Edge of the Heat 6 (7 page)

Jerry looked up quickly, his eyes burning into Sara’s. “I’m going.”

She nodded and smiled, relief making her feel almost lightheaded. “You can go. But only as support. You’ll have to stay at the Army base we will be staged at when I go in.”

He nodded, his eyes unreadable.

Vivian looked around the table at each of them in turn. “Are you all crazy?” She asked, her face twisted. Her eyes finally settled on Sara. “Sara, we can’t ask you to do this for us. It’s too much.”

Sara nodded. She had expected this. “Vivian, I’m not doing it for you. Not like you think. I’m doing it for Sergeant Taylor. And for Daniela Clarkson - she’s the reporter. And for the entire country. And for me.” Jerry squeezed her hand. She smiled. He understood.

Craig lifted his chin. “I’m going too.”

Sara looked at Craig, then at Emma. This she didn’t expect and wasn’t sure what to say.

Emma looked back. “Me too.” She took Craig’s hand.

Sara nodded slightly. She knew the president would let her take as much support as she wanted. All she had to do was say the word. She looked questioningly at Hawk. He looked at Vivian. She smiled faintly and took his hand, then took her sister’s next to her. “We’re in,” Hawk told her.

Sara raised her eyebrows. Six
             
for Kuwait then. She got up to make the phone call.

Somewhere in the desert

JT jerked awake, his whole body discordantly singing in agony. He lifted his head, feeling like it weighed 100 pounds. He rolled his shoulder and tried to get the feeling to come back into his upper back and neck. As it came, it burned.
Sleeping sitting up, with your hands tied behind you and your chin resting on your chest is some pretty bad torture
, he thought.
How long have we been here, trying to sleep this way
? he wondered. There was no way to tell with no rising and falling of light, but he had tried to count off the minutes in the back of his mind while he was awake. And if he slept three hours just now, which is what he guessed, based on how his head feels, then he puts it at three days. Three days with no food and only the smallest amount of water. Just enough to keep them alive.

JT rolled his chest muscles as best as he could, trying to get some strength into them. He tested his ropes again for the hundredth time to see if he could free himself. He knows he has to get them out of here, and quickly, before just being here kills one of them, or permanently damages them. It can’t be good for their bodies to be stuck in one position for three days. His ropes are still tight. His muscles are weakening. He can tell. Panic bursts into his head in the form of scary thoughts and an adrenaline rush. He beat it away with strong mental fingers. He has practice with this. He is good at it.

JT listened closely to the room. He heard nothing in the room they are in, which he knows has stone walls and a canvas roof, like a giant tent dropped over a busted-out stone building. Beyond his walls, he heard activity, motion. People talking, laughing, banging metal against wood, possibly eating, maybe making things. Lots of activity. So it is daytime. He can’t see light at all with the black hood over his face.

His black hood was only taken off once. About an hour after they got here. At the coffee shop in Kuwait, they were taken out the back to waiting cars. JT in one, the woman in the other. The hateful black hood was shoved onto his head and he was forced to the floor, his pockets emptied immediately. He was frisked and his hands were tied behind his back. The knife in his boot was found. He mourned the loss of it. He would fight with his hands and his teeth if he got the chance though.

The men in the cars with him had talked and laughed in Arabic, occasionally kicking him or resting their feet on him. They spoke Arabic, and he only understood one out of every three or four words, and none of them seemed to mean anything to him.

After an hour’s car ride they got on an airplane, JT still hooded. At this point he had no idea if the woman was still with them or where they were going or why. The airplane seemed to be a small jet. These terrorists were well-funded for sure.

After a four hour plane ride, they landed. As the door was cracked the hot smell of the desert found JT’s nostrils, even through his black hood. They were no longer in or near a city. JT filed all of this knowledge away. His mind tried to make judgments about how horrible this new development was, but he didn’t let it. He had desert survival training. If they could escape, he could get them out of the desert. And his plan certainly was to escape. It had been from the moment the insane man in the coffee shop had herded them towards the counter.

From the airplane he was shoved into the back of a vehicle. An open bay truck it seemed. They rode for two hours. To this place. Wherever this place was. He was tied to a hard chair. A burst of activity in the area around him held his attention. But he couldn’t make out what was happening.

Finally, a single man spoke, his voice unnaturally loud and pointed, like he was speaking for an audience. JT picked out a few words. His own name. Guantanamo Bay. The Arabic words for America, prisoners, kill, stop, and release.

And then his hood was taken off. He blinked as the room swam into focus. He took in everything as quickly as he could. He knew the hood was going back on at any moment. A TV camera. The insane man from the cafe. The walls and ceiling. Men everywhere with guns and knives, all of them pointed at him. And the woman. She was still hooded, but he recognized her, approximately five feet away from him, tied to a chair just as he was.

The insane man pointed at him, then took a knife from a man behind him and drew it across JT’s cheek. JT stared at him, hate in his eyes. The pain in his face screamed, but he refused to scream himself. The insane man seemed disgusted and barked an order. Another man thrust his hood back on his head.

And that was three days ago. Since then, the hood had been rolled up, but not removed, on three occasions. He was almost certain it was a woman doing it. It was too gentle to be a man. The hood was rolled up to his nose and a cool ladle held to his lips. He drank greedily each time, wanting to keep his strength. The ladle had been refilled 4 times, but when the person had tried to refill it a 5th, a man had yelled something guttural in Arabic. The ladle had not come again and the hood had been rolled down. He heard the act repeated to his right.

