“We’ll troll the forest for any remaining Lucies. You know that Jasper will be long gone. For now, anyhow. The coward!” Trond said. “You go off to the school. I know you’re anxious to check on Camille’s status. Plus you’ll need to report back to the SEAL teams and tell them that Trond will be back shortly.”
Harek jogged through the jungle, having to pause only once when he literally ran into a snake the size of a telephone pole, hanging from a tree. A little exaggeration, but not much. It was a big bugger and took two swipes of his broadsword before he was able to decapitate it. Yeech!
He stopped in his tracks when he got to the clearing behind the school. His heart began to race wildly as he viewed the inferno that enveloped the school. Please, God, don’t let Camille be inside.
There were fire trucks, but they didn’t seem to be making much headway. The fire was too out of control. There were also ambulances and medical personnel carrying gurneys with both injured and dead bodies. Not a lot, which made Harek wonder where the students and staff were.
He saw Brad being treated for a broken arm. When he went up to him, he could tell that the news was not good. “Henry didn’t make it. The bastards slit his throat. Everyone else on our team survived, though, except for some minor injuries like mine. Some of the other teams have injuries, as well, but no fatalities. BK set fire to the school with a couple explosions, intending to burn all the staff inside, but Sly, Donita, and Omar managed to get most of them out.”
“And Boko Haram?”
“Wiped out. Well, almost all of them who were here. Close to a hundred.”
“Then the mission was a success?”
“Not exactly.” He winced as the medical technician tightened the splint on his arm. “They got away with some of the students. Hell, they got away with a lot of the students. Close to fifty.”
“Camille?”
Brad nodded.
“Crap! Where are Geek and the other SEALs?” He needed to find Camille before BK shipped the girls out of the area. Then it would be almost impossible to find them.
“They’ve set up operations in that garage over there.”
He headed in that direction and wasn’t surprised to discover that the SEALs and government operatives had already set up a command center. Buses and other motor vehicles had been removed and were parked outside. A porta-potty was located near the back door. Inside, folding tables and chairs had been brought in. Computers and communications equipment were arranged around the room, where men and a few women gathered to gain information and give opinions. There was even a coffeemaker perking away, with Styrofoam cups and napkins arrayed with condiments. Some prisoners sat on the floor at the far end of the large garage, being interrogated by Omar and an FBI agent proficient in Nigerian dialects.
“Where you been, buddy?” Slick asked him, then glanced down at his bloody sword. “Never mind. You’ve heard that Camo was taken with the other students?”
He nodded, unable to speak at first over the lump in his throat. “How did that happen?”
“Only a handful of the girls managed to escape. They’d been hiding in a basement storage room, under Camo’s direction. Apparently, she’d gone off to rescue some other girls when she got caught.”
Of course she did, Harek thought. It was an asinine thing to do, to take such a personal risk, but he knew very well that Camille would have told him it was her job.
“I want to be involved in the rescue mission,” Harek said. “When do you start?” There was no doubt in his mind that the SEALs would go after the girls, especially with a Navy WEALS among those kidnapped. No man (or woman) left behind was their motto.
“It will be a couple of hours. We’re putting together teams right now, and Omar hopes to get some intel from the captives so we have credible maps to go on, instead of chasing our tails in this fucking jungle.”
“Hours! They’ll be long gone by then,” Harek complained.
“Not necessarily. The two rickety buses they shoved the girls in were seen heading inland, and I imagine the vehicles can only go so far in that dense foliage. I imagine they’ll have to stop and move them on foot to . . . wherever. Can you imagine all those screaming, crying girls? They have to slow the tangos down, I imagine.”
“There are a whole lot of imagines in there, Slick.”
“It is what it is.”
“I hate that expression. By the way, Trond had to take one of the fallen Wings operatives to a hospital. He should be back here shortly.”
Slick nodded, although he had to wonder about the protocol of a SEAL taking off on his own, without prior permission. While some of the SEALs knew of the vangels’ existence, Slick was not one of them.
