Freefall

Cover image © Craig Toocheck, courtesy of stock.xchng

Cover design copyrighted 2008 by Covenant Communications, Inc.

Published by Covenant Communications, Inc.

American Fork, Utah

Copyright © 2008 by Traci Hunter Abramson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any format or in any medium without the written permission of the publisher, Covenant Communications, Inc., P.O. Box 416, American Fork, UT 84003. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed within this work are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect
the position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Covenant Communications, Inc., or any other entity.

This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are products of the author's imagination, and are not to be construed as real.

First Printing: January 2008

978-1-60861-515-5

Dedication

For the dedicated individuals who protect the freedom we enjoy

Acknowledgements

A special thanks to Nikki Abramson and Rebecca Cummings for your invaluable advice while this book was still in its infancy. Thank you to Kirsti Kirkland and Katie Stirling for seeing what this book could become and encouraging me to strive to make it better. Thank you to Kat Gille for shepherding this book through the publication process so efficiently and for seeing what everyone else missed. And thank you to the other wonderful people at Covenant, especially Angela Eschler and Kathryn Jenkins, for your continued support.

Finally, my continued appreciation goes to my husband and children for sharing me with the computer even when it means eating cereal for dinner, and to my extended family members, friends, and readers who continue to provide me with much needed encouragement. Without you this book wouldn't exist.

My father is going to kill me,
Amy Whitmore thought to herself. Of course that was assuming that the terrorists across the room didn't decide to take care of the job for him. Amy looked up at the two men guarding the penthouse door, automatic weapons in hand. When one glanced at her, she averted her eyes, looking back to the two-toned beige carpet, and prayed that help would arrive soon.

Why hadn't she listened? Her parents, her brothers—everyone had told her that travel in this part of the world was too risky right now. Of course that was part of the problem. They had told her. With an inward sigh, Amy wondered why she kept falling into the same trap. Ask her nicely to do something and she was bound to agree in a heartbeat.
Tell
her to do something and she would refuse twice as fast.

Still, when the job offer to work in the Diplomatic Corps had come her way, she had jumped at it. Politics had been part of her life for as long as she could remember, and working for the State Department finally gave her something that wasn't directly in her father's control.

Senator James Whitmore had been in politics since before Amy was born. The honorable senator from Virginia was well known for his honesty, his integrity, and his ability to get things done. He knew how to play the game, and he knew how often the rules changed. When he saw something he could do to make his country better, he moved forward with an intensity that was unequaled in the senate chamber.

When Amy had graduated from college, he had offered her a job working on his staff. She could admit now that she had been tempted and probably would have even accepted the job had it not been for Jared. Their brief engagement during her senior year of college had started on Christmas Eve and ended before the new year even began.

Amy had been excited about getting married, but as she prayed each night about her decision, she continued to feel uneasy. Three days after agreeing to marry Jared, she had walked into her kitchen to find her parents standing at the stove, her dad's arms wrapped around her mom's waist. The unity of their stance, the humor in their voices, and the love that flowed from them struck her, making her realize that she wanted what her parents had—which was something she couldn't find with Jared.

Jared hadn't really taken her seriously when she broke off their engagement. Instead he thought she just needed some time before she would be ready to settle down. Despite her insistence that they had no future together, Jared had simply chosen not to believe her. Not sure what else to do, Amy had let him believe whatever he wanted.

When she had turned down her dad's job offer, she had told him that she needed to live outside of the shadow of the Whitmore name for a while. To some extent, she had been telling him the truth. She needed to find an identity separate from the rest of the family. After all, it wasn't always easy being the senator's daughter. Both of her older brothers cast pretty long shadows as well. Charlie, who was two years older than she was, had just graduated from college at the top of his class, and Matt, the oldest, was playing his fourth season of major league baseball for the Florida Marlins.

At one point, Amy had planned to utilize her artistic abilities full time. After working a few summers with her dad, however, she'd decided to pursue a career in the political arena instead of developing her natural drawing ability. What she wouldn't give for a chance to go back and rethink that decision!

Taking an overseas assignment a few weeks after her college graduation had seemed exciting and ambitious. Now it just seemed dangerous.

She had barely even heard of Abolstan, the little country tucked along the Mediterranean coast between Turkey and Syria. As soon as she'd accepted the assignment, she had read everything she could get her hands on about Abolstan, including its culture, climate, and politics. The research she had done in the weeks before her arrival had suggested that terrorist activity was inconsequential in the capital city. Obviously the person who had written that article had never stared down a man holding an AK-47.

