by Vicki Hinze
Reese’s eyes stretched wide. “You’re going to seal her in there alive?”
“Of course.” Kunz walked over to the table and opened a metal box that had been sitting there untouched for two days. “It’s only civilized to give her time to make her peace, hmm?”
Amanda tried not to shudder, but it was obvious that the real torture was only now to begin.
“I said to put down the gun, Paul. Hostility doesn’t become you.” He nodded toward the door. “Go get someone to see to your face.”
Reese walked to the door still cupping the blood-soaked handkerchief over his wound. “I’m glad you’re going to die a slow death, Amanda West.”
“Do think of me, Paul.” She smiled at his feeble parting shot. “Every time you look in the mirror.”
He slammed the door shut. The windows above rattled. Kunz took her measure. “You’re very astute, Captain. Few things could upset Paul as much as damaging his face.” Kunz’s eyes sparkled respect. “And you’re clearly not a coward.” That seemed to intrigue him. “Few men have refused to respond to Paul’s inquiries, knowing they would next face mine. You’re the first woman to do so, actually.”
She hiked an eyebrow. “What shall we do to celebrate?”
He looked back over his shoulder, saw her defiance, smiled, and filled a syringe. When he tapped it, a small amount of fluid spurted and soaked into the floor. “I have a special treat for you,” he said, walking over and then injecting her. “In honor of the occasion.”
The stick in her arm burned. There were other needle tracks on her inner arm. How had they gotten there? She couldn’t remember. Stark terror shot through her. This injection would either kill her or cost her everything.
Kunz smiled.
The scumbag knew. He knew, and it amused him. Her temper exploded, and it took everything she had to restrain herself. He had taken everything else, she would not give him that, too. Panic seized her, contorted her muscles. No. No fear. No fear. You will find a way around this, Princess. You will not show this trash fear.
“There you go.” He pulled out the needle, and then backed away. “Contrary to what you might believe, in your time with us, you’ve been very cooperative. We’ve learned all we need to know from you, Captain. For now.”
He wasn’t bluffing. And if he wasn’t bluffing, she’d definitely breached security. What had she told him? When had she told him anything? She’d never seen the man until today. He was bluffing—had to be—and he was too good at it, making her doubt herself. “So now I die,” she said. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, but what did you give me?”
“Peace.” He brushed her cheek with a feathery-light fingertip.
It sent icy chills down her neck and through her chest. When she didn’t cringe as he obviously expected, respect lighted in his eyes. “I’d love to stay and enjoy the day with you, but you’ve caught me at an inopportune time. I’m very sorry to say that this will be clean and quick. You would have been intriguing, I’m sure.” He let his gaze roll over her, prone on the floor. “But my loss is your gain. You really should thank me for it.”
“Thank you,” she said and meant it. He loved torture and she’d seen file photos of what was left of some of his victims. She was truly grateful to be spared.
He picked up on her sincerity. “You’re welcome, Captain West.” Walking back to the table, he put the empty syringe into a box. “The miracles of modern medicine amuse me.” He waved a loose hand. “Incidentally, that injection won’t kill you. It’ll just make you sleep for a while so you don’t injure any more of my men. You’ll wake up, and then—well, you’ll see. No need to make peace with your God just yet. You’ll have a few days to decide your fate.”
“My fate?”
“Yes. Your reaction to it will be most amusing to watch.” Puzzled by his cryptic comments, she shot him a questioning look. “My reaction to my fate will be amusing?” What in the world could he mean by that?
“You’ve got a dilemma before you, Captain. The dilemma is entertaining, but your reaction to your fate will be by far the most intriguing aspect of your—shall we say, situation.”
She opened her mouth to snap at him, to inform him with unwavering certainty that her fate was her own and none of his business, but her tongue was too thick; she couldn’t speak. He droned on, but she couldn’t make out his words. His voice faded, as if echoing from deep in the belly of a cave. Amanda strained to keep watch, but her eyelids wouldn’t stay open.