“It was Karl Mortensen,” Harek elaborated. “I think you know him. He was in BUD/S with Trond at one time.”
“Yeah, I do. Good man! Is he okay?”
“He’s in pretty bad shape.”
“Oh shit!”
At least that drew Slick’s attention away from Trond’s breach of Navy procedures.
Slick turned to a newcomer to the scene, a Nigerian military officer. While Slick went off to greet him, Harek walked back to the area where the captives were being held. “Any news?” he asked Omar. At the moment, Omar was alone with about eight male captives, bound with plastic cuffs at the wrists and ankles. A few of them looked pretty banged up with wounds seeping blood. Nothing fatal. Omar’s fellow interrogator, the FBI agent, had gone over to one of the computers and was typing away.
“Not much. In the old days, we could have tortured information from a prisoner. A little waterboarding and they’d squeal like stuck pigs.”
Harek wasn’t sure if Omar was kidding or not. Still, he offered, “I could take one or two behind the building and torture them for you. I’m not military. They can’t court-martial me.”
“Yeah, but they could put you in prison.” Omar laughed, figuring Harek wasn’t serious. He was. “Thanks, but no thanks, buddy. Listen, I’ve gotta hit the head. Been drinking coffee for the past hour. Can you stand watch ’til I get back?” He eyed Harek’s bloody sword and advised, “You might want to hide that thing. Raises lots of questions.”
“Go ahead,” Harek said. He wasn’t about to give up his sword yet. He saw the way the prisoners eyed it with trepidation. Guns were to be feared, but a bigass sword gave images of head loppings to this crowd.
For a brief moment, his eyes connected with one of the captive’s . . . an odd shade of green. Not a native Nigerian, he would suspect. Harek knew instinctively that this was his opportunity. With a speed that had all the BKs gazing at him in shock, he was behind Green Eyes, yanking him to his feet, with one arm around his neck, under his chin. The other arm still held the sword.
“Hold on tight, buddy,” he whispered into the guy’s ear—he was a head shorter than Harek, but built like a bull. With a whoosh, he teletransported them both outside and to the edge of the woods.
Setting the prisoner on the ground, he cut the leg manacles with a swing of his sword. The man closed his eyes, probably figuring that Harek was going to chop off his legs, or something. When he realized that he was free, except for the hand restraints, he stood awkwardly.
“Do you speak English?” Harek asked.
The man nodded, clearly confused by his new situation.
“This is your lucky day, pal. If you cooperate with me, no one is going to get hurt. I need you to take me to your leader.”
“No, no, no. They kill me.”
“Not if you pretend that I’m your prisoner.”
“Huh?”
“Show me the way. When we get near the camp, I’ll cut your cuff and hand over my sword.”
“Why? Why you do this?”
“I need to rescue the girl I . . .” He was about to say “love,” and there was no longer any “think” about. He cleared his throat and said, “I need to rescue my daughter.” He supposed he was old enough to have a teenaged daughter, just barely.
The man smiled know
ingly and patted his chest. “Two daughters.”
“You understand then?”
Green Eyes nodded. “I take you.”
Chapter 19
He didn’t ride a white horse, but . . .
Camille wasn’t feeling so good. In fact, she hurt all over, and was fighting nausea.
And no wonder. Red Scarf, the man whose thick head she’d grazed with a bullet back at the school, took every opportunity he could to either punch or kick her. It would serve her captor right if she barfed all over him.
He was just as annoyed that she’d damaged his new scarf as he was that she, a lowly woman, had attacked him. At least that’s what she’d been able to gather from his accented English. The expletives weren’t all that hard to understand. “Whore!” “Crazy American!” “Bitch!” “Stupid girl!” At least he still thought she was a schoolgirl . . . albeit a gun-wielding schoolgirl. She couldn’t imagine his reaction if he found out he’d been fooled, too.
