CHAPTER TWO
India Fox stared at the darkened screen, waiting for a response to her text message. There were very few people she would call when shit hit the fan… Draven Kilkenny was one of them.
Her daddy was getting an earful when she got home, and she didn’t care if her father thought she was being rude. It wasn’t as if she was going to yell at him in the office… oh no, she would save that for the next time he summoned her to dinner at the main house.
It will be an easy in and out. Pick up the intel packet and come straight home.
She could hear her father’s voice in her head and snorted silently. She’d been a field agent at the Central Intelligence Agency for long enough to know easy was rarely part of the job, no matter what the deputy director, aka her father, promised her.
The last time he promised you easy, you got shot.
She didn’t need to remind herself of that either; she had the scars to prove it. And she especially didn’t need to remember it right now when she was trying to avoid bumping into one of the Lord’s Resistance Army, who were crawling all over this freaking little piece of hell tonight. Even on the lowest setting, the back light on her satellite phone lit up the cave she’d stumbled across and was using as a hiding spot. She immediately cupped her hand around it and read the message.
DK: On my way.
Thank you, sweet suffering baby Jesus on a bicycle .
If there was anyone she wanted to come pull her out of here, it was her best friend Lizz’s big brother. The former SEAL now worked with Nemesis Inc. Black Ops contractors with bases in multiple countries across the globe. It was probably too much to hope for that he was in Djibouti or at least somewhere in Africa and could get here in hours, but she’d take the help no matter how long it took for him to get here.
The sound of yelling from the jungle outside sent her into the deepest recesses of the cave. Bats, rats, snakes, or any other creature didn’t matter at this point. She had to remain hidden.
Stay alive until Draven gets here. That was all she had to do. She hoped that would be as easy as it sounded. But the way her luck was running… things weren’t likely to pan out that way. She didn’t dare turn on a light, but still had to figure out a way to hide the dispatch papers she’d picked up. She steeled herself to stand up and run her hands along the walls of the cave.
Yes, you will do.
Her fingers traced the small opening. Hopefully it wasn’t one which gushed water when the rains fell and was a fissure which had developed for some other reason. Either way, she figured it was big enough to hold the envelope she carried in her backpack. She shrugged off the bag and placed it carefully on the ground.
More yelling and the sound of boots hitting the ground told her the LRA had discovered the drop-down she’d fallen over earlier, before her hand had come through the branches and foliage which covered the cave entrance.
Stupid. Silly girl, you should have kept running.
Now you’re going to get caught and then you’re screwed.
She patted the backpack, using her hands to make sure her Velcro patch, declaring her a member of the press, was still in place, and then moved to the zipper. If she was hoping for it to open quietly, she wasn’t rewarded, as it sounded so freaking loud in the cave. India held her breath and hoped they didn’t hear it. But of course, she heard one of them asking for silence. She paused with her hand on the half-open zipper. Maybe if she didn’t move, they wouldn’t hear her.
When a couple of minutes had passed, she figured she was safe to pull the envelope out of the bag and hide it.
This is worse than trying to keep my hand steady for that stupid buzzing game .
The mind does funny things when you are in dangerous situations . Throwing India back to a childhood memory of weekends at her friend’s house trying to move a loop along a twisty wire was apparently one of them. She understood the logic behind it, though waiting for the freaking buzzer to make you jump was similar to how she felt right now.
She got the papers out, and somehow finding the fissure on the wall was more difficult this time around. But she did it, even if she had to bite down so hard on the inside of her cheek she tasted blood to prevent herself from screaming when she brushed a cobweb, and again when something ran over her hand. Those documents were now safe… she hoped.
India cocked her head to one side, listening, hoping the people outside had moved on, but was disappointed when she could still hear the snoring from whichever one really should see an ear, nose, and throat specialist. From the way his breathing paused and then restarted on a snore loud enough to wake the dead, he had sleep apnea or something.
She turned away from the direction of the entrance and turned the watch she wore inside out to prevent the luminous face from giving any hint of her presence. Damn, she was almost up to twenty-four hours. She needed to check in. But she didn’t dare turn on her phone. It would beep or vibrate, and with the lack of animal sounds, it would echo out of the cave. Then she was screwed. She couldn’t even switch on a flashlight to see if there was any water source in here.
Don’t think of water.
Damn it, why did you think of water?
She silently berated herself for it. Because now the thirst she’d been working so hard to ignore was all she could think about. She stuck her hand into her pocket for the Tic Tacs she kept there. Draven had been the one to tell her to take them out of the box and stash them in a cloth handkerchief, as it would make less noise should she need to keep silent. She felt through the folded material and popped one into her mouth. Sucking on it would hopefully produce some saliva and help with her thirst.
I’m going to kiss Draven on the lips the second he arrives for teaching me this one, and I don’t even care that he thinks I have cooties or something .
She grinned. He’d wipe his mouth off and grumble at her that she was infecting him with germ-itis just like he used to when they were teenagers.
Ha, you had such a crush on him. Germs were the last thing you thought he had.
She understood now why he’d pushed her away back then. The six-year age gap between them would have landed him in jail if he’d taken her up on her brazen hussylike offer on her sixteenth birthday. She’d been wrong to refuse to speak to him for so long afterward.
Amazing how being stuck in a cave in a jungle with terrorists sleeping outside the door makes you forget all about your embarrassment of his rejection, isn’t it?
Shut up.
And now you are talking to yourself.
No, I’m not.
Yes, you are.
Oh, crap, she was.
In her defense, it was that or lose her mind. This was probably one of the many stages of exhaustion and dehydration setting in. But she couldn’t remember which, and she figured it didn’t really matter. As long as she kept the conversations confined to silent ones in her head… then nobody could hear and nobody had to know.
She leaned her head back against the rocks and closed her eyes. She needed another cat nap. Ten minutes, that was all she could allow herself. Anything longer, and she’d drop into a deep sleep. Then it would take a tornado warning going off to wake her. That wouldn’t be a good thing. Not today or tonight, whatever it was now.
He’ll come. He said he was coming. Now I just have to wait.
She thought it was a damn shame she’d never really learned the art of patience. But she’d better figure it out fast… because getting caught meant certain death.