Kasalla, Sudan
Cade’s fingers scratched against the hard-packed dirt beneath him. He was bound at the wrist and ankles in tight cording with both bindings joined by a length of old electrical wire. Hog-tied in a mud hut in Africa was not how he had pictured his eventual end, but even he had to admit his current options for survival or revenge were few. His special operations training gave him many ideas, but mainly it kept him focused. Ignore the captors, use the pain, find a weakness.
The inside of his makeshift prison was always dark, but he also heard sounds from night birds outside. Nighttime was his time; it was when he forced himself to stay awake, listen, try to find a way out of this mess. From some of the smells, he had determined that previously, this was probably a storage shed. He’d also occasionally seen rats digging in the red dirt for what looked like grains of rice. Food was important here, that was a given. Other ideas were less certain; like how secure would the building be? He pondered the thought as he tested the bindings. His hands and fingers were going numb; he needed to get his wrist loose enough for blood to flow. The building seemed solid, but it was never meant to be a prison.
The guard posted outside began to snore softly. Even with his concussion, Cade had gotten better at tracking schedules, time of day and when the daily harassment would begin. His bindings were also lashed to one of the support beams, so his range of movement was extremely limited. Over the past few days, he’d used all of his available senses to take in every measure, every detail of the dark space.
His fingers touched something under the dirt. He traced the edge and determined it was a rock. Even with the numbness, he could feel it was slick like quartz, not rough like the more common sandstone. That could work. Quietly, he dug his nail deeper into the dry soil to free the stone. In the mission briefing he’d learned this part of the country got less than three inches of rain a year. The ground everywhere was either dust or baked hard as a brick. The surface here had likely not seen moisture in decades. The rock didn’t budge, and his nails scraped away only minuscule layers with each attempt. Painstakingly, he kept at it.
As his fingers dug, Cade contemplated why he was alive and why he was still here. The mission had been a colossal failure but not because of his team. It was a command failure. They had eyes on everything in the field, including his helmet camera feed. The suit he wore should have been steadily sending telemetries back, so they would have known he was alive and captured. Nothing in this shithole village was worth sacrificing his life over. That was not just his opinion—he knew on some missions the possible rewards were that high. Not here, not for Majeed. The guy was a pissant, a minor player. It had been a fucking training op. So why had the military not come for him?
There was only one reason he could think of that Blackhawks weren’t already circling above with soldiers fast-roping down to get him. Control had marked him as dead, KIA along with the rest of Domino team. He fucking hated that computer. It probably was covering its fuckup in misidentifying the team as hostiles. How could anyone think giving command authority to something that had never had any skin in the game was a good idea? Shit, it has no skin anywhere. Just a goddamn machine.
* * *
It had taken all night to uncover less than an inch of the rock. Cade’s fingernails had been worn away to the bed. Fingers were worn and bleeding, but as meager beams of daylight began to filter through some of the cracks overhead, he felt rewarded. One of the men would be along shortly with a bottle of water and maybe a piece of bread, or maybe nothing. Carefully, he began to cover the stone back up with the excavated dirt. It wouldn’t do for them to find what he’d been doing. His arms ached from being stretched behind his back for so long, but for now, he hoped they left them that way for at least another night.
A dog barked outside, and soon, he heard the rattle of keys at the door and the unmistakable sound of a boot kicking something soft followed by angry words between two men just outside. Cade didn’t speak whatever language was used. Sudan had over sixty, but English and Arabic were the most common. He could tell by the tone, though, that his night guard was getting an ass chewing, probably for sleeping. Cade slumped over onto the ground and closed his eyes hoping to appear weak, tired and defeated. If he were honest, the first two were not an act, but the latter definitely was.
Through slitted eyes, he saw the enormous shadow of a man appear in the door and approach. He’d grown familiar enough with his captors to assign names. This one he’d tagged as Tiny, since it was inaccurate, derogatory and probably would have been deeply offensive to the man. He recalled this one did speak a bit of English but not much.
Cade anticipated the boot strike before it even happened and tensed his stomach muscles. The foot hit hard, and with no way to protect his body, it still drove the air from his lungs. The real agony it produced amused the big man.
“Yo, breakfast, American.”
An open plastic bottle with an inch of murky looking water was set next to him along with an unidentifiable piece of fruit or plant…or something. “Gee, thanks, Tiny,” Cade muttered in as sleepy a voice as he could manage. “What say you untie me so I can eat?”
The large man laughed. “You funny. You can manage, or you can die. I no care.”
