The Guardian (A Wounded Warrior Novel)

by Anna del Mar

  Stout snorted. “See what I mean?”

  “Shut up, old man.” It was Cara’s turn to snap. “I’ve got my instructions and you’ve got yours.”

  “Student loans are a pain the ass.” I probed a little deeper. “But you have other options, you know.”

  Cara’s jittery foot tapped on the floor. “You try negotiating with the local dealers.”

  Drugs. Of course. A huge debt beyond her student loans. Peter had provided the drugs, she’d run up a tab, and now she was on the hook for the balance. Yep, things were beginning to make perfect sense.

  “Did Peter recruit you?” I asked.

  “He and I shared an affinity for some fine products he made accessible to some of us here at the station. We got talking. One thing led to the other. Next I knew, I was in on the plan.”

  The plan? Of course. The plan to take out Matthias and get to the elephants. That was the poacher’s ultimate objective at Pacha Ziwa, as Kumbuyo himself had admitted. In my mind, everything came together. Peter Drake dealt drugs, did aerial surveillance for Kumbuyo and his poachers, and spied on the staff at the station. At some point, he’d enlisted Stoats and Cara to augment his inside information gathering capabilities and to help get Matthias—the poacher’s greatest impediment—out of the way.

  One other thing. Matthias had said he and Cara had had a misunderstanding when she first arrived at the station. If Matthias had turned down Cara’s advances, then he’d added a personal dimension to her motives. And if she’d stolen into his tent undetected at least one time before, she had probably managed it a second time as well.

  It hit me right then. “You were the one who stole Matthias’s Ka-Bar, weren’t you?”

  Cara didn’t bother denying the truth. “Matthias’s days are numbered on this earth.”

  I moved so fast she didn’t have time to react. One moment I bent over my feet, playing with my boot laces, the next moment I lunged. Matthias’s days were far from numbered. In fact, he was going to live a long, full life, and I was going to make sure of it.

  I snatched the gun from Cara while delivering a hard kick to her stomach. I landed on my feet and twisted around. Sweeping my arms up, I aimed the gun and shot at Stoats, the only way to prevent him from killing the ranger sprawled on my floor.

  The shot hit him, where, I wasn’t sure, but his gun fell out of his hands and clattered onto the stoop. He clutched his shoulder and crumpled against the wall, leaving a trail of blood on the white paint as he slid toward the floor. I whirled on my heels and found Cara pushing off from the ground and charging me. She was no match for me.

  I lifted the Makarov and aimed it. “Stop right where you are.”

  Cara froze and lifted up her arms in the air. “You can’t kill me. We are friends!”

  “Your definition of friendship is pretty sketchy,” I said. “With friends like you, who needs enemies?”

  “Agreed.” A deep bass announced behind me at the same time that a cold circle pressed on the back of my skull. “Drop your weapon, Jade.”

  The blood froze in my veins. I turned my head ever so slightly. My stomach dropped when I spotted Kobe Kumbuyo in my peripheral vision. The muzzle of his AK-47 pressed against my skull.

  “Hello, Jade.” He flashed his chilling grin and snatched the Makarov from my hand. “You wanted to interview me? Well, now I want to interview you.”

  I forced myself to suppress a rush of uncontrolled fear. I stood there, accounting for his eight men, some of who were still climbing over the back deck’s railing. In the darkness, I spotted the glimmer of an aluminum flat-bottom boat on the water. They’d rowed across the swollen river.

  “You took your damn time,” Stoats groaned, holding his arm as he pushed himself up from the floor. “She could’ve killed me!”

  “She could have.” Kumbuyo gave him a mocking glance and pressed the AK-47’s muzzle even harder against my head. “But since she didn’t, I’ll do it.”

  Kumbuyo lifted the Makarov in his other hand and shot, three silent bullets that plunked into Stoats’s chest and exploded into crimson blotches that sprayed the wall. Eyes wide open, Stoats sprawled on my floor, dead, because he was no longer useful to Kumbuyo. Life was a free commodity to him, nothing to fret about.

  Kumbuyo’s black eyes found Cara, cowering in the corner.

  “No, please,” she whimpered, lifting her hands in the air.

