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Someone was here to get her?
Another burst of gunfire. Outside the tent, a man made a pained yelp that ended with an abrupt finality that didn’t bode well for the maker of the sound.
This was a rescue.
She glanced at her arm. She hadn’t used the tracker. Not even accidently. She couldn’t with her hands bound above her head as they’d been.
In a flash, Bassam yanked her to her feet and pressed a knife to her throat. “No sound.” He nodded to his brother and signaled to the back of the tent. Behind her.
“We must go,” he whispered in Arabic.
Jamal ran forward and lifted a flap at the back of the tent, revealing a small slit that could be crawled through.
Her hands, while freed from the post, were still bound together. “I can’t crawl on bound hands,” she whispered. Maybe with free hands, she could grab the knife, or one of the AK-47s.
Bassam removed the knife from her neck and sliced the rope, nicking her wrist in the process. Any thought of taking a weapon faded as the numbness in her hands was quickly followed by excruciating pins and needles.
Jamal crawled through the opening, and Bassam pushed at her from behind. She ignored the pain of putting her weight on her hands as she crawled through the flap. Strangely, she felt the pins surgeons had installed in her ankle. At least, that was what her brain said she felt, but it wasn’t really possible. It had to be a phantom pain.
Blood rushed in her ears as she took everything in at once. She couldn’t focus or think.
This was nothing like SERE.
She’d expected to leave the tent and come up against a sandstone wall, but Jamal dragged her into what must be a low overhang.
The world was pitch-black again, but cool sandstone was just inches above her head as she crawled along the ground. Jamal kept moving, and she realized it wasn’t an overhang, it was a tunnel that had either been dug into the sandstone, Nabataean-style, or she was in a natural crevasse.
The row of tents had been placed in front of a hidden escape route.
With Jamal in front and Bassam behind, she was trapped, but no one had a gun or knife on her now. In moments, she would be lost in this tunnel. Consumed by the desert.
Should she scream? Would her rescuers even know she’d been here if she didn’t?
Before she could change her mind, she sucked in a deep breath and let out a shrill wail, hoping the sound would reach the tunnel entrance and beyond.
Chapter Five
Chris entered the second room in the tent with Kramer at his back and swore at finding it empty. Cut ropes at the base of the center pole hinted that this was where Dr. Edwards had been held.
He crossed to the back of the tent and probed at the curtain with his rifle. Sure enough, there was a slit in the lower panel that, when pulled back, revealed another curtain with a small slit. A back door that required crawling through.
Not wanting to be unnecessarily vulnerable, he used a sharp knife to extend the slit and ducked through the bigger opening, coming face-to-face with a rock wall less than a yard from the rear of the tent. He looked left and right, seeing nothing, then glanced down, where he spotted impressions in the sand that could be drag marks, disappearing under a natural overhang.
A shrill, piercing wail emitted from the overhang.
He dropped to his knees and peered into the gap beneath the overhang. It wasn’t an overhang; it was a dark void. A tunnel. With the aid of his NVGs, he spotted the bottom of a pair of boots crawling away from him.
He radioed his team before entering the tunnel with Kramer literally at his heels.
Jamal yanked her from the end of the tunnel. She’d crawled at least a hundred meters and emerged into what appeared to be another narrow wadi. The night was moonless, and with only the light of Jamal’s flashlight, she couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her.
Before she could get her bearings, Jamal backhanded her. “You were told to be silent!”
She swayed on her feet as Bassam rose behind her and shoved her forward. “Run!”
His urgency told her that someone had followed them into the tunnel. She took two steps forward, then made herself stumble. It wasn’t hard given the pain in her ankle.
She used that pain, and the memory of it when she’d felt it during her SERE training, to ground her.
