Target of One's Own

by M. L. Buchman

  Turning away from the airport toward the near horizon dispelled that impression completely. Palm trees gave way to twisted scrub and cactus growing from the achingly dry red-brown sand. He twisted a foot and felt the slickness of blown sand over the tarred pavement. Just enough to make him compensate if he was turning a corner at a dead sprint or on a speeding motorcycle. He filed that away against future need.

  Done showing off his car, Christian waved Luke toward the back seat. It wasn’t small-car cramped, but neither was it the back of his Silverado pickup’s Crew Cab. DeMille was half the size, but he was the one crawling into the back—stupid two-doors. How did she keep making him do shit like this?

  She settled in the front passenger seat and at least had the decency to slide it forward…then she tipped the seat well back. He reached out to grab the lever and pop her upright, but the back of the seat hit the center of his chest before he could reach the control.

  Which left him staring at the top of her dark part and the cascade of blonde hair falling to either side. It looked thick and soft, perfect for a man to run his hands through and—

  He was not thinking such shit about Chief Warrant Zoe DeMille. Just plain and simple wasn’t happening.

  She tipped her head back to smile up at him upside down as if she could read his thoughts. Worse, he wouldn’t put it past her. It would explain some of why he always felt off balance around her.

  Her position also provided a very pleasant view down the front of her sundress that revealed enough to show that, while she didn’t wear a bra, she was very definitely female.

  Whatever.

  Shit! Now he was sounding like her. Given the choice, he’d rather sound like Napier, despite his new-found Colorado-pilot-Joe Friendly mannerisms while flying his Chinook.

  DeMille had placed him here. In Senegal. No idea why. And no way to ask without revealing DeMille’s game. Or maybe she and Christian were in on it together.

  If she was wasting his time, he’d see that she was busted but good and—

  Except that wasn’t like her.

  So, she did have some clear purpose but enjoyed trying to get a rise out of him by not giving him even a clue. Fine. Let her try. He pulled on his shades against the lowering sun and stared out the window to watch the desert give way to concrete buildings. Lots of them. Most of ’em empty.

  Damned weird country.

  Zoe stared out the window. She’d fallen into a strange science fiction novel. The Half-built Apocalypse or something like that. Her first ever trip to Africa, first out of the US other than some training trips to Canada and Ramstein in Germany. And that lone mission to Honduras. She’d flown all over the world from the safety and comfort of her coffin—most of the time ten miles up, but to see Africa in person from ground-level was overwhelming. She’d thought it would be so easy, like slipping down to Honduras on a luxury cruise boat had been.

  Not so much.

  At the airport, she’d focused on Christian’s Vega II partly because it was amazing, but partly because everything else was wholly disconcerting.

  She wasn’t so parochial that being one of the only three white people in the entire airport was affecting her, but everything was different.

  The clothing styles had started it. Men wore button-down white shirts, dark trousers, and leather shoes. That was fine.

  The women were swathed from neck to ankle in form-fitting dresses that came in a wild array of colors and patterns. It had taken her a long time to notice among the wild oranges, reds, purples, golds, and every other color both in and out of nature that no two were alike. The colored patterns of the material—which would appear wild in the extreme elsewhere—somehow belonged in Dakar. They were remarkably modest in that they covered the women from throat to ankle, but they also displayed them elegantly.

  During the flight she’d been particularly captivated by a teen across the aisle who would be wearing jeans, a slogan t-shirt, and Converse in any Western culture. Instead, she wore leather sandals and a stop-sign-red dress with a gigantic bloom of multicolor painted flowers flowing upward from her hip to curl around her breast and also spilling down over the skirt. It made Zoe’s own efforts to push “The Cutey-Edgy” appear timid and reserved. And it made the girl breathtakingly beautiful.

  Once away from the airport, the women’s lush fabrics were the only color to be seen.

  She’d never seen anything like what was passing outside the window, not even the desert towns near Clovis AFB.

