Catalyst (Flashpoint Book 2)

by Rachel Grant

  A sinking feeling had settled in her gut when her captor had turned his truck around and headed west. The rough roads meant they were driving through the marsh, on tracks that had never been smoothed by any type of machinery.

  They were in the no-man’s-land, heading toward the market. And she knew with a certainty that chilled her on a humid night that tomorrow she would be sold to the highest bidder.

  4

  Bastian took stock of their gear. Night vision goggles, weapons, ammunition, water, food, a hefty amount of cash. Just what everyone in this war-torn country needed. Add to that radios, maps, and a satellite phone and they were ready for a few fun-filled days sightseeing in South Sudan.

  UN peacekeepers provided his A-Team with four battered SUVs. Two would search to the north and northeast. Two would go south under Bastian’s command.

  Ezra approached Bastian as he climbed into the vehicle. “Find her,” the aid worker said. “Promise me you’ll find Brie.”

  Bastian gave Ezra a sharp nod, wondering if he was in love with her. If she loved him back, then Bastian would deliver her into Ezra’s arms. All he cared about was that she survived.

  Two hours after dawn had broken across the central African country, they alternated between driving and searching the side of the road on foot, finding traces of what they believed was Brie Stewart’s passage at regular intervals.

  Even though the swamp didn’t show footsteps, her trail was easy to follow. Broken reeds, ripped lily pads, snapped branches lit her path. Easy tracking for a Special Forces team. Hell, they taught foreign soldiers how to do this type of tracking.

  Ripley, Espinosa, and Goldberg were mucking about the swamp’s edge while Cal, Pax, and Bastian searched along the higher ground. Pax let out a whistle indicating he found something. Cal and Bastian joined him at the side of the dirt track that passed for a road.

  “Boot print,” Pax said, pointing to the tread mark that had become familiar in the hours since they’d been following her steps. “She stepped up to scout. From the angle, she returned to the swamp, going that way.” He pointed, and Bastian saw the faint depression where reeds had been crushed.

  Bastian nodded, his gaze to the north, following the path she’d taken. “We’re ten miles from the USAID building.” He was strangely proud she’d made it this far while men hunted her. She was smart. Determined. Even if she did leave a trail. Most people would.

  “What’s the deal with her, Bas?” Pax asked. His breaking protocol by using Bastian’s first name was a signal that this was an off-the-record sort of query.

  “Nothing,” he said brusquely.

  “Bullshit,” Cal said. “You told Cap you didn’t fuck her. Was that a lie?”

  “No lie.” He took a deep breath. He owed these men the truth, not that there was much to tell, but they were risking their lives to save Brie Stewart. “I recognized her. When I saw her with Savvy at Camp Citron, I knew exactly who she was. And I—” He paused. Own it. “I hated her for the things she did when she worked for Prime Energy and let her know it.”

  “If you dislike her, then why insist on leading the team to find her?” Pax asked.

  Espinosa, Goldberg, and Ripley climbed the bank to join the conversation. Fair enough. They deserved the truth too.

  He shook his head. “That’s the thing. Something about her got to me. We didn’t even talk all that long. But in the end, I felt like a shit. Like she really has changed, and I was kicking an aid worker—who’s providing relief to starving people in fucking South Sudan of all places—in the face.

  “I mean, who does that? She could live anywhere in the world, eat off golden plates, and binge on truffles and caviar. Yet she’s living and working here?” He spread his arms wide to encompass the humid, mosquito-filled swampy landscape. “After we met, I did some research, and learned fun facts about her work here. For instance, she only had electricity when the fuel truck arrived to fill the tank for their generator—which happened maybe once a month. During the rainy season, the truck can’t get there at all. Water is scarce in the dry season because the streams might have the cholera bacteria, and mosquitoes carrying the malaria parasite thrive around water sources.

