Chapter 9, 72 hours
Haruka groaned and struggled to sit up straight. Muscles all over his body were stiff and crying out in pain. There seemed to be manacles on his hands and chains that fastened to the wall. One particular muscle was not stiff but was definitely in pain. It didn't help that he also had to urinate. He noticed two plastic buckets within reach, one turned out to be empty. Groaning he made use of it, difficult though it was to work around the swelling caused by Crusader's knee. A quick check of the other revealed water that he carefully drank, trying not to spill any in his eagerness. Although light shone in from the hallway, he assumed it was still night. He definitely didn't feel as thought he had been asleep very long, and he doubted the pain in his body would let him get back to sleep for some time yet. And the lack of clothes made him cold, the temperature in the building too cool for some kept inactive and nude.
He knew all this was deliberate. Lack of sleep to make him groggy. Nude to make him feel defenseless and to try and break his spirit. No food to make him weak. Looking around he noticed no windows in the room and wondered if they would eventually try to twist his sense of time. Muscles screaming in protest he sat back on his haunches. Should he kill himself? If there were truly no hope of rescue – then he remembered.
******* 3 months before ************
He had been attending a highly unusual, top secret meeting of all garrison leaders in Southeast Asia. The regional leader was the lecturer. They had covered several up and coming technical advancements although none of them seemed important enough to warrant a top level meeting without second in commands when the regional Instructor had started the last day's topics. Using a pair of tweezers he held up something so small that none of them could completely make it out. "This, gentlemen, is the reason for this meeting. This is a tracking device. When you are guarding a government official who maybe a target for kidnapping you are to find someway to put it on that person. We do NOT want the opposition to know we have such things, that way they will, hopefully, not search for and discard them. Therefor; do not let the person you are guarding know about them. Do not spread the word among your men unless there is a very, very strong need to know. This is the last resort for finding a kidnap victim. Once others know about it, it will be useless. Each garrison will get 4 of these. We have a tracking satellite in space that can be used to find each device. Each device is registered with its own security number and frequency. If you need to find someone who has a device on them, contact the regional office and report a code 301, that will get you to the proper people who can use the security number of that device to find the victim."
"Now, we all know that you are the ones most likely to be kidnapped. You each have knowledge that terrorist would kill for. So each one of you will have one of these inserted beneath your skin at the juncture of your shoulder and your neck. Should any of you "disappear", we will be able to hunt you down and find you. For that reason, you should tell one, at the most two, of your most trustworthy men about this so that they can call us and report a 10-00 situation if that happens. Then we will find you."
******* end flashback ******
So – sometime Wednesday Iwase would arrive at the Bed and Breakfast they were supposed to meet at and find him missing. How long would it take him to report it? If he knew his lover he would be frantic but lie to himself and say he was fine. It would probably be nightfall before he was certain something was wrong. Maybe he wouldn't even call in until Thursday morning. So, if Iwase called in on Thursday morning, they would start tracking him almost immediately. Say 2 hours to find him, 4 hours to plan an assult and up to 3 hours to start it. Maybe a full day. They would probably be here by Thursday night. So all he had to do was hang on until Thursday night, approximately 72 hours. Haruka's stomach twisted. This wasn't going to be fun, it probably wouldn't even be bearable. But he had to do it. Just 72 hours, he just had to hold on for 72 hours.
********* GD ************
Sorry – no action in this chapter, and I'm not sure how much in the next. I had thought I would have more going on but setting things up for the next few chapters took longer than I thought. I sure hope that some day I'm not talking to myself and someone out there actually reads and reviews this story. Its my first real story.