Page 110 of Duty Preserved

Sarah’s voice on the line, and then the sound of her being hit, and then Nasser telling me what would happen to her next.

And I’d stood there and listened to every word and couldn’t stop a single one of them.

I put the phone in my pocket and braced both hands flat on the side of the nearest cabin. Leaned into it.

My chest was tight and my breathing had gone to hell. I rested my forehead on the rough concrete, and everything inside me wanted to tear something apart.

I had to pull it together. Sarah was still alive. She was somewhere out there, and it was up to me to find her.

There was no decision to make. I just had to figure out how to do it.

I dialed Jace.

He picked up on the second ring. The usual faint clatter of a keyboard that accompanied every call with him came through before he spoke.

“Tell me this is a social call. I’ve been staring at satellite imagery for six hours, and I’m developing a personal relationship with a cloud formation over Nanyuki.”

“Nasser has Sarah.”

The keyboard stopped.

“He called me fifteen minutes ago. I need that call traced, and I need a location.”

“Send me the number.”

I forwarded it.

“That’s an Iridium sat phone. Every call on their network routes through specific satellite beams, and every beam covers a specific piece of ground. I can pull the routing data and work backward to a general footprint. How long was the call?”

“Long enough.”

“Give me everything. What he said, what you heard in the background, any detail that narrows the search.”

I gave him all of it. What Nasser said, what he demanded, what he did to Sarah when she told me not to give in.

“Twenty minutes,” Jace said. “I’ll have something.”

I hung up and went to find Andrew.

He was in the arms room. Seated on an ammo crate with a rifle across his knees, pressing rounds into rifle magazines one at a time. He looked up when I came through the door, and his hands stopped.

“Hey man, how are you holding up?”

“Nasser called. He confirmed he has Sarah. He wants us off the reserve. If we don’t pull back, he said his men would—” I stopped. The words lodged in my throat like broken glass. “Jace is tracing the call now.”

Andrew kept reloading rifle magazines, each round seated a little harder than the last.

“How is she?”

“She was conscious. She talked to me.” My throat was so tight the words barely fit through it. “He hit her while I was on the line. Then he told me what would happen to her if we don’t pull back.”

Andrew was quiet for three seconds.

“How much ammo should we bring?”

“As much as we can carry.”

“What’s the plan?”