by Fiona Quinn
On other screens, Grey’s team was monitoring each of us from our helmet cameras. They could see what we saw. They were able to keep track of who’s camera view they managed by the automatic picture that came up in the corner of our camera feed, including our names and GPS locations.
“We own the night,” I whispered under my breath. “We own it. We own this mission. It’s our outcome.”
I’ll admit it, I was shocked that I was this calm. I had expected the adrenaline to be racing through my veins like it had when I had escaped from the Honduran prison and flown the plane through the storm trying to reach American soil.
By the time I ran past Strike Force, the men were stacked up outside of what we thought was the fighters’ barracks.
“Striker. Breacher up.”
Blaze slapped the blast strip into place to enter the men’s quarters.
I flattened against the wall outside of where we thought the women were held. A low murmur of moans came from inside the thin-walled building.
Through my comms, I heard. “Striker. I have control. Breach in Three. Two. One.”
I crouched and waited for the blast, knowing things were about to get crazy.
BOOM! The concussion followed.
I rounded to the front to check my door. Depending on what we needed, someone would run up. We hoped bolt cutters would do the job.
The women’s wailing rose up and swirled the air, raising gooseflesh over my body. The last time they’d heard blasts was probably as the RPGs landed on their fellow evacuees. Death, mayhem, and capture had followed. I’d allow myself to sympathize later. Now, we needed to get them on the trucks and get them the heck out here.
The door didn’t seem to be bolted. There was a crack where it was open.
That didn’t seem right.
“Lynx. Striker, the door’s ajar.”
“Striker. Stay put. I’m sending Gator up to be first man in.”
Seconds later, Gator moved up. Standing to the side, he stomped the door open.
The women’s wails turned to screams.
Gator rounded in, got a visual, and moved back outside to guard the door. “Gator. Team Mushkila up,” he said in Arabic with a Cajun twang.
That was me, too.
My fellow teammates glowed acidic green as they moved from cover to cover, leapfrogging forward then moving in wedge formation. Someone had trained them well. They were professional about their duties.
We arrived at the door, and everyone stacked up behind me. Gator gave the nod, and over the comms, I heard him say. “Gator. Female building is open. Mushkila’s team entering.”
“TOC. Good copy.”
We raced in quickly, moving from bed to bed. The women lay in rag piles on the dirt floor. Mushkila’s soldiers grabbed the women’s blankets and jerked them off. “Sisters, we are here to help,” they yelled. They were using different languages. That had been the plan, so that should the women come from different regions, they could understand and hear a female voice. My role was to call in English for Dr. Street. To use that name so she’d know I was there for her from a professional search. She needed to be with Strike Force. And it had been agreed that the best time to find her was when the women were all in one place.
The stench from the room was putrid. It reminded me of the time I spent in the Honduran prison. My memories were lighting my nerve endings, and I needed to clear the images so I could stay focused on this task.
The barracks was like a warehouse. On either side of a narrow corridor were bunk beds about the width of a double mattress, but they were merely wooden platforms. Two or three women rested on each platform. They were stacked three high and ran at least fifteen deep. I did a quick calculation. Grey and Sophia were right. There must be two hundred women in here.
On my command, we pulled up our night vision goggles and Three. Two. One. We clicked on our headlamps.
Women. Children.
They were in terrible shape.
The women squished their eyelids tight, throwing their arms over their eyes to protect them from the sudden brightness of our high-lumen lights.
The smell. The open wounds. They were dressed in rags. Their greasy hair strands fell in their faces.
We made our way through the barracks. Amongst the fear screams, one rose up higher, pitched with terror and pain.
We were calling to them, “You’re safe. You’re safe!”
At first, they cowered into balls, then some ran into the night. This was what we didn’t want to happen.
Shots had been ringing out, and we didn’t want the women to be caught in the crossfire or held as a shield. Gator used the length of his rife to push them back in place. It was good that he wasn’t pointing the barrel at them.
He closed the door and stood inside, bodily blocking their exit.
The screams lifted higher, then I saw it—the man, the glint of a bright edge, a drip of blood.
“Blade,” I yelled into my comms.
I threw the other women to the side, forcing my way forward, trying to grab at the man’s hand. It plunged again. He was protected from me by the lip of the bunk. I grabbed at his turban.
Blood was on the cloth below him.
I yanked his head back, kicking my boot into the back of his knee. Standing on his leg, I forced him down. I reached around and grabbed his beard to drag his face into the light of one of my teammates.
It was bedlam.
The screams and the frantic movement. The dark and the sudden strobe of bright lights that destroyed my ability to see. The weight and bulk of my equipment that kept me from maneuvering.
Mushkila grabbed his barefoot and dragged him around.
I scrambled toward the injured woman.
I heard Mushkila behind me demanding. “Does anyone know this man? What is this man’s name?”
And I knew before I got my light on her face that the woman who was under attack was Kaylie Street.
In Arabic, I heard. “That’s Bakar Wajdi Fayad.”
