by Ann Jacobs
ENTRAPPED
Ann Jacobs
Chapter One
At least the American's screams had ceased. For now.
Perhaps for eternity.
Since January 16, 1991 Jamil al Hassan had lain each night on the same filthy cot, chained hand and foot to iron rings imbedded in the rough concrete walls of an underground bunker not far from al Qurnah, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers converged to form the Shatt al-Arab.
The Iraqis had captured him after his fighter took a hit and went down in the midst of a swirling sandstorm over the heavily guarded Zugayr oilfield. They'd kept him when they had repatriated many of his countrymen because he'd had the misfortune to have nearly completed his university education in geo-petroleum engineering at a time when the Iraqis desperately needed all the experts they could find to help rebuild their war-ravished oilfields.
His punishment for failing in his mission had been enslavement by the Iraqi dogs who had overrun his homeland. His fate for having been so stupid as to barter for his countrymen's freedom with his expertise in rebuilding ruined oil wells had extended his imprisonment-and his existence on earth-indefinitely. Sometimes-hell, most of the time-he cursed the sense of duty that had been bred into him and which had made him put fellow prisoners' welfare above his own.
Jamil had lost track of dates, but this was the eleventh spring season he'd spent in captivity. That it was spring, he confirmed by the presence of water that dripped from the bunker ceiling onto his naked body-water that came to the Zubayr Rumaila only when the snows melted and flowed down the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers from the mountains to the north.
Jamil shivered more from grim anticipation of what form his torture would take on the morrow than from the cold, for the bite of frigid north winds rarely traveled this far south.
A plaintive moan caught in the fetid air and drifted to Jamil's ears. The American his captors had brought here recently from a prison somewhere west of Baghdad must have survived his brutal initiation at the hands of chief jailer Mohammed Dubaq and his henchmen.
Apparently the Americans were rumbling loudly of war, of avenging the deaths of thousands of their civilians at the hands of a few fanatic Islamic terrorists. Rumors flew among Jamil's captors that U. S. troops lay in wait with brutal firepower, amassing more men and equipment daily all over the region, including thousands in Kuwait and more in the tiny sheikhdom of Qatar. The jailers grumbled that many American airplanes flew over Iraq every day dropping bombs on antiaircraft defense sites.
Nearly every day Jamil saw white streaks in the sky that he recognized as the trails of jet fighters. Many more of them lately than before. He imagined some of them had taken off from the Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia, as he had done eleven years ago on what had proven to be his personal journey into hell.
This new threat to the Butcher of Baghdad brought Jamil hope where there had been none. And now his captors had brought him a potential ally in the American. Unlike his countryman, Asad al Qassimi, who lay near death in the cubicle next to the guard's post, the American might still possess the strength to attempt escape.
"Asad?" he whispered, wanting assurance that his cousin Dahoud's former executive assistant still lived.
The guard stomped to his cell. "Be silent. Your friend yet breathes. If you wish to join him in his pain, disturb my sleep again."
"A thousand apologies," Jamil murmured, not anxious to feel the jailer's boot. At least this wasn't Dubaq, the perverted warden, or one of his favorite accomplices. This man treated guarding prisoners as a job, not an opportunity to visit untold miseries upon his helpless victims.
On occasion Jamil had heard the man mutter about the inhumanity of treatment accorded the prisoners by their captors-and express his disgust at the soldiers and their perverted pleasures.
Jamil didn't even know the man's full name, only that he was called Maktoum, and that he was one of the Marsh Arabs who had lost his nearby home when Hussein had ordered the Marshes drained, leaving the area unfit to support life.
Five nights of every seven, Maktoum guarded the prisoners in this bunker, offering Jamil and Asad-and now the American-blessed respite from the physical and psychological torture meted out by Dubaq and his subordinates on a daily basis.
For what seemed like the forty-thousandth night he lay on the narrow cot, trying to conceive a way of getting word to Dahoud…of obtaining assistance from someone with freedom to move about who would not report him, resulting in the slow, torturous mutilation and death of his fellow prisoners or himself.
