“What’s wrong?” Bunny demanded.
Emily held up a hand as she listened on the phone. Prenner stood over the technician at the keyboard, his stiff body language asking the same thing.
Still, static filled the screen. It had been like that for nearly ten minutes. Davidson had been ready to take out Brandt’s two remaining escorts and then poof. The feed was gone.
“The feed was overwritten,” the technician finally announced.
“We’ve been hacked?” Prenner demanded.
That couldn’t be, could it? They were in the Pentagon. They should be hack-proof, right?
“No,” the tech reassured them. “Someone within this building overrode my commands and turned the feed off from the satellite itself.”
“Who would do that?” Bunny asked.
Emily hung up the phone. “That is something my boss would like to know.”
“It is something everyone wants to know,” Prenner shot back.
“Yes,” Bunny agreed. “However, that isn’t going to help Brandt and the rest in real time. What are we doing to help them right now?”
Prenner shrugged. He actually shrugged. “Like I said earlier, they are on their own.”
“On their own?” Bunny couldn’t keep the exasperation from her voice.
“The men went AWOL.”
“To save a decorated hero!”
Prenner pulled up to his full height. “Black ops men know the risk.”
Bunny was about to launch into the tirade to end all tirades when Emily stepped between them.
“Now, now,” she cooed. “I’ve asked the Brits for a spot of help.”
Bunny’s mood brightened. “Vanderwalt?” she asked. He had been super helpful during the whole Jordan debacle. And his crooked smile was kind of sexy.
Emily nodded. “We should have a feed on the area within the hour, and they have some ‘aid’ workers even closer than I do.”
Bunny sank into her chair, not realizing tears were at the edge of her eyelids. She wasn’t built for this. She always read the last page of a book so that she didn’t have to stress about the characters the whole time. And if the heroes didn’t win in the end? She just didn’t read the book.
Her CIA handler squeezed her shoulder. “It is going to be over forty-five minutes before we can even get a glimpse of the area. Why don’t you go lay down?”
Wiping the tears away, Bunny shook her head. “No. I want to be here. I have to be here.”
“Very well,” Emily stated. “Then I think it is best we all get some food—some real food—in our bellies.” She turned to Prenner. “Is the Moulin Rogues still in the Pentagon Row?”
The technician shook his head. “Nope. Closed down last summer, but Panda Express is just around the corner and has a drive-through.”
“Well then, Panda Express it is.” Emily turned to Prenner. “I’ll write our order down.”
“What the hell?” Prenner countered. “I’m not your dinner bitch.”
Emily cocked her head in that really cute way. “Really? Because I am pretty sure that the department that has a big fat mole that ruined a black ops mission, putting all of our assets in the region in danger, gets to go get the food.” She looked to Bunny. “Right?”
Bunny might just have a new hero. “Right.”
“It’s a rule.” Emily turned back to Prenner. “Maybe not written, but a rule nonetheless.”
To Bunny’s surprise, Prenner sighed. “Give me the list,” he said, “and I’ll get a private to do it.”
Bunny could taste the egg rolls now. Although, even the best soy sauce wasn’t going to make the next forty-five minutes go by any faster. She could only prey the men were safe until then.
Safe. Not dead. Safe.
Maybe if she repeated that frequently enough, she could make it come true.
CHAPTER 7
══════════════════
Undisclosed Location
9:47 p.m. (CAT)
Rebecca awoke facedown on a cool earthen floor. She felt like she’d fallen out of a plane, through a rain forest, then squeezed by a python.
Oh, wait, she had.
A little worried about where she had ended up, Rebecca was loath to open her eyes. The Disciples were in the area and had already snatched Brandt. Had they found her too? Would she be staring at a room filled with torture instruments?
Squeezing her eyes shut against the horror wouldn’t make it go away. At the least she needed to get her bearings.
Cracking her eyelids open, Rebecca found a typical African hut. The curved walls were made of braided vines. Although, these had some adornment. Scattered throughout the walls were brightly colored strands. The contrast created a random yet beautiful pattern.