“She’s safe,” he eventually told the guards. “Bury her—remember, a tomb, not a grave. The good captain has a fondness for aboveground boxes.”
The box. She might have groaned, though she couldn’t be certain the sound was hers and not the guards laughing. The box was the thing she hated most—and the thing people like Kunz would imagine she feared most.
She did fear it. But she also had learned young to hide in the wretched thing to avoid being found and beaten. Inside the box was the last place her father ever would have thought to look for her. And that Kunz didn’t know.
Yet he did know about the box. But how? The only other person in the world who knew about it was her father, and she had avoided him for years. Even today she didn’t trust herself to see him and not kill him. And never in her adult life had she given anyone the means to connect them. So how had Thomas Kunz known about her father or the box?
Even beaten to within an inch of her life, she would shield that information. She had never admitted it to another human being—often, not even to herself.
But if her father hadn’t told Kunz about the box, and she hadn’t told him, then how did he know about it? As the blackness overcame her, all she could think was, How?
Amanda awakened in pitch-black darkness.
Her mouth felt like cotton, her head throbbed. She lay wedged in a box, but this one wasn’t wood, it was brick, and the mortar was still wet.
The demented freak actually had bricked her into a tomb.
That was her first thought. Which demented freak? was her second. Somehow she knew it had been Kunz, knew he’d told her he was going to do so. But for some reason, she couldn’t remember the actual telling.
They’d taken her out of the chair; it wouldn’t fit with her in the small area. But her hands were still tied. She worked the ropes loose with her teeth. Finally, they fell free.
Sliding her hand along the wall, over the rough brick, she felt the wet mortar stick to her fingers. “Where’s a good spiked heel when you need one?”
She felt all along the perimeter of the sealed tomb, dragging her fingers through the dirt. Nearly through working the grid, she felt a bump, backed up, and felt—a stick? No, spear-tipped. Feather. An arrow. It was an arrow.
Reese collected arrows. He’d buried it with her as a final dig, proof that he had won.
But he hadn’t won. Not yet. Not...yet.
Seeking the wettest mortar, she hoped that it was away from whomever was watching her, if anyone, and dared to hope, too, that they didn’t hear the noise. “You will dig yourself out of this tomb, Princess,” she whispered to herself, using the hated name her father had called her. “You will live. You will kill Paul Reese for hitting you. And you will capture Thomas Kunz and steal his life for stealing yours.”
It took forever. She slept, worked, slept and worked and worried about what to do. Her knuckles were raw, her stomach turning over on itself, and she was so thirsty she thought she might die from that alone. Finally, she punched through the wall. Bracing, she drew up her knees, got leverage, and then kicked. Before long, she’d kicked out a hole large enough to crawl through.
Wary, expecting to be leveled or shot by a guard as soon as her feet touched the ground, she dived through the opening, rolled over the crumbled brick and concrete. A chunk dug into her hip and pain shot through her side.
“An actual cemetery.” She looked around at row upon row of graves and tombs, reflecting in the full moonlight. Seeing no one, she hurriedly stacked the loose bricks
back into the opening, hoping to lessen the odds of her escape being quickly noticed, then crept from tombstone to tombstone to get a fix on her location.
James St. Claire
1926-1959
Jacob Charles Anderson
Beloved Father and Husband
Alison Hayes
Age: 3 Blessed Days.
“Safely into the arms of Angels.”
American, Amanda thought. Definitely American. The smell of ash trees and wildflowers filled her nose. Somewhere in the South, but not Georgia. In the Carolinas, maybe. She eased out of the cemetery and into the adjoining woods, her left arm throbbing.
Pausing, she twisted it in the moonlight. Dark bruises muddied her arm, wrist to elbow. It was swollen and caked with blood near the thumb side of her wrist. It was a wound. An IV puncture wound.
Baffled, she just stared at her arm. When had she had an intravenous tube?
Her stomach soured. She frantically looked around. She’d been in the desert. Now she was in the woods. Where was she?
