Jase gulped down a soldering mouthful of coffee, it tasted like shit. It could have been the hangover, he realised, but regardless, it tasted like shit. He relaxed his body into the uncomfortable chair and drummed his fingers on the cool metal table. He was seated amid sixteen other people in a grey, windowless operations room. Only two of the other attendees were women, and only maybe seven of the group had his respect. The remainder were the brass; the ones too focused on procedure and numerical targets than people's lives and the safety of his team. Jase would have loved to pluck them from the comfort of their mahogany desks and drop them in the shit to see how they fared without his men to rescue them.

"Still waiting on the connection, they're piggybacking off another address, this could take a while," Agent Lorres tapped various buttons with elegant fingers and shook her head, glossy highlighted hair shining in the reflection of the light. Jase knew the briefest of summaries of why he was there; a group of aid workers had been smuggled from a refugee camp in Greece and were being held hostage by a wannabe terrorist, a lone wolf attempting to make his mark and earn the respect of the elders.

"They'll do anything to stop us getting a signal," a suit commented, another nameless face who wielded influence and did too little with it. Jase rolled his eyes, it was a similar routine each time; the bad guys never made it too easy for them. There were always politics and red tape involved, and the fact that contact had even been made told Jase that if all went well, there would be some kind of bullshit meet and swap, probably with a handover of several dangerous terrorists back to their homeland with no further questions asked. Jase much preferred to storm a place and fold bullets into bodies. With irritation he grasped his polystyrene cup and took another swig of the bitter liquid, forgetting he had sworn against the terrible batch of acrid coffee.

"Okay, we're coming in now. Is everyone ready?" Agent Lorres stepped back after adjusting some of the settings on the wall length screen in front of them, taking a steady breath as she always did. Cool and collected, Lorres possessed an almost unnerving ability to remove emotion from situations. She was all process and deliverance, and it was what made her so excellent at her job. Jase couldn't help but respect her tenacity; if he was the soldier holding the gun, she was the soldier behind the desk.

"With bated breath," Sonny murmured next to him, the faintest whiff of liquor coming from his mouth. Jase smirked in response, his friend had outdone himself the previous night, drinking nearly his considerable body weight in alcohol and still raising himself at the emergency call that afternoon.

"Can I remind Alpha team your participation in this meeting is silent until after the live feed is suspended," Lorres raised perfectly manicured brows in Sonny's direction, who clenched a meaty fist under the table. The screen sparked alive and a dark skinned man came in to focus. Jase did the obligatory physical observations; he may have the opportunity to kill him later, if the team did their job correctly and located the hostages before their time ran out.

"Who am I speaking with?" The man asked in a easily recognisable British accent. It was no surprise, his clothing was western, and with his carefully groomed hair and beard he hardly fit the bill of most of the profiles that crossed the table. European fighters, a majority of them being British, were no rare occurrence in any of the terror cells. They fled their home country in the call to arms, the biggest concern being that they would come back with their nationality intact and a head full of extremist ideologies.

Agent Lorres provided a brief round of introductions to the man on the screen, quickly identified by researchers in the furthest corner of the ops room as Bazish al-Raheem, a thirty-four-year-old male from east London known to have travelled via Turkey to Syria nine months ago. His profile was illuminated in a second screen beside his grainy and moving image, and Jase digested the information quickly. As Lorres announced names around the rectangular table heads nodded one by one, almost by way of greeting. Jase acknowledged the habitual formality with distaste, and as the round of introductions skipped over his team, sat in an orchestrated position out of view of the camera, they stared squarely at the screen. We will find you, their eyes collectively promised.

"Good," the man nodded, apparently pleased with his audience. "I am Bazish al-Raheem. Would you like to see your women?" The tone immediately provoked a lurch of rage within Jase's gut. Agent Lorres sucked in a breath and lowered her eyes automatically; she'd probably seen worse than they had; as the most senior field-agent at the table it was her job to review the grisly details of the worst cases. The camera panned, and Jase realised there were only two hostages bound and slumped in fear on the ground. By their accounts there should have been four, the translator was already dead, but they were expecting two other older women, also aid workers at the Lesbos camp. Typically, the two remaining hostages now shown on screen were the perfect catch; young, western and attractive. One was clearly in shock, and a syringe laying next to her on the ground told Jase she'd been summoned back to consciousness with adrenaline.

"Are you both ok? Are either of you in need of any medical assistance?" Agent Lorres asked clearly but impersonally, her famous disassociation taking full effect. The camera swerved to face the second female; Paige, Jase realised from the brief. British, twenty-five. She had long dark hair that cascaded gently around her face and over her shoulders, the ends were tangled and matted together with blood.

"Go on, I told you to respond if they ask you anything," Bazish urged his captive.

"We're ok-" the girl began before a belt struck down across her cheek. A scream rang out from the hostage beside her, clearly in great distress with the aid of the adrenaline injected in to her body. As Paige struggled back up Jase watched a streak of blood across her face quickly seep down to drip gently from her chin. Tiny shards of metal had been attached to the belt.