No one had talked to him since that first day. There usually was a guard in the room. JT sometimes heard him snort or fart or clear his throat. Sometimes he heard something metal get placed on the ground. He had heard canvas rustle heavily several times and two men talk. That is when the guard changed, he thought. Sometimes, like right now, they did not seem to have a guard. He could hear nothing. Not even snoring. But would they really be left without a guard? He didn’t know. He reached his consciousness out to the right, trying to hear or feel the woman. He couldn’t.

She was so quiet. She hadn’t cried or even whimpered that he had heard. She hadn’t said a word. It confused him. He couldn’t imagine a woman that wouldn’t cry in a situation like this. It was such a horrible situation. Although he fiercely hoped they would, he truly doubted they would make it out alive. She had to be thinking the same thing. So why didn’t she plead for her life? Release tension by crying? At least ask what was going on? Possibilities ran through his mind. She was mute. She was in on it. She was in extreme shock. None of them seemed likely.

Maybe he should try to talk to her. Was it worth the risk? Maybe. Especially if they didn’t have a guard right now. Especially if they were to have a chance at escaping. If even the smallest chance presented itself, they had to do it. JT replayed the scene after the camera had turned off. The insane man had laughed, like the message was just a big joke. And then he had said something to another man in Arabic. They sounded very close to each other, like they were hugging or shaking hands. JT had picked out a few words and phrases in their conversation. Those words had been
fools, believe it, dead in the ground, never.
JT’s gut told him there was no plan to ever exchange them for Guantanamo prisoners. It screamed at him that if they were to live, they had to get out of here on their own. The chance of the U.S. Government finding them and being able to free them seemed so low it wasn’t even worth thinking about.

Like a fish hook in his brain, his thoughts keep trailing out to the woman. Is she there? Should he say something to her?
I have to try
, he thinks.
But first
…

“Guard!” JT said, but not loudly, only with a little urgency. He wanted to know if someone was in there with them. “Guard, I have to use the bathroom! Now - It’s an emergency!” Nothing. They've already been taken to the pit latrine, basically a hole in the ground with a board over it, 146 steps away. It is through a narrow corridor and he has to take several twisty turns to get to it. He has been led to it three times with the hood over his head. He can’t smell it in here, but he can in the corridor closest to it.

Still no response from the guard, if there was one. JT chewed on his lip under the hood. It seemed there was no guard. He decided to chance it.

“Hey, are you there? I don’t really have to use the bathroom, I was trying to see if we have a guard,” JT said, his voice pitched low and his face pointing towards where he last saw her, shackled to her own chair.

“I’m here.” Her voice came back immediately. It was small, but calm.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Yes. Not really. I don’t know.”

JT almost laughed at her answer. He knew exactly how she felt.

“My name is JT.”

“Hi JT, I’m Dani, it’s horrible to meet you.”

That time he did laugh. He couldn’t help it. Dani had a sense of humor. He did notice her voice waver a bit this time though. His heart went out to her. This was a one hell of a cluster fuck they were rolled up in.

“We have to get out of here, do you have any ideas?” JT said. He had a few, but none of them were very good.

Dani stayed silent. JT was about to ask her again, when she finally spoke.

“The military will come get us. Maybe we should just try to hang in there.”

JT took a deep breath. Is that why she was so silent? Just hanging in there waiting for the cavalry to arrive? He didn’t want to bash her hopes, but he knew he needed to.

“I don’t think they are going to find us, at least not anytime soon.” He said gently. “I think we need to try to get out of here ourselves.”

“They know where we are. I know they do.” Her voice dropped even lower and he had to struggle to make out the words. “I have a GPS tracker in my shoe. I activated it when they put us in the cars at the cafe.”

JT tried to make sense of this. A GPS tracker? She had one small enough to fit in her shoe? And she activated it? He tried to remember what kind of shoes she was wearing and couldn’t. He tried to figure out why she would have a GPS tracker on her and couldn’t come up with anything there either. His mouth dropped open inside his hood.
Just ask her!
his mind shouted.

“Why do you have a GPS tracker in your shoe?”

“I’m a reporter,” she said.

Ahhhhh
. Many things clicked into place for him then. Both her demeanor and her GPS tracker. An American reporter in the Middle East during war time? She was trained in how to handle situations like this. She knew the risks long before she ever got here. And she had a failsafe, just in case. But she had to know what happened the last time the military had gone in and tried to save hostages, didn’t she? He opened his mouth to ask her when something in the air of the room changed.

Heavy canvas rustled. Someone entered the room with them.

JT went stiff, expecting the worst. If the person who entered had heard them talking and understood English, their ultimate fate might be coming sooner than they thought. He prayed it wasn’t so.

             
Sara watched the middle screen in the bank of fourteen screens on the wall, a frown on her face. “You can’t get closer?” she asked.

             
The unmanned drone operator, a young Army Corporal shook his head. “I can’t. We don’t go below 50,000 feet and it’s magnified to full capacity.”

Sara bit her lip. She needed to see
inside
those vehicles, needed to know exactly who was in them. Or at least if it was men or women.

“What if you went down to 30,000 feet? They can’t shoot you down that high up, can they?”

             
The Corporal twisted in his chair and fixed her with a withering look. “Actually, they
can
, although I don’t think these guys have the right firepower to do it. But at 30,000 feet, the UAV will be
seen
, and I know you don’t want that.” He twisted back, apparently convinced that he had put her in her place.

Sara didn’t bristle. She didn’t have time to take offense. She knew she was missing something here, but she didn’t know what it was. She was willing to look stupid to this young man, just to make sure she didn’t miss anything.