His acquiescence and Asad's had bought their countrymen some time and suffering but nothing more. They now lay dead in Dubaq's crude common grave at the edge of the oilfield. But now that time was running out for Asad. For himself, too. Escape, if it was possible, would have to be soon.
But he had to trust someone other than himself to contact his cousin in Kuwait. Someone with freedom to move who would be amenable to betraying his employers for a fistful of Kuwaiti dinars.
Maktoum?
The lazy guard's snores rumbled through the bunker.
Jamil dared not approach any of Dubaq's soldiers, and he had no access to the other Marsh Arabs who did menial labor around the encampment.
It would have to be Maktoum. Jamil had little choice but to pray the Marsh Arab's betrayal of his superiors might be bought.
He shifted, trying to find some comfort within the confines of the cot and his chains. There was only so far a man could move with his ankles and wrists shackled to the four corners of the tiny cubicle. A heavy iron collar circling his neck and attached with chains to eyelets above his head further impeded his ability to move.
Bruised and battered from the latest round of beatings Dubaq had administered, Jamil closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep-to elude this living hell for a few blessed hours.
His nightmares came less often now.
But today's round of torture weighed heavily on his mind. This time he'd escaped the humiliation of standing naked before his jailers, being beaten and threatened with branding, castration, and eventual death. Dubaq's fiendish attention had focused instead on Asad, who for the past month had been refusing to work on the oil wells and taunting his captors as though he wished to die. And on the newly arrived American lieutenant, Brian Shearer.
Water dripped through the porous ceiling, stinging the wounds on Jamil's chest that had not yet healed from his latest encounter with the warden's whip.
Asad's anguished screams still rang in Jamil's ears. For ten days now, Dubaq had been hacking off a finger a day. If Dubaq followed his usual pattern, castration would come next, followed by a slow death from the festering wounds. Jamil had observed the jailer's methods of torture well over the past eleven years.
And he knew he'd escaped mutilation so far because his knowledge of the oil wells made him valuable enough for Dubaq to keep him not only alive but reasonably fit for work. A similar knowledge had saved Asad as long as he'd been willing to apply it.
Not that the psychological torture Jamil had endured during the first years of Dubaq's tour as commander of the prison outpost was any less painful. It had taken him years to shut off his mind and accept the inevitable whenever Dubaq had ordered him stripped and shackled to the bunker wall for his perverted games.
At least the rapes had ceased. Jamil supposed Dubaq's woman who had arrived from Baghdad about a year ago was now his victim of choice when he wished to satisfy his carnal urges. Lately, all Jamil had been forced to endure were beatings and stomach-curdling threats of death and dismemberment during the hour or more he spent chained to the bunker wall each day for so-called interrogation.
That and the unrelenting pressure from the ball-stretcher Dubaq had ordered
him to wear soon after his arrival.
The jailer had never rescinded that order even after he had ceased the weekly rapes. And Jamil dared not remove it himself for fear of attracting more of Dubaq's unwanted attention to his genitals.
"I will keep tightening it, and when I tighten it sufficiently, the ring will destroy your manhood," Dubaq had said each time he'd squeezed and jerked on Jamil's tortured testicles while ramming his cock up Jamil's ass. "You will be a eunuch. Enjoy the sensations of pleasure while you can, Kuwaiti devil."
A eunuch? Jamil would rather have been dead.
But what did it matter, since he could hardly find pleasure, shackled and enslaved?
His pleasure came only in the freedom within his mind. Only in his dreams.
* * * * *
Grunts and groans filtered through thin walls of the jailer's barracks. Dubaq must be going at her sister-in-law again, despite the advanced state of Mernoosh's pregnancy.
Leila al Sinan shrugged. The sounds coming from Mernoosh's throat bespoke pleasure, not pain, though Leila sometimes thought the two sensations must be closely related.
