Prologue
Two months earlier
The U.S. soldier piloting the military aircraft announced they would be landing near Kabul shortly. Dr. Viviana Lincoln took a deep, calming breath. Her destination was usually the same no matter where in the world she was flying to—an undisclosed, Central Intelligence Agency installation. Although a CIA agent in title, she preferred being called by the far less James Bondish “Dr. Lincoln”. An expert linguist in several modern and archaic Middle Eastern and North African dialects, Viviana was flown to various government installments in those regions whenever her translation skills were needed. She wasn’t an intelligence officer or a spy—just an academic who would have fared well at the Tower of Babel!—so she cringed a bit every time a colleague forgot her preference and referred to her asAgentLincoln.
“We land in fifteen minutes, Agen—Dr. Lincoln.”
She glanced up at the co-pilot and smiled. At least he was trying. “Okay thanks.” When he kept looking at her quizzically she inwardly sighed, but outwardly answered the question she knew he wanted to ask. She should consider having a card printed out to dispense to anyone who gave herthe look. “I earned the title ‘doctor’ twice over so I prefer it to the one supplied to me at work.”
He nodded, appeased. Most did.
“Besides, I feel like I should be jumping off high-rises and driving a Lamborghini that morphs into a speedboat when I’m called ‘agent’.”
He laughed. Again, most did.
Thankfully, he turned back around and did whatever it was co-pilots do. In ten minutes Viviana would be landing in Afghanistan, the one place on earth she’d vowed never to return to. It had been three years since that hellish attack, but she still suffered with nightmares from it. Dr. Berman, the CIA shrink, had ordered her to face her fears—not requested or encouraged her to confront them, but ordered her to. Once commanded, all choice had been removed from the equation, barring her resignation. Had that variable not been in place, the oath to never come back to this Godforsaken land of nightmares would have gladly been kept.
Viviana closed her eyes and rested as comfortably as she could. Military pilots weren’t concerned about landing with the same smooth finesse as commercial pilots so they rarely did. This one was proving to be no exception.
Eight minutes—the amount of time she had left before Dr. Berman got his way. She tried to keep her mind clear and present, but it had other plans. It wanted to remember.
On her belly in a janitorial closet under cleaning supplies, Viviana trembled in the small, dark room as she prayed to God the al Qaeda soldiers didn’t find her. The heinous smell of gunpowder, feces, and blood filled the air. It was the odor of human excrement that frightened her most because she knew people released their bowels upon death.
“Yalla!” she heard an enemy soldier yell. The precise meaning of “yalla” varied with the dialect, but it usually meant, “let’s go” or “come on”. She could only hope they were being ordered to evacuate.
The door to the closet creaked, inducing Viviana’s heartbeat to accelerate. She closed her eyes tightly and prayed she wasn’t discovered.
“Please don’t let them find me,” she heard a female voice whimper. “Please God.”
Viviana’s eyes shot open. She recognized that voice. It belonged to Agent Kennedy, an experienced intelligence analyst in her mid-forties. “Marisol?” she whispered.
There was a momentary pause. “Vivi?”
“Yes.” She was careful to keep her voice to a barely audible hush. “How many have we lost?”
Asking her colleague questions was apparently not the thing to do. It made Agent Kennedy’s breathing labor and her voice rise a bit. “All,” Marisol gasped. “A few of the men have been taken as hostages, but most were killed during the initial raid. Kendra, Michaela, and Marie were forced into niqabs and taken who knows where. The other women have all been raped and killed.”
Ice-cold fear coursed through Viviana’s veins. The females of average or plain appearance had been raped and murdered, while the prettiest ones had either been taken as forced brides or sex slaves. “This isn’t happening,” she choked out. She and Marisol would likely fall into the latter group of women—a fate literally worse than death to her. “Why haven’t we been evac’d yet?”
“I don’t think the alarms are working,” Marisol said, her breathing thankfully calming. “Vivi—they had an in. I know they did. No other explanation makes a fucking bit of sense!”
There was a traitor in their midst. A scary realization on a normal day—terrifying on this one.
Both of the last remaining women lay on the ground. Viviana stayed hunkered down under cleaning supplies. She thought to tell Marisol to join her when the door was riddled with bullets from a machine gun. Within moments Marisol was screaming as an al Qaeda fighter dragged her from the closet.
Viviana bit into her hand to keep from sobbing. Her heart slammed in her chest so brutally that she could hear it in her ears. Lying beneath a worn painter’s tarp, she could see two more al Qaeda soldiers give the janitorial closet a cursory glance.
“All clear,” one of them pronounced in a Syrian dialect. He slammed shut what little of the door was left.
“Mumtaz,” another said, his accent distinctly Saudi.Excellent.
Though the door was shut, the bullet holes made seeing through it easy. Shaking and panicked, Viviana continued to bite her hand to keep from accidentally giving herself up.
Marisol was stripped of all clothing in front of her very eyes. Viviana’s stomach lurched at the thought of watching her colleague get raped. Although she would have laid odds on Marisol falling into the “pretty” group of women, there was no other reason for three men to strip her unless rape was imminent.
Agent Kennedy was passed between the smiling men, all of them touching her where they wished to with their hands, but so far none of them undoing their fatigues to take the nightmare further. Marisol had been gagged, but her muffled cries could still be heard, especially when one of the younger men started playing with her nipples.
“I take it you desire her,” the man she believed to be the trio’s leader said to the soldier squeezing one of Marisol’s breasts while latching his mouth onto the nipple of the other. It sickened her that the leader could speak those words with such levity and humor in his tone. “What is her fate?”