Cade bent over and picked up the mouth of the bottle with his teeth and leaned back allowing it to drain down his parched throat. “Tell me, Tiny, how are you so big in a country where starvation has been elevated to an art form?”
“Shut up, little man, before I stomp you.”
No one had ever referred to Cade as little before, but this towering giant actually could. Why were they even keeping him alive? By now he expected to have been beaten and dragged through the streets of the village. Leaning back over, he tried to get a bite on the fruit, but it was just beyond the reach of his restraints. The big man laughed, then used his boot to kick it closer. Cade thought of all the ways he could end the man if he were free. He wasn’t, and pride would do nothing to improve his situation, so he leaned over and reached the fruit or whatever it was. For now, he was just a dog to the man. He chewed the bitter unidentifiable pulp and swallowed. One thing he thought, This dog will not be domesticated, asshole.
* * *
Cade’s arms were beyond numb, the feeling long since vanished from the appendages. He dragged the hands over the exposed rock by sound more than feel. Positioning the bindings over what he hoped was a sharp edge of the small rock, he resumed the back and forth seesawing motion. Two days he had been at this, and he had no idea if he were making any progress. If he didn’t free himself soon, he expected the nerve damage would be permanent. A soldier with useless arms was pretty much a career killer. Who was he kidding, nerve damage was the least of his worries.
Since this was not the first time Cade had been captured, he took things in stride. The first time had been a little over two years earlier in that other desert, another shithole country. Chasing one group of militants, he and his second-in-command, Sergeant Charlie ‘Deuce’ Taylor, had been ambushed and captured by a totally different group of radicals. His sleepless nights were still tormented by those memories. The army, and even his friends, claimed that the event had changed him, made him a bit crazy. Maybe, he couldn’t deny that it was more than just a normal workday, but the truth was, he’d been nuts long before then.
Jeish al-Sahaba had been ruthless in his torture; their brutality was constant and effective. For the five months the two soldiers had been imprisoned, Cade had given up only three pieces of intel, all things he knew would be useless to the extremists by that time. Everybody broke under torture, he knew that, so he used the information to buy him additional time until his time ran out. He hadn’t seen or heard from Deuce but hoped to keep his younger protégé alive until rescue.
His escape from the group on the day of his planned execution was still something he couldn’t fully comprehend. He remembered being blindfolded and dragged from his cell. He recalled a weak voice that sounded like his old friend. He remembered the bright lights as they removed the hood, and he recalled the bearded man with the ancient curved sword, standing beside him. A headless body soaked in blood lay a few feet in front of him. The tattered uniform let him know his friend was gone. The death of Deuce sent waves of rage through his tortured mind. Little of what followed would ever make sense to him.
Cade did not recall when his lone rescuer showed up or the relentless killing that came next. He did remember the blood-soaked walls, the utter destruction of the bodies of his former captors. He remembered fleeing into the desert but not what happened to the man who saved him. When he was found near death several days later by a U.S. Marine patrol, no one was sure he would even survive. He was airlifted to Ramstein, Germany, where they kept him in a medically induced coma for five weeks. During that time, his body healed, his mind didn’t. Eventually, after several ‘incidents,’ the army had delayed a determination of mental fitness for service. He’d narrowly avoided a Section-8 by being reassigned to the semi-private paramilitary security group with Tim Jurgens, AKA Domino.
In his present predicament, Cade suddenly felt the slightest degree of additional reach between his arms. One of the ropes had frayed, possibly even parted, on the rock. He kept at it. The hospital stays back in Germany had been followed up with months of rehab and physical therapy. When he asked about the rescue, who should he thank and what branch, they sent him to counseling. A young, pretty clinician prescribed him a mix of medications that would have made any junkie’s day. Pissed off, he’d thrown them in the trash. It’d taken him six months to finally get to the bottom of it. There had never been a rescue, no one ever knew where he was, they claimed no one else was in that room that night. When the marines stormed the camp hours later, they found nothing but bodies.
Struggling to focus on the here and now, Cade continued the rhythmic sawing. Several hours later, he heard a distinctive snap and his arms flopped apart by nearly a foot. He smiled as he clumsily fought to unwrap his fumbling hands. As he finally was able to move his arms back to a normal position, the pain set in. Arteries, nerves and muscles that had been starved of blood began to scream at him now. I have to fight back the pain, swallow it down, stay silent. You’ve been here before, he thought. Slowly, he realized the barbarian in him was waking from its slumber. The Cade personality began to fade into the depths. Be smart, man, got to play it cool and escape, he told himself. The brute who ruled his psyche had other ideas.
“Fuck that, it’s time to raise hell and break shit.”