  Christian was racing the big car along the road like a cross between a luxury liner and a cigarette racing boat. The divided highway—three lanes to either side—boasted perfect pavement, concrete dividers, Western-style exit ramps, and clusters of little orange and yellow taxis that were mere flashes in Christian’s wake.

  To either side of the pristine highway was an entire city under construction. Mile after mile of three-story apartment blocks, malls, a Yankee-stadium-sized sports arena, and more. And no sign of a single person or car on the side roads except for construction vehicles. Only the highway had traffic and no one using the big, sign-posted exits and on-ramps. This couldn’t be normal, could it? She had no way to judge.

  Anything.

  It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Hathyaron goes to race The Dakar. Superfan Christian Vehrs lets Zoe and Luke go undercover at The Dakar Rally as his “assistants.” They find and take out Hathyaron. Done. Simple.

  Except Christian was still in Dakar, Senegal, rather than preparing for the start of The Dakar Rally in Argentina. And now it was all going to hell and Luke was going to just flat out kill her for screwing it all up so badly.

  How much of her “instant plan” had been an ego trip of “Zoe knows best” and how much had been real? Was it too late to declare a mission abort? Could she ask Luke? What would he think of her if she did? This empty city was scaring her like an echo of a bitter emptiness that had devastated her so long ago. A city with no life. No purpose. No—

  “Yes, dearest Zoe,” Christian must have noticed her distraction. “It surprises all people the first time. The president, he decides that the city must grow, so he is building the city before the people come. A vast city far from any services.”

  At least he didn’t appear to have noticed her rising terror before she could throttle it back down—something she had too much practice doing.

  “Scam?” Luke asked from the back seat. He’d made no response to her laying the seat back to tease him and now it seemed even more foolish to return it to upright, which left her craning her neck to see over the dashboard. Which felt even sillier.

  Christian shrugged. “It is Africa. There is always someone else’s hand—how do you say—on the pot? It is so normal, we don’t even bother to look anymore.”

  Luke offered one of his grunts, apparently exhausting his verbal capacity by unearthing an actual word.

  She tipped her seat upright and continued watching ahead. Still no detectable reaction from Luke Altman and there was no passenger side mirror on the old car so that she might catch a glimpse of him without turning. The man was a brick—almost literally. Solid, dependable, and just as exciting. No tease penetrated his formidable facade. Had she ever seen him smile?

  So the question was, why did she keep trying? He wasn’t like her father, content with his small garage and his quiet life. Her father was an open book, a gentle man with gentle thoughts who loved his family and his cars. Yet she couldn’t leave the inscrutable SEAL alone. Maybe because she needed a distraction.

  Luke thumped the back of her seat, as if he was punching her shoulder. Not about raising her seat, she’d already done that. So why? To remind her of something? Nothing that she could think of.

  After the team had cleared out of Hathyaron’s compound, there hadn’t been time for any planning. There’d barely been time to shower and pack—there was always a sense of flying in a coffin that she had to wash off immediately after any shift. Cold, chill efficiency. As if she had indeed flown t
he Raven directly rather than remotely. She could feel the kerosene of the jet fuel drying and tightening her skin even if she couldn’t actually smell it.

  It wouldn’t bode well if Luke knew that her plan had just imploded.

  They finally moved out of the Half-built Apocalypse area and rolled into outer Dakar, the scenery changed only a little. One-story buildings of gray concrete topped with tin roofs were scattered among baobab trees—the fat gray tree trunks sported thin branches with few leaves, looking like forlorn rocket stages dropped end-on into the sand. She only recognized them from having read The Little Prince in high school French class.

  In the city itself, there were few cars, almost all old, and not all that many scooters. Sheets up on roofs drying in the hot wind indicated that there were finally a few inhabitants. The flat terrain revealed a city with a few taller buildings yet they never seemed to come closer despite their considerable speed.

