The soldier glanced inside the cab, then rifled through the sheath of papers. Raising a beckoning hand, he called over two other guards. They appeared to be hassling over the papers, delaying the convoy while they held a conference among themselves.
Yasmin’s bandaged hand gripped Sam’s thigh, near his crotch, and he came close to ejaculating.
The main guard stepped to the back to raise the tarpaulin. In the rearview mirror, Sam saw Jack nod at something the guard asked. What was back there? Anything suspicious? Only his duffle bag, Janet’s backpack, and Jack’s canvas carryon. And, of course, the qat. Yasmin, the beautiful one, had nothing.
At last, the guard nodded and marched on back to the convoy’s last car of tourists, occupied by the two German couples.
Once away from the first checkpoint, Sam could feel the tension ease from Yasmin’s body. He could only hope that when all this was over, she might walk away unscathed. Ultimately, that decision wasn’t his.
Within the hour, he was in heaven, because she fell asleep and gradually her head gave into gravity and rested on his shoulder. The descent from the mountain’s eastern side was sheer enough to cause the ears to pop. Alas, his princess awoke.
Janet had never gone to sleep. He wondered if she ever did. She seemed ever alert. Ever scanning. Ever analyzing.
The air quickly warmed, and Sam turned off the heater and rolled down the window. Ahead, dawn’s early light was pinking the sky. From the beige, sprawling scrubby plateau, the heat-baked asphalt road steadily took the convoy uphill toward black rocky outcrops, part of a low line of a mountain ridge.
The convoy never made it that far.
Directly in front of Sam, an enormous fire ball exploded, rattling the Toyota violently. Abruptly, he braked. Aghast, he stared ahead into the swirling smoke and flames. The lead escort pickup packed with guards and the Land Cruiser carrying the Mormon missionaries had been instantly incinerated.
Yasmin screamed, her bandaged hand gripping his thigh again.
“Get off the road!” Janet shouted.
A little difficult, he thought, wedged between the inebriated German tourists behind him and the flaming remnants of wreckage in front. Perspiration beaded on his temples. Quickly, he performed a three point turn, gunned the motor, and shot from the asphalt like a rocket. The Toyota veered off into the desert, slammed into the sand, bounced twice, and then stuck. Nothing. No traction. Vaguely, he was aware his nose was spurting blood in a shotgun spread pattern after his face had smashed into the steering wheel.
Then, behind him another ear-shattering, ground-shaking explosion lit his rear-view mirror. The Peugeot of Germans and the rear escort pickup of soldiers were evaporated.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Janet and Jack collided outside the faded red pickup. “I’ll drive!” Jack yelled. “Sam get out!”
Blinded by blood, Sam flung open the door and stumbled out.
“The pickup’s going nowhere,” she yelled back. “Let some air out of the driver-side tires. I’ll get the passenger’s side.”
She figured whoever was firing the missile launchers was quite likely using the most recent, the M20A1B1. Its range extended a thousand yards at the most. Their assailant had to be firing then from the rocky outcrop up ahead – which put the Toyota just on the fringe of the shouldered-fired missile’s capability.
As the air hissed from the first tire, she steeled her mind against the smell of roasting flesh drifting toward the Toyota. She darted toward the rear tire.
“”This tire’s kaput,” Jack shouted.
Next instant, she was blown off her feet by the impact of a fiery ball, only yards off to the right. She lay stunned. Beneath her, the ground still trembled as though from an earthquake aftershock. The searing dry heat was an open furnace. Its fiery light out-glared the rising sun. Surely, the nearby globe of flames was drying her blood to a thick crust of pulverized cement.
Then she felt herself lifted, cradled. Her name shouted, twice. Louder, it seemed, than the explosion. She peeled back her lids, saw Jack. His intense expression puzzled her. “You got my attention,” she murmured. “You can stop yelling.”
His gaze moved rapidly over her face, checking. Then he shoved her into the Toyota’s passenger side. Next to her, Yasmin was murmuring something, but Janet’s ears were still ringing.
