Chapter 30
Donovan
The line was dead.
I stood holding the phone against my ear like something might come back through it. A voice. A breath. Anything that told me she was still conscious on the other end.
Nothing came.
My hand was shaking. A tremor running from my wrist into my fingers, the phone rattling at my ear.
The operational part of my brain was already sorting. The sat phone was traceable. Nasser had called from a device with a signal that could be located. He’d used it to make a point and the point had landed, but the call itself was a mistake. His mistake.
The rest of me was somewhere else entirely.
Sarah’s voice on the line, and then the sound of her being hit, and then Nasser telling me what would happen to her next.
And I’d stood there and listened to every word and couldn’t stop a single one of them.
I put the phone in my pocket and braced both hands flat on the side of the nearest cabin. Leaned into it.
My chest was tight and my breathing had gone to hell. I rested my forehead on the rough concrete, and everything inside me wanted to tear something apart.
I had to pull it together. Sarah was still alive. She was somewhere out there, and it was up to me to find her.
There was no decision to make. I just had to figure out how to do it.
I dialed Jace.
He picked up on the second ring. The usual faint clatter of a keyboard that accompanied every call with him came through before he spoke.
“Tell me this is a social call. I’ve been staring at satellite imagery for six hours, and I’m developing a personal relationship with a cloud formation over Nanyuki.”
“Nasser has Sarah.”
The keyboard stopped.
“He called me fifteen minutes ago. I need that call traced, and I need a location.”
“Send me the number.”
I forwarded it.
“That’s an Iridium sat phone. Every call on their network routes through specific satellite beams, and every beam covers a specific piece of ground. I can pull the routing data and work backward to a general footprint. How long was the call?”
“Long enough.”
“Give me everything. What he said, what you heard in the background, any detail that narrows the search.”
I gave him all of it. What Nasser said, what he demanded, what he did to Sarah when she told me not to give in.
“Twenty minutes,” Jace said. “I’ll have something.”
I hung up and went to find Andrew.
He was in the arms room. Seated on an ammo crate with a rifle across his knees, pressing rounds into rifle magazines one at a time. He looked up when I came through the door, and his hands stopped.
“Hey man, how are you holding up?”
“Nasser called. He confirmed he has Sarah. He wants us off the reserve. If we don’t pull back, he said his men would—” I stopped. The words lodged in my throat like broken glass. “Jace is tracing the call now.”
Andrew kept reloading rifle magazines, each round seated a little harder than the last.
“How is she?”
“She was conscious. She talked to me.” My throat was so tight the words barely fit through it. “He hit her while I was on the line. Then he told me what would happen to her if we don’t pull back.”
Andrew was quiet for three seconds.
“How much ammo should we bring?”
“As much as we can carry.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Once Jace gets me a location, then we can start moving and come up with a plan on the way.”
“How many are we taking?”
“Two.”
Andrew looked at me. “Two.”
“You and me.”
“Donovan—”
“I’m not taking the rangers.”
The words came out sharper than I intended. Andrew studied my face. He knew why.
He knew about Owen. I’d told him on a late night during a job in Kurdistan. He knew exactly what I was looking at when I looked at Zayn and Baraka and Jomo.
“They’re not ready for this,” I said. “A hostage rescue against an armed crew in a fixed position. I can’t risk that many lives.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I just can’t take that risk.”
Andrew was quiet. His thumb moved along the edge of his rifle sling, but the rest of him was still.
“Okay,” Andrew said. “Then it’s you and me.”
“I’m not asking you to come.”
“I know you’re not.” He unslung his rifle and seated a fully loaded magazine.
“Sergeant York, 1918. One man took out a line of machine gun nests and captured 132 soldiers. When they asked him how he did it, he said he picked them off from the back so the ones in the front didn’t know what was happening.
” He slapped the magazine home. “So I suppose any threat under 270 enemy combatants should be reasonable for the two of us to handle.”
My phone buzzed. Jace.
“General footprint,” he said. “The call routed through two Iridium birds. The first one was dropping below the horizon during the call, so the network handed off to a second. The beam overlap between the two narrows it to a stretch of farmland south of the reserve boundary. Maybe a fifteen-kilometer radius from the southern access road. Cross-referencing with satellite imagery, there are a handful of structures in that area. Rented farmsteads, livestock outbuildings.”