  Focus. There was a reason she was here and, short of bailing out of a car going over ninety, she was stuck in a bucket seat of her own making. She didn’t want Luke giving her some other unsubtle reminder.

  “Christian. You have raced The Dakar seven times, right?” Maybe he knew Hathyaron personally.

  “Nine,” Christian suddenly lit up, as if he hadn’t already been glowing before. Some part of her had been keeping up with his inane chatter about how Zoe was his wife’s style guru and how her energy and vitality had captured his imagination as well.

  “Ever won?” The conversation killer asked from the back seat with two whole words.

  “One does not win The Dakar so easily,” Christian replied in a huff. “One survives it. The big sponsors, they command resources that we amateurs can never bring. There are over three hundred entries, and four winners each year. This is not some simple party; it is the Dakar Rally.”

  “Which isn’t in Dakar?” Luke had all the tact of a turnip.

  “Alas, no.” And Christian looked so sad that Zoe reached out to pat his arm.

  And now DeMille was getting all cozy with the guy? Holding onto his arm while he was driving at twice the speed of any other traffic?

  Hadn’t Mr. Suave said it was such a pleasure to meet her in person?

  Luke sent a secure text to Nikita: Investigate relations: Zoe DeMille, Christian Vehrs, Dakar, Senegal. Check whatever that site was you showed me.

  They waded into Dakar—the city, not the race. The capital of Senegal, it might seem a Third World city, but only on the surface. Buildings weren’t falling apart, they were being built and painted. It was being worked on in a thousand different ways.

  After a while, he managed to sort out the new construction from the old. Only after a building was finished did it get a coat of paint. He’d been in enough concrete block towns to appreciate how rare such attention was. They were done up in pastels, mostly pale yellows and equally dull blues, but they were painted. No wild Indian paint jobs here.

  The city proper had crazed traffic. The rotaries—probably used instead of traffic lights because the electricity was too unreliable—were so narrow and tight that it was hard to see how a truck or bus negotiated them even without the clutter of bicycles, scooters, and taxis ignoring any rational sense of navigation. All of the vehicles came in the same color—dust-coated red—no matter what their actual paint job might be, but they were there. It meant that they had moved beyond strictly foot-and-moped culture that so much of the Third World never made it past.

  However, they still changed lanes as if they were fresh out of the moped era—with psychotic abruptness most SEALs wouldn’t attempt. Any opening over half a car-length long was an excuse for hard acceleration, even if a pothole the size of Kansas awaited them.

  In his experience, few cities anywhere had pedestrian dress codes. Paris required a certain amount of chic—most of it black. Seattle had a dress code of never looking dressed up. Dakar did as well. Men all wore the ubiquitous slacks and button-down shirt. Some women were in the evocative dresses and others dressed similarly to the men, but all decently attired. There might not be much money here, but there was a pride in who they were. In how they carried themselves.

  He also didn’t see any beggars on the street. Little kids selling neatly folded packets of peanuts they’d toasted on a small propane burner using a steel wok, but not begging. Fruit stands could be merely a single pile of bananas. One woman sold mangoes into which she’d jabbed a wooden stick and was peeling with a small machete. He’d make a point of keeping an eye out for where these vendors were, in case he needed to grab a machete on short notice.

  The stark poverty was missing. Which was interesting. As if that low, painful layer had been scrubbed clean from the city—or perhaps never been there.

  They plunged into the city. Suddenly the massive length of Christian’s car commanded attention. But it didn’t do him any good as the congestion pressed them down to a slow jog. It let Christian babble even more in his tour-guide role.

  No obvious connections outside social media, Nikita pinged back. He responds to almost every post by Zoe, but so do hundreds of others. He’s one of the most consistent, though always in his wife’s name as he claims she is the true fan.

  He started to type back: Is hundreds good? But figured Nikita wouldn’t have mentioned it if it wasn’t. Zoe. First name basis. Of course Zoe had been Nikita’s maid-of-honor, so it made a certain sense.