On Yasmin’s other side, Jack threw the Toyota into drive. Wheels spun. He shoved the gear into reverse, then drive, rocking the pickup. Traction! The green pickup rocketed out through the sandy flats just as another fireball shattered the exact site where the Toyota had been stuck. It shuddered violently and, propelled by the explosion, flew through the air, then landed and bounced again before regaining a lurching traction.
“Sam?” Janet asked, her parched voice of concern falling somewhere between a whisper and a groan.
For the first time, Yasmin’s ripe lips split into a full grin, displaying teeth almost as white as Sam’s. But then no one’s could be that white. She nodded back over her shoulder. “In the back, under the tarpaulin.”
Backing Carpal Tunnel Sin? Janet shook her head, pinched her nose, and blew, clearing her ears.
“Where to now?” Jack asked, grimacing with each plunge of the flat-crippled pickup.
Janet scrubbed her face with her palms, trying to scrub her thought processes clean, as well. “We can’t go back to the road. They’ll be waiting to ambush us once the road gets to the pass.”
He shook his head. “Well, I can tell you now this old girl isn’t going to make it over that steep ridge of rocks.”
“Zig-zag, Jack! Now! I’m thinking.”
“Think quick, please!” He wrenched the wheel to the left, and Yasmin and she were slammed toward his shoulder.
“We don’t want to stay in the vicinity,” Yasmin said.
“Yeah” she muttered, “the cockroaches you warned about.” The outlaws who hid on the fringes of the Empty Quarter and Yemen’s PSO and fugitive jihadists who crawled its perimeters, as well as the wild tribes who ruled its vastness – those fireballs could attract their attention.
He spun the wheel to the right. Yasmin crashed against her and she was flung against the door.
“And we don’t have a compass,” she finished. “Getting lost in the Empty Quarter is less than ideal.” The desert was larger than the state of Texas. “So head parallel with the road, straight toward that high rocky ridge.”
He raked a brow. “Straight toward the bad guys firing on us?”
“They haven’t fired in the last minute or so,” she stalled. “Maybe they’re out of rounds. Once we reach that ridge, we’re below their sites.”
Another whoosh of yellow-orange flames directly behind them shuddered the ground, the truck, and its passengers.
Jack ratcheted the wheel back to the left. “Plan B?” he yelled, floor-boarding the decrepit pickup.
Go home.
Home? Home was Arizona’s desert and mountains. She mentally shrugged. “Like I said, head toward that low mountain.”
* * * * *
“You’re not climbing up there alone!” Jack gritted.
Janet rolled her eyes. “Yes, I am.” She, Jack, and a rather stunned Yasmin and Sam stood in the shadows of the ridge’s base, where their pickup had limped to its final halt. “Now listen to me. Any of you three would make all kinds of alerting noises.”
“I grew up in the desert,” Yasmin said, “I know my way.”
“These guys are trained for desert warfare. You’re not.”
Sam opened his mouth, then shut it. His face and once impeccably white shirt were splattered with rapidly drying blood.
“At least, take this,” Jack said, extending the AK-47 he had retrieved from the pickup.
“Are you kidding?! Sunlight refracting off its metal or bumping it against a rock would sound a siren for these guys.” Besides, you may need the rifle. “Wait for me. An hour, and hour and a half at the most, I should be back.”
“And if you’r
e not?” Jack’s gaze burned as fierce as the rising desert sun.
She grinned. “Then call 911.”
She climbed out of a deep wash onto a high flat mesa, much like the three mesas of Hopiland. This mesa was a perilous obstacle course of every kind of cactus and shrub. Then it was scaling rubble and rock to the ridge’s summit. She took extreme care to peer barely over the top of anything. She began to inch forward, alert for things like the slightest movement of dirt above her; a motion a spider or desert rat might produce.
One disturbance in particular she could not fully define yet knew that it was a predator, maybe a desert fox or a mountain lion, yet it could also be that kind of disturbance made by man. Whatever it was, it always had a fatal effect on land and possibly human life. The core of her soul paid rapt attention. The concentric rings thrown by a mountain lion and a man were distinctly different, yet at that great distance and that far up the slope, she could have misinterpreted their origins.
She paused. Nothing. Nothing she could distinguish.
