Guarding the Princess

by Loreth Anne White

  And leaving horses tethered was not really an option if Amal didn’t want them eaten by night predators.

  The rock walls of the Valley of Ghosts loomed suddenly into view once again, black shadows etched with scrub on top. He veered off the track that would have led them out of the wide part of the gorge, and entered the narrowing part instead. From this point the cliff walls began to funnel inward.

  Brandt spun Skorokoro’s wheels for good measure, making sure their change in direction was easily visible in the silver moonlight. Then he drove down the gorge, along the dry riverbed of sand. Cliffs started to close tightly in on either side of them, blocking the moon. In his rearview mirror he could clearly see Skorokoro’s tire marks in the sand.

  They arrived at the end of the gorge—barely the width of three jeeps. Here, the ground fell away into what was a thundering waterfall in the height of the rainy season. Brandt maneuvered the jeep behind an outcrop of rock. Unless Amal was checking topographical maps as he pursued them, which Brandt doubted, he would not be aware the ground fell away here in a dead end. Amal’s presumption would more likely be that Brandt had continued through the gap.

  He cut the ignition and turned to Dalilah.

  “This is it.” His eyes met hers. “Ready?”

  She nodded, reached for his hand, squeezed.

  “Let’s do this, then,” he said.

  Brandt carried one of the boxes of handmade grenades, picking a fairly easy route up through the rocky gorge wall, Dalilah right behind him. Near the top of the ridge, beside a flat rock, he set the box down. Brandt balanced a bottle of petrol on the rock, checking it was level enough—it was.

  “Remember, as you light the Molotovs, throw them immediately, and gravity will do the rest. You going to manage with that arm?”

  She nodded. “I’ll position the Molotov on the rock, light, then throw.”

  He handed her the lighter. “Be careful, concentrate.”

  She took it from him and he realized she was shaking.

  “You’ll be safe up here, Dalilah,” he said, holding her gaze with his own. “Just stay down behind the rocks. I’ll be on the opposite side of the gorge over there with the gun—I’ll keep them busy. When you hear my whistle, toss the first grenade.”

  “I got it.”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I will be.”

  He turned to head back down.

  “Brandt—”

  He stilled.

  “Promise me that you’ll take me home after. To your farm.”

  Brandt held her gaze in the moonlight and his chest hurt. “I promise,” he whispered. And it solidified his intent—his plan was suddenly crystal sharp in his mind and he knew from the bottom of his soul that he was going to get her out of this alive. And once it was done, they’d both be free, in so many more ways than one.

  “Good.” She smiled. “Because I know you don’t break a promise.”

  Brandt hurried down through the rocks, and this time he took two boxes from the jeep—the other container of cola bombs and a box that contained the small camp stove, a tin of kerosene and the pot filled with rifle shells.

  He found a good spot that was protected by rocks and there he set down the cola bottles filled with petrol. He then trotted along the ridge about a hundred meters in the direction from which they’d come and set up the stove with the pot of bullets on top. He poured kerosene over them and steadied his breathing as he watched the darkness. It wasn’t too long before he saw the flash of headlights in the distance, coming along the gorge bottom. Then came the second set—both vehicles going slowly enough so as not to lose Skorokoro’s tire marks in the sand. No horses, just as he’d figured.

  Brandt waited until they got a little closer. Then he turned the knob on the camp stove and lit the gas. The bullets would explode and the men would think they were being fired on from behind. He ran back to where he’d left his handmade grenades.

  Taking one of the bottles out of the box, he readied his match. The headlights came closer and he could hear the purring of the engines. His heart jackhammered. Across the ridge, he caught the gleam of Dalilah’s hair in the moonlight. Tension whispered through him, but he settled it—putting his mind in the zone, a place he was familiar with. And waited for his prey to arrive.

  *

  Jacob felt something was wrong as soon as the jeeps entered the dark gorge—the sixth sense of a hunter. A sense of foreboding. This was a trap—he was sure of it. But he said nothing from his seat in the back of one of the jeeps. Jock’s head rested on his lap. Amal sat in front of him.