  “And I haven’t even mentioned the number of rapes committed by government and rebel forces, or the special risks to aid workers. Some have been abducted—by government forces—and large ransoms demanded. When foreign governments refuse to pay, they demand money from the oil companies, who are trying to restart their drilling operations in the midst of war.” He gazed down the narrow road, not seeing the trees or ruts. In his mind, he saw too-wide brown eyes and a flawless unfortunate nose.

  He let out a slow breath. “She’s been here seven months now, and by all accounts intends to stay through the rainy season. As far as I can tell, she’s the real deal.”

  “She could be trying to generate positive PR for Prime Energy,” Espinosa said.

  “If that were the case, wouldn’t Prime Energy have her splashed all over their website?” Ripley asked.

  “Not if they wanted to keep her safe,” Cal said. “They could be waiting until she’s home again and then promote the hell out of her charity work.”

  Bastian shrugged. “Hell, it’s possible this whole fucking abduction was arranged by PE. But what if they didn’t? What if she’s genuine? Savvy said she’s been working for USAID for five years. This isn’t her first deployment, it’s just the most dangerous, and PE never promoted her work before.”

  “Won’t she be surprised you’re the man leading her rescue,” Cal said.

  Bastian forced a smile and aimed for jocular. “I’m sure she’d prefer a SEAL like Lieutenant Fallon.”

  “Don’t they all, though,” Espinosa said.

  Pax grinned. “The smart ones prefer Special Forces.” He nodded toward the road ahead. “Speaking of, I promised Morgan we’d rendezvous in Rome before she leaves Europe. SOCOM approved my leave request for next week—which means I need to get my ass back to Camp Citron so I don’t miss my vacation. Let’s find Brie Stewart and get the hell out of South Sudan.”

  With that, the best damn half A-team that had ever served in the US Army resumed tracking the reformed, quirky aid worker Bastian was desperate to find.

  5

  Even though she’d expected it, Brie still couldn’t quite believe her situation. She was in a slave market. A real, honest-to-fucking-Satan slave market.

  How could a place like this exist in the twenty-first century?

  Children were gathered in small clusters, connected by rope. Some girls wore bright-colored, traditional Sudanese tobes, while others wore nothing at all. Flies gathered around their eyes, and they wore the dazed look of starvation and shock.

  Bile rose in Brie’s throat. The girls were as young as nine and likely faced sexual slavery. The boys were maybe a year or two older, and those who escaped sexual slavery were destined to work in diamond mines in the Central African Republic or work for the oil companies here in South Sudan.

  Children—of both genders—might be sent to Qatar to work as domestic servants, to Poland for sexual servitude, or Saudi Arabia and Yemen for forced begging. She’d known this market existed, but seeing the children was still shocking. Horrifying.

  There were no adult women. Where were the mothers? Slaughtered by the slavers before their children’s eyes?

  Or were mothers frantically searching the bush and Sudd for their babies?

  Brie wanted to save every child here. Children who should be home with their families. In school. At the park trying to catch Pokémon. Or being told by their parents that they couldn’t wear a sexy vampire costume on Halloween because dammit, nine-year-olds shouldn’t be sexualized.

  But these children had never heard of Pokémon or Halloween. They’d never known the joy of dressing up as a superhero and demanding candy from strangers.

  Really, there was nothing better than Halloween. It combined the joy of pretending to be something greater than one’s self and chocola
te. She wished every child on the planet could experience Halloween at least once. These kids had likely never even had candy.

  Horrifying that they’d only known war and famine, and now they would know slavery.

  Once upon a time, she’d naïvely gone to grad school so she could understand the perspective of the indigenous groups that were being harmed by Prime Energy practices all over the world. Her fellow students had rightly scoffed that, coming from the ultimate privilege as she did, she would never understand. Not really.

  Now, here she was, at a slave market, to be sold to the highest bidder. The anthropologist in her recognized she was being presented with an opportunity to understand. The terrified part of her told the academic to fuck off.

  This shit was getting real.

