawra is controlled by the biggest military contractor and supplier in the world—Denniston Corp.”
“Seriously?” Half the legion’s supplies were stamped with that logo. “Okay, that could be interesting, if it’s true.”
“Oh, it’s true. It was the story I was chasing before I was captured. Denniston’s about to go bankrupt, and when they do, a whole lot of dirt will wash up. Not just the ties to al-Thawra, but money laundering, terrorist links, political corruption... Kickbacks have been bouncing around the world for years, and a lot of people have got very rich and very powerful—senators, members of Congress, business leaders, at least one prime minister. Jail terms all round.”
“Wasn’t Denniston the company set up by—”
“Senator Hyland, yes. When he left the marines, that’s where he made his money. Officially he’s sold out of it, but unofficially he still calls the shots—in Denniston and al-Thawra.”
“Isn’t he the guy running for—”
“President. Yep. If Denniston goes bust, he loses everything—including his liberty. The one thing that’ll save them is a lucrative multigovernment contract, and soon.”
Whoa. It was like having his own live news service. “And they’ll get this contract if there’s another war?”
“Bingo. Things aren’t profitable right now, with troops withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the US and its allies wary about getting mired in another conflict. So Denniston and Hyland and his buddy Sara invented al-Thawra and Hamid, and she masterminded the LA attacks—using foot soldiers who genuinely thought they were martyring themselves in a jihad—and made it look like Somalia was sheltering the terrorists. This invasion would not only get Hyland out of the crap—it’d make him look good.”
“The presidential candidate was behind an attack on his own country? Bullshit.”
“You think al-Thawra kidnapped me just because of my profile?”
“Hey, I was kidnapped and I don’t know about any of this.”
“I’d just verified enough evidence to run with the story and, bam.” She gestured at the room.
Okay, the fact she was in an al-Thawra dungeon might back up her story. “Does anyone else know?”
“My producer knew I was chasing the story, and my crew, but I had to keep it contained—many people would do anything to prevent this getting out, or find a way to discredit it.” She chewed the corner of a fingernail. “I don’t know what happened to my translator—we were separated when al-Thawra sprang. The cameraman was killed.”
“The translator—Somali guy?”
“Do you know what happened to him?”
The woman was in her last days—did she need the details?
She swore, and rubbed her eyes with the fingers of one hand. “Oh God. Really?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I could see it in your face. Dead?”
Very. “Afraid so.”
She tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling, her shiny eyes reflecting the light. His gut twisted—he knew the pain and guilt of losing buddies. Hell, he might have just lost all the friends he had.
“So all this stuff about them kidnapping you because you offended Islam...?”
“As you so eloquently put it? ‘Bullshit.’” She lowered her head and stared at a stain on the mattress. “Hamid will play the publicity for all it’s worth, then kill me, live—so to speak. She’ll want to generate more anger in the States, so Hyland can stir up the political will to get over the line in Somalia.” She lifted her gaze. Strength had returned to her eyes, cut in with new anger. “She’s also eager to pull France into her game. Your execu—your capture could tip them.”
Subtle she wasn’t. “Hamid will assume you’ve told me all this, that I know her secret.”
She winced.
“Guess I was dead anyway,” he said.
“Didn’t want to say it.”
A clink and a squeal—the door upstairs. Footsteps crossed the floor above. Dirt drifted down between the boards, lit by slits of weak light. One soldier, by the sound of it.
“I’m just pissed I’m going to die before I get this story out,” she added.
A grin tugged at his mouth. Smart, gutsy and hot. If he could have chosen one person to share his last days, it might well have been someone like her. As the room lightened she was looking paler and more fragile—but there was fire in her, for sure. He twitched with competing urges—to fold her into him and hide her from all this, and to tease that flame out of her in a far less honorable way. He stayed rigidly still.
Above, one bolt shot across, then another. She gripped the mattress, knuckles blanching.
“Tess, look...” he whispered, ignoring the burn in his ribs as he leaned closer. He stopped short of making it Tess Newell, as he’d heard hundreds of times on TV. Tess seemed incomplete. “Them kidnapping me buys you more time. Sounds like they plan to kill us together, and if your theory is true—”
“It is true.”
“—they’ll want to drum up anger about me in France first, right? That’s got to give us a few days.”
“You’re a real comfort,” she said flatly, but her knuckles returned to a normal color.
“I’ll find us a way out of this.”
She smiled, sadly—acknowledging his attempt at solace even if she didn’t believe it. Well, damn, he’d just have to prove her wrong.
The hatch yawned open. He tensed. Or he could be wrong about the whole time thing. One burst of fire down that hole...
A rope lowered, from the hands of a woman in gray camo gear and a hijab. Flynn shuffled in front of Tess but she exhaled, pushed to her feet and hobbled past him.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Trust me, we want to cooperate with this.” She grabbed a yellow bucket from the corner of the room and hooked it up.
“That what I think it is?”
“Hey, at least they change it twice a day. Otherwise I guess the smell would float up.”
“Real hospitable.”
The bucket rose and disappeared. Something fell. Before he could warn Tess, it clonked her on the head. Another bucket. Clean, at least.
“You okay?”
“Peachy,” she said, rubbing her head. She ducked as a brown plastic packet thunked onto the dirt, then another. She threw one to Flynn.
“An MRE?” he said.
The hatch dropped and was bolted.
“The finest field rations Denniston produces. They earn a dollar in profit from every meal, and they supply dozens of forces around the world—sometimes both sides in a conflict. And that’s only one of their contracts. They might not be making the bombs but they’re sure making the money—or they were. Most countries have a stockpile of these things now, so they’re not renewing their contracts.”
He ripped open the plastic, went straight for a brownie and bit in. Scam or not, he was as hungry as a wolf. She sat on the mattress and hugged her knees again, pulling her socks away from her toes. He got the idea she’d spent a lot of the week sitting like that. It’d sure suck to be alone down here. Hell, it sucked anyway, but it sucked a little less with her next to him.
“You not eating?” he mumbled.
“Later. Hard to drum up an appetite for something with a shelf life of three years.”
“Takes that long to go through your system.”
“I don’t want to know about your system.”
There was that unexpected smile again. He’d have to watch that smile—better yet, not watch it. He studied the packet, speaking through a mouthful of brownie. “This one expired two years ago.” He shoved the last of it in his mouth.
“So now you’re speaking with a French accent.”
“Am I?” he said, trying to sound offhand as he fished out a packet of crackers. “I don’t speak English much, so I’m all over the place.” That was true enough. French had become his official first language when he’d signed his life to the legion nearly a decade ago. The less of his old identity that remained, the better.
He felt her gaze as he crunched, the sound bouncing off the walls like shrapnel. He glugged from his water bottle.
“What are you hiding?” she said.
He choked, and the water splattered his jacket. “What?”
“I once did a story on the legion. It’s not a career path for well-adjusted kids from good families. They say everyone’s hiding or running—or both. So what’s your story?”
“No story. I wanted adventure.”
“Come on—we could be dead by dawn.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“I’m not taking notes. You could at least be civil—this could be the last conversation of your life. Between you and me, what are you hiding?”
Between him and her and her audience of millions? “Maybe I’m just an idealist.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Uh-huh.”
“What you said, about escaping—maybe it’s true of some of the foreigners. But for French officers it can be a quicker trip through the ranks, if you’re prepared to put up with a platoon of lunatics.” Again, not exactly a lie.
“And are they—lunatics?”
“Non,” he said. Watch yourself. “Most just need a job. Others want to earn a European passport. Sure, some are running, but they’re not serial killers.” He gulped. The words had slipped out. Dumbass. “They’re more likely to be escaping bitter ex-wives.”
“Ah. And do you have one of those?”
“No, thank God.”
“Where are you from?”
“I told you—France,” he said, too quickly.
“You already said that. I meant, where in France?”
Damn. “Corsica, where my regiment is based.”
“Corsica, huh? That’s the...parachute regiment.”
Mate, she sure paid attention. Proceed with caution, soldier. “Oui, le 2E Régiment étranger de parachutistes.”
“The elite force—paratroopers, commandos.”
He shrugged. “My parachute training is about as useful down here as your notebook.”
“Do you spend much time at the French base at Djibouti—Monclar?”
“When I’m in town.”
“Maybe that’s why you look familiar—maybe I saw you there, when I was researching my legion piece. I watched a few training sessions.”
Yeah, that wasn’t why. “That’s it, then.” Let it go, lady. He scanned the ceiling. Enough chitchat. “Is that the routine here—bucket goes up, food comes down?”
“Twice a day—morning and evening.”
He stood, and ran his hand over the wooden planks that marked the ceiling, ignoring the sting in his ribs and his throbbing head. At one point the gap was wide enough for a few fingers. He scanned the ceiling, then the hatch, then the room.
“Looking for something?” she said.
“Hooks, nails, staples, bolts. Anything that could attach to the wood up here.”
“It’s all rocks and dirt. You have an idea?”
“I’ll tell you if it works. What’s above us?”
“Some storage bunker, I think.”
“Empty?”
“Mostly.”
“Number of guards?”
“They come and go, usually in pairs. They might beef up patrols now—I don’t think I was much of a threat.”
You are to me, sunshine. “When they bring the evening rations and do the bucket thing, does one person do it, like then?”
Her gaze shot to a corner of the room, thinking. “Yeah.”
“Is it light or dark outside?”
“Dark—right after sunset, I think. They don’t seem to have electricity in this building—this is as floodlit as it gets.”
That presented possibilities. Maybe if he could create some leverage... “Give me a look at your bag.”
She chucked it over. “You planning to bust us out with tweezers and diarrhea pills?”
“Beats waiting for the execution.”
CHAPTER 3 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Tess watched the soldier palpate gaps in the ceiling. His brain better be as honed as his body, because she sure wasn’t seeing a way out.
Damn straight he was a pretty boy—or would have been, once. Caramel-colored hair blended with his tan, and his grim expression made his cheekbones look sculpted, his defined lips determined and his jaw even squarer. His narrowed eyes were pale—blue or maybe green. And still his face nagged at her memory, like meeting a guy you hadn’t seen since junior high and searching his features for the boy you remembered.
But the stubble, the crooked nose, the lines dug out between his eyes, the sun-worn skin... He was rough and a little frayed, too. And there’d been nothing delicate about the solid body pressed against hers last night. Just the thought... Whoa.
Hell, she didn’t even know the name of the guy who’d lulled her into her first proper, blessed sleep in nearly a week. Evidently it’d once been stenciled on his chest pocket but only a few faded strokes remained. An F? Or an E?
“What’s your name, soldier?”
A pause. “Flynn.”
“That doesn’t sound very French.”
He tugged at a board, acting like he hadn’t heard. It shifted, and dirt showered him. He was hiding something, for sure. Debts? Petty crimes? Recruits to the legion could change their names—was it the same for native officers, if he even was French? His French accent sounded kosher but she’d have sworn his Australian accent was authentic, too. Beaut, he’d said last night. Did anyone but Australians say that? Wouldn’t his native language be more likely to slip out in a drugged daze? And he’d said bloody hell—the French didn’t say that. Any minute, the neurons would connect, telling her where she knew him from. Something told her it wasn’t her visit to the French base—it went further into the past, to somewhere unexpected, somewhere dark. Damn, that was annoying. When she’d taken her first good look at his face, a frisson of danger had crawled up her spine—her subconscious issuing a warning? Why?
“Flynn who?”
“Does it matter?” His gaze was locked on the ceiling.
Well, hey, if he was a mystery, he was a welcome one. She froze. Unless he’d been planted down here to extract information. Crap. Al-Thawra had a rainbow of nationalities. Was he pretending to be a French soldier to earn her trust? That could explain the erratic accent and her usually reliable instinct pricking up.
Maybe Hamid was still trying to figure out if Tess had a copy of her dossier—using a carrot this time, rather than a pair of pliers? Tess chewed her lip. She’d know from the emails, as carefully worded as they were, that Tess hadn’t had a chance to get the evidence to Quan in Addis Ababa, and she hadn’t risked storing it online. Thank God caution had stopped her short of mentioning the backup of the dossier to Flynn—if that was his name. Could he be here to stage a bust-out so she’d lead him to it?
No. She was going loco. Too much time alone, locked in her head. If he got her above ground, at least she’d have options. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to do what she did best—prod him for information, push him a little, see if he slipped up. A wee game. Hey, she didn’t have anything else to do.
“Do you have a big family in Corsica?” she said.
He stiffened. “No.”
She waited, but he offered nothing more. Could be a good sign. In her vast experience with liars, they usually spoke too much, not too little.
“Did you grow up there?”
“Does it matter?”
“Just making conversation.”
“How about we focus on the task at hand? You’ll have the rest of your long life to make meaningless small talk.”
“Humor me. I’ve had no one to talk to for six days—and days last a mighty long time down here.”
“Fine. You want to talk, let’s talk about you. Where are you from?” He didn’t even pretend a genuine interest. Though if his French accent was faked, too, why did his words roll over her skin like velvet?
“The States,” she said, with a sly smile.
“Well, yeah. I meant...” He met her eye, then looked away. She detected a faint curse—called out on his own caginess. He crouched beside a wall and began examining it. “You know what I meant.”
Ah, what the heck. It was all on the internet. “I’m based in New York when I’m in the States, which isn’t often.”
“Where are you mostly?”
“I live in Addis Ababa, not that I’m there often, either. I cover Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan, South Sudan... So I’m mostly on the road.”
He was silent a few seconds, regarding her with raised eyebrows. “Wow, you didn’t land the cushy job. Did you piss off your bosses?”
She laughed. “I begged to be posted here.”
“What are you running away from?”
“Nothing. I like it here.”
He returned focus to the wall. “Where did you grow up?”
“Fort Bragg, mostly, though we moved around.”
“The army base?”
“That’s the one. My mom and brothers are still headquartered there.” She swallowed. And her mom had just become an al-Thawra target, too. Your other whistle-blower will soon meet the same fate as the first. Nice and tidy. Was Hamid bluffing? Tess could only hope Lieutenant Colonel Newell was one step ahead of Hamid—it was her job to know what people were thinking before they thought it, to outmaneuver them before they took a step. Which had sucked when Tess was a teenager, but now...
“You’re an army brat.” He ran his hands down the padded straps of her bag, frowning. “That ain’t gonna work,” he muttered.
“What isn’t?”
He fished around in the bag, emerging with a small rolled bandage. “Fort Bragg. That’s in the South, oui?”
“North Carolina, yeah.”
“You don’t sound Southern.”
“My accent comes and goes, a little like yours.”
“We did a joint exercise off Hawaii with some guys from there,” he said, his voice tight, evidently ignoring her dig. “Stevens, Porter, Luiz... Know them?”
Common enough surnames and it was a big base. Lucky guess?
“Mauricio Luiz?” she said.
He unwrapped the bandage and snapped it taut. It ripped. He swore. “Sounds right.”
“Blond guy?”
He looked at her sideways. “With a name like that? Nah, Colombian or something. Short guy, burn scar across his neck, tattoo of a...snake, or something. Arrogant piece of shit.”
“Oh yeah, that’s him.” So Flynn probably wasn’t faking the military thing. “He’s a good buddy of one of my brothers. God knows why. Last I saw him, he’d bleached his hair.”
“That’d be right.”
“Have you trained elsewhere in the States? Maybe that’s where I’ve seen—”
He held up his hand, listening, as a car engine surged and fell away. “We’re near a road?”
“Yeah. Not a lot of traffic but it seems to be a public road. I’ve heard children’s voices, buses, donkeys...”
He scanned the room for the twentieth time. “So what stopped you signing up, like your brothers?”
Wow, he was as seasoned at changing the subject as a politician. “Hard to be a lefto, greenie conspiracy theorist and shoot people.”
“You forgot the tinfoil hat.” His lips pulled up into a lopsided grin. It made him look boyish. Cute, even. Green—his eyes were green.
She pulled focus. Like it mattered. “I was more interested in keeping the higher ranks honest than doing their bidding. I saw the crap my mom and brothers had to put up with.” She left her Bronze Star–winning father out of it—he’d been the type to serve up the crap, while cheating on her mother on every tour. “Mom was only too happy to send me to college to keep me out of uniform.”
“Bet she didn’t imagine you’d be the one winding up here.”
“Guess not.” Or the child who’d bring killers to her door. What was her mom doing now? No one in the family would sit back and wait for the authorities to act, despite their respect for the chain of command, but she’d know Tess’s abduction had put her at risk. It was only after she’d put Tess in touch with Latif six months ago, while he was still working as an IT security analyst at Denniston, that the conspiracy had started to become clear. And now Latif was dead—“collateral damage” in a drone strike against al-Thawra, as if that could be believed—despite Tess’s promise to protect him, and the evidence he’d left behind was her only hope. Too many deaths already.
Flynn pushed a finger through the gap he’d widened in the floorboards, then retracted it, his forehead wrinkling. Was he planning to yank the whole floor down?
“What do they do—your family?” he said.
Warning bells jangled—was he fishing for information? Something to hold over her? But, hey, her family was no secret—Rolling Stone had profiled the entire clan last year on the third anniversary of her “American hero” father’s death.
“My brothers are Special Forces—all three of them. Mom’s in Intel.”
“Is that why you’re obsessed with this Somalia story—you’re afraid your family will be deployed there?”
“I don’t like to see any soldier go to war without a very good reason.”
He ran a hand over the boards. “Neither do I. Hell, I could end up deployed there... So this dossier—can you do your story without it?”
A chill tiptoed up her spine. “My bosses would never run it without hard evidence—it’s too damning, too dangerous.”
“So you need to get it back.”
“I don’t imagine that’s an option.”
She picked up her MRE. Maybe force-feeding her stomach would stop it churning. This guy might be radiating mixed messages but at least he brought hope.
“How long have you been in the legion?” she said. If he was hiding something, she’d catch him out. If in doubt, ask the same question ten different ways until they got flustered. The Human Lie Detector, Quan called her.
Half a minute passed. He poked and prodded and shifted the floorboards. “Nine years,” he said.
She waited. Nothing. Sheesh, the guy didn’t offer much.
“How old were you when you signed up?”
Another pause. “Twenty.”
She pretended to focus on opening a packet of gray mush that claimed to be oatmeal. That made him three years younger than her. With his cynicism and frown lines she’d have picked older. “I thought you’d transferred from the regular army?” She forced an offhand tone. She sensed him stilling, imagined him looking down at her and frowning as he assessed the question.
“Yeah, that’s where I signed up, L’armée de Terre. That’s what I meant. I transferred to the legion after graduating the academy.”
“And where did you do your officer training?”
“Sunshine, we could be here for weeks. You wanna wear me out the first day?”
“I’m just interested—and I’m trying to figure out where I’ve seen you before.”
“I told you—one of those faces.”
No, that wasn’t it. Maybe a less direct approach... “I’ve never been to Corsica. Is it much different from mainland France?”
Pause. “It’s peaceful. People don’t ask questions.”
She smiled, the movement unfamiliar on her lips. He was probably right, at least within the legion, where “Don’t ask, don’t tell” took on a far wider meaning. The legionnaires she’d met all had Flynn’s cagey look, the sideways glances, the spare details, as if the ghosts of their pasts were about to jump them and haul them back.
Something shot across the floor. She gasped, clutching her chest. “Damn mouse.”
“There’s a nest in the corner. You want me to get rid of them?”
She screwed up her face. “I don’t know. We’ve been together awhile now. I was present at the birth.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve named them.”
“Minnie and Mickey and...Huey, Dewey and Louie.”
“Pretty sure those last ones are ducks. How about I send them to a happier place and I’ll be your friend instead?”
“Let them be. They’re trapped here, too.”
What just came out of her mouth? She was fighting for the rights of mice now? There it was—proof she’d gone crazy.
“Just what I need to be stuck with—a vegan, lefto, greenie conspiracy-theory crusader. Trust me, not all life deserves to be preserved.”
“I’d rather not have a pile of bodies rotting in the corner—the smell is bad enough already. Unless you’re sizing them up for lunch?”
“Couldn’t eat another thing. Don’t worry, princess. I won’t kill them if you don’t want me to. I’ll repatriate them.” He raised his chin to indicate the newly widened slats above his head.
“They won’t fit through there.”
“The fuckers can get in anywhere. They go flat as paper. You wanna help? Tip the mattress on its side to block their escape that direction.”
As she hoisted it up, he ripped open a packet of peanut cookies, crumbled one and threw the remains into a corner.
“You’re assuming they’ll recognize that as food.” She found herself whispering, like the mice could understand English.
He crouched, motionless, the shape of his butt outlined by his faded trousers. How good had that felt under her hand last night? Round, but firm and muscular. She nibbled her lip. Small pleasures were about all she could hope for.
She spent far too many of the next ten minutes admiring his rear view. Finally, the mother mouse scampered to the crumbs. The babies weren’t old enough to venture from the nest or Tess might not have come over all Cinderella.
“Okay, very slowly, bring that mattress closer.” Flynn inched in until he was between the mother and the nest, as Tess slid the rectangle of foam along the floor, flush against the wall, closing in. Each time the mother looked up, twitching, they froze. Time ticked by. His thighs had to be killing him, quads of granite or not.
Tess stumbled. The mouse took off. In a blur of desert camos, Flynn flung forward and shot out an arm. “Got it.”
Dang, he had the reflexes of a cobra.
“Grab the babies, one by one, and ease them through that gap up there.”
“I can’t reach that high.” Thank God. She wasn’t squeamish, but wild mice weren’t on her preferred list of things to handle. Flynn’s butt, on the other hand, was currently sitting in the top ten. Top five. Top—
Stop it.
He swore, his fingers clamped around the mouse’s tail as it clawed air and gyrated. “Then you’ll have to hold her while I move them.”
She widened her eyes. “Hey, I’m tolerating them—just—but I don’t want cuddles.”
“If I release her first, she’ll come back down to the nest.” He met her gaze. “I didn’t take you for a wimp.”
Damn, exactly the kind of crap her brothers dished up. “Hand her over.” Oh man, really?
He edged behind Tess, his breath teasing the top of her hair as he encircled her with his arms. “Her instincts are going mental, so you’ll have to hold tight. Clamp down on the tail, either side of my fingers.”
Yuck, yuck, yuck. But she followed his instructions. He hovered a palm underneath their hands as he let go. “Got her?”
“Got her.”
“Spin her gently so she can’t arch back and bite you.” He backed away. “Can’t believe I’m busting my arse to liberate mice.”
“Think of it as earning karma. But hurry up.”
He knelt by the nest. “It’s okay,” he crooned in a falsetto, “you dirty little fuckers. Just call me Uncle Scroo—”
He froze and plucked something from the nest. Not a mouse. String? He passed it under a shaft of gray light, and it glinted.
“What is it?”
“A wire. You said there was no electricity in this building.”
“Not as far as I can tell.”
“Seen any electrical cords? Wiring?”
“Nothing.”
He scraped at the dirt where the stone wall met the floor, just shy of the nest.
“What are you looking for?”
“Tell you when I find it.”
Minnie pawed the air like she was on a mouse wheel. “Ah, could you look quickly? She’s about to turn herself inside out.”
He crawled along one wall, digging into the dirt at its foot, then shoved aside the mattress and crept along the next wall, doing the same. Halfway along he stopped and dug faster, like a dog after a bone. Maybe that head injury was affecting his brain.
“You beauty,” he muttered.
“A secret tunnel?”
“Not quite, but looks like that karma might have come round pretty quick.”
He tugged something. She jumped as a long shape scooted along the floor. More mice? Crap—a snake? Minnie’s claws scraped her wrist. “Yeouch.” She arched her hand.
Flynn was holding something—the end of a piece of rope, embedded in the dirt. She squinted. Not rope—an electrical cord, tapering off to a frayed end. He gazed up at the ceiling, frowning.
“Excellent,” Tess said. “Now we can fire up my hair straightener and singe our way out of here.”
“You have a hair straightener?”
“Does it look like I have a hair straightener?”
He shrugged. “Pity. Could be a useful weapon.”
“Would you mind hurrying things up with those mice?”
“Just a sec.” He clawed at the dirt farther along and ripped up another cord.
“Do you think it’s live?”
“I doubt it—the mouse managed to chew right through without getting electrocuted.” Holding each cord by its white cover, he touched the frayed ends together. “Yep, dead.”
“Flynn...? This mouse is about to explode.”
He stood and ran his hand over a floorboard, biting the inside of one cheek.
“Flynn!”
“Yeah, yeah. On it.”
He sauntered to the nest, evidently distracted by mysterious calculations running through his brain. Kneeling, he shoveled half a dozen balls of gray onto one palm and enclosed them with the other. He stood and eased the creatures through a crack one by one, eyes crinkled in concentration. Oh boy, a tough guy being gentle—it got her right there. And that was her problem. No more tough guys, you hear? Dependable, loyal accountants.
“Now for Minnie.” He came up so close beside Tess the warmth of his body reached out and caressed her. She stood straighter. This was not supposed to be an intimate experience. He maneuvered his hands around hers. “Separate your fingers a little. Got her. Let go.”
“Gladly.”
He gripped the mouse’s body and lifted it to the gap. It sniffed, found purchase with its scrabbling claws and blessedly disappeared. Tess shook her wrist.
Flynn looked at his palms, grimacing. “Got any more wipes?” Suddenly he shut his eyes tight, like someone had stabbed his voodoo doll.
“Flynn?”
“Too much...action for this soldier.” When he opened his eyes they looked like they were retreating into his skull. Nothing fake about his head injury. A fraction more force and the wound could have been fatal.
She kicked the mattress flat, caught his arm and guided him down. “More painkillers?”
“I’ll hold out... Need to keep sharp.” He sounded anything but. God, what if his wound did prove lethal? He could have internal bleeding, swelling...
She grabbed the wipes. “Give me your hands,” she said, kneeling in front of him. She scrubbed at one, then the other—muscular, tanned, callused hands that flinched at her strokes. She fought the temptation to bring one up to her face, to feel the roughness against her cheek. Yep, desperate and pathetic. And eager for him not to die, whoever he was.
He yawned. She echoed, her eyelids feeling as heavy as his looked.
“We should...sleep,” he said. “Store our energy. Must have been well after midnight when I... I’ll take the floor.”
“Don’t be silly. We’re adults. We can share. You don’t want to pick up an infection, and this place is far from sterile.”
His lidded gaze ran the length of her body, her skin goose-pimpling in its wake. Earth to Tess. He was probably just figuring out how they’d both fit on the mattress. Did he remember anything of the previous night? Her face warmed.
“I...need to use the facilities.” He jerked his head toward the bucket.
“Sure,” she said. She swiveled away and concentrated on popping a couple of painkillers. Trying to ignore the noises from the other half of the room, she brushed dirt and stones off the mattress, lay straight and rigid on one side of it and closed her eyes. Her muscles pulsed as they eased up. The toe Hamid had stomped on throbbed double time, at least eclipsing the pain from the other.
Sometime last night she’d awoken on her back, Flynn’s forearm heavy on her belly, his hand curled around the side of her waist, his stubbly cheek against her shoulder. It would have been so easy to turn into him so their bodies were flush together and hunker down into a place of refuge. When she was single, that was what she missed most—the physical contact. Yes, she missed sex, but it was plain old touch she ached for—a strong, rough man’s body cocooning hers. That was when she felt safest, when she felt loved, when it felt like nothing could sneak in to destroy her happiness. It wasn’t even necessarily about being in love. Had she ever been in love with Kurt? Or just in love with the idea of him, the fantasy that it might actually work out, despite her misgivings?