A total of seven hostages were seated around the hotel room—five Americans and two Brits. This hotel typically housed the new arrivals for both the American and British embassies. Newly transferred employees often lived at the hotel for the first month or two until permanent apartments became available. Though the hotel was equipped with a high-end security system, it apparently wasn't good enough to withstand last night's assault, when a bomb of some sort had gone off. Seconds after the explosion, Amy and the others had been dragged out of their rooms and brought to the penthouse. Once inside the penthouse, the terrorists had separated them, making them sit far enough apart so that communication wasn't possible. One of the men guarding the door spoke English well, and Amy guessed that he had been educated in the United States.

The two armed men in the room were the latest shift of those sent to guard the hostages. She studied their faces, thinking that they would look normal if it weren't for the guns they held. She had counted at least fifteen terrorists when they had been abducted, and many of their faces were already etched into her mind. All she had to do was close her eyes and she could replay the moment her door had been kicked in.

She had originally mistaken the bomb for an earthquake and was standing in the doorway between the living area and the bedroom when her door simply fell into the room. Naively, she had thought that the two men staring at her from the hallway were part of the hotel's security staff and had come to make sure that she was okay. Then she'd seen their weapons. Eyes wide, she had just gaped at them as one trained his weapon on her. When the other man swiftly came toward her, she instinctively backed up, but she quickly realized she had nowhere to go but through the door her abductors had come through. Terrified, she had dug her heels into the carpet as the man grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into the hallway.

Any lingering hope that someone would help her disappeared when she saw six other hostages being pulled from their rooms at the same time. She considered trying to fight her way free until she saw the man next to her do just that. He took the butt of a gun to the side of his head and crumpled to the floor in pain. Amy leaned toward him to help, but the two men holding her by the arms didn't give her the opportunity. Instead, she could only watch in horror as several other hostages were brutalized for resisting. Below them, other hotel guests were screaming as they fled from the hotel.

Amy now thought the hostages had been individually targeted. Like her, all of them were new employees of their respective embassies, each of them in the process of securing a more permanent home in Abolstan. Amy was the newest arrival in the group, having landed just two weeks earlier. She had no doubt that the terrorists knew who they were and who they worked for. Specifically, they knew who her father was.

She shifted her willowy frame, leaning back against the wall. Her auburn hair was still in a ponytail from her workout on the treadmill in the hotel's gym right before their unexpected guests had arrived. Thankfully, she was still dressed comfortably in the T-shirt and sweatpants she had worked out in.

She turned her head to the left and studied the other misfortunate souls who were sharing this misery. Each of the five men had been beaten when they had tried to resist, and she could tell that if they didn't get help soon, some of them might not last through negotiations. Frank, her new supervisor at the embassy, adjusted the bandage on his leg where he had been shot. His injury provided an example of what would happen if they didn't cooperate. For now, they had little choice.

As darkness fell outside, Amy closed her eyes against the tears that threatened. She bowed her head and once more began her silent prayers.

* * *

This isn't going to be pretty,
Brent Miller thought to himself as he continued through the dark shadows into the alley behind the hotel. The back of the building was charred black from the explosion nearly twenty-four hours earlier. The doors leading to the kitchen were gone, their remnants scattered on the pavement along with fragments of broken glass from the windows on the first three floors.

Brent took a moment to consider his target. The building was twelve stories high, but light was only visible from the windows on the top floor. He scanned the fire escape on the far side of the building and the wrought-iron balconies above him. He didn't sense any movement on the first several floors, leading him to believe that he could simply enter the building and make his way upstairs.

But Brent had never been fond of obvious choices, and his training as a Navy SEAL reinforced his natural instincts. Ignoring the fire escape and the back doorway, he ran a hand over the brick and found his first handhold. Slowly, meticulously, he started his climb up the side of the building. Soot covered his fingertips as he silently stepped onto the first floor balcony and proceeded to make his way up to the next floor.

Through his headset, he heard Tristan Crowther's western drawl. “Time frame?”

“Twenty minutes,” Brent answered, his voice low.

The elite five-man team was well-trained for situations like this. As a Navy SEAL, Brent knew where his teammates were and how dependent they all were on perfect timing as they worked through this operation. His job was simple enough: neutralize any terrorists with the hostages. As he approached from this side of the building, two of his teammates were moving into position from other locations to help attain their objective. All were anxious to complete this part of their assignment so they could move on to the difficult task of transporting the hostages to safety.

All of them knew what they were up against. Namir Dagan, a radical who had long been challenging for power in Abolstan, had claimed responsibility. His list of demands had been long, including the removal of all American forces from the region. Unfortunately, no one believed that he would ever release the hostages alive. Whether he got what he wanted or not, none of the hostages would survive negotiations unless Brent and his team successfully recovered them by force.