The Lions Of Lucerne

47

The hardest thing to get used to had been the smell-the godawful smell-that and the intolerable, intermittent wailing of people being called to worship over scratchy public address systems. Then there was the sand. It was everywhere-in his clothes, in his hair, even in his food. There didn’t seem to be a single crack or crevice in the president’s cell that the sand hadn’t made its way into. He had heard that about the desert. It would eventually overtake anything, even if it took thousands of years to do it. The sand reminded him of when he and his late wife had visited Egypt and the Pyramids many years ago. He wondered where in the world he was now.

He knew he was someplace hot. At times unbearably hot, and very dry. The calls to worship meant that he was close to an Islamic population-maybe a town, a village, or even a city of some sort. His cell had no windows, so he had no idea if it was day or night. Only the deliveries of terrible-tasting food through a sliding grate at the bottom of the cell door interrupted his isolation.

The floor was covered with straw. There was a bed with a thin mattress against one wall and a Turkish toilet in the corner-which was nothing more than a hole in the floor with two stone footrests to stand on. At first, he thought the terrible stench was wafting up from the toilet, but gradually he realized it was coming from outside and was being carried in by the ventilation system of his cell. He tried to memorize every detail, as he knew there would be a very extensive debriefing once he returned home. If I return home, he thought.

Of course he would return home. He couldn’t let himself think otherwise. He was the president of the most powerful nation on earth. Right now in D.C. they would be doing everything they could to get him back. He knew that, and had to keep focusing on it. If the kidnappers had wanted him dead, they could have killed him already. There was no reason to keep him alive unless they intended to return him once their demands were met.

To take his mind off his confinement, the president tried to think about his daughter, but that only led to more distress. He had no idea what had happened to her. The last thing he remembered was splitting up with her detail, planning to meet back at the house for hot chocolate. As he made his way down Death Chute, there was some sort of accident and he lost his vision. There were strange voices, and someone started an IV on him, and then he awoke in this cell dressed in a cheap and uncomfortable peasant robe bearing an Arabic logo. That was all he was really sure of.

Even though there was a huge chunk of his memory missing, it wasn’t hard to figure out that his detail had been ambushed and he had been drugged, kidnapped, and then taken someplace very far away. He only hoped Amanda hadn’t been harmed. He tried to convince himself that she had made it back to the house safely. Scot Harvath was on her detail, and he was one of the best. He wouldn’t have let anything happen to her. She had to be all right. She was all right. Anything else was unthinkable. Losing his wife had been painful enough, but if anything happened to Amanda, he didn’t know if he could go on living.

For now, though his body was weak and he had no sense of time, his mind was strong and he vowed to hold on. The United States would not allow its president to languish in a cell in the middle of some godforsaken desert. His salvation would come. He would be getting out, and getting out alive. This would be the only thought he would allow his mind to entertain. He had a daughter to get back to and a country to lead.

The president’s interior pep talk was interrupted by the sound of the bolt sliding back from his cell door. Two large men entered wearing desert fatigues and kaffiyeh headdresses that covered their faces. One was carrying a Kalashnikov AK-47 machine gun, and the other had one hand hidden behind his back. The man with the machine gun gestured for the president to move back against the wall.

Instead of moving, Rutledge rose to his full height and said, “I demand to speak with whoever’s in charge here. Now!”

For a moment, both of the men stood still, shocked into immobility by the outrageous insolence of their prisoner. The shock wore off quickly, though, and the guard with the machine gun covered the distance across the cell to the president in a fraction of a second. He raised the butt of his weapon and was preparing to strike Rutledge when the other man stopped him with what sounded to Rutledge like a quick stream of angry Arabic.

The guard lowered his weapon. The president began to breathe a sigh of relief, which immediately caught in his throat as the other man, who had been steadily moving toward him, grabbed him by the wrist and plunged a long hypodermic needle into his arm.