By all accounts, the rains had started early this year. The roads were still passable, but in a few more days, they might disappear. Brie lay on her cot and stared up at the metal roof, listening to the musical tap of the mild storm. The roof magnified the sound. A slight sprinkle sounded like a deluge. Was it the rain that had woken her at—she hit the button to illuminate her wristwatch—just after three a.m.?

She was lucky to have a metal roof and walls. The locals only had thatched-roof huts. The storm was light right now, but they’d get worse.

Who would’ve thought it could feel hotter when it rained? This close to the equator, it was hot to begin with, but now, with the need to close the windows against the storm, it was sweltering. The thatched-roof huts breathed, at least. But they also let in water and mud.

Every time she adjusted to the…uniqueness of living here, the conditions changed. At least now she could use more than six cups of water to wash her entire body every few days. Maybe she’d grow her hair long again. She’d chopped it all off the day after she returned from Camp Citron, giving herself a super-short cut in a fit of depression.

Chief Bastard never would have recognized her as Princess Prime without the long dark hair she’d been known for. Cutting her hair had been a stupid rebellion, directed at a man she’d never see again.

Not that she wanted to see him again.

That was a definite no. He’d reminded her of the person she’d been. The woman who’d hurt people for company gain. Business first, humanity second. He believed she still was that person.

Then he’d kissed her. Soft and sensual and hot at the same time. He kissed like a man devoted to the art form, only to turn and walk away in cold, flagrant rejection.

What had she been thinking to let it get that far? What had she been trying to prove to him? To herself?

If she’d wanted to prove she wasn’t the woman she used to be, it would have been smarter to point out she’d worked in several developing countries over the last five years, South Sudan being only the most recent and most dangerous. She had no part in what her family did. She gave back to the world instead of taking. Not that he’d have believed her.

Kissing him had been very much the old Gabriella. His harsh reminder that she couldn’t atone for her past had her throwing herself at him to convince him to like her, to see her as something other than Jeffery Prime’s daughter and first-class oil industry shill.

But life didn’t work that way. Men didn’t work that way. Screwing him wouldn’t improve his opinion of her, and she damn well knew it. But still, in a fit of insecurity, she’d gone for the ego boost but crashed and burned on liftoff.

Pathetic to realize four weeks had passed and she was still thinking about Chief Warrant Officer Sebastian Ford and that kiss. There was something wrong with her that one conversation, one kiss, could set her so far back in her self-esteem.

But then, it probably wasn’t her self-esteem that obsessed over him. It was her body. It had been a year since she’d gotten laid, and he was a fine male specimen with his thick biceps and dark eyes.

She wondered what he looked like in his uniform, sweaty and dirty after a day of training locals in the desert sun. She’d peel off his clothing, layer by layer, and then things would get really dirty…

The crack of a bullet sounded, jolting her from her ridiculous fantasy. What the hell?

A second burst of fire sounded, then a third. Three shots in each burst.

Shit.

It was the signal. Invaders had breached the outer perimeter. They didn’t have much in the way of security at this facility. Just two guards whose job was to sound the alarm, because they lacked the ability to take on an assault force.

The list of suspects for this was endless. Boko Haram? Troops representing the current president? The former vice president’s rebel forces?

Any and all of them could be after the food stored here, and only a fool would stick around to find out the answer. She slipped on her boots and grabbed the backpack that she always kept within arm’s reach.

She raced to the storage room with the crudely disguised escape route as she heard glass breaking at the front of the facility. As expected, security hadn’t been able to hold them off for long.

She hoped the guards were okay. They’d done their job in providing the warning shots. They weren’t expected to put up resistance in the face of certain defeat.

The supplies in this building could be all that prevented this area of South Sudan from reaching a magnitude of four on the Integrated Phase Classification scale for measuring food insecurity. IPC 1 indicated food insecurity was minimal, while IPC 5 meant famine.

With the ongoing civil war, there hadn’t been much planting this year, meaning harvest yields would be low. Now the rainy season was upon them and they were already at IPC 3, making the food stored here valuable. When the roads became swampland in the coming days, this grain would be all that stood between the locals and starvation.