  Jacob scanned the black cliff faces that were closing in on either side of them. Then suddenly a glint of reflected moonlight up on the ridge caught his eye. His heart began to pound and sweat beaded on his brow. Still, Jacob said nothing to the man in the front seat, but he quietly removed the leash from Jock’s collar so the dog would be able to flee.

  Suddenly gunfire sounded in the ridge behind them. All the men in the two jeeps spun around. Amal yelled for his driver to speed up.

  The drivers gunned forward, but the cliff walls grew very narrow. Jacob heard a sharp whistle. Then a flare of orange fire came arcing down from the sky. The fireball hit the bonnet of their jeep and a bottle exploded into a raging burst of flame.

  Another fireball came down from the other cliff wall, hit behind them. Then more bombs, followed by gunfire. The jeep engine caught fire. Amal and his men dived out of the vehicle, seeking cover in the rocks.

  Jacob bailed, leaping from the backseat. Jock followed him. Mbogo was barking orders, trying to shoot up at the cliff face from behind rocks on the canyon floor.

  More Molotov cocktails rained from the sky. The second jeep exploded into flames.

  One of the men caught a bullet in the neck, and fell, his gun flying from his hands. Jacob scrabbled over the sand, grabbed the automatic rifle. And from the cover of a rock he aimed at five of the men now huddled in a group behind an outcropping to avoid being shot from above—they were sitting ducks the instant they moved. Jacob squeezed the trigger, his thin, old body jerking as he raked a barrage of bullets over the men. Then he shot them all again, to be sure.

  Breathing hard, he stilled. Jacob quickly did the math—there’d been eleven men in total in the posse, including the one-armed Arab and his giant sidekick. But four of the men on horses had headed south when they’d been stumped by a series of cattle grids.

  He’d shot five. There were two left somewhere. Jacob’s heart hammered. Where were the others?

  Suddenly a gleam caught his eye—the shiny bald pate of Mbogo climbing the cliff, using rocks as cover from whoever was above, and he was moving fast. Jacob’s gaze shifted farther up the cliff face. His pulse kicked—the woman. He saw her move, moonlight on her hair, the shape of her silhouette as she darted from one rock to another.

  Mbogo had almost reached her.

  An explosion rent the air as one of the jeep’s fuel tanks blew. Bitter smoke billowed through the gorge as flames roared and crackled. Jacob crept quickly through the shadows and smoke, wanting a clear line to Mbogo. He’d lost sight of the Arab who’d leaped from the vehicle without a gun.

  Crouching, Jacob pressed the rifle stock to his shoulder, aimed and squeezed the trigger.

  The big man’s body jerked and spasmed under a hail of bullets. Then he tumbled, thudding down like a giant rag doll between the rocks.

  But before Jacob could move, he heard Jock’s low, throaty growl, and suddenly the animal was beside him, snarling. Jacob realized too late why—the Arab leaped down from a rock above him. And he felt the dagger go deep into his side.

  Amal yanked the dagger out, but before he could plunge it in again, Jock lunged at the man’s throat. Amal screamed, a terrible sound, followed by sick wet tearing, growling as he struggled with one hand to fight off the dog.

  Jacob put his hand to his waist. Blood was soaking through his shirt, through his fingers. He pressed his hand to the wound, tried
to crawl away.

  Then his world went black.

  *

  Brandt stilled. Beneath the roar of flames he detected human screams that chilled him to the bone. He listened carefully, trying to separate the sounds. He thought he could hear animal snarls, like a wild dog attack. Nausea washed over him as an image of his son’s body slammed through his mind.

  Then suddenly there was silence. Deadly silence, apart from the crackle of fire. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but someone down there had killed five men of his own party in a hail of bullets, then shot another who had been climbing up toward Dalilah, just as Brandt had been about to fire on the man himself.

  He put his fingers into his mouth, issued three shrill whistles. In the moonlight on the other side he saw Dalilah wave her arm up.

  Relief bottomed out of his stomach. Her orders were to stay hidden until he’d scoped out the place properly—there could still be someone down there alive.

  Brandt waited another few beats. Still no sound. Heart thudding, he made his way carefully down between the rocks, gun in hand.

  Five bodies lay in a twisted mess at the bottom of the cliff.

  Amal, however, was not among these five dead. Brandt crept along the gorge bottom, staying in shadows. Smoke was thick and acrid down here, the smell of fuel strong. Then out of the blackness between rocks, something came at him.

