Kick agreed. He didn’t like the guy, but nobody deserved to go that way. “I don’t know about the others.” But he didn’t think the pilot had made it. Or Bill Henning.
“I thought I saw a parachute below us,” she said, dashing away the tears from her eyes.
“Lafayette. He jumped before us.”
“So he must be alive.”
“With any luck.”
But he’d heard the screamed curse when the tangos had opened fire on them. If Marc Lafayette wasn’t dead, he was hurting. Bad, by the sound of that swear word.
Or, there was an outside chance he could have been bluffing. Sound traveled a long way in the desert. His loud scream—the kind of giveaway that was drilled out of every rookie ZU NOC operator—may have been so the fuckers below would hear him, think he was injured, and go after him first. To draw the enemy off Kick and Rainie. To give him time to get her to safety. And hopefully locate the field pack with the SATCOM.
Best not waste that advantage.
He urged her to her feet and thrust the wadded-up parachute at her. “Hold this. I thought I saw one of the packs on the ground as we landed. Give me a minute to find it, then we need to make tracks.”
“I’ll help,” she said, and turned in the opposite direction.
“Stay close!” he ordered brusquely, but she was already searching around a scatter of low boulders a few yards away.
“Here!” she called moments later.
She’d found the duffel bag of rifles. Quickly, he pulled out the weapons. With nothing to break the bag’s fall, one rifle’s wooden butt had cracked in half on impact; another had a bent barrel. But the third looked to be in good shape. The Heckler & Koch PSG-1 sniper.
Excellent.
The cleaning kit had made it unscathed as well.
Using the bent weapon as a spade, he swiftly dug a hole in the sand and, after removing the firing pins, buried the two useless guns. Then he took the parachute Rainie was holding and stuffed it along with the rifle and cleaning kit into the duffel and hoisted it over his shoulder.
“All right, we’re oscar mike. Shout if I go too fast for you.”
“But what about the other man?”
“We’ll find him later. Right now we need to get ourselves a place to hide.”
She didn’t argue, though she sent a troubled glance in the direction the other parachutes had gone down, on a plateau on the other side of a wide wadi, a dozen or more miles away.
“Walk in my footprints,” he told her, and took off across the rocky sand.
“Why?”
He glanced back and saw her frown as she tried to match her stride to his. He took shorter steps. “So we only leave one set of tracks.” Mostly it didn’t fool anyone, but sometimes it worked. If they were dealing with amateurs.
“Why?”
He grimaced and faced forward again as he walked, working past the pain in his leg. “That way, if they catch me, they won’t be looking for you.”
Obviously she didn’t miss the implications on both ends of that statement. She stayed silent for many minutes after that. Not that he wanted to talk.
“Where exactly are we going?” she finally asked when he stopped to examine the terrain ahead.
Good fucking question.
He was trying to stick to the rock ier, more hard-packed sand where it would be difficult to track them. They had a good shot at finding a decent hiding place in the myriad rock formations and cliff walls of the wadi that plunged down on three sides of the plateau they were on. Hopefully they could escape detection from their pursuers in the short run. But after that?
“We’ll figure that out later, too.”
“Then how do you know this is the right direction?” she asked.
“I don’t.”
That shut her up for another quarter mile of power-hiking before she broke down, breathing hard, and asked, “Kick?”
He sighed. “Yup?”
“Do you have even the remotest idea where we are?”
The corner of his lip curved in a humorless smile. That one he could answer. Because there was no doubt in his mind exactly where they were.
“In deep fucking shit.”
OF
course, Kick actually
did
know from studying the maps on the plane where they were and what direction they were headed—in general terms. Navigating in unknown territory using only the sun and stars to guide him was pure instinct after being a NOC operator for over sixteen years.
And once they were able to stop and check the SAT photo he had tucked into his DCU jacket pocket, he’d know precisely where they were.
Oh, yeah, he’d come prepared. This was not the first time he’d been goatfucked on an insert. Far from it. And if there was one thing he was good at, it was learning from his mistakes.