She arrived in the storage room in unison with her three coworkers. Like her, they were breathless and carried their own emergency packs. Alan lifted the panel that covered their exit. It wasn’t so much a door as a hole in the aluminum wall hidden by a slightly larger sheet of aluminum. There was no hinge on the sheet, no attachment to the structure, just a piece of flimsy metal. The hole was disguised by debris on the outside of the building and usually blocked by crates on the inside.

The exit wasn’t far from a line of trees that gave way to grassy swampland that edged the river. They were just a few miles from the Ethiopian border.

Ezra had grabbed the satellite phone and was attempting to call UN security, based in the capital. His eyes were bleak as they met hers. “Even if I get through, Juba is too far away.”

“If we all escape, they will search for us,” Jaali, the lone South Sudanese USAID employee, said. “Brie must get away. I will stay and tell them you are all long gone, back to America.”

She knew why he made the offer. Odds were, the men at the front of the building were just after the food. While it wasn’t unheard of for male aid workers to be raped in this situation, female aid workers were raped ninety-nine percent of the time.

“I’ll stay with Jaali,” Alan said. “Ezra, Brie, head to the UN in Juba—”

The door to the storage room cracked as it was battered from the other side. Jaali shoved Brie through the small opening, and she forced her way through the pile of garbage on the outside. Before she made it through, the panel slid back into place behind her.

She was outside. Alone. There hadn’t even been time for Ezra to follow.

She ran toward the swamp. She would hide there until it was safe to head into the village. If she was lucky, she’d be able to locate someone with a truck and catch a ride to where she could find help.

Bastian sat at the table in Special Operations Command headquarters with the rest of his A-Team, braced for the coming briefing. The moment he’d heard the words “South Sudan” combined with “USAID,” he’d felt sick to his stomach.

The head of SOCOM stood and addressed the room. “Five hours ago, a USAID facility in eastern South Sudan was attacked.” The commander clicked on a laptop touchpad, and a map of the South Sudan border with Ethiopia was projected onto a large screen.

“Our nearest estimate is a dozen men attacked the facility. All four USAID workers have been taken hostage.”

There were multiple USAID facilities in South Sudan. Gabriella could be stationed at any one of them. He met Savannah James’s steady gaze. She gave nothing away.

The commander tapped the computer again, and the projected image changed. Official USAID portraits of four aid workers were laid out in a square. Pretty brown eyes and a not even remotely unfortunate nose were on the bottom right.

His vision dimmed, but he pulled up before anyone could see his reaction. The name under her portrait—Brie Stewart—gave him hope no one in South Sudan knew who her father was.

“The UN compound in Juba received a distress call from one of the aid workers moments before they were taken,” the commander continued. “Peacekeepers arrived at the village, which is about twenty-five miles southwest of Akobo, at oh-five hundred, where they found the facility in flames and hostages gone.” A moment passed as he let that statement sink in. “It was assumed the facility was attacked for the food aid stored there, but according to locals, the building was torched before a single bag of grain was removed. The local Ciro clansmen attempted to put out the fire but were fired upon by the assailants. Three locals were killed. The survivors fled into the swamp, returning only when they saw the militants’ truck leaving the village. They spotted at least three USAID workers in the back of the truck.”

“So they burned the food, shot at locals, and took USAID workers hostage,” Lieutenant Randall Fallon, leader of the SEAL team, said. “The aid workers were the target all along?”

The commander nodded. “That appears to be the case.”

“Have they made demands?” Bastian’s XO, Captain Oswald, asked.

“None as yet. We intend to rescue the hostages before they have a chance.”

Bastian sat up straight. “We know where they’re being held?”

The commander tapped the pad on the laptop again. A cluster of cylindrical, thatched-roof huts appeared on the screen. “The truck was spotted by several individuals entering this small village about ten miles from the USAID facility. One informant said he saw three hostages being moved into this hut.” With a laser pointer, the commander indicated a hut in the middle of the screen.

“Only three?” Pax asked.

