“Are you sure?”
She wiped her nose. “I haven’t slept with anyone else in almost two years. I…I was sick with a bug in Colombia, perhaps that’s why the pill didn’t work. And condoms obviously have their limitations.”
“It’s mine?”
She nodded, smiled, tentatively.
He just stared at her beautiful face, not quite able to absorb her words. He was going to be a father!
He threw back his head, closed his eyes for a second. He felt his family, his mother, father, the entire universe smiling down on him.
The irony, the absurdity of it all, was not lost on him. They’d met to kill, fallen in lust, then love, and now they’d created life.
A team.
This woman who could be his equal, who could understand who he was and what he did, was his. If she’d have him.
He cupped the back of her head, drew her close, and leaned in for a kiss. It was gentle, beautiful, and he opened her robe, placed his hands on her warm tummy, and he thought nothing in this world could be more perfect than this.
He pulled back suddenly. “Come!” he said grasping her hand. “I want to show you something.”
Omair led Faith into the salon. His energy was palpable and his eyes shone. And the relief, the love she felt for this man right now was indescribable. With her hand in his she suddenly felt invincible.
He brought her up to a paneled wall on which a series of photographs had been mounted. He pointed to one.
“That’s my brother Zakir, beside Nikki, his queen.”
Faith stepped forward to study the photo more closely. Nikki was wearing a diaphanous veil, her hair covered. Around them children of various ages played, all dark-skinned. Faith had read that Zakir’s queen was of Nordic origin and she was surprised to see that Nikki covered herself even in a family photo.
“Those seven are their adopted children.” Omair smiled. “All were war orphans, children of violent pasts. Nikki saved them.”
“I didn’t know.”
“She used to be a renowned Chicago eye surgeon, married to a man who was, at the time, a top Chicago lawyer. They had two beautiful toddlers.”
Faith shot him a glance. “I thought she came from Norway.”
He placed his arm around her shoulders. “There’s a reason I’m telling you this, Faith. It’s a family secret. It’s why Nikki doesn’t leave Al Na’Jar, and it’s why she always wears a veil in any public photo. I’m trusting you with this secret because you trusted me with yours. And I believe in my heart you will never hurt Nikki by talking about this, because she was like you.”
“An assassin?”
He laughed. “No, she wanted to hide. She fled from her very powerful and abusive husband who is now about to become one of the most powerful men in the United Sates.”
A chill washed over her skin. “You can’t mean—”
“Senator Sam Etherington.”
Her mouth opened, her brain racing.
Sam Etherington hailed from Chicago and had a legal background. His first wife—Dr. Alexis Etherington, an eye surgeon—drove off a bridge with their twins, killing them. Dr. Etherington spiraled mentally after that, eventually losing her medical license. The media raked her through the mud over it all, and then she just disappeared. It was a huge mystery at the time. The senator had her declared dead in absentia years later. He’d since remarried and had two more children.
“Sam Etherington tried to kill his wife, Faith. He hired a hit man who ran her off an icy bridge. Then he tried to blame his wife for the deaths of their children.”
“I remember the accident,” she whispered. “It was all over the news, particularly because Sam was running for a senatorial seat at the time.” She shot him a look. “Nikki is Alexis?”
He nodded. “She fled her country under very difficult circumstances, and she came to Africa where she could save children because she hadn’t been able to save her own. For five years Nikki worked as a volunteer nurse at a mission orphanage in one of the most remote and hostile regions of the northwest Sahara. But when rebels attacked the mission, killing everyone, she was forced to flee into the desert with a small surviving band of orphans. When she unwittingly crossed into Al Na’Jar in the middle of the last coup attempt, Zakir took her in. Zakir himself was struggling with the fact he’d just become king of a country in chaos. And he was going blind. Nikki became his guiding force, and he fell in love with her. He did everything to protect her from Sam, Faith. Like I will protect you from STRIKE.”
“Omair, if this news about Nikki gets out now, it could scuttle the senator’s run for the White House,” she said. “It could send him to prison.”
“It won’t get out. Because protecting Nikki’s anonymity, her secret, her new life is paramount to all of us.”
“Even if it means the senator—the future president—gets away with murder?”
Omair nodded. “Unless Nikki wants different. I helped build her new identity with my FDS contacts. Together Zakir and I gave her a past, and a future. This is how much I—we—can we can do for you, Faith. We can build you a new life.”
He turned to her. “If you will let me.”
But before she could say another word, a pinging alarm sounded urgently from the bridge.
Omair’s body went rigid.
“That’s the satellite surveillance system,” he said quietly. “We’ve got company.”
*
Faith ran after him as he took the stairs to the bridge two at a time, the setting sun bronze on his torso. Her mind reeled with the information he’d just given her, but there was no time to think about it. He’d pulled up a live satellite view of their location, and two crafts were rapidly approaching their yacht in a pincer format—one coming from the east and one from the south.
“High performance jet boats,” he said. “Military class.”
Faith’s pulse started to race.
The boats slowed suddenly in unison, and stopped.
“They’ve stopped just outside our radar range.”
“They think we can’t see them?”