Behind her, the mattress shifted as Flynn lowered onto it. His body grazed her spine, then settled, his warmth radiating into her. He had to be half an inch away, at most. She risked a peek. His body mirrored hers, facing the opposite wall, spooning air. She nestled down and ordered her eyes to close. She could still steal comfort from the pinpricks of electricity heating her back. It seemed impossible that a body so warm, so alive could be so...not, in a matter of days. Hours, perhaps. Hamid said she’d kidnapped him to be a double act with Tess. Another life on her conscience.
Even with him there, sleep didn’t come. Ten, twenty minutes later she remained rigidly awake, her thoughts pushing into ever darker places. She sighed.
“This is stupid,” he said huskily. She sensed him rolling over. He propped himself up on an elbow. “We’re lying here like corpses.”
“Did you just say ‘corpses’?”
“Okay, not the best word choice. Point is that I can’t sleep like this and neither can you. Come here.”
Without waiting for a reply, he slipped his hands around her waist and pulled her in until his chest skimmed her back. Shock waves of awareness buzzed into her stomach. She caught her breath. That shouldn’t feel so good.
“Relax,” he said, skating a hand down her arm. “I’m not hitting on you. Priority one is to get some rest, and this way we can both be comfortable. I’m just glad I didn’t get chucked in here with a guy.”
Mercifully, he kept his hips away from her butt—that kind of contact would not be conducive to sleep. She forced herself to inhale deeply. On the exhalation, she let her body settle into his. Something nudged her hair—his nose? Oh man, lips?
“Better, huh?” he whispered. Yep, his lips. Better, yes. And so much worse.
“Yeah,” she said, high-pitched and wooden. “That’s fine.” Idiot.
Just take the respite. Last night was a godsend, but this was a gift straight from him—offered, not stolen. And despite her instinct blinking neon warnings, she genuinely liked this prickly, brazen guy—maybe a little too much.
Outside, something banged. She tensed. He squeezed her forearm and they waited in silence. Nothing.
“Don’t worry, sunshine. We’ll be out of here as soon as that hatch opens tonight. Meantime, I’ve got your back.”
Right now, she’d let herself believe it.
* * *
Flynn waited until near darkness to thread the first length of electrical cord through the gap in the floorboards for the first of his handholds. He’d coated it with mud but the white would still glow through, catching any light that passed. Still, the guards seemed confident about the security of their prison—boots crossed over the boards just once every hour.
Apart from the odd shout or footfall outside, the only sounds for the past thirty minutes had been him scrambling around and Tess’s steady breath. Her curled shape on the mattress was melting into black, with just her hair still picking up the light. He’d let her rest as long as possible. With injured feet, she’d have a hard enough time keeping up.
Hell, how long since he’d had an encounter like that with a woman? Gentle and innocent—except for the dirty thoughts running through his head. For nearly ten years his few relationships had been short-term and only about sex. In one fling, with a Canadian tourist, he’d pretended he didn’t speak English to avoid conversation. Yep, he was that much of a lowlife. Stick around and they’d start asking questions.
The last time he’d stuck with a woman—with a journalist—too long, she’d torn his life apart. The bitch had pretended to be into him just long enough to paste his face and whereabouts all over the media, leaving him no choice but to leave Australia. Oh yeah, he’d learned his lesson, about journalists and women.
He twisted the cord and tried to angle it to fall over the gap on the other side of the board, so he could pull it through and secure it. Bugger, this would take more time and effort than he’d budgeted. He was fast running out of light, and his head wound pulsed every time he looked up. He made himself breathe—in, out, in, out. At least the pain in his ribs had eased.
After ten minutes he took a break and a handful of painkillers. On his next attempt, success. The cord flipped into the right spot and he used Tess’s tweezers to grip the loose wires and urge them to a point he could grab them. He pulled both ends tight and tied them, then swung on the cord, tentatively lifting his feet off the floor. It held. Sweet.
With the scissors, he sawed off another length of cord at the point it disappeared between the rocks. It was shorter—just enough for a second handhold. Threading it through would be even more of a bitch than the first.
Tess shifted. Mate, the light had fallen fast. This was taking too long. If the soldier returned before he was ready, his plan was screwed. He tucked the cord under his arm and crouched over Tess, his fingers finding her neck, then navigating to the safer territory of her shoulder. He gently shook it.
“Tess, wake up.”
She groaned and sat. He kept his hand on her. Maybe because he didn’t want her getting disorientated. Maybe because the smooth curve of her shoulder felt good. With his other hand he searched for the open bottle of water.
“It’s dark,” she said.
“Ready to bust out? Here, have a drink.” He let his hand fall to the middle of her back while she gulped. “Can you get your boots on?”
“Maybe, if I strip down the bandages on my toes. It’ll be...tight.”
“Leave them off for now. Put them in your backpack—it’s leaning on the mattress. I’ve packed it. You might have to take out one of the water bottles—I’ve stuffed in as many as can fit.” She’d run faster in socks, if she could run at all. He’d have to steal a vehicle.
“What’s your plan?”
“Get us above ground.”
“And then?”
“Wing it.”
Her silence told him everything about her faith in that.
“Sunshine, winging it is what I do best.”
Anything was better than sitting down here, rotting. He got back to work on his handholds, giving her his watch so she could direct its light up. Even the faint blue glow cast shadows.
“Someone’s coming.”
Damn, she was right. Footsteps neared, thudding on dusty ground. “A few more seconds.” The frayed end of the second cord was poking up through the boards, but he still needed to catch it, yank it back down and tie it. “Kill the light. I’ll do it blind.” He hadn’t had time to check everything, let alone practice his maneuver. Could he wait? And then what—risk escaping in daylight? They might not be alive by tomorrow night.
He let his head drop forward, taking the pressure off his wound, and left his fingers to do the work, snapping the tweezers blindly into the gap. A scrape and a click—the key in the lock.
“Put the backpack on,” he whispered. He’d intended to carry it, but plans were evolving too fast.
A door squeaked open. The tweezers snagged something. Shafts of light fell through the cracks. He pulled the end of the cord and caught it in his fingers. Footsteps passed overhead—one person, too heavy to be the woman. Flynn held his breath. One flick of the flashlight in his direction and the cords would gleam like strip lights.
He drew the cord down. Screw it, no time to prepare, test the angles, experiment with his run up. The diagram in his head would have to do. As the bolts shot across, he tied the ends and tested his weight, wincing as the cords rolled, shuddering, along the floorboards. He lowered to the floor, released the handholds and backed into the wall, wiping his sweaty palms on his combat pants. Chalk would be good, like at high school gym. He settled for dirt. No shortage of that.
The hatch squealed as it was levered off, the flashlight beam dancing out from the soldier’s hands. The handholds glowed. Now. Flynn sprang out, launched himself off the floor and into the loops, and swung his feet up. The guy squawked. Flynn’s boot collected something as his feet flew out of the hole. The rest of his body didn’t make it. The flashlight cracked into a wall and flickered off.
He hooked his boots on the edge of the hatch, his torso swinging down wildly. Bugger. Not enough momentum. High school gym was too long ago. The guy shouted something. Flynn crunched up, flailing with his right hand, his ribs burning, his skull complaining about being upside down. Pressure dug into his back—Tess, pushing him from underneath. He got a fingerhold on the side of the hatch, then a hand. The guy shouted again. Merde, how long until reinforcements arrived?
Pain slammed into his shins. Something pushed on his soles. The guy was trying to tip him back in. Funneling his strength into his right arm, Flynn hoisted himself, with a grunt. One foot slipped but his upper body was out. He rolled clear of the hole and sprang upright.
Footfalls rapped from outside, flashlight beams jiggling through the open doorway. His opponent’s eyes lit with fear. Flynn smashed a fist in his solar plexus, dropping him. The guy scraped for breath but kicked out, catching Flynn in the nuts. Flynn swore, unbalanced, slipped sideways. Something skidded out beside him and dropped into the hatch. The MREs the guy had been carrying.
As Flynn picked himself up, another soldier reached the doorway, running, an M16 aimed. A flashlight beam skidded over the wall, revealing an alcove. Flynn dived. Bullets ripped up the room; warm liquid sprayed his face. Putain.
Suddenly, the gunman flailed, reared up and smacked into the floor at Flynn’s feet, his rifle flying up. What the—?
No fucking way—the guy had tripped on the looped cords sticking up through the floorboards. The first soldier lay still on the floor, his skull flipped open like a lid. More shouts outside. Five or six men, a couple of women. Some closing in, some farther away.
Flynn dropped on the gunman, smashing an elbow into the back of his neck. “Look out below,” he called, lifting the guy in a spear tackle and launching him headfirst into the hole. He landed with an unhealthy crack. Hell, Flynn should have taken his rifle. Not thinking quickly enough.
He pressed into the alcove, reining in his heaving breath, as another guy approached the door. A splintering crack ricocheted from the other side of the room. Shit. A second external door had been forced open. Two goons spilled in, silhouetted in a floodlight, rifles glinting dully. Enemy left and right. Nowhere to retreat. He needed a plan B.
CHAPTER 4 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
“Flynn!”
Something skidded across the floor and smacked into Flynn’s boot. He crouched, felt for it, flinched. Hot metal—the M16 barrel. Tess had chucked it out of the hole. Legend.
Gunfire tore into concrete an inch above his head. He slotted the rifle into his arms and let loose a burst. One enemy went down. Two. Three. As the echoes faded, stillness settled. Someone gurgled. Shooting unidentified targets wasn’t Flynn’s style, but neither was dying for a principle. Dusty beams from two fallen flashlights crisscrossed the floor. Voices pinged around outside, closing fast. They had thirty seconds, tops.
In the light spilling in from outside, he made out the ladder, attached to bolts in the wall. He flung it into the hole, his gaze—and rifle barrel—flicking between the doorways.
“Tess,” he hissed. “Climb, quick.”
The rope jerked and swung. She yelped. “He’s got me. My ankle.”
Flynn peered down, barrel first. “Let her go,” he warned. He released a volley over the guy’s head. Tess sprang up a little as he wisely took the chance Flynn had offered. Flynn grabbed her forearm and hauled her out. “Stay behind me.”
He unhooked the rope ladder and tossed it into the hole, then leaned against the concrete beside the gaping second doorway and scoped out the exterior. No movement, no sound. He felt behind him for Tess but his hand hit air. She was leaning over a dead enemy.
“Tess!”
She tugged at something, then ran to him in a loping stride, shouldering an M16 like she knew how.
“What now?” she said breathlessly.
“First, we get out of the light.” Adrenaline surged through his veins and lit up his nerves. This was more like it. “And then I’m going to fucking kiss you.”
* * *
Tess stuck behind Flynn as they sprinted to a patch of darkness, ignoring the bolts of fire in her toes. Pain was just her nerves yelling to her brain that there was a problem. She knew there was a problem—her nail beds were pulpy masses of blood and goo—so her nerves could shut the hell up.
Her brain threw together a jumpy picture of her surroundings. It wasn’t the concrete-walled compound she’d imagined, more a sprawl of huts ringed by a ten-foot chain-link fence. Ahead, beyond an open gate, was a dirt road, otherwise there was a whole lot of dark nothing. A desert? Crap. Urgent voices carried from the far side of the bunker—half a dozen goons getting closer. Far off to the right was a sprinkling of lights—a village? A pair of headlights bumped toward them along the road. She couldn’t hear the engine over her own panting.
Light spilled from a hut next to the gate. A gatehouse. It looked deserted—the guards must have rushed to the bunker. A lucky break but they’d have to be quick. She sped up—and was yanked back.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
Flynn’s hand encircled her biceps. “It’s exactly where they think we’ll go.”
“That’s because it makes the most sense.” She tried to tear free but he held tight. “We could flag down the car.”
“Again, that’s what they’d expect us to do.”
She clenched her teeth. “Again, that’s because it makes sense.”
“Got a better idea. Trust me.” His eyes glittered. Green, definitely.
Stop it.
Trust him? Right now instinct urged her to, but instinct had got her into bad places where men were concerned. Still, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his survival instincts. If he got them to safety, she’d return the favor and ditch him. She didn’t need another death on her tab.
“Fine,” she said.
She followed him behind a small wooden shack near the fence. A hole-in-the-ground toilet, by the smell of it. She pressed her back into its rear wall, and he did the same. Sheltered from view, for now.
The car neared, its headlights lighting them up. Flynn leveled his rifle.
“You’re not going to shoot it?”
“Nope,” he whispered, tracing its progress with the barrel. When it was a foot or two past the gate he opened fire. She smacked her palms over her ears, craning her neck. What the hell? Dust rose along the path of the bullets, lit red by the taillights. He’d missed. Was that good or bad? The car revved, tires squealing. Footsteps and shouts sounded from the compound, closer now. A woman barked orders. Hamid.
The car bumped and skidded, engine straining. Poor guy driving it had to be terrified.
“What the hell was th—?”
“Wait,” he whispered, hardly louder than if he’d mouthed it. Something soft touched her ear—his lips. His hand pressed on her thigh. Just a warning to keep it together, that he had this under control—like hell—but she allowed herself to close her eyes for a second, to breathe. Whatever his plan, she had no choice but to go along with it. This kind of situation had to be his day at the office.
Sheesh, he’d promised to kiss her back there. A throwaway comment, obviously, but it’d heated her up all the same, just as his lips and hand were doing now. Man, she was messed up. How soon could PTSD set in? Was that also the reason for her paranoia about him? Well, paranoia was part of her job, but she was finding whole new levels.
Great, so now she was paranoid about being paranoid.
A vehicle door opened and slammed. And another. One, two, three more. An engine growled to life. Wheels skidded. Another engine started and whined into a crescendo as it accelerated, tires crunching along the rocky road. The fleeing car reached panic pitch.
So that was Flynn’s plan—make Hamid and her goons think Tess and Flynn had flagged down the car. God—imagine if they had? If it had been her choice... As the cars left and their noise faded, Hamid’s voice rang out. A one-sided conversation—on a phone? She could be speaking English, but Tess couldn’t make out the words over the pulse pummeling her eardrums. Behind them, a guy shouted. Another answered.
The compound was otherwise quiet. Flynn had taken out four or five goons. Maybe five more had left in the cars. How many were left? They all had to be focused on that car, having assumed Flynn’s gunfire had come from one of their guys in pursuit. And the driver had, naturally, hoofed it, making the car the target Flynn wanted it to be. Two birds, one stone. Smart—and ruthless.
Flynn appeared to be tracking something, out of her vision. Hamid’s voice receded—she was walking to the gate? His hand left Tess’s thigh and he silently lined up a shot. She settled her breath like it was her finger on the trigger. A man’s shout. Footfalls across the compound, toward Hamid. Flynn pressed back into the building, lowering the rifle, and gave a quick shake of the head. No shot. He gestured that Tess should lead them along the fence line, behind the buildings. Back into the compound? No kidding he was winging it. But, hey, if it confounded her, it’d confound Hamid.
She peered around her side of the shack, away from the gate. No one. She scampered into the open, her breath catching, and slipped into the darkness behind the next building. A few feet separated its concrete wall from the fence. How long until Hamid’s goons caught up with the car and figured out the truth?
Rocks pricked her feet through her socks. At least her tread was silent, though the car rally out front would mask a wildebeest stampede. Flynn walked so quietly she had to check he was following. Was that something military guys practiced—tiptoeing drills?
The fence didn’t let up. They came to a corner, near a long, low concrete building with barred windows and several doors opening to a veranda. Dark and quiet.
“We’ll have to go over the fence,” Flynn whispered.
“I don’t think I can. My toes—I wouldn’t be able to get a grip.”
He frowned, first at her feet, then at the fence. He could leave her behind, of course, but self-preservation stopped her suggesting it. If he was a selfish guy, it would occur to him. If not, he’d refuse.
“Wait here,” he said.
“Where are you—?”
He’d gone. Her breath hitched. Maybe he was the selfish type. He tried the first door in the building and pushed it open, leading with his rifle. He disappeared inside. After a silent, tense half a minute, he reappeared and did the same with the next door, and the next. He jogged back, something glinting in his hand—a pocketknife.
He knelt at the fence and slashed, the clinking and tearing echoing through the rear of the compound. She cringed.
“Give me the bag and your weapon.”
He slid them under the fence and lifted the makeshift flap. She shimmied through, the back of her head brushing his arm, followed by her shoulders, back and butt. She reached back to do the same for him but he retreated a few paces, charged, flew at the fence, clung on about halfway up, cleared the top in some flippy maneuver and landed at her feet, knees bent. Nimble and quiet as a kitten.
“What now?” she said, trying not to sound impressed. Exactly the kind of stunt her brothers liked to pull. He could just as quickly have shimmied under.
“No idea,” he said, throwing the backpack on. “But it’s been pretty fucking ninja so far.”
“Show-off.” Still, her lips curled up. Hey, she adored her brothers, though she’d never let on to them.
Gunfire popped. She gulped. Had they got some innocent driver killed? Flynn stilled, head cocked, gaze locked on hers. The car race had stopped—the engines were idling. He pushed the fence back in place and kicked some scattered rubbish around the break.
“If I’d gone under I would’ve had to make the hole twice as big. With luck they won’t notice till morning, at least. They’ll have to waste resources searching the compound.”
Somewhere a dog howled, answered by several others. Or were they hyenas? Did hyenas howl? Tess looked left, into blackness, and right, also into blackness.
“Seriously, though,” she said, “do you have a plan?”
* * *
Flynn shouldered both rifles. “You’re not easily impressed, are you, sunshine?”
He inhaled deeply. Adrenaline was good for jumping out of pits and scaling fences, but not for strategic thinking. Case in point: his comment about kissing her. Not that the urge had passed—the woman was lighting up dark parts of his brain. The sooner he got her to safety and returned to his unit, the better.
“First, we get out of the open,” he said. “Then we find transport or comms—preferably, both.”
“This is kind of all ‘the open.’”
“See that?” He pointed out a large shape a few hundred meters away, a hulk of charcoal against the dark. “Could be a hut or a vehicle. We shelter there and make a plan.”
Engines revved in the distance, getting louder. “They’re returning.” He ripped the bandage off his head and stuffed it in a pocket—it’d glow like a flare. “Follow in my footsteps but keep a couple of meters behind—there could be old land mines around. Can you run?”
“I can try.”
He set off in a jog, listening for her footfalls to judge his speed. Rocks jarred his feet even through his thick boots. Socks wouldn’t last her long but at least the ground was too hard to hold footprints. Her stride faltered, like she didn’t know which foot to favor. He slowed, though it near killed him.
To their left, a beam of light flashed and skidded across the ground. Damn. Probably just a large flashlight but it meant they had eyes on the ground already.
“Go faster,” she hissed. “I can keep up.”
He obliged. Hamid’s soldiers would split up—searching the compound, the road, the wasteland, then fanning farther out... Would she call in reinforcements? He and Tess would need to be long gone by daybreak or they’d stand out in this dead-flat terrain like hippos in a bathtub. Hamid would guess they were headed for the distant village lights, but what choice did they have—hijack a camel?
As they neared their target, he slowed. Something jutted out at forty-five degrees, aimed their way. A large gun, looming out of an abandoned tank. He skidded around to the far side of it, perched on one of its exposed, trackless wheels and swung the backpack around.
“You planning to start this thing up and roll us out of here?” Tess huffed as she caught up.
“I wish.” He pulled the pocketknife from his combat pants. “It’s a Russian T55.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s been sitting here rusting for thirty years or more. It’ll be from the Ethiopia-Somalia war, abandoned where it was put out of action—or broke down, more likely. Which means we’re probably near the border of the two. Dunno which side, but maybe on the road to Hargeisa.”
“I was taken from Somalia—near Hargeisa—so that would make sense.”
“And me from Djibouti, along the Somali border. Not in such easy striking distance, but they could have used a chopper.”
They’d gone to some lengths to find a French soldier. Was Tess right about Hamid wanting to suck France in? He found his watch in the backpack and strapped it on. They must have screwed up by capturing a legionnaire. The whole point of the legion was to give France an expendable force—he was cannon fodder no one cared about. No one except his frères d’armes. His unit would fight to the death for him. He cricked his neck. He needed to make contact, a-sap.
“What were you doing in Djibouti when you were captured?” she said.
“I’m not at liberty to talk to the media.”
“I’m not writing this down.”
He pulled her boots from the backpack. “Quit asking questions. You might not like the answers.”
Silence.
“No big story,” he conceded. No point firing up her curiosity. “Just on terrorist watch, like always. Guess we hit the jackpot.”
“They’re not—”
“Sunshine, if it looks like a terrorist, smells like a terrorist and shoots like a terrorist, I’m calling it a terrorist. Do you remember anything between being kidnapped and landing in the dungeon?”
“Vague flashes of being on the back of a truck. You?”
“Not a bloody thing.” He stabbed the toe of one of her boots and dug the blade into the leather.
“Hey! That’s the only footwear I have.”
“I’m giving them air-conditioning. We might be on foot awhile. We can duct-tape them later.” He sawed the toe off one side. “Or you can buy more with your superstar salary. Try this.”
She slipped it on, wincing as she worked her foot in. “Do you really think there are land mines here?”
He started on the second boot. “Abandoned land is often abandoned for a reason out here. But these thorn bushes and acacias have been cut back recently—for cooking fires or goat pens—so we’re probably safe.” A shout sailed out from the compound. “Relatively. You gotta watch the scrubby areas that are untouched.”
“Are we heading for those lights—the village, or whatever it is?”
“We don’t want to be in the open come morning. Here.” He passed her the boot.
“That’s where they’ll expect us to go,” she said, her voice tight, anticipating pain.
“That’s because it makes the most sense.”
She forced a thin-lipped smile and yanked up the laces. A shaft of light landed beside the tank, casting a shadow of the gun. He gripped her leg in warning—needlessly, it turned out, seeing as she was tense as concrete. Voices drifted over, conversational rather than urgent. Hopefully Hamid assumed he and Tess had headed out the gate, and had sent only a couple of schmucks around back to cover their bases. The light lingered on the tank’s turret, then moved on in a steady sweep. He realized he was still holding her, right around the thigh. He let go.
“Don’t suppose you know how to use one of those?” He nodded to the weapons beside them.
“I did some skeet shooting growing up, and I’ve shot an AR-15 in a firing range, but only on...”
He picked up a rifle and ejected the clip. Nearly full. He checked the next one. Full. “Only on...?”
She finished tying her laces and stood, testing a few steps. “Only on dates.”
“You messing with me? What kind of guy are you dating?”
“The wrong kind. And sometimes I go to the firing range with my mom and brothers. Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays—we’ve always been a little...competitive. I’ve never used one of those, though. Is it an M16?”
“Yep.” He gave her the 101 of readying and firing. Dating the wrong guy, huh? And that information had zero relevance. She was a celebrity; he was a recluse and planned to stay that way. Not a combination that’d work. Well, any relationship involving him wouldn’t work.
He shortened the sling to fit her frame and fitted it over her shoulder. “For you, this is a last resort. Your clip’s nearly full, so you have enough for four bursts. Don’t use it needlessly—and don’t use it on me.”
“Depends on the circumstances,” she said, with not nearly enough of a teasing tone.
“Don’t forget who busted you out.” And who’d had his arms around her much of the day. He’d lain awake for the last half hour of their nap while he’d mentally run through his plan, trying not to think about how soft her skin felt and how neatly she fit into him. Sicko. “You good to go?”
“You’re speaking Australian again.”
Bugger. When had he switched? “Told you my English is all over the place.”
He peered around the hull. Might as well stick with Australian now—the less his brain had to compute, the better. He’d be rid of her soon enough, and then he could ease back the paranoia lever.
The searchlight had moved off. Headlights trailed along the road, toward the village. Out in nowhere land, maybe three klicks away, a warm light flickered. Campfire. Probably nomadic herders—little chance of a phone there. With no moon, stars lit the sky like holes in a sieve. He scanned the horizon.
“The village is to the west. Hopefully the road continues the other side so we won’t have to pass the compound on the way out of town.” West was more likely to mean civilization—Addis Ababa, or maybe they could scoot back up to Djibouti. North likely meant Somalia, east a whole lot of nothing.
“How do you know the village is west of us, if you don’t know where we are?” She tugged the laces of her second boot.
Man, she was the suspicious type. He pointed above their heads. “I checked the map.”
“You can navigate by the stars?”
“You got a compass?”
Satisfied with her boots, she tipped her head back. “Prove it.”
He grunted. What a pain in the arse. He didn’t need to prove anything, but if it made her ease up on the interrogation... “North Star.” He pointed. “We’re about ten degrees north of the equator so you look about ten degrees above the horizon. The rest is easy. Bit of trust here?”
“Show-off.”
“You asked. Time we moved. But first we need to dirty up your T-shirt.”
“I’ve been wearing it for a week—it’s not dirty enough?”
“I can still see some white—it’ll show up like a reflector if that light catches it. Here.” He picked up a handful of soil, grabbed her wrist and dropped it in her palm. “Spit on this and rub it into the front. I’ll do the back. We’ll turn it into desert cammies.”
He picked up another handful and moved behind her. He could almost cover her back in a single hand span. She was all shoulder blades, spine and ribs—she’d gone easy on the MREs. Lucky he was into curves. Just you remember that, soldier.
“You like this stuff, don’t you?”
“What stuff?” Having his hands all over a beautiful woman? Too right. He liked her, that was the problem. She lit him up and she wound him up. A dangerous combination.
“Playing soldiers.”
“I am a soldier. It’s no game.”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t that why you joined up—you wanted to make the computer games a reality? Dive inside that Xbox?”
“You’re fishing for information.” And way off the mark. He’d been one year off an engineering degree when that journalist bitch outed him. With the walls closing in, he’d fled to Paris. Before that he’d been more into “Tetris” than “Call of Duty.” “Is that why your brothers joined up? And your boyfriend?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she snapped.
“Whoa.” Mission Change of Subject accomplished. He spun her. “Your face is glowing.” He smoothed the dirt in his hands over her cheeks, nose and forehead before running his fingers around her neck and into the exposed V of her chest. She took a sharp breath. A few inches lower and—
Shut it down. “Better,” he said.
She clicked her tongue. “And I just cleaned my face.”
“Waste of time out here, if you’re playing soldiers or not.” He ripped a strip of reflective metallic fabric off the bag and pocketed it, and rolled the rest in the dirt. “Same rules apply—keep your distance and step where I step. Sound’s gonna travel, so we go steady and careful. I do this...” He brought his palm level with the ground and lowered it, quickly. “We drop flat. If their lights pick us up, we run like lightning.” His gaze slid to her feet. “If you can. And try not to step on anything shiny.”
“What should I do if something goes click?”
He grimaced. “It won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“It’ll just go bang.”
“O-kay. Nice reassurance.”
“You want reassurance, hire a life coach. We’ll stick to tracks wherever possible—human, goat, donkey, camel... And, hey, if this area is mined, Hamid’s soldiers might not come after us.”
“I guess there’s that.”
“Ready?”
“After you, Lieutenant.”
CHAPTER 5 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Tess’s instincts ping-ponged with red alerts. She focused on following Flynn’s boots, trying to ignore the pressure in her toes and the hyperawareness of every noise. Not that there was much sound, bar her panting and the distant drone of vehicles.
Maybe a mile away, maybe five, three sets of headlights crept parallel to them, casing the road. Flynn’s head was skewed in that direction, his hands cradling his rifle. He’d better be looking out for shiny things, too—she’d met too many people in this part of the world with missing limbs.
Her chest tightened at the thought of putting her fate in the hands of a stranger, even one who made her stomach do flippy things. Especially one who made her stomach do flippy things. Rule number one in Africa: beware of the strangers who approached you, who tried to befriend you, to offer directions or some other “help.” They were the ones with an agenda—invariably involving relieving you of money. If you needed help, you sought out the ordinary people keeping to themselves, plying honest trades. Which category did Flynn fall into? Maybe falling drugged from the sky wasn’t the same as sidling up to her at a bus station, but he was hiding something. He wasn’t bothering with the French accent anymore. He had to be Australian.