“We haven’t been able to confirm if the woman, Brie Stewart, is with her male coworkers,” the commander said.

Bastian did his best to keep his face blank, even as he found it hard to breathe.

Was this about her? Did the abduction have to do with Prime Energy? Or had they separated Brie from the men in order to rape her? Last year, a USAID facility in Juba had been hit, and all the women had been rounded up and gang-raped by rebel forces. But government forces were no better; they were known to rape women and children when ransacking villages.

His chest constricted.

“How confident are we in the intel?” Lieutenant Fallon asked.

All eyes in the room turned to Savannah James. Her specific title was unknown, but Bastian had long suspected she was more than a CIA analyst. He believed she was Special Activities Division, making her a field agent who was as well trained as any military special forces operator. SAD was the super-secretive department within an already intensely secretive agency. It was said Savvy’s work was so classified, not even she knew her real name. “Assets I have in the area have heard rumblings about a Boko Haram strike, potentially targeting US citizens.”

“And you did nothing?” Bastian said, then snapped his jaw shut. He was out of line, but at least she was CIA and not in his chain of command.

“Warnings were issued to all US citizens in the area, including USAID personnel,” James said in a clipped tone, her cold eyes unflinching. “If the aid workers chose to ignore the warnings, it’s on them.” She gave him a tight smile. “The US military can hardly mobilize in response to every whispered threat in the region, Chief Ford.”

“What about the intel on the hostage location?” Lieutenant Fallon prompted.

“We have multiple identical accounts from different witnesses on the location of the truck. One eyewitness gave the hut location. We’re certain they’re in that village, less certain of which hut they’re being held in,” James said. “But once they move, we’re likely to lose them. Boko Haram has gotten very good at hiding hostages.”

“And we’re certain this is Boko Haram?” Pax asked.

“We’re reasonably sure they’re affiliated with the terrorist organization,” James said, “but they might not be card-carrying members.”

A detailed map of the surrounding area filled the screen. The Pibor River ran to the east; the Nanaam River was farther to the west. There were plenty of trees and swampland, but it wasn’t thick forest cover, it was more grassland, which could be just as concealing in places. There was open space around the hut where the hostages might be held.

“We’re planning a joint operation, SEALs and A-Team?” Captain Oswald asked.

“Yes,” the SOCOM commander said. “We want the A-Team in the swamp and grasslands, neutralizing scouts while SEALs go for the hostages.”

“How long until wheels up?” Fallon asked.

“At seventeen hundred hours, both teams will take a transport flight to our Forward Operating Base in western Ethiopia, where we have two silent birds waiting to take you to South Sudan at twenty-one hundred.”

“That early? Shouldn’t this be a deep-night op?” Fallon asked.

“We don’t want to risk them moving the hostages,” the commander said. “It’s only May first but the rainy season started early. In a matter of days, the roads in the area could be impassable. Another storm is expected tomorrow. We’re monitoring the area with satellites. If they move the hostages while you’re en route, we’ll adjust accordingly.”

Bastian fixed Savannah James with a hard stare. Someone had to explain who Brie Stewart was. It would be irresponsible to send in SEALs and an A-Team, all of whom would risk their lives to rescue the hostages, without advance warning that this might have nothing to do with USAID and everything to do with the fact that one of the hostages was heir to one of the richest men in the world. Bastian would speak, but he didn’t want to reveal he’d met Gabriella Stewart Prime or they might pull him from the op.

Finally, Savvy gave him a slight nod and stood. “What I’m about to tell you doesn’t leave this room. It’s not classified per se, but secrecy is the best protection for Brie Stewart.” She went on to reveal Brie’s full name and family connections, never once meeting Bastian’s gaze as she did so. It appeared Savvy wanted him on this op too.

Interesting. She always had an agenda, but he had no clue what it could be in this instance.

“So it’s possible,” Lieutenant Fallon said, “that they attacked the facility and torched the place because they were after Gabriella Prime. Whose bright idea was it to send an oil heiress to fucking South Sudan?”