  Upon arriving at the market, she was searched by a guard—a white man who only grunted his commands, giving no hint as to his native language or accent—then fitted with a metal collar with a six-foot chain. After obtaining her leash, the Nuer man who’d captured her led her across the sweltering market, heading toward a series of thatched-roof huts in the market center.

  Dozens of children sat in clusters of three and four as men shouted their attributes in Arabic and English. Some slavers were white; others were dark and bore scars that indicated a dozen different ethnic groups.

  At least a dozen buyers milled through the market, looking over the children. These men were of different ethnic backgrounds, with every shade of skin represented. None bore tribal scars. Were they Europeans and Americans who ran the diamond mines and oil companies, or were they in the market for sex workers?

  Foreigners looted the continent of both resources and citizens. They took the oil, diamonds, gold, and other precious metals from Africa, knowing full well that nothing trickled down to the citizens of the countries they raped.

  Rape was an apt word. These men violently took what they wanted. Government leaders profited. Their armies were well funded, but not by tax dollars. The rulers of most of the resource-rich countries of Africa didn’t need the consent of the people to govern, because they didn’t need tax dollars. They got their money—and therefore their armies—from oil, diamond, and other mineral revenues.

  With citizens removed from the governing equation, there was no need to give a crap what the masses needed. So the people of Africa lived far below the poverty line, while their dictators enjoyed lavish wealth.

  These children would suffer so their dictator could entertain men like her father at their dinner table. Men like Viktor Drugov and his son, Nikolai, the Russian oligarchs her father had sold his soul to years ago.

  Today, she would suffer with the children. A fitting justice—to have a Prime pay this price, except her father wouldn’t give a damn if he knew. So all the horror would be hers, and hers alone.

  Was she to be a worker or sex slave?

  Who was she kidding? She would be a sex slave. There was no hope she’d be anything less horrible.

  Damn, she wanted to talk with the children who’d been ripped from their families. She wanted to hold them and tell them what they faced wasn’t sex. Sex was something shared. A joining. A joy.

  Rape was something taken. Even if they—and she—acquiesced to avoid further pain, it was rape. There was no shame in not fighting. Whatever it takes to survive. Even if the only option was to submit.

  Survival was paramount.

  She stumbled, and the Nuer yanked on the chain, jerking her forward.

  She wanted to save all the children she passed, but the truth was, she couldn’t even save herself.

  Bastian rolled his shoulders, looking at the road ahead and behind, then finally down again. There on the ground in front of him were Brie’s footprints. They faded into drag marks, then disappeared next to fresh tire tracks on the muddy road.

  They’d suspected it, but here was the proof. She’d been caught.

  The tire tracks turned in a U, heading north again. There were no paths to the east that weren’t cut off by swamp and river. The other half of his team was searching north of the burned USAID facility. That left west. There’d been precious few roads that trailed west toward the savannah, which narrowed their search area considerably.

  West, deep into the marshy grasslands that concealed a slave market.

  “We need better intel on the market,” he said to Ripley, who had the satellite phone. “Is it controlled by rebel or government forces? What tribe holds the power here?” Alan had said neither Dinka nor Nuer controlled the area, but he was an aid worker, not privy to intel gathered by intelligence agencies. “Get Savannah James on the phone.”

  A moment later, they had Savvy on speaker. “Both rebel and government forces have been driven out of the area. SIGINT indicates there could be Russian players.” SIGINT was signal intelligence—data gathered by intercepting signals.

  “How are you getting SIGINT out here?” Ripley asked. A fine point, considering that only satellite phones worked in this electronic dead zone.

  “I’m not. The intercepts are elsewhere, but we think the communications pertain to the market.”

  “What about human intelligence?” Espinosa asked. “Has the Russian connection been supported by personal accounts?”

  “Brie Stewart was my best hope for HUMINT on the market.”