A stone flicked off his boot and rocketed onto her exposed left sock, shooting fire up to her shin. She stumbled to a halt, scooching in a breath.
Flynn spun. “You okay?” She bent double, her eyes watering. He crouched and rested a hand on her shoulder. “Your toes?”
“Stone,” she gasped. Wow, she was such a princess. It was only a freaking toe. Who knew they could hurt so much? Flynn had a gaping head wound.
“You want me to carry you?”
“Hell, no.” She managed an expansive breath. The pain would settle—she just had to wait it out. “I’m good. Keep going.”
“If you need a break, I’m serious about carrying you. You probably weigh less than the backpack.”
She straightened. He kept his hand on her shoulder. He could be right. She hadn’t been eating well since she started chasing this story. The stress diet. Maybe she should quit journalism, write a diet book, make millions.
In the distance a pair of headlights flared—too far off for the beam to reach her and Flynn, but resolutely aimed their way.
“Flynn, the car’s turning.”
“I see it.”
“What do we do?”
“We hope. They get too close, we hit the deck, make like rocks and hope some more. It’s a massive patch of land and a dark night, so if their lights don’t get a direct hit we might be okay. Even then we might get lucky if our camouflage works. You sure you’re good to move?”
“Yes. Go.”
He released her. She swayed. She hadn’t realized how much she was letting him prop her up—in all sorts of ways.
It had to be healthy that she recognized she was in danger of falling for him—out of some sense of fear or gratitude, perhaps, some outdated feminine impulse to secure protection. And if she was aware of it, she could damn well make a conscious decision to resist it.
She settled back into his stride, faster now, the rifle bouncing against her back. Maybe that was why her instinct was going mental, like the mouse mom’s. Not because there was something familiar in his face, but because her brain was intent on protecting her from another Kurt-esque debacle. Clever brain. She should let it take charge more often.
The closest headlights grew bigger and brighter. Another light swept from the side of the vehicle—someone hanging out the passenger seat with a flashlight. The village lights weren’t getting any closer. Flynn was near sprinting, Tess stumbling along behind as if he were dragging her on a tow rope. Her breath was getting shallower, her toes jarring with the shock of each step. Tough it out. A good run wouldn’t kill her. Plenty else around here would.
Flynn glanced back.
“I’m fi—” she began.
But he wasn’t looking at her—he was looking over her shoulder, frowning. She followed his gaze. Another set of headlights was barreling straight for them. Oh God.
“Could we hide in those trees?” she gasped.
“What trees?”
“At your two o’clock.”
“I don’t see them.”
She pointed, though his back was to her again. “You can’t see that?” True, they weren’t much—a tangle of spindly branches—but they were clearly outlined, black against gray. The more she looked, the more trees she made out. Could you summon a mirage at night?
“Wait. Now I do.” He changed direction, angling toward them. “We don’t have a choice.”
It was all she could do to keep breathing. The trees didn’t seem to be getting bigger. The headlights behind her were.
“Down,” he whispered, hitting the deck as the flashlight swept their way.
She didn’t land quickly enough. The beam lit her up. Crap. It passed on without hitching. Keep going, keep going. It stopped and lurched back, burning straight into her retinas. Flynn sprang up, grabbing her hand. Her vision swam with black and red and purple. They hurtled toward the trees, her shaky legs threatening to give out.
“They still want us alive, right?” she shouted.
“I hope so. If anything, they’ll take me out and haul you back.”
“I’m not going back.” She upped her pace. Gunfire cracked around them.
“Just warning shots,” he yelled.
“How do you know?”
“We’re not dead.”
Her eyes adjusted. Both sets of headlights were trained on them, bouncing light and shadows on their path. The engines screamed. Flynn pulled her to the left—skirting the bleached skeleton of an animal. At least, she hoped it was an animal. Half a minute later, she heard it crunch and snap under a wheel. They passed the first tree, then the second. Another hundred feet and the goons would have to follow on foot.
The terrain changed. They plunged downhill, her knees wobbling as the ground steepened. Flynn’s hand tightened. Spindly trees panned out around them. It was a gully. Crap.
The headlights flared on something red, to her right—a warning sign, with a skull and crossbones.
“Flynn, it’s a minefield.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“That’s what I hoped.” He released her hand and skidded down a bank. “Stay behind me. Some of them spray sideways.”
Oh Jesus. Behind, a vehicle skidded to a stop. More gunshots, too close. She braced. No pain—nothing new, at least. She was still on her feet, her body still taking orders from her brain. The second engine roared closer.
“Out there we have a hundred percent chance of death,” Flynn shouted. “In here, maybe less.”
They careered downward, slaloming between trees, ducking under branches. It was hard to figure out where Flynn even was, let alone follow his path or watch for mines. Her mind was about to blow, with all the warnings it was pelting at her. Gunfire smacked into dirt by her feet. She yelped. Shouldn’t warning shots go upward?
The second vehicle slowed. As the engine silenced, another motor filled the gap, farther off but pushing fast. Possibly more than one. Among the clatter of gunfire she caught shouts edged with panic. Hell, they were worried?
A beam of light swept past them. Something glinted on the ground ahead of Flynn.
“Stop! Flynn!”
He kept charging. Her scalp went cold. She lunged for his waist and dragged him to a shuddering halt, her toes bouncing on the stones.
“What are you—?”
“Don’t move.” She drew upright, practically climbing his body, and clung to his left arm. “Something shiny.”
“Where?” His biceps was rigid.
“An inch in front of your foot.”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Like a bunch of nails sticking up.”
“You’re kidding me. That’s a bounding mine.” He shook his head. “I still can’t see it. You must have superhuman sight.”
“Guess I got used to the dark.”
To their left, the light snagged on trees.
“Maybe I should go first,” she said. God, that was the last thing she wanted.
“No.”
“I can see better than you.”
He caught her waist and lifted her sideways, moving them behind a tree trunk that was half his width. “I don’t want the responsibility,” he whispered into her ear. “You stay behind me, you’re safe.”
“Until you get blown up and then I’m on my own anyway, if I’m even alive.”
“Most of these things will be buried. Just then, we got lucky.”
Gunfire burst out. She shook him off. “And we might get lucky again if we can see. Come on.”
She took a step. He pinned her arms to her sides, his chest grazing her back. “I go first.”
“I’m quite capable of taking responsibility for my own death.”
“I can see that. I’m still going first.”
Wow, he sure had a hero complex. “Oh, I get it,” she said, changing tack.
“Get what?”
“It puts me in their line of fire. If I get shot, you get away.”
“What? No!”
He loosened his grip. Taking advantage of his indignation, she set out, her heart thumping hard enough to break a rib. Best-case scenario, she got lucky. Second-best, she died quickly. Her mind flashed up an image of a boy shepherd she’d met after his leg had been blown off midthigh. She’d forced herself to watch as a doctor had removed his filthy dressing, and then she’d swallowed vomit. The black, pulpy mass had writhed with maggots.
Sometimes knowledge wasn’t power.
Crap—Flynn wasn’t behind her. She glanced back, slowing. He was crouched over the mine. What was he doing—defusing it? He grabbed something from his pocket and laid it beside the spikes. The reflective strip he’d ripped off her bag. A warning to others? He would stop to be considerate, now?
He started running, waving her on. The land began to rise again up the other side of the gully. She stuck to where the trees were thickest. More gunfire. Not potshots—they were spraying the wood. Branches swooshed and cracked like a windstorm. She hurtled across the stony ground, bent double, scanning for shiny things. Or dull things. Anything that didn’t look right. Could the goons see her, or were they shooting blind? A burst clapped out behind her—Flynn had caught up and was returning fire.
A dark hulk loomed. She stopped, an inch from smashing her nose into it. A boulder. She swiveled, thrusting out her hands. Flynn was running sideways, looking back over his shoulder. “Fl—”
He rammed into her chest, slamming her spine into the rock. Pain spiraled through her torso. His rifle smacked her elbow, deadening her arm.
“Merde. You okay?” He bounced off and caught her, his hands pressing up and down her back.
Breath rasped back into her lungs. “Peachy,” she squeaked. It felt like she’d been hit by a rhino. A bullet cracked above them, showering her with rock chips. He pulled her into a crouch, leaning over her as the stone rain settled.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing her hand.
Blindly, she stumbled after him, rounding the boulder. He yanked her down on the other side and scooted in beside her. Cover. Thank God. Her feet pulsed. Ahead, the land flattened out again—the top of the gully easing out into a plateau.
She let her head fall backward onto the rock and took a shuddering breath. Gunfire tore through the trees, their echoes alone loud enough to burst an eardrum. Dozens of bullets, maybe hundreds. A lot of fingers on a lot of triggers.
“Still warning shots?” she said.
“Their orders have changed. My guess? They’re cutting their losses. They’ve realized they can’t risk you getting away.”
“So they’re shooting to kill.”
“It’s a good thing. It means they think we have a chance of getting out of here, which means we must have a chance—we just need to find it. This can’t be a dead end.”
“Wow, you’re quite the optimist.”
“Nah. An optimist sits back and waits for good shit to come to them. I don’t expect anything good to come to me—you gotta go out and make that shit happen. If you get lucky, you get lucky. No such thing as karma—you die or you don’t, whether you deserve it or not.”
“So right now, are we lucky or unlucky?”
“Depends what happens next.” He unzipped the bag and passed her a water bottle. “But don’t go all philosophical on me. My head hurts too much for thinking. Let’s just try not to die today.”
“Hey, it was you doing the philosophizing.”
“Hardly. I can’t even pronounce that word.”
She drank greedily, the water loosening her stuck throat. To her left, a bullet whacked into the dirt. Something pelted her temple. She gasped, fumbling the bottle, but it flipped out of her grip. She’d been shot in the head?
“Tess?”
She patted her face. No broken skin—just a burning sensation. Her T-shirt was soaked. “A stone, I think. Must have ricocheted up.” She grabbed for the bottle but it rolled away, into the line of fire. She lurched forward. A force hauled her back—Flynn’s hand, gripping her waistband. She flew for a second and plopped down, jamming his fingers into her butt crack. Graceful.
“Leave it,” he said, tugging his hand free.
“They’ll see it.”
“They’re more likely to see you—I don’t think they have your superhero vision.”
He grabbed a fallen branch and coaxed the bottle within reach. As good as empty.
“They could keep this up all night, all week,” she said. “Starve us out—if there’s anything left to starve by the time they run out of ammunition.”
“I’m counting on Hamid not having the patience for that. If what you say is true—”
“It is tr—”
“Then there’s too much at stake. The longer this goes on, the more anxious she’ll get, the more likely she’ll make a bad call. You said she reports to someone higher-up?”
“She runs al-Thawra, but al-Thawra reports to Denniston and the senator.”
“Then that’s where the bad call will come from. Bad decisions always come from bosses who aren’t on the ground, aren’t reading the conditions.” He punctuated his words with the bottle. “They want a black-and-white outcome, no matter the cost and screw the circumstances.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Personal experience?”
He scoffed like she’d asked an intimate question. “Human nature. They’ll be telling Hamid to find you before this gets out of control. Minefields aren’t put in dead ends. They’re designed to stop the enemy getting somewhere—they’re laid in shortcuts, thoroughfares.” He shook the last drops of water onto his tongue. “Which means this patch of scrub leads somewhere useful and they know it. It’s not just some oasis.”
“No kidding it’s not. Maybe it leads up into those hills?”
“Hills?”
“There.” She pointed. “Silhouetted against the stars.”
He squinted. “Yep, that’s where they’ll expect us to go.”
He flipped onto his belly and scooted to the far end of the rock. “Man, I could kill for NVGs.” He shouldered his rifle, let off a burst and ducked back under cover.
“What are you doing that for?” He couldn’t take on a couple of dozen soldiers.
The return gunfire surged. “Confirming we’re still alive.”
“If they think we’re dead they might stop shooting.”
“Hamid won’t believe we’re dead until she spits on our bodies. I want to make her nervous, impatient. Staying put and strafing this scrub to keep us pinned—or, better, kill us—is her best strategy. I don’t want her choosing the best strategy.”
He slid into his firing position and let off another round. She shoved her fingers in her ears, though they were already ringing like church bells. As he rolled back, she could smell his adrenaline—sharp and tangy and spiced with scorched metal.
“Aren’t you worried about giving away our position?”
“Not the way these shots are echoing. And there’s enough scrub to mask the muzzle flash. I’ll give it a rest now, anyway. Hear that?” His teeth gleamed. She could no longer figure out where one surge of fire ended and the next began. “The sweet sound of panic. We’re relatively safe here, and sooner or later they’ll figure that out. Meantime, I have a plan.”
“Which is...?”
He looked above their heads. Checking the stars? “I’ll tell you, if it works.”
“Flynn...”
“Hey, the last one worked, didn’t it? Kind of?” He flattened against the rock and pointed along the ridge in the direction of the village, as near as she could tell. “You see any more rocks we could shelter behind?”
“Yeah, maybe a hundred feet away. Man, they are not letting up.”
He dragged the backpack toward him, unzipped it and pulled out the open MRE.
“You’re eating?” she said. “Now?”
“Gotta keep up the energy. Here.” He slapped a bar of something onto her lap.
“You have it. My stomach is flipping around so much the food might bounce right out.”
“Eat the bloody thing. You don’t look like you’re carrying a lot of reserves and I’m not having you flaking out on me.”
In the darkness, her glare was wasted. She fought through a sickly sweet granola bar, a nibble at a time. Oh, for a fresh, crisp apple. At the thought, saliva poured into her mouth. Flynn laid into something that smelled like curry. At a time like this. As they ate, the gunfire became sporadic then eased off, leaving them cloaked in silence. She stashed the bar’s wrapper in her pocket, wincing at the crackle.
Flynn scooted to his vantage point and beckoned her over. They lay on their bellies, shoulders touching.
“What’s that superhero vision telling you?” His murmured words vibrated right through her.
She blinked, hard. “Nothing,” she whispered. “Wait, something’s moving. A person. More than one—maybe half a dozen, entering the gully.” Crap.
“Spread out or in single file?”
“Spread out.”
“Good.”
“Was that your plan?”
“They’re doing what the bastards who buried these mines hoped. The mines are laid out under the theory that soldiers spread out. You go in alone, or single file, odds are you’ll get out alive. A whole unit spreads out, chances are one will set off a mine that catches his buddies with shrapnel, so it lowers everyone’s odds. It’s a numbers game, like the chance you’ll be the one picked by the shark at the beach.” He fell silent. “Maybe a little more likely than that.”
“You’d think they’d know that, living here.”
“They’ll be following orders—bad ones, and they’ll know that and resent it. You can’t do a grid search in single file. I bet they’re praying to Allah.” He caught her eye. “Or God, or Buddha, or their mothers.”
“They’ve stopped shooting, at least.”
“Merde. They might be flanking us.”
Her neck prickled. She rolled onto her back, peering into the trees on the plateau while he watched the other direction.
“You cover our backs,” he said, creeping behind her. “Don’t fire unless you have to, but don’t hesitate, either. I’m going to create some chaos. On my say-so, we pull back to that other rock.”
She flipped the catch to full-auto as he’d shown her. God, she hoped he was wrong about them being flanked. She adjusted her grip and forced her breath to settle. It was just like on the range, shooting at targets. Except targets didn’t shoot back. She widened her eyes as if they were satellite dishes. The bigger the disc, the more it picked up, right? Movement wasn’t always immediately obvious—like before, seeing the soldiers among the trees, sometimes you had to sift through layers of darkness to catch it.
Gunfire burst out next to her. She jumped, her pulse rocketing. Flynn again. A shifting noise as he changed position. He fired again. A boom split the air, rocking the ground. Oh man. That was no gunshot.
A throaty scream echoed up the gully. Light flashed, right up to the plateau, illuminating the unmistakable figures of two men, dressed in camouflage, walking straight toward her, rifles panning left and right.
Her throat dried. She flattened, holding in her stomach—as if that would make all the difference. The explosion from the gully flared, like something was burning. One of the men looked directly at Flynn and raised his weapon. Shit. Shit. Should she fire?
The light flickered and cut out. Darkness swarmed back in. She blinked, blinded. Of course she should fire. But where had they gone? Around her, gunfire cracked, thwacking along the earth, pelting the rock. Incoming, not outgoing. Oh God, had her hesitation got Flynn killed? Where the hell were the men?
CHAPTER 6 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Screw it. Tess had an automatic rifle—no need to pinpoint the bull’s-eye. She squeezed the trigger, fighting the kickback as she peppered the trees. The recoil shook her skull, strobing her vision. Her hearing muffled. Far away a man was talking. She couldn’t release her finger—the trees were becoming men, one by one, then a dozen at a time, closing in from all sides.
Something gripped her forearm. “Stop.”
She let go of the rifle with a start. The voice—it had been Flynn’s. Her hands reverberated—hell, her whole body shook. The hordes of enemy morphed back into trees. Crap. Had there been any real soldiers?
“You got them,” Flynn said, his voice soaring down from the stratosphere, his hand tight on her arm. From the gully the screams continued—or was that in her ears? Gunfire rattled, like a million balloons bursting in her head, the shouts of a dozen men laid on top. “We need to move.”
He swept the backpack on and pulled her up. She’d shot the two goons? Were they dead? She grabbed her rifle and stumbled after Flynn, clutching his hand like a lifeline. So much for keeping her distance. Hell, they were deep in this together; they might as well get blown up together.
The screaming rose in pitch, and broke into a shout. “La. La! Laaaaa!”
No, in Arabic? A single shot rang out above the rest. The screaming stopped. Flynn’s hand tightened. A faint buzzing circled, like a toy helicopter. She clicked her jaw but her ears wouldn’t equalize. She couldn’t hear her feet hitting the ground, though she could feel them, all right.
Something moved through the trees. She yanked Flynn’s hand. Too late. A guy ran toward them, raising his rifle. Flynn released her, spun, lifted his weapon. Kaboom. Everything exploded into light—the ground, the air, the trees. A force rammed her back and shoved her down, slamming her nose and mouth into the earth. She couldn’t breathe—she was buried under something huge and heavy. A boulder? A tree?
Someone had hit a land mine. Her? Flynn? Hail pelted the dirt—not ice but shrapnel, sticks, stones. The hulk on top of her shifted and groaned. Oh God—Flynn? His breath rasped like his throat was crammed with gravel. Then he went still and silent. No, no, no. She was panting so hard she couldn’t tell if his chest was moving against her back. She forced her face to the side, scraping her cheek on stones.
A flame flickered, lighting up a swirling fog of dust, flaring just long enough for her to identify the shape in front of her face. An arm. Only an arm. Too skinny to be Flynn’s. Oh crap—hers? She clenched both hands, scraping her fingernails through the dirt. All fingers accounted for. Her feet were evidently still attached—nothing phantom about the pain shooting from her toes to her thighs.
She gagged on the smell of dirt, smoke and she didn’t want to think what else. Footsteps approached. Flynn remained dead still. She swallowed a mist of hot dust. Beyond the bloody arm she made out two figures, slinking closer. Quiet, urgent voices carried. One of them kicked something, with a fleshy thud. Any second, they’d spot her and Flynn. Her rifle poked into her ribs but she couldn’t budge, let alone grab it.
The voices trailed off. The goons didn’t seem to be coming closer. They were...retreating? No way. Flynn was in head-to-toe desert camo gear, no doubt coated with dust and debris—maybe they looked like a rock? We might get lucky if our camouflage works.
Dark silence dropped like a blanket. A gulp stuck in her throat. Too scared to whisper, she forced herself to stop panting, ignoring the need in her lungs. Was Flynn’s chest rising? Was he breathing? Be okay, be okay.
A guttural curse scraped out of him. She relaxed into the ground. A swearword had never sounded so beautiful. He lifted off her with a groan, like it was a huge effort. She lay still a second, the sudden absence of his weight giving her the sensation she was levitating.
“Too close,” he moaned. “You okay?”
“You die or you don’t,” she rasped, rolling onto her back. He leaned over her, a shadow against the stars. She patted down his chest, his ribs. Intact. “I thought you’d...” She swallowed.
“I’ll live. You good to walk?”
She lurched to a sitting position. “I think so. You sure caused chaos.”
He pushed up into a crouch, grabbed her upper arms and lifted them both to their feet. “It wasn’t all me, sunshine,” he whispered. “That was some crazy shooting of yours. Not bad for a—”
“I hope you’re not going to say, ‘Not bad for a woman.’”
He groaned, dropping contact. “Not bad for a woman who couldn’t bring herself to kill a mouse a few hours ago. Jeez, Germaine.”
She wiped her dusty hands on her dusty trousers. “Honestly? I have no idea what just happened. What was going on down below?” She nodded to the gully. “Before we moved, before those guys...” Before I became a killer. “Someone else stepped on a mine?”
“I exploded the one you found.”
“How...? Wait—the reflective strip. You shot it.”
He winced. “It was meant to be a diversion. They were closer than I’d thought.”
“The screaming—it stopped. Abruptly.”
In the shadows, something crunched. A walkie-talkie crackled with static. Flynn pulled her behind a tree, his arm tight around her waist. Her rifle bumped a branch. She caught it. Beyond the spindly foliage the outline of a man passed, his movements jerky, too fixated on scanning the ground to spot her and Flynn. Chaos was right. These guys were spooked. Hell, so was she.
Another guy appeared—no, a woman—farther away, creeping in the same direction. Flynn tightened his grip, his fingers digging into her hips, his muscles tensed against her, all the way across his arm and shoulder and down his thigh. Last night—was it only last night?—she’d run her hands down those long, powerful legs. Yes, focus on that, not the goons with guns passing a few feet away. Then, Flynn had been a very fit body. Now he was every other kind of sexy, too—smart, brave, witty, protective. An all-round menace.
Words buzzed from the walkie-talkie. Nothing discernible. The woman looked directly at their tree, frowning. Trying to make out the message, or trying to identify the suspiciously thick shape? Tess held her breath. She’s staring into space. She hissed something to her friend and they skulked off.
Tess stood rigid. The soldiers melted into the darkness, their silhouettes no longer distinguishable from the trees. As silence returned, her scalp tingled. She stretched and fisted her fingers to stop the trembling. It didn’t work.
“We’re clear,” Flynn said, releasing her. “Let’s move, fast and quiet.”
At the next boulder he pulled out a fresh water bottle and offered it. She bent double, resting her hands on her thighs. She could barely inhale, let alone drink.
“Can you hyperventilate a little quieter?” he whispered. He laid a hand on the middle of her back. She suppressed the instinct to flinch. “Like I say, it’s a numbers game. We’re the needles, this is the haystack. We’ll stay here a minute, let them sweep on ahead. Enough enemy have been through that they’ll mark off this sector as checked.”
She took a deep, settling breath, resisting the urge to let it out in a hiss as she would to calm her nerves before a live report from the field. Straightening, she took the water. As she gulped, he slid her rifle off her back.
“If luck’s on our side, they’ll assume we’re pressing on toward that hill,” he said, ejecting the clip. “You have one more burst left.”
“Thought you didn’t believe in luck.”
“I didn’t say that. I said we create our own luck—and we have.” He checked his own clip.
Luck. There was a relative term. Was she unlucky to be stuck in a minefield, stalked by an army of goons, or lucky to be out of the dungeon with a kick-ass soldier on her side? Probably on her side.
Definitely on her side. Sheesh.
And the fact she was growing more attracted to him by the minute—would that prove lucky or unlucky?
Huh. Luck? Plain stupidity, more like. About time she cured her weakness for alpha military crap.
After today. Today, alpha military crap was keeping her alive, in body and hope. Next week, when all this was a memory of the did-that-really-happen kind, she’d make a psychiatric appointment. A lobotomy should take care of it.
He silently took the water bottle and slipped it into the pack, and handed back her rifle. “We keep going west, toward the village. You okay to lead? If you can concentrate on the ground, I can look out for enemy.”
“Oui, Lieutenant.”
She stared downward until her eyes adjusted enough to make out—or perhaps imagine—individual stones among the shades of black, then crept out from behind the rock. It felt like a boa constrictor was wrapping around her chest. Flynn grabbed her arm and pulled her into him. Oh God, what now?
“Not on the ridge,” he growled. “We stay under it. No silhouettes.”
She scooted downhill. They made steady progress, skirting suspect shapes on the ground—too round, too square, too regular, too pointy. She was probably seeing things, but at least it gave her something to focus on. Every foot they traveled eased the tightness in her stomach. Maybe this would be a lucky day.
Don’t say that.
Thank God for Flynn dropping into that hole—he might not believe in luck, but for her that’d been a blessing from above. Even if she’d managed to get out by herself, she’d have been caught in minutes. Her mind didn’t work nearly as quickly as his—but then, this kind of thing was his job. In her work she didn’t do anything—she dug into other people’s experiences and put them into words and pictures. All talk, no action.
Was that why she liked military guys? They were all action, from boots to buzz cut. Flynn must have some interesting stories—starting with his own history. Drawing that out would be a challenge, for sure.
After twenty minutes, the terrain began to level and they passed another triangular sign, facing away from them. She pinched her eyes shut for a second. Out of the minefield. Thank God. Flynn nodded as she pointed at the sign, but his focus was fixed ahead. Down a slight slope, light filtered through the thinning trees. Male voices trickled up. She squinted as Flynn inched ahead, the weak beam drilling into her brain, right behind her eyes. Two lights—headlights? Yes, a hefty vehicle parked at an angle. One of al-Thawra’s white Ford Ranger trucks. Crap.
Flynn made the get-down signal and dropped noiselessly. She crunched into a stack of dry leaves, silently cursing. He crawled over.
“They have NVGs—night vision goggles. Only one of them has them on his eyes right now. They’re probably part of a perimeter block.”
As her sight adjusted, she made out one of the guy’s faces, partially obscured by a cap but uplit by a mobile phone screen under his nose. Her jaw tightened. No mistaking the scar twisting his lip or his outsize military jacket. It probably still had her blood on it. The other guy looked familiar, too.
“Definitely Hamid’s guys,” she whispered. “So what now?”
He looked over his shoulder. “We can’t risk gunfire. Our advantage is that Hamid doesn’t know where we are and I’d rather not give it up. And we’re low on ammo.” He fell silent, frowning. Take all the time you need. She sure didn’t have any ideas.
“There are two of them,” he said eventually. “We’ll have more chance if I can split them up.”
He shrugged the pack off his back. In the silence, the zip roared like a fighter jet. Neither goon moved.
Flynn slipped a bottle out, unscrewed the lid and started shoveling dirt and small stones inside. It was the bottle she’d emptied down her top. When it was full, he tested its weight, scanned the terrain and crawled backward—into the minefield. He motioned for her to follow.
Goddammit. She followed him behind a prickly bush, her shoulders tensing. When would this night be over? How long since they’d busted out—thirty minutes? Several hours?
“There are more headlights to the north and the south,” he whispered. “Stationary, like these ones.”
“We’re surrounded.” The words caught in her throat.
“We only have to get past these two guys. Wait here and cover me—but only shoot if you’re about to die. If this doesn’t work, you can...” He glanced left and right, as if expecting to spot a TARDIS. “It’ll work.”
“What are you going to do?”
Silence.
“Right—you’ll tell me if it works. Wouldn’t want to blow your karma.” She raised a palm. “Not that you believe in it.”
“I’ll signal for you to come out when it’s safe.” He gripped the neck of the bottle and experimented with flicking movements.