"Why are you doing this?" The other hostage begged in a muffled tone away from the view of the camera. Jasmin, twenty-seven, serial do-gooder, he deduced from the folder. Jase had little patience for people who put themselves in these kinds of situations. Squealers, they called them. Aid workers and humanitarians who refused to heed any warning about dangerous territories, but then squealed for help as soon as the shit hit the fan.

"Every time you make a noise, I hurt her, alright?" Al-Raheem explained calmly to Jasmin. The camera shook as it was set down at a vantage point where both hostages were in full view, slumped on the ground. Al-Raheem approached them with something Jase couldn't make out, it was a reel of something metal- wire, he realised; barbed wire. It was weaved around Paige's wrists, ankles, and then her neck, and Jase felt Sonny adjust his position with the same anger that boiled in all of them. It was common for captors to do this, to pick one main punching bag to abuse and break the spirits of everyone else; a form of psychological torture for the others, as well as physical torture for the unlucky hostage.

Jase studied the folder in front of him, scanning through the profiles of the women. Jasmin was a humanitarian by trade, Paige was a psychologist. The journey to certain death made sense on Jasmin's part, but what was Paige doing there? The thought irritated him; anyone who looked like that was going to get into trouble. A piercing scream tore Jase's eyes from the folder. With every bolt of electricity that shuddered through her body, Paige contorted in pain and writhed around desperately; all this did was tear her skin as the barbed wire chewed at her wrists. Hysterical sobbing echoed from Jasmin, who watched helplessly as her friend was mercilessly abused.

Jase watched for several minutes as both of the hostages were tortured, he didn't look away. A quick scan of the table told him the only eyes fixed on the screen were those of his team. Were they so desensitised to these sorts of atrocities now? They had seen some shit, but nothing prepared a man for the sight of real torture; real, bloody, inhumane torture. As bad as it was, Jase would have been more comfortable watching a man suffer. Though they would be just as innocent and undeserving as anybody else, there was something intensely sickening about watching a female victim. Paige was the sort of woman he would take a second glance at in everyday life, maybe in a bar he'd buy her a drink, Sonny would try more than that. But instead she was a bloodied figure on a screen, miles from home with Jase as her only hope.

"So now you see," Bazish al-Raheem twisted the camera around to face him. He looked bored, Jasmin was now entirely unconscious, and after a defiant and strong-willed battle to show no weakness, Paige was reduced to a shaking huddle on the ground. "This is what happens to your women in our care. I stopped my brothers from raping them today, what would happen if I wasn't around? This is just the camera sport. The things my friends would do, the humiliation and degradation they would inflict if they truly had their way with them would be something else." He waved a hand around for emphasis. "So now you see I am not a man to be messed with, and if you want your women back alive you will grant me whatever I ask for."

Camera sport. That was all it was, just a bit of camera sport. The sad thing was, Jase knew what he had just witnessed wasn't anywhere near the worst they could, and would do. Maybe it was a good thing he and his team were there to witness, because now they were filled with the right kind of hunger to complete the mission headed their way. Jase zoned out as the particulars were discussed. He tuned his ears back in just in time to hear the punchline; a prisoner swap. Of course it was a prisoner swap, of course they wanted some of their most high value assets freed and back home to run their camps. Think of the stories they could tell, think of the people they would inspire. He could feel the brass consider the situation. He knew exactly what they were thinking, only because it was an option they occasionally had to consider when other avenues seemed hopeless, and he had made peace with that. This time however, it made him sick.

Did anyone else know they had Western hostages? Did they have any photographic proof, any recorded proof already uploaded somewhere else? In other words, could they airstrike and write the hostages off as civilian loss in order to retain high value prisoners? Nobody would ever know how they died, and certainly not that it had technically been at US hands. Al-Raheem had given them 36 hours to respond.

"Do we have an estimated location?" Someone mused aloud nonchalantly, but the question was laced with insinuation. A ball of rage surged in Jase's gut that he swallowed down carefully, readying himself to deliver a cool warning.

"If anyone says another fucking word to even so much as hint at what you're suggesting, I will personally deliver you over to their fucking holy land so you can be restrained with barbed wire and tortured." The words came out so calm and collected, but he had snapped. Fortunately his position allowed him a little weight to throw around, and he considered it his duty to occasionally remind the suits who they called upon for help.

"Yeah I'll get in on that," Sonny echoed in his Southern drawl.

"Alright!" Lorres snapped curtly, they were all drained, and bickering amongst each other would do them no favours.

"Send us in, get us clearance, I don't care how long we have to sit on the location for because we'll find them, and I'll take him alive." Jase punched his finger towards the frozen screen with a tight jaw. If they had an estimated location, he'd find them. Then he'd take the captors to nice little black hole site and really let off some steam. He wasn't normally one for revenge, and he didn't have a sadistic nature even at the worst of times. Something about what he had just watched put him in the mood to make somebody bleed.