She'd have been better off completely alone in Baghdad than here, where each day she had to watch Saqr's older sister preen over the fact that she had a husband and Leila did not.
When Mernoosh had persuaded Leila a year ago to come with her to this desolate outpost miles from any form of civilization, she'd promised there would be many handsome young Iraqi soldiers from which Leila might choose a new husband. Instead, the soldiers under Dubaq's command were few, toothless, fat, and ugly-outcasts kept here in this miserable place to guard an oilfield and a handful of Kuwaiti prisoners the government had been holding since its invasion of Kuwait had been thwarted more than ten years earlier.
A handful of prisoners whose numbers had decreased on an almost weekly basis since her arrival.
Mernoosh's husband appeared to be younger than any of his men, and by Leila's reckoning he had to be at least forty years old. Not that she'd have looked twice at Mohammed Dubaq even if he wasn't married to Saqr's sister. Not after having witnessed the bite of his lash and recognizing a streak of sadistic cruelty in him that she guessed he must temper with Mernoosh, who apparently worshiped him.
No. Leila would do without a man if she couldn't attract a more desirable one than the louts who worked with Mernoosh's husband.
Still her yoni ached. She yearned for Saqr's touch, though more than a third of her twenty-six years had passed since he'd died fighting for Iraq. Her left cheek ached, too, reminding her she would always bear awful scars. Scars left from burns she had suffered on the heels of learning her young husband's fate, when the Americans had begun their relentless bombing of Baghdad.
Attacks that had left the few remaining members of her family dead.
Mernoosh's whimper brought home the fact that Leila had no one to take care of her carnal needs.
Aroused by the sounds of sex that drifted through walls as thin as paper, she dipped one hand between her legs. Her yoni wept, as if mourning the lack of a man to pleasure it.
She ran the fingers of her free hand over the rough, uneven-textured skin on the left side of her face before letting them drift along the scars that stretched across her jaw, her neck, on the outer curve of one breast and down her arm. In the light of day, no man with the gift of sight would look at her with lust in his eyes.
Her pierced nipples had remained undamaged by the flames. They beaded now at the touch of her fingers, just as her clitoris hardened and tingled at her touch.
Mernoosh cried out, the ecstatic sound reminding Leila of the way Saqr used to make her scream with pleasure when she came. Dubaq's lusty yell soon followed.
Leila's yoni grew hotter. Moisture gushed onto her hand. Pressure built inside her, so intense she wanted to scream.
Desperate for release, she rubbed her swollen clitoris harder, caught it between her fingers and pinched it hard. But her hand was no longer enough to keep the yearning at bay.
By Allah, the Kuwaitis and their American friends had stolen her husband and her looks. She wouldn't let them steal her life.
She'd take vengeance along with her satisfaction. Now, before Dubaq executed the last of the enemy dogs he'd been keeping alive so he could torture them in that foul-smelling bunker he called a prison.
She'd take her pleasure, steal the seed they'd ripped from Saqr when they blew up the tank he'd been driving through the desert. Insha'Allah, that seed would take root in her womb and give her a child to love.
There would be no better time for action than now, before the last of the prisoners succumbed to the release of death.
Only two of the original Kuwaiti prisoners remained-plus the American who had arrived earlier today and endured a vicious "interrogation" by her brother-in-law. He would hardly be fit for fucking even if Leila could stomach the idea of having sex with one of Saqr's killers, and neither would the older Kuwaiti whose last remaining finger Dubaq had boasted about hacking off this afternoon.
That left one-the Kuwaiti oilfield engineer, Jamil al Hassan. The prisoner Dubaq forced to work in the oilfield nearly every day. He had told her his name once, months ago, when she'd delivered his meager midday rations while he supervised some sort of complex-looking repair to a damaged pump.
Her nipples tightened when she pictured his muscles straining while he tightened a valve, the contrast of his olive skin against the white ghutra on his head and the endless expanse of pale desert sand…his sensual mouth and large, dark eyes.
Al Hassan seemed a likely specimen.