“Be careful—the guy with the phone...” She inhaled. “He’s a psycho. Well, they’re all psychos, but that guy...”
“What did he do to you?”
She trailed her gaze to her feet, which pulsed in pain on cue.
His jaw went rigid. “I’ll treat him with extra care. Stay put.”
Flynn left the backpack and retreated into the minefield. She screwed up her face. Watching him creep through it was somehow more stressful than going in herself. He reached a clearing and hefted the bottle. It arced high into the air and landed with a cracking thud in bushes a couple of hundred feet away, on the edge of the scrub. Ah. Another diversion.
The psycho looked up from his phone. He waved the other guy away in the direction of the noise and leaned into the cab through the open passenger door. A radio crackled, silenced as he spoke into it, and crackled again. At what point would he call in reinforcements? Surely they’d first check that it wasn’t an animal?
So Flynn planned to pounce on the goon who was checking out the noise, then draw in Psycho and grab him, too? But wouldn’t Psycho call for support rather than go in alone? She chewed her lip. And wouldn’t the first goon see Flynn coming anyway, through his goggles?
Overthinking. Any plan was better than none. Trust him. Focus on covering him, not second-guessing him. She eased her rifle into position.
Minutes passed. Not even a twig snapped. Her heart felt like it was leaving bruises on her rib cage. The second guy had disappeared from her sight line. Psycho leaned back on the hood of the truck between the headlights and pulled on his goggles. Surely he’d see two figures, not one? From there he could open fire—she wouldn’t put it past him to take out his own guy, just to get Flynn. He yelled. His friend replied from out of sight. Oh God, Flynn. Stay alive.
She caught a flicker of movement behind the bed of the truck. Crap, a third man—bigger than the others. Flynn wouldn’t have factored him in. She fixed him in the scope, finger light on the trigger. Don’t shoot unless you have to—but don’t hesitate, either.
He disappeared from view behind the truck. Still no movement at the tree line. The beam of the farthest headlight flickered as a dark shape shot past. The new guy. She swung the barrel, searching for him. Psycho jerked backward. A column of light pinned two grappling figures, one wearing desert camos. Whoa. She eased her finger off the trigger. The new guy was Flynn.
He had Psycho in a headlock, his other hand clamped on his wrist, trying to wrestle away a handgun. Psycho shouted. They lurched out of the light and disappeared behind the truck. Scuffling, a meaty crack, a thud. Oh God. Dust puffed across the headlight beams.
The other goon ran out of the scrub, rifle leveled, shouting into a comms device on his shoulder. Hell, even if Flynn were winning, this guy would take him out. And then reinforcements would come...
She couldn’t just watch. Screw Flynn’s orders.
She jumped up and yelped, as if she’d hurt herself. The guy turned. She let out another screech and flattened onto the dirt, panting, directing her shaky fingers onto the trigger.
The goon’s face snapped up, scanning the bushes. Behind him, a figure staggered out from behind the truck, wearing NVGs and an oversize military jacket, tugging down his cap. Psycho. She swallowed a squeak. That crack she’d heard... Psycho wouldn’t have walked away if Flynn were alive. Tears stung. Shit, shit, shit. He was dead, and she was screwed.
No. She still had a chance, if she took out both goons before they started shooting.
One burst.
Don’t hesitate.
CHAPTER 7 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Tess blinked away moisture and lined up her shot. If Flynn had died, she’d damn well ensure it wasn’t for nothing. When her story went to air, his sacrifice would help save hundreds of thousands of lives. That would mean something to him, even if he’d deny it.
Oh God, she really didn’t want him to be dead. The second guy glanced at Psycho and returned focus to the scrub, shouting and pointing—right at her. Her nape crawled. If this worked, she could steal the truck. And go where? It was Flynn who was good at winging it. The only things she could improvise were words, and she didn’t always nail the first take.
Hanging back in the shadows, Psycho looked more intimidating than ever. He strode up to the second guy, who was raising his rifle her way.
One burst, right to left—the gunman first, then Psycho. No second takes. She nestled her finger on the trigger and tensed, bracing for the kickback. Now.
A flash of movement, and both men dropped. What the hell? Psycho had tackled the other guy and they were wrestling. Psycho raised his handgun and crunched the butt into his friend’s forehead. The impact rippled through him, and he crumpled, still. Psycho ripped away the rifle and tossed it. He flipped the guy over and forced his arms behind his back. What now? Should she still shoot?
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Brynn Kelly
Tensions sizzle in this electrifying novel guaranteed to capture your heart and take your breath away. Fans of Julie Garwood, Suzanne Brockmann and Jayne Ann Krentz will devour this action-packed, emotionally stunning tour de force, where every page reveals another damning secret and daring gamble.Rotting in an African dungeon is the last place journalist Tess Newell expected to find herself. As she's held hostage by the terrorist group she’s investigating, Tess’s salvation—and temptation—arrives in the form of another prisoner. A French Foreign Legionnaire with a sinful smile and too many secrets to be anything but dangerous. Yet she knows he’s her only hope of surviving.The Legion is the only family Flynn has. His sanctuary and his purgatory, after years spent in hell. When a mission goes south and Flynn is captured, it’s not the enemy that worries him, but the brazen, alluring reporter whose prying questions threaten to bring down his world—and the walls he’s built around his heart.Yet after a daring escape, Flynn must risk it all and go on the run with Tess to retrieve the evidence she needs. The chemistry between them threatens to detonate but, with the enemy fast closing in, time is running out to unravel the truth from the lies in this deadly conspiracy…
Tensions sizzle in this electrifying novel guaranteed to capture your heart and take your breath away. Fans of Julie Garwood, Suzanne Brockmann and Jayne Ann Krentz will devour this action-packed, emotionally stunning tour de force, where every page reveals another damning secret and daring gamble.
Rotting in an African dungeon is the last place journalist Tess Newell expected to find herself. As she’s held hostage by the terrorist group she’s investigating, Tess’s salvation—and temptation—arrives in the form of another prisoner. A French Foreign Legionnaire with a sinful smile and too many secrets to be anything but dangerous. Yet she knows he’s her only hope of surviving.
The Legion is the only family Flynn has. His sanctuary and his purgatory, after years spent in hell. When a mission goes south and Flynn is captured, it’s not the enemy that worries him, but the brazen, alluring reporter whose prying questions threaten to bring down his world—and the walls he’s built around his heart.
Yet after a daring escape, Flynn must risk it all and go on the run with Tess to retrieve the evidence she needs. The chemistry between them threatens to detonate but, with the enemy fast closing in, time is running out to unravel the truth from the lies in this deadly conspiracy...
Praise for Edge of Truth (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
“Edge of Truth has it all—danger, desire, and heart-pounding action. Brynn Kelly captures you on page one and doesn’t let go!”
—Laura Griffin, New York Times bestselling author
“Dark and deep—a twisting romantic suspense that will grab you and never let go.”
—Cynthia Eden, New York Times bestselling author
“Edge of Truth is a breathtaking romantic thriller. The characters are so real they leap off the page, the love story is hot and the action never lets up. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Karen Robards, New York Times bestselling author
“Brynn Kelly will capture your heart and leave you breathless in this passionate, harrowing novel of romantic suspense. A must-read!”
—Brenda Novak, New York Times bestselling author
Praise for the novels of Brynn Kelly
“Captivating and cutting edge! Deception Island offers smoldering chemistry, cunning twists, and a whole lot of heart. Brynn Kelly delivers everything I love in a romance.”
—Heather Graham, New York Times bestselling author
“In Deception Island, Brynn Kelly pens a raw, dark, emotional novel of danger and intrigue that will keep readers turning the pages.”
—Kat Martin, New York Times bestselling author
“Intense and exciting...romantic suspense at its best!”
—Carla Neggers, New York Times bestselling author, on Deception Island
About the Author (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
After an award-winning twenty-year career as a journalist, BRYNN KELLY has abandoned fact in favor of her first love, fiction.
She’s delighted that she gets to spend her days in a bubble of delicious words and fiendish plots, turning all those stranger-than-fiction news reports into larger-than-life romantic thrillers.
Brynn has a journalism and communications degree and has won several prestigious writing awards, including the Valerie Parv Award and Pacific Hearts Award. Her acclaimed debut novel, Deception Island, was nominated for a Golden Heart® Award by Romance Writers of America. She’s also the bestselling author of four nonfiction books in her native New Zealand.
Edge of Truth
Brynn Kelly
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
Cover (#u30827fd6-d8c2-5a41-94be-81f6b0d8cdcf)
Back Cover Text (#uf85c1218-aec6-53e6-a73b-102dd64676bc)
Praise (#u3319771a-a75b-5616-98f9-cf89b238a4df)
About the Author (#u2fc74999-c6cf-5eb2-af3b-1901929b5742)
Title Page (#u1f57e097-8896-52c4-9efa-f693997f41f1)
CHAPTER 1 (#u9bc064b3-9318-517a-aab6-6be41f1188e2)
CHAPTER 2 (#u1b831e8c-cb22-53bd-9691-08a4f4267350)
CHAPTER 3 (#u59455937-4ae1-547e-b15e-7296a9671635)
CHAPTER 4 (#u820e67eb-3926-502f-9b16-82477da53129)
CHAPTER 5 (#u50db38cf-4e1b-549e-81f0-c3f709c19478)
CHAPTER 6 (#u89245244-88c7-5ba0-8eda-7996911e3ed1)
CHAPTER 7 (#uc9c97da8-fea0-50be-91dd-26c20955bf6a)
CHAPTER 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Tess clutched the bare mattress and gulped a lungful of stale air, her heart jackhammering against her ribs. A nightmare? No—men were shouting, outside. She widened her eyes, then squinted. Open, closed, open, closed, it made no difference. Black was black was black.
She sat up with a lurch and shuffled back against the damp stone wall to at least get a fix on which way was up. Not a sliver of gray slid between the floorboards above. Had to be night. She’d been asleep? For how long? She laid her palm over her face and blinked, the lashes tickling her skin. Definitely open. This wasn’t the kind of nightmare you got to wake from. As further proof, her big toes throbbed in unison where Hamid’s men had ripped out the nails.
A door squealed, and something solid was dragged across the floor overhead. From their nest in the corner of her cell, the mice scratched and squeaked—even they knew something was up. She shakily exhaled. Six days she’d been here, and each night had been heavy with silence until the distant song of a muezzin’s call to prayer. What was different about tonight?
A flashlight beam flickered through the cracks. More voices—instructions, perhaps. A series of clinks, a heavy scrape—they were opening the bunker hatch. Was she to be freed? She swallowed. Or executed?
Fresh air puffed over her face as the hatch lifted. She drew up her knees and hugged them. The flashlight beam tracked around the cell, pausing on a food tray the mice had finished up, and a scattering of empty plastic water bottles. The light flicked to her, scorching her eyes and drilling pain into her brain. She shut them tight and sealed her palms over top. Even then her vision pulsed bloodred.
If they were planning to make another video, or if Hamid was coming to ask again if she was ready for death, the next sound would be the rasp and bump of the rope ladder being lowered. But this early? This felt more like the hour of...
Enough overthinking. She breathed deeply through her mouth—she’d stopped inhaling through her nose days ago, so she couldn’t smell herself rotting.
People had survived years like this. She had to keep believing that the kidnap of a high-profile American TV journalist would prompt a large-scale search, even in East Africa. She had to keep visualizing a company of marines scouring the arid terrain. Or would they be out to get her, too?
Overthinking.
The rasp didn’t come. More scuffles and scrapes. She forced her eyes open. Shadows circled the dirt floor. Above the hatch, figures moved and a man grunted, as if with great effort. Something blocked the square hole, returning the cell to darkness. It wasn’t the hatch cover, so what was—?
The thing dropped. She shrank back as it thudded down a few feet away. A strobe of light flashed on a large curled shape before the hatch thunked shut. Metal scraped on metal—the bolts sliding home. She shivered. Voices and footsteps retreated, a door squealed shut, a key clicked in a lock, leaving the darkness absolute. She let her crown drop back on the cold stone. Not execution, not yet. Maybe they were storing something down here. But at this time of night?
As her shuddering breath subsided and the mice settled, she made out another sound. Air rasping, in and out, in and out. Holy crap. The thing was alive.
“Hello?” Her voice caught. She cleared her throat. “Hello?”
No answer.
She crawled off the mattress and felt her way along the packed dirt. Her right hand hit something warm, covered with smooth fabric. It flinched. Human, at least.
“It’s okay,” she said.
She splayed her fingers. Under the fabric the skin was firm but yielding. A stomach? A groan rose up—a man’s voice. Her left hand touched something hard. Bones—a row of them. He shuddered and arched away. His spine? Which meant her other hand was currently exploring a particularly solid butt. She released her grip.
He muttered something unintelligible. French?
“Are you hurt?” In the cloying silence, the walls whispered back.
A grunt. She’d have to find out for herself. Maybe they’d sedated him with the same drug they’d used on her after they’d dragged her from the Land Rover. She glided her hands over his curved back. No sign of injury—nothing but hard ridges of muscle, under a thick cotton jacket. At his shoulders, her finger caught in a loop. An epaulet. Military? An enemy soldier to Hamid and the al-Thawra network was likely to be an ally to her—and there’d be more where he came from.
Unless his team was dead, as hers might well be. Her cameraman had taken a volley of bullets within seconds of the ambush. Every time she closed her eyes she saw his face—the flicker of disbelief and realization before he slumped, lifeless. Just a young Zimbabwean news junkie who thought working with her would propel him into the big time, and all it got him was... She sucked in air through clenched teeth.
Her translator better still be alive. Last she’d seen him, al-Thawra thugs were dragging him feetfirst along a stony road. He was just an honest, reliable local dad who’d needed the money. Had she been explicit enough about the risk of working for her, about the need for secrecy? He’d been so eager for the job. If she’d got him killed, too...
No. Cling to hope. She’d been the target, not him.
She dipped two fingers under the soldier’s collar and scooped. No dog tag. Thick, corded neck, suede buzz cut. His crown was hot and...sticky. Ugh. She snapped her hand away. Had to be blood. He moaned. A bit of light would be handy—she’d rather not stick her fingers in his brain.
“You’ve got a wound up here. I’m going to check it. Hold still.”
Like he was capable of anything else. She closed her useless eyes and brushed her fingertips over the spot. An inch-long gash gaped over a lump the size of half a tennis ball. Ouch.
“It’s not too bad,” she said. Like she had any idea. “I have a first-aid kit.”
He needed sutures, but alcohol wipes and adhesive strips would have to do. God help him if it got infected down here. He muttered again. She caught a guttural R. Definitely French, maybe from Djibouti—no other army this side of the Congo would speak French. Or L’armée de Terre? But why would a French soldier be out here?
“Is anything else hurting?” Silence. “I’m just going to check.”
She leaned over him, her knees touching his back. Her hair slipped loose. She looped and twisted it into a knot. One benefit of hair that hadn’t seen shampoo in a week—it was greasy enough to tie without a band.
She ran her fingers over his shoulder and a rolled sleeve, down to his right hand. Jesus, the guy had muscles. As she slid her fingertips into his palm, his hand closed. Just a reflex, but she gave in to it, letting the flicker of comfort shoot right up to her chest.
“Merci, madame.”
The deep words came from so low in his throat she could have imagined them—she’d been imagining a lot of crazy things lately. Maybe not a reflex, then? She squeezed back.
“De rien,” she said, her choked R giving away her rusty tourist French. God, was he ever welcome, whoever he was. She shouldn’t be thankful some other luckless schmuck had wound up here.
Reluctantly, she eased her hand from his. He’d be more comfortable on the mattress but first she should make sure moving him wouldn’t worsen any injuries. She patted his stomach, then stroked up. At his chest, hard pecs tightened. Nothing wrong with those reflexes.
His neck and jaw were rough with stubble—almost a beard—rising up to a sharp, smooth cheekbone and speed bumps of tiny wrinkles beside his right eye. His forehead was unlined, though a little rough and peeling. The skin between his eyes was bunched into two crevasses. Was this how blind people built a picture of someone? The bones were in the right places, though the nose felt wonky. He didn’t recoil when she skated her fingertips along it, and there was no open wound. An old break, perhaps.
“Can you roll onto your back?”
He sighed, and seemed to understand, shifting and resettling and—she guessed from the sound of rubbing fabric—straightening his legs. He was moving freely enough. She checked his other arm. A gravelly graze on his elbow but otherwise okay. The fingers of that hand didn’t curl around hers. Which was fine.
She skipped the business part of his trousers—nothing much she could do about that if it wasn’t working, and she already knew there wasn’t a thing wrong with his butt. His legs felt fine. Very fine—powerful thighs slid into long, strong calves. His trousers—combat pants, presumably, given the number of pockets—were tucked into socks. His boots were intact. Best leave them on—in this filth, his feet were better off contained.
“Back in a sec,” she murmured.
She felt her way to the mattress and found her backpack, which had been ransacked for everything but her first-aid kit and a few toiletries. No phone, no laptop, no documents, no notes—little more than Band-Aids, sunscreen and lip gloss. I need you to stay pretty for my videos, Hamid had said, shoving the backpack into Tess’s stomach.
Hamid had stood there, a few feet from where Tess now sat, flicking through her notebook. You’ve been trying to find my base. Congratulations, my friend. You succeeded. If I’d known you were so keen to drop in, I would have invited you much sooner.
How did you find me? Tess had demanded.
The same way I usually find people. The same way I found your whistle-blower, the traitor Latif. Hamid held up Tess’s phone. With the help of America’s very useful National Security Agency. My job is a bit like yours, you know. It’s all about the contacts.
That’s impossible. I was careful. She hadn’t been online in a fortnight. She’d been using burner phones, contacting no one she knew. We were all careful.
Not all, Hamid said. Not all. Your translator texted his wife several times.
Tess’s face went cold, all over again. She removed the first-aid kit from her backpack. She could do nothing for her crew now but she could help this soldier. Returning to him, she coaxed his head onto her lap, cradling his shoulders with her thighs while keeping her bandaged feet clear.
What had this guy done to incur al-Thawra’s wrath? Or was Hamid trying to draw France into their phony conflict?
“I’m going to clean the cut on your head. It might sting a little.”
At his solid weight, a memory flashed up of her final weekend with Kurt, when he’d taken leave and met her in Cairo. Ugh. Turned out even a Medal of Honor didn’t make a man honorable—even if half of America swooned over him. No more military heroes for her.
Next time she’d go for a dependable small-town accountant whose chief attribute was loyalty. Someone who could be relied on to come home after work—alive, and not smelling of another woman. Charm and bravado spelled trouble. She frowned. That was if she got a chance at a next time and didn’t end up in two pieces like the last unfortunate American kidnapped by Hamid.
She ripped open an alcohol wipe and ran it over her hands. Working on feel and guesswork, she smoothed the next few wipes over the lump, wringing out the alcohol so it dripped on the wound. He hissed, his shoulders tensing against her.
That’d have to do—she was low on wipes, and she might need to change the dressing in a day or two, if they both lasted that long. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to send the message to her other senses that they were on their own, as she held the wound closed with one hand and pressed on the suture strips with the other. Several times the strips tangled and she had to start over. She finished by winding a bandage around his head. Better than nothing.
Would twice the people be looking for al-Thawra and their hostages now? Soldiers were full of no-man-left-behind macho crap. At least they’d be a whole lot more enthusiastic about looking for one of their own than for a pain-in-the-ass reporter. More than a few American politicians and military brass would be greatly relieved to pay their respects at Tess’s funeral.
“Done,” she whispered. Now, how the hell would she move him? His head felt heavier, suddenly. “Monsieur?”
He groaned. “Oh.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh.” She heard him swallow, with effort. “Water.”
“Of course. Hang on.” Duh—he was saying “eau,” not “oh.” No kidding he’d be thirsty. The air out here was so dry it felt like you’d swallowed a cup of salt. She eased his head off her lap and crawled to the mattress, waving her arm as if she were divining the water. She knocked over a bottle and caught it before it rolled away.
“Here,” she said, scrambling back. “Can you sit up?”
No answer. Unconscious, again. Crap, how was she going to do this? She heaved him upright, cradling his back against her chest. She sensed his head slumping, and caught him as he tipped sideways. Her foot grazed his thigh, searing pain up her leg. She adjusted under his weight, her arm muscles burning as she guided his head back onto her shoulder. Man, he had to weigh two hundred pounds. Help me out here, buddy.
Grunting with effort, she closed her arms around his torso and twisted the cap off the bottle. It couldn’t be a good idea to pour liquid down his throat. She splashed a little water into her palm and lifted it to where she guessed his mouth was. She got his prickly chin, instead. She tried again, a little higher. When her palm touched his dry lips, she eased the water into his mouth. He moaned and straightened a little, relieving the pressure on her muscles. On her next attempt he darted out his tongue and licked her palm, shooting fissures of awareness up her arm.
Well, if he was strong enough to do that... She brought the neck of the bottle to his lips and raised it. Water trickled down her arm but his throat made swallowing sounds. She flinched as something warm and rough closed over her fingers—his hand, guiding the bottle to a better angle. She couldn’t bring herself to extract her hand. Maybe he was a hallucination—her isolation and fear playing on her subconscious—but whatever he was, whoever he was, calm spread through her for the first time since her translator had slowed for that damn roadblock near Hargeisa. Hell, she’d take any relief she could get.
He released her hand. “Beaut,” he gasped.
Beaut? Was that French? Something about the accent was familiar—something that didn’t fit this picture. When he’d said “water” in English, he hadn’t used the French R. He’d trailed off with no R at all.
“Can’t...see. Eyes...”
Definitely not a French accent. Was he English? But why the French words earlier? A multilingual local? Or maybe his accent was just messed up after too many years away from home, like hers.
“Nothing wrong with your eyes. It’s pitch-black down here—I can’t see anything, either.”
His back collapsed against her chest and she fought to catch him. Conked out again? She laid him down and extracted herself. She found the graze on his elbow and dabbed and dressed it. It couldn’t be healthy to leave him on the dirt—at night the cold seeped up through it. The mattress was filthy and scratchy but it provided a couple of inches of insulation and comfort.
Well, if she couldn’t take him to the mattress... She felt her way across the cell and shoved the squab up against him. Screwing up her face, she rolled him onto it. He shuffled and settled, with a sigh that might have been gratitude. After checking he was lying clear of his wound and breathing okay, she let her shoulders slump. God, it felt good to not be alone. The chances of him being a psycho killer had to be low, right? This compound already contained more than its fair share.
So where would she spend the night? No way was she taking the floor, not when there’d be a little space right in front of him she could just fit into. If he was sedated he was likely to sleep soundly, and she probably wouldn’t sleep at all—she’d dozed off only a few times in the long days and nights she’d been locked up. By the time he returned to his senses in a few hours she’d have disentangled herself. In his current state, he was no threat to her—or anyone else, unfortunately.
After gulping some water, she crept to the top of the mattress and slipped down into his outstretched arms as if sliding into a sleeping bag. One heavy forearm weighed down her waist. She wriggled until his other biceps pillowed her head. Was this a little creepy of her? He’d understand, surely.
Arrested by a thought, she trailed her fingers down his rough, corded left arm and over his knuckles. No ring. Not that that proved anything—plenty of married military guys didn’t wear them, much less abide by them—but at least she might not be taking advantage of another woman’s semiconscious husband. Just a regular semiconscious guy. She curled her legs around his bent ones. He mumbled and pulled her closer, burying his face in her hair and sliding a hand down her outer thigh. Uh-oh—he wasn’t about to have some drug-addled wet dream, was he?
She held her breath but in seconds he relaxed—with her firmly in his grip. And, hell, that felt good. She dared to press her nose to his arm and inhale. Gravelly. Tangy. Real. His sweat probably smelled a damn sight fresher than hers.
Still no dusty beam of gray spilled through the cracks overhead—she couldn’t even see the boards. Dawn had to be hours away. She yawned. If these were the last hours of her life, at least they’d be comfortable ones—even if the relief was stolen from an unwitting stranger.
Don’t you dare die on me, soldier.
* * *
Flynn leaped to his feet, blinking to clear the fuzz from his brain. What the fuck? A dim bunker. No door, no window. Underground? A woman, pushing herself up from a mattress—not naked, at least. Christ, his head thumped like a drum solo. He brought his hand up to it. Bandaged. Not a hangover, then.
“What the fuck?” They were the only words he could get his mouth around. He cleared his throat. It felt stuffed with acacia thorns.
The woman straightened to full height, which wasn’t much, palms upright as if calming a snorting bull. Her face registered somewhere deep in his mind—young, hot, in a pointy-jaw tough-girl way. Even in near darkness her eyes shone blue. Was he delirious?
“You’re okay,” she said.
“This doesn’t look like okay.” Except for her. She was a damn sight more than okay.
She shrugged. “Relatively.”
“What is this?” He swept an arm around, blinking moisture into his eyes. This, meaning: What the hell was this place, what the hell was he doing here and who the hell was she? He patted his pockets. Empty. No holster, no pistol, no knife, no tac vest, no utility belt. No helmet—had he been wearing one?
“You’re Australian?”
“You’re American.” He swore as his brain caught up. “You’re that missing journalist.”
So this was what deep shit looked like. He shut his eyes tight and pinched the top of his nose. The dressing pulled at his scalp. Think. His unit got ambushed, right? The last memory his brain could locate was of running through a village—goats scattering ahead of them, Angelito shouting commands, the thuck-thuck-thuck of enemy fire. They dropped back behind a concrete hut. Levanne went down, in the open. Flynn dashed out to help him. Then, a crunch—hot pain in his skull, bullets zipping around, fabric smothering his face. No, no helmet—just his useless beret. He’d been chucked onto a truck bed or something, fighting to breathe, retching on a chemical smell.
He gagged at the thought. He’d been captured—by al-Thawra, seeing as he was with the reporter. What was her name—Newell, right? Tess Newell. A big deal in the States—her kidnapping had been all over CNN. She didn’t look it now, with blond hair pulled back and dirt smearing her face. Pain twisted behind his eyes. He winced, which made it worse. What’d happened to Angelito and the others? So much for their routine patrol.
“I have painkillers.” She limped past him and unzipped a bag. “Only over-the-counter stuff, but it might take the edge off. Here.”
He took the offered trays and popped out four, for starters. She zipped away her first-aid kit and passed him a fresh water bottle from a plastic-wrapped stash in the corner. He slugged back the pills.
“You fixed me up,” he said, pointing to his head. As she nodded, a memory filtered in. More like a feeling—of relief, of knowing he was looked after, of surrendering the fight to stay awake, to stay alive. Hell, how far had he lowered his guard?
“You know where this place is?” he said. “What this place is?”
“A compound of some sort, somewhere remote.”
He swallowed another mouthful of water. “Narrows it down.” Remote described 95 percent of the Horn of Africa—assuming they were still in Africa. They could have crossed over to the Middle East. Hell, they could be in the Bahamas. “You were sedated when they brought you here?”
“Yes... So you’re Australian?”
“French,” he corrected, automatically.
“You don’t sound French.”
“Eees zees betterrrr, mademoiselle?” Dickhead. Nine years of faking a French accent whenever he spoke English to strangers, and he chooses a hotshot journalist to slip up to? “I was taught English by an Australian. It comes out in the accent sometimes.” Not a lie. He’d learned English from a whole town of Australians—the shit heap where he’d grown up.
“Wow, that’s a strong influence. So you’re—what?—French Army?”
He patted the Tricolore on his left arm. She squinted, her gaze drifting up to the legion patch. With luck she wouldn’t know what it meant.
“‘Légion Étrangère,’” she read awkwardly. “You’re Foreign Legion.”
Bloody hell.
“But aren’t their soldiers foreign—hence the name?”
