“Do you know where they took her?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
He found a white terry robe on a hook behind the door and wrapped it around her. As delicate as a porcelain doll.
“Keep the towel over your mouth and nose,” he said, the smoke clogging his throat.
Her brown hair hung in limp curls and ringlets around her soft pink face. “I don’t know where I am.”
“Muscat, Oman.”
She shuddered. “I’m-I’m not sure I can walk,” she said through the towel.
“Lean on me. I’ll help.”
They made it halfway down the hall. But seeing the smoldering corpse lying in the scorched entrance to the sitting room, her knees buckled. The smell was horrible.
Crocker lifted her in his arms.
“Cover your nose. Close your eyes.”
He felt her frail bones under the robe. Her heart beating against his chest like a little bird’s.
Through the wider hallway to the living room, out the door of the suite. He followed the bloody footprints he’d left, hoping that Akil and Davis would find Malie so he could return to his family. Spend time with Holly and Jenny. Laugh, play games together, maybe take a vacation.
Rounding the corner, he saw a dozen soldiers in black riot gear and visored helmets pointing automatic weapons at him.
Reminded him of an image he’d seen in a video game.
A shorter soldier on the right of the group, holding a 12-gauge M1014 combat shotgun with a telescoping tubular stock, shouted in British-accented English: “Freeze right there or we’ll shoot!”
Stopping, he suddenly felt exhausted. The smoke was creating havoc in his head.
“Now slowly hand the girl to my men.”
“Okay.” Coughing.
Brigitte, in his arms, whimpered.
Crocker, feeling lightheaded, tried to reassure her. “They’re government soldiers,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”
He transferred her to two big men who carried her away. Two other soldiers stepped forward and pointed their weapons at his head.
“Now get down the floor and hold your arms over your head!”
“I’m an official of the U.S. government.” Actually, his situation was a bit more complicated. But he couldn’t explain that he was a leader of a U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six unit on assignment with the CIA.
“Get on the floor!”
“I need to talk to-”
“GET DOWN, NOW!”
Crocker didn’t have the energy to argue. His head was wobbling. As he bent his knees, his legs gave out.
He was already unconscious when he hit the floor.
Chapter Seventeen
Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.
– Lance Armstrong
He woke up dreaming that he was floating in clouds looking for something below in the choppy blue water.
What?
The question was immediately lost in the flood of messages that crowded his brain. Pain first, emanating from his arms, legs, face, and ribs. Then, impressions of his current surroundings.
He lay on a metal hospital bed in a pale blue room approximately twenty feet by twenty. Steel bars painted white over the one window that faced another wing of the hospital. Birds chirped playfully outside. A uniformed guard watched him from a folding metal chair by the door.
“Where am I?” he asked.
The guard put his hands behind his head and yawned.
Crocker pushed himself up on his elbows, and as he did, a thick knot of pain traveled from his shoulder up to the base of his skull.
There was no phone on the nightstand. No immediate means of connecting with the outside world.
For the moment he welcomed the peace and quiet. The space to think.
An IV fed a vein in his left forearm. Two monitors attached farther up relayed information to a series of machines on a cart-blood pressure, heartbeat, and so on.
“How long have I been here?” he asked, realizing that he was wearing a light green hospital gown and that his clothes and other personal belongings were nowhere in sight.
“How long have I been lying here?” he asked the soldier again. He looked to be in his thirties. A wide, flat face, clean shaven. Hooded dark eyes. A green-red-and-white Omani flag patch on the shoulder of his uniform.
The soldier tapped his watch, held it to his ear, then stood and opened the door. Crocker watched him turn from the waist and say something in Arabic to someone in the hallway.
That’s when he remembered the girl, Brigitte, and the events at the Al Bustan Palace hotel. The terror, gunfire, and flames returned.
Malie? I wonder what happened to Malie?
Dozens of related questions begged for answers. First of alclass="underline" Where’s the rest of my team? Did they find her? Were they able to stop Sheik Rastani, Cyrus, and the others?
He made a careful evaluation of his body, starting with his feet and ankles-all bare and sore, but otherwise functional. Pain pulsed from a bruise below his right knee, which was covered with a bandage. Both hamstrings were tight. His lower back ached, especially on the right. His ribs were tightly wrapped in bandages. And there was a big dressing near his right shoulder where he’d been burned.
Raw claw marks on his neck. His mouth swollen, sore, and dry. Lower lip ripped and stitched. His right incisor had been broken, a triangular-shaped piece missing from the top.
He’d been in worse shape than this. During previous operations, he’d broken his back and other bones, fractured his pelvis, suffered high-altitude pulmonary edema, and nearly drowned.
When he tried to move, sharp warnings rose from almost every part of his body. The guard stood at the door looking anxious, fingering the pistol that hung from a leather holster at his side.
“I have to use the bathroom,” Crocker explained slowly, trying to recall the words in Arabic.
Just a frown from the soldier. A threatening look in his eyes.
“The bathroom. Le pissoir.”
The Omani shouted something urgently down the hall.
Crocker considered disconnecting himself from the machines and taking his chances, when a nurse in a brilliant white uniform entered. Short, straight brown hair cut in a pageboy. Her features were somewhat Hispanic.
“How do you feel?” she asked in lilting English.
“Sore as hell.”
“Sore’s not so bad.” She introduced herself as Luci, from the Philippines. Told him he’d arrived at the hospital yesterday in the early afternoon. It was now 3 p.m.
“I assume I’m still in Muscat.”
“Yes, you are. Lovely city. This morning I watched dolphins playing in the water from the window of my apartment.”
What he would do to change places with those creatures now.
“I need to talk to someone from the U.S. embassy.”
“We need to get you to a dentist first.”
“No, the embassy. It’s urgent. How do I get to a phone?”
“I’ll ask.”
She helped him out of bed and to a bathroom down the hall. The guard walked beside them, muttering a prayer under his breath, and waited outside the door.
Crocker’s face looked worse than he thought it would. His right eye was practically swollen shut, and the blue-and-purple bruise around his mouth extended high up his cheek and down across his jaw. Long red gashes marked his neck.
Returning to his bed exhausted, he fell asleep. Dreamt he was watching his mother iron clothes with a cigarette clenched in her teeth. The expression on her tired, weathered face said Learn to take the good with the bad, son.
I will, Mom. I will.
When he awoke hours later a bright light burned overhead. The sliver of sky through the window had turned deep Prussian blue. He felt like he was floating.
Three dark-skinned men stood at the end of the bed, two in military uniform, the third in a doctor’s white lab coat.
“U.S. Navy Chief Warrant Officer Thomas Crocker?” the uniformed man with the thick black mustache asked.