I whipped off my pack and grabbed my kit to stop the bleed. Praying under my breath that she’d survive. “Dr. Street. United States. We’re here to rescue you. Stay with me, Kaylie. Keep your eyes open.”
Beside her, a one-year-old baby was hysterical.
Chapter Forty
We drove the trucks over the open terrain to the border. We were nearly out of gas by the time we reached the Army outpost. The soldiers brought food and water to the women. They gassed the trucks and took over the driving, taking the women to a humanitarian camp, leaving our unit and the Army outpost behind.
Mushkila’s team and Strike Force would have bunk space at the outpost once we cleaned up.
Kaylie and her baby were in the infirmary. Her wounds had been superficial. Thank God. She was being well cared for by a female doctor. She had answered all three of our questions accurately.
“What grade school did you go to?”
“What was the name of your childhood cat?”
“What dorm did you live in at university?”
Her question for us. “I have three children. This one and two others. Please, can you help me find them? Please?”
I got Prescott on the phone to let him know what was happening, then handed it to Kaylie so she could hear a familiar voice tell her about her other children.
Her medications took effect, and I pulled the phone from her ear with Prescott still crooning, “I’m coming, Kaylie. I’ll be there soon. I’m coming.”
“Prescott, it’s Lynx. She’s asleep.”
“God.” His voice caught.
***
Three major successes—the release of the women, finding Kaylee Street and her child, now Strike Force was waiting for Grey to arrive. We had bagged an important prize. Bakar Wajdi Fayad.
A good night’s work.
The sun was just starting to shift the night sky. Mushkila’s unit had started a fire and had waited for their adrenaline to settle. Adrenaline dropping out of the system made the bod
y exhausted. They went off to sleep.
The first thing Grey did was inspect our prisoner, confirmed his identity, then sat down with us, a cup of steaming coffee in hand.
After so much noise, smells, and craziness, this quiet around the fire seemed like a good thing.
Mushkila was talking to me about what life had been like before ISIS. She said that losing a husband to war was a terrible thing.
I pulled out my cell phone, ineffective here for calls. I was reliant on the SAT phone. But it had my pictures. I scrolled to pull up my wedding picture with Angel. “My husband,” I said. “This was our last picture together. He died in an IED explosion two years ago.”
She had stilled beside me; her brain was working hard. I reached out and flipped to a picture of a close up of grinning Angel.
Her muscles tightened and a frown formed on her face.
“You knew him, didn’t you?” I asked gently. I had no idea under what circumstances she might have met Angel. They could be very bad circumstances—triggering circumstances. It would be nice, though, to hear a story about him.
She took my phone from my hand and moved closer to the fire. She tipped it toward Grey and said something, then they both looked my way. They obviously knew something about him, and that something I watched them silently agree not to tell me.
That wasn’t okay.
I walked over and sat next to Grey, accepting my phone back from Mushkila.
We sat in silence, but Mushkila grew more uncomfortable as the minutes ticked by. Finally, she stood, tipped her head back to drink the last of her tea, and said she was going to get some sleep.
Once we were alone, I sniffed and looked into the fire. “I know you. You’re looking better. Last time I saw you, you were running over the rocks with one sock on.”
He shifted around so we were face to face.
“It was a harrowing escape, being pulled out of that jail cell. She’s a hell of a pilot, D-Day.”
His mind worked on the puzzle; that jailbreak was highly classified. He worked in a non-permissive zone. Somebody had to have talked.
“The little girl, the one with the too-big dress and the red bandana holding back her black curls? She wasn’t the one who gave away your position. The ISIS fighters had warned the fighters of your direction via radio. They didn’t see the Little Bird, only the Blackhawk. But your pilot was about to set down anyway. D-Day didn’t have enough fuel to get much farther. She lost too much fuel from the hole in her tank. The place in the tank the shooter focused on while Delta Force Echo pulled you across the ladder.”
“I thought you worked with Iniquus.” His words were measured.
“Yes.”
“That was a secret op.”
“It still is.”
He didn’t reply. He rubbed this information back and forth to see if he couldn’t get a spark of understanding.
“You won’t figure it out because I won’t explain it to you. Just like you’ve decided that you won’t explain to me your connection with my husband.” I paused while he absorbed the idea. “Of course, you’re obviously not the only one with the information that I want. I’ll get it, one way or another, before I leave Iraq.”
His focus was on the fire. His brain was on fast forward.
I reiterated, “I’m not going home until I know. I won’t give up until I know. You have to weigh that into your decision making. It might be that we could sit here at the fire, and you could tell me a little story. It could well be that you’d find it less of a problem if it were you who were quietly telling me what I want to know rather than my poking and prodding, perhaps putting something at risk. It might even be, should I not find what I’m looking for, that I could bring up my experience with some of my reporter friends here, and they could help me sniff around. Because something is very wrong with the picture of my husband’s death.”
Grey picked up a stick and poked at the fire, making the sparks erupt in a fountain.
“The funeral was held in Puerto Rico. They told me that Angel’s remains were unrecognizable, and so it was a closed coffin.” I covered my eyes as the breeze blew smoke in my face, and I shifted to the side. “I was down there not even a week ago and had the coffin exhumed.”
