Rescuing Rayne (12 page)

Eduardo and Diana were sitting on the two chairs in the room, and once again, Eduardo hadn’t let go of his wife’s hand. He would lean in and whisper in her ear in Spanish and she’d nod, then a few minutes later, he’d do it again. They were the cutest couple Rayne had ever seen. It just sucked that they were all in this kind of situation…whatever this situation
was
.

Sarah leaned over and whispered to Rayne, “What the heck is going on?”

Rayne could only shake her head. “I have no idea. None of this makes any sense really.”

“Do you think the guide meant to lock us in here? Or was it an accident?”

Rayne had been thinking about the exact same thing. “I think he had to have known. I mean, we didn’t really see many people in the last couple of rooms we went through, and it certainly seemed as though he knew where he was going…didn’t it?”

When Sarah nodded, Rayne said louder, so the others could hear her, “Diana, how did you guys arrange for this tour?”

She lifted her head and Rayne could see the worry on her brow. “It was at the airport. We had come through customs and were waiting on the bus when Hamadi came up to us and asked if we wanted a tour. He was very nice and spoke excellent English. We haggled a price and he said he would pick us up at the hotel this morning.”

“Did you tell him there would be eight of you?”

“Oh yes. He urged us to find two others to join us as he said he had room for ten in his van. That’s why we asked you and Sarah to come with us.”

It was a method many locals in not-so-prosperous countries used to try to rob the rich tourists coming into the city. Rayne’s thoughts were running rampant. She thought back to the things her brother had tried to teach her about security. Dammit, one of the first things he’d taught her was never to talk to or go with anyone who wasn’t with a legitimate tourist company. She’d thought everyone knew that, but apparently not. She hadn’t even thought to ask Diana and the others more questions about how they’d booked the tour. She’d just assumed they’d taken precautions. Diana had told her she’d met Hamadi at the airport, but Rayne hadn’t realized until now that he didn’t work for a reputable tour company. She mentally kicked herself. Chase would be disappointed in her.

“They’d planned for ten, although eight would’ve worked,” Rayne said to no one in particular. “I saw Hamadi talking to several groups of men as we went through the different tourist spots today. Maybe they were in on it?”

“In on what? What the fuck are you babbling on about, woman?” Michael asked caustically.

“On whatever this is. On why we’re sitting locked inside a windowless room in the middle of a government building on Tahrir Square,” Rayne retorted, not bothering to try to be nice anymore.

“I’m sure they just forgot about us. As soon as they find us, we’ll go back to the hotel and laugh about this,” Paula said in a watery voice.

Just then a large boom sounded from somewhere in the building. Then another, and another that made the floor beneath their feet shake.

“Oh my freaking God, what was that?” Sarah asked, standing up quickly, as did Rayne.

“Come on, everyone over here,” Rayne ordered, falling back on her flight attendant training. The room shook again and plaster actually flaked off the ceiling and rained down on the small group.

The four couples and Sarah and Rayne huddled against one of the walls, away from where they heard the loud thuds. Sarah and Rayne tried to reassure the group, using their experience to try to keep everyone calm, even though none of them knew just what they were being reassured about.

When another boom sounded, much closer than any of the others, Rayne looked around the room. “Sarah! Help me with the couch.” The two women dragged the small couch over in front of the group. “Everyone kneel down behind this. It’s not a lot of cover, but it’s better than nothing.”

Michael was silent. He apparently had no comebacks or rude remarks when in the middle of a dangerous situation. The group huddled behind the minuscule cover of the couch, wondering what in the world was going on.

G
host
and his team sat silent on the C-17 transport plane as they flew across the Atlantic Ocean. They’d come back from their fact-finding mission in Egypt two weeks ago and now were returning—but this time it wasn’t a fact-finding mission, it was a rescue.

All hell had broken loose in Egypt and the US government was frantically trying to get all Americans out of the country. The militants had made their move, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. It was bold; no one had expected it, which had helped to make their aggression successful.

The coup had begun in the middle of the city, in the same place everything had gone down a few years earlier, although now the streets around the government building and in the square were deserted. In the past, they’d been teeming with news crews and other media, but this time the threat of violence was keeping everyone away. They’d set off a series of bombs in the square and with that distraction, they’d taken over the government building.

Their plan was simple and effective. The group had hundreds of men posing as tour guides. They’d slowly but surely infiltrated and learned the layout of the building. They’d laid in wait, even bribed the security officers. They’d planned well, each of the men bringing in as many tourists as they could round up, and now there were countless Americans and others being held hostage inside the large governmental complex, and it’d become a political nightmare.

The militants were parading the captured men and women in front of some of the windows in the huge building and they’d begun executing them when the Egyptian government didn’t react fast enough to their demands.