A road stretched out up ahead. Deserted, no buildings—nothing but woods and empty road in all directions. She walked down it until she reached a crossroad and saw a sign. Freedom Lane and Liberty Way?
Amanda came to a dead stop. This couldn’t be. She’d been somewhere in the Middle East. Somewhere in the desert. How had she gotten to a North Carolina cemetery? To a CIA extraction point, for God’s sake?
Kunz was rubbing her nose in it. He was betting she would hide the truth about this lapse in her memory to save her job. He knew she was a loner, that her job was all she had, and if she reported the memory lapse, she’d lose her security clearance. A S.A.S.S. operative without a security clearance was worthless. She’d have nothing.
Dread dragged at her belly. Thomas Kunz knew far more than S.A.S.S. or the CIA believed—about her, and obviously about U.S. clandestine operations.
Stunned, reeling from the implications of all this, she checked the moon. Dawn would come in about two hours. She walked off the road into the open clearing. A chopper would be by before daybreak. This was a daily drop zone she and other intelligence sources used often. There was an artesian well here. Water!
She ran to it, drank thirstily, then drowned her face and washed in the cool water. As it sluiced over her, she sighed. It felt like Heaven had rained down on her.
The chopper arrived before she stopped dripping water. She wrung out the edge of her shirt, signaled, and the chopper set down in the clearing.
What had Kunz done to her? That she didn’t know roused demons of being violated and abused and her hatred for not being in control. Her skin went clammy cold and her heart raced, thumping like a jackhammer in her head.
What are you going to do about this?
She should report it immediately to her boss, Colonel Drake.
You’ll be fired on the spot.
But if she didn’t report it, S.A.S.S. missions and operatives could be vulnerable. Kunz had gotten her from the Middle East to Carolina without her knowing it. Was it so hard to imagine him getting her to talk, to breach security and identify and compromise other agents and missions?
There’s no easy way out.
There didn’t seem to be even a reasonable way out.
There isn’t. You’re screwed.
Totally.
Kunz took a huge risk, leaving you this close to a CIA drop zone. He had to be extremely confident you’d hide the truth. How could he be so confident?
She didn’t have a clue. At the moment, she didn’t know herself what she was going to do.
When she boarded the chopper, a stranger sat in the pilot’s seat. “Who are you? Where’s Harry?”
“I’m Jim.” The pilot blinked hard and fast. “Harry’s dead, ma’am.”
She plopped down in her seat and buckled in. “Dead?”
“Yes, ma’am. He crashed in Iraq about two months ago.”
The man had lost his mind. “What are you pulling here?”
Puzzled, he asked, “Ma’am?”
“Harry was alive and well less than a week ago.” She challenged him. “Code?”
He reeled off his security-clearance code and then asked, “Would you verify your identity, ma’am?”
“Captain Amanda West,” she said. “Alpha Tango. One-three-five-eight-one-two.”
“I was sure by your pictures, but—but—” he sputtered, stalled, and then finally went on. “You can’t be Captain West, ma’am. It’s not possible.”
Oh, for God’s sake. She was exhausted, starved, soaked and out of patience. “It’s possible. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“No—I mean, yes, ma’am. But you can’t be here. I mean, how did you get here, ma’am? You’ve been MIA.”
“Yeah, well. This jerk bricked me in a tomb.” She shook her head, tried not to think about Harry. She’d liked him. She’d mourn him as soon as she regrouped. Right now, it took all she had to hold it together. “It took me a while to make it out.”
“You had rations in a tomb?”
She looked at Jim as if he’d lost his mind. “I had the tip of a broken arrow.”
He thought a long moment, his sober expression eerie in the green light cast from the chopper’s control panel. “So you’re saying,” he spoke slowly, “that you haven’t been on an insertion mission. You’ve been in a tomb. And you’ve lived in that tomb without food or water for three months?”
“That’s right—no, that’s not what I’m—” Cold chills swam up and down her backbone, set the roof of her mouth to tingling. “Did you say, three months?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He nodded. “That’s how long you’ve been missing.”