She resumed the agonizingly slow climb. Several times she came to an abrupt, nearly panic-stricken stop as faint outer rings of nature would drift to her. From behind or above?
Hair would be nice right now.
Then, she halted on one rocky ledge, paralyzed. Her fingers clumped charred rubble that had been fused into tiny shards of glass. Something out of the ordinary. Something that should not exist. For a couple of seconds she stared at her find uncomprehendingly.
Then, Holy Mary, Joseph, and Jesus! She was looking at evidence that an ancient civilization had possessed the technology to harness the power of the atom . . . and had actually used that technology as a powerfully lethal weapon for warfare.
Would that weapon be the lost Ark of the Covenant?!
No time to ponder. The morning sun was rolling higher over the mountain ridgelines, and she quickly moved on, sometimes on all fours, sometimes bellying along, which was brutal on the stomach muscles. She was nearing the top and was alert for broken cobwebs among the cacti and shrubbery. Some of the plants emitted far stronger scents after being trampled. And the vegetation faced in the direction in which her quarry must have passed – minute broken branches, leaves and roots turned liked sunflowers toward the highest point of the ridge that overlooked the pass below.
She opened her mouth slightly to increase her hearing range. Her gaze moved in a sweeping figure-eight arc. As she hauled herself up the face of that ridge, she watched for other outer rings thrown from rubble, warnings of the proximity of the attackers.
The rocks increased to boulder size. Then she saw what she was watching for. After a boulder had come to rest in one spot, dirt and sand humped up around its base. Once the boulder was stepped on, this wall of dirt and sand below crumpled and appeared as a shadow around the boulder’s base.
There it was, the crumpled dirt and sand, a shade different than the lower edge of the boulder. Besides the evidence, she noticed the also fine particles of dust, sand, and dirt left on the boulder’s surface. The sun’s low-angle lighting accentuated the shadows and made the tracks easier to see. Still, following that kind of trail on rock for some distance was grueling and she had to cut slowly.
Their smell reached her first. Male sweat. The old sweat of unwashed bodies. Another smell disturbed her more – that of shaving cream. Generally, Arabs wore beards.
Then the faintest of voices tickled her ears. After the pummeling the explosions had given her eardrums, she could not rely upon her hearing in judging distance and direction. She might blunder upon the assailants just beyond the next outcrop of boulders.
She paused. Her hand went down to her high-top boot. She slid out the short Pakistani-made knife she had found at the Suk on the pretext of wanting sunglasses. It was sharp and had a good point, excellent for throwing. She had not tested its balance and weight, so did not know the exact distance required for accurate penetration. Hopefully, she would have the opportunity to find out.
As she inched forward, her ears detected a humming. Sometimes, desert people spoke of singing sands, which sounded liking a humming and was the result of one layer of sand sliding over the other. Yet after a moment she could determine that this was a man’s distinct falsetto humming, a monotonous herding song. She crested the ridge and catapillared around an enormous boulder. Her eyes level with the ledge, her gaze swept the small rock-rimmed battlement. Three bearded men in faded green turbans squatted, jambiyas at their scrawny waists.
The two braced with shoulder-fired Russian HEAT missiles peered over the battlement’s balustrade of rocks to the pass below. She had first dealt with the HEAT missiles when posted in Afghanistan. Now she familiarized herself with her opponents. One of the Arabs, his cheek packed with qat, was as slight as she. The other, smelling strongly of rifle oil, was larger.
Her gaze focused next on the lone Arab, facing her, his back lounging against the rock, the rifle cradled carelessly between this arms. He stopped humming long enough to spit. At that close distance of maybe a dozen feet, he presented the most immediate threat.
Still, she did not move. Her gaze scanned the sandy surface – and came up one set of footprints too many. These were of a man who would have been wearing a completely plain boot, its unpatterned sole fashioned with rounded edges so that no recognizable track would be left behind. A SWAT-type boot. She never forgot footprints because footprints were like faces, and this one was definitely familiar. She estimated him to be five foot ten inches and a lean one hundred seventy-five pounds. The gnawed toothpick in the dust just beyond confirmed her suspicion.
Nuke had been here. Where was he now?
