Dak told himself to focus. Not on getting out, but on the more immediate need. Light. He needed to find light.
His rifle had a light attached to it, but it was long gone. He felt for the cell phone in his pocket, but it was gone. Dak sighed in frustration. With his weapons and phone gone, that left few options for finding anything that could light up this tomb.
Tomb. That's it.
The realization hit him. He'd considered the cavern a metaphorical tomb, not thinking about the fact that—at the moment—it was literally a place of death. The bodies of the terrorists they'd taken out during the mission would still be all over the floor, exactly where the men had fallen during the attack. There was zero chance the team took the time to remove all the bodies.
Dak fought against the aches and pains surging from his left shoulder and his head, and pushed himself forward onto his hands and knees. He recalled the layout of the cave room, mapping it in his head. He remembered being in the back where the crates were stacked before he blacked out. Odds were, his men didn't move him. They would have been in a hurry to get out of there with their loot. On top of that, they'd have to find a place to stash it—which wasn't a problem out here in the middle of nowhere Iraq, but it would take time. The team would be expected to report in at some point. He wondered how they planned on handling his mysterious disappearance.
Distractions. He had to stay focused.
Dak crawled forward on his hands and knees, inching his way along the hard floor. He hadn't gone more than five or six feet before his fingers nudged something soft. It was cloth.
The bitter, iron smell of congealed blood mingled with the limestone all around them, along with the musty scent of the mountain underground, and a still lingering hint of gunpowder.
He realized crawling around could have planted his hands directly into a pool of blood and immediately decided to conduct the rest of his search on his feet—if this guy didn't have what he needed.
Dak squatted like a baseball catcher as he felt his way through the folds of the man's garments, searching for a light or a phone, anything with some kind of artificial illumination.
He'd searched through the man's entire outfit and discovered nothing, so he shifted slightly to the right and shuffled forward until he felt his feet hit another solid object.
Dak kept hoping that his eyes would eventually adjust, as they did when he turned off the lights of his bedroom at night. That usually only took a minute or two, but five minutes into waking in the cave, he started to realize that luxury wasn't coming.
He was bathed in total pitch darkness and the only thing that would change that was a light.
He bent down and began searching the next body. The first guy smelled bad, but this guy reeked of weeks without a bath and it was all Dak could do to not throw up at the scent. That, combined with the looming aroma of death was nearly all he could take, but he forced himself to choke back the bile rising in his gut. He was about to give up and move on to the next body when he felt something solid in a pocket of the man's robes. He dug deeper and his fingers grazed against a smooth, hard surface.
A flip phone.
Seven
Hamrin Mountains
Dak’s heart skipped a beat. He pulled the device out of the dead man’s clothing and flipped it open. The pale glow from the little screen and the numbered keypad may as well have been the brightest beacon, a lighthouse guiding him to safety.
The weak light cast an eerie glow on the macabre scene at his feet. Now he could see the bodies strewn around on the floor. The deathly silence hung over him like a thick fog, seeping into his lungs and coating his skin.
He scanned the room and noticed that most of the terrorists’ guns, if not all, were still here.
“I guess Bo didn’t think disarming them was necessary.” The thought struck him as funny and even with the dire circumstances enveloping him, Dak chuckled for a second until the action caused the pain in his head to worsen.
Bo and the others had gone to the trouble of disarming him but left all these other weapons. Maybe his former partner simply wanted his guns and not the inaccurate Kalashnikovs the extremists preferred.
Dak bent down and picked up one of the rifles that didn’t appear to have any blood on it and slung the weapon over his shoulder. He rummaged through three more dead men’s clothes until he found a phone with a brighter light on it. Then he pocketed the first light as a backup, then switched on the new one.
The device flashed a bright, white glow into the room. Dak shone the beam in every direction until he was certain he’d searched the entire area, then made for the passage. When he reached the corner, he glanced back one last time. He looked down at the watch on his wrist and noted the time. They’d entered the cave more than eight hours ago. By now it would be morning.
It was then Dak realized he could have used the glow from his watch to search for a better light.
He sighed, irritated with himself, and then proceeded up the corridor toward the cave’s entrance.
Dak knew the rest of his team was long gone, but he hurried anyway, trotting up the path at a pace that caused his head to pound even harder than before. He pulled off the speed a little hoping to ease the throbbing, wondering if ibuprofen would be strong enough to take care of the pain. Not that there was any of that around here.
He weaved his way through the bends in the passage and then