“But—but that’s outrageous.” She’d been tortured, injected with something, and then awakened in the tomb and dug her way out. Okay, she didn’t remember the IV, but she sure would have remembered something in three months. “Three days, maybe. But not three months.”
“I’m telling you, it’s been three months since we received any transmissions from you, ma’am. I should know when you went missing. I flew the search team who went in looking for you.”
Three months? She couldn’t wrap her mind around it. How could that be possible? Why would Kunz want to knock her out of commission for three months? And again, what exactly had he done?
Chapter Two
“Kate?” Amanda waited for her fellow S.A.S.S. operative, Captain Katherine Kane, to look up from her desk.
Relief flooded her solemn eyes. She stood up and hugged Amanda. “You’re back.” She clapped Amanda’s shoulder, her turbulent expression at odds with her quiet features. “Good grief, Amanda. Three months and not a sign. Not a word. We thought you were dead.”
Kate, the unit’s bomb-squad specialist with expertise in biological and chemical weapons, was the taller of the two at five-eight, with green eyes and streaked blond hair. Amanda’s eyes were blue and her hair was long and deep brown. Both women were in good physical condition—they had to be. “I thought I was dead, too, for a while.” She nodded toward Colonel Sally Drake’s office door. “Is she waiting for me?”
Kate nodded. “Jim radioed the tower from the chopper. They let her know you were on the way in.”
Well, here it came. No moment of truth waits forever. She had to choose: lie and stay safe, or tell the truth and be sacrificed.
“You don’t look happy to be back.”
Amanda shrugged. “Overload.”
“Rough?” Empathy shone in Kate’s eyes. She knew what could happen to an exposed operative stuck in the field.
“Yeah.” Amanda didn’t hesitate or bother trying to minimize it. It’d be futile. “Let’s talk later, after I see Colonel Drake.”
“We’ll have dinner.” They were both loners, like so many of the S.A.S.S. operatives, but Kate seemed to know that Amanda’s first night home would be especially difficult. Flashbacks to captivity were most potent and disorienting in the early days after release.
“Amanda.” Colonel Drake
appeared at her office door. In her late forties, the S.A.S.S. commander looked lean and mean. She was a redhead; her hair cropped short and spiked, bold and brassy. The color and style suited her and her personality.
“How was your vacation?”
Drake was already trying to cover Amanda’s back. She was a good woman and a great commander. “Fabulous.” Amanda smiled. “Check out the tan.” She walked into Colonel Drake’s inner sanctum and sat down.
The colonel took her chair behind her wide desk, dropped the light tone and got serious. “You okay?”
The moment of truth. “Yes, I am. But we have a problem.”
“Scale?”
Colonel Drake assigned everything a value from one to ten. “Twenty.”
Her serious expression turned grim. “Enough said. What do you need?”
Amanda nearly sighed her relief. She didn’t know what had happened, and if Colonel Drake let her report that, then the colonel would have no choice but to act on it. This was a whacked-out version of “don’t ask, don’t tell”—as dangerous as it gets, considering—but it was the one chance Amanda would have to keep her life intact and she grabbed it with both hands.
In a display of ultimate trust, the colonel was giving Amanda a chance to do what she had to do to protect the interests of the U.S. and S.A.S.S. without sacrificing herself or her job. But was that possible?
Amanda wasn’t sure. She licked at her lips. “I need to see the medical officer right away.”
“Can it wait until after the mission out-briefing?” Colonel Drake frowned.
“No, ma’am. Time is of the essence. I need some blood work done.”
Drake leaned forward, laced her hands atop her desk. “Were you raped, Amanda?”
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t lie to protect her own interests and leave S.A.S.S. wide open. Kunz must have believed she would—her career was all she had to lose—or he never would have allowed her to escape from the tomb. He needed blackmail fodder. Something important enough to her that she’d agree to spy for him in exchange for keeping the truth about her blackouts buried.