  I took in the terror on Cara’s face, her trembling lips, and her tears streaking down her cheeks. Everything that she had done was wrong, pretending to be my friend, setting up Matthias, helping Peter, Stoats, and Kumbuyo infiltrate the station. But her actions stemmed from her drug addiction, a sickness she’d concealed from me, from all of us, a condition that had delivered her straight to the likes of Peter Drake and ultimately into Kumbuyo’s hands.

  “Listen to me, Kumbuyo,” I said, as evenly as I could manage. “You’ve got me. You don’t need to kill her.”

  “You’re right,” Kumbuyo said. “I don’t need to kill her but…I don’t like witnesses.”

  Kumbuyo’s finger pressed on the trigger. He shot straight into Cara’s chest. The life went out of her gaze as she fell. She was dead before she hit the ground. My heart seized. Her last gasp screeched in my ears like a loud, mournful scream.

  I grabbed the muzzle of Kumbuyo’s carbine and spun on my heels at the same time, sweeping my leg around to kick him off his knees. This was my last chance to escape. But Kumbuyo was ready for me. With a massive yank, he lifted me off my feet and slammed me on the hard floor. The breath swooshed out of my lungs. The last thing I remembered seeing was the butt of his AK-47 coming at me before my world went dark.

  27

  Matthias

  I woke up to the rattle of a rough road. My head ached, my stomach churned and I had to rip my cheek off the Land Rover’s vinyl seat. For a moment, I couldn’t figure out where I was. I forced my mind’s rusty gears to turn and took in the dark sky. A sliver of light offered a shy outline of the flat horizon, revealing we were racing south. I peeled my tongue off my parched mouth’s roof and remembered. The mission. Drake. Rem. I looked around. Jade wasn’t in the truck.

  I clenched my jaw so hard my teeth ached. The notion that she had put my safety above hers did nothing to appease my fury. Rem and Zeke were right up there with Jade on my shit list.

  Sometimes, friends and lovers were a major pain in the ass.

  I tested my hands. They were bound at the wrist with zip ties. Rem had made sure I wasn’t gonna give his men hell. Well, fuck Rem. My Ka-Bar was back at the station, but a SEAL always had a plan B. Moving very slowly, I reached down for the backup knife I kept tucked in my prosthetic. I was gonna do my best not to hurt Rem’s men, but hell no, I wasn’t going south, not without Jade.

  Jade

  A muted rasp broke through my mind’s silence. I struggled to place the peculiar sound. Rasp…rasp…rasp. The quiet rhythm lulled my senses into a false sense of security. A thought broke through the murkiness, awakening the pain throbbing on the side of my head. Danger. The echoes of my last memories reverberated in my head and shook me out of oblivion. Kumbuyo had found me. Cara and Stoats were dead. Rise and shine, marine.

  I kept very still but peered between my eyelids. A murky grayness welcomed me to the unknown, interrupted only by the flickering light of an oil lamp. Underground, maybe? Above me, I spotted a wooden framework stuffed with soil and grasses. A rigid surface creaked beneath my body, but I couldn’t move much. A hard hold squeezed around my neck.

  I tested my arms. My wrists were bound behind my back. Looking down the length of my body, I spotted my legs, spread apart, and my ankles, bound by a pair of iron shackles fastened to opposite sides of the cot. Initial assessment? Not good. Situation critical.

  The rasp stopped, replaced by the low rumble of a snicker. “I know you’re awake.”

  I tried craning my neck. The chain coiled tighter around my throat. The links dug in and made me gag. Still, I managed to turn
my head and forced my eyes to focus.

  Kumbuyo’s vicious stare met mine on the cracked little mirror hanging on the corner post. He stood with his broad muscular back to me, his face illuminated by the lamp’s flickering flame. He faced an old basin, chest bare, cammo pants riding low on his hips, cheeks and chin covered with suds. The first thought that came into my head was that he looked like a rabid animal, foaming at the mouth.

  Rasp…rasp…rasp. He scraped his face with an old razor, edging the corners of his mouth with careful strokes. I started to work my bindings right away, pulling on my legs, trying to slip my feet through the shackles, tugging my wrists apart to loosen my bonds.