  He spun around, gun leading, and then his heart stalled. An animal—a dog. Advancing toward him, blood on his mouth—like a ghost. A ghost from his past.

  Jock.

  For a nanosecond Brandt couldn’t think as past looped into present. Then he snapped back, curling his finger around the trigger as he aimed at the animal.

  But the dog lowered his head suddenly as he neared, its tail tucking in as it edged toward him sideways, wiggling, whining. That’s when Brandt saw Amal’s body behind the rock—throat ripped out. Arm mauled. Dead. This dog had killed the one-armed bandit? Another body lay in the sand a few metres away from Amal.

  They were all dead, every single one of the men who had entered the ambush.

  Confusion raced through Brandt’s mind as he crouched down and took hold of the animal’s collar. He reached for his flashlight, shone it on the tag.

  Jock.

  His heart began to hammer overtime, his life flashing before his eyes—images of Stefaan, mauled. His own dog, blood on its mouth. Yolanda. His brother. He was beyond exhausted—he hadn’t slept for days, he told himself. He was hallucinating, here in the Valley of Ghosts—seeing a dog from his past.

  Fatigue was catching up with him, that’s all this was. Brandt tried to shake the ghostly sensation as he whistled for Dalilah.

  While he waited for her to come down, he read the name on the dog’s tag again, just to be certain he’d seen it right the first time. “Hey, buddy,” Brandt said, crouching. “What happened here? Where are you from?”

  The dog whimpered then slithered off to a body lying not far from Amal. He licked the man’s face, then lay down beside him with another whimper.

  Frowning, Brandt went over to the body.

  Dalilah came scrambling down the rocks behind him.

  She froze.

  “That’s Jock!” she whispered.

  “I know,” he said, crouching beside the dog. Just like the animal he’d rescued from the wilds in Caprivi, the one his brother shot. It looked exactly the same—a russet Staffordshire cross, stocky and strong.

  “Jock from the safari lodge,” she said, still trying to wrap her own head around the animal’s appearance in the Valley of Ghosts. “The lodge owner told us he was using him to track… Oh, my God.” She dropped to her haunches beside Brandt. “This is Jacob. He’s the lodge tracker—Amal must have forced them to trail us, Brandt.”

  An AK-47 lay in the sand next to him.

  “It must have been Jacob,” he said, looking at the gun, “who turned on them all. He killed Amal’s men, and Amal must have attacked him—Jock tried to protect him.”

  Dalilah reached to feel for a pulse at the old man’s neck.

  “He’s alive, Brandt! He’s got a pulse!”

  Quickly they rolled him over. There was blood across his abdomen, and more blood pooled dark in the sand under him. Yanking up the old man’s shirt, Brandt shone his flashlight over him. “He’s been stabbed.”

  Brandt ripped off his own shirt. Balling it up, he pressed it to the old man’s wound. “Hold this! I’m going to see if I can bring our jeep round.”

  Dalilah pressed the balled-up shirt into Jacob’s side as Brandt ran off to find the jeep. Smoke burned her throat and eyes, a fire still crackling in one of the engines.

  The dog whimpered beside her, wriggling closer to Jacob. Emotion squeezed through Dalilah’s chest, and her attention went to the mauled body lying a few feet from her.

  Amal Ghaffar. The one-armed enemy of the Al Arif clan, dead in the moonlight, a hooked and bejewelled dagger covered with blood at his side. Killed by a dog. It seemed fitting somehow, she wasn’t sure why. But however this bastard had died, a battle of decades was finally over. An era of true peace was finally possible for the Al Arif family. And it had ended in the Valley of Ghosts.

  Bile rose in her throat, and she looked away.

  The dog stayed with her, whimpering softly. Tears pooled and ran down her cheeks.

  Two days later

  Brandt and Dalilah had been in Gaborone, the Botswana capital, for over forty-eight hours now. They’d driven Jacob in Skorokoro to the nearest town, where Brandt had accessed a phone and secured a chopper. Jacob had been airlifted with them and Jock to the Princess Marina Hospital, where he’d gone straight into surgery. Luckily, he was going to survive.

