Miles To Go Part 9

"I guess I'll have to take what I can get then. You have a beer in any of those pockets?"

He smiled at her jab at his uniform. He always admired her ability to maintain her sense of humor in the face of everything she had endured. He found he was attracted to her and felt like a fool for it.

Fareed stepped back to the opening of the stable; he wasn't in 0.

the mood to talk tonight. He had grown tired of Armin's festivities for his brother before they had even begun. Disgusted by the impending pomp and Armin's inevitably bombastic speech, he had slipped away to relieve Hannah's guard and to give himself a moment of peace. The absurdity of the evening, Armin firing his weapon into the air like a maniac, only confirmed that he had to leave this place, resume a life of some kind of normalcy, a life without guns and bombs and the death of innocents. But then there was Hannah. Armin had long accepted that she was just a casualty in this mess she had stumbled into, but lately he had taken to calling Hannah The Jewess . It was unlike Armin, and Fareed feared for her.

That morning when he had awakened, knowing he had to get out before his collusion with Armin caused him to step even further into the abyss, he thought of Hannah alone in her stall.

He wanted to go to her, to tell her he would make her safe. Still in the flush of sleep, still in that place of dreams where anything seems possible, he imagined himself slipping away in the night and spiriting Hannah away with him. Now he saw how preposterous it all was, a foolish romantic notion born out of desperation. He would leaveArmin couldn't stop himbut he would have to leave Hannah behind. If he left like a thief in the night, taking their hostage, he would spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. But if he left without her, he thoughthe had to believethat Armin would let him be.

He could make an argument to Armin for setting Hannah free, but he knew it wouldn't be heeded. No one even suspected she was still alive. In many ways she wasn't, living like an animal, eating sc.r.a.ps and sleeping in a stall. And she knew too much.

Fareed had told her too much, in moments of weakness, when she seemed to be the only thing in his life that was civilized. She was unlike any woman he had ever met, hard and soft, full of an aggressive cynicism tempered by an expansive heart she almost never showed. And she was beautiful in a way that made him ache.When she was taken she had only been in Tajikistan a week, 0.

covering a story for one of the wire services on the country's transition to a market-based economy. A group of colleagues had planned a day hike in the mountains and asked her to join them.

She was the only American. Hikers who did their homework knew better now, but then the area was still considered safe. He thought of the photograph taken of her soon after her abduction, the one they issued to the press. Hannah had been a difficult prisoner, never showing the fear they wanted to capture on film.

She only gave them anger, never the weakness they needed to broadcast to the world to show their power and make every American traveling abroad feel vulnerable. So they drugged her and the picture was snapped, Hannah looking like she was in shock, wide-eyed and confused. Long after she was taken, she'd begun to trust himat least a little. He suspected she wasn't one to ever trust completely no matter what her circ.u.mstances.

Fareed dropped his cigarette to the ground and crushed it with his boot. He could hear Armin bellowing to the crowd as he walked back to Hannah's door.

"You okay? You seem a million miles away tonight," Hannah said.Fareed thought of London. "Not quite that many," he said as he took a key and unlocked the stall door.

"What are you doing?" she asked, suspicion suddenly in her eyes."It's okay. I want to talk to you about something."

He stepped inside, leaving the door partly open.

"Let's sit," he said.

The guard tossed down his cigarette, opened the door where Hannah stood and went into the stall. Rennie didn't think, she just acted. Climbing over the edge of the bank, submachine gun in hand, she ran for the stable. The moment she leapt from the cover of the woods, she knew how vulnerable she was but also knew that she had to reach the doorway to the stable before the soldier came back out. She didn't allow herself to think what he might be doing there. She knew better than anyone that these 0.

people, those who transformed their religion into something murderous, were capable of every form of brutality.

