Page 33 of Her Fearless Warrior

When the man had finished lowering the ladder, Vugar looked at the two men who were still holding Katherine. “Her first,” he said.

“No,” Leila argued. “Me first. If she falls and kills herself, your entire plan goes up in smoke. Let me go first and that way I can help her if she loses her balance.”

He smiled slowly. “I don’t know, Leila. Twenty-four hours of you down in that hole with a corpse would definitely get you to talk, don’t you think?”

“No. I don’t. I think it would make me more likely to find a way to slit my wrists. So let me go down the ladder first.”

Even his laughter made her queasy.

“You are a delight. Fine, you can go first, then Katherine can go.”

Leila took the four steps necessary to get to the ladder, then she backed down five rungs and waited for Katherine to follow her. It took them all of three minutes to get to the bottom of the dark and foul, smelly bottom. Every instinct she had was to grab the ladder and yank at it, causing whoever was pulling it back to be jerked over the edge of the hole, but that would only injure her and or Katherine.

The sound of the grill grinding over the tiles as it was pushed over the hole sickened her. Leila jumped. Had she heard something? No, it was just the sound of Katherine rubbing against the side of the hole as she leaned against it. She tried not to look down at her feet, so she closed her eyes. She didn’t want to know if there were bugs or rats.

She just didn’t want to know.

7

“And we can’t use a Black Hawk. Why again?” Linc asked.

“It’s a dead issue. And besides that, I’ve got some more wonderful news. The al-Assad government has just said Al Tanf Outpost is shut down for the next forty-eight hours. So it’s just us kids.”

“Do we know why?” Linc asked.

“Just concentrate on driving,” Kostya muttered.

“Yeah, you’re going to get us killed. I always thought it was going to be a firefight, not because you decided to drive a sixty-year-old Buick like a ninety-year-old granny on meth,” yelled Jase from the back as he gripped the headrest behind Linc.

“Gideon, this makes no sense. From the intel you’ve received, we’re not heading toward ISIS or Al Qaeda strongholds. We’re heading toward someone who is basically one of al-Assad’s oligarchs.”

“Not al-Assad’s. This guy is all on his own. He’s an arms dealer and information broker, and he’s walking a very fine line. If any of the countries he’s doing business with realizes he’s getting and giving information to another, he’s dead.” Gideon explained. “He’s in bed with governments in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia, Turkey, Belarus, and Syria. He’s got so much money now he could buy a small country.”

“And he lives around here?” Jase asked incredulously.

The man was right. The burnt-out shell of the city of Homs was a bitter sight to see.

“He has homes all around the world,” Gideon answered, “including one in each country that he siphons money out of. Syria is one of those countries.”

“So, what is it he wants from Leila and Katherine, or Elijah, for the matter?” Linc asked Gideon.

“If he’s a player, this is an operation that is much bigger than something Jerry would run,” Linc said. “Unless they just stumbled on something at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Do you believe the report that we got from the CIA?” Jase asked, as Linc continued to drive down a small two-lane road like he was a Formula One driver.

“You mean the one that said that they were bringing in Landry and Cole to do business with al-Assad directly, and bypass USAID? No. Not buying it one bit. That was definitely a cover story for something bigger. This guy, Vugar Gadirov, he’s too big of a player to be concerning himself with something like that.”

“Not even for Landry Oil?” Linc asked.

Shit!

He swerved to miss the chunk of asphalt that was missing out of the road.

Would have fucked up the car for good.

“Nah, Landry Oil would be a nit on a gnat for this guy. However, I have Clint, Dex and Kane all digging deep on our boy Vugar and trying to see what drives him,” Gideon explained.

“Good. Are we close?” Linc asked. The moon was bright, and he was beginning to see trees and there were walls that had been put back up on the side of the road. No graffiti. It looked like an area that had been cleaned up after all the fighting and the earthquake, and it was eerie, considering they’d just driven through Homs where it looked like Godzilla and Mothra had duked it out.