Leila stopped fingering her wet yoni. Quickly she wrapped a black silk hijab around her head, more to conceal her scars than to preserve her modesty. The abaya and shaila would serve dual purposes, as well.
Their blackness would allow her to blend in with the night, and their all-encompassing cover would conceal her identity should she be seen. Maktoum, the night guard, would surely be asleep. If not, she would lurk in the shadows, find her way past him to Jamil.
Her nipples puckered when she moved and the rough homespun fabric of her abaya abraded them. Her heart beat faster as she sneaked from Mohammed's house while he and Mernoosh still giggled and groaned in their bed.
Accustomed as she was to lurking in the darkness, Leila had no trouble adjusting her vision to the dim illumination from a naked bulb near the bunker stairway.
Maktoum the guard slept as soundly as she'd guessed he would, his snores resounding off the walls within the bunker's close confines. Water dripped, dripped, dripped from the ceiling to the packed sand floor.
The American groaned intermittently while the older Kuwaiti prisoner lay as still as death on a cot beside the guard. Neither appeared to be shackled. Leila assumed that was because the injuries that had resulted from today's torture made it unlikely that they would attempt escape.
Jamil lay quietly, his legs and arms spread wide and chained to the four corners of his cubicle. His chest rose and fell slowly, regularly. It was good he was bound. She was certain his overweening Kuwaiti pride would never allow him to take her willingly.
She raked him with her gaze, anticipated him giving her the woman's pleasure she had been missing for so long. What male beauty!
And what a shame for it to be confined so cruelly. She shuddered when she noticed the iron collar around his neck. If he attempted to move his head, he would choke to death.
His body, though thin, looked surprisingly fit considering the treatment he had endured. She supposed he had cuts and bruises. It would have been a miracle if he didn't, considering that her sister's husband spent a good part of each day supervising his prisoners' torture. But she didn't see any in the weak light from that one light bulb near the door.
Even in the near darkness she could tell his lingam was long and thick, and resting at the moment against his inner thigh. Leila's mouth watered.
She hiked up her abaya and straddled him, then rubbed her yoni over his sleeping sex. When he opened his
eyes, she clamped her hand over his mouth.
"Silence, Kuwaiti dog, or you die now. Nek ni."
Jamil blinked.
Was he dreaming? Had this apparition just demanded in a raspy whisper that he fuck her?
No. This was no apparition, and it wasn't one of Dubaq's cock-sucking underlings. This was a woman. He swelled against what unmistakably was a warm, wet pussy. But all he could see in the dim light was a figure swathed in black, its features obscured but for the whites of dark, inscrutable eyes.
She smelled of greasy roasted goat and yogurt-or was that the stench of his own unwashed body?
Apparently his cock didn't care. Like a man long deprived of water who had suddenly spied an oasis pool, it quickened and sought the opening to paradise.
Its aim unerring, Jamil's cock found its target and sank inside the tight, wet glove of a sleek satiny pussy. His balls strained against the hard leather stretcher, making him bite his tongue to avoid crying out with agony when she began to ride him.
He tried to concentrate on her movements-slow, rocking, almost like that of a camel lumbering across the desert.
"Unchain me," he ordered roughly, suddenly anxious to touch her, to discover if she was real or only another cruel illusion.
"Silence! Lest you feel the sting of my lash," the guard roared, his voice raspy with obvious annoyance at being awakened.
She bent, obscuring the faint light, and whispered near Jamil's ear. "I have no key. Be silent or you will summon the guard."
By Allah! For a moment he'd forgotten his keeper who slept not ten feet from his cell. "If you have a care, at least loosen the leather that binds my testicles. Surely you can feel it." He whispered this time, near where he thought her ear must be.
Her rocking motions ceased. She cupped his tortured balls, found the stretcher. It bit harder into his flesh, then fell away, its sting replaced by the delicious sensation of her callused fingers. Gentle fingers, rubbing away the pain.
Caressing his balls as only a woman would.