She’d made the mistake of trying to defend her shooting him by pointing out that he’d been about to attack her. Her perfectly logical explanation resulted in a twist to her injured wrist, which she’d now ascertained was sprained, not broken, but might not remain that way if her tormenter kept up his abuse.
Neither had her nose been broken by her forward fall when she’d been knocked out, though it hurt like crazy. She wasn’t able to check herself because her hands were restrained behind her back, but one of the girls kidnapped with her had observed that it seemed straight and only a little swollen.
Camille had been in and out of consciousness during the bus trip from the school to here, wherever “here” was. Actually, the bus had been driven into some underground bunker, where there were other equally rickety buses and all-terrain vehicles. Then, Camille and a large number of the Global School girls were frog-marched through the jungle until they reached some kind of intersecting paths where the captives were divided randomly into three groups and continued to push through the thick, snake-infested foliage. Toward evening, covered with mosquito bites but dully quiet, having cried themselves out, the girls finally arrived at a village, which had apparently been expecting them.
This might have been a tribal village at one time, but there was no evidence of families here now. Mostly men, and the downtrodden female slaves who served them, some of which Camille realized, to her horror, were the kidnapped schoolgirls the world had been looking for the past few years. By the way they averted their eyes with shame, Camille ascertained that the slaves were being forced to serve more than food to the men. Not unexpected, but disgusting just the same, especially considering their young ages.
About twenty of them were crammed into a large, single-room dwelling, which might have been a village communal meeting place at one time, or home to a large family. They sat or lay about on an immense woven carpet of once vibrant colors that covered the dirt floor and was filthy with misuse. No one seemed to care. They were exhausted and frightened into silence.
Everyone except Camille had been untied, and the others had been warned that they would die if they touched her ropes. Five-gallon buckets sat at each end of the room, serving as toilets for all of them. Another bucket, presumably clean, held drinking water and a long-handled dipper. Hunks of flatbread were their only food.
Red Scarf had taken great pleasure a short time ago in dragging her over to one of the buckets, pulling her panties down, and sitting her down to pee. The luxury of toilet paper was denied them. “Ha, ha, ha!” he’d laughed to one of his comrades. In what dumb-man rulebook did embarrassing women count as a joke? When she’d asked for water, he pressed the dipper to her mouth, and half of it landed on her face. More dumb laughter.
She took immature satisfaction in calling him an asshole under her breath.
Jasmine Olander, the Nigerian girl sitting next to Camille (her parents were foreign diplomats, who, in hindsight, should have taken the twelve-year-old with them to Paris), shared bits of her bread.
“I saw what you did to that man at the school,” Jasmine said.
Camille nodded, not wanting to draw the attention of the rifle-toting guard at the open doorway.
“You’re not a student, are you?”
Camille shook her head and whispered, “Navy WEALS.”
Jasmine’s big eyes went even bigger, the whites showing starkly against her ebony skin. “You’re a Navy SEAL?”
Not exactly, Camille should have said, but didn’t. It would have taken too long to explain. “Yes,” she said.
Jasmine smiled, probably the first time any of them had smiled all day. “Thank you, Jesus. Our prayers are answered. The SEALs will come to rescue us!”
Lord, I hope so, Camille thought.
And then was alarmed to see Jasmine whisper the news to the girl next to her, and like dominos, the news spread around the room. The Navy SEALs were on their way. Camille only prayed she hadn’t raised false hopes in the girls, who, reassured that rescue was only hours away, settled in for the night. Like a nest of puppies, they cuddled up against one another.
Too tired to stay awake, Camille fell asleep, as well. A deep, dreamless sleep interrupted only by the occasional twinge of pain from her injuries.
It was daylight when she awakened to a loud ruckus outside. There were angry shouts, arguing, what sounded like slaps and thuds, cries of pain. “You fool! Bringing a stranger here!”
“He rescued me.”
“How do you know you weren’t followed?”
“We weren’t. Besides, he only wants his daughter.”
