The Kill Zone by Chris Ryan

the other pulled a long, wicked-looking knife.
    The blade twinkled in the light coming from the doorway as its owner bent down and held it towards Jack’s body. He grinned horribly, circling the point of the blade in the region of Jack’s face.
    Jack did what he could to prepare himself for the sensation of the blade slicing skin.
    Instead, his tormentor shuffled down to Jack’s wrists. With a single swipe, the sharp blade cut through the ropes binding them. The knife man stood up quickly, leaving Jack’s legs bound tight. He and his colleague walked backwards out of the door, closing it in front of them and locking it from the outside.
    Enough light seeped in from around the door and from a small opening high in the opposite wall for Jack to be able to see. He sat up painfully, rubbing his sore wrists. The bucket they had thrown at him was about a metre from where he was sitting. It was rusty, and touching his face where it had hit him, Jack felt a small stream of blood. He pressed hard on its source to stem the bleeding while looking around the rest of the room.
    It was a square space, about five metres on each side. Although it was largely empty, Jack had the impression that it was used as a storeroom. The walls were made of hard-baked mud – the sort of material the inhabitants of Helmand had used for centuries to build the square, high-walled compounds in which they lived. These walls were thick and unbelievably sturdy, often able to withstand the impact of artillery fire. There was a stale smell of animal shit in the air, and along one of the walls was some kind of dried crop and a small pile of firewood. Jack was sitting almost up against the back wall. Between him and the door he saw whatever his two visitors had dumped on the ground when they arrived. Shuffling up towards it, he realised what it was. Food – a large piece of flatbread – and a plastic bottle of what he hoped was water. His mouth was drier than the dust on the ground.
    He ate the bread in big, ravenous mouthfuls, ignoring the bits of grit that clung to its underside. The water was warm and stale, but as he gulped it down, Jack felt his body absorbing it like a sponge. When he had finished, he looked around a little desperately to see if they had left him anything else to eat or drink. In the bottom of the rusty bucket there was still a bit of water, so he carefully decanted this into his bottle, then screwed the top back on. He’d leave that for an emergency.
    Fuck, he told himself. Like it isn’t an emergency already.
    Jack felt a surge of fear. He knew he had to master it. His priority was survival, and fear was his worst enemy. If he let it, it would affect his ability to think, to make intelligent decisions.
    He needed to keep a cool head. Not easy. Not very fucking easy at all.
    He took a deep breath and tried to work out what the hell was going on.
    The first thing was this: he was alive. There had to be a reason for that, because his captors could have killed him at any moment. What was more, they had just given him food and water, which meant they had plans for him. And Jack could guess what those plans were. He was an enemy combatant, and you didn’t have to be a military fucking genius to work out he was SF – they’d already have examined his digital camouflage and his SF helmet cut away round the ears. That meant he was a good prize, and potentially a good source of intelligence. Jack looked down at the bottle of water. He’d conducted enough field interrogations of his own to realise that you didn’t want your subject to be halfway to Hades before you started on him. You wanted him conscious and alert. No point torturing a comatose man.
    He got up on tiptoes and looked through the opening. The sun was high. It was past noon. The first three hours after capture were critical – that was the time frame in which you were most likely to be rescued. But that three-hour limit was long gone. To make matters worse, he estimated that