A Prince Among Men (Red, Hot & Blue)

by Cat Johnson

  “Why didn’t they tie your feet?”

  “They needed us to walk here from where they hid the stolen truck and supplies. We were all conscious. They couldn’t carry us and hold the guns.”

  “How did only two men get the five of us in here?” And how did they best Ryan’s Alpha Team?

  “There were three of them. They drove you in another truck up to the door. Two of them dragged your men in, one at a time, while the other had a gun on us,” Wales answered. “We haven’t seen the third since then.”

  Great. And Ryan could only imagine how delicately they’d dumped them on the floor. No wonder he ached like he’d been in a bar fight or worse.

  Jordan motioned toward the back room of the building they were stashed in. “When they wake up, it is eight against two. We can take them.”

  Something niggled in the back of Ryan’s brain and he focused hard to zero in on it. Reason slowly took shape. “There’s no way three guys took my team of five. It’s impossible. I remember I was leading the way. It was after sunset, but even in the dark we spotted tire tracks leaving the road. I had hoped it was your truck. I followed the tracks in the dark with a flashlight, telling the rest of my team to cover me, and then whack. Everything went black.” Ryan wrinkled his forehead gingerly. “But still, even with me out of it, there were still four armed, well-trained soldiers behind me.”

  Ryan had had his helmet on, but they’d gotten him with the butt of a rifle just above his eyes. No wonder he felt like shit. He probably had a concussion, but he was alive, and that was all that mattered for now.

  “Well, just because we only saw the three doesn’t mean that’s all there are. There’s no way of knowing how many more are in that hut or staked out in the orchard,” Rumsfield, always the voice of reason, pointed out.

  Ryan wasn’t so sure about the wisdom of taking on an unknown number of men with injured soldiers who had no weapons. It sounded like a really good way to get shot. Then again, the longer they waited, the closer they got to whatever not-so-fun festivities the baddies had planned for them.

  He’d have to knee-walk to that back room, find his men and assess their injuries for himself. He just had to get motivated to make the move and hope he didn’t vomit from the exertion. “I’m sure the rest of my squad and the other two American squads on base are already out looking. They’ll find us.”

  Thinking about what was happening back at base brought the image of Vicki into Ryan’s mind. She must be going crazy with worry by now. She hated when he went out on routine missions, but now that he was missing…

  However, thinking about Vicki wouldn’t get him out of here. In order to get back to her, he had to put her out of his mind and concentrate. How could they get out of here?

  Jordan interrupted Ryan’s thought. “There’ll be more than your two American squads looking for us, I can bet you on that.”

  “Shut it, Jordan.” Rumsfield looked as if he wanted to smack his comrade upside the head.

  Jordan turned away from the door to face the room. “He should know, Rumsfield. His life is in danger too, and maybe he can help.”

  “And maybe he will turn us all in, in exchange for getting himself free. Did you ever think of that?”

  Jordan shook his head. “You’re batty, Rumsfield. The Yanks are our allies, and no one would be stupid enough to make a bargain with the Taliban and expect them to keep their word.”

  “Look. Fighting among ourselves does no one any good,” Wales reasoned.

  Ryan nodded and paid the price with a wave of nausea. “I agree totally with Wales.”

  He watched the Brit’s eyes open wide. “You know who I am.”

  Ryan frowned and nodded, again regretting the action the minute he did it. “Yeah. Your name is written across your chest, just like mine is.” He glanced down and realized his uniform was so covered in dirt and blood, his own name was illegible. Jeez, he’d bled a lot, but then head wounds always did. He glanced up. “I’m Pettit. Sergeant Ryan Pettit.”

  Looking relieved, Wales smiled wryly. “I’d shake your hand, but…”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Hoping the other two didn’t start to fight again, Ryan decided to distract them with a few questions that he needed answered anyway. “How far are we from where they attacked the truck?”

  “About thirty kilometers, I guess,” Wales estimated.

  “Any chance they left that truck parked out in the open?” It was a long shot, because if that were the case, air support would have spotted it by now.