“Not all,” he said quickly. Several Frenchmen in his company had masqueraded as Canadians or Belgians to get a new identity, but he wasn’t about to tell a journalist that. “Anyway, I’m a lieutenant—officers are drawn from regular army.” Usually. They’d made an exception for him and Angelito. He went to shove his fingers through his hair, but hit the bandage and stopped, clenching his teeth. “Too many questions, lady. What is this—60 Minutes?”
She started. “Sorry—habit.” Her tone softened. “I’ve had a while longer to get my head around this.”
And there was that feeling again. It was her voice—quiet and husky. That voice had filtered through the haze last night like some angel’s prayer. At his fuzziest he’d wondered how a reprobate like him had made the cut for heaven. Lucky he hadn’t been able to see her—he’d have immediately sold his soul to the nearest deity, even if her clothes looked like they’d been washed in mud. The stench of mouse piss should have been a giveaway that this was nowhere close to heaven.
He checked his watch. Nearly 0800. Late. Angelito would be going apeshit—if he was alive. He’d better bloody be alive. Tu n’abandonnes jamais ni tes morts, ni tes blessés. You never abandon your dead, your wounded. Angelito would have risked everything to save Flynn—they all would have.
She tilted her head. “Have we met? There’s something about you...”
No. Anything but that. “Believe me, I’d remember. I just have one of those faces, that’s all...” Deflect, soldier. “Have they hurt you?” No obvious injuries, but he couldn’t see jack in this hole.
“Nothing too bad. Hamid wants me looking pretty for the execution.”
“Son of a bitch—Hamid Nabil Hassan is here, in person?” Shit was getting worse. The man at the top of every terrorist watch list, here. “Is this al-Thawra’s headquarters? What country are we even in?” Think. His brain clunked over. “Intel has you being held in Somalia.”
“I wouldn’t trust it. But that’s possible.”
Something clattered—a key in a lock—and a door squealed. Footsteps thumped above. Metal clunked. She grabbed his wrist with a cold hand and pulled him clear of a square hatch cut into the boards overhead, a few inches above his six-three height. Lucky he hadn’t smacked his head on the roof when he’d leaped off the bed. Bed. Hell. Somehow he’d wound up curled up in bed with the Tess Newell—spooning the Tess Newell.
Above them men spoke—and a woman. He caught a breathy “eshi”—okay, in Amharic. So maybe this was Ethiopia? “It’s Hamid,” Tess hissed.
Flynn pulled her behind his back. She was half the size she looked on TV—he could hide two of her.
The hatch shifted, releasing square-cut blades of light. Someone grunted, and it lifted. They were in a dugout under a concrete-block building, by the look of it. An M16 barrel poked into the hole. “Do not move, soldier,” said a thickly accented voice. A rope ladder dropped down.
As the rifle eyed Flynn, two men in camo gear jumped through the hole, landing with knees bent and barrels aimed. One looked Middle Eastern, maybe Ethiopian. The other was darker skinned and taller—Somali? They fanned out as a figure descended the ladder, his shape masked by a robe. Tess sucked in a breath and stepped out from behind Flynn, drawing away one of the rifle barrels. Her face was set in the don’t-feed-me-bullshit expression he knew from TV. A mask, probably, but bravery usually was. If you weren’t scared shitless in a situation like this, you were a fool.
The robed man touched the floor, spun and pushed back his hood. Her hood. Holy shit. A column of dusty light revealed a woman—witch-thin and only a few inches shorter than Flynn. She was backlit, so he couldn’t get a fix on her face. Nothing in the intel had suggested a woman was high up in al-Thawra.
“Bonjour, soldat,” she said, stepping forward. “J’espère que tu as bien dormi?” She arched thin eyebrows toward Tess. She wasn’t a native French speaker but he couldn’t pick the accent. She was maybe fifty, tanned, a pale blue scarf tied around her hair. In France you’d call her une femme d’un certain âge. In Australia a MILF. Not what he’d expected.
“With the drugs you lot gave me, I didn’t have a choice but to sleep well.” He answered in English, for Tess’s benefit, with his adopted singsong Corsican accent. Tess would wonder what’d happened to his Australian twang, but she’d become threat number two. Until he figured out how much the terrorists knew about him, he was safer playing to expectation. “Who are you?”
The woman raked her gaze up his body as if checking out livestock. As she reached his face, her kohl-rimmed brown eyes lit with a challenge. “I am the one you know as Hamid Nabil Hassan. The most wanted man in the world.”
CHAPTER 2 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Flynn ground his heels into the dirt. This was the man America had been hunting since the Los Angeles terror attacks? “You don’t look like a Hamid.”
She laughed, the sound dull and harsh in the thick air. “You don’t think a woman can be a powerful adversary?”
Oh, he knew all about how dangerous women were. “You’re American?” Bloody hell, their intelligence really...wasn’t. “You’re supposed to be Somali. And a man.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “In the twenty-first century we no longer need to be defined by lines on a map or the accident of our birth. I am a person of the world, as you are. I am defined by the things I can control, not those I can’t. Gender, age, lineage, provenance—these are outdated concepts.”
“You forgot to mention religion,” said Tess, sounding like she was clenching her teeth.
“Oh no,” the woman—Hamid—said, her heavy eyes drifting to the bearded soldier next to her. “Religion can still be very useful.”
She and Tess looked like they were about to shoot lasers out of their eyes at each other.
“Why am I here?” Flynn said.
Hamid didn’t take her eyes off Tess. “Because my captive here was lonely and I like to play matchmaker. She’s pretty, don’t you think? You are well suited.”
“My government will not pay a ransom for a lowly soldier.”
Hamid tilted her head, assessing him again. “I would pay a good deal of money for a man like you. But, yes, I’m counting on that.”
He fisted his hands against his thighs. “Then why?” Like he didn’t know what was about to happen.
“I requested a pretty French soldier and my men did not disappoint.”
She stepped forward, lifting her hand to the square patch sewn on the chest of his jacket and tracing her fingertips over its twin stripes. “And an officer. Even better.” She glanced at Tess. “The French lieutenant’s woman—it has a certain allure, right?” She hooked a finger under the thin red foulard looped around his shoulder and tugged it. “And what does this mean? This scarf?”
“It means it’s dusty out there.” He resisted the urge to swallow. If she didn’t know he was legion, she’d figure it out when she saw his patch. Once she knew how expendable he was to France he’d be worth less. And it wasn’t like Australia would give a damn.
Her fingers grazed his cheek. One movement and he could have his hands around the throat of the psycho who’d ordered the deaths of thousands of civilians.
“Yes. My men chose well. The world will be twice as incensed by the brutal execution of two beautiful people as they would by the deaths of regular people. Unfair, yes? You will look handsome indeed on television, next to your new friend. I think we will kill you first and make her watch. Maybe she will cry for you—people love that kind of thing.” She flipped her hand and slid the backs of her fingers down to his jaw, lowering her voice. “Did you make the first move last night, or did she? And was it as good as I was imagining?”
“You are Hamid?”
“It depends who’s asking, and what story fits your worldview.” She spoke just above a whisper. “To the Western world, yes, I am that shadow from their worst nightmares, the one who could invade their comfortable lives and blow them up any second.” She clicked her fingers, right next to his ear, the snap echoing off the walls. “Your supermarket, your cinema, your school. I can be anywhere, take any form. A former soldier driven mad by war. A frustrated immigrant whose dream of a new life never came true.” She rested her palm on his chest, her breath smelling of coffee and toothpaste. “If you are poor and powerless and from this side of the world, I am a rallying call, a raison d’être in an otherwise disenfranchised life. No, not a raison d’être. A reason for dying.” She smiled.
He made a point of eyeballing her. “You expect me to believe that a mob of jihadists would take orders from an American woman?”
She trailed her hand across to his shoulder, sliding a sideways look at the goon next to her. “You mean these people?” Her lashes were so thick with mascara he was surprised she could keep her eyes open. “Oh, they think I am Hamid’s jihadi bride, and if they play nice little jihadists I will introduce them to the oracle. I make them call me Mrs. Hamid. You see? Different things to different people. I am whatever you want me to be.” She stroked one side of his neck. “And what would you like me to be, Lieutenant?”
He swallowed, drawing her focus to his throat. She laughed. “I make you nervous. Don’t worry. I make everyone nervous.”
Flynn’s gaze flicked to the nearest weapon. If he tried to strangle “Hamid” he’d be dead before her heart stopped and she’d be revivable. Breaking her neck would be quicker and more permanent. He unclenched and clenched his fists. Taking out a mass murderer would be a fitting end to his life—and better to die with his secrets safe than have his face broadcast in one of al-Thawra’s snuff videos.
“But why are you telling me all this?” He made his words come out slow and halting, like he was settling into a long speech. “Aren’t you worried that—?”
He sprang to her midsentence, spun her and caught her in a headlock with his left arm. Shouts bounced around. One chance. As his right hand gripped her jaw and yanked sideways, pain slammed into his skull. The room twisted. His crown exploded with heat.
A force grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him backward, as Hamid scrambled away—gasping but alive, fuck it. The silhouette of a sidearm rose above him. The pricks had pistol-whipped his wound. He bit down on his cheeks, internalizing the pain pinballing through his head.
A female soldier leaped down in front of him, a reinforcement from above. Flynn pulled at his captor—captors, now, one pinning each shoulder. They bore down as he dragged them across the dirt toward Hamid. He tossed forward to flip them but the reinforcement launched a boot to his gut. His breath yelped out.
“Don’t touch his face,” spit Hamid as she repositioned her scarf and hood. “The rest of him is yours.”
The woman pulled out a cable tie and sprang round back of Flynn as the other goons pinned him. It clicked as it tightened around his wrists. Warm liquid dribbled down his forehead and into his eye. Blood. He blinked to clear it but a filmy smear remained, coloring the room red.
Damn sedative must have slowed him. No point fighting now. Better to concede and hope they didn’t take it out on the journalist. Light flashed in his face. A phone camera. Taking his picture for their press release? His vision swam in blues and reds.
At least with a dirty face, a bandaged head, an eye socket running with blood and a scruffy half beard he’d be unrecognizable from the teenager Australia remembered. A soldier shoved him to the floor face-first. Something smashed into his lower back. A knee? He inhaled through the pain. In his peripheral vision, the woman stepped back and leveled her rifle. One chance and he’d screwed it up.
“We’ll take a more attractive photo once we get you cleaned up,” said Hamid, her voice ironed smooth. “Maybe I’ll shave you myself. And now, my other pretty one, you must write a note for me.”
With his cheek rammed into the dirt, Flynn watched Hamid tower over Tess. Tess lifted her gaze, defiant, her fists clutching her cargoes. Hamid snapped a command—in Amharic?—and something small pelted through the hole. A soldier passed it to Hamid. Baby wipes.
“Clean your hands first,” hissed Hamid, handing them to Tess. “You’re filthy and I don’t want the paper smudged.”
“A note?” said Tess, with a hint of challenge.
“To your producer. You will write exactly what I tell you.” Hamid’s robe swished as she lifted something from it. “Use this.”
“My notebook.” Tess said it like an accusation.
“Date it a week ago, exactly. Write, ‘Quan. There’s nothing in the story linking al-Thawra with Denniston Corporation. Hyland’s clean.’”
Tess scoffed, a tick from the back of her throat. “Let me guess. Quan will receive this after my death?”
“Write it or I’ll remove your hand and write it for you. And no tricks—I know your handwriting.”
Shaking her head, Tess pulled a pen out of the notebook’s spiral top and began writing.
“Good,” said Hamid, peering over her shoulder. “Now add, ‘I can’t trust using a phone, so I’m posting you this.’”
The pen rolled over the pad.
“Sign it with ‘Ciao’ and two small Xs. And now a T, with a full stop.”
Tess looked up, her forehead creased. “You’ve been reading my emails.”
“Do it.”
Biting her bottom lip, Tess returned to the note. When she was finished, Hamid snatched it, smiled and stomped on Tess’s right foot. Tess yelped. The pen skidded onto the dirt by Flynn’s nose. Hamid ground in her heel a couple of seconds before releasing. Tess crumpled to her knees, air scraping into her lungs. Jesus. Flynn bucked against his guards but all it got him was a smack on the head.
Hamid stepped back, sniffing. “Oh, and thanks to the information on your laptop, I’ve discovered the identity of your other whistle-blower. She will soon meet the same fate as the first. Nice and tidy.”
A cry squeaked out of Tess.
“It’s over.”
“Never,” Tess breathed, raising her chin. “If I found out the truth about al-Thawra, someone else will, too. They’ll take you down, along with Denniston and Senator Hyland.”
Wait—Senator Hyland? He was in on this? Shit, Flynn was even more dead.
“No. You have kindly revealed a crack in this organization and I am fixing it. I am going through your so-called evidence piece by piece to ensure there will be no more lapses.”
Tess pushed to her feet with a slight grunt. “You can’t win this.”
“I already have and your death will seal it. In a matter of days, the US and its allies will announce war on Somalia. Very soon, the senator will be president.”
“With you behind the scenes doing his dirty work.” If Tess was scared, she hid it well. Wrap it up, sunshine. This ain’t comfortable.
“You say that as if you think it is he who is in charge of me,” Hamid said, brushing a streak of dirt from her robe.
“He’s got you believing you hold the power here? You know that sucking people in and spitting them out is what he does best? You’re his pawn, as much as these people.”
“Oh, I am looking forward to the hour I get to spit you out.”
A swishing noise. Hamid was climbing the ladder. The pressure on Flynn’s lower back released. More scrambling marked one soldier’s departure, followed by another. The one remaining guy rubbed Flynn’s face in the dirt and let go.
Flynn inhaled dust, pain stabbing his chest. A cracked rib? The hatch clonked shut, sucking up the beam of light.
“I have nail scissors,” Tess said weakly, nodding to his bound hands. “You took me by surprise with that move on Hamid. I should have done something, tried to grab a gun, or...”
“You couldn’t have done anything. And for future reference, don’t try. I can look out for myself. You should, too.”
In a minute she’d snipped off the ties. He rolled onto his back with a groan and pressed his fingers into his ribs.
“It was worth a shot,” she said. “Broken?”
“Don’t think so.” Hope not. He hoisted himself onto his elbows, suppressing a wince, and wiped his eye clear with his jacket sleeve. “Your foot...”
Tess swept her leg around in front of her. Even in the gray light a scarlet bloodstain stood out, spreading over the toe of her sock, following the path of a darker stain like fresh lava over old. The sock was stuffed with something—a bandage?
“They ripped out your toenails.” The pricks. As torture went, it was old-fashioned but painful as hell, by all accounts. At least nails grew back—given the chance. “What did they torture you for?”
“A dossier of the evidence I have on them—they wanted to know whether there were copies and where they were.”
“Did you tell them?”
“Everything.” Her answer was strangely short.
“There’s some shit going down here, isn’t there?”
“Oh yeah.”
He caught her other leg and trailed his hand down to the foot. More blood, but dry. She pulled both feet away.
“Hamid’s a psychopath, in case you hadn’t worked that out,” she said.
“Hamid’s a woman.”
“You noticed. I’d better take a look at your head—I might have to close the wound again.”
“And an American. What’s with that?”
She pushed to her feet and unrolled his bandage. “Yep. Born and raised in Chicago. Ex-marines, ex-CIA. Her real name is Sara Hawthorn.”
“Sara. The most wanted man in the world is a hot Chicago cougar called Sara.”
“Hey, if she’s your type, you have problems.”
“A woman heading a jihad?”
“Al-Thawra is no jihadist group, despite what their thugs believe.”
“Really? They kind of give it away with all the ‘death to the infidels’ shit.”
“That’s what Hamid—Sara—wants people in the West to believe,” she said, her voice cut with bitterness. “Hell, it’s what we’re quick to believe, isn’t it? That we’re under attack from whacked-out extremists from the other side of the world? It’s harder to understand if the cracks are in your own country.”
“Now you’re sounding like her.”
Featherlight fingers drew through his scalp. He bit down on his cheeks.
“This doesn’t look too bad—the strips have held.” She knelt in front of him, her knees and legs splayed awkwardly. To protect her toes? With a finger under his chin, she raised his head so his eyes were level with her chest. What could he do but explore the hint of cleavage diving into her T-shirt? Sure, he could shut his eyes, but he was no monk, and hey, this could be his last happy moment.
He inhaled. Earthy and musky. He shouldn’t find that sexy, but...damn. He’d never been into women who reeked of perfume—or worse, tasted of it.
Crap, she was talking. Mind out of the cleavage, mate.
“...goons are mostly Muslim, answering the call to jihad, but they’re being fooled as much as anyone. It’s all a cover.” She bent slightly to get something from her bag, bringing her cleavage within millimeters of his nose.
Focus. “A cover for what?”
She snipped something—surgical tape?—and pressed it on his wound, shooting sparks through his skull. He forced himself to imagine what was under that T-shirt, seeing as he didn’t have a real anesthetic...
Man, he was screwed up.
Like he didn’t already know that.
“Long story.” She wound the bandage on, sat on the mattress and removed a wipe from the packet Hamid had left. She ran it across her forehead, leaving a pale streak.
“So you said. We have time.”
She scrubbed her cheeks like she wanted to erase them. “God, I hope you’re right.”
She studied the wipe, now the same dusty gray as the floor. How long had she been here—a week? In solitary, under threat of death, with a couple of rounds of interrogation and torture. Enough to send a commando berko but she seemed calm. Tougher than she looked, maybe. Or just good at hiding the damage.
Dirt—technically mud, now—was swirled over her face, mixed with scoured pink streaks. He itched to lean over and finish the job, so he could stare at something beautiful for a minute. He hadn’t seen much of that in a long time.
Not that he was about to hit on Tess Newell. Hell, no. Journalists cared about headlines, not people, no matter how much they pretended otherwise. He wouldn’t fall into that trap again, just in case these weren’t his last days.
“Hold still.” She leaned forward and smoothed a clean wipe over his forehead and around his eye. “So,” she said, sitting back and hugging her knees. “Interesting times to be a soldier. Where have you served?”
Changing the subject? “Classified.”
She sighed. “And here’s me thinking it might be nice to have someone to talk to.”
You want polite conversation, you got the wrong cell mate. He dragged his sorry arse along the floor and sat on the mattress cross-legged, a hair short of touching her. So the warm, pliant body he’d woken up pressed against was hers. He’d thought it was a soldier from his commando unit. Pity he hadn’t figured out the truth before he’d panicked and leaped up—or maybe just as well.
Ah, crap, her guilt trip was working—she looked genuinely bummed by his brush-off. He could give the woman some company without going into details. “You don’t last long in this business without seeing a bit of action. I’ve served in a lot of places. Too many. One dusty, pointless conflict after another.”
“What had you expected?”
He shrugged, shamelessly watching as she drew out another wipe and attacked a cheek. At least talking gave him an excuse to stare. “I didn’t get into it to be noble, if that’s what you mean.” Even at twenty, when he’d signed up, he hadn’t been naive enough to think it was all exercises and hard drinking—though that would’ve suited him fine. But he hadn’t counted on seeing so much death and misery in so many places. Like he hadn’t lived through enough of that growing up. He scratched his elbow and found a Band-Aid on it. Did she do that last night, too?
She closed her eyes and ran the wipe over them. It felt weirdly intimate, watching a woman clean her face—the kind of thing you only usually saw if you were screwing her. And this was not a woman he’d be screwing.
“Why did you get into it?” she said.
Deflect attention, a-sap. “You said al-Thawra’s a cover—for what?”
“You tell me. Who benefits from those conflicts you’ve been sucked into?”
“No one,” he spit out. Pain stabbed his torso, where that bitch had kicked him.
“Really?”
“No one I’ve seen,” he gasped, clutching his side.
“Maybe I should take a look at your ches—I mean check your ribs.”
He held up a palm. If he could survive broken ribs without medical help as a kid, he could survive them now. Anyway, if his ribs were cracked, a Band-Aid and nail scissors wouldn’t do shit. And the last thing he needed was those pretty fingers skating all over his chest. “Just bruised.”
A pause. “But someone benefits, right?”
“From war? Yeah, journalists.”
“You think?”
He shuffled back to rest against the cool stone wall, buying himself a few inches of space. “Gives you a job, doesn’t it?”
“I could say the same about you.”
“I’m guessing your job pays better than mine.”
“But there are easier and safer ways for both of us to make a living, right?” She stretched her legs out, angling them awkwardly to avoid his. “If the US and its allies invade Somalia tomorrow, to crush the supposed threat from al-Thawra, who benefits?”
“Supposed threat? That’s a whacked comment coming from a woman sitting on jihadist death row—or whatever kind of death row you think this is. Who benefits? How about the people who don’t get blown up in the next terrorist attack?”
“Oh, come on—you don’t believe the PR about war making us safer?”
“Ah, crap, really? I’m stuck in a hole in I-don’t-know-the-hell-where, about to have my head sliced off, having some philosophical debate with...” With a woman who was getting more attractive—and formidable—by the second. He swallowed. “With some lefto greenie...tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy-theory crusader.”
“Power and money, right?” She bulldozed on, but with a hint of a smile. “That’s what it’s about—what it’s always about.”
“Not from where I’m looking. You missed survival and the fact that some of us actually like defending innocent people.” God, now he sounded like he was on 60 Minutes, or whatever self-righteous program she worked for.
“Yeah, but you’re looking at the foot soldiers, right? And the victims—the poor people just trying to keep their goats and children alive. Who benefits from a war in Somalia?”
“Ah. That would be no one.”
“No one in Somalia, sure. But how about in America? In the UK, in France, in Australia, in every other country al-Thawra’s trying to provoke?”
“Sunshine, my brain’s too fuzzy to decode your conspiracy theory. And I’m guessing you’ve had no one to lecture for an entire week, so how about you lay it all out for me?” At least she wasn’t interrogating him about his yo-yoing Australian-French accent.
She smiled again, the pale light catching her eyes. He could get used to looking at a face like that. Pity he wouldn’t get a chance. “What about the good old-fashioned war profiteers? In the Civil War they were the carpetbaggers. In World War II, the industrialists. Now they’re the contractors and suppliers.”
“Bloody hell, I’m gonna need more painkillers—you’re saying al-Thawra’s a military contractor?”
“Not directly, but I have—I had—a paper trail proving that al-Thawra is controlled by the biggest military contractor and supplier in the world—Denniston Corp.”
“Seriously?” Half the legion’s supplies were stamped with that logo. “Okay, that could be interesting, if it’s true.”
“Oh, it’s true. It was the story I was chasing before I was captured. Denniston’s about to go bankrupt, and when they do, a whole lot of dirt will wash up. Not just the ties to al-Thawra, but money laundering, terrorist links, political corruption... Kickbacks have been bouncing around the world for years, and a lot of people have got very rich and very powerful—senators, members of Congress, business leaders, at least one prime minister. Jail terms all round.”
“Wasn’t Denniston the company set up by—”
“Senator Hyland, yes. When he left the marines, that’s where he made his money. Officially he’s sold out of it, but unofficially he still calls the shots—in Denniston and al-Thawra.”
“Isn’t he the guy running for—”
“President. Yep. If Denniston goes bust, he loses everything—including his liberty. The one thing that’ll save them is a lucrative multigovernment contract, and soon.”
Whoa. It was like having his own live news service. “And they’ll get this contract if there’s another war?”
“Bingo. Things aren’t profitable right now, with troops withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the US and its allies wary about getting mired in another conflict. So Denniston and Hyland and his buddy Sara invented al-Thawra and Hamid, and she masterminded the LA attacks—using foot soldiers who genuinely thought they were martyring themselves in a jihad—and made it look like Somalia was sheltering the terrorists. This invasion would not only get Hyland out of the crap—it’d make him look good.”
“The presidential candidate was behind an attack on his own country? Bullshit.”
“You think al-Thawra kidnapped me just because of my profile?”
“Hey, I was kidnapped and I don’t know about any of this.”
“I’d just verified enough evidence to run with the story and, bam.” She gestured at the room.
Okay, the fact she was in an al-Thawra dungeon might back up her story. “Does anyone else know?”
“My producer knew I was chasing the story, and my crew, but I had to keep it contained—many people would do anything to prevent this getting out, or find a way to discredit it.” She chewed the corner of a fingernail. “I don’t know what happened to my translator—we were separated when al-Thawra sprang. The cameraman was killed.”
“The translator—Somali guy?”
“Do you know what happened to him?”
The woman was in her last days—did she need the details?
She swore, and rubbed her eyes with the fingers of one hand. “Oh God. Really?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I could see it in your face. Dead?”
Very. “Afraid so.”
She tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling, her shiny eyes reflecting the light. His gut twisted—he knew the pain and guilt of losing buddies. Hell, he might have just lost all the friends he had.
“So all this stuff about them kidnapping you because you offended Islam...?”
“As you so eloquently put it? ‘Bullshit.’” She lowered her head and stared at a stain on the mattress. “Hamid will play the publicity for all it’s worth, then kill me, live—so to speak. She’ll want to generate more anger in the States, so Hyland can stir up the political will to get over the line in Somalia.” She lifted her gaze. Strength had returned to her eyes, cut in with new anger. “She’s also eager to pull France into her game. Your execu—your capture could tip them.”
Subtle she wasn’t. “Hamid will assume you’ve told me all this, that I know her secret.”
She winced.
“Guess I was dead anyway,” he said.
“Didn’t want to say it.”
A clink and a squeal—the door upstairs. Footsteps crossed the floor above. Dirt drifted down between the boards, lit by slits of weak light. One soldier, by the sound of it.
“I’m just pissed I’m going to die before I get this story out,” she added.
A grin tugged at his mouth. Smart, gutsy and hot. If he could have chosen one person to share his last days, it might well have been someone like her. As the room lightened she was looking paler and more fragile—but there was fire in her, for sure. He twitched with competing urges—to fold her into him and hide her from all this, and to tease that flame out of her in a far less honorable way. He stayed rigidly still.
Above, one bolt shot across, then another. She gripped the mattress, knuckles blanching.
“Tess, look...” he whispered, ignoring the burn in his ribs as he leaned closer. He stopped short of making it Tess Newell, as he’d heard hundreds of times on TV. Tess seemed incomplete. “Them kidnapping me buys you more time. Sounds like they plan to kill us together, and if your theory is true—”
“It is true.”
“—they’ll want to drum up anger about me in France first, right? That’s got to give us a few days.”
“You’re a real comfort,” she said flatly, but her knuckles returned to a normal color.
“I’ll find us a way out of this.”
She smiled, sadly—acknowledging his attempt at solace even if she didn’t believe it. Well, damn, he’d just have to prove her wrong.
The hatch yawned open. He tensed. Or he could be wrong about the whole time thing. One burst of fire down that hole...
A rope lowered, from the hands of a woman in gray camo gear and a hijab. Flynn shuffled in front of Tess but she exhaled, pushed to her feet and hobbled past him.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Trust me, we want to cooperate with this.” She grabbed a yellow bucket from the corner of the room and hooked it up.
“That what I think it is?”
“Hey, at least they change it twice a day. Otherwise I guess the smell would float up.”
“Real hospitable.”
The bucket rose and disappeared. Something fell. Before he could warn Tess, it clonked her on the head. Another bucket. Clean, at least.
“You okay?”
“Peachy,” she said, rubbing her head. She ducked as a brown plastic packet thunked onto the dirt, then another. She threw one to Flynn.
“An MRE?” he said.
The hatch dropped and was bolted.
“The finest field rations Denniston produces. They earn a dollar in profit from every meal, and they supply dozens of forces around the world—sometimes both sides in a conflict. And that’s only one of their contracts. They might not be making the bombs but they’re sure making the money—or they were. Most countries have a stockpile of these things now, so they’re not renewing their contracts.”