Tied to these walls were a line of gourds, primitive storage vessels. The roof above was made of wide green fronds. Unlike the round huts of the African planes, tribes in the moist Congo region could not use dried thatch. Otherwise, they’d have mildewed walls within days.
No, the rain forest tribes had adopted nature’s own waterproofing, using the waxy plants of the forest to construct their homes. Which would have all been great fodder for a scientific paper on aboriginal African hut building. Unfortunately, she was not on an academic assignment.
Rising up on one elbow, her eyes explored more of the hut.
There was a small central fire pit that spit sparks at a chunk of meat being grilled on a skewer. Her fingers felt the soft ground beneath her until she realized it wasn’t ground at all. It was a loosely woven rug of moss.
Again, ingenious use of natural resources, but not exactly information she could use to formulate her escape.
Soft footsteps carried from outside the hut. Rebecca lay back down, closing her eyes.
“Jambo,” a sweet voice called out.
So Rebecca hadn’t been hallucinating. She opened her eyes to find the same little girl sitting on her haunches next to her. The girl opened her small hand to reveal half a dozen burgundy berries. Strangely, they smelled of rose petals.
“Kola,” the girl urged.
Tentatively, Rebecca took one from her palm. The girl urged her to bring it to her mouth. However, when Rebecca bit down, she found it wasn’t a berry. Instead, it was brightly colored nut. A nut with a rather tough exterior.
The little girl giggled, shaking her head as she sat down cross-legged. Tucking her skirt over her knees, she used the orange fabric as a bowl. Picking out a seed, the girl used her fingernail to crack open the burgundy exterior to reveal a smooth white shell. This, too, she opened. Inside the shell were four small seeds.
Rebecca accepted one from the girl, sniffing at it. This seed certainly didn’t smell like roses. Actually, it smelled like her face wash. But the girl pantomimed that Rebecca should put the seed in her mouth.
With that bright smile, how could Rebecca refuse?
Popping the seed into her mouth, she realized that not only did the seed smell like her face wash, it tasted like her face wash, with a bit of astringent mixed in for good measure. But the girl, even though wincing herself at the bitter taste, kept chewing, giving Rebecca the universal thumbs-up. So Rebecca kept chewing. And the bitter became sweet.
It was weird. The more she chewed, the sweeter it got. Plus, the pounding in her head receded and she felt stronger. Rebecca looked down at the seeds with more appreciation.
The kola nut. The basis for the original cola soft drinks. That was caffeine racing through her veins. Usually, she tried to avoid stimulants of any kind, but after the day she’d had? Rebecca grabbed the other two seeds and started chewing.
A grunt came from the other side of the hut. Rebecca cringed as the tall man with skin the color of night stood to his full height. That one milky eye staring straight ahead.
Instead of moving toward her, though, he moved to the spit, rotating the meat above the fire. Again, Rebecca normally tried to stay away from charbroiled game meat, but she couldn’t help it as her mou
th started to water.
The little girl pointed to a coiled carcass.
The python.
Rebecca’s stomach turned as she realized the meat on the spick was the snake that had tried to eat her. In the jungle, the real jungle, it truly was eat or be eaten.
And damn if Rebecca wasn’t really, really hungry.
* * *
Brandt’s jaw throbbed as the SUV’s engine smoked. Lopez cut the engine.
“I think we’ve ridden this pony as far as she is going to go,” the corporal admitted.
He couldn’t disagree with Lopez. It was just that Brandt had been hoping for a few more minutes of sitting. Not hiking. Not climbing up a huge-ass mountain. As always, fate didn’t seem to give a crap what he wanted.
As Talli opened the passenger door, Brandt asked, “What is our extraction point?”
When no one answered him, let alone looked at him, he knew something was wrong. Really wrong.
“We do have an extraction plan?”
Lopez snorted as he climbed out of the vehicle. “Well, yeah, duh, we had a plan.”
