Page 54 of Shadow Target

Willow felt terror. She gulped, her throat dry and pinched feeling. She forced a swallow.

“Without even having you in my hands as my prisoner, they began a bidding war with each other. Zakir Sharan, a Pakistani billionaire from Punjabi, and Valdrin Rasari, born and living in the country of Malgar, near Albania, want you, instead. Now, the bidding is still going on very briskly. Right now, Rasari has bid ten million dollars for you.”

She gasped, giving him a startled look.

“Fly!” he roared, sitting up, curling his hand into a fist, threatening to strike her.

Jerking her head forward again, her heart crashing in her chest, she felt terror as never before.

“You see,” David said, relaxing and sitting crossways in the seat, staring at her, enjoying the fear he saw in her expression, “you had better hope that Rasari wins this bidding war for your body. If, on the other hand, Zakir Sharan is the top bidder, he will use your body for as long as it pleases him, and then? He will have you decapitated on a livestream that I’m sure will go viral.”

Willow couldn’t think. Her mind blanked out momentarily. David and Zere were laughing uproariously. She studied the changing landscape below her; the plains had become foothills as they climbed in elevation. Zegye sat next to Lake Tana, but the airstrip was up in the hills above it at twenty-six hundred feet. She took the plane up to thirty-five hundred.

“Now,” David said pleasantly, a finger on his lower lip, looking out at the blue sky in front of them, “Do not think you are getting off lucky. As your American slang goes? What is the saying? Leaping from the frying pan into the fire? Yes, I think this suits the situation perfectly. Rasari is a sadistic sexual monster, even by my standards. Did you know? He lives in the mountains, has his own village, only the village consists entirely of women he breeds to excellent male studs from all countries, and then he puts the resulting children up for auction all around the world. If you are from Africa, you will want a black child. If you are from Asia, a Chinese child, or if from South America, a Latino child, and so on. And of course, white children are in highest demand. He traffics in babies bred at his breeding facility. Only they are humans instead of horses being bred and sold.” He laughed deeply, slapping his knee.

Her stomach turned. She wanted to vomit. Her fingers tightened around the yoke.

“Rasari, of course, is the top stallion of the place and he personally impregnates the most beautiful teen girls who are brought to him, whom he refers to as his ‘broodmare band.’ Now with you? I wonder what he’ll do with you. He also makes the most interesting pornographic videos in the world. Sells them for thousands, sometimes millions of dollars, to very rich men who enjoy watching what can be done sexually with a child or young girl’s body. And then, there’s this other side to him. He likes rough sex. He likes women who fight back, and I think you fall into that category. He really likes red-haired women. Or,” and David laughed, sharing a quick joke with Zere, “perhaps he will free you in the mountains, then he will stalk you, chase you through the woods, tiring you until he hunts you down, and he has his men strip you naked, hold you down while he rapes you. And of course, this will be on video to be sold. And, he could possibly impregnate you, see if you throw red-headed children, which, by the way, are in the highest of demand because they fight and possess a warrior’s heart, and he always gets the highest price for them, no matter what their age is.”

Willow thought she knew fear, but this pulverized her emotionally. Looking around casually, as if she were not shaken to her core, she kept a sharp eye on the terrain below. They were now flying over a thick carpet of forest. Up ahead, less than ten minutes away, was Zegye. She punched several buttons on the console.

David grabbed her wrist, hard.

She cried out, trying to jerk away.

“What are you doing, bitch?” he snarled.

“Nothing! I have to prepare for landing. Let me go!” and she wrenched her wrist out of his fingers.

David glared at her. “Oh, I’m hoping that Rasari bids the highest. He beats women like you into the ground. He’ll torture you. You’ll wish you could die every day you wake up in his concubine building. You will become a hollow shell of yourself, your eyes dead and glazed over, no fight left in you, only whimpers and pain every time you move.”

Lips thinning, she bit back a curse. David didn’t realize it, but she had hit the locator button that would continually broadcast her GPS to any airport within range. Not only that, but she had also engaged an SOS emergency call that her plane was going down and would crash. That would alert the Addis Zemen airport tower where she was supposed to have landed that she was way off course at least. Would Luke Gibson be aware of this? Was he hooked up to the tower there? Even if so, would they immediately alert him of her SOS call? She had no way of knowing but prayed that it was so. If they received the signal, a search and rescue helicopter would be sent out immediately to her last known GPS location. She prayed that Luke was a man of infinite details and would have their course monitored closely on every flight. But she couldn’t be sure. Nothing was for sure, anymore.

Willow racked her brain for ways to escape. It was a thousand-foot runway. Her pistol was gone, but she kept a spare in her go bag. However, that was stashed behind her seat and she couldn’t reach it. There was also her cell phone in the bag, as well as a satellite phone, all encased in waterproof bags and charged. If she could get to her go bag? Escape? She could call Luke. And he would instantly alert Shep. Could they save her? Was there anywhere to run and hide from David? Could she survive a crash? Or was it better to die in a crash than be taken by these heartless monsters who saw her only as a sub-human to be bid upon and sold?

She had bare minutes to come up with a plan. Any plan was better than none. She cobbled one together and locked it in. She told David, “There’s the airstrip. I’m going in for a bush landing.”

“What is that?” David demanded, scowling.

“A short landing, drop in hard and anchor it quickly, because it’s such a short landing strip.”

He waved his hand. “Fine, whatever you need to land there.”

She looked down to the far end of the runway. There were two white Toyota Hilux pickup trucks stopped there. She saw at least three men in the back of each, standing behind the cabs, and even from this distance, something about their outline and stance told her they were heavily armed. There appeared to be a single driver behind the wheel of each truck.

A thousand feet…

She saw a lot of scrub brush and trees that were probably around twenty feet tall at the near end of the runway where she needed to touch down. Below, on either side of the plane flowed by mature woods, some of the trees fifty to seventy feet tall. It was a thickly wooded area, and that gave her hope. Now? All she had to do was survive what she was going to do next.

David sat languidly, looking at her, no harness on. Zere had his gun always on her. Could she, do it? Could she pull this off?

Willow didn’t know, but she sure as hell was NOT going to be taken prisoner!

As she dropped the Otter suddenly, the nose pointing down at the very end of the approaching runway, the engine shrieked. She dropped the plane hard, slowing the trundling beast, its tail suddenly flipping skyward.

David was thrown against the console. He cried out in rage, flailing around, arms akimbo, nose bloody.

Zere screamed and held on. He fired the gun.

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