He ripped open the plastic, went straight for a brownie and bit in. Scam or not, he was as hungry as a wolf. She sat on the mattress and hugged her knees again, pulling her socks away from her toes. He got the idea she’d spent a lot of the week sitting like that. It’d sure suck to be alone down here. Hell, it sucked anyway, but it sucked a little less with her next to him.
“You not eating?” he mumbled.
“Later. Hard to drum up an appetite for something with a shelf life of three years.”
“Takes that long to go through your system.”
“I don’t want to know about your system.”
There was that unexpected smile again. He’d have to watch that smile—better yet, not watch it. He studied the packet, speaking through a mouthful of brownie. “This one expired two years ago.” He shoved the last of it in his mouth.
“So now you’re speaking with a French accent.”
“Am I?” he said, trying to sound offhand as he fished out a packet of crackers. “I don’t speak English much, so I’m all over the place.” That was true enough. French had become his official first language when he’d signed his life to the legion nearly a decade ago. The less of his old identity that remained, the better.
He felt her gaze as he crunched, the sound bouncing off the walls like shrapnel. He glugged from his water bottle.
“What are you hiding?” she said.
He choked, and the water splattered his jacket. “What?”
“I once did a story on the legion. It’s not a career path for well-adjusted kids from good families. They say everyone’s hiding or running—or both. So what’s your story?”
“No story. I wanted adventure.”
“Come on—we could be dead by dawn.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“I’m not taking notes. You could at least be civil—this could be the last conversation of your life. Between you and me, what are you hiding?”
Between him and her and her audience of millions? “Maybe I’m just an idealist.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Uh-huh.”
“What you said, about escaping—maybe it’s true of some of the foreigners. But for French officers it can be a quicker trip through the ranks, if you’re prepared to put up with a platoon of lunatics.” Again, not exactly a lie.
“And are they—lunatics?”
“Non,” he said. Watch yourself. “Most just need a job. Others want to earn a European passport. Sure, some are running, but they’re not serial killers.” He gulped. The words had slipped out. Dumbass. “They’re more likely to be escaping bitter ex-wives.”
“Ah. And do you have one of those?”
“No, thank God.”
“Where are you from?”
“I told you—France,” he said, too quickly.
“You already said that. I meant, where in France?”
Damn. “Corsica, where my regiment is based.”
“Corsica, huh? That’s the...parachute regiment.”
Mate, she sure paid attention. Proceed with caution, soldier. “Oui, le 2E Régiment étranger de parachutistes.”
“The elite force—paratroopers, commandos.”
He shrugged. “My parachute training is about as useful down here as your notebook.”
“Do you spend much time at the French base at Djibouti—Monclar?”
“When I’m in town.”
“Maybe that’s why you look familiar—maybe I saw you there, when I was researching my legion piece. I watched a few training sessions.”
Yeah, that wasn’t why. “That’s it, then.” Let it go, lady. He scanned the ceiling. Enough chitchat. “Is that the routine here—bucket goes up, food comes down?”
“Twice a day—morning and evening.”
He stood, and ran his hand over the wooden planks that marked the ceiling, ignoring the sting in his ribs and his throbbing head. At one point the gap was wide enough for a few fingers. He scanned the ceiling, then the hatch, then the room.
“Looking for something?” she said.
“Hooks, nails, staples, bolts. Anything that could attach to the wood up here.”
“It’s all rocks and dirt. You have an idea?”
“I’ll tell you if it works. What’s above us?”
“Some storage bunker, I think.”
“Empty?”
“Mostly.”
“Number of guards?”
“They come and go, usually in pairs. They might beef up patrols now—I don’t think I was much of a threat.”
You are to me, sunshine. “When they bring the evening rations and do the bucket thing, does one person do it, like then?”
Her gaze shot to a corner of the room, thinking. “Yeah.”
“Is it light or dark outside?”
“Dark—right after sunset, I think. They don’t seem to have electricity in this building—this is as floodlit as it gets.”
That presented possibilities. Maybe if he could create some leverage... “Give me a look at your bag.”
She chucked it over. “You planning to bust us out with tweezers and diarrhea pills?”
“Beats waiting for the execution.”
CHAPTER 3 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Tess watched the soldier palpate gaps in the ceiling. His brain better be as honed as his body, because she sure wasn’t seeing a way out.
Damn straight he was a pretty boy—or would have been, once. Caramel-colored hair blended with his tan, and his grim expression made his cheekbones look sculpted, his defined lips determined and his jaw even squarer. His narrowed eyes were pale—blue or maybe green. And still his face nagged at her memory, like meeting a guy you hadn’t seen since junior high and searching his features for the boy you remembered.
But the stubble, the crooked nose, the lines dug out between his eyes, the sun-worn skin... He was rough and a little frayed, too. And there’d been nothing delicate about the solid body pressed against hers last night. Just the thought... Whoa.
Hell, she didn’t even know the name of the guy who’d lulled her into her first proper, blessed sleep in nearly a week. Evidently it’d once been stenciled on his chest pocket but only a few faded strokes remained. An F? Or an E?
“What’s your name, soldier?”
A pause. “Flynn.”
“That doesn’t sound very French.”
He tugged at a board, acting like he hadn’t heard. It shifted, and dirt showered him. He was hiding something, for sure. Debts? Petty crimes? Recruits to the legion could change their names—was it the same for native officers, if he even was French? His French accent sounded kosher but she’d have sworn his Australian accent was authentic, too. Beaut, he’d said last night. Did anyone but Australians say that? Wouldn’t his native language be more likely to slip out in a drugged daze? And he’d said bloody hell—the French didn’t say that. Any minute, the neurons would connect, telling her where she knew him from. Something told her it wasn’t her visit to the French base—it went further into the past, to somewhere unexpected, somewhere dark. Damn, that was annoying. When she’d taken her first good look at his face, a frisson of danger had crawled up her spine—her subconscious issuing a warning? Why?
“Flynn who?”
“Does it matter?” His gaze was locked on the ceiling.
Well, hey, if he was a mystery, he was a welcome one. She froze. Unless he’d been planted down here to extract information. Crap. Al-Thawra had a rainbow of nationalities. Was he pretending to be a French soldier to earn her trust? That could explain the erratic accent and her usually reliable instinct pricking up.
Maybe Hamid was still trying to figure out if Tess had a copy of her dossier—using a carrot this time, rather than a pair of pliers? Tess chewed her lip. She’d know from the emails, as carefully worded as they were, that Tess hadn’t had a chance to get the evidence to Quan in Addis Ababa, and she hadn’t risked storing it online. Thank God caution had stopped her short of mentioning the backup of the dossier to Flynn—if that was his name. Could he be here to stage a bust-out so she’d lead him to it?
No. She was going loco. Too much time alone, locked in her head. If he got her above ground, at least she’d have options. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to do what she did best—prod him for information, push him a little, see if he slipped up. A wee game. Hey, she didn’t have anything else to do.
“Do you have a big family in Corsica?” she said.
He stiffened. “No.”
She waited, but he offered nothing more. Could be a good sign. In her vast experience with liars, they usually spoke too much, not too little.
“Did you grow up there?”
“Does it matter?”
“Just making conversation.”
“How about we focus on the task at hand? You’ll have the rest of your long life to make meaningless small talk.”
“Humor me. I’ve had no one to talk to for six days—and days last a mighty long time down here.”
“Fine. You want to talk, let’s talk about you. Where are you from?” He didn’t even pretend a genuine interest. Though if his French accent was faked, too, why did his words roll over her skin like velvet?
“The States,” she said, with a sly smile.
“Well, yeah. I meant...” He met her eye, then looked away. She detected a faint curse—called out on his own caginess. He crouched beside a wall and began examining it. “You know what I meant.”
Ah, what the heck. It was all on the internet. “I’m based in New York when I’m in the States, which isn’t often.”
“Where are you mostly?”
“I live in Addis Ababa, not that I’m there often, either. I cover Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan, South Sudan... So I’m mostly on the road.”
He was silent a few seconds, regarding her with raised eyebrows. “Wow, you didn’t land the cushy job. Did you piss off your bosses?”
She laughed. “I begged to be posted here.”
“What are you running away from?”
“Nothing. I like it here.”
He returned focus to the wall. “Where did you grow up?”
“Fort Bragg, mostly, though we moved around.”
“The army base?”
“That’s the one. My mom and brothers are still headquartered there.” She swallowed. And her mom had just become an al-Thawra target, too. Your other whistle-blower will soon meet the same fate as the first. Nice and tidy. Was Hamid bluffing? Tess could only hope Lieutenant Colonel Newell was one step ahead of Hamid—it was her job to know what people were thinking before they thought it, to outmaneuver them before they took a step. Which had sucked when Tess was a teenager, but now...
“You’re an army brat.” He ran his hands down the padded straps of her bag, frowning. “That ain’t gonna work,” he muttered.
“What isn’t?”
He fished around in the bag, emerging with a small rolled bandage. “Fort Bragg. That’s in the South, oui?”
“North Carolina, yeah.”
“You don’t sound Southern.”
“My accent comes and goes, a little like yours.”
“We did a joint exercise off Hawaii with some guys from there,” he said, his voice tight, evidently ignoring her dig. “Stevens, Porter, Luiz... Know them?”
Common enough surnames and it was a big base. Lucky guess?
“Mauricio Luiz?” she said.
He unwrapped the bandage and snapped it taut. It ripped. He swore. “Sounds right.”
“Blond guy?”
He looked at her sideways. “With a name like that? Nah, Colombian or something. Short guy, burn scar across his neck, tattoo of a...snake, or something. Arrogant piece of shit.”
“Oh yeah, that’s him.” So Flynn probably wasn’t faking the military thing. “He’s a good buddy of one of my brothers. God knows why. Last I saw him, he’d bleached his hair.”
“That’d be right.”
“Have you trained elsewhere in the States? Maybe that’s where I’ve seen—”
He held up his hand, listening, as a car engine surged and fell away. “We’re near a road?”
“Yeah. Not a lot of traffic but it seems to be a public road. I’ve heard children’s voices, buses, donkeys...”
He scanned the room for the twentieth time. “So what stopped you signing up, like your brothers?”
Wow, he was as seasoned at changing the subject as a politician. “Hard to be a lefto, greenie conspiracy theorist and shoot people.”
“You forgot the tinfoil hat.” His lips pulled up into a lopsided grin. It made him look boyish. Cute, even. Green—his eyes were green.
She pulled focus. Like it mattered. “I was more interested in keeping the higher ranks honest than doing their bidding. I saw the crap my mom and brothers had to put up with.” She left her Bronze Star–winning father out of it—he’d been the type to serve up the crap, while cheating on her mother on every tour. “Mom was only too happy to send me to college to keep me out of uniform.”
“Bet she didn’t imagine you’d be the one winding up here.”
“Guess not.” Or the child who’d bring killers to her door. What was her mom doing now? No one in the family would sit back and wait for the authorities to act, despite their respect for the chain of command, but she’d know Tess’s abduction had put her at risk. It was only after she’d put Tess in touch with Latif six months ago, while he was still working as an IT security analyst at Denniston, that the conspiracy had started to become clear. And now Latif was dead—“collateral damage” in a drone strike against al-Thawra, as if that could be believed—despite Tess’s promise to protect him, and the evidence he’d left behind was her only hope. Too many deaths already.
Flynn pushed a finger through the gap he’d widened in the floorboards, then retracted it, his forehead wrinkling. Was he planning to yank the whole floor down?
“What do they do—your family?” he said.
Warning bells jangled—was he fishing for information? Something to hold over her? But, hey, her family was no secret—Rolling Stone had profiled the entire clan last year on the third anniversary of her “American hero” father’s death.
“My brothers are Special Forces—all three of them. Mom’s in Intel.”
“Is that why you’re obsessed with this Somalia story—you’re afraid your family will be deployed there?”
“I don’t like to see any soldier go to war without a very good reason.”
He ran a hand over the boards. “Neither do I. Hell, I could end up deployed there... So this dossier—can you do your story without it?”
A chill tiptoed up her spine. “My bosses would never run it without hard evidence—it’s too damning, too dangerous.”
“So you need to get it back.”
“I don’t imagine that’s an option.”
She picked up her MRE. Maybe force-feeding her stomach would stop it churning. This guy might be radiating mixed messages but at least he brought hope.
“How long have you been in the legion?” she said. If he was hiding something, she’d catch him out. If in doubt, ask the same question ten different ways until they got flustered. The Human Lie Detector, Quan called her.
Half a minute passed. He poked and prodded and shifted the floorboards. “Nine years,” he said.
She waited. Nothing. Sheesh, the guy didn’t offer much.
“How old were you when you signed up?”
Another pause. “Twenty.”
She pretended to focus on opening a packet of gray mush that claimed to be oatmeal. That made him three years younger than her. With his cynicism and frown lines she’d have picked older. “I thought you’d transferred from the regular army?” She forced an offhand tone. She sensed him stilling, imagined him looking down at her and frowning as he assessed the question.
“Yeah, that’s where I signed up, L’armée de Terre. That’s what I meant. I transferred to the legion after graduating the academy.”
“And where did you do your officer training?”
“Sunshine, we could be here for weeks. You wanna wear me out the first day?”
“I’m just interested—and I’m trying to figure out where I’ve seen you before.”
“I told you—one of those faces.”
No, that wasn’t it. Maybe a less direct approach... “I’ve never been to Corsica. Is it much different from mainland France?”
Pause. “It’s peaceful. People don’t ask questions.”
She smiled, the movement unfamiliar on her lips. He was probably right, at least within the legion, where “Don’t ask, don’t tell” took on a far wider meaning. The legionnaires she’d met all had Flynn’s cagey look, the sideways glances, the spare details, as if the ghosts of their pasts were about to jump them and haul them back.
Something shot across the floor. She gasped, clutching her chest. “Damn mouse.”
“There’s a nest in the corner. You want me to get rid of them?”
She screwed up her face. “I don’t know. We’ve been together awhile now. I was present at the birth.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve named them.”
“Minnie and Mickey and...Huey, Dewey and Louie.”
“Pretty sure those last ones are ducks. How about I send them to a happier place and I’ll be your friend instead?”
“Let them be. They’re trapped here, too.”
What just came out of her mouth? She was fighting for the rights of mice now? There it was—proof she’d gone crazy.
“Just what I need to be stuck with—a vegan, lefto, greenie conspiracy-theory crusader. Trust me, not all life deserves to be preserved.”
“I’d rather not have a pile of bodies rotting in the corner—the smell is bad enough already. Unless you’re sizing them up for lunch?”
“Couldn’t eat another thing. Don’t worry, princess. I won’t kill them if you don’t want me to. I’ll repatriate them.” He raised his chin to indicate the newly widened slats above his head.
“They won’t fit through there.”
“The fuckers can get in anywhere. They go flat as paper. You wanna help? Tip the mattress on its side to block their escape that direction.”
As she hoisted it up, he ripped open a packet of peanut cookies, crumbled one and threw the remains into a corner.
“You’re assuming they’ll recognize that as food.” She found herself whispering, like the mice could understand English.
He crouched, motionless, the shape of his butt outlined by his faded trousers. How good had that felt under her hand last night? Round, but firm and muscular. She nibbled her lip. Small pleasures were about all she could hope for.
She spent far too many of the next ten minutes admiring his rear view. Finally, the mother mouse scampered to the crumbs. The babies weren’t old enough to venture from the nest or Tess might not have come over all Cinderella.
“Okay, very slowly, bring that mattress closer.” Flynn inched in until he was between the mother and the nest, as Tess slid the rectangle of foam along the floor, flush against the wall, closing in. Each time the mother looked up, twitching, they froze. Time ticked by. His thighs had to be killing him, quads of granite or not.
Tess stumbled. The mouse took off. In a blur of desert camos, Flynn flung forward and shot out an arm. “Got it.”
Dang, he had the reflexes of a cobra.
“Grab the babies, one by one, and ease them through that gap up there.”
“I can’t reach that high.” Thank God. She wasn’t squeamish, but wild mice weren’t on her preferred list of things to handle. Flynn’s butt, on the other hand, was currently sitting in the top ten. Top five. Top—
Stop it.
He swore, his fingers clamped around the mouse’s tail as it clawed air and gyrated. “Then you’ll have to hold her while I move them.”
She widened her eyes. “Hey, I’m tolerating them—just—but I don’t want cuddles.”
“If I release her first, she’ll come back down to the nest.” He met her gaze. “I didn’t take you for a wimp.”
Damn, exactly the kind of crap her brothers dished up. “Hand her over.” Oh man, really?
He edged behind Tess, his breath teasing the top of her hair as he encircled her with his arms. “Her instincts are going mental, so you’ll have to hold tight. Clamp down on the tail, either side of my fingers.”
Yuck, yuck, yuck. But she followed his instructions. He hovered a palm underneath their hands as he let go. “Got her?”
“Got her.”
“Spin her gently so she can’t arch back and bite you.” He backed away. “Can’t believe I’m busting my arse to liberate mice.”
“Think of it as earning karma. But hurry up.”
He knelt by the nest. “It’s okay,” he crooned in a falsetto, “you dirty little fuckers. Just call me Uncle Scroo—”
He froze and plucked something from the nest. Not a mouse. String? He passed it under a shaft of gray light, and it glinted.
“What is it?”
“A wire. You said there was no electricity in this building.”
“Not as far as I can tell.”
“Seen any electrical cords? Wiring?”
“Nothing.”
He scraped at the dirt where the stone wall met the floor, just shy of the nest.
“What are you looking for?”
“Tell you when I find it.”
Minnie pawed the air like she was on a mouse wheel. “Ah, could you look quickly? She’s about to turn herself inside out.”
He crawled along one wall, digging into the dirt at its foot, then shoved aside the mattress and crept along the next wall, doing the same. Halfway along he stopped and dug faster, like a dog after a bone. Maybe that head injury was affecting his brain.
“You beauty,” he muttered.
“A secret tunnel?”
“Not quite, but looks like that karma might have come round pretty quick.”
He tugged something. She jumped as a long shape scooted along the floor. More mice? Crap—a snake? Minnie’s claws scraped her wrist. “Yeouch.” She arched her hand.
Flynn was holding something—the end of a piece of rope, embedded in the dirt. She squinted. Not rope—an electrical cord, tapering off to a frayed end. He gazed up at the ceiling, frowning.
“Excellent,” Tess said. “Now we can fire up my hair straightener and singe our way out of here.”
“You have a hair straightener?”
“Does it look like I have a hair straightener?”
He shrugged. “Pity. Could be a useful weapon.”
“Would you mind hurrying things up with those mice?”
“Just a sec.” He clawed at the dirt farther along and ripped up another cord.
“Do you think it’s live?”
“I doubt it—the mouse managed to chew right through without getting electrocuted.” Holding each cord by its white cover, he touched the frayed ends together. “Yep, dead.”
“Flynn...? This mouse is about to explode.”
He stood and ran his hand over a floorboard, biting the inside of one cheek.
“Flynn!”
“Yeah, yeah. On it.”
He sauntered to the nest, evidently distracted by mysterious calculations running through his brain. Kneeling, he shoveled half a dozen balls of gray onto one palm and enclosed them with the other. He stood and eased the creatures through a crack one by one, eyes crinkled in concentration. Oh boy, a tough guy being gentle—it got her right there. And that was her problem. No more tough guys, you hear? Dependable, loyal accountants.
“Now for Minnie.” He came up so close beside Tess the warmth of his body reached out and caressed her. She stood straighter. This was not supposed to be an intimate experience. He maneuvered his hands around hers. “Separate your fingers a little. Got her. Let go.”
“Gladly.”
He gripped the mouse’s body and lifted it to the gap. It sniffed, found purchase with its scrabbling claws and blessedly disappeared. Tess shook her wrist.
Flynn looked at his palms, grimacing. “Got any more wipes?” Suddenly he shut his eyes tight, like someone had stabbed his voodoo doll.
“Flynn?”
“Too much...action for this soldier.” When he opened his eyes they looked like they were retreating into his skull. Nothing fake about his head injury. A fraction more force and the wound could have been fatal.
She kicked the mattress flat, caught his arm and guided him down. “More painkillers?”
“I’ll hold out... Need to keep sharp.” He sounded anything but. God, what if his wound did prove lethal? He could have internal bleeding, swelling...
She grabbed the wipes. “Give me your hands,” she said, kneeling in front of him. She scrubbed at one, then the other—muscular, tanned, callused hands that flinched at her strokes. She fought the temptation to bring one up to her face, to feel the roughness against her cheek. Yep, desperate and pathetic. And eager for him not to die, whoever he was.
He yawned. She echoed, her eyelids feeling as heavy as his looked.
“We should...sleep,” he said. “Store our energy. Must have been well after midnight when I... I’ll take the floor.”
“Don’t be silly. We’re adults. We can share. You don’t want to pick up an infection, and this place is far from sterile.”
His lidded gaze ran the length of her body, her skin goose-pimpling in its wake. Earth to Tess. He was probably just figuring out how they’d both fit on the mattress. Did he remember anything of the previous night? Her face warmed.
“I...need to use the facilities.” He jerked his head toward the bucket.
“Sure,” she said. She swiveled away and concentrated on popping a couple of painkillers. Trying to ignore the noises from the other half of the room, she brushed dirt and stones off the mattress, lay straight and rigid on one side of it and closed her eyes. Her muscles pulsed as they eased up. The toe Hamid had stomped on throbbed double time, at least eclipsing the pain from the other.
Sometime last night she’d awoken on her back, Flynn’s forearm heavy on her belly, his hand curled around the side of her waist, his stubbly cheek against her shoulder. It would have been so easy to turn into him so their bodies were flush together and hunker down into a place of refuge. When she was single, that was what she missed most—the physical contact. Yes, she missed sex, but it was plain old touch she ached for—a strong, rough man’s body cocooning hers. That was when she felt safest, when she felt loved, when it felt like nothing could sneak in to destroy her happiness. It wasn’t even necessarily about being in love. Had she ever been in love with Kurt? Or just in love with the idea of him, the fantasy that it might actually work out, despite her misgivings?
Behind her, the mattress shifted as Flynn lowered onto it. His body grazed her spine, then settled, his warmth radiating into her. He had to be half an inch away, at most. She risked a peek. His body mirrored hers, facing the opposite wall, spooning air. She nestled down and ordered her eyes to close. She could still steal comfort from the pinpricks of electricity heating her back. It seemed impossible that a body so warm, so alive could be so...not, in a matter of days. Hours, perhaps. Hamid said she’d kidnapped him to be a double act with Tess. Another life on her conscience.
Even with him there, sleep didn’t come. Ten, twenty minutes later she remained rigidly awake, her thoughts pushing into ever darker places. She sighed.
“This is stupid,” he said huskily. She sensed him rolling over. He propped himself up on an elbow. “We’re lying here like corpses.”
“Did you just say ‘corpses’?”
“Okay, not the best word choice. Point is that I can’t sleep like this and neither can you. Come here.”
Without waiting for a reply, he slipped his hands around her waist and pulled her in until his chest skimmed her back. Shock waves of awareness buzzed into her stomach. She caught her breath. That shouldn’t feel so good.
“Relax,” he said, skating a hand down her arm. “I’m not hitting on you. Priority one is to get some rest, and this way we can both be comfortable. I’m just glad I didn’t get chucked in here with a guy.”
Mercifully, he kept his hips away from her butt—that kind of contact would not be conducive to sleep. She forced herself to inhale deeply. On the exhalation, she let her body settle into his. Something nudged her hair—his nose? Oh man, lips?
“Better, huh?” he whispered. Yep, his lips. Better, yes. And so much worse.
“Yeah,” she said, high-pitched and wooden. “That’s fine.” Idiot.
Just take the respite. Last night was a godsend, but this was a gift straight from him—offered, not stolen. And despite her instinct blinking neon warnings, she genuinely liked this prickly, brazen guy—maybe a little too much.
Outside, something banged. She tensed. He squeezed her forearm and they waited in silence. Nothing.
“Don’t worry, sunshine. We’ll be out of here as soon as that hatch opens tonight. Meantime, I’ve got your back.”
Right now, she’d let herself believe it.
* * *
Flynn waited until near darkness to thread the first length of electrical cord through the gap in the floorboards for the first of his handholds. He’d coated it with mud but the white would still glow through, catching any light that passed. Still, the guards seemed confident about the security of their prison—boots crossed over the boards just once every hour.
Apart from the odd shout or footfall outside, the only sounds for the past thirty minutes had been him scrambling around and Tess’s steady breath. Her curled shape on the mattress was melting into black, with just her hair still picking up the light. He’d let her rest as long as possible. With injured feet, she’d have a hard enough time keeping up.
Hell, how long since he’d had an encounter like that with a woman? Gentle and innocent—except for the dirty thoughts running through his head. For nearly ten years his few relationships had been short-term and only about sex. In one fling, with a Canadian tourist, he’d pretended he didn’t speak English to avoid conversation. Yep, he was that much of a lowlife. Stick around and they’d start asking questions.
The last time he’d stuck with a woman—with a journalist—too long, she’d torn his life apart. The bitch had pretended to be into him just long enough to paste his face and whereabouts all over the media, leaving him no choice but to leave Australia. Oh yeah, he’d learned his lesson, about journalists and women.
He twisted the cord and tried to angle it to fall over the gap on the other side of the board, so he could pull it through and secure it. Bugger, this would take more time and effort than he’d budgeted. He was fast running out of light, and his head wound pulsed every time he looked up. He made himself breathe—in, out, in, out. At least the pain in his ribs had eased.
After ten minutes he took a break and a handful of painkillers. On his next attempt, success. The cord flipped into the right spot and he used Tess’s tweezers to grip the loose wires and urge them to a point he could grab them. He pulled both ends tight and tied them, then swung on the cord, tentatively lifting his feet off the floor. It held. Sweet.
With the scissors, he sawed off another length of cord at the point it disappeared between the rocks. It was shorter—just enough for a second handhold. Threading it through would be even more of a bitch than the first.
Tess shifted. Mate, the light had fallen fast. This was taking too long. If the soldier returned before he was ready, his plan was screwed. He tucked the cord under his arm and crouched over Tess, his fingers finding her neck, then navigating to the safer territory of her shoulder. He gently shook it.
“Tess, wake up.”
She groaned and sat. He kept his hand on her. Maybe because he didn’t want her getting disorientated. Maybe because the smooth curve of her shoulder felt good. With his other hand he searched for the open bottle of water.
“It’s dark,” she said.
“Ready to bust out? Here, have a drink.” He let his hand fall to the middle of her back while she gulped. “Can you get your boots on?”
“Maybe, if I strip down the bandages on my toes. It’ll be...tight.”
“Leave them off for now. Put them in your backpack—it’s leaning on the mattress. I’ve packed it. You might have to take out one of the water bottles—I’ve stuffed in as many as can fit.” She’d run faster in socks, if she could run at all. He’d have to steal a vehicle.
“What’s your plan?”
“Get us above ground.”
“And then?”
“Wing it.”
Her silence told him everything about her faith in that.
“Sunshine, winging it is what I do best.”
Anything was better than sitting down here, rotting. He got back to work on his handholds, giving her his watch so she could direct its light up. Even the faint blue glow cast shadows.
“Someone’s coming.”
Damn, she was right. Footsteps neared, thudding on dusty ground. “A few more seconds.” The frayed end of the second cord was poking up through the boards, but he still needed to catch it, yank it back down and tie it. “Kill the light. I’ll do it blind.” He hadn’t had time to check everything, let alone practice his maneuver. Could he wait? And then what—risk escaping in daylight? They might not be alive by tomorrow night.