  “No such luck. They’ve got it buried in the brush in an orchard and covered in camo netting, which I’m sure they stole from one of our camps.” Jordan was back at his post, spying out the crack in the door again.

  They had to do something. He was not about to sit here like a lamb waiting for the slaughter. Ryan pulled again at the ropes behind his back. “Hey, Wales. It feels like there is some give in the knots around my hands. If we sit back to back, I think you might be able to work at the knots and get them loose.”

  “I’ll try, Pettit. But I’ll be working blind.” Wales pushed off the wall so Ryan could scoot against his back.

  “We won’t be blind if one of your guys acts as our eyes.”

  Wales smiled over his shoulder at Ryan. “Gotcha. Teamwork. Rumsfield, I need your eyes.”

  Ryan shifted so Wales could work the ties binding him, and step one in the great escape plan had begun.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The browser tried and tried to load the window until finally a message appeared. No Internet connection found.

  Vicki tried one more time to connect, only to get the same error message. “What the hell?”

  Wally, sitting on his bed while cleaning some big-ass gun for like the tenth time since returning to base, looked up. “What’s wrong, darlin’?”

  She didn’t take the darlin’ personally or make more of it than what it was. Wally had explained he was from Alabama. The man was a die-hard flirt, but she figured calling women darlin’ and flirting were second nature to Southern boys, so she ignored it. “The Internet is down.”

  “They always shut it down when someone gets hurt or killed.”

  She spun around in her chair to face him head-on. “We don’t know that someone is hurt or killed. Do we?” Her voice carried a tone of panic, mixed with anger and a healthy dose of accusation.

  Wally looked sorry he’d said anything. “They shut it down when anyone’s gone missing too. SOP. That’s all.”

  Frowning, Vicki huffed out an angry sigh of frustration.

  “SOP. Standard operating procedure.” Wally must have misinterpreted the reason for her frown.

  “Yes, I know. Thank you.” She turned back to flip the lid of her laptop closed a bit harder than she’d meant to, feeling bad immediately afterward. No use taking her frustration out on an innocent piece of equipment.

  Vicki stood and began pacing within the small, ridiculously cluttered hut. “Why isn’t everyone out looking? I don’t get it.”

  “We can’t go running out there, darlin’. Ain’t no tellin’ how many baddies there are, lying in wait, most likely with a nice ambush set up for us.”

  “So bring enough men and guns with you so you can fight them.” Vicki couldn’t believe she was actually condoning—no, encouraging these men to go out and face a known danger when this was the exact thing she hated Ryan doing.

  “This base may be small, but it’s full of equipment and munitions. There has to be a strong force left here to protect all that.” Wally might sound like a goof-off a lot of the time, but he was right on the ball when it came to knowing military stuff.

  Vicki sighed. Logic didn’t make her feel any better. Doing something would. She itched to call Mel. He would know what she could do to help. If she thought it would get Ryan back to her any faster, she’d get on the phone to the damn New York Times, the London Times, the Queen of England and the president of the United States.

  That would prob
ably bring in more manpower to help search, but it also might put Ryan in more danger. Besides, Hawk had sworn to her, though only to get her out of his face and away from the operations center, that his backup was on the way. That had been hours ago.

  “Hey, Wally. What do you know about some friend of Hawk’s named Dalton?”

  Wally frowned. “Gotta give me more than that to go on, darlin’.”

  “Hawk said this guy Dalton’s security clearance was so high the man officially didn’t even exist.”

  Wally thought for a second. “There was this guy named Dalton we came across right before we left Germany for here, but he ain’t no friend. He was part of this high-tech Special Operations team that kicked our asses during a training mission. Pissed Hawk the hell off, I can tell you that.”

  High-tech Special Ops. Now we’re talking. Maybe Hawk did know what he was doing after all. She only hoped they didn’t arrive too late.

  “You keep pacing like that and you’re likely to wear a hole in that there floor.”

  Vicki looked up to see Wally following her journey back and forth across the tight space with his gaze. She rubbed her hands over her face. “I can’t sit still. I hate not being able to do anything. This sucks.”