  “You didn’t think I’d forget, did you?” Kumbuyo bit down on his upper lip and scraped at the bristle beneath his septum. “Not after our last encounter. Not after you wrecked my chances to find the ivory and finish off the game warden.”

  My gaze swept over my surroundings. We were in a small hut with mud walls and no windows. The dampness and the muffled noises confirmed we were underground. I recognized my empty backpack on the table. Kumbuyo must have taken it from my bungalow. My cameras were on the table, along with my laptop. The only door out of the hut stood right next to Kumbuyo. Not that I had a chance at getting at the door. I kept tugging on the chains. They didn’t give an inch. I wasn’t going anywhere soon.

  “By the look on your face, I don’t think you like our accommodations.” Kumbuyo tucked the razor in his belt and rinsed the suds off his cheeks. “Never mind that.” He grabbed a rag and patted his chin dry. “We’ll be moving on soon enough.”

  I wondered how long it’d been since he knocked me out at the reserve. A day, maybe two? I’d been unconscious most of the time, but I must have come to at times, because snippets of our trip flashed in my mind. I remembered the oars dipping quietly in and out of the water as we traveled upriver in the darkness, the violent rattle of a crowded truck bed as we raced away, and the steady knocking of a shoulder against my ribcages as someone hauled me to…where?

  Kumbuyo ambled to the cot and looked down on me. “Time for a little chat.”

  I held his stare. “You and I have nothing to chat about.”

  “You’re wrong, Jade. You’re going to tell me where the elephants hide in the reserve, plus every single thing you know about that huge pile of ivory you featured in your segment.”

  So, he hadn’t gone after it yet. He was smarter than we’d given him credit for and more cautious too. This was shitty news for me, because my best hope for a quick release involved Rem’s team chasing after Matthias’s decoys and finding me along with the ivory.

  It didn’t look like that was going to happen today. I suppressed a shiver of fear. I was on my own.

  “I’m ready for you this time around,” Kumbuyo said. “Now that I know you were a marine and worked on intelligence gathering missions with special ops, I won’t fall for your tricks.”

  He had looked me up real good, which could only confirm that Lamba and his terrorists had high-level contacts capable to access lots of information. Kumbuyo and Lamba were not the ignorant savages that the world press made them to be. They had knowledge, connections, and resources at a global level.

  “When we met, you wanted to interview me.” Kumbuyo lowered himself onto the bare springs and sat next to me. The cot bent under his weight and whined with a loud screech. “But now it’s my turn to ask questions. I think you’ll find my methods much more persuasive than yours.”

  I felt naked under Kumbuyo’s stare. It was worse when he slid his hand under my tank top and beneath my bra. His touch sickened me. His fingers closed about my breast, cruel and painful. His callous thumb rubbed against my nipple, harsh against my skin.

  “I do remember these beauties from the first night we met.” His fingers pinched and hurt. “I remember the way you looked and felt, and what you promised me. I’ve been looking forward to collecting on that debt.”

  Heaven help me. I strained in my bonds, but the chains held. I couldn’t move to stop him. Helpless again. I gritted my teeth. For the second time in only a few weeks, I felt powerless. But I wasn’t going to let Kumbuyo know that. Or anything else for that matter.

  “I don’t have any info that interests you,” I said. “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  His smirk froze the blood in my veins. “We’ll see about that.”

  The dark lust clouding his eyes announced that I was a bug about to be squashed. My stomach churned. He was so controlled, watching me as he touched me, stoking my fears, sending gushes of adrenaline to flood my brain. But the one thing he didn’t know about me was that fear led to fury and fury led to defiance.

  I pushed the words through my dry lips. “Why haven’t you killed me yet?”

  Kumbuyo’s smug smirk widened. “The short answer?”

  It took all I had to flash my fangs at him. “Sure.”

  His lips straightened and his stare hardened on my face. “Because I want you to suffer.”

  The chill in his glare iced my spine.

  “You humiliated me in front of my men.” He traced his fingers over my lips, softly for a man who harbored such violence in him. “You distracted me from my primary task: killing the warden.”

