Katie O'Brien, successful journalist, fresh from covering the latest Economic Summit in El Jabrah awoke in her bed in the Khazabad Majestic Hotel at some ungodly hour and felt like death. Or even worse.  Death was probably OK compared to how she felt.   Her mouth tasted like  she imagined an Afghan's armpit smelt and she was at the same time nauseous, thirsty and in dire need of a pee.

"Shit, I need a piss" she said out loud.  (I know most of us don't confuse these two bodily functions, but it was in the middle of the night and she was still pretty drunk. Try to understand her!)

What an almighty marathon bash the final night of the assignment had been! Wow! But what is an expense account for if not to be used,  she thought as she inched her way in the gloom to the bathroom door.  One good pee and then back to bed.  A few hours and she would be fine again - almost.  Good enough to get the flight home and she wouldn't be the only one with a hangover. Not by a very long way, she wouldn't!!   She remembered THAT much of the previous evening!  There had been quite a  number of hacks whooping it up with her.  Quite a bunch of guys, the International Press Corps.  Many a struggling distillery and brewery owed their salvation to the heroic efforts and loyal patronage  of people such as they!

She fumbled towards the door, opened it and stumbled through - onto a fire escape  in the cold night air and overlooking the  street!  The door slammed to behind her and her befuddled brain became dimly aware that her life had just taken something of  a  turn for the worse.

"You bloody oaf" she cursed herself, groaning,  and turned to go back. No way! The door had no handle on the outside and fitted so flushly that you could scarcely see the join. Great!  Nice little initiative test  for her!

"Another fine mess I've got myself into!"

Being locked out of the rear of the hotel with the front entrance in the next street was bad enough.  It was no help that it was the middle of the night.  The fact that the night time temperature in this Central Asian republic was enough to freeze the  vital organs off a brass monkey was not the most splendidly good news either.  Above all these considerations lay the fact that Katie was not wearing  a stitch of clothing. Mega bad news!   The increasingly painful messages coming from her bladder only added to the growing impression in Katie's mind that this was not going to be a good day, at least not to start with.

The two immediate imperatives were to relieve the strain on her bladder and to find a less exposed position in which to do so.  Being caught like this in this rather Puritanical country with its fundamentalist Islamic regime could be expensive and time consuming to say nothing of painful. You could be fined for showing your ankles if you were a local resident (and female) and even though Westerners, especially western journalists had  had a lot of licence extended to them in the last few days of the Summit  - well this tolerance would hardly extend to a nude woman peeing in the open air, even if she were a respected presswoman.

And the summit was over after all said and done.  The delegates and press were preparing to go home and on to their next assignments and some had already left.  Last night's little shindig had been something of a rearguard action.  Pretty eventful one, though!  What was that story she had seen before she came out here?  Some Western resident of this country beaten for immorality?  She supposed they would call public nudity and relieving oneself in a public place, immoral.  Even in her own country with its tolerant liberalism  and encouragement of cultural and lifestyle diversity they were not encouraged too warmly.

She saw no way of getting back in through any of the windows - they were simply  not accessible, even if she had been  Sheena,  Queen of the Jungle. (Spiderwoman - Yes!).

Down the fire escape she went, knocking on each door as she descended and getting no response.  At the bottom in the area she found a place to relieve herself in comparative privacy.  Like being in the Brownies again on my first camp!

She looked down at herself in the increasing light and saw that there was even less covering her than she had realised.  It came back to her  now, how she had so painstakingly removed all the varnish from her finger and toe nails before slumping into bed.  Why, oh why had she done that!  Only her lovely butterfly tattoo still adorned  the dimpled side of that  generous  left ass cheek.   Nice butterfly!

She was a sweet looking girl, even if she was still tending to see double!  Red haired, five feet nine and slim, but with good arms and legs - no stick-like limbs for her - she had made sure of that.  Small, but nice breasts,  a flat tummy, a luxuriant and untrimmed bush , a friendly, generous,  pneumatic ass which she patted absent mindedly, feeling reassured somehow by its firm gentle roundness.  Her sweet little feet were her special pride and joy and she looked down at them with a loving, tipsy smile, before pulling herself together, trying to collect her wits and think what to do.

The sad thing was that she still felt quite quite terrible.  No one in the entire history of the universe had ever felt more utterly ghastly than poor K.  O'Brien did right now.  All she wanted to do was crawl away and sleep (or die - just as long as she could crawl away- crawl away anywhere).  The cold air was doing nothing for the waves of sickness which kept breaking over her. She was tired, ill and increasingly frightened.  The cold air and the ominously uncertain prospects  were together beginning to penetrate even her drink affected mind.  This could be really bad!  What CAN I do?

If it had happened at home she would have attracted the attention of the first person she had met, knocked on doors and shouted for help and people would have understood and it would all have been a bit of a joke the next day!  But this was not home.  She was a nude woman alone in a strange and maybe not very friendly country, whose customs she had flouted in a big way.

Hell, I'm not alone! There's all the other fellows! But they were mostly in other hotels and had staggered off after Katie had gone to bed!  Only a couple of the guys remained in this one and she knew they were both checking out early.  What if they had already gone?

She remembered the hotel was about twelve doors down and decided in her still befuddled way that the best bet was to try and get around to the front entrance. Then she could maybe grab a master key and get up to her room unseen.   Slowly she began to move down the street, looking around to see if she had been spotted.  Lucky for her it was still very quiet. She still found it difficult to walk in a straight line and kept having to pause and take stock of the situation laughing in a silly way as she did. Got to sober up - and fast.  Getting damned cold too.

She made it to the end of the street and round  the intersection, back into the main avenue where the front entrance was.  This was a busy thoroughfare in the day.   Street vendors stalls lined its entire length and hordes of people and streams of  traffic made it a veritable bedlam.  There was the hotel!  Oh how beautiful it looked!!   Only a few doors away and nobody in sight.   Oh Bliss!!  The front door was open!  As long as the desk clerk was a man of understanding, human warmth and compassion, or better still not at his post, all would be well!  Nasty few moments, but in a minute or two she would curl up in bed and sleep off this dreadful hangover. God! how utterly awful she felt.  Up the steps. Through the door and there was the clerk!  Smiling at her in a kindly, bewildered sort of way and then looking terrified.

"Sorry" I made a silly mistake and locked myself o....!"

Her arms were roughly siezed from behind and she was pulled towards the door.

"You very bad woman. You cheap bloody whore!  You plenty stinking drunk!  You foreigners think you do what you damn well like.  You get taught bloody good lesson. You learn plenty good, plenty damn soon.  We teach you bloody good!"

"Tell Mr Ford Room 234" she shouted at the desk clerk before being pulled out onto the street, thrown with incredible roughness  into a prison van and driven away, bruised, frightened and suddenly all too sober into the dawning day to face - what?