The US Army had already sent several units to the area and they were working with the Egyptian Army to secure the streets around the besieged building, but it wasn’t until the bodies of two men and two women were thrown out the third floor window of one of the buildings that Delta Force and the SEALs were called in.

The bodies of the killed tourists lay where they’d landed; any attempts to recover them had been thwarted by the militants. They obviously liked having them on display for the hundreds of news crews that had taken up residence in the buildings around the square. Filming from the windows suited them just fine.

Ghost had been surprised to see the SEAL team at the airport that they’d assisted six months ago in Turkey. The SEALs had been escorting Sergeant Penelope Turner home after successfully snatching her from right under the noses of ISIS when either their plan had been discovered, or the terrorists had gotten lucky, and they’d been shot down en route to safety. Ghost’s team had swooped in, cleaned up, and escorted the SEALs and Sergeant Turner to a safe base, where they’d parted ways.

They hadn’t spent very much time with the other men, but Ghost and his team had a lot of respect for how the SEALs had acted and how their team had operated on the mission. It was no hardship to work with them again. Ghost suspected his longtime friend and brother-in-arms, Tex, had something to do with them meeting up again today. It wasn’t as if he could make the actual decision on what missions they were assigned to, but the man had an uncanny ability to do things others would think impossible. A suggestion here, a coded message there…and voila! Ghost honestly wasn’t surprised to learn that each of the men on the SEAL team not only knew Tex, but were close friends with him as well.

Tex was a man who knew everyone and he was a former SEAL himself, so it was only natural that Wolf and his team relied on him for intelligence and information. Tex had been wounded on a mission and had medically retired from the Navy, but it seemed he was just as active today, if not more so, as when he’d been on the teams.

Ghost had greeted Wolf warmly. “Good to see you, Wolf.”

“You too, Ghost. Let’s get a move on, we can debrief onboard.”

Ghost and his team usually flew commercial to try to stay under the radar, but for this mission, time was of the essence, and it was more important to get over to Cairo and help rescue the remaining hostages than it was to try to be stealthy. As far as anyone knew, they were a part of the SEAL team, not Delta Force.

After the thirteen men got settled on the plane and they were in the air, as the highest-ranking soldier, Ghost started the debriefing and didn’t beat around the bush.

“Okay, here’s what we know…which isn’t a lot. Reports are sketchy coming out of Cairo, more so because no one seems to know exactly what’s going on inside the building. There’s no definite number of militants and no real count of how many hostages there might be.”

“So we’ve got a whole lot of who-the-hell-knows-what,” Wolf bit out, obviously pissed off.

“That about covers it,” Ghost agreed.

“As much as it sucks, we’re gonna need to take a day or two for reconnaissance,” Fletch stated. “We can’t make a move until we know where those hostages are being held.”

“Agreed,” Abe, one of the SEALs, stated. “The last thing we want is to go in balls to the wall and get innocents killed.”

All the men hated the delay, but it was a necessary one.

“All right. Let’s discuss Plan A. Then we’ll figure out a Plan B, C, and D. If all else fails, get the fuck out of there and to safety with as many hostages as you can find,” Ghost ordered, smoothing the map out on the table in front of them.

Mozart, another of the SEALs, groaned. “Easier said than done.”

“No shit,” Beatle agreed.

“Okay, here’s the plan…”

The men strategized, argued, and discussed various plans of action all the way across the ocean. Finally, hours after they’d taken off, the military plane landed. All thirteen men on board were locked and loaded—ready to take out as many bad guys as possible, and bring home as many hostages as they could get their hands on.

R
ayne bit
back the moan of fright that threatened to come out of her throat. They’d been stuck inside the locked room for what seemed like hours, but when they were finally freed, the situation wasn’t anything they had imagined it would be.

A gruff-looking Egyptian man had opened the door and been followed in by three others. All four men were holding automatic rifles and they’d immediately started ordering them to do something in Egyptian.

It was Michael—of course it was Michael—who was stupid enough to complain to the men that he didn’t understand what they wanted. He was rifle-butted in the face for his insolence. Afterwards, Michael hadn’t complained again.

They were herded into another room, which held about twenty other tourists, and another five or so men and boys with loaded weapons. Rayne and Sarah huddled close together, not wanting to get separated. The other couples had done the same thing, and Rayne couldn’t help but get a lump in her throat at watching how Leon, Eduardo, and Steve put themselves between the men with rifles and their wives. Finally, after another hour or so, their entire group was moved into another room, this one again with no windows. The doors were shut once more and they were all locked in.