“Only a handful of people know who she is,” James said. “She was safe because she hid her identity. Also worth noting, she is estranged from her family and is no longer one of the heirs of the Prime family fortune. She earned the job on her own merit—she has a master’s degree in cultural anthropology—and USAID has a hard time retaining women employees in places like South Sudan. With the ongoing attacks on women and children, many locals are afraid to speak with male aid workers. They’re afraid of all men. Brie has worked for USAID for nearly five years and has been stationed in several developing countries. She took the job on the condition that no one would know who she is.”

“Sounds like somebody figured it out,” Captain Oswald said.

“We don’t know that,” Savvy said. “Intel indicates this is Boko Haram. It may have nothing to do with Brie Stewart.”

“Why wasn’t she chipped?” Pax asked. “You mentioned she was here at the end of March. You could’ve implanted a subdermal tracker in her then.”

“As you know, trackers have big limitations. One of which is battery life. The other is viability after a certain amount of time. Their maximum reliability is sixty days. We’d have to fly her back here every two months to replace the chip. That’s a lot of expense just to keep an aid worker in place.”

“Make her pay for it, then,” Carlos Espinosa, a sergeant on Bastian’s A-Team, said. “She’s loaded, and she’s the one at risk.”

“We discussed that,” James said. “But as I mentioned, she’s estranged from her family. She’s not a wealthy heiress anymore. And her USAID salary is probably less than any of us makes per year.”

“Bullshit. People like that have trust funds.” This came from Sergeant Cassius Callahan, another A-Team member and one of Bastian’s closest friends.

Bastian admitted to himself that he’d had the same thought. Once upon a time, Brie had an expensive drug habit, but given the amount of money she must’ve had in her trust fund, it was hard to believe she’d injected it all.

Savvy shrugged. “I ran a full check on her. She and her family parted ways before her trust matured when she turned thirty. There’s a property in Morocco she owns along with her two half brothers, but nothing she can liquidate. Besides, it’s a moot point; the other limitation is trackers need an active cell phone signal to piggyback on. Cell towers are few and far between in South Sudan outside of Juba or the oil drilling operations. We’re talking about a country where they don’t have water or electricity in most areas. War has decimated what little infrastructure South Sudan had. Djibouti is rich with resources in comparison.”

“Why was she here—at Camp Citron—to begin with?” asked Lieutenant Fallon.

“That’s need-to-know only and has no bearing on your mission,” Savvy said. “Brie Stewart is to be treated like any other hostage. This could be Boko Haram or a by-blow of the civil war, and we can’t let on to the locals that she has wealthy family members.” James placed her fists on the desk, knuckles down. “We are not in the business of ranking hostages based on their bank accounts, and she is no more important than the three men who were also taken.”

With that they all turned their attention to planning the rescue operation. Bastian dialed in his focus as they formulated a plan, giving no outward sign this mission was different for him. And it shouldn’t be different. As Savvy had said, Brie was no more important than the others.

But to him, in spite of everything, she was.

Brie crouched behind branches, ass-deep in muck. She’d managed to evade the searchers in the dark, but daylight was a different story.

The fact that they’d continued to search for her only raised questions. But then, there was no end to her list of questions. Minutes after her escape, she’d seen Ezra, Jaali, and Alan as they were marched toward the truck, backlit by the burning building.

Thousands of pounds of food that would’ve fed entire villages for months, destroyed.

If they didn’t want the food, why storm the compound? How did destroying food serve a strategic goal?

This couldn’t be about her. No one—not even her coworkers—knew who she was. Chief Warrant Officer Sebastian Ford and CIA agent—or whatever she was—Savannah James were the only people for thousands of miles who knew about her family.

Could Bastian have betrayed her?

She would never believe that. He might hate her, but she couldn’t believe he was a monster. He was a Special Forces operator. He wouldn’t risk the people of the village. He wouldn’t jeopardize other USAID workers.

People had died in the village last night. Shot by the men who’d stormed the facility. Were Ezra, Jaali, and Alan hurt? Jaali had limped as he crossed the dirt road. Had he been beaten while the others were spared, because he was South Sudanese? He served his country by ensuring food aid was given to all in need, and for that he was considered by some to be a traitor. His work aided everyone—including enemy tribes. Both rebel and government militias would’ve been fed by the food in storage.

