Page 2 of Trapped

He saw the woman in the doorway clutch her chest and fall. Red blood spread across the fabric of the blue burka as she lay on the ground.

A bullet slammed into Cash’s thigh and he went down. Then another one caught him in the arm.

Horror swirled through his mind, through his soul. He was still screaming, “No,” when his eyes blinked open and he found himself lying on a narrow bed in a darkened room.

Sweat drenched his skin and the tee shirt and briefs he was wearing. The bedclothes were tangled around him. And dim light filtered in under the crack at the bottom of the door.

He’d awakened from a nightmare—about Afghanistan. His last assignment.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

No, he corrected himself immediately. That wasn’t his last assignment.

The dream was so vivid that it had seemed like reality. But he knew he had made it up. It wasn’t real. Lieutenant Calley was a guy from Vietnam who was notorious for having ordered the mass murder of innocent villagers. That was how he had ended up in a nightmare about the massacre of a village in the Afghan hills.

Or was there something real about the dream—and his mind had twisted the facts? Like the lieutenant’s name.

He moved his arm and found it was sore—as though he’d suffered a recent injury. Fumbling beside the bed, he found a table and a lamp attached to the wall. He switched on the lamp, then sat blinking in the sudden light.

When his vision cleared, he looked at the upper part of his right arm and saw a round red scar—from a recent bullet wound.

Like in the dream.

And what about his leg?

Quickly he pulled the covers aside and found another scar on his right thigh. Just where he’d been hit in the nightmare village.

So where was he now?

Was this a prison? An asylum?

Once again, panic gripped his throat, and he pushed himself off the bed because he needed to get away from the place where the dream had grabbed him.

When he stood up, pain shot through his injured thigh. He caught his breath, adjusting to the weight on the leg, then staggered to the door across from the bed.

To his vast relief, when he turned the knob, the door opened.

Thank God. At least he wasn’t locked in. He stared down a long corridor, lit only by dim emergency lights. Like his room, the walls were of cinder block painted an institutional green. And the lights were spaced about every fifteen feet, leaving pools of darkness between them.

If he had to guess, he’d say it was night, and they’d turned the lights down because most people were sleeping. Or maybe that was the norm in this place.

He closed the door and leaned against it, trying to bring the recent past into focus.

He felt a wave of relief when details came zinging back to him like a rock swinging from the end of a rope that he’d sent sailing away—only to have it come back.

He’d been in Thailand. That was his last assignment.

Images flooded his mind. Beautiful gold and red temples. Fifteen-foot-high statues of Buddha. Lotus blossoms. Peaked roofs so different from the architecture of any other country he had visited. A wide river where fan-tailed outboard motorboats zipped past each other. Streets clogged with cars and trucks and little three-wheeled open-air cabs with a driver on something like a motorcycle in the front and a bench seat in the back for the passengers.

He’d taken those cabs. And he’d ridden on an elephant, feeling like he was going to fall off the bench seat swaying on top of the lumbering beast.

Yeah, Thailand. But what was he doing there?

Once he had the name of the country and remembered some of the things he’d seen and done, the answer supplied itself. He’d been working security for a diplomatic mission to Bangkok. The diplomats wanted to see the ancient capital of Ayutthaya, that the Burmese had burned two hundred years ago. The stone buildings were still standing, like ghosts of their former selves.

But while the party was away from the city, they got the word that bird flu had broken out in the area. A deadly airborne strain. And the only sure way to avoid getting infected was to go underground—into a secret bunker.

As the news of the epidemic had spread, panicked citizens had attacked them, trying to get to safety. That’s where he’d gotten shot, defending the diplomats. He remembered that very clearly now.

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