Page 26 of Hayes (Voodoo Guardians #37)

Hayes picked up the weapon with his uninjured hand, maneuvering it easily, loading it, and unloading it. As a SEAL, they’d practice this very thing many times. If you were injured in the field, you should be able to use either hand to shoot, but also to reload. Even just one-handed.

“Hayes, son, you could stay here and wait,” said his father.

“I can’t do that, Dad,” he said, looking at Hoot.

“She’s here because of me. She’s here because I encouraged her to be brave or live without me.

Live without us. I did this. I forced her hand, making her leave our damn home.

Had I been kinder, nicer, she would have stayed on the property, and I would have been… ”

“Dead,” said Hoot. “You would have been dead. Bonds and Aamani would have found you, forced you to do their dirty work, and then killed you.”

“Which is what they’re going to do to her,” he said with tears in his eyes.

“No,” said Mo, walking closer to him. “No, they won’t. We will get to her. All of us. We will find her, get her home, and kill Aamani. She’s a brilliant young woman, and she knows what she’s doing.”

“I know that, Mo. I know that, but this is Aamani. He won’t have the patience to wait if she decides to stall.”

“Hayes, she’ll stall appropriately,” said Mo. “I know my daughter. Sometimes, I think I know her better than myself. I get a daughter just when I thought I would never have a child. She’s brilliant, but not just a high IQ. She has incredible survival skills.”

“I know that, sir. But this is Aamani we’re talking about.

He won’t care that she’s a woman. In fact, he’ll care less because she’s a woman.

I shouldn’t have written those letters. I thought I was figuring out how to ask her forgiveness, how to get her to understand where I was coming from.

It was easier to write it all down than to have to speak to her. ”

Mo nodded, chuckling along with the other men.

“This isn’t funny!” said Hayes.

“Hayes, it’s not funny, but it is ironic.

You figured out that you couldn’t live without the one woman you needed most. She figured out that she couldn’t live without the one man she needed most. You’ve reached the same conclusion, and now you know.

I’d say that’s a good start to the rest of your life,” said Mo. Even Hayes had to chuckle at that.

“I guess it is ironic. I just have to find her, sir.” Gator and Jak walked in carrying several maps of the area they believed Victoria had been taken.

“According to Hiro and AJ, the signal is in and out from this area in the city to the marketplace. It’s good for a few minutes as they walk through the marketplace, then it’s intermittent.

“It goes off, here and then here,” he said, pointing to the map.

“But that’s a desert area,” said Hayes.

“The whole fucking country is a desert,” said Luke. “But that is running parallel to the Euphrates River. If there is a tunnel that goes beneath the river, it might take her to the other side, which would likely come up here.”

He pointed to the spot on the map and frowned. It was a long shot without exact locations. But if all they had was a long shot. They’d take it.

Victoria stared at the equipment once again and admired her work. She’d put it all together, just as it should be. Of course, they didn’t know how it should look or how it should operate, but she’d figured something out.

They couldn’t rescue her if they didn’t know where she was. And they wouldn’t know where she was if she didn’t get the tracking signal through the dirt and potentially water.

So, she worked with what she had. Connecting the machine to her own trackers and comms devices, she turned the device on and then began tapping Morse code on her comms receiver.

There was no way to tell whether they were getting her messages or not unless they provide Morse code back. She felt, rather than heard, her guard walking behind her, watching her. Turning, she nodded toward the machine, and he shook his head.

“It’s almost ready,” she said.

He stared at her, frowning, and she repeated the phrase. Either he didn’t speak English, or he didn’t believe her. She wasn’t sure which, but she was going to play this charade to the very end.

As he walked away, she turned her attention back to the communications device and began tapping once again. Just as she was about to give up, she heard a faint tapping back. Her heart jumped, daring to hope that the device actually worked.

Tapping out her message once more, she waited for a reply.

Understood.Continue comms.

“Holy shit,” she whispered to herself. Connecting the device to a remote battery, she programmed it to continue the tapping, signaling the location. It would repeat every forty-five seconds until someone turned it off.

Now she had to get creative and kill time. Kill time or be killed. That seemed simple.