  Wally’s head cocked to the side. “Chopper.”

  Vicki’s pacing stopped dead. “Could it be Hawk’s backup?”

  Wally grinned. “Let’s go to the landing zone and see.” After slapping his weapon together with a click Vicki had heard too many times in the past few hours, Wally slammed his helmet on his head and looked back at her. “Coming?”

  Her eyes opened wide. “Can I?”

  “Until Hawk tells me otherwise, I don’t see why not. Put on your body armor and helmet, little darlin’. I don’t want to have to go explaining how I single-handedly got a civilian reporter killed.”

  Vicki snorted. “That’s not happening today. Don’t you worry.” She had no plans of departing the earth, or the base, until she knew Ryan was safe.

  By the time they reached the landing zone, Hawk was already there surrounded by seven men dressed in black from their now dusty dark combat boots, to their monochromatic body armor, right up to the tip of their black helmets.

  Hawk hadn’t been kidding. His backup was the men in black, literally, and they were here to get Ryan back. For some reason, Vicki honestly believed they would.

  Vicki hung back slightly as Wally ran up to his leader. “Hawk, we movin’ out now?”

  Hawk spun on Wally with that face that Vicki had learned to fear. “No. It seems we’re not good enough to ride along with the Super Ops here.”

  One of the men in black shook his head. “You know that’s not it, Hawk. We’ll move faster and more efficiently with just the seven of us.”

  Another man, who had been standing apart from the group occupied on the phone until now, strode over to the conflict and addressed the first man. “Problem here, Dalton?”

  That was Dalton? If Vicki wasn’t about to throw up with worry over Ryan, she might have thought him gorgeous. As it was, even his black face paint didn’t hide his piercing blue eyes and chiseled bone structure that made him look more like a supermodel than a Super Op, as Hawk had called him.

  Dalton shook his head. “No, Jimmy. No problem.”

  “Yeah, there is a problem.” Vicki could have sworn Hawk puffed his chest up like a male peacock as he took one step closer to the two men. “Those are my men out there. I’m coming with you to get them back.”

  Jimmy, who was apparently the man in charge, at least of this particular operation, shook his head.

  “The less foxes sneakin’ into this henhouse the better, Hawkins. You know that.” In a southern accent that rivaled Wally’s, he squashed Hawk’s bravado in one fell swoop.

  Hawk shook his head. “How are you going to find them without our help? Wally can show you the exact point where they were taken.”

  “I have the coordinates you gave me, but tracking them on foot from the point of attack is our last resort. I have much better means of locating them at my disposal.” The answer did not come from either Jimmy or Dalton. Instead a man sitting in the doorway of the chopper with a laptop responded. He raised his head and looked at Hawk. “And might I add, if you at least had a tracking device installed in that missing pickup truck, it wouldn’t be missing.”

  Hawk’s eyes narrowed. “The Army doesn’t give us any of the good toys, Coleman. You’ve got them all.”

  Coleman grinned at him, angering Vicki. Men could be dying somewhere out there, and they were joking around and wasting time fighting? “Ever hear of LoJack, Hawkins? It costs like what, a hundred bucks? I’ll buy you one.”

  As she watched Hawk’s mouth harden into a tight line, Vicki figured this smart-ass Coleman was lucky to still be standing, or rather sitting, upright. Vicki never thought she’d see the day, but Hawk was speechless. These guys must be really good at what they did for Hawk to take this kind of abuse from them willingly.

  “Who are these guys again?” Vicki whispered to Wally.

  “The guys that kicked our asses back in Germany during a training mission.”

  “It doesn’t seem as if Hawk likes them very much.”

  Wally grinned. “Oh, darlin’. You have no idea.”

  “Anyway,” Coleman continued, “I’m hoping to locate them by using a computer program that takes real-time satellite photos of the vicinity and overlays them with thermal imaging. All I have to do is give it the parameters to search for and bingo, we’re good. There is a group of three and a group of five men missing, as well as a pickup truck. Correct?”