“Idiot! He’s too young to father one of the schoolgirls.”
“He told me he was sixteen when—”
“He told you, he told you! I am surrounded by idiots!”
A loud slapping noise, followed by a cry of pain. She wasn’t sure if it was the rescuer or the rescuee who’d been hit.
A more authoritative voice broke in, “What’s going on here?” Quickly apprised of the situation in a native dialect Camille didn’t understand, the man in charge said, “Bring him!” And there was the sound of a person being dragged unwillingly away. This time she was almost certain it was the stranger, not the BK member who had been “rescued.”
All of the girls were awake by now, glancing toward her for answers. She looked at the guard and arched her brows. To her surprise, the man answered, but it wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear, “They take man to be tortured. Aikeem good torturer. The prisoner will spill his guts. Ha, ha! Get it? Spill his guts.”
That would be prison humor, Camille figured, but she wasn’t laughing. None of them was.
Several hours later, after a delicious breakfast of unsweetened, glutinous oatmeal, she got her answer. Two BK soldiers dragged in a man wearing camouflage clothing, his arms tied behind his back. One eye was swollen shut. His bottom lip was bleeding. He’d obviously been beaten, all over his battered body.
“Do not touch the enemy,” one of the guards ordered the girls. “He is unclean.”
Huh? If you asked Camille, everyone in this camp was unclean.
Propping the prisoner’s back against the wall across the room from where Camille sat, the guard extended the man’s legs, none too gently. Fortunately, because his pain must be unbearable, the man appeared to be unconscious.
Stunned, everyone in the room just gaped. Camille let out a little gasp of recognition when she realized who it was.
Harek.
He looked like hell. How bad were his injuries? Was there internal damage? She knew how these BK thugs liked to kick a body’s soft parts. His hair was a greasy mess, and not the usual designer disarray. There was a bloody slash across one forearm, probably from a knife. Through his ripped clothing, she could see damaged skin. His black and blue marks would have black and blue marks. He might have chipped a fang.
Once the guards left, Harek opened his one good eye and winked at her.
Whaaat?
“Prince Charming to the rescue,” he drawled.
&
nbsp; For the first time in this horrendous ordeal, Camille burst out in tears. It was humiliating, really, and probably against Navy regulations.
A beautiful princess, she was not . . .
Camille’s hair was a wild, red, uncombed bush, her freckles standing out like blinking zits, her skirt and blouse ripped in places, her socks bagged around her ankles, bruises everywhere. One shoe was missing.
Thank God she still appeared to be wearing the breast binder, otherwise she would probably be bruised in other places, too. Not that the BKers were squeamish about raping underage girls!
In essence, Camille looked like hell, but he was so glad to see her, you would have thought she was a goddess smiling down with appreciation at him. Not that she was smiling. Once she got over her bout of hysterical crying, she shot questions at him, like bullets.
“Why are you here?”
“To rescue you.”
“Where are the SEALs?”
“On their way. Eventually. Maybe. I couldn’t afford to wait.”
“Why?”
“You know why.” Along the grueling trek from the school to this godforsaken village, Harek had decided that he no longer “thought” he loved Camille. He “knew” for a certainty that he loved her. But he wasn’t about to make that announcement in front of a roomful of adolescent girls and Camille looking like Little Orphan Annie’s cousin from the asylum. He didn’t have an IQ of 200 for nothing. Besides, it wasn’t the place for romance. It kinda smelled in here.
“What’s your plan?”
Definitely not romantic. “What plan?”
“No talking!” the guard barked.
Once the guard turned away to watch something outside, she began talking again. “Where are the others?”
“What others?”
She rolled her eyes, which had to hurt considering the bruises on her face, including the distinct imprint of a man’s hand on her left cheek. Someone was going to pay for that.
“You came alone?”
He nodded. He was starting to get a headache with all this talking. Or it might have been that kick to the head by a guy with a red scarf. He was going to remember that red scarf.