Way of the Warrior (Troubleshooters #17.5)(5)

And, yup. So that had happened. She still couldn’t quite believe it. Though the fact that she’d shaken like a junkie for the first sixty minutes of her confinement spoke volumes about the awful reality of her very, very close call. There had been such hatred in the men’s eyes in that split-second when she’d come face-to-face with them. Such feral, evil hatred.

Then, of course, there had been the incessant pounding on the door, followed by a series of muted pinging noises that she had to assume meant the terrorists were shooting at the bulletproof steel of the chamber. But all that had ended long ago. And now she was left with…silence. Deafening silence. A silence so complete that the deep breath of sterile air she pulled into her lungs—the oxygen in the safe room was pumped in through a separate ventilation system to counteract any possible chemical weapons attack—sounded like she was doing her best impression of Darth Vader.

“Luke,” she growled, lowering her voice a few octaves. “I am your father.”

The sentence reverberated around the room before the thick walls absorbed the words. She snorted, realizing she was straight-up losing her marbles. Going crazy as a bullbat as they liked to say back in her lowcountry hometown, a place so small it sometimes forgot its own name. And that whole so-small-it-sometimes-forgot-its-own-name thing was precisely why she’d worked so hard to make a name for herself within the pool of diplomatic secretaries. So she could get an overseas assignment. So she could get the hell out of Georgia.

See the world, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

“Yeah, right.” She’d give her eyeteeth to be back home right now, sitting on the front porch swing at her folks’ house, drinking a tall, sweating glass of sweet tea. And if she happened to make it out of this thing alive, that’s exactly what she was going to do—catch the first transport home.

She was done with Pakistan. D.O.N.E. She’d had a taste of adventure and, quite honestly, she didn’t care for it. It was time to go back to the land of the free and the home of the brave and implement her life plan. Husband. Kids. A job that didn’t come complete with armed terrorists…

Raking in another fortifying breath, she reached into her purse, pulled out one of the boxes of Tic Tacs, and tossed a couple of the tiny candies into her mouth. Then she glanced around the space and decided two things. Number one: she was thirsty as all get-out, and those gallon jugs of water stacked beside the door were calling her name. And number two: if she was going to be here for a while, she had better get comfy and stop cowering in the corner like a chicken-hearted cur. There was only so much self-pity she could stand. And she’d just about reached her limit.

Pushing up, she rubbed her hands over her mostly numb derriere, grimacing when the muscles came back to life in a rush of pins and needles. “Talk about a literal pain in the ass,” she said, hobbling toward the water containers.

She’d just unscrewed the plastic top on one, using both hands to tilt the room-temperature water down her throat, when a series of soft pops sounded outside. She bobbled the jug, managing to spill a good portion of its contents onto her blouse before she caught it and carefully replaced the cap. Setting the half-empty container back atop its carefully arranged compatriots, she tilted her head toward the door, listening.

Pop, pop, pop.

Gunfire. She was sure of it.

But this was different than what she’d heard before. For one thing, it didn’t sound like the rounds were hitting the walls of the panic room—praise be for small miracles. For another thing, the frequency was steady, almost…calculated. Of their own accord, her feet shuffled her closer to the door. She’d just placed a hand on the cool surface when—Ring, ring! Ring, ring!—a phone sounded in the room behind her.

She jumped like a scalded cat, glad the water jug was no longer in her hands. What the what? A phone? Where the heck had that been for the last three hours? She spun, her eyes searching the ceiling-high shelves stacked against the south side of the room and piled with canned foods and dry goods.

Ring, ring! Ring, ring!

Where was it coming from? There was no phone on the shelves. No phone on the lone wooden table in the middle of the space. No phone atop or beneath the half-dozen cots crammed together on the opposite side of the room. No phone—

Aha! On the back wall, a yellow light blinked over a small door no bigger than that of a mailbox. She raced toward it, wrenching open the little aperture and revealing a cubbyhole where, sure enough, an old-fashioned corded phone sat nestled all safe and sound.

“Now, why wasn’t this part of my orientation?” she grumbled as she snatched the receiver from the cradle, running a hand through her hair again. It was a nervous tic. One she’d been working to overcome until today when nervous tics were the least of her worries.

“Hello?” she barked, not surprised when that one word sounded like it’d been broken on a hard edge. She prided herself on being a gutsy gal—after all, she’d spent nearly a year living and working in Pakistan, hadn’t she? A country where females, especially American females, weren’t all that highly revered—but the last few hours had definitely taken their toll.

“Miss Searcy,” an authoritative voice sounded in her ear, “this is General Pete Fuller. Sorry we took so long to contact you. We’ve been a bit busy around here, but—”

The line crackled and cut out just before another voice, a wonderfully deep, wonderfully familiar voice, rumbled against her eardrums. “…thought I told you to patch me through, goddamnit. She knows me and—”