Breaking Ties by Elle James
Chapter 11
By the timethe Deltas returned, the Army camp and the village were in flames.
Dawg’s heart sank to his knees as he leaped out of the helicopter onto the ground and ran toward what was left of the tents and the camouflage canopy.
Villagers stumbled out of the grass and underbrush, tears in their eyes as they surveyed what was left of their homes.
Dawg’s hopes lifted when he spotted PFC Miller and Corporal Ramsey with Dash’s arms looped over their shoulders, emerging from a nearby field. He ran toward them, his gaze sweeping the field for more of the military personnel who’d kept the small tent city running. Several soldiers came out of hiding, helping older villagers. One of the villagers who’d worked with the US military assisted the wounded Team Charlie Delta from his hiding place in the brush.
As others emerged and the smoke cleared, it became clear. Beth and Colonel Parker were gone.
Rucker got on the satellite phone and asked for assistance locating the missing doctor and nurse while Dawg paced, feeling useless in the wake of the attack.
“That’s excellent news,” Rucker was saying. “We’re loading up now. I’ll relay the coordinates to the pilot.” He ended the call. “Our guys at Langley are on top of it. They’ve been conducting satellite surveillance in the area since we landed, trying to nail the location of the Boko Haram base. They’ve been moving at least once every three or four days.”
“How is that going to help us if they’ve been moving?” Dawg demanded. “We need to know where they’ve taken Lieutenant Drennan and Colonel Parker now. Today.”
Rucker held up a hand. “Fortunately, they had their satellites trained on our position when the terrorists struck. They were able to follow them to their current base. But they say it appears they are preparing to bug out. We have to get there before that happens. Gather the teams.”
Dawg was running before the last words left Rucker’s mouth.
Within minutes, they had the Deltas loaded into the helicopter and were lifting off the ground. They swung east, heading in the direction the men at Langley had indicated.
They rode with the doors open, the wind whipping through, making the heat more bearable. Dawg had chosen a seat on the outside edge of the helicopter. He stared down at the darkened landscape, straining his eyes to see more, to find Beth before Boko Haram did horrible things to her. Hopefully, they would keep her alive and well in order to ransom her and the doctor for money. However, with them being US citizens and members of the military, the terrorists might decide to kill them as an example to others.
Dawg couldn’t let himself think that way. If they’d decided to kill them, they would’ve done it already and left their bodies in the ashes of the village. The fact that they’d taken only the doctor and the nurse could mean they had need of medical assistance, and then they might ransom them later.
Either way, the Deltas were going to get them back.
Alive.
Beth wokeseveral minutes after she’d passed out in the back of the truck and wished she’d remained unconscious. Every time they hit a rut in the dirt road, her head hit the metal floor of the truck bed, making her head hurt. She pushed her way into a sitting position, propping herself up against another body lying beside her. In the light from the stars above, she could see the body belonged to Jonathan.
Her heart lodged in her throat. He lay so still. Was he dead? With her wrists secured behind her back, she couldn’t reach out to press her fingers to the base of his neck to feel for a pulse. Instead, she scooted around to touch her fingers to the inside of his wrist, also secured behind his back. It was difficult to feel anything with the truck bumping along. After a few minutes, she gave up.
Then Jonathan moved, his arms twitching and his legs pushing outward. The terrorists had secured his ankles but hadn’t secured hers. Somehow, she had to break the duct tape free around her wrists and figure out a way to escape. She couldn’t just roll out of the back of the truck because there were four other men seated on the sides, armed with AK-47s. Even if she managed to roll out and not die from the fall, they would plug her so full of bullets, and she wouldn’t survive anyway.
Until the odds improved, she was stuck in the back of the truck.
Several more jarring bumps later, Jonathan came to and pushed to a sitting position.
The four men aimed their AK-47s at him as a show of force.
Jonathan shook his head and looked around. When he spied Beth, his shook his head. “I told you to run,” he whispered.
She gave him a weak smile. “I didn’t want them to steal the antibiotics. That stuff is like gold around here.”