If this was another battle in South Sudan’s ongoing civil war, the wanton destruction of food would only make the locals more desperate. They’d hardly be eager to fight for the side that had just ensured their children would starve.

After watching her coworkers’ forced evacuation and the horrifying gunning down of those who sought to save the food, she’d fled into the swamp and made her way south. If Ezra’s call to the UN went through, help would arrive, but she hadn’t stuck around to wait for them, because it was only a matter of time before they began searching for her. She had to put distance between herself and the village.

Plus, if Ezra’s call hadn’t gone through, it was up to her to find help.

The options were limited. Kemet Oil had a rig operation to the north, near the Upper Nile. The head of the operation used to work for her father. He’d recognize her. Plus, Prime Energy was in the process of trying to secure the rights to build a pipeline to deliver oil from South Sudan to the Atlantic, removing the need to pay Sudan for use of their pipeline. It was a billion dollar project meaning that at any given time, representatives from Prime Energy could be at Kemet Oil headquarters. Her brothers might even make an appearance.

To make matters worse, the Russian-based oil company, Druneft, was also vying for the pipeline concession. The last thing she needed was for someone from Druneft to recognize her.

She’d suck it up, though, and go to them if she believed Kemet Oil would lift a finger to help aid workers. But they wouldn’t. Many of their workers were children—slave laborers.

She pulled herself from the marsh and trudged up to the road, staying low and out of sight, as she’d been doing for the last several hours. She’d been heading toward Juba on instinct even as she mentally debated the only other option, the UN camp a hundred miles to the northwest.

Her USAID facility had been located here in an attempt to get people to return to their villages and out of the overloaded UN camps where malaria was rampant and food supplies low.

A year ago, this area had been a stronghold of the rebels, but the fighting had moved north, creating a no-man’s-land of burned-out villages in the eastern region of the country. With the camps at critical mass, USAID determined that placing food reserves in the old villages might convince the women and children to return home. Most of the men had been killed during village raids. Most of the boys who’d survived had been impressed into service.

The population of Brie’s village had tripled in the months she’d been there, but now that the food they’d relied on to see them through the rainy season was gone, many would likely head back to the camp.

The camp couldn’t spare peacekeepers to help her. Most of the UN personnel were medically trained aid workers and the few peacekeepers needed to protect the camp’s thousands of residents from both rebel and government forces. Plus the road to the camp would flood soon, while the road south should last for several more weeks.

She might as well go south, where she’d come across several villages just off the main road to Juba. Someone was bound to have a radio, or if she was lucky, a satellite phone. Lacking those, they might have a truck and she could catch a ride. She wouldn’t have to walk all two hundred and fifty miles to the capital.

With a dugout palm tree canoe, she could paddle upstream, but fighting the flow would wear her out. And the river meant risking river blindness and other fun diseases and parasites. She had her malaria pills in her pack, but they only protected her against the one disease.

Following the road to Juba was the most promising direction. She zigzagged from swamp to road, seeking signs of friends or foes, and walking through the muck to hide her tracks. Her skin itched where mud had dried on her face. She scooped up another handful and rubbed it across her cheeks. It worked as both camouflage and sunblock.

She sweltered in the early afternoon heat. Mosquitoes nipped at her, reminding her to take the day’s antimalarial dose. She washed it down with a few bites of beef jerky and a few sips of water.

Venturing alone into the bush held risks greater than facing down cheetahs, tiang, giraffes, and jackals. The men who’d attacked the USAID outpost weren’t the only threat Brie might face. Government soldiers were known to rape women when they left their village to collect firewood or food. For that reason, she’d never ventured into the bush alone. Her pack had a knife, but she didn’t know how to fight with a knife. She didn’t know how to fight, period.

She began to shake with exhaustion and fear, and forced herself to take a deep breath, think about her coworkers, and keep walking. They’d sacrificed themselves to protect her. They needed her to keep her shit together and find help.