“Had?” Brandt asked, touching his swollen cheek, then regretting it. Davidson might be a phenomenal sniper. A dentist, not so much.
Lopez glanced to Talli, who looked to Davidson. Okay, this must be bad if they wanted Davidson to deliver the news.
“Yeah, um…” the younger man said, digging his toe into the moist rain forest soil. “We kind of have to make a detour.”
Brandt’s eyelids narrowed. “Detour?”
“And…” Davidson said, then licked his damaged lips. “We’re not quite sure where.”
This was going to take an extremely long time if Brandt incredulously repeated the last asinine statement the men made.
“Out with it.”
“Well, you’ve probably noticed that we don’t have Rebecca,” Davidson said.
“Rebecca?” Brandt spat out. As much as he swore he wouldn’t just repeat things, he couldn’t help himself. “What the fuck would Rebecca be doing here?”
“Sarge,” Lopez interjected, stepping between Brandt and Davidson, “she was like Bridezilla on steroids. There was no keeping her off the plane.”
Brandt’s fury rose, threatening to blind him. He wanted to lash out, but all that came to the tip of his tongue was swear words. Lots and lots of swear words. A litany of them. Yet they stalled there, unable to pass his lips.
He could still hear her words as he was lifted into the Disciples’ helicopter. “We are right behind you.” Not “The men are right behind you.” Or “They are right behind you,” but “We are right behind you.” He should have known Rebecca would find a way to tag along. Not even his Death Star gaze could have stopped her. And on her wedding day?
Maybe he did need to cut his men some slack. Just a little.
“Fine,” Brandt snapped. “Where is she, then?”
Again, Davidson became obsessed with a patch of moss on the ground.
“Davidson…”
“Look,” Lopez said, “there was a plane crash, and then some crazy tribesmen—”
“Where?”
“We don’t know,” Davidson finally admitted. “I couldn’t hold on…And she went down somewhere in the forest.”
Brandt wanted to strangle the sniper, but something about the way his voice hitched with shame kept Brandt from fulfilling his desire. As a matter of fact, all the men seemed equally upset that Rebecca was missing.
Which didn’t fucking change the fact she was missing.
“But hey, we sent our best tracker, Levont, out for her before we hoofed it here,” Lopez explained.
“And?”
Lopez frowned. “Um, we haven’t heard from him.”
Brandt didn’t bother repeating that. No point.
“And what exactly is Command doing to locate both of them?”
The moss kicking again. Talli actually turned to look deeper into the forest as if keeping sentry. Yeah, right.
“What the fuck are they doing?” Brandt demanded.
Davidson sighed. “They tried to reassign us, so we kind of went AWOL.”
Brandt tried to keep his temper in check. Unfortunately, that usually meant grinding his teeth, and well, one of them was fucking missing at the moment.
“Please specify what ‘kind of’ AWOL means?”
“Hey,” Lopez jumped in, “they weren’t sending anyone after you. We had to come.”
“Which would simply make you AWOL,” Brandt added.
“Right, and they cut us off,” Davidson said. “But once we were here, they hooked us up with thermal imaging of the village.”
“Which would then make you on active duty.”
“Yeah.” Lopez sighed. “Then they cut us off. Not sure why.”
Brandt glared at each of his men in turn. Including the back of Talli’s head.
“Let me get this straight,” Brandt said as calmly and cautiously as he could. “You brought my bride to Africa, lost her in the jungle, and now have no way to find her?”
“True, all,” Lopez said, nodding. “But I’ve got great video.” The corporal must have felt the wave of rage coming his way as he raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry, sorry.” When Brandt backed off a step, Lopez continued. “Too soon?”
A glare shut him up.
“Silver lining here,” Davidson added. “Levont was supposed to gather Rebecca and take her to the spot we dropped the little girl. So we do have a secondary staging point.”
Brandt just picked up a pack—he didn’t even know who’s it was—and set off north. Lopez trotted to catch up with him.