He must have discovered she was tracking him and laid the ambush. Would a professional such as he been foolish enough not to ascertain her take down? If he had an pressing appointment to keep with unlimited fortune and power, maybe.
She returned her attention to the hummer. She figured a knife throw could take him out. After that, she could tackle the closer of the shoulder-fired-missile Arabs, whose back was to her, before he realized what was happening. That left the third. God, she missed her Glock. Well, all she could do would be to fall back on the art of distraction. A moment of fear shot through her veins. She drew a deep, steadying breath, concentrating on the taste and smell of that breath moving down her windpipe.
All right. Bring it on!
Leveling herself into a crouch, she reached for a hand-sized rock and chunked it with her left hand just beyond the guy farthest from her, the bigger one smelling of rifle oil. He whirled in the direction the rock landed. Rocking her weight forward, she threw the tip of her blade with her right hand. The knife spun one and a half revolutions before plunging directly into the hummer’s heart with a thunking sound. The humming ceased.
She sprang forward, pouncing on the next nearest guy, the one with the squirrelly pouch of qat. They rolled over and over. She grappled for his jambiya, snatched it from its sheath, and drew it back to plunge it into his gut.
A hand manacled her shoulder and slammed her backward, prone onto the battlement’s grinding rubble. Her cap went sailing. Next, the rifle-smelling Arab kicked her in the ribs. The breath whooshing from her, she rolled to her side, doubled-up. She blinked away spots, waiting for the agony in her ribs and shoulder to pass. Dust clouded her nostrils. She sneezed, coughed, and felt the resulting pain vibrating along her ribs and on up to her scapula.
In front of her appeared not one but rather two sets of dirty feet in brown leather sandals. She heard the two men arguing. Suddenly, she was kicked in the ribs again with a force that propelled her face up once more. One man crouched over her. When hands tore at the snap of her jeans, she understood. The two were fighting over who would rape her first.
She summoned strength to claw at the qat-cheeked face directly above her. The man hurled a violent oath. His fist slammed into her jaw. Her head snapped to the side. Tears stung her eyes. Her tongue swiped at the acrid tasting blood brimming inside her cheek. Pain rad
iated in excruciating waves throughout her body.
He hissed a command to the other, who with one hand yanked her wrists above her head, pinning her. Then she felt the cold thin blade of his jambiya anchoring at her throat. The two continued to quarrel stridently. The surrounding rocks reverberated their angry shouts, setting her ears to ringing again. Maybe they were arguing this time about killing her first, then raping her?
She heard her jeans zipper give and felt her jeans and panties snatched downward, binding her ankles. She was trussed like a turkey and about to be stuffed, damn’t!
She jack-knifed her knees, bucking the man mounting her into the rifle-oil-smelling dude with the jambiya at her throat. Both went tumbling. She scrambled for the one with the jambiya. Drove his own weapon deep into his chest. Felt the curved dagger’s jarring impact with ribs. She yanked out the jambiya. Blood spewed. His eyes still open, almost in disbelief, he fell back on the rubble of rock.
Cheek-qat guy sprang to a crouch, his own curved dagger drawn. She gauged his wiry weight, his ordinary height, his survivalist’s stamina. All told, not too much more than hers. His experience with the jambiya for sure outmatched hers. What did she have to lose? Nothing but her life. She grinned. Bite me, buster.
The grin caught him off-guard. His jambiya-wielding hand dipped, only a fraction, allowing her the possible opportunity to drive home her blade -- but the loud staccato burst of gunfire ripping through the battlement changed the odds.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A battered Janet, along with Yasmin and Jack, openly shouldering the AK-47 now, waited at the pass, on the road’s far side. Janet sighed over the arsenal of weapons abandoned at the battlement above, but foreigners too well armed might raise suspicion.
An old flatbed water truck was parked on the other side of the road, hood raised, while a young Arab bare of headdress fiddled with the engine. Two other young Arabs in patterned futas and faded head-cloths sat cross-legged nearby in a tiny patch of shade cast by a hardy boswella tree. They stared suspiciously at Sam. He was negotiating with them for a ride into Marib.
Call Me Crazy (Janet Lomayestewa, Tracker) Page 11