Grey nodded, acknowledging that he heard me.
“There was a tooth in a little box. There was a piece of boot with his dog tag. There was a portion of his other dog tag.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” His body language read as guilty.
I wondered if they hadn’t been working an op, and Grey was the CIA officer who had given bad intel. Maybe he thought he put the team in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that didn’t make any sense at all. Mushkila was Syrian. Her husband died after Angel did. She became a warrior after her husband died. She recognized Angel and took his photo with a warning look over to Grey.
He tipped his head back to take in the great bowl of the galaxy. The stars were so numerous that it was hard to find the constellations.
“Seriously? You’re not going to just tell me?”
Nothing.
“Let me tell you a little bit about me. I wasn’t on the op that helped save you. I wasn’t connected to your rescue in any concrete way. I dreamed about it. I saw it in my mind’s eye. I can tell you more. I can tell you that you had gone without food or water for so long that when the Deltas pulled you out of the window, you thought you were hallucinating. You had assumed that the next time you left that cell that you would be tortured until you spilled all your secrets, and then you’d die. You wondered how long you could hold out against the torture. You wondered if those few hours you might buy your assets would help them and their families escape or not. You wondered, was it worth it? And you had tried to devise a plan to suicide, but your brain kept tripping up. You couldn’t get a solid leg to stand on. A strong enough thought process. Dehydration can do that to a brain.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face, then laced his fingers, resting his elbows on his splayed knees. His gaze still on the fire.
“I’ve been dreaming about Angel all week. Not dreaming. Nightmaring. Not nightmaring. Hallucinating about his going to Hell.” I swiped a finger toward my ear. “I keep hearing Angel in my head calling to me. ‘Help me. I’m in Hell. I’m burning.’ The sound of his plea brought me here. I’m not going home without answers.”
“If you tell my story to anyone, many people could die.”
“I understand that’s what you’re caught on. I’d like you to move past that. I’m not threatening you or your assets’ lives or covers. I’m here about Angel. Unless, of course, these two things overlap. And then I’ll find out why they overlap, one way or another.”
“‘Help me. I’m in Hell. I’m burning’ is in the present tense?” he asked the fire.
Of course, I realized this too. It was Angel in Hell screaming at me. I hoped Grey wasn’t pointing out to me that this made no sense, and then I’d have to decide how much more to tell him. I thought in terms of psychic information, I’d probably said all I felt comfortable saying. “Present tense,” I said.
“And you think he’s in physical danger and want to get him help.”
I…what? “Yes.”
“This will be delicate.”
“I get that.” Actually…what?
“I’ll have to come up with a plan. It risks a lot. But listening to you, hearing you, I think I have the picture, and…okay, yes.” He slapped his hands on his thighs. “I’ll have to do something immediately.” He stood, stepped over the fire, and strode away.
I chased after him. “You’re leaving?”
“I need to talk to some people. I’ll be back.”
“When? Where?”
“Here. As soon as I can. No more than twenty-four hours. When did this start?”
I rolled my eyes up in my head, trying to remember. “I think ten days or so ago.”
“Jezus.” He walked away with long strides.
I stood there with my arms dangling, watchi
ng him go. What just happened?
I headed back to Strike Force. I wanted to tell them about this odd exchange and ask them what they thought. I thought that Grey was telling me that Angel was present tense. That he was alive.
I couldn’t even wrap my mind around…everything.
I needed my family. I needed Striker.
Chapter Forty-One
“I have something to tell you,” I told my team before launching into what I had discovered in the last few days about Indigo and his experiment, Doc and her research, and now Grey at the campfire. “Then he said, ‘I’ll have to do something immediately,’ and left.”
“Wait. Whoa. What does that mean exactly?” Gator asked his hands on his hips, a scowl on his face.
“It sounds like—shit, I hate to say this out loud—Angel isn’t dead?” Blaze said.
I breathed a stream of air between my lips. “I wanted your take on it. It sounded that way to me. But I’m off my game when it comes to all this stuff. Beyond the nightmares, the physical issues have been pretty intense.”
“Tell me more about the physical issues,” Jack said.
Striker turned his back to me. I think he just didn’t want me to see his face. I couldn’t imagine being in his position, engaged to a married woman who was…well, soul attachments aside, this put yet another twist in our relationship. How much could one man handle?
“The closest way to describe it is that I’ve felt physically terrible. I kept taking my temperature, but it’s always perfectly normal. I went to the Iniquus clinic, and they did a blood check. My white cells are where they belong. Everything came out just fine. But I’ve felt feverish, sweaty, no appetite, light, and sound sensitive, exercise averse, exhausted beyond belief. I felt like I was in and out of consciousness. And then there was the pain. Excruciating pain like my eyeballs were catching on fire. When I was called in to be on the Kaylie Street case, I knew I was hitting my wall, something needed to change. And this must have been it. I was told through a knowing and through the Galaxy viewers directives to go looking for Trouble. Here I am. I guess now I wait and see what Grey comes back with.”