He let his head drop forward, taking the pressure off his wound, and left his fingers to do the work, snapping the tweezers blindly into the gap. A scrape and a click—the key in the lock.
“Put the backpack on,” he whispered. He’d intended to carry it, but plans were evolving too fast.
A door squeaked open. The tweezers snagged something. Shafts of light fell through the cracks. He pulled the end of the cord and caught it in his fingers. Footsteps passed overhead—one person, too heavy to be the woman. Flynn held his breath. One flick of the flashlight in his direction and the cords would gleam like strip lights.
He drew the cord down. Screw it, no time to prepare, test the angles, experiment with his run up. The diagram in his head would have to do. As the bolts shot across, he tied the ends and tested his weight, wincing as the cords rolled, shuddering, along the floorboards. He lowered to the floor, released the handholds and backed into the wall, wiping his sweaty palms on his combat pants. Chalk would be good, like at high school gym. He settled for dirt. No shortage of that.
The hatch squealed as it was levered off, the flashlight beam dancing out from the soldier’s hands. The handholds glowed. Now. Flynn sprang out, launched himself off the floor and into the loops, and swung his feet up. The guy squawked. Flynn’s boot collected something as his feet flew out of the hole. The rest of his body didn’t make it. The flashlight cracked into a wall and flickered off.
He hooked his boots on the edge of the hatch, his torso swinging down wildly. Bugger. Not enough momentum. High school gym was too long ago. The guy shouted something. Flynn crunched up, flailing with his right hand, his ribs burning, his skull complaining about being upside down. Pressure dug into his back—Tess, pushing him from underneath. He got a fingerhold on the side of the hatch, then a hand. The guy shouted again. Merde, how long until reinforcements arrived?
Pain slammed into his shins. Something pushed on his soles. The guy was trying to tip him back in. Funneling his strength into his right arm, Flynn hoisted himself, with a grunt. One foot slipped but his upper body was out. He rolled clear of the hole and sprang upright.
Footfalls rapped from outside, flashlight beams jiggling through the open doorway. His opponent’s eyes lit with fear. Flynn smashed a fist in his solar plexus, dropping him. The guy scraped for breath but kicked out, catching Flynn in the nuts. Flynn swore, unbalanced, slipped sideways. Something skidded out beside him and dropped into the hatch. The MREs the guy had been carrying.
As Flynn picked himself up, another soldier reached the doorway, running, an M16 aimed. A flashlight beam skidded over the wall, revealing an alcove. Flynn dived. Bullets ripped up the room; warm liquid sprayed his face. Putain.
Suddenly, the gunman flailed, reared up and smacked into the floor at Flynn’s feet, his rifle flying up. What the—?
No fucking way—the guy had tripped on the looped cords sticking up through the floorboards. The first soldier lay still on the floor, his skull flipped open like a lid. More shouts outside. Five or six men, a couple of women. Some closing in, some farther away.
Flynn dropped on the gunman, smashing an elbow into the back of his neck. “Look out below,” he called, lifting the guy in a spear tackle and launching him headfirst into the hole. He landed with an unhealthy crack. Hell, Flynn should have taken his rifle. Not thinking quickly enough.
He pressed into the alcove, reining in his heaving breath, as another guy approached the door. A splintering crack ricocheted from the other side of the room. Shit. A second external door had been forced open. Two goons spilled in, silhouetted in a floodlight, rifles glinting dully. Enemy left and right. Nowhere to retreat. He needed a plan B.
CHAPTER 4 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
“Flynn!”
Something skidded across the floor and smacked into Flynn’s boot. He crouched, felt for it, flinched. Hot metal—the M16 barrel. Tess had chucked it out of the hole. Legend.
Gunfire tore into concrete an inch above his head. He slotted the rifle into his arms and let loose a burst. One enemy went down. Two. Three. As the echoes faded, stillness settled. Someone gurgled. Shooting unidentified targets wasn’t Flynn’s style, but neither was dying for a principle. Dusty beams from two fallen flashlights crisscrossed the floor. Voices pinged around outside, closing fast. They had thirty seconds, tops.
In the light spilling in from outside, he made out the ladder, attached to bolts in the wall. He flung it into the hole, his gaze—and rifle barrel—flicking between the doorways.
“Tess,” he hissed. “Climb, quick.”
The rope jerked and swung. She yelped. “He’s got me. My ankle.”
Flynn peered down, barrel first. “Let her go,” he warned. He released a volley over the guy’s head. Tess sprang up a little as he wisely took the chance Flynn had offered. Flynn grabbed her forearm and hauled her out. “Stay behind me.”
He unhooked the rope ladder and tossed it into the hole, then leaned against the concrete beside the gaping second doorway and scoped out the exterior. No movement, no sound. He felt behind him for Tess but his hand hit air. She was leaning over a dead enemy.
“Tess!”
She tugged at something, then ran to him in a loping stride, shouldering an M16 like she knew how.
“What now?” she said breathlessly.
“First, we get out of the light.” Adrenaline surged through his veins and lit up his nerves. This was more like it. “And then I’m going to fucking kiss you.”
* * *
Tess stuck behind Flynn as they sprinted to a patch of darkness, ignoring the bolts of fire in her toes. Pain was just her nerves yelling to her brain that there was a problem. She knew there was a problem—her nail beds were pulpy masses of blood and goo—so her nerves could shut the hell up.
Her brain threw together a jumpy picture of her surroundings. It wasn’t the concrete-walled compound she’d imagined, more a sprawl of huts ringed by a ten-foot chain-link fence. Ahead, beyond an open gate, was a dirt road, otherwise there was a whole lot of dark nothing. A desert? Crap. Urgent voices carried from the far side of the bunker—half a dozen goons getting closer. Far off to the right was a sprinkling of lights—a village? A pair of headlights bumped toward them along the road. She couldn’t hear the engine over her own panting.
Light spilled from a hut next to the gate. A gatehouse. It looked deserted—the guards must have rushed to the bunker. A lucky break but they’d have to be quick. She sped up—and was yanked back.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
Flynn’s hand encircled her biceps. “It’s exactly where they think we’ll go.”
“That’s because it makes the most sense.” She tried to tear free but he held tight. “We could flag down the car.”
“Again, that’s what they’d expect us to do.”
She clenched her teeth. “Again, that’s because it makes sense.”
“Got a better idea. Trust me.” His eyes glittered. Green, definitely.
Stop it.
Trust him? Right now instinct urged her to, but instinct had got her into bad places where men were concerned. Still, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his survival instincts. If he got them to safety, she’d return the favor and ditch him. She didn’t need another death on her tab.
“Fine,” she said.
She followed him behind a small wooden shack near the fence. A hole-in-the-ground toilet, by the smell of it. She pressed her back into its rear wall, and he did the same. Sheltered from view, for now.
The car neared, its headlights lighting them up. Flynn leveled his rifle.
“You’re not going to shoot it?”
“Nope,” he whispered, tracing its progress with the barrel. When it was a foot or two past the gate he opened fire. She smacked her palms over her ears, craning her neck. What the hell? Dust rose along the path of the bullets, lit red by the taillights. He’d missed. Was that good or bad? The car revved, tires squealing. Footsteps and shouts sounded from the compound, closer now. A woman barked orders. Hamid.
The car bumped and skidded, engine straining. Poor guy driving it had to be terrified.
“What the hell was th—?”
“Wait,” he whispered, hardly louder than if he’d mouthed it. Something soft touched her ear—his lips. His hand pressed on her thigh. Just a warning to keep it together, that he had this under control—like hell—but she allowed herself to close her eyes for a second, to breathe. Whatever his plan, she had no choice but to go along with it. This kind of situation had to be his day at the office.
Sheesh, he’d promised to kiss her back there. A throwaway comment, obviously, but it’d heated her up all the same, just as his lips and hand were doing now. Man, she was messed up. How soon could PTSD set in? Was that also the reason for her paranoia about him? Well, paranoia was part of her job, but she was finding whole new levels.
Great, so now she was paranoid about being paranoid.
A vehicle door opened and slammed. And another. One, two, three more. An engine growled to life. Wheels skidded. Another engine started and whined into a crescendo as it accelerated, tires crunching along the rocky road. The fleeing car reached panic pitch.
So that was Flynn’s plan—make Hamid and her goons think Tess and Flynn had flagged down the car. God—imagine if they had? If it had been her choice... As the cars left and their noise faded, Hamid’s voice rang out. A one-sided conversation—on a phone? She could be speaking English, but Tess couldn’t make out the words over the pulse pummeling her eardrums. Behind them, a guy shouted. Another answered.
The compound was otherwise quiet. Flynn had taken out four or five goons. Maybe five more had left in the cars. How many were left? They all had to be focused on that car, having assumed Flynn’s gunfire had come from one of their guys in pursuit. And the driver had, naturally, hoofed it, making the car the target Flynn wanted it to be. Two birds, one stone. Smart—and ruthless.
Flynn appeared to be tracking something, out of her vision. Hamid’s voice receded—she was walking to the gate? His hand left Tess’s thigh and he silently lined up a shot. She settled her breath like it was her finger on the trigger. A man’s shout. Footfalls across the compound, toward Hamid. Flynn pressed back into the building, lowering the rifle, and gave a quick shake of the head. No shot. He gestured that Tess should lead them along the fence line, behind the buildings. Back into the compound? No kidding he was winging it. But, hey, if it confounded her, it’d confound Hamid.
She peered around her side of the shack, away from the gate. No one. She scampered into the open, her breath catching, and slipped into the darkness behind the next building. A few feet separated its concrete wall from the fence. How long until Hamid’s goons caught up with the car and figured out the truth?
Rocks pricked her feet through her socks. At least her tread was silent, though the car rally out front would mask a wildebeest stampede. Flynn walked so quietly she had to check he was following. Was that something military guys practiced—tiptoeing drills?
The fence didn’t let up. They came to a corner, near a long, low concrete building with barred windows and several doors opening to a veranda. Dark and quiet.
“We’ll have to go over the fence,” Flynn whispered.
“I don’t think I can. My toes—I wouldn’t be able to get a grip.”
He frowned, first at her feet, then at the fence. He could leave her behind, of course, but self-preservation stopped her suggesting it. If he was a selfish guy, it would occur to him. If not, he’d refuse.
“Wait here,” he said.
“Where are you—?”
He’d gone. Her breath hitched. Maybe he was the selfish type. He tried the first door in the building and pushed it open, leading with his rifle. He disappeared inside. After a silent, tense half a minute, he reappeared and did the same with the next door, and the next. He jogged back, something glinting in his hand—a pocketknife.
He knelt at the fence and slashed, the clinking and tearing echoing through the rear of the compound. She cringed.
“Give me the bag and your weapon.”
He slid them under the fence and lifted the makeshift flap. She shimmied through, the back of her head brushing his arm, followed by her shoulders, back and butt. She reached back to do the same for him but he retreated a few paces, charged, flew at the fence, clung on about halfway up, cleared the top in some flippy maneuver and landed at her feet, knees bent. Nimble and quiet as a kitten.
“What now?” she said, trying not to sound impressed. Exactly the kind of stunt her brothers liked to pull. He could just as quickly have shimmied under.
“No idea,” he said, throwing the backpack on. “But it’s been pretty fucking ninja so far.”
“Show-off.” Still, her lips curled up. Hey, she adored her brothers, though she’d never let on to them.
Gunfire popped. She gulped. Had they got some innocent driver killed? Flynn stilled, head cocked, gaze locked on hers. The car race had stopped—the engines were idling. He pushed the fence back in place and kicked some scattered rubbish around the break.
“If I’d gone under I would’ve had to make the hole twice as big. With luck they won’t notice till morning, at least. They’ll have to waste resources searching the compound.”
Somewhere a dog howled, answered by several others. Or were they hyenas? Did hyenas howl? Tess looked left, into blackness, and right, also into blackness.
“Seriously, though,” she said, “do you have a plan?”
* * *
Flynn shouldered both rifles. “You’re not easily impressed, are you, sunshine?”
He inhaled deeply. Adrenaline was good for jumping out of pits and scaling fences, but not for strategic thinking. Case in point: his comment about kissing her. Not that the urge had passed—the woman was lighting up dark parts of his brain. The sooner he got her to safety and returned to his unit, the better.
“First, we get out of the open,” he said. “Then we find transport or comms—preferably, both.”
“This is kind of all ‘the open.’”
“See that?” He pointed out a large shape a few hundred meters away, a hulk of charcoal against the dark. “Could be a hut or a vehicle. We shelter there and make a plan.”
Engines revved in the distance, getting louder. “They’re returning.” He ripped the bandage off his head and stuffed it in a pocket—it’d glow like a flare. “Follow in my footsteps but keep a couple of meters behind—there could be old land mines around. Can you run?”
“I can try.”
He set off in a jog, listening for her footfalls to judge his speed. Rocks jarred his feet even through his thick boots. Socks wouldn’t last her long but at least the ground was too hard to hold footprints. Her stride faltered, like she didn’t know which foot to favor. He slowed, though it near killed him.
To their left, a beam of light flashed and skidded across the ground. Damn. Probably just a large flashlight but it meant they had eyes on the ground already.
“Go faster,” she hissed. “I can keep up.”
He obliged. Hamid’s soldiers would split up—searching the compound, the road, the wasteland, then fanning farther out... Would she call in reinforcements? He and Tess would need to be long gone by daybreak or they’d stand out in this dead-flat terrain like hippos in a bathtub. Hamid would guess they were headed for the distant village lights, but what choice did they have—hijack a camel?
As they neared their target, he slowed. Something jutted out at forty-five degrees, aimed their way. A large gun, looming out of an abandoned tank. He skidded around to the far side of it, perched on one of its exposed, trackless wheels and swung the backpack around.
“You planning to start this thing up and roll us out of here?” Tess huffed as she caught up.
“I wish.” He pulled the pocketknife from his combat pants. “It’s a Russian T55.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s been sitting here rusting for thirty years or more. It’ll be from the Ethiopia-Somalia war, abandoned where it was put out of action—or broke down, more likely. Which means we’re probably near the border of the two. Dunno which side, but maybe on the road to Hargeisa.”
“I was taken from Somalia—near Hargeisa—so that would make sense.”
“And me from Djibouti, along the Somali border. Not in such easy striking distance, but they could have used a chopper.”
They’d gone to some lengths to find a French soldier. Was Tess right about Hamid wanting to suck France in? He found his watch in the backpack and strapped it on. They must have screwed up by capturing a legionnaire. The whole point of the legion was to give France an expendable force—he was cannon fodder no one cared about. No one except his frères d’armes. His unit would fight to the death for him. He cricked his neck. He needed to make contact, a-sap.
“What were you doing in Djibouti when you were captured?” she said.
“I’m not at liberty to talk to the media.”
“I’m not writing this down.”
He pulled her boots from the backpack. “Quit asking questions. You might not like the answers.”
Silence.
“No big story,” he conceded. No point firing up her curiosity. “Just on terrorist watch, like always. Guess we hit the jackpot.”
“They’re not—”
“Sunshine, if it looks like a terrorist, smells like a terrorist and shoots like a terrorist, I’m calling it a terrorist. Do you remember anything between being kidnapped and landing in the dungeon?”
“Vague flashes of being on the back of a truck. You?”
“Not a bloody thing.” He stabbed the toe of one of her boots and dug the blade into the leather.
“Hey! That’s the only footwear I have.”
“I’m giving them air-conditioning. We might be on foot awhile. We can duct-tape them later.” He sawed the toe off one side. “Or you can buy more with your superstar salary. Try this.”
She slipped it on, wincing as she worked her foot in. “Do you really think there are land mines here?”
He started on the second boot. “Abandoned land is often abandoned for a reason out here. But these thorn bushes and acacias have been cut back recently—for cooking fires or goat pens—so we’re probably safe.” A shout sailed out from the compound. “Relatively. You gotta watch the scrubby areas that are untouched.”
“Are we heading for those lights—the village, or whatever it is?”
“We don’t want to be in the open come morning. Here.” He passed her the boot.
“That’s where they’ll expect us to go,” she said, her voice tight, anticipating pain.
“That’s because it makes the most sense.”
She forced a thin-lipped smile and yanked up the laces. A shaft of light landed beside the tank, casting a shadow of the gun. He gripped her leg in warning—needlessly, it turned out, seeing as she was tense as concrete. Voices drifted over, conversational rather than urgent. Hopefully Hamid assumed he and Tess had headed out the gate, and had sent only a couple of schmucks around back to cover their bases. The light lingered on the tank’s turret, then moved on in a steady sweep. He realized he was still holding her, right around the thigh. He let go.
“Don’t suppose you know how to use one of those?” He nodded to the weapons beside them.
“I did some skeet shooting growing up, and I’ve shot an AR-15 in a firing range, but only on...”
He picked up a rifle and ejected the clip. Nearly full. He checked the next one. Full. “Only on...?”
She finished tying her laces and stood, testing a few steps. “Only on dates.”
“You messing with me? What kind of guy are you dating?”
“The wrong kind. And sometimes I go to the firing range with my mom and brothers. Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays—we’ve always been a little...competitive. I’ve never used one of those, though. Is it an M16?”
“Yep.” He gave her the 101 of readying and firing. Dating the wrong guy, huh? And that information had zero relevance. She was a celebrity; he was a recluse and planned to stay that way. Not a combination that’d work. Well, any relationship involving him wouldn’t work.
He shortened the sling to fit her frame and fitted it over her shoulder. “For you, this is a last resort. Your clip’s nearly full, so you have enough for four bursts. Don’t use it needlessly—and don’t use it on me.”
“Depends on the circumstances,” she said, with not nearly enough of a teasing tone.
“Don’t forget who busted you out.” And who’d had his arms around her much of the day. He’d lain awake for the last half hour of their nap while he’d mentally run through his plan, trying not to think about how soft her skin felt and how neatly she fit into him. Sicko. “You good to go?”
“You’re speaking Australian again.”
Bugger. When had he switched? “Told you my English is all over the place.”
He peered around the hull. Might as well stick with Australian now—the less his brain had to compute, the better. He’d be rid of her soon enough, and then he could ease back the paranoia lever.
The searchlight had moved off. Headlights trailed along the road, toward the village. Out in nowhere land, maybe three klicks away, a warm light flickered. Campfire. Probably nomadic herders—little chance of a phone there. With no moon, stars lit the sky like holes in a sieve. He scanned the horizon.
“The village is to the west. Hopefully the road continues the other side so we won’t have to pass the compound on the way out of town.” West was more likely to mean civilization—Addis Ababa, or maybe they could scoot back up to Djibouti. North likely meant Somalia, east a whole lot of nothing.
“How do you know the village is west of us, if you don’t know where we are?” She tugged the laces of her second boot.
Man, she was the suspicious type. He pointed above their heads. “I checked the map.”
“You can navigate by the stars?”
“You got a compass?”
Satisfied with her boots, she tipped her head back. “Prove it.”
He grunted. What a pain in the arse. He didn’t need to prove anything, but if it made her ease up on the interrogation... “North Star.” He pointed. “We’re about ten degrees north of the equator so you look about ten degrees above the horizon. The rest is easy. Bit of trust here?”
“Show-off.”
“You asked. Time we moved. But first we need to dirty up your T-shirt.”
“I’ve been wearing it for a week—it’s not dirty enough?”
“I can still see some white—it’ll show up like a reflector if that light catches it. Here.” He picked up a handful of soil, grabbed her wrist and dropped it in her palm. “Spit on this and rub it into the front. I’ll do the back. We’ll turn it into desert cammies.”
He picked up another handful and moved behind her. He could almost cover her back in a single hand span. She was all shoulder blades, spine and ribs—she’d gone easy on the MREs. Lucky he was into curves. Just you remember that, soldier.
“You like this stuff, don’t you?”
“What stuff?” Having his hands all over a beautiful woman? Too right. He liked her, that was the problem. She lit him up and she wound him up. A dangerous combination.
“Playing soldiers.”
“I am a soldier. It’s no game.”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t that why you joined up—you wanted to make the computer games a reality? Dive inside that Xbox?”
“You’re fishing for information.” And way off the mark. He’d been one year off an engineering degree when that journalist bitch outed him. With the walls closing in, he’d fled to Paris. Before that he’d been more into “Tetris” than “Call of Duty.” “Is that why your brothers joined up? And your boyfriend?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she snapped.
“Whoa.” Mission Change of Subject accomplished. He spun her. “Your face is glowing.” He smoothed the dirt in his hands over her cheeks, nose and forehead before running his fingers around her neck and into the exposed V of her chest. She took a sharp breath. A few inches lower and—
Shut it down. “Better,” he said.
She clicked her tongue. “And I just cleaned my face.”
“Waste of time out here, if you’re playing soldiers or not.” He ripped a strip of reflective metallic fabric off the bag and pocketed it, and rolled the rest in the dirt. “Same rules apply—keep your distance and step where I step. Sound’s gonna travel, so we go steady and careful. I do this...” He brought his palm level with the ground and lowered it, quickly. “We drop flat. If their lights pick us up, we run like lightning.” His gaze slid to her feet. “If you can. And try not to step on anything shiny.”
“What should I do if something goes click?”
He grimaced. “It won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“It’ll just go bang.”
“O-kay. Nice reassurance.”
“You want reassurance, hire a life coach. We’ll stick to tracks wherever possible—human, goat, donkey, camel... And, hey, if this area is mined, Hamid’s soldiers might not come after us.”
“I guess there’s that.”
“Ready?”
“After you, Lieutenant.”
CHAPTER 5 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Tess’s instincts ping-ponged with red alerts. She focused on following Flynn’s boots, trying to ignore the pressure in her toes and the hyperawareness of every noise. Not that there was much sound, bar her panting and the distant drone of vehicles.
Maybe a mile away, maybe five, three sets of headlights crept parallel to them, casing the road. Flynn’s head was skewed in that direction, his hands cradling his rifle. He’d better be looking out for shiny things, too—she’d met too many people in this part of the world with missing limbs.
Her chest tightened at the thought of putting her fate in the hands of a stranger, even one who made her stomach do flippy things. Especially one who made her stomach do flippy things. Rule number one in Africa: beware of the strangers who approached you, who tried to befriend you, to offer directions or some other “help.” They were the ones with an agenda—invariably involving relieving you of money. If you needed help, you sought out the ordinary people keeping to themselves, plying honest trades. Which category did Flynn fall into? Maybe falling drugged from the sky wasn’t the same as sidling up to her at a bus station, but he was hiding something. He wasn’t bothering with the French accent anymore. He had to be Australian.
A stone flicked off his boot and rocketed onto her exposed left sock, shooting fire up to her shin. She stumbled to a halt, scooching in a breath.
Flynn spun. “You okay?” She bent double, her eyes watering. He crouched and rested a hand on her shoulder. “Your toes?”
“Stone,” she gasped. Wow, she was such a princess. It was only a freaking toe. Who knew they could hurt so much? Flynn had a gaping head wound.
“You want me to carry you?”
“Hell, no.” She managed an expansive breath. The pain would settle—she just had to wait it out. “I’m good. Keep going.”
“If you need a break, I’m serious about carrying you. You probably weigh less than the backpack.”
She straightened. He kept his hand on her shoulder. He could be right. She hadn’t been eating well since she started chasing this story. The stress diet. Maybe she should quit journalism, write a diet book, make millions.
In the distance a pair of headlights flared—too far off for the beam to reach her and Flynn, but resolutely aimed their way.
“Flynn, the car’s turning.”
“I see it.”
“What do we do?”
“We hope. They get too close, we hit the deck, make like rocks and hope some more. It’s a massive patch of land and a dark night, so if their lights don’t get a direct hit we might be okay. Even then we might get lucky if our camouflage works. You sure you’re good to move?”
“Yes. Go.”
He released her. She swayed. She hadn’t realized how much she was letting him prop her up—in all sorts of ways.
It had to be healthy that she recognized she was in danger of falling for him—out of some sense of fear or gratitude, perhaps, some outdated feminine impulse to secure protection. And if she was aware of it, she could damn well make a conscious decision to resist it.
She settled back into his stride, faster now, the rifle bouncing against her back. Maybe that was why her instinct was going mental, like the mouse mom’s. Not because there was something familiar in his face, but because her brain was intent on protecting her from another Kurt-esque debacle. Clever brain. She should let it take charge more often.
The closest headlights grew bigger and brighter. Another light swept from the side of the vehicle—someone hanging out the passenger seat with a flashlight. The village lights weren’t getting any closer. Flynn was near sprinting, Tess stumbling along behind as if he were dragging her on a tow rope. Her breath was getting shallower, her toes jarring with the shock of each step. Tough it out. A good run wouldn’t kill her. Plenty else around here would.
Flynn glanced back.
“I’m fi—” she began.
But he wasn’t looking at her—he was looking over her shoulder, frowning. She followed his gaze. Another set of headlights was barreling straight for them. Oh God.
“Could we hide in those trees?” she gasped.
“What trees?”
“At your two o’clock.”
“I don’t see them.”
She pointed, though his back was to her again. “You can’t see that?” True, they weren’t much—a tangle of spindly branches—but they were clearly outlined, black against gray. The more she looked, the more trees she made out. Could you summon a mirage at night?
“Wait. Now I do.” He changed direction, angling toward them. “We don’t have a choice.”
It was all she could do to keep breathing. The trees didn’t seem to be getting bigger. The headlights behind her were.
“Down,” he whispered, hitting the deck as the flashlight swept their way.
She didn’t land quickly enough. The beam lit her up. Crap. It passed on without hitching. Keep going, keep going. It stopped and lurched back, burning straight into her retinas. Flynn sprang up, grabbing her hand. Her vision swam with black and red and purple. They hurtled toward the trees, her shaky legs threatening to give out.
“They still want us alive, right?” she shouted.
“I hope so. If anything, they’ll take me out and haul you back.”
“I’m not going back.” She upped her pace. Gunfire cracked around them.
“Just warning shots,” he yelled.
“How do you know?”
“We’re not dead.”
Her eyes adjusted. Both sets of headlights were trained on them, bouncing light and shadows on their path. The engines screamed. Flynn pulled her to the left—skirting the bleached skeleton of an animal. At least, she hoped it was an animal. Half a minute later, she heard it crunch and snap under a wheel. They passed the first tree, then the second. Another hundred feet and the goons would have to follow on foot.
The terrain changed. They plunged downhill, her knees wobbling as the ground steepened. Flynn’s hand tightened. Spindly trees panned out around them. It was a gully. Crap.
The headlights flared on something red, to her right—a warning sign, with a skull and crossbones.
“Flynn, it’s a minefield.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“That’s what I hoped.” He released her hand and skidded down a bank. “Stay behind me. Some of them spray sideways.”
Oh Jesus. Behind, a vehicle skidded to a stop. More gunshots, too close. She braced. No pain—nothing new, at least. She was still on her feet, her body still taking orders from her brain. The second engine roared closer.
“Out there we have a hundred percent chance of death,” Flynn shouted. “In here, maybe less.”
They careered downward, slaloming between trees, ducking under branches. It was hard to figure out where Flynn even was, let alone follow his path or watch for mines. Her mind was about to blow, with all the warnings it was pelting at her. Gunfire smacked into dirt by her feet. She yelped. Shouldn’t warning shots go upward?
The second vehicle slowed. As the engine silenced, another motor filled the gap, farther off but pushing fast. Possibly more than one. Among the clatter of gunfire she caught shouts edged with panic. Hell, they were worried?
A beam of light swept past them. Something glinted on the ground ahead of Flynn.
“Stop! Flynn!”
He kept charging. Her scalp went cold. She lunged for his waist and dragged him to a shuddering halt, her toes bouncing on the stones.
“What are you—?”
