He checked his watch, looked up at the opaque sky.
"Colonel!" called a lieutenant from a cement outbuilding twenty yards ahead at the perimeter. "You're going to want to come check this out."
Al-Khayr? God, he hoped he was seconds away from seeing that sadistic son of a bitch.
From the open door, a sergeant escorted someone down the cinderblock steps...another Army sergeant? A man he thought they'd left at the air base.
"What the hell are you doing here, Sergeant?"
"I was ambushed, sir," he answered while shrugging off the last of the knot binding the rope around his wrists. Apparently he hadn't gone down easy if his split lip and torn sleeve were anything to judge by.
Shit. "On patrol?"
"No, sir. A request came in from one of the NGOs for medical assistance for a woman having a tough labor. The officer in charge back at air base assigned me to escort the nurse."
Nurse? A bad, bad feeling spidered up his instincts. "The nurse? One of our military nurses?" he asked, already knowing damned well they would have all been loaded up to go or already out in the field with his group.
"No, sir. We had a volunteer—"
"Colonel," shouted one of his Rangers from across the path. "I think we've got someone over here, too."
Drew charged across, heart thumping in his head as loud as the wind pounding against his ears. It wasn't her. The bad feeling increased with every step closer to the cement outbuilding. It wasn 't her. Closer to muffled sounds growing louder.
He would not let it be her.
Hiking his gun up and ready, Drew booted in the door to dark and dust. And a muffled moan. Weapons from his men clicked up and in place.
"Light!" Drew ordered. "I need some light here, damn it."
On command, flashlights arced beams into the room. Streaking across. Landing on a woman clothed in a black dress. She twisted, jerked against the wall without moving forward. Illumination flicked up to...Yasmine's face, a gag in her mouth, her wrists manacled above her head.
Chapter 19
Yasmine's arms burned in the sockets. She resisted the urge the arch closer to Drew. Wonderful, big and right-there-alive Drew with his beautiful blue eyes watching her above a camouflage cloth tied over his mouth and nose. During the thundering explosions she'd prayed he would be all right. Prayed he would come to her.
Prayed his men would not level the building first.
"Shit!" Drew charged across the dank cell, kicked over a chair on his way toward her. He reached up, unlooped her tied hands from the hook over her head.
Her arms fell like lead over his helmeted head to land across his shoulders, her hands still bound.
Forget being strong. She sobbed against his chest, from the fear of the past hours of being ambushed and interrogated, from the burning pain in her numb arms with nerve endings shrieking back to life.
From the excruciating thought that she might never see him again and have the chance to find forgiveness in his eyes. That he might be wounded. She'd heard so many cries of pain intermingled with the gunfire. Did not know who...
Drew's gloriously healthy hands worked behind her head to untie the gag.
She gulped in gasps of clean air filled with the scent of him. Sweaty, musky and yes, yes, yes, alive. "You are really all right, Drew? Nothing happened to you tonight?"
"I'm fine." His gruff answer from beneath his camouflaged face wrap didn't reassure her. "Not a scratch on me, ma'am."
Ma'am? How cruel he could be.
But he was rattled, too. She knew it. Believed it. Embraced it as firmly as she wanted to embrace him.
He ducked from under her arms, careful not to jostle her, then looked back over his shoulder at the soldiers standing wide-eyed. "Check the perimeter around this building, make sure it's secure before sight lines go to shit in the sandstorm. You've probably got about five minutes tops."
Once they cleared the doorway, he tried to untie her wrists. Puffy flesh swelled over hemp. Blood soaked the rope, pulling it tighter.