She came to an intersection where a muddy track split from the main road, heading west around the wetland. She knew if she went far enough, the westward road would give way to savannah, but this road must be avoided at all costs. Deep within the marshlands, there was a market where none of the factions that were destroying South Sudan reigned supreme, but where they all came together to buy and sell. At the market, men could buy anything—artifacts, drugs, weapons, but mostly they trafficked in children for labor or sex.

Situated in territory held by neither the president nor the opposing vice president in South Sudan’s civil war, it was believed the market had formed a few months ago. The market had been the primary reason for her visit to Camp Citron, to report what she knew about it to Savannah James. But it wasn’t like the US could or would take action to shut down the operation. After all, Americans weren’t being threatened by this human trafficking.

South Sudan’s oil was spoken for—claimed by Chinese and British oil companies with American Prime Energy and Russian Druneft vying for the pipeline construction contract. Closing down the slave market wouldn’t help PE’s bid for the pipeline, so there was no strategic reason for the US military to get involved in a minor thing like child trafficking in South Sudan.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

It was that heartless attitude she’d had to tolerate while working for Prime Energy that had led her to self-medicate in the first place. It was a stain on her soul that she’d ever averted her gaze from the truth of the damage her family did to the world in a quest for power and ever more wealth.

The rumble of an engine in the distance warned her of an approaching vehicle, and she jumped off the road and waded into the swamp just as fat drops of rain began to fall again. If it was a friend, she could be wasting an opportunity to hitch a ride. But waiting by the road to find out was a risk she couldn’t afford to take.

The rain would be good for hiding her tracks, but if it turned into a real storm, she’d be in trouble. As it was, she couldn’t cross the wetland—it was too deep and boggy. Even if she could, she’d find herself in the middle of a wide, flowing river that would be even harder to cross.

Still, she considered it, because if she could cross the river, she’d lose anyone who was hunting her, plus, after hiking a few more miles, she’d reach the border with Ethiopia.

She took a step into the deeper muck, and promptly slipped.

Nope.

She considered all the wildlife that likely made this wetland home as she swatted at mosquitoes.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

She regained her footing and continued to walk just inside the edge of the marsh, hoping the showers wouldn’t turn into a storm. At least the muck swallowed her footsteps. When she ventured up to the road, there was no disguising her tracks.

She’d been told that during the height of the rainy season, sometimes the Sudd—the vast swamp that was one of the major geographical features of South Sudan—extended this far east. Roads would vanish. It was one of the reasons USAID had selected this area for food storage. At least by foot, the location served areas cut off when the roads flooded.

The rumble of yet another engine had her stepping deep into the vegetation that protruded from the swamp. She wouldn’t think about swamp-dwelling critters, wouldn’t imagine water snakes residing in the muck.

She tucked herself into the greenery of a shrub that thrived in the wetland. Between the mud on her face and dirty clothes, she was camouflaged.

She held still, careful not to rustle branches or splash. Even her breathing was shallow, but that was due to fear.

A car door slammed, then she heard two men arguing in Arabic. They were looking for her. They must be from different tribes with their common language being Arabic, because they both had local accents.

Had they been sent by the rebels? The government? Why were they after her? They’d already destroyed the food and they had her coworkers.

She didn’t dare move. Breathing was no longer an involuntary act.

Minutes ticked by. Birds chirped. A warm breeze filtered through the stiflingly hot day. Eight degrees above the equator, every day was hot, the air always thick, even when it rained.

Eventually she heard the sound of retreating footsteps, followed by car doors slamming.

Tires kicked up rocks on the muddy track.

She took a shallow, silent breath.

They’d moved on.

She waited five minutes, debating if she was safer heading back the way she’d already come—after all, they’d already searched there—or if she should continue south.

But help wouldn’t be found behind her. There was only forward, even if she had to walk all two hundred and fifty miles to Juba.

Slowly, she emerged from her hiding place. She scrambled up the low bank and tucked herself behind a tree so she could peek down the narrow road, to see how far ahead the searchers had gone. No sooner had she settled in than she heard the sound of a shotgun being cocked behind her.