  The idea that Brie could right now be taking in the mother lode of intel twisted Bastian’s gut. He knew this was Savvy’s job—and Brie must’ve been game or she wouldn’t have been at Camp Citron—but Savvy never should have asked someone untrained in espionage to report on a black market that trafficked in weapons, drugs, and children.

  “So it’s possible Russians are backing the market, providing security, laundering money, and who knows what else,” Cal said.

  “Yes,” Savvy said.

  “Wasn’t there some sort of alliance between Prime Energy and Russia’s Druneft?” Bastian asked, again wondering if her abductors had known she was a Prime.

  “The alliance fell through about six months ago,” Savvy said. “Now the two companies are competing for the same pipeline concession.”

  “So this could be about Brie’s family connections and a business rivalry.”

  “We can’t rule anything out. But if someone found out Brie is a Prime, she never suspected. And she was careful. After you recognized her, she considered not going back because she was compromised. I convinced her you would keep her secret.”

  He appreciated that there was no question in Savvy’s tone.

  “We need the coordinates for the market, ASAP,” Cal said.

  “Satellites are searching as we speak. We will find it.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you find it before?” Bastian asked. “You’ve had, what, a month?”

  “It wasn’t high priority. We have no role in the market and had no reason to believe an American would end up on the auction block. And you might recall we spent a week of that time searching for Morgan Adler.” Savvy’s tone was defensive. But then, she’d just admitted that while she was gathering intel on the market, there’d been no plans for the US to do anything about it.

  “Hurry and find it,” Bastian said and ended the call.

  He studied his team. If they were going into the market, they needed to get out of their military gear. None of them could pass for Sudanese, but they could conceal their US Army affiliation. Fortunately, blending with locals was one of the skills Army Special Forces excelled at.

  Once they had the coordinates, Bastian would enter the market alone. His features were ethnic enough to not be obviously American, plus Special Forces were given leeway on shaving, allowing them to fit in with the locals they trained, and he’d taken advantage of that for the last few weeks. He rubbed his thick beard, grateful, not for the first time, that men from Pacific Northwest tribes tended to have more facial hair than other indigenous Americans. Between his beard and Arabic fluency, he’d be able to navigate the market with ease.

  The others would be in position outside
the market and ready to move when he located Brie. All that was left was to pray she hadn’t already been sold.

  As both adult and white, Brie was a rarity in the market. A fact made clear when the man holding her leash dragged her toward one of the thatched-roof huts in the center.

  The common language here was Arabic, and she understood enough to know the transactions that took place inside the huts were different from the wholesale marketing of children outside.

  She was to be auctioned separately, out of view of the regular market crowd. Inside the hut, her chain was attached to a bolt embedded in a concrete block at the center of the round structure.

  The Nuer man who’d abducted her received payment from the man who locked her chain to the bolt. The Nuer left the hut, his part in capturing and selling her complete.

  The slaver pocketed the key as his gaze scanned her from head to toe. This must be his hut. Was the whole market his, or was this the equivalent of a booth in a farmer’s market?

  Wouldn’t Savvy love Brie’s observations on the market now?

  The slave trader had facial scars, but Brie couldn’t identify a particular tribe from the pattern. Without preamble, he produced a sharp knife, pulled her shirt collar away from her throat, and sliced downward, splitting the cloth from collar to hem.

  Instinctively, she covered her bare breasts—she hadn’t spared a moment to don a bra when she fled the USAID building—but he waved the knife in front of her face and she dropped her hands.

  Next he reached for her waistband. The blade nicked her skin, drawing a bead of blood. He signaled with the knife that she would undress herself or risk being cut.

  I will survive this.

  She mentally chanted the words as she removed her clothes.

  I will survive this.

  She had to believe in something, and she chose survival. She didn’t dare hope to be unscathed. Rape was a certainty. But she would live. She would find a way to escape. She was thirty-three years old and spoke English, French, and some Arabic. She wasn’t a starving child. These men usually preyed on the young and weak. Kids who spoke only their tribal language. Children who knew nothing of life beyond their war-torn villages.