Rennie covered the two hundred yards in about thirty seconds, her feet pounding a rhythm into the hard ground. She crouched low, just out of sight, beside the opening of the wide center aisle of the stable. She had thumbed off the safety of her sub-gun the moment she left her sniping position. She'd rather not shoot the soldier, for though the sub-gun was silenced, it still made an audible retort. She reached down and unsnapped the hold on the knife at her thigh.

She could hear the crowd growing louder under Armin's influence. Nocturnal insects chittered all around. Crouching lower, she peeked into the stable. The pa.s.sageway was clear and low voices came from inside the woman's stall. Her boots silent on the dirt floor, she crept slowly to the door. The stall, like many, was equipped with Dutch doors. The top half was fully open and hooked to the wall. The lower half was open a few inches. A light flickered, probably from a candle. Their voices were louder now but she couldn't discern the words. She peeked through the opening in the lower door, ready to fire if necessary.

The next few moments blurred together as she acted even as her brain a.s.similated the information her eyes offered her. Seeing the guard standing over the woman, obscuring her from seeing Rennie, she bolted from her cover and silently crossed the few steps between them. She let go of her sub-gun, its strap keeping it handy, and slipped the knife from its sheath. In an instant, one arm encircled the guard's chest while the other pa.s.sed the blade under his jaw. She could see Hannah Marcus over his shoulder scrambling backward on her cot, her face in shock. The guard's body kicked, struggling for what seemed like an eternity, not so much against her, but against the life rushing out of him. She held him tight, feeling his terror until he finally sank, slipping motionless from her grasp. Later, much later, Rennie would remember the pressure of the knife and the way the skin gave under it, unresisting, making the man seem so pliant, so weak.

But then, she dropped him to the floor of the stall, bare and 0.

clean, feeling nothing.

Hannah Marcus was pressed as tightly into the corner of the stall as she could be, her arms wide, her palms flat against the wall. Her mouth was set and she looked at Rennie with wide dark eyes. Her gaze was impenetrable and for a moment Rennie was transfixed by it.

"My name is Rennie Vogel. I'm with the FBI. We've got to get out of here." Rennie put out her hand to the woman.

Ignoring Rennie's proffered hand, Hannah moved to the edge of the cot and put her feet gingerly on the floor. She moved as slowly as if she were wading through mud. She stood unsteadily and reached down to the guard, placing a hand on his shoulder, her expression unchanged.

Rennie knew at once that getting the woman out of the stall and into the woods was not going to be a simple task.

"We've got to hurry," Rennie said.

Hannah still said nothing. Rennie could see that she couldn't get her body to move.

"I'm going to help you." Rennie slipped her arm around Hannah's waist and moved her to the door. She was very pet.i.te, with a small frame. And thin, very thin. Rennie edged them into the pa.s.sageway, sub-gun in hand. She closed the door behind her and fastened the padlock with one hand. She hurried them both toward the exit of the stable. At the doorway, she carefully looked around the corner.

All was clear. Hannah still seemed weak and unable to walk on her own. Rennie threw one of Hannah's arms around her shoulder and put the arm with her weapon around the woman's waist. And then she was off, half-carrying, half-dragging her as they ran the two hundred yards to the woods. Out in the open she could hear Armin more clearly. The crowd was clapping and yelling.

This was madness, almost suicidal. Armin and his soldiers were only a half-mile away. If they were seen at this point, they would be caught. Rennie stumbled as Hannah's legs buckled.

They both went down, hitting the ground hard. Only Hannah 0.

had a free arm to break their fall and their knees took the worst of it.

"Up, up!" Rennie pulled Hannah to her feet roughly. They had to get to the woods.

Rennie was nearly frantic as they struggled across the last twenty yards. Hannah was moving more easily now. The shock of the fall seemed to restore some of her strength. Crashing through the thick foliage, Rennie eased her down onto the vine-covered slope. She looked exhausted just from their short run.

How would they ever make it through the forest?

Crouched low, Rennie scanned the woods and then turned back to the encampment. Everything seemed quiet except where Armin was still giving his speech. She checked her watch: 9:45.