“Don’t move.” She drew upright, practically climbing his body, and clung to his left arm. “Something shiny.”
“Where?” His biceps was rigid.
“An inch in front of your foot.”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Like a bunch of nails sticking up.”
“You’re kidding me. That’s a bounding mine.” He shook his head. “I still can’t see it. You must have superhuman sight.”
“Guess I got used to the dark.”
To their left, the light snagged on trees.
“Maybe I should go first,” she said. God, that was the last thing she wanted.
“No.”
“I can see better than you.”
He caught her waist and lifted her sideways, moving them behind a tree trunk that was half his width. “I don’t want the responsibility,” he whispered into her ear. “You stay behind me, you’re safe.”
“Until you get blown up and then I’m on my own anyway, if I’m even alive.”
“Most of these things will be buried. Just then, we got lucky.”
Gunfire burst out. She shook him off. “And we might get lucky again if we can see. Come on.”
She took a step. He pinned her arms to her sides, his chest grazing her back. “I go first.”
“I’m quite capable of taking responsibility for my own death.”
“I can see that. I’m still going first.”
Wow, he sure had a hero complex. “Oh, I get it,” she said, changing tack.
“Get what?”
“It puts me in their line of fire. If I get shot, you get away.”
“What? No!”
He loosened his grip. Taking advantage of his indignation, she set out, her heart thumping hard enough to break a rib. Best-case scenario, she got lucky. Second-best, she died quickly. Her mind flashed up an image of a boy shepherd she’d met after his leg had been blown off midthigh. She’d forced herself to watch as a doctor had removed his filthy dressing, and then she’d swallowed vomit. The black, pulpy mass had writhed with maggots.
Sometimes knowledge wasn’t power.
Crap—Flynn wasn’t behind her. She glanced back, slowing. He was crouched over the mine. What was he doing—defusing it? He grabbed something from his pocket and laid it beside the spikes. The reflective strip he’d ripped off her bag. A warning to others? He would stop to be considerate, now?
He started running, waving her on. The land began to rise again up the other side of the gully. She stuck to where the trees were thickest. More gunfire. Not potshots—they were spraying the wood. Branches swooshed and cracked like a windstorm. She hurtled across the stony ground, bent double, scanning for shiny things. Or dull things. Anything that didn’t look right. Could the goons see her, or were they shooting blind? A burst clapped out behind her—Flynn had caught up and was returning fire.
A dark hulk loomed. She stopped, an inch from smashing her nose into it. A boulder. She swiveled, thrusting out her hands. Flynn was running sideways, looking back over his shoulder. “Fl—”
He rammed into her chest, slamming her spine into the rock. Pain spiraled through her torso. His rifle smacked her elbow, deadening her arm.
“Merde. You okay?” He bounced off and caught her, his hands pressing up and down her back.
Breath rasped back into her lungs. “Peachy,” she squeaked. It felt like she’d been hit by a rhino. A bullet cracked above them, showering her with rock chips. He pulled her into a crouch, leaning over her as the stone rain settled.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing her hand.
Blindly, she stumbled after him, rounding the boulder. He yanked her down on the other side and scooted in beside her. Cover. Thank God. Her feet pulsed. Ahead, the land flattened out again—the top of the gully easing out into a plateau.
She let her head fall backward onto the rock and took a shuddering breath. Gunfire tore through the trees, their echoes alone loud enough to burst an eardrum. Dozens of bullets, maybe hundreds. A lot of fingers on a lot of triggers.
“Still warning shots?” she said.
“Their orders have changed. My guess? They’re cutting their losses. They’ve realized they can’t risk you getting away.”
“So they’re shooting to kill.”
“It’s a good thing. It means they think we have a chance of getting out of here, which means we must have a chance—we just need to find it. This can’t be a dead end.”
“Wow, you’re quite the optimist.”
“Nah. An optimist sits back and waits for good shit to come to them. I don’t expect anything good to come to me—you gotta go out and make that shit happen. If you get lucky, you get lucky. No such thing as karma—you die or you don’t, whether you deserve it or not.”
“So right now, are we lucky or unlucky?”
“Depends what happens next.” He unzipped the bag and passed her a water bottle. “But don’t go all philosophical on me. My head hurts too much for thinking. Let’s just try not to die today.”
“Hey, it was you doing the philosophizing.”
“Hardly. I can’t even pronounce that word.”
She drank greedily, the water loosening her stuck throat. To her left, a bullet whacked into the dirt. Something pelted her temple. She gasped, fumbling the bottle, but it flipped out of her grip. She’d been shot in the head?
“Tess?”
She patted her face. No broken skin—just a burning sensation. Her T-shirt was soaked. “A stone, I think. Must have ricocheted up.” She grabbed for the bottle but it rolled away, into the line of fire. She lurched forward. A force hauled her back—Flynn’s hand, gripping her waistband. She flew for a second and plopped down, jamming his fingers into her butt crack. Graceful.
“Leave it,” he said, tugging his hand free.
“They’ll see it.”
“They’re more likely to see you—I don’t think they have your superhero vision.”
He grabbed a fallen branch and coaxed the bottle within reach. As good as empty.
“They could keep this up all night, all week,” she said. “Starve us out—if there’s anything left to starve by the time they run out of ammunition.”
“I’m counting on Hamid not having the patience for that. If what you say is true—”
“It is tr—”
“Then there’s too much at stake. The longer this goes on, the more anxious she’ll get, the more likely she’ll make a bad call. You said she reports to someone higher-up?”
“She runs al-Thawra, but al-Thawra reports to Denniston and the senator.”
“Then that’s where the bad call will come from. Bad decisions always come from bosses who aren’t on the ground, aren’t reading the conditions.” He punctuated his words with the bottle. “They want a black-and-white outcome, no matter the cost and screw the circumstances.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Personal experience?”
He scoffed like she’d asked an intimate question. “Human nature. They’ll be telling Hamid to find you before this gets out of control. Minefields aren’t put in dead ends. They’re designed to stop the enemy getting somewhere—they’re laid in shortcuts, thoroughfares.” He shook the last drops of water onto his tongue. “Which means this patch of scrub leads somewhere useful and they know it. It’s not just some oasis.”
“No kidding it’s not. Maybe it leads up into those hills?”
“Hills?”
“There.” She pointed. “Silhouetted against the stars.”
He squinted. “Yep, that’s where they’ll expect us to go.”
He flipped onto his belly and scooted to the far end of the rock. “Man, I could kill for NVGs.” He shouldered his rifle, let off a burst and ducked back under cover.
“What are you doing that for?” He couldn’t take on a couple of dozen soldiers.
The return gunfire surged. “Confirming we’re still alive.”
“If they think we’re dead they might stop shooting.”
“Hamid won’t believe we’re dead until she spits on our bodies. I want to make her nervous, impatient. Staying put and strafing this scrub to keep us pinned—or, better, kill us—is her best strategy. I don’t want her choosing the best strategy.”
He slid into his firing position and let off another round. She shoved her fingers in her ears, though they were already ringing like church bells. As he rolled back, she could smell his adrenaline—sharp and tangy and spiced with scorched metal.
“Aren’t you worried about giving away our position?”
“Not the way these shots are echoing. And there’s enough scrub to mask the muzzle flash. I’ll give it a rest now, anyway. Hear that?” His teeth gleamed. She could no longer figure out where one surge of fire ended and the next began. “The sweet sound of panic. We’re relatively safe here, and sooner or later they’ll figure that out. Meantime, I have a plan.”
“Which is...?”
He looked above their heads. Checking the stars? “I’ll tell you, if it works.”
“Flynn...”
“Hey, the last one worked, didn’t it? Kind of?” He flattened against the rock and pointed along the ridge in the direction of the village, as near as she could tell. “You see any more rocks we could shelter behind?”
“Yeah, maybe a hundred feet away. Man, they are not letting up.”
He dragged the backpack toward him, unzipped it and pulled out the open MRE.
“You’re eating?” she said. “Now?”
“Gotta keep up the energy. Here.” He slapped a bar of something onto her lap.
“You have it. My stomach is flipping around so much the food might bounce right out.”
“Eat the bloody thing. You don’t look like you’re carrying a lot of reserves and I’m not having you flaking out on me.”
In the darkness, her glare was wasted. She fought through a sickly sweet granola bar, a nibble at a time. Oh, for a fresh, crisp apple. At the thought, saliva poured into her mouth. Flynn laid into something that smelled like curry. At a time like this. As they ate, the gunfire became sporadic then eased off, leaving them cloaked in silence. She stashed the bar’s wrapper in her pocket, wincing at the crackle.
Flynn scooted to his vantage point and beckoned her over. They lay on their bellies, shoulders touching.
“What’s that superhero vision telling you?” His murmured words vibrated right through her.
She blinked, hard. “Nothing,” she whispered. “Wait, something’s moving. A person. More than one—maybe half a dozen, entering the gully.” Crap.
“Spread out or in single file?”
“Spread out.”
“Good.”
“Was that your plan?”
“They’re doing what the bastards who buried these mines hoped. The mines are laid out under the theory that soldiers spread out. You go in alone, or single file, odds are you’ll get out alive. A whole unit spreads out, chances are one will set off a mine that catches his buddies with shrapnel, so it lowers everyone’s odds. It’s a numbers game, like the chance you’ll be the one picked by the shark at the beach.” He fell silent. “Maybe a little more likely than that.”
“You’d think they’d know that, living here.”
“They’ll be following orders—bad ones, and they’ll know that and resent it. You can’t do a grid search in single file. I bet they’re praying to Allah.” He caught her eye. “Or God, or Buddha, or their mothers.”
“They’ve stopped shooting, at least.”
“Merde. They might be flanking us.”
Her neck prickled. She rolled onto her back, peering into the trees on the plateau while he watched the other direction.
“You cover our backs,” he said, creeping behind her. “Don’t fire unless you have to, but don’t hesitate, either. I’m going to create some chaos. On my say-so, we pull back to that other rock.”
She flipped the catch to full-auto as he’d shown her. God, she hoped he was wrong about them being flanked. She adjusted her grip and forced her breath to settle. It was just like on the range, shooting at targets. Except targets didn’t shoot back. She widened her eyes as if they were satellite dishes. The bigger the disc, the more it picked up, right? Movement wasn’t always immediately obvious—like before, seeing the soldiers among the trees, sometimes you had to sift through layers of darkness to catch it.
Gunfire burst out next to her. She jumped, her pulse rocketing. Flynn again. A shifting noise as he changed position. He fired again. A boom split the air, rocking the ground. Oh man. That was no gunshot.
A throaty scream echoed up the gully. Light flashed, right up to the plateau, illuminating the unmistakable figures of two men, dressed in camouflage, walking straight toward her, rifles panning left and right.
Her throat dried. She flattened, holding in her stomach—as if that would make all the difference. The explosion from the gully flared, like something was burning. One of the men looked directly at Flynn and raised his weapon. Shit. Shit. Should she fire?
The light flickered and cut out. Darkness swarmed back in. She blinked, blinded. Of course she should fire. But where had they gone? Around her, gunfire cracked, thwacking along the earth, pelting the rock. Incoming, not outgoing. Oh God, had her hesitation got Flynn killed? Where the hell were the men?
CHAPTER 6 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Screw it. Tess had an automatic rifle—no need to pinpoint the bull’s-eye. She squeezed the trigger, fighting the kickback as she peppered the trees. The recoil shook her skull, strobing her vision. Her hearing muffled. Far away a man was talking. She couldn’t release her finger—the trees were becoming men, one by one, then a dozen at a time, closing in from all sides.
Something gripped her forearm. “Stop.”
She let go of the rifle with a start. The voice—it had been Flynn’s. Her hands reverberated—hell, her whole body shook. The hordes of enemy morphed back into trees. Crap. Had there been any real soldiers?
“You got them,” Flynn said, his voice soaring down from the stratosphere, his hand tight on her arm. From the gully the screams continued—or was that in her ears? Gunfire rattled, like a million balloons bursting in her head, the shouts of a dozen men laid on top. “We need to move.”
He swept the backpack on and pulled her up. She’d shot the two goons? Were they dead? She grabbed her rifle and stumbled after Flynn, clutching his hand like a lifeline. So much for keeping her distance. Hell, they were deep in this together; they might as well get blown up together.
The screaming rose in pitch, and broke into a shout. “La. La! Laaaaa!”
No, in Arabic? A single shot rang out above the rest. The screaming stopped. Flynn’s hand tightened. A faint buzzing circled, like a toy helicopter. She clicked her jaw but her ears wouldn’t equalize. She couldn’t hear her feet hitting the ground, though she could feel them, all right.
Something moved through the trees. She yanked Flynn’s hand. Too late. A guy ran toward them, raising his rifle. Flynn released her, spun, lifted his weapon. Kaboom. Everything exploded into light—the ground, the air, the trees. A force rammed her back and shoved her down, slamming her nose and mouth into the earth. She couldn’t breathe—she was buried under something huge and heavy. A boulder? A tree?
Someone had hit a land mine. Her? Flynn? Hail pelted the dirt—not ice but shrapnel, sticks, stones. The hulk on top of her shifted and groaned. Oh God—Flynn? His breath rasped like his throat was crammed with gravel. Then he went still and silent. No, no, no. She was panting so hard she couldn’t tell if his chest was moving against her back. She forced her face to the side, scraping her cheek on stones.
A flame flickered, lighting up a swirling fog of dust, flaring just long enough for her to identify the shape in front of her face. An arm. Only an arm. Too skinny to be Flynn’s. Oh crap—hers? She clenched both hands, scraping her fingernails through the dirt. All fingers accounted for. Her feet were evidently still attached—nothing phantom about the pain shooting from her toes to her thighs.
She gagged on the smell of dirt, smoke and she didn’t want to think what else. Footsteps approached. Flynn remained dead still. She swallowed a mist of hot dust. Beyond the bloody arm she made out two figures, slinking closer. Quiet, urgent voices carried. One of them kicked something, with a fleshy thud. Any second, they’d spot her and Flynn. Her rifle poked into her ribs but she couldn’t budge, let alone grab it.
The voices trailed off. The goons didn’t seem to be coming closer. They were...retreating? No way. Flynn was in head-to-toe desert camo gear, no doubt coated with dust and debris—maybe they looked like a rock? We might get lucky if our camouflage works.
Dark silence dropped like a blanket. A gulp stuck in her throat. Too scared to whisper, she forced herself to stop panting, ignoring the need in her lungs. Was Flynn’s chest rising? Was he breathing? Be okay, be okay.
A guttural curse scraped out of him. She relaxed into the ground. A swearword had never sounded so beautiful. He lifted off her with a groan, like it was a huge effort. She lay still a second, the sudden absence of his weight giving her the sensation she was levitating.
“Too close,” he moaned. “You okay?”
“You die or you don’t,” she rasped, rolling onto her back. He leaned over her, a shadow against the stars. She patted down his chest, his ribs. Intact. “I thought you’d...” She swallowed.
“I’ll live. You good to walk?”
She lurched to a sitting position. “I think so. You sure caused chaos.”
He pushed up into a crouch, grabbed her upper arms and lifted them both to their feet. “It wasn’t all me, sunshine,” he whispered. “That was some crazy shooting of yours. Not bad for a—”
“I hope you’re not going to say, ‘Not bad for a woman.’”
He groaned, dropping contact. “Not bad for a woman who couldn’t bring herself to kill a mouse a few hours ago. Jeez, Germaine.”
She wiped her dusty hands on her dusty trousers. “Honestly? I have no idea what just happened. What was going on down below?” She nodded to the gully. “Before we moved, before those guys...” Before I became a killer. “Someone else stepped on a mine?”
“I exploded the one you found.”
“How...? Wait—the reflective strip. You shot it.”
He winced. “It was meant to be a diversion. They were closer than I’d thought.”
“The screaming—it stopped. Abruptly.”
In the shadows, something crunched. A walkie-talkie crackled with static. Flynn pulled her behind a tree, his arm tight around her waist. Her rifle bumped a branch. She caught it. Beyond the spindly foliage the outline of a man passed, his movements jerky, too fixated on scanning the ground to spot her and Flynn. Chaos was right. These guys were spooked. Hell, so was she.
Another guy appeared—no, a woman—farther away, creeping in the same direction. Flynn tightened his grip, his fingers digging into her hips, his muscles tensed against her, all the way across his arm and shoulder and down his thigh. Last night—was it only last night?—she’d run her hands down those long, powerful legs. Yes, focus on that, not the goons with guns passing a few feet away. Then, Flynn had been a very fit body. Now he was every other kind of sexy, too—smart, brave, witty, protective. An all-round menace.
Words buzzed from the walkie-talkie. Nothing discernible. The woman looked directly at their tree, frowning. Trying to make out the message, or trying to identify the suspiciously thick shape? Tess held her breath. She’s staring into space. She hissed something to her friend and they skulked off.
Tess stood rigid. The soldiers melted into the darkness, their silhouettes no longer distinguishable from the trees. As silence returned, her scalp tingled. She stretched and fisted her fingers to stop the trembling. It didn’t work.
“We’re clear,” Flynn said, releasing her. “Let’s move, fast and quiet.”
At the next boulder he pulled out a fresh water bottle and offered it. She bent double, resting her hands on her thighs. She could barely inhale, let alone drink.
“Can you hyperventilate a little quieter?” he whispered. He laid a hand on the middle of her back. She suppressed the instinct to flinch. “Like I say, it’s a numbers game. We’re the needles, this is the haystack. We’ll stay here a minute, let them sweep on ahead. Enough enemy have been through that they’ll mark off this sector as checked.”
She took a deep, settling breath, resisting the urge to let it out in a hiss as she would to calm her nerves before a live report from the field. Straightening, she took the water. As she gulped, he slid her rifle off her back.
“If luck’s on our side, they’ll assume we’re pressing on toward that hill,” he said, ejecting the clip. “You have one more burst left.”
“Thought you didn’t believe in luck.”
“I didn’t say that. I said we create our own luck—and we have.” He checked his own clip.
Luck. There was a relative term. Was she unlucky to be stuck in a minefield, stalked by an army of goons, or lucky to be out of the dungeon with a kick-ass soldier on her side? Probably on her side.
Definitely on her side. Sheesh.
And the fact she was growing more attracted to him by the minute—would that prove lucky or unlucky?
Huh. Luck? Plain stupidity, more like. About time she cured her weakness for alpha military crap.
After today. Today, alpha military crap was keeping her alive, in body and hope. Next week, when all this was a memory of the did-that-really-happen kind, she’d make a psychiatric appointment. A lobotomy should take care of it.
He silently took the water bottle and slipped it into the pack, and handed back her rifle. “We keep going west, toward the village. You okay to lead? If you can concentrate on the ground, I can look out for enemy.”
“Oui, Lieutenant.”
She stared downward until her eyes adjusted enough to make out—or perhaps imagine—individual stones among the shades of black, then crept out from behind the rock. It felt like a boa constrictor was wrapping around her chest. Flynn grabbed her arm and pulled her into him. Oh God, what now?
“Not on the ridge,” he growled. “We stay under it. No silhouettes.”
She scooted downhill. They made steady progress, skirting suspect shapes on the ground—too round, too square, too regular, too pointy. She was probably seeing things, but at least it gave her something to focus on. Every foot they traveled eased the tightness in her stomach. Maybe this would be a lucky day.
Don’t say that.
Thank God for Flynn dropping into that hole—he might not believe in luck, but for her that’d been a blessing from above. Even if she’d managed to get out by herself, she’d have been caught in minutes. Her mind didn’t work nearly as quickly as his—but then, this kind of thing was his job. In her work she didn’t do anything—she dug into other people’s experiences and put them into words and pictures. All talk, no action.
Was that why she liked military guys? They were all action, from boots to buzz cut. Flynn must have some interesting stories—starting with his own history. Drawing that out would be a challenge, for sure.
After twenty minutes, the terrain began to level and they passed another triangular sign, facing away from them. She pinched her eyes shut for a second. Out of the minefield. Thank God. Flynn nodded as she pointed at the sign, but his focus was fixed ahead. Down a slight slope, light filtered through the thinning trees. Male voices trickled up. She squinted as Flynn inched ahead, the weak beam drilling into her brain, right behind her eyes. Two lights—headlights? Yes, a hefty vehicle parked at an angle. One of al-Thawra’s white Ford Ranger trucks. Crap.
Flynn made the get-down signal and dropped noiselessly. She crunched into a stack of dry leaves, silently cursing. He crawled over.
“They have NVGs—night vision goggles. Only one of them has them on his eyes right now. They’re probably part of a perimeter block.”
As her sight adjusted, she made out one of the guy’s faces, partially obscured by a cap but uplit by a mobile phone screen under his nose. Her jaw tightened. No mistaking the scar twisting his lip or his outsize military jacket. It probably still had her blood on it. The other guy looked familiar, too.
“Definitely Hamid’s guys,” she whispered. “So what now?”
He looked over his shoulder. “We can’t risk gunfire. Our advantage is that Hamid doesn’t know where we are and I’d rather not give it up. And we’re low on ammo.” He fell silent, frowning. Take all the time you need. She sure didn’t have any ideas.
“There are two of them,” he said eventually. “We’ll have more chance if I can split them up.”
He shrugged the pack off his back. In the silence, the zip roared like a fighter jet. Neither goon moved.
Flynn slipped a bottle out, unscrewed the lid and started shoveling dirt and small stones inside. It was the bottle she’d emptied down her top. When it was full, he tested its weight, scanned the terrain and crawled backward—into the minefield. He motioned for her to follow.
Goddammit. She followed him behind a prickly bush, her shoulders tensing. When would this night be over? How long since they’d busted out—thirty minutes? Several hours?
“There are more headlights to the north and the south,” he whispered. “Stationary, like these ones.”
“We’re surrounded.” The words caught in her throat.
“We only have to get past these two guys. Wait here and cover me—but only shoot if you’re about to die. If this doesn’t work, you can...” He glanced left and right, as if expecting to spot a TARDIS. “It’ll work.”
“What are you going to do?”
Silence.
“Right—you’ll tell me if it works. Wouldn’t want to blow your karma.” She raised a palm. “Not that you believe in it.”
“I’ll signal for you to come out when it’s safe.” He gripped the neck of the bottle and experimented with flicking movements.
“Be careful—the guy with the phone...” She inhaled. “He’s a psycho. Well, they’re all psychos, but that guy...”
“What did he do to you?”
She trailed her gaze to her feet, which pulsed in pain on cue.
His jaw went rigid. “I’ll treat him with extra care. Stay put.”
Flynn left the backpack and retreated into the minefield. She screwed up her face. Watching him creep through it was somehow more stressful than going in herself. He reached a clearing and hefted the bottle. It arced high into the air and landed with a cracking thud in bushes a couple of hundred feet away, on the edge of the scrub. Ah. Another diversion.
The psycho looked up from his phone. He waved the other guy away in the direction of the noise and leaned into the cab through the open passenger door. A radio crackled, silenced as he spoke into it, and crackled again. At what point would he call in reinforcements? Surely they’d first check that it wasn’t an animal?
So Flynn planned to pounce on the goon who was checking out the noise, then draw in Psycho and grab him, too? But wouldn’t Psycho call for support rather than go in alone? She chewed her lip. And wouldn’t the first goon see Flynn coming anyway, through his goggles?
Overthinking. Any plan was better than none. Trust him. Focus on covering him, not second-guessing him. She eased her rifle into position.
Minutes passed. Not even a twig snapped. Her heart felt like it was leaving bruises on her rib cage. The second guy had disappeared from her sight line. Psycho leaned back on the hood of the truck between the headlights and pulled on his goggles. Surely he’d see two figures, not one? From there he could open fire—she wouldn’t put it past him to take out his own guy, just to get Flynn. He yelled. His friend replied from out of sight. Oh God, Flynn. Stay alive.
She caught a flicker of movement behind the bed of the truck. Crap, a third man—bigger than the others. Flynn wouldn’t have factored him in. She fixed him in the scope, finger light on the trigger. Don’t shoot unless you have to—but don’t hesitate, either.
He disappeared from view behind the truck. Still no movement at the tree line. The beam of the farthest headlight flickered as a dark shape shot past. The new guy. She swung the barrel, searching for him. Psycho jerked backward. A column of light pinned two grappling figures, one wearing desert camos. Whoa. She eased her finger off the trigger. The new guy was Flynn.
He had Psycho in a headlock, his other hand clamped on his wrist, trying to wrestle away a handgun. Psycho shouted. They lurched out of the light and disappeared behind the truck. Scuffling, a meaty crack, a thud. Oh God. Dust puffed across the headlight beams.
The other goon ran out of the scrub, rifle leveled, shouting into a comms device on his shoulder. Hell, even if Flynn were winning, this guy would take him out. And then reinforcements would come...
She couldn’t just watch. Screw Flynn’s orders.
She jumped up and yelped, as if she’d hurt herself. The guy turned. She let out another screech and flattened onto the dirt, panting, directing her shaky fingers onto the trigger.
The goon’s face snapped up, scanning the bushes. Behind him, a figure staggered out from behind the truck, wearing NVGs and an oversize military jacket, tugging down his cap. Psycho. She swallowed a squeak. That crack she’d heard... Psycho wouldn’t have walked away if Flynn were alive. Tears stung. Shit, shit, shit. He was dead, and she was screwed.
No. She still had a chance, if she took out both goons before they started shooting.
One burst.
Don’t hesitate.
CHAPTER 7 (#ufeb3a2a7-b9b2-5ca6-b5fc-c04c535bd1d9)
Tess blinked away moisture and lined up her shot. If Flynn had died, she’d damn well ensure it wasn’t for nothing. When her story went to air, his sacrifice would help save hundreds of thousands of lives. That would mean something to him, even if he’d deny it.
Oh God, she really didn’t want him to be dead. The second guy glanced at Psycho and returned focus to the scrub, shouting and pointing—right at her. Her nape crawled. If this worked, she could steal the truck. And go where? It was Flynn who was good at winging it. The only things she could improvise were words, and she didn’t always nail the first take.
Hanging back in the shadows, Psycho looked more intimidating than ever. He strode up to the second guy, who was raising his rifle her way.
One burst, right to left—the gunman first, then Psycho. No second takes. She nestled her finger on the trigger and tensed, bracing for the kickback. Now.
A flash of movement, and both men dropped. What the hell? Psycho had tackled the other guy and they were wrestling. Psycho raised his handgun and crunched the butt into his friend’s forehead. The impact rippled through him, and he crumpled, still. Psycho ripped away the rifle and tossed it. He flipped the guy over and forced his arms behind his back. What now? Should she still shoot?
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Brynn Kelly
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Tensions sizzle in this electrifying novel guaranteed to capture your heart and take your breath away. Fans of Julie Garwood, Suzanne Brockmann and Jayne Ann Krentz will devour this action-packed, emotionally stunning tour de force, where every page reveals another damning secret and daring gamble.Rotting in an African dungeon is the last place journalist Tess Newell expected to find herself. As she′s held hostage by the terrorist group she’s investigating, Tess’s salvation—and temptation—arrives in the form of another prisoner. A French Foreign Legionnaire with a sinful smile and too many secrets to be anything but dangerous. Yet she knows he’s her only hope of surviving.The Legion is the only family Flynn has. His sanctuary and his purgatory, after years spent in hell. When a mission goes south and Flynn is captured, it’s not the enemy that worries him, but the brazen, alluring reporter whose prying questions threaten to bring down his world—and the walls he’s built around his heart.Yet after a daring escape, Flynn must risk it all and go on the run with Tess to retrieve the evidence she needs. The chemistry between them threatens to detonate but, with the enemy fast closing in, time is running out to unravel the truth from the lies in this deadly conspiracy…