Page 2 of Keeping Amanda
He didn’t have to finish his sentence, it was obvious what would happen if they didn’t. Michael’s pained cries seemed very loud in the clearing.
He’d been taken deep into the trees, so Amanda couldn’t see what was happening to him, but her heart broke with every sound he made.
“And you,” the leader continued, looking at the girls, as if he couldn’t hear the pathetic cries of a child echoing through the forest, “will be responsible for cooking and cleaning, at least for now. Husbands have already been chosen for you, andthey will begin arriving to retrieve you in a few days. Your job is to serve your husbands and make babies who will further our cause.”
If she thought she’d been horrified before, Amanda was even more so now. Bibi was only four. And Natasha, the oldest, was eleven. The thought of anyone hurting them made her physically sick.
“What about Mandy?” Sharon asked. She’d been extremely clingy throughout their trek through the rainforest, and while Amanda also wanted to know her fate, she wished the girl had kept her mouth shut at that moment.
The leader smiled then—an evil smile that made the hair on the back of Amanda’s neck stand up.
“Ah yes, the brave teacher who refused to leave her students. We definitely have plans for her. But for now, she continues to do what she’s been doing…keeping you all in line.”
And with that, he turned and headed in the direction he’d been going when Michael interrupted him.
A shiver swept through Amanda from head to toe. She wasn’t going to make it out of there. That much was obvious. She was being used to keep the children calm and compliant, but as soon as the girls were given to whomever came for them, and the boys were cowed from exhaustion or beatings, she was expendable.
And the looks of the faces of the men around her were suddenly a little too eager. As if they’d been wondering what the leader had in store for her, and now that he’d spoken, they assumed she’d be nothing more than a plaything to use as they saw fit until her death.
“Mandy?” Sharon whined.
Turning her thoughts away from her inevitable future, she straightened her spine and faced the girls. “Come on, let’s go get settled in our tent,” she told them. Looking at Joseph, the oldest boy, she added, “Joe, look after Richard, James, and Mark. Split them up amongst the rest of you.” The three boys she’d singledout were the youngest, and would need looking after if they were going to survive.
Joseph nodded, and Amanda was glad to see the boys immediately split themselves up, each tent housing a mixture of older and younger kids.
Natasha, the oldest girl, picked up Bibi and carried her toward the tent they’d been assigned. The other girls followed suit, the older girls pairing up with the younger ones, holding their hands as they trudged toward their new home for however long they’d be there.
Amanda wanted to ask if they’d get some food. Some water. If they’d be able to wash their clothes. After two weeks of walking, they were all pretty ripe. But she also didn’t want to bring any more attention to themselves than they already had. As much as she wanted to come up with a strategy to escape, to run into the jungle and get away from whatever this group of men had planned, she knew that wasn’t exactly viable.
She had no idea where they were. Couldn’t survive on her own in the jungle, forget about taking twenty-three boys and girls with her. And Amanda would no more leave the kids to fend for themselves than she’d kick a wounded puppy in the streets.
No, she was going to be here until she died. No matter how this played out.
She had zero confidence that a miracle would happen, that they’d either let them go or someone would come to their rescue. Life only worked like that in movies and novels. The reality was, the boys would be forced to fight for these rebels, and the girls…
She didn’t want to think about their fate.
Refusing to cry, as that wouldn’t solve anything, Amanda herded the girls to the tent.
One minute at a time. That’s all she could do. That’s all she had the mental bandwidth to deal with. Whatever would happenwould happen, but when the time came forherfate, she vowed to fight to the bitter end. She wouldn’t make it easy for them, no matter what their captors had in store for her.
Nash “Buck” Chaney clenched his fists under the table, trying to hold on to his patience. He and his copilot, Obi-Wan, were currently in Guyana, preparing for a rescue mission. Twenty-three children and one American teacher had been kidnapped from their school near the border of Venezuela and taken into the rainforest. They’d just been briefed by the director of the school about what had gone down that day just over two weeks ago, when the school was raided, and nothing they’d heard was making him very happy.
He and Obi-Wan might not be in the middle of a war zone, but knowing there were innocent children going through something horrific right this moment was making him more than a little anxious to get this mission started.
The location of the kidnapping victims was currently unknown, but the Guyanese government had an idea of where they might be, or at least of the direction they’d gone. There were several training camps in the depths of the rainforest they were keeping an eye on, since they were relatively close to the border. Tensions with their neighboring country had ramped up in the last few years, and no one wanted to be surprised by an invasion via the forest.
Hostilities were even higher very recently, because Venezuela announced the annexation of Guyana’s western territories in something they called the Venezuelan Referendum. Guyana had strengthened their military partnership with the US in order to help protect their people and land from their larger neighbor.
But nevertheless, theyhadbeen surprised by the kidnapping. It happened so fast. The men had crossed the border withoutdetection, driven straight to the school, loaded up the children and teacher and crossed back into Venezuela, all within ten minutes. There’d been one fatality—a teacher was shot—proving the men weren’t afraid to use lethal force if threatened.
The reason Buck and Obi-Wan were there was because the vice president of the United States had a connection to the small country of Guyana, and he’d pressed the president to take action. To authorize the use of the Night Stalkers to see if they could rescue the children.
Officially, the involvement of the specialized Army unit was because of the American teacher taken with the kids. That was their “in,” so to speak. Sending a message that kidnapping American citizens wouldn’t be tolerated.
It was a tenuous excuse at best. Because Amanda Rush had no connections to the military or government. She had no intel that any foreign military would deem desirable. She was a volunteer, spending time in Guyana helping an organization educate a school full of orphans.
But the longer Buck sat at the table and listened to intel about the group who took the kids and their teacher, the more uneasy he became. This was no unorganized, ragtag group of men. They were terrorists, plain and simple. Reports of the things they’d done in the past made his blood boil. They were ruthless, and they didn’t care if the soldiers they “recruited” were nineteen or nine.
