“He’s extolling your virtues,” Cage whispered from behind her, then laughed.
“What?” Joy whispered.
“He’s
really
extolling your virtues, darlin’.”
“If he mentions my big butt, he is in big trouble.”
Cage chuckled, but it was F.U. who whispered, “That’s not the big things he’s praising. Whoa, do you really have nipples the size of marbles?”
“Silence!” Omar said, turning on her. “Take it off.”
Her head shot up. She’d been expecting this, but not so soon.
“Help her,” he ordered the two other “women,” who took off her veil and gown. When F.U. went to unsnap her bra, she turned on him and, with her foot, gave him a karate chop to his private parts, which caused him to yelp and moan in a bent-over position, “Holy crap! I was just teasing.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, I was just teasing, too, then.”
“Uh . . . I think we need to start over,” Omar said.
“Tell slime-o to keep his paws off of me.”
“What’re you gonna do if one of the tangos touches you?” Omar asked.
“I’ll close my eyes and think of Krispy Kreme donuts.”
“You’re supposed to say Uncle Sam,
chère.
” Cage laughed.
“You think of Uncle Sam. I’ll think of something sweet, thank you very much.”
K-4 winked at her.
She was in such a state that the wink didn’t even turn her on as it might have done otherwise. One good-looking hunk, he more than earned the Italian Stallion pejorative the SEALs sometimes hurled at him. Oops! She forgot. She’d given up good-looking hunks, having decided a few years back that they were too high-maintenance.
Yikes! My brain is splintering away here.
But then Slick, leader of this mission, turned on her. “Listen up, Nelson. F.U. can be Dickhead of the Month—
“Hey!” the dickhead protested.
“—but he’s also a damned good SEAL.”
“Damn straight I am,” F.U. huffed.
“If this mission goes FUBAR,” Slick continued, “do you want a training operative like F.U. at your back or a nambypamby may-I man?” She was about to say something, but Slick held up a halting hand. “Make up your mind right now. No more jump kicks to a man’s goodies, whether they be SEALs or tangos. We’re a team here. Either you’re serious about being a lady SEAL, or you can get a desk job with the Navy back in Coronado.”
“I’ll do it, dammit.”
However, she lost her cool halfway through the second rehearsal when one of the Arab terrorists, i.e., Max, walked up and circled her underwear-clad body, stroking his fake mustache as he remarked on various parts of her anatomy in Arabic. She didn’t need to know the language to tell that one of his comments related to her behind because the word J.Lo was mixed in. Turning on him, she snapped, “What are you gawking at?”
That led to rehearsal number three where Omar did in fact flick the hooks on her bra, exposing her boobs. Everyone in the room went silent. Her breasts were always a surprise to men the first time she went full monty. Because she was so tall and slim and athletic, they probably expected pancakes.
Fortunately, no one said anything. But they thought it.
It took them a half dozen rehearsals before they got it even remotely right. Agent Zekus was railing over the impossibility of Joy pulling this off. F.U. was still complaining about his pain. Slick was giving everyone last-minute instructions.
“I can do it,” she promised the agent. “Really, I can do it. I promise.” And she would, too, or die trying. She hoped that wouldn’t be literal.
“If it looks as if she can’t handle it, I’ll tie her hands and put a gag in her mouth,” Omar told the agent. “A resisting sex slave wouldn’t be a stretch.”
Oooh, Joy didn’t like the sound of that.
The plan was to get inside the tango hideout. CIA and SEALs would be stationed outside. She had a high-tech device implanted just under the skin behind her ear. It could listen to what was being said within ten feet, give her messages, and in case of emergency, allow her to signal for help. It also had a GPS locator in it. Despite all the technology, it still needed people to make this work.
People
, meaning her.
“Okay, folks,” Slick said then. “Everyone good to go?”
“Hoo-yah!” they all answered, even Joy.
As they walked toward the designated location, Omar swaggering in front, with her and the two other “women” following meekly behind, Joy got her first flash of intuition that something was going to go wrong. Loud and clear, a message was beginning to pound in her brain, and it wasn’t saying “Hoo-yah.”
Nope, it was that same old
What was I thinking?
You could say
Snafu
was her middle name . . .
It was worse than Joy ever could have imagined.
But if ever Joy had any doubts about taking part in this mission, she had none how. How could she, when she saw the three young girls, in purdah, already purchased by the terrorists? Huddled in one corner, they wept copiously but silently, after being slapped across the face a few times by the guard at the door.
The girls, two from Spain and one from South Africa, could be no more than thirteen. Children, really. But not for long if the leering glances of one of their purchasers was any indication. He was a particularly evil-looking man, bone-thin, eyes like ice, but lips thick over yellowing teeth. A livid scar ran from his left eye to his chin, drawing his mouth up on one side in a perpetual sneer.
Omar had told the men that Joy was from America, thus explaining his occasional use of English with her.
Her group had not arrived here yet when the girls had been brought forth for examination by the half dozen Arab men in the room, but she suspected it had been more than humiliating. Especially when she noted a morbidly obese woman in a burka but no face veil, wearing disposable rubber gloves. If the bitch dared to put those rubber gloves near her, Joy was afraid she would not be able to hold up her pretense, and it was dangerously important that she do so now that they were in the midst of these snakes.
Drawing her to the center of the room, Omar flipped her face veil off. Immediately, she bent forward, using her long hair to hide her face. She’d been advised to leave her hair loose, another selling point, she supposed. They must have gotten a bit of a peek anyhow, because one of them said something in a snide tone to Omar.