“Are you okay?” he asked, his brow furrowed.
She nodded. “And you?”
“I am, though my head’s a little fuzzy.”
The truck slowed as it climbed into the hills and eventually came to a halt.
The man surrounding Beth and Jonathan leaped out, then reached in and dragged their captives out and onto their feet. One of the men jabbed a knife through the bindings around Jonathan’s ankles allowing him to kick free of the tape.
With AK-47’s poking them in their backs, Beth and Jonathan were marched across a compound and pushed into a hut made of sheets of tin kluged together with wire and screws. The door was closed, throwing them into pitch darkness.
Immediately, Beth moved around the tiny space, searching for a rough surface, which wasn’t hard to find. “Jonathan, find a rough surface and rub the tape against the metal. We have to break through the tape and find our way out of here.”
She was working on getting the tape free when their captors returned, grabbed Jonathan and hauled him out of the hut.
“No!” Beth cried and tried to stop them.
One of the men slammed the butt of his rifle into her gut, knocking her down. The door shut behind him, and Beth was alone.
With the wind knocked out of her, she sat for a moment fighting back the tears. What were they going to do to Jonathan? She didn’t want to marry him, but she didn’t wish him dead.
Once she could breathe normally again, she went to work, rubbing the tape against a jagged piece of metal. Before long, she broke through several layers of the tape until the last piece snapped, and she pulled her wrists apart. Removing the duct tape took a layer of skin with it, but her hands were free.
Beth felt her way around the tin hut, returning to the door that was nothing more than a sheet of tin secured by wire hinges. She could see through the cracks to where a guard stood outside. If he would walk away, she might ease through the opening and sneak way without him knowing. She needed a distraction.
Dropping to her knees, she felt along the dirt floor, hoping to find a rock, stick or something she could shove through the crack in the door to make a noise.
She didn’t have to. Shouts sounded, and men ran past the hut.
Her guard called out to the men running past, and then he took off after them.
Beth pushed against the door only to discover it had been secured by a wire tied to a nail on the other side. She pushed harder, stretching the wire as far as she could, creating a gap barely wide enough for a child to get through. But she bent, contorted and squeezed through the gap, ripping her shirt and her skin before she fell out on the ground. She rolled to her feet and ducked behind the tin hut.
She could have run and saved herself, but she couldn’t leave without Jonathan.
Moving between huts, tents and barrels, she worked her way through the compound.
Men ran, throwing equipment and supplies into the backs of trucks, shouting to each other as they went. No one seemed to see Beth as she slipped through broken pallets, cardboard boxes, crates and junk littering the ground.
Ahead, what appeared to be an old army tent stood in the middle of the compound. Several guards carrying AK-47s surrounded it, guarding what was inside. If they’d taken Jonathan anywhere, it had to be inside that tent. The other structures were in the process of being torn down and loaded into the backs of the trucks.
Beth circled wide of the main tent, looking for a side that wasn’t as heavily guarded. The rear of the tent had only one man guarding it, but there wasn’t a door flap there.
If she could get close enough, she might distract the guard and slip beneath the bottom edge of the tent to see what was inside. She prayed for another distraction that would coax the guard into running away.
As if in answer to her silent prayer, one of the guards in front of the tent circled to the back and sent that guard off on an errand. A moment later, the guard that had taken his place ran back to the front. Though he might only be gone for a moment, Beth had to take a chance to look inside the tent for Jonathan. Unless they had loaded him into one of the trucks, there was nowhere else he would be.
Hunkering low, she ran toward the tent, dropped to the ground and rolled up against the bottom edge. Once there, she hoped she could slide beneath the bottom edge. The gap wasn’t wide enough for her to get her body beneath, but she could see inside.
A light shone down on a cot where a man lay, his trouser cut away from his leg.
Jonathan leaned over the cot, tending the man’s wound.
Beth couldn’t get to him, but at least she knew he was okay and where he was. She’d have to find a way to get him out of the tent and away from the terrorists. But first, she had to find a place to hide until she came up with a plan.