“Where are you—?”
He’d gone. Her breath hitched. Maybe he was the selfish type. He tried the first door in the building and pushed it open, leading with his rifle. He disappeared inside. After a silent, tense half a minute, he reappeared and did the same with the next door, and the next. He jogged back, something glinting in his hand—a pocketknife.
He knelt at the fence and slashed, the clinking and tearing echoing through the rear of the compound. She cringed.
“Give me the bag and your weapon.”
He slid them under the fence and lifted the makeshift flap. She shimmied through, the back of her head brushing his arm, followed by her shoulders, back and butt. She reached back to do the same for him but he retreated a few paces, charged, flew at the fence, clung on about halfway up, cleared the top in some flippy maneuver and landed at her feet, knees bent. Nimble and quiet as a kitten.
“What now?” she said, trying not to sound impressed. Exactly the kind of stunt her brothers liked to pull. He could just as quickly have shimmied under.
“No idea,” he said, throwing the backpack on. “But it’s been pretty fucking ninja so far.”
“Show-off.” Still, her lips curled up. Hey, she adored her brothers, though she’d never let on to them.
Gunfire popped. She gulped. Had they got some innocent driver killed? Flynn stilled, head cocked, gaze locked on hers. The car race had stopped—the engines were idling. He pushed the fence back in place and kicked some scattered rubbish around the break.
“If I’d gone under I would’ve had to make the hole twice as big. With luck they won’t notice till morning, at least. They’ll have to waste resources searching the compound.”
Somewhere a dog howled, answered by several others. Or were they hyenas? Did hyenas howl? Tess looked left, into blackness, and right, also into blackness.
“Seriously, though,” she said, “do you have a plan?”
* * *
Flynn shouldered both rifles. “You’re not easily impressed, are you, sunshine?”
He inhaled deeply. Adrenaline was good for jumping out of pits and scaling fences, but not for strategic thinking. Case in point: his comment about kissing her. Not that the urge had passed—the woman was lighting up dark parts of his brain. The sooner he got her to safety and returned to his unit, the better.
“First, we get out of the open,” he said. “Then we find transport or comms—preferably, both.”
“This is kind of all ‘the open.’”
“See that?” He pointed out a large shape a few hundred meters away, a hulk of charcoal against the dark. “Could be a hut or a vehicle. We shelter there and make a plan.”
Engines revved in the distance, getting louder. “They’re returning.” He ripped the bandage off his head and stuffed it in a pocket—it’d glow like a flare. “Follow in my footsteps but keep a couple of meters behind—there could be old land mines around. Can you run?”
“I can try.”
He set off in a jog, listening for her footfalls to judge his speed. Rocks jarred his feet even through his thick boots. Socks wouldn’t last her long but at least the ground was too hard to hold footprints. Her stride faltered, like she didn’t know which foot to favor. He slowed, though it near killed him.
To their left, a beam of light flashed and skidded across the ground. Damn. Probably just a large flashlight but it meant they had eyes on the ground already.
“Go faster,” she hissed. “I can keep up.”
He obliged. Hamid’s soldiers would split up—searching the compound, the road, the wasteland, then fanning farther out... Would she call in reinforcements? He and Tess would need to be long gone by daybreak or they’d stand out in this dead-flat terrain like hippos in a bathtub. Hamid would guess they were headed for the distant village lights, but what choice did they have—hijack a camel?
As they neared their target, he slowed. Something jutted out at forty-five degrees, aimed their way. A large gun, looming out of an abandoned tank. He skidded around to the far side of it, perched on one of its exposed, trackless wheels and swung the backpack around.
“You planning to start this thing up and roll us out of here?” Tess huffed as she caught up.
“I wish.” He pulled the pocketknife from his combat pants. “It’s a Russian T55.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s been sitting here rusting for thirty years or more. It’ll be from the Ethiopia-Somalia war, abandoned where it was put out of action—or broke down, more likely. Which means we’re probably near the border of the two. Dunno which side, but maybe on the road to Hargeisa.”
“I was taken from Somalia—near Hargeisa—so that would make sense.”
“And me from Djibouti, along the Somali border. Not in such easy striking distance, but they could have used a chopper.”
They’d gone to some lengths to find a French soldier. Was Tess right about Hamid wanting to suck France in? He found his watch in the backpack and strapped it on. They must have screwed up by capturing a legionnaire. The whole point of the legion was to give France an expendable force—he was cannon fodder no one cared about. No one except his frères d’armes. His unit would fight to the death for him. He cricked his neck. He needed to make contact, a-sap.
“What were you doing in Djibouti when you were captured?” she said.
“I’m not at liberty to talk to the media.”
“I’m not writing this down.”
He pulled her boots from the backpack. “Quit asking questions. You might not like the answers.”
Silence.
“No big story,” he conceded. No point firing up her curiosity. “Just on terrorist watch, like always. Guess we hit the jackpot.”
“They’re not—”
“Sunshine, if it looks like a terrorist, smells like a terrorist and shoots like a terrorist, I’m calling it a terrorist. Do you remember anything between being kidnapped and landing in the dungeon?”
“Vague flashes of being on the back of a truck. You?”
“Not a bloody thing.” He stabbed the toe of one of her boots and dug the blade into the leather.
“Hey! That’s the only footwear I have.”
“I’m giving them air-conditioning. We might be on foot awhile. We can duct-tape them later.” He sawed the toe off one side. “Or you can buy more with your superstar salary. Try this.”
She slipped it on, wincing as she worked her foot in. “Do you really think there are land mines here?”
He started on the second boot. “Abandoned land is often abandoned for a reason out here. But these thorn bushes and acacias have been cut back recently—for cooking fires or goat pens—so we’re probably safe.” A shout sailed out from the compound. “Relatively. You gotta watch the scrubby areas that are untouched.”
“Are we heading for those lights—the village, or whatever it is?”
“We don’t want to be in the open come morning. Here.” He passed her the boot.
“That’s where they’ll expect us to go,” she said, her voice tight, anticipating pain.
“That’s because it makes the most sense.”
She forced a thin-lipped smile and yanked up the laces. A shaft of light landed beside the tank, casting a shadow of the gun. He gripped her leg in warning—needlessly, it turned out, seeing as