In the same pocket as the photo he also had a geo-map of the area, a roll of American dollars, GPS finder, pocketknife, bubble-pack of chlorine tabs, and a couple of protein bars. Strapped to his ankle was his trusty SIG Navy—which they’d returned to him at the compound—and an extra clip. Never leave home without it.
What he
didn’t
know was what the hell he was going to do about the woman. There was a ticking clock running on this gig. NSA had picked up chatter that the attack on the Western embassies in Khartoum was imminent, within the coming week it was believed. Kick had to take out abu Bakr before the terrorists made their move. He couldn’t afford any delay.
But no way in flaming hell would he take a woman along.
Somehow, he had to find a place to stash her, locate Lafayette and find out if he was still alive, and then hunt down the damn field packs. Without the SATCOM he couldn’t call in a request for someone to get the fuck down here and take her off his hands. Or to call in the STORM air strike once abu Bakr was neutralized, for that matter. And if he managed to make it though this mission alive, it was a hell of a long hike back to Egypt. No radio, no ticket home . . . for anyone.
He also had to find water fairly soon, if he didn’t retrieve at least one of the packs. The human body didn’t survive long in this scorching heat without water.
Speaking of which . . . He turned to scrutinize what Rainie was wearing. Forsythe must have scrounged her some clothes at ZU headquarters. She had on men’s jeans and a white T-shirt under a long-sleeved khaki work shirt that looked like military issue. Her sneakers weren’t ideal, but they’d do. She was still wearing his cap. Good.
“Here.” He pulled his sunglasses from his outer pocket. They were the flex kind, so the frames were unbent from his roll on the ground, but one of the lenses had popped out. He snapped it back in and slid them on her nose. “Did you put on sunblock when we did on the plane?”
“Didn’t think I’d need any,” she said, looking bleak.
Damn. Her face would burn to a crisp in this sun.
“Hang on,” he ordered, and fished a corner of the parachute out of the duffel. Silk was a bitch to rip, but he managed to tear off a large square, which he tied around her head and neck, Bedouin-outlaw-style, with just the reflection of the glasses showing beneath the brim of her cap.
She looked like a harem girl gone gangsta.
For the first time that day he smiled.
Sexy. Very sexy.
The silk crinkled, like she was smiling back. And suddenly he was struck by the most inappropriate urge to lift her makeshift veil and kiss her.
The sun must be frying his brain. The woman wanted nothing to do with him, and he didn’t blame her.
He looked away. “I’ll get you home safe, Rainie. If it’s the last thing I do,” he told the horizon.
“I know,” she whispered.
And he would. He’d get her back to her comfy life without him in New York, or he’d die trying. That was a fucking promise.
But that wasn’t what had started his insides churning with uneasiness. Or the drug cravings, either.
It was her utter faith in him that those two words—
I know
—conveyed, and the overwhelming trust in her voice as she’d said them.
That
nearly broke him in two.
“SHOULDN’T
we be heading for higher ground?”
Before answering, Kick approached the blunt drop-off of the rocky plateau they’d been hightailing it across for fifteen minutes. Though he’d never show it, he was getting very nervous. For the past little while now, carried on the desert wind, he’d picked up the whine of an engine. At first elusive as a ghost’s whisper, now it was a small but steady hum, like a gnat circling his head. The louder it got, the more his blood pressure went up.
He lifted his goggles and peered down into the sprawling wadi below. The dry riverbed that thousands of years ago flowed with cool water now flowed with a river of hot, undulating sand. He didn’t appreciate its breathtaking beauty, spread out before them in a kaleidoscope of yellows, oranges, and browns, shadows and light curving along the rippled, wind-blown surface like giant serpents, defining the shapes of the dunes. It was beautiful, but deadly.
“What about up on top of that?” Rainie pointed at a nearby low butte.
He finally glanced at her. “I see you’ve been reading your
Art of War
.”
“No. Just watched a lot of Westerns when I was a kid.”
He wished he could see her face. To glean a hint as to whether she’d had a good childhood, or a painful one. Not that it made a bit of difference. Not to the present situation.
