John Ringo - Ghost

He went to the broom closet again and filled his bottle with water, then drank and drank and drank. Before he filled himself up totally he took some more Pepcid and ibuprofen along with three Imodium AD. Three Imodium would stop up an elephant, but he figured he was going to have worse problems than constipation and the opposite would be a nightmare.

No food but you could go a lot longer with no food than with no water. He needed to carry more with him, but there weren’t any really good containers.

He took one more drink, then went back to his hide and gathered up all his gear. He was as set as he could imagine, given the situation. He carried the railroad flare back to the air shaft, opened the grate, crawled in, closed the grate and moved back to the vertical bend. Once there he set all his stuff in place, set the alarm on his watch for nine hours, put out the flare and lay back to consider the situation. He was reasonably secure, watered up, ammoed up and couldn’t do anything until after dark. And only maybe then. Tonight he’d find the girls and hope like hell that wasn’t too late.

He’d had a busy two days and sleep hit him before he realized it was sneaking up.

When Amy Townsend woke up, all she knew was that she didn’t like the situation at all. She was seated on some sort of metal chair, there were bars across her thighs and butt, which she could tell was naked, rather than a solid bottom. It was pretty uncomfortable seat but that wasn’t the worst of the situation. There were metal restraints on her wrists and ankles. The room was echoey, like it had rock or concrete walls, and girls were crying. It also stank, shit and piss and a smell she could only define as “fear.”

Amy was a twenty-year-old student at UGA from Bainbridge, Georgia, working on her nursing degree and letting ROTC pay for it. She was pretty in a square-jawed way with brown hair and pretty green eyes, but many of her friends considered her to be a bit “butch.” She wore her hair fairly short, above the shoulders, and between being in shape from weight lifting instead of aerobics or cheerleading and her standard rolling walk which was anything but feminine, she tended to have a hard time finding guys that could look at her as a female rather than “just another one of the guys.” This despite a rather large chest.

She kept her eyes shut, head down, and moved her ankles slightly. She could move them side to side pretty freely but only forward or back about four inches. When she moved her right foot forward, something pulled on her left. And she felt a yank that wasn’t from her after a moment.

She opened her eyes and looked down. She was fully naked and her ankles and wrists had metal bands on them. The bands each had a ring welded to them, shutting them closed. They weren’t coming off short of a hacksaw. There was a chain, one for the feet, one for the wrists, that ran through metal rings on the seats, which turned out to be more of a long bench, then to the rings on the restraints. She looked to either side and saw she was part of a line of five girls, all similarly restrained. Some of them still appeared to be asleep or unconscious. There was a gap to her left, then another line of five girls. There was another line of girls in front of her as well and the girl directly in front of her was awake, crying, and had apparently relieved herself on the floor, explaining at least part of the smell.

She thought back, her brain getting more and more coherent as whatever drug had been used on her leached away. She remembered being royally pissed that she had been surprised. She usually had good situational awareness but the van had just come out of nowhere when she was crossing a student parking lot, headed home from a late class. She’d gotten one solid kick in when they got her in the van, struggling and screaming as loud as she could, then two men had gotten restraints on her and started stripping her. She’d refused to give in to hopelessness or despair, even when they took her to the warehouse and she saw the other girls and realized that the men were terrorists rather than just your generic serial rapists. She’d seen a couple of the girls stripped, loaded in what looked like coffins and then somebody had stuck a needle in her deltoid and that was the last she remembered.

“We are so totally screwed,” the girl next to her whispered, fearfully. “We are so screwed.”

“We’re not screwed, they are,” Amy said, quietly but definitely, keeping her head down. “I don’t care where on earth we are, there are very violent guys who are gearing up right now to come rescue us.”

“In your dreams,” the girl said, bitterly. “Cliff won’t care, he only cares about the oil.”

“Oh, we so don’t want to be having this conversation,” Amy said. “I’ll bet you a dollar, most of us get out of here. Alive. But you can give up if you want. Feel free. In the meantime, I’m Amy.”

“Britney,” the girl said. She was a short, fine-boned blonde with small breasts and a refined face that was twisted in fear. “God, I’m scared,” she whispered, gritting her teeth. “You know what they’re going to do to us, right?”

“Yeah,” Amy said, slowly lifting her head. There was a single door at the far right end of the room. Two soldiers in purple camouflage guarding it. Who in the hell used purple camouflage? At the end of the room, in the center, was a dais and on the dais was the sort of table she’d only ever seen in nightmares. Metal, like a surgical table, with restraints on it. On the left was a camera, a regular TV news type camera, and lights. In the center of the end wall, directly behind the dais, was a large mirror that was obviously one-way glass. “This is truly going to suck.”

“How can you be so…” Britney stopped and shook her head.

“Because unlike you, I trust the ‘rough men’ that Orwell talked about.”

“What?” Britney said, confused.

“’People sleep soundly in their beds because rough men wait to do violence to those who would harm them,’ ” Amy replied, quietly. “Like I said, they will come for us.”

“They didn’t come for any of the other hostages in Iraq,” Britney said, bitterly. “And how are they going to find us?”

“They will,” Amy said. “If you can’t hold tight to that thought, you’re just going to break long before you make it to the table. And if you do, don’t go crying on my shoulder.”

“Start packing,” Senior Chief Adams said, walking into the room where Charlie Platoon was getting ready for the evening’s snatch mission. “We’re locked down.” Adams was the platoon’s senior enlisted man, and usually passed the immediate “word” while the officers dealt with the rest of the “head shed.”

“What the hell?” PO2 “Spooky” Vahn said, looking up. Vahn was a short little Vietnamese sniper that the rest of the team thought proved the truth that fighting the Vietnamese was a losing proposition. “What about the mission?”

“Scrubbed,” the chief replied. “We’re packing and taking a transport to Qatar. Everybody is scrambling in every direction.”

“The girls,” PO Third Sherman said, high-fiving his buddy PO Third Roman. “We’re going to go rescue us some pussy from durance vile. If that don’t get us laid, nothing will!”

“Navy SEALs,” Roman shouted. “We’re here to get you off! Errr… out!” They high-fived again as the new meats looked at them in amazement.

“Whatever,” the chief said, shaking his head. “All I know is we need to be packed in one hour. So get with it.”

“We’re fully dialed in,” the secretary of defense said. “We’ve got aerospace deconfliction and penetration planning going on, but it’s not going to be easy.”