She wondered how much longer he would speak, if she had time to take a shot. The sniper gun was still in position where she had left it. From the way he fell, the soldiers would know the direction of the shot and quickly figure out it had come from the line of the woods. She knew it would be risky. The whole area would be swarming in seconds with the armed soldiers, pumped-up and bloodthirsty from Armin's speech.

It was too uncertain. She would be risking more than her own life. She looked down at Hannah lying next to her. She was gazing up at Rennie with a slack, unreadable expression. Rennie knew when she left her team dead where they camped that it was unlikely she could make it through the woods, take the shot and get out on her own. But now this. They had never imagined that Armin still had Hannah Marcus. It had been a year and a half since he had released her photograph and made his demands.

The FBI a.s.sumed she was dead. But she wasn't. Rennie had to decide. What was this woman capable of?

0.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Hannah Marcus couldn't think. Her body was slack on the slope, her feet braced against a tree so she wouldn't tumble down the steep incline, her fingers gripping a tangle of vines. Her ability to reason seemed to have shut downand her emotion with it.

She knew thingsthat Fareed was dead, that she was no longer locked in her stall, and that this woman claiming to be FBI was squatting next to her, peering through the scope of a gunbut she couldn't a.s.similate any of it into anything meaningful. Each stood in isolation, somehow bearing no relation to the other. She had never experienced this kind of disconnection and she didn't even have the energy to be worried about it.

She usually kept it all together. She had not fallen apart during her abduction or her long captivity. She had allowed herself once, and only once, to sob in despair, face down, on her uncomfortable cot. But that was unlike her. She was never one to feel sorry for herself, had never felt privileged enough to allow herself that luxury. She tried to force herself to understand her situation.

My name is Hannah Marcus. I am a journalist. I was kidnapped by a group of Islamic fundamentalists.

Wait. That wasn't entirely right. Fareed was about as religious as she was. Again.

My name is Hannah Marcus. I am a journalist. I was kidnapped by a group using the cloak of Islamic fundamentalism to further their agenda.

Whatever that was. Fareed had only told her so much. Fareed.

She never even knew his last name. He had been good to her.

Maybe even kept her alive.

I lived in an old stable for eighteen months, just biding my time, never holding out hope of being rescued.

That wasn't entirely right either. She knew that the United States never negotiated with terrorists, but she had indulged in fantasy, on occasion. A helicopter, the beating of blades in the nightdescending in a rush and disgorging a clot of men, black-suited, faces covered, to rush her into the monstrous aircraft and fly away.

I was rescued by a woman, an FBI agent. Rennie Vogel.

A woman. She had never imagined this scenario and she had imagined many. A lone woman.

The engines of her mind began to rumble to life. How likely was it that her government, which was not in the business of rescuing their abducted citizens, would send a single female to rescue her? Not likely. Not likely at all.

Hannah heard the sc.r.a.pe of metal against metal and looked over at Rennie who was still fiddling with the long gun. She could see her almost clearly in the moonlight, accentuated by the lights from the stage. Tall, her body very defined, she looked like she'd been through h.e.l.l getting to this point. Her clothes were filthy and she was covered in scratches and her head had a huge b.u.mp, still slightly b.l.o.o.d.y. But underneath it all, she was striking.

Hannah turned her head further to see where Rennie had the gun trained. Sounds began to filter into her consciousness as she saw a man standing in front of an excited crowd speaking into a bullhorn. It must be Armin. Hannah spoke Farsi, had spent most of her career in Iran, and was able to pick out a few phrases. A shiver went down her spine. Armin spoke of jihad and the killing of infidels. Her mind seemed to finally be clearing. She glanced at Rennie again. She had her eye pressed tightly against the scope which seemed to be aimed directly at Ahmad Armin.

"Oh," Hannah said aloud. All of her mental functioning seemed to return to her in a rush of clarity. Rennie turned to her, her face tight with anger.

She spoke quietly, punctuating each word. "Do not make a sound. Sit there and pull yourself together. As soon as I fire this weapon, we will run as far and fast as we can." Her face softened.