Omar argued back in Arabic, then repeated it in English for her benefit. “Yes, she is older . . . almost twenty-one . . .”
Joy almost snorted at that. She was closer to thirty . . . well, twenty-seven . . . and hadn’t been carded in ages.
“. . . but her assets more than make up for being long in the tooth.” Omar motioned to the two chaperones, F.U. and Cage, to disrobe her, which they did immediately and without fanfare.
“Aaaahhh,” the Arab terrorists said as one.
Scar-face made an arrogant slash of his hand to Omar that could only be interpreted as
Take the rest of her clothes off
.
Omar shook his head vehemently, rattling off a bunch of Arabic. Back and forth they argued. Only then did he repeat some of it in English. “You have seen enough. If you want to see more, put an offer on the table. Let us say, fifty thousand dollars.”
Several of the terrorists laughed at that, obviously thinking she wasn’t worth that much.
“I have more like this one,” Omar inserted slyly.
Scar-face stood and walked toward her. Omar stepped in front of her, and she could feel F.U. and Cage stiffen behind her. Then everything went haywire at once. Scar-face grabbed her by the arm, pulling her to the side with a head-lock, his chest pressed to her back, a sharp knife to her neck. Omar and the two chaperone SEALs were screeching something in Arabic. The girl captives were screaming. The Arab woman was running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
And in her ear a message was being shouted, “Mayday! Abort mission! Tangos approaching! Stand down, stand down! Mayday!” Omar and the other SEALs were getting the same message and trying to assess how to get out of this place with her and not alert the Arabs to their true identities. The fact that she was now half-naked didn’t seem important in view of these other calamities.
Just then, a bomb went off outside, diverting everyone’s attention. She was able to escape Scar-face’s hold on her, and everyone was rushing for the back door. “Wait here ’til we see if the coast is clear,” Omar told her, then muttered under his breath, “This is a freakin’ cluster fuck.” For just a moment she was left alone in the room.
But then there was another boom. Closer. The building shook. Ceiling plaster fell.
And everything went black.
Yep, she was barmy, all right . . .
The first time Joy awakened after the explosion, she noticed the goose egg that felt as if it was splitting her skull open. And she noticed that she was wearing a drab brown gown with a rope belt over the plain white underwear she’d donned that morning. She was lying on a wide bench attached to the wall of a strange, primitive room. Like a hut of some kind, with woven twig sides and a thatched roof.
She must be dreaming.
So she succumbed to unconsciousness again.
The second time she awakened, she registered that she was not alone. There were others. Men, women, even children, similarly attired. Some of them were weeping. Others were murmuring amongst themselves. In some foreign language. It wasn’t Arabic. Or German. No, it was something else that almost sounded like English. And, oddly, she could understand what they were saying. Like she had some translator in her brain.
“What language are they speaking?” she asked the old woman next to her.
“Norse.”
“You mean Norwegian?”
“No, lackwit. Norse.”
Okaaay.
“Where are we?”
The woman frowned at her as if she was crazy. “Hedeby.” “Ah.” They had passed the quaint model village on the way here yesterday, Joy recalled. Apparently, it was a reproduction of a Viking market town from a thousand years ago when this part of northern Germany was actually part of Denmark. The Danes had lost the territory to the Austrians and Prussians during some seventeenth-century war. She would have liked to visit it if she’d had time.
But why would the Arab terrorists bring her here? These people hardly qualified as sex slaves. Only one of the women was even passably pretty.
And where were the SEALs who had been with her? She pressed the implant behind her ear three times, paused, then pressed three times again. Code for distress. Nothing. And she wasn’t hearing anything, either. Well, hopefully, someone would follow the GPS locator and would be arriving shortly to rescue her. No sweat.
As she moved her hand away from her ear, she touched something odd on her neck. It was a leather cord with a metal disk in the center. She tried to look down at it, but it fit too tightly. “Huh?” She tried in vain to undo it.
“Now what?” her not-so-friendly bench companion asked.
Joy realized that everyone in the room seemed to have similar metal “necklaces” around their necks. “What is this?” she asked, pointing to her neck.
“Thrall collar. You really are barmy, methinks.” The woman shifted away from her.
Thrall collar? What the hell was that?
She must have spoken aloud because the woman snapped, “Slave collar. Once you are purchased, your new master will replace your amulet with one of his own.”
This must be related to the terrorists’ sex for bombs business. “How do we get them off?”
“Bloody hell, wench! Best ye be holding yer tongue lest one of the slavers hear,” a scruffy man across from her said. “They be quick to use their whips.”
Whips? Oh, good Lord! What have I gotten myself into this time?
“If ye must know, the collar can only be taken off by yer master once he releases you.
If
he ever releases you. Best ye be hopin’ ye get bought by one of the Northmen. They be kinder to their thralls and willin’ to free ’em if they serve well fer ten years.”
Whoa! Hadn’t they heard of the Emancipation Proclamation? Slavery was illegal.
But wait a minute. Northmen? Did she mean men from Northern Iraq or Northern Afghanistan? Or somewhere else?
There was something else strange here. She touched her head. Everyone, man and woman alike, had their hair chopped off, except her.
The man, sensing her thoughts, explained, “All slaves must have their hair chopped off at first, fer the lice. Later, the women can let their hair grow, as long as it’s tucked under a kerchief, but the men’s scalps mus’ be bald. The kerchief and the shaved heads are signs of thralldom. But they think yer red hair will bring more coin.”
It was too much for her aching head to comprehend, so she let herself fall “asleep” again.