He nodded. “My bet is they don’t know we have military-standard satellite surveillance on board, and that we can see them from the air,” he said quietly, watching the boats. “The Al Na’Jar military uses geo-stationary
satellites to produce very detailed imagery of the western Sahara and coastal regions. Zakir acquired the technology for Al Na’Jar after receiving threats from rebels with base camps in the desert. The yacht has access to it.”
“What do you thing they’re doing, laying low until dark?”
He nodded. “They’ll probably come in quietly, surprise us.”
Omair calmly powered up the yacht engines, began to move slowly south, then changed direction suddenly.
The boats adjusted their positions accordingly, maintaining their speed, staying the same distance away.
“They know we’re here—they’re locked onto us. They must also be using a satellite system, which likely means military connections.”
“You said no one apart from your brother and the evac team knew we were on this boat.”
Omair frowned, moistened his lips. Either they’d been tracked somehow, or worse, there was an internal breach in Zakir’s team. The sun was already beginning to dip into the sea and once it got fully dark, this satellite system—and theirs—would have limitations.
He zoomed closer in on the satellite image.
“I can make out five people in total,” he said, studying the boats. “Could be more below deck.” He reached for his encrypted sat phone and called Zakir.
“We’ve got company. Two high-performance crafts, minimum five occupants, just outside of radar range. Looks like they’re going to move when it’s dark in an effort to surprise us. We’re going to need backup.” He hesitated. “Who knows about this, Zakir?”
“The extraction team. So far that’s all.”
“We might have a breach,” Omair said quietly in Arabic. “Whoever you deploy
for backup, keep them in the dark, a need-to-know basis only, and if we get through this, I want everyone to believe Faith died in the attack.”
“You better get through it, my brother,” Zakir replied. “Nikki went into labor an hour ago, and when those twins come out into this world, they’re going to want to meet their uncle, understand?”
Emotion tightened Omair’s chest. He glanced at Faith. He wanted to share their news with Zakir. But now was not the time to tell his brother that he, too, was going to be a father.
Signing off, Omair said to Faith, “Best-case scenario is air support from Al Na’Jar within three hours—they’ll need to get through Moroccan airspace to the coast, and then fly over the ocean.” He zoomed the image out as he spoke.
“The closest mainland is the coastline south of Casablanca to the east, over here.” He pointed. “The next closest land is the island of Funchal, there to the west of us.”
“And miles of nothing but ocean in between,” Faith said. “The sun will set before reinforcements reach us.” She began to pace, tying her robe closed. Then she whirled back to face him.
“You’ve got dive gear on board—I saw it.”
“What are you thinking?”
“That we’re not going to get backup before those jet boats move in. Either they’re going to blast us right out of the water with RPGs, or they’re going to board with weapons. Either way we’re outgunned and outnumbered. Once they start to move closer they risk us picking them up on radar, even in the dark, so I figure the most efficient way for them is to come in at high speed, and fire some kind of handheld missile. Boom, we’re gone.”
“What do you suggest?”
“The only way for us to survive is to go underwater, below the boat. Way below. At night they won’t likely pick this up on satellite. And if for some reason they don’t try and blast us out and come aboard instead, we can surface, come over the backs of their crafts, and use the element of surprise.”
She moved to the door. “I’m going to get the scuba tanks. I saw them on the deck—”
But he grabbed her, his face going serious. “Faith, you can’t do this.”
“Of course I can, I’ve worked scenarios like this before.”
“No, I mean, I can’t allow you to do it. You’re pregnant. Diving is not safe, the fetus absorbs as much nitrogen as the mother and can’t get rid of it.”
She hesitated.
“Are…you sure?”
“There’ve been no official studies done, but the consensus is that depth and pressure increase risk to the fetus. This information I got from a medic with the FDS—we had a military diver who got pregnant, and they made her take maternity leave as soon as they knew.”
She dragged her hands over her hair, going suddenly pale. “Dammit, Omair, you’ve just given me all the reason in the world to live, to change, to try something new. I’m used to being in control—I can’t just sit here!”
Conflict tore through Omair.
He didn’t want to risk harming his child, but she was right, their chances were not good above water. Then it hit him. He jerked back, holding her at arm’s length.
“The diver propulsion vehicles! They’re like underwater jet skis—the DPVs can be set to shut off at a predetermined depth. It’s not breathing the compressed air from the tanks that’s dangerous, Faith, it’s depth. We could use the scuba tanks, stay no more than eight feet below the surface and travel out from the yacht. If we leave right now we can put in some good distance before nightfall. Go get suited up!”
Omair quickly called Zakir, outlining their strategy. “We’ll set a direct westerly course toward the island of Funchal.”
“The batteries on the DPVs won’t last that long,” Zakir replied. “You won’t reach land.”
“We’ll take the individual survival rafts with us, inflate them once the coast is clear. We’ll need long line evacuation from the ocean when the helos get here. The rafts have personal locator beacons that are activated upon inflation. And I’ll have my sat phone.”
He gave Zakir the yacht coordinates.
“I’ve got you on satellite now, I can see where you are.” He paused. “Be careful.”
“The twins?”