“Come on, Sarge, I know you are worried, but this is Dr. Monroe we are talking about. Rebecca and the jungle are BFFs. Remember Ecuador?”
That was the problem. The first time Brandt had laid eyes on his bride-to-be was seared into his brain. At the time, she had gotten herself tied to a stake with an anaconda about to squeeze the life from her.
So he would consider their relationship a little more on the frenemies side. Vicious, cold-blooded frenemies.
He hoped the jungle knew what it was doing when it messed with Rebecca.
* * *
Frellan breathed in through his nose and whistled the air through his teeth as he stared down at the blip on the screen, which was supposed to give him the exact location of Brandt. It was the only reason they had allowed the man to escape. The Master had thought that Frellan would take too long in his ministrations. She had put them on this path.
Of course, the Master had not counted on the rest of his team arriving so rudely unannounced. Why have someone placed so highly in the US government if they were not forewarned of such things?
Across the clearing, Mikhal glared that glare of his. The sniper was still angered that he had been taken out of the equation. But how exactly were they to allow Brandt to think he’d run off on his own if they had revealed they had the sniper with them?
Had the sniper taken a single shot, Brandt would have known he survived only by the Master’s good graces. And another, more closely held reason burned in Frellan’s chest. He would not allow the sniper to share in the glory of finding their Savior. That alone was reserved for Frellan. He alone must atone for his family’s sins.
But now, now here he stood, staring down at a tooth. The white enamel glistened brightly against the deep-green ground. The words Fuck You dug into the loam.
Usugo kicked the thing deeper into the forest.
They were not without their resources, though. He turned as one of their trackers trotted up to him.
“There is a clear trail for the SUV heading due east.”
Even someone with half of Frellan’s experience would know that there was a clear trail east. It was not Brandt’s ultimate path. Frellan looked through the trees to the position of the moon. They would not have the British satellite feed for another half an hour. Brandt was in no shape to make a speedy escape from the region. This escape attempt reeked of desperation.
Frellan let his body shift side to side as it navigated the treacherous road back to the village. Closing his eyes, he let the rhythm bring him closer to God. He did not resist the rough course that He had put him upon. As they made the last hairpin turn into the village, Frellan opened his eyes to find Monnie standing on the wooden stoop of a dilapidated hut. She bent her head in supplication as he exited the Jeep.
He ignored her. His only want was to find a quiet hut and a subject to express his desires upon. As he went to pass, she whispered, “Master Frellan.”
There was something beguiling in that soft tone. Beguiling enough for him to turn to her. “Yes, Monnie?”
“I believe I have found someone you should speak to.”
Frellan had not even noticed the older woman huddled at Monnie’s feet. You could smell the fear on the woman. Her dark eyes tried so hard not to stare at his piercings, yet they failed. He knelt beside the old woman, cupping her face. Ah, so many wrinkles to work with. Her sagging features a worthy canvas for him to work upon.
“She says she has information if we agree to not harm anyone in the village.”
“And you agreed to such terms?”
Monnie would not meet his eye. “Yes, I thought it better to—”
He held up his hand. Her arrogance would be dealt with later. Perhaps she was used to such latitude, given her new position as a watcher of the word. In the sanctuary, the title held great power. In the African forest? She would learn. What message would it send the Master if he marred that smooth skin of Monnie’s?
He let none of that show on his face, however. He simply nodded. The woman prattled on in a smattering of French and Lingala. Frellan, however, caught the salient points. The girl had been entrusted to a local witch doctor.
“There,” she said in English, pointing up the mountain.
Frellan turned to Ugudo. “The helicopter.” He turned to the next man. “Leave no witnesses.”
“No!” Monnie cried out. “You promised!” she said as she went to slap his face.
Frellan caught her hand in midair. “No, Monnie. You promised that which you could not honor.” Her hand shook as shots, then screams rang out across the village. His only regret that it would all be over so quickly. Frellan usually liked to take his time. Put true effort into the taking of someone’s life. They deserved as much.
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