other female archaeological students on this dig had been on this floor at least twice in the past four days, dragged there by bored and angry terrorists who had grown tired of waiting for Ibrahim Mubarak’s return from Somalia.
Metit clawed at the sand and scurried a few feet deeper into the tent. Her tormentor chuckled at the sight of her desperate attempt at escape, and walked over to the trunk. The heavy lid and combination lock would prevent the hostages from getting to their captors’ weapons when the rapist dozed off in postcoital exhaustion. He spun the dial on the lock, rolling through the tumblers in order to open it, then dropped his AK-47 and Glock 17 into the trunk. The two simple guns and their ammunition would prove problematic if they fell into the hands of even a novice like the pretty twenty-three-year-old Rashida Metit. The Glock had no thumb safety, and was always ready to fire, while the AK-47 had been designed so that even untrained irregular militiamen from Angola to Zimbabwe could use them.
Her captor took one stride toward her, and Metit kicked out. Barefoot, she didn’t have much of a chance of causing him harm, even if he hadn’t danced lithely out of the path of her driving foot.
“Still have some fight, eh, bitch?” the rapist asked, chuckling as he unbuckled his belt.
“Get away from me,” she growled.
His chuckle turned into a deep guffaw as he slipped the belt out of its pant loops. He wound the leather around one fist, the cured hide creaking as it was drawn tight into an improvised fist weapon, the buckle hanging across the top of his knuckles once he was done. Metit knew what punches from that felt like. “Get undressed, girl. It’s fun time.”
Metit gritted her teeth, showing no intention of following his orders. He was going to have to work for what he wanted, and she lashed her foot out again. Only the rapist’s reflexes had protected his testicles from being smashed, her kick instead landing on his muscular thigh. The belt-wrapped fist came down hard on her shin and pain seared from ankle to hip, the leg gone numb from the brutal, jarring impact.
She grabbed at the side of the tent, her splintered fingernails clawing for a handhold, and her tormentor stepped in closer to her. Her fingers ached from the days of abuse as a prisoner, the nails cracked and worn down to the quick as she and the other women had scratched at the ground in order to dig an escape tunnel from their prison tent. It was when the terrorists had discovered their efforts that the rape tent had been initiated.
The wound belt bounced off Metit’s jaw, and her brain spun helplessly inside her skull. The impact hurled her against the canvas, which was taut enough to hold her hundred-and-five-pound weight without tearing. Then she crumpled to the ground.
Moments later, a rough hand squeezed her chin, holding her limply bobbing head still for a moment, and a second later, blessed unconsciousness descended upon her.
REALITY BROKE THROUGH her fever dreams of unconsciousness, and Metit managed to rise to her elbows before her stomach contracted violently. Bile coughed out between her blood-caked lips, and the acid in it burned the puckered wound on her inner cheek. Tears flowed down her cheeks as she rolled onto her side, instantly regretting the decision as she put her weight on her injured leg. Metit righted herself, lying on her back to alleviate her injuries.
Numbly, she reached down to take inventory of herself with her fingers. Her T-shirt was still intact, only having been shoved up and out of the way to bare her breasts. Her shorts and panties were gone from her hips, however. The sob she released transformed into a pained cough from a dry, blood- and bile-clotted throat and she turned her head to spit out the choking glob.
She took several deep breaths. Her leg ached badly, but gently flexing her foot and toes, she knew that no bones had been broken. It was a small mercy. Metit grimaced and saw that her shorts and underwear were still wrapped around one ankle. Stiffly, she slid her hurt leg through them, and pulled them up.
Getting dressed took on a new level of discomfort, every movement aggravating aching muscles, spearing her pain receptors mercilessly.
Her rapist was still in the tent, lying not far from her, his pants open and his genitals exposed. Metit was tempted to jam her thumbs into his closed eyes, gouging them out and blinding him for the horrors he’d inflicted on her, but as she had trouble even tugging her shorts over her hips, such aggression wasn’t in the cards for now.
Something was wrong. The way the terrorist lay was unusual. Her pain and nausea had been so distracting that she had missed the fact that he wasn’t breathing. A closer examination in the dim light of the rape tent showed that his throat had been slashed from ear to ear. Metit bit her lower lip and she crawled away from the corpse of her tormentor.
Emotions conflicted in her. She felt nothing but disappointment that she didn’t get to see the actual execution of her rapist, but if she had been rescued, then why were there no medics around to tend to her injuries? She closed her eyes in an effort to focus on her hearing. Even with the normal day-to-day routine of the Sinai archaeological dig disrupted by the presence of hostile riflemen, there had been sound, from chatting guards to sobbing hostages, as well as the smell of cigarettes and coffee percolating on the fire.
Silence and old, stale odors were all that answered her reaching senses. Metit’s stomach turned, but there was nothing down there to come up. Filled with a bottomless well of dread, she struggled to her feet and took a tentative step to the flap of the rape tent. Peering through the slit, she couldn’t see anyone, and the silence was thick and ominous. Her rapist had dragged her to the tent around noon, and she could see that the sun had dropped considerably in the sky. Since the terrorists had taken her watch, and she didn’t know the exact time of sunset by memory, all she could guess was that she’d been out for at least half the afternoon.
Metit was hesitant to leave the tent alone and unarmed. She also didn’t want to make a lot of racket smashing open the trunk that the hostage-taker had stashed his weapons in. The eerie silence may have sounded empty, but it all could have been a trick.
Maybe, she thought, the rapist had his throat slashed because the other terrorists thought he’d killed her, ruining the fun for the rest of the group. It was a grim, morbid thought, and she was acutely aware of the foul taste of her bile still in her mouth, as if it was punctuating the realization that she had been counted among the dead.
It would probably explain the inactivity of the camp. With one of their own having killed off a valuable hostage, there would have been enough of a panic to evacuate the dig site, moving to another area so as not to be associated with her murder. Metit rubbed her cheek, and looked at her hand, watching the dried flakes of blood and vomit tumble like dust off her skin. She didn’t have a mirror available, but she could easily imagine that she appeared like death warmed over.
The belt had been discarded by her rapist, tossed casually aside after Metit had been battered into unconsciousness. She picked it up and wrapped the strap around her fist just as her rapist had. She could only get half the belt around her hand, as it was smaller than his, and the buckle dangled like the ball of a flail. Metit nodded. It was a better weapon than a glorified fist load. She weighed a little over a hundred pounds, so her punches wouldn’t have the same benefit as a full-grown man’s fist and body mass. However, centripetal force would amplify the strength of her swing, enabling her to cave in a cheek or gash an eyeball from a socket easily. She felt a moment of uncertainty, shocked by how swiftly she had descended into a kill-or-be-killed state of mind, determining the lethality of one form of weapon over the other.
She remembered what an anthropologist once told her. The will to survive was universal human nature, but what needed to be done to achieve that survival often seemed to go beyond what most people called civilization. Every animal engaged in brutal conflict to survive, and combat was hardwired into each and every