The thirty or so of them spent the next day confused, hungry, and terrified out of their minds. Rayne felt disgusting in her T-shirt and jeans and, as inappropriate as it was, wished she could wash the sweat and fear off with a scalding-hot shower.

A couple of times some of the men banged and kicked at the doors, with no luck. Finally, after they were all frightened beyond belief and beyond the need to rebel, the group was led once again to another room. This one looked as if it had been a ballroom at one time.

There were ornate carvings and paintings on the walls, and red tapestries hung as curtains from the windows. The incongruence between the opulence of their surroundings and the way they felt—beaten down, smelly, hungry, and scared—was jarring. Overall, there were probably around sixty or so hostages in the large room. Rayne couldn’t tell what country everyone was from, except not everyone was speaking English. There was what sounded like French, German, Spanish, and some Slavic language thrown in as well. But at the moment they were allies, thrown into this awful situation by fate, and nationality didn’t matter.

Sarah and Rayne immediately went to the back of the room, away from the windows and doors, and sat down against the wall. Rayne whispered urgently to Sarah, wiping sweat from her brow from the warm room and the stress. “Don’t do anything to call attention to yourself. Nothing, you hear me? Don’t get hysterical, if no one else is. Try not to throw up. Don’t yell at anyone, don’t get in any arguments. If you call attention to yourself, you’re making yourself a target, and that’s the
last
thing you want to do in a situation like this. Blend in or die, Sarah. I’m not kidding.”

“How in the world do you know these things? I don’t remember them teaching that to us in flight attendant school,” Sarah questioned in wonder.

“My brother is in the Army. Counterterrorism. He taught me.”

The women were quiet for a while as they watched what was happening around them. Rayne wasn’t surprised when Michael tried to make himself the leader of the large group. Rayne could’ve told him it was the wrong thing to do, but he wouldn’t have listened to her anyway.

For the first day or two in the ballroom, their captors ignored them for the most part. They brought in slabs of some kind of meat and cheese, and buckets of water for them all to share, but that was about it. After they’d emptied one of the buckets, it was put in a far corner for use as a bathroom.

When Michael started getting mouthy with the guards and demanding to be let go, Rayne could tell they were losing their temper.

On the third day of their captivity—Rayne didn’t know why they were being held captive or by who, but supposed it was a moot point anyway—the guards apparently had had enough of Michael and some of the other more demanding hostages.

The entire group was ordered to line up. Women in one line and men in another. Rayne watched sadly as Diana and Eduardo, Leon and Paula, and Tracy and Steve said tearful goodbyes. No one had any idea what in the world was going on, and being separated from each other suddenly seemed like a death sentence.

Becky and Michael flatly refused to do as their captors said. Michael stood next to his wife with his arm around her shoulders and declared, “No. You can’t separate us. This is my wife and she is very delicate. We aren’t going anywhere; you need to let us go. You’re all gonna die anyway, so you might as well give up now!”

Rayne couldn’t believe how stupid Michael was. She had no idea what he thought his little speech was going to accomplish, but it was evident that it irritated the man who was trying to get everyone in order.

He pulled out his rifle and shot Michael in the head, and when Becky started screeching, put two bullets into her without a word of warning.

The room was silent as their bodies fell to the ground with a thud. No one dared scream. No one wanted to piss off the unstable man who’d just murdered two people in front of them without seeming to think twice about it.

“Anyone else want to complain about your treatment? Anyone else want to be set free?”

No one said a word.

The man, apparently still pissed off, turned and shot the man in line closest to him, then killed the closest woman as well. He gave no explanation, simply turned and walked out of the room, saying something to the other captors in Egyptian before he left.

“You men, yes, you four in line. Pick up bodies and throw out window, there,” another captor ordered. His English was broken, but more than understandable.

Rayne watched, trembling and weak from fear and hunger, as the men did as they were told. Michael and Becky’s bodies were dragged to the window and tipped out. Next came the other man and woman, who’d done nothing except stand too close to Michael.

Everyone was silent as the women were herded out one door and the men were led away through a door on the opposite side of the big room. Everyone had thought, or was deluding themselves into thinking that the situation would end nonviolently up until that point. Now they all knew they were expendable. There was no telling when their captors would get sick of them and decide it was easier to throw their dead bodies out a window than feed them, give them water, or deal with them in any way.

For the first time since they’d been locked in that first room, Rayne thought there was a higher-than-average chance she wouldn’t live through whatever was going on. She’d never see her brother and sister again. Would never go dancing with Mary. And would never, ever have the opportunity to see Ghost again.

Why that last thought was the one that made her the saddest was beyond her, but a lone tear made its way down her cheek as Rayne meekly followed behind Sarah to wherever and whatever the militants had planned for them.