“Can you narrow it further?”
“Not from the signal alone. But you know what Nasser needs. A building with road access, cover from aerial observation, and enough space for vehicles. That eliminates most of the footprint. I’m looking at three, maybe four possible locations.
The closest is eight kilometers past the reserve’s southern boundary on a dirt track off the main road. ”
“Send me the coordinates.”
“Already done. Donovan.” He paused. “You guys be careful. Bring her back.”
“Will do.” I ended the call. Andrew had heard enough.
We were already in the right room. Rifles, load-bearing vests to hold extra magazines, individual medical kits, and some tools for mechanical breaching. We each made sure to top off on water as well. We loaded what we needed and nothing we didn’t.
The ranger bunkhouse was quiet. All of them asleep or trying to be, worn down from the firefight and the adrenaline crash that followed it.
I stood in the compound and looked at that building for longer than I should have.
These men had fired back last night. They’d held positions and followed orders under live contact and driven an armed crew off their reserve.
Four days ago, they couldn’t have done any of it.
They’d earned the right to be part of what came next.
And I was walking past them because I couldn’t risk being wrong again.
We took the truck from the vehicle bay. Andrew drove. I rode with my rifle barrel-down between my knees and the coordinates glowing on my phone between us. We pulled out of camp on the southern access road. Andrew drove fast and didn’t talk.
Neither of us spoke. Somewhere ahead of us, Sarah was in the hands of a man who had hit her at least once already and promised worse.
The farmstead sat at the end of a dirt track that branched off the main road and dead-ended at a wire fence.
We left the truck a kilometer out and covered the rest on foot. The terrain was flat scrubland broken by scattered acacia. Good concealment on the approach. Bad for extraction if things went sideways.
We settled into a position fifty meters out and watched.
Three buildings. Two were lit from inside, shadows moving behind the glass. The third sat apart from the other two, smaller, its windows dark. Two guards posted on it, one at the front door and one at the back.
Three vehicles parked between the buildings. Men moved between the two lit structures. Two more walked a loose patrol around the perimeter, rifles slung, talking to each other but keeping their eyes on the tree line.
“I’ve got at least a dozen,” Andrew whispered.
“Look at the guards on the dark building. They’re facing inboard.”
“Why would you face guards inward?”
“Prison guards face inboard.”
We watched. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Then the door of the nearest lit building opened, and a man walked out carrying a single plate.
He crossed the gap between the buildings, opened the door of the dark one, went inside.
Came back out a minute later without the plate.
The guard didn’t move. The man went back the way he’d come.
Andrew looked at me. “So what’s the play? We start dropping them from here? Concealed positions, pick them off before they know what’s happening?”
“And someone inside puts a bullet in her head the second the first shot cracks.”
He was quiet.
“We have to get in close somehow and get Sarah out without a firefight,” I said.
“Through a dozen men.”
“Around them. Maybe through some of them.” I looked at the guards on the shack and the two men patrolling.
He didn’t argue. We both knew the other option was worse.
The plan required quiet, so we’d have to use blades. We each slung our rifles tightly to our backs and drew our bush knives.
It took twenty minutes to time the patrol’s loop. They were lazy, following the same path, pausing at the same corners. Andrew and I crept forward to a thicker stand of brush along their route and waited for them to come around again.
We lay in wait on opposite sides of their path in the thick grass. As they came closer, they stopped for their usual break at this spot. Andrew and I seized the moment. Each one of us took a guard. Hand over mouth, blade into the artery on the neck.
We laid them down and hid their bodies in the grass where we had been hidden.
Two down. The compound didn’t react.
We circled south together, keeping the dark building between us and the front guard’s sightline.
The back guard was leaning against the wall, rifle across his chest, playing a game on his phone.
The light from the screen had destroyed whatever natural night vision his eyes had, and it let us approach quickly and quietly almost straight on.
The knife did the rest.
Three down.
“Playing with your phone while on guard duty?” Andrew whispered. “Maybe these guys aren’t as high-speed as we thought.”
“Complacency kills.”