  Hawk nodded.

  “Okay, then. Hopefully these bastards made it easy for me, and I’ll find heat signatures for eight warm bodies huddled together in one spot, nice and easy to rescue.”

  Although the high-tech computer talk was impressive, Vicki thought hoping the bad guys would make it easy probably wasn’t the best idea. She glanced at Hawk and Wally. Neither of them looked too hopeful either.

  “And what happens if the eight ain’t still together?” Wally asked.

  Vicki’s mind asked another, far more horrible question. What if they’re not still alive and warm?

  Wally continued, “And even if they are, what are you fixin’ to do? Knock on the door of every hut in the province that’s got three, five, or eight people inside? And what about guards? They’ll show up on the thermal too. So then there will be more bodies.”

  Matt grinned again, putting down one laptop next to him and whipping out another one. “I made it all sound much simpler than it is. Believe me, even if the thermal program doesn’t yield a location, I have a few more tricks up my sleeve. Don’t you worry.”

  The guy in charge looked totally confident in his computer guy’s abilities. “When we pinpoint the location, we’ll stake it out from a distance and go in after dark. Unless we plan on taking the captors out with a firestorm, which really isn’t our style and would risk the lives of the hostages, we need the cover of darkness to get in and out relatively unnoticed.”

  Dark. That was hours away. Vicki felt herself start to shake again and honestly feared that, for the first time in her life, she might faint. She started to sway, and then Wally’s hand was suddenly on her arm, holding her up.

  “Hey now, little lady. You okay?”

  Vicki shook her head and cringed when Hawk turned toward her. “Shit. I totally forgot about you. Wally, take her back to the hut. And Vicki…” Hawk’s voice lowered to a growl.

  “I know, I know. You don’t have to tell me again, Hawk. I’m not to write one word.” Suddenly, the anger helped her stay conscious and upright. “But I am telling you one thing. You don’t bring Ryan home to me alive, and I’ll write a story that will make your head spin.”

  Hawk raised a brow. “You threatening me?”

  “Damn right I am.”

  He smirked and shook his head. “Take her to the hut, Wally.”

  Wally cocked one brow and looked
down at her. “So, you and Pettit, huh? I knew I should have let you sleep in my bed.”

  He shook his head as if disappointed, but before Wally could even turn them back toward the hut, Coleman jumped up. “Got ’em.”

  With one quick hand signal, the leader had his team loaded back into the helicopter. He paused in the doorway and yelled back to Hawk, “I’ll radio base when we’ve got ’em in hand.”

  When, not if. Vicki liked the sound of that.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Things were progressing much too easily, and that made Ryan really nervous. Loosening the ties. Unbinding the limbs of all the men. His team, finally conscious, though they had headaches matching his own. Apparently, the rifle butt to the forehead was the baddies’ favorite move.

  Alpha team was all ready and willing to do whatever it took to get out of here, especially when they heard they were being held by only two guards.

  Those two guards were taking a really long time to eat their meal, which left their prisoners alone to plot. Maybe goat meat had the same effect on the body as turkey and they’d all fallen asleep. Who the hell knew, but the waiting was a bit nerve-racking.

  Standing by the door now after having switched off the watch with Jordan, Ryan turned to his guys. “Please tell me the five of us didn’t get taken by only these two men who are more interested in eating than checking on their prisoners.”

  “Hell, no. It wasn’t just two.” Bender shook his head and then touched it with his fingers as if he was in pain. Ryan knew exactly how the man felt. “We heard a thud and you grunted and then suddenly the four of us were covered in a net with two Soviet-era AK47s pointed in our faces.”

  “So one man took me out and two held you four with nothing but a net and two old guns?” Ryan rolled his eyes in disbelief. How embarrassing.

  “They had you, Sergeant. You were unconscious, so I took command. I figured we had a good chance they’d take us to where they had the three Brits and the supply truck if we went peacefully,” Moraches explained, looking pale and queasy beneath his usually dark complexion. Definite concussion there.