Page 34 of Indirect Attack
But I was chained to a pipe in the middle of a terrorist compound—I wasn’t going anywhere.
An involuntary whimper escaped my throat, and the man’s lips turned up at the very edges at the sound.
I flinched as he reached out, but it was only to put a hand to my face—I could see the dingy white of the cloth from the corner of my eye. The slight upturn of his mouth became a smirk as he began wiping the blood from my face. He wasn’t anything close to gentle, and I had to take deep breaths to keep from making any outward signs of pain.
Finally, the man was done, and he pulled back, resting his arm over his thigh as he stared at me. The way his gaze traveled over me, inspected me, took me in, made my skin crawl.
“What do you want from me?” I finally asked, in English this time, because I was too tired to dredge up the Russian. But the man surprised me, answering in the same, though heavily accented and guttural.
“You’re too pretty to kill.”
Was he just going to keep me here? Some kind of pet chained up in a room? The thought was possibly more frightening than death.
“Why did you take me? I’m nobody. I’m an archaeologist, that’s all.”
“Yes, an archaeologist who discovered something important.”
I stilled, my mind instantly returning to the chamber we’d discovered. Jason’s speculation about the meaning and what it could do to the legitimacy of long-held beliefs came galloping after it.
“I’m not the only one who knew about the discovery,” I replied, then bit my tongue. I instantly regretted that the words had come out, sorry I’d put my fellow archaeologists in danger.
But from the terrorist’s smile, he already knew. Maybe Jason and the others were already dead.
“We will keep you here as collateral until our main mission is done. Then we will blow up the archaeological site and the entire town of Florin with strategically placed bombs.”
My intake of breath was automatic and sharp. This man, the terrorists, were going to blow up an entire city? For what? To keep a secret safe? The threatened loss of life was staggering.
“You can’t do that.”
The terrorist stood up, tucking the bloody cloth into his pocket and wiping his hands. “I don’t think anyone can stop us.”
“Oh yes, they will. The Marines are coming. They know I’m missing, and they’re going to come look for me. They’ll kill you when they find you.”
A grin split the man’s face, and then he spit on me. I felt the warm, wet slide and shivered.
“You are less than a dog,” he hissed. “I will personally kill your soldier and bring you his head.”
My expression betrayed me, my eyes widening and my mouth opening on words that wouldn’t come out.
“Oh, yes,” the terrorist said. “I know all about Benjamin Rusev, and I know who you are to him. The Rusevs have been a thorn in our side, curse them to the lowest levels of hell, and it is time to exact our vengeance. Then you will submit to me, and I will have you over Rusev’s dead body.”
I choked on the words in my throat and the image in my head, fear spiraling, taking every thought and action with it. The terrorist smiled at my reaction, then left without another word, the door slamming shut behind him with a finality that left me empty.
Tears clouded my eyes and started slipping down my cheeks.
Though I knew I was here, part of me still couldn’t believe I was in this situation. Part of me wanted, desperately wanted, to believe this was all a dream. How had I gone from excitement over my dream job, to finding Ben again, to the archaeological find of a lifetime, to being in the hands of terrorists, all in forty-eight hours?
“I’m not supposed to be here.” Hyperventilation meant the words came out in a gasp to myself, to someone, to anyone up above listening.
I was supposed to be figuring out what was behind that door, not locked in some kind of basement at the center of a terrorist plot. A plot that would bring down an entire city, killing hundreds if not thousands.
Panic, hot and terrible, rushed through my veins. I could read the headlines, hear the news reports, see the destruction as if it had already happened—it was impossible not to. Florin would lie in rubble, so many dead they would need mass graves. The country, so newly emerging from war, would collapse again, the lives of people just finding some semblance of normalcy plunged into chaos yet again.
And for what? So information could stay buried, where it had been for centuries?
Not that the find wouldn’t change everything, if it was what we thought it was. But it had to come out—it would only help stabilize the country. Which, I was willing to bet, these terrorists didn’t want. That much was clear.
But to kill so many people just to keep it a secret? To destroy what had been buried for centuries? The loss of life was staggering in its awfulness, but it would also be terrible to lose the history that still lay buried under the sand—it would be lost, forever, if the terrorists had their way.