"You have to find the strength. If you don't, we're both going to die, because I won't allow us to be captured. Find the strength.

It's there. Just draw on it."

She thought then that Rennie would reach out to her, a rea.s.suring hand on her shoulder. It was something in her expression. But then the look pa.s.sed and she turned away. Hannah drew herself up on her knees to be ready to scramble down the steep hill. So, this was it all along.

An American agent sent to a.s.sa.s.sinate Ahmad Armin accidentally discovered I was alive.

She rescued me anyway.

Rennie turned back to the scope. She could only hope Hannah would be ready when the time came. After she fired the sniper gun, she calculated they would have three-and-a-half minutes to get ahead of the men. Four minutes, tops. Thirty seconds for the men to react to the shooting and three-to-three-and-a-half minutes for them to run the half mile to the line of the woods.

That's if they a.s.sumed the shot came from the woods. Rennie wondered if she could divert their attention to the road.

She scanned the camp with the scope. It was split by the road.

On the side that ran parallel to the wood line was the staging area where Armin spoke at the far left. Then a large barracks.

Next was the little stable where Hannah Marcus had been kept captive. Then another smaller barracks. Beyond that, the road curved sharply out of sight. On the other side of the road were the residences of the leadership and the eating quarters. And directly across from the stableRennie could see it through the center pa.s.sage which ran the length of the small structurewas the armory.

Rennie reached down and gingerly ran her fingers over the outline of the device in her cargo pocket. It was an M2 SLAM mini-bomb.

She positioned the crosshairs of the scope back on Armin's head as she unb.u.t.toned the pocket of her cargo pants and removed the bomb. It would be risky, insanely risky. She would have to expose herself again out in the open. Plus, the bomb was equipped with a timer and the shortest setting was fifteen minutes. She had no idea how much longer Armin would speak.

She paused, flashing on an image of Hannah's intelligence profile.

It wasn't very thick and she had wondered at the time why there wasn't more. Just the two photographs everyone had seen on the evening news, a couple of sheets of background information and the summary of what was known about the kidnapping. But she was able to recall a particular piece of information. She could see the page in her mind as if she were holding it in her hand.

Languages spoken: English, German, Farsi.

"You speak Farsi," Rennie whispered.

"Yes."

"Do you have any indication how much longer he will continue speaking?"

"It's hard to say. It's too far to hear much, but he seems to be on a roll."

Rennie held Hannah's gaze for a long moment as she thought.

"Okay. Here's what's going to happen." Rennie outlined her plan.

Hannah seemed to be looking at Rennie as if she were taking her in for the first time. A wave of guilt washed over Rennie as she saw herself through Hannah's eyes. She had never imagined she would be compelled to take a man's life in front of a civilian.

Hannah finally spoke, interrupting the moment of understanding that had pa.s.sed between them.

"Why don't you set it for less time?" Hannah asked. "He could finish soon."

"I can't set it for any less time."

Hannah shook her head. "That's brilliant."

"If anything goes wrong before I get back, run. As fast as you can," Rennie said taking her compa.s.s from her belt loop. "Just keep going west and you'll eventually reach a village."

Hannah looked skeptical as she slipped it into her pocket.

Rennie didn't say what she thought, that the likelihood of her making it with no supplies was slim to none. She looked at the woman for a long moment. She looked wasted, her arms thin and reedy.

"What do I do when I make it to the village?"

"Just use your wits. Try to find someone you think you can trust. And contact the FBI or the American emba.s.sy as soon as you can."

"Okay." Hannah smiled weakly in resignation.

Rennie could see that she knew she would be in disastrous trouble if Rennie didn't make it back. She picked up the M2, set the timer and synchronized her watch with it to the second. She carefully put it back in her cargo pocket.

"I'm going," she said, taking a last look at Armin, who was still speaking.

Hannah put her hand on Rennie's arm. "Be careful."