  Luke stared at his phone, waiting for further information, but there wasn’t any coming in. He could feel Nikita doing that almost-smile of hers that she’d picked up since marrying Drake. Just daring Luke to ask the next question.

  To hell with that. He stuffed the phone back in his pocket.

  “The Deux Mamelles, the Two Breasts,” Christian suddenly had Luke’s complete attention. He slipped his hand onto the hilt of his hidden knife—five inches of hardened steel. While not quite his Winkler blade, if that man tried to grab DeMille’s breast, he’d find that hand pinned to his own thigh—hard.

  Christian instead waved his hand to take in the surroundings rather than making a pass at DeMille, which drastically increased his projected lifespan. But he wasn’t indicating some well-endowed woman on the street either—and there were a lot of those to see now that they were barely crawling.

  “They stand above Dakar like guardian angels.”

  Luke decided he had to be talking about the two hills. They weren’t much to look at, maybe a hundred meters tall. However, with the severe flatness of Dakar and the flatter Atlantic Ocean beyond to compare them to, they were indeed prominent—and kind of breast-shaped. The far one sported a tall lighthouse in traditional white like an oversized nipple. The near one had some crazy monument that was half as tall again as the hill it stood on. A powerful man, holding aloft a child pointing out to sea, and forty meters of bronze babe on his arm with her hair and skirt billowing out from high on her long thigh.

  But what Luke really noticed was that DeMille’s hand still rested on Christian’s arm. He remembered the feel of that from the Honduras mission where they had posed as a couple. She’d often kept her hand in the crook of his elbow when they were in public, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to her. Natural to her maybe. So foreign to him, even undercover, that he could almost feel her fingers there even now. The only people who ever touched him were the occasional bar babe, for the brief encounters that entailed, and soldiers who needed a few lessons in hand-to-hand combat.

  Except it was this Christian guy she was touching.

  Fine. Not as if he had any claim on her himself. Or interest in her.

  The Frenchman just damn well better not touch her in return.

  5

  Zoe struggled to make some sense of her surroundings. Everything had gotten so disorienting that even that slightest contact with Christian was the only thing that kept her from flying apart. She’d stopped as soon as she caught herself, but she missed that tiny bit of human contact badly.

  They were seated on the verandah
of what she supposed was an upscale Italian restaurant. The food was good—though not up to Pismo Beach standards, or even Fort Rucker DFAC standards—but the Fort Rucker Dining Facility had some seriously good cooks working the line so maybe the comparison wasn’t fair. Ahead of her lay the Atlantic: nothing but the Cape Verde Islands five hundred kilometers over the horizon until the ocean slammed up against The Bahamas. The sun was easing down toward that watery line in a sky that should be painfully blue but was tinted gold with a hazy red dust.

  The ocean didn’t smell of ocean. Nothing here smelled right. There was the faintest hint of sea salt, but none of the rich sea-ness of Pismo or the murky thickness of the Florida panhandle just south of Fort Rucker. Instead of the smell of garbage, which she’d expected, there was the smell of livestock.

  “But we’re in the heart of the city,” she’d protested when they’d been stopped along a major road while five cows had moseyed through the intersection.

  “That is Farouk’s herd,” Christian had shrugged negligently. “They make most of their living in this area. Everyone knows them. Phillipe’s goats wander less, but you can sometimes see them down that street.”

  As if on cue, she’d looked and there they were, sorting through the garbage to see what was edible. Apparently almost everything was, as every member of the small herd was chewing away happily except for a pair of baby goats chasing each other in circles.

  When they’d arrived at the restaurant, it was almost as disorienting. It was thoroughly Western in design, furnishing, and menu. The verandah perched over a craggy beach with the Atlantic rolling away from them forever.

  Between their table and the ocean were tiny patches of sand that had been leveled within rock-walled terraces and were graced with picnic-table sized, open-side thatch roof. There was nothing inside them except more sand, but it might get them clear of the sun during the daytime.