  When Jacob had been able to speak after the operation, he’d told Brandt he’d seen signs of the ambush as they entered the gorge, and he’d said nothing—he’d wanted Amal to die, and he’d figured Amal was going to kill him and the dog anyway. Jacob preferred going by ambush, he’d told Brandt.

  They’d also learned from him that all the staff back at the Zimbabwe lodge had been systematically slaughtered, including Jacob’s wife. He had no remaining family.

  Brandt invited the old tracker to come stay on his farm, where the old man could heal and be with Jock for as long as he wanted. Brandt was indebted to Jacob—he’d kept the blood off both his and Dalilah’s hands. He couldn’t begin to say what this meant to him.

  After contacting Omair, Brandt had also spent a full day with the Botswana police and military. The Botswana army had rounded up Amal’s remaining four horsemen and had been in contact with Interpol and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. A most-wanted terrorist had been killed. The hunt for Amal Ghaffar, son of the infamous Aban Ghaffar—aka the Moor—was finally over.

  While Dalilah had shopped for clothes and rested in a suite at Gaborone’s top hotel, Brandt had printed the photographs he’d shot of Dalilah. His favorite image of the bunch he’d had enlarged. It was now wrapped and ready to go up on his bedroom wall. He’d then deleted the files from the camera, packaged it up with the wallet and mailed it to the driver’s-license address in Germany, along with a substantial check to cover any other expenses incurred for their losses. Omair could reimburse him later.

  Meanwhile, a pilot colleague of Brandt’s was on standby with a chopper at Madikwe Safari Lodge about thirty klicks outside Gaborone. Brandt had left Jock at the lodge with the pilot. When Jacob was ready to leave hospital, he’d have both Jacob and the dog flown up to his place together. Money was no object—Omair had wired a small fortune into Brandt’s account, and he had no qualms accepting it. He’d paid his debt to the sheik. He’d done the job. And he was going to need a new plane.

  The hard part—telling Omair about his feelings for Dalilah—was yet to come.

  Brandt pulled up outside the hotel, a low, functional-looking building with a nice pool outside. Gaborone was a small town by city standards, and this was what passed as the top hotel.

  Nerves wash
ed through him as he gathered a bouquet of flowers off the passenger seat. He still hadn’t slept and he felt a little rough around the edges, but he’d bought flowers and was dressed in new khaki shorts and a fresh white shirt. He’d shaved and had his hair cut. Brandt rubbed his smooth jaw now as he strode across the baking-hot parking lot, feeling naked without his usual stubble.

  He hadn’t seen Dalilah since she’d had her arm reset at the hospital, and nerves bit deeper as he entered the hotel lobby. He felt like a teen on a first date.

  Another wave of anxiety washed through Brandt as he started down the long corridor to her room. He wondered suddenly if this was foolish, if she might have had a change of heart—if her words had all been in the heat of battle, and now that things were settling, she’d go back to her duty.

  To Haroun.

  To being the princess—the real Arabian queen—she was born to be.

  What on earth made him think she’d actually want to stay at his farm in the remote bush? Would she really be that interested in what he wanted to show her on his land, on getting to know him better?

  He nodded to the security detail he’d had posted outside her door, then paused, perspiration pricking over his body, his hand fisting around the bouquet of flowers. He should back out now. Call it quits. Save face, make it easier on both of them.

  In spite of his anxiety, he raised his hand, rapped once on the door.

  Silence.

  Heart pounding, he glanced back down the corridor. Then suddenly he heard her voice inside and the door swung wide open.

  Freshly showered, hair wet, wearing nothing but the hotel’s white terry robe and her new fiberglass cast, Dalilah stood with a cell phone pressed to her ear. She was in the midst of conversation with someone and beckoned to him to come in, mouthing, “Omair.”

  “I’ll come back later,” Brandt said, hesitating.

  She frowned, shook her head and reached for his hand, pulling him inside her room. As Brandt closed the door behind him, he caught the scent of soap and shampoo. Desire rushed through him.

  She pointed to the bar as she walked over to the window, saying something in Arabic into the phone. Brandt felt tense—Omair was not going to be pleased when he learned that Brandt had not only saved Dalilah’s life, but now planned on keeping his sister for the rest of his life. If she’d have him.