  I tried to jerk away from his touch, but the chains were too tight. In the interest of self-preservation, I kept my thoughts to myself. There was no point in further provoking the brute. I knew what he was capable of. I’d seen him in action. Killing came as easy as breathing to him.

  “Women like you must be tamed.” He slid the shaving razor from his belt, opened it and plucked out the rusted blade. “I know a traditional method that works well. It will help you become humbler, respectful, servile. If nothing else, it will make you talk.”

  My skin crawled and an involuntary shiver shook me all the way to my bone marrow. I had a bad feeling that I knew what he was talking about. With a sickening rip of the blade, he slashed the crotch of my pants into a ragged V.

  “So that you know.” A conspiratorial gleam brightened Kumbuyo’s eyes. “As per the World Health Organization’s classification, I’m going for type three.”

  A surge of fear squeezed my throat worse than the chain around my neck. I tugged on those bonds with all I had, pulling on the shackles, one foot, then the other. In preparing for this trip, I’d done tons of research. I’d read the reports condemning the heinous practice of female genital mutilation and describing the different times of procedures commonly performed on young tribal girls. In type one, the clitoris was held between two fingers and sliced off. In type two, the outer and the inner lips were also removed in addition to the clitoris. In type three, all of the female genitalia were amputated and then the wound was sewn tightly closed, leaving only a tiny opening to allow for the flow of urine and menstrual blood.

  Millions of women had been submitted to this horror over the generations. Activist all over the continent were trying to curb the atrocious practice. Not Kumbuyo. Oh, yeah and by the way, these procedures were traditionally done with a razor just like the one that Kumbuyo held between his fingers.

  Panic sent a jolt of fear through my system. Outrage lent me superhuman strength. I can’t really explain how it happened, only that after pulling on my bonds throughout the entire disturbing exchange, the chain that held my left ankle snapped. I kicked up and struck Kumbuyo on the head with my knee.

  He stumbled off the cot, taken by surprise. The razor blade tumbled in the air and dropped to the floor. Kumbuyo roared, leapt from the floor and came after me. I batted the sweeps of his fist with my free leg, but he caught my ankle, held it down and landed some vicious punches on my torso, growing more savage with every strike.

  His ferocious fury found a target in my body. I didn’t think he was going to stop. Pinned and bound as I was, I had no real way to defend myself. I took the pounding and fought for breath as pain flared and black dots obscured my vision. I was about to pass out when then the door slammed open and a rotund, giant o
f a man strode into the hut.

  “What in the name of God are you doing?”

  Kumbuyo’s fist landed in my gut.

  “Stop him,” the newcomer ordered as I fought to stay conscious.

  Two heavily armed men wearing jungle fatigues grabbed Kumbuyo by the back of his pants, pulled him off me, and hurled him halfway across the room. Kumbuyo crashed against the wall. The collision must have returned him back to his senses, because he looked up and gawked at the newcomer, blinking hard, as if he couldn’t believe his own eyes.

  “Commander?” He grappled for words. “What are you doing here?”

  Commander? The title brought me back to full alert mode. My ribs ached and my gut was on fire, but I was alive for the moment, and that was a lot more than I expected a few seconds ago.

  I pretended as if I were drifting in and out of consciousness. Better if they thought I wasn’t listening. Through hooded lids, I evaluated the newcomer. Tall and rotund, he sported a sprawling nose and a prolific double chin. His ridiculously ornamented uniform could’ve come straight from a Cirque du Solei act. His beret was adorned with red ribbons and the gun at his holster was new and shiny. The two bodyguards who flanked the door looked even larger than Kumbuyo and armed to the teeth.

  “You seem so surprised to see me,” the man said in a remarkably soft voice and a tilting accent, French perhaps?

  “I wasn’t expecting you.” A visibly rattled Kumbuyo pushed himself off the dirt. “I hadn’t been informed you were coming. If I may ask, how did you get here?”

  “I didn’t trek all the way through Central Africa if that’s what you’re asking,” the other man said. “I caught a ride with a friend of mine, a Tanzanian minister who owns a private jet. It’s a much more civilized way to travel. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes, of course,” Kumbuyo mumbled, but he couldn’t really hide his bewilderment.