“Not yet. By the time we pluck you from the ocean, they’ll be waiting for you. Don’t disappoint Nikki, Omair.”
Omair heard the subtext and worry in his brother’s words.
“I won’t.” Omair signed off, raced to the next deck. Faith was pulling a wetsuit over her naked body. He stalled for a moment at the sight of her full bare breasts as she zipped the suit over them.
“Not exactly comfortable,” she said. “But no time to find a bathing suit.”
Omair’s chest tightened. He realized now why she’d looked softer, more feminine to him. It was the pregnancy. Her breasts were full because of it. She glowed with it. A powerful protective fire began to rage in him. Nothing in this world was going to stop him from marrying her, being with her for the rest of his life—as long as she would have him.
He suited up himself, tested the scuba tanks. She grabbed a pair of fins and shrugged on her tank as he checked the charge on the DPVs. He zipped his phone into a waterproof pouch, gave her a diving knife, and he took a spear gun. They each slung a canister containing a single person inflatable life raft across their chests.
Within fifteen minutes they were bobbing quietly in the slowly heaving swells alongside the yacht as the sun sank below the horizon. They waited a few moments longer for full dark, when they’d no longer be visible via satellite from the sky.
Omair met her eyes through the dive mask. She gave a thumbs-up, nodded.
And down they went. LCD displays showed depth, and at a mere eight feet they leveled out below the surface. Bubbles streamed behind them as they put the DPVs to full speed, using their bodies and fins like dolphins to steer.
Faith’s hair flowed white behind her and Omair smiled around his mouthpiece—she was his killer mermaid. And if this worked, if the yacht was blown up, it was the perfect time for her to vanish from her old world for good, and enter his new one.
They traveled for almost an hour in the mystical darkness of the ocean, tiny lights from their DPVs throwing phosphorescence in their wake. Through the surface above they could see the glimmer of stars. After another hour of traveling, Omair flicked his light, their sign. She killed her engine, and their vehicles floated slowly to the surface as they held on.
They bobbed on the surface in the dark for maybe twenty minutes before an explosion sent shock waves through the water. About ten miles out an orange glow lit the sky. They watched it fade over time as pieces of Da’ud’s yacht burned and drifted down to Davy Jones’s locker. No one would know they weren’t on that boat.
When the fire in the distance had died, and there was no sign of any jet crafts heading their way, they inflated their personal survival rafts.
The U-shaped design of the rafts allowed for easy entry from the water, and with the sea anchor deployed, the rafts floated facing downwind so the canopies could remain unzipped.
Omair held on to Faith’s raft as they bobbed in the dark. Their bodies were submerged below the waterline, which was comfortable but cold.
After yet another hour, the cold grew bitter. Faith began to shiver, but it didn’t matter. She reached out for Omair’s hand, squeezed. Even adrift in the ocean in the dark and cold she’d never felt safer. And in the darkness like this, she sensed they were three, a family. Them against the world on the ocean of life.
“Will you marry me, Faith?” he said suddenly out of the darkness.
Surprise rippled through her. Then she laughed, but she quieted as she felt the weight of his sincerity in the following silence.
She glanced at him, his black eyes glittering in the shadows of his orange life cocoon.
“I never dreamed about getting married,” she said, “but if I had, not in my wildest fantasies could I have imagined being proposed to in his-and-her life rafts in the m
iddle of the Atlantic Ocean.”
Silence descended, apart from the slap of water against their rafts.
“You didn’t answer,” he said after a while.
“I think you know the answer,” she replied quietly. “I was destined to be a part of your life, one way or another, from the day I saw you in that Tagua cantina, Santiago.”
He chuckled. “So that’s a yes?”
“It’s a maybe. Yes would make it too easy for you.”
He yanked her raft toward him, reached over and kissed her.
They fell silent again, and time seemed to stretch to eternity as they watched the heavens move above them. Faith supposed that if they did die out here together, it would still be a good ending, considering her life, and all the other ways she could have gone. She started to drift inside her mind, shivering in the cold.
“Why’d you never dream of marriage?”
She pulled herself back into focus. “Let’s just say my father and mother weren’t exactly great ambassadors for the institution of marriage and family life.” She was unable to keep the bitterness from her voice.
“They made me see marriage was a farce, a lie, and that behind smiling families and little white picket fences, there lurked dark things you didn’t share with neighbors.” She paused. “I hated them both because of it.”
“Yet you brought a damaged photo of them on your mission—why?”
Memories rolled through Faith’s mind. She listened to the small slaps of water and she felt something nudge her below, at first soft, then hard, maybe a fish. She looked up at the sky again, noting the passage of the stars. Help better come soon or they were going to end up as shark bait.
“Why the photo, Faith?” he repeated.
“I don’t really understand why I brought it, Omair,” she said eventually. “I’ve always tried to block my childhood out, and when I signed up with STRIKE, I threw everything from my past away, but that one photo of my mother holding me… I couldn’t let it go. I put it in a safe deposit box, and when I suspected I was pregnant, just before flying out on the Algiers mission, I found myself at the bank looking for that photo. It was like I needed to understand, accept something.”
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