“Higher is certainly more defensible,” he agreed. “First thing any good cowboy, Indian, or war fighter learns.”
She turned to head toward the butte. He laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Which is why we’re going down there instead.” He indicated the cliffs below their feet. “They won’t be looking for us down there.”
She peered over the edge and said a bad word.
He hiked a brow. “Afraid of heights?”
“Kick. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m afraid of pretty much everything.”
Vivid, visual memories of that night in her apartment, in her bed, flooded through him for an ill-chosen instant. “Not everything,” he said without thinking.
She made a little choking noise. Was she remembering, too? Damn, he
really
wanted to see her eyes.
He forced himself to look around instead of dragging off those stupid sunglasses.
No
time
for this crap.
He did a slow survey of the entire three-sixty of horizon, searching for a telltale dust devil.
There.
There it was.
He looked closer. No. Three. There were three distinct plumes within one long cloud of dust. And the mothers were closing in. Five, maybe ten miles away—hard to tell in the limitless landscape of the desert. The good news was, a substantial wadi lay between the plateau where the tangos were and the one Kick had deliberately aimed his parachute at, for that very reason. Crossing would slow them down. Maybe their Jeeps would even get stuck. The shifting dunes that filled the wadi bottoms could be treacherous to drive across. Even walking on them could be a crapshoot. The rare patches of quicksand were virtually indistinguishable from regular sand.
He turned back to Rainie. “They’re close,” he said. “We have to hurry.”
She nodded jerkily.
This time he was glad he couldn’t see her frightened eyes.
“Stay low,” he told her. “I’ll look for a good spot to climb down.”
He took off at a crouch-run along the very edge of the cliffs, scouting for a trail down easy enough for a woman to handle, that looked promising for possible hiding places. About a half mile away he found what he was looking for. Not a minute too soon. He waved at her to come to him, which she did, stepping on the rocks as he’d instructed so it would be impossible to tell where they’d gone over the side.
“Are you out of your mind?” she said when she saw where he intended to take her. It was a deep split in the cliff face, with a hundred-foot drop to the bottom. “I’ll never—”
“Yes. You will,” he told her firmly. “There are lots of big cracks and boulders and handholds. You’ll be fine. I’ll be right under you. I promise.”
“I can think of better ways to have you under me,” she muttered.
He darted her a shocked look. Then snapped his mouth shut. “Consider it an incentive,” he said. “Once we’re hidden, I’m all yours.”
And on that note, he dropped over the edge.
NINE
IT
took ten minutes of hard climbing to make it down to the one-quarter point from the bottom. Kick gauged they were still a good fifteen or twenty feet above the sandy surface of the wadi. Optimum cover. The whole time, the sound of the Jeeps got louder and louder. Unfortunately, they hadn’t gotten stuck. By now his pulse was pounding in his ears and his hands were shaking. He
really
wanted a fix.
“Rest here while I look around,” he ordered Rainie, guiding her under a large boulder. On the climb down he’d been watching for a likely hiding spot, but so far nothing. The sheer cliffs were pocked with wind-caves, but most were too shallow to be of any use. Those that were had been impossible to reach.
Edging along a precipice that led around a jutting cliff wall, a horizontal wedge-shaped crack in the rock with a relatively flat floor suddenly appeared before him. A relieved sigh
whooshed
from his lungs.
Finally.
The engine noise was almost on top of them. But something about it sounded different.
He took a few seconds to sweep the cave out with an edge of the parachute and make sure there were no scorpions, vipers, or other unwelcome intruders sharing the space. Then he dropped the duffel and hurried back to fetch Rainie.
He could hear voices now, shouts in Arabic—above the whine of a single motor.
Damn.
That’s why it had sounded different. One vehicle.
Which meant the tangos had split up before crossing the wadi. He was dead certain he’d had a visual on three vehicles earlier.
It was a safe bet one of them was now headed for the site of the plane crash, to see what could be scrounged from the wreckage. Kick doubted anything useful was left. The explosion had been thorough. A lucky bullet must have sparked the fuel tank.