Danger in the Desert

by Merline Lovelace

  “The chopper will be here in ten minutes.”

  The announcement clearly startled the tour guard. “How is it possible for a helicopter to arrive from Cairo so quickly?”

  “The crew is part of a unit performing night exercises not far from here,” Kahil replied smoothly. “They’re diverting here to pick me up. Jaci, you will want to gather your things.”

  She rushed toward the stairs. Fahranna came with her, as did several of the women who’d gathered downstairs to check out the unexpected visitor. They helped her shove the items she’d bought at the souk and the few belongings she brought with her into her carryall.

  “Please,” she implored Fahranna, “tell them how grateful I am for their friendliness and hospitality. I will send thank-you gifts as soon as I can.”

  “You don’t need to send gifts.”

  “I know, but I want to,” she insisted.

  Sheik Yousef said the same when Jaci thanked him. Folding her hands between both of his cal loused palms, he boomed down at her.

  “All that is necessary is that you see your friend through her injury. And that you return to Jawal for another visit someday.”

  “I would love to.”

  The cackle of his son’s radio turned all heads. When Kahil once again reached under his billowing robe, everyone present—including Hanif—got a good view of the holster strapped to his hip.

  “The chopper is on final approach,” the colonel advised his tense listeners. “I told them we would use the lights from our vehicles to guide them to a safe LZ.”

  “Then we’d better get to it,” Deke bit out.

  “I will help,” Hanif said, “then I will drive back to Cairo.”

  Deke and Kahil didn’t so much as glance at each other this time, but Jaci picked up on their unspoken signals. They were both reserving judgment on the guard and this seemingly legit emergency. After another flurry of goodbyes, Jaci and Fahranna accompanied the men through the brass-studded doors and out into the night.

  Mere minutes later, Kahil pulled the Land Rover up on a long finger of hard-baked mudflats that ran well clear of the date palms. He left the engine running and the lights on. Hanif did the same on the opposite side of the flats.

  The crossed beams of their headlights vectored the helicopter in. Its powerful searchlight skimmed the area, blinding the watchers during its approach. The whap-whap-whap of the rotor blades was deafening. Kahil had to shout into his radio to give them clearance to touch down.

  As the chopper slowly descended, the bite of sand thrown up by its blades proved ten times worse than the noise. Gasping, Jaci dragged her scarf across her face and squinted at the whirling sand.

  It obscured almost everything. She could barely make out Deke as he reached back inside the Land Rover for their overnight bags, or Hanif, when he plowed across the flats with an arm flung across his face to protect it.

  “I will see you at the hospital in Cairo,” he shouted.

  Jaci nodded, her doubts about him allayed by the presence of the helicopter and their imminent departure.

  “Thank you for driving all this way to tell me about Mrs. Grimes,” she shouted back.

  “What?”

  “I said thank you.”

  Hanif shook his head, pointed to his ear and moved closer. Jaci squinted at the man through the slit in her veil. She had difficulty seeing him through the slinging sand, but the sudden, fiercely intense look in his eyes sent a fission down her spine. Before she could do more than take a step back, he’d leaped forward, thrust a hand under her veil and buried a hand in her hair. The next instant something hard and small and round jammed into her ribs.

  The snake-fast attack caught the others by surprise. Deke wasn’t more than three or four feet away. He spun in a half circle, then froze as Hanif shouted a warning.

  “If you reach for your weapons, I will kill her!”

  “Ma’at’s messenger?” Deke yelled back, every muscle in his body taut. “You’ll kill Ma’at’s messenger?”

  “If I must!”

  He tightened his savage hold on Jaci’s hair. Fiery pain tore at her scalp. She thrust up both hands in an agony to ease his grip but couldn’t reach under the head cloth now dragged tight against her throat. With one frantic hand, she tugged at the choking fabric. The other tangled in the scarab’s thin gold chain.

  Some good luck charm! The hysterical thought shot through her as Hanif bellowed at the others, almost shattering her eardrum.

  “The true believers cannot allow Ma’at’s messenger to fall into the hands of this corrupt government. They will use her to distort the goddess’s message.”

  Tears stung Jaci’s eyes and blurred the tableau that would remain etched indelibly in her mind for the rest of her life.

  However long that was!

  Deke gripped the carryalls in white-knuckled fists. His jaw was locked and murder flamed in his eyes. Kahil had stepped in front of Fahranna to shield her with his body. Behind them, the side hatch of the helicopter had slid open. A crewman in a zippered air force flight suit squinted out at the group gathered beside the Land Rover.

  He couldn’t see what was happening, Jaci realized in desperation. They were standing outside the spear of the headlights. Even with the reflected glare from the chopper’s landing and cockpit lights, her flowing robe hid the weapon jammed into her ribs, and her head scarf covered Hanif’s brutal grip on her hair.

  “Your radio!” Hanif shouted to Kahil above the undulating whine of the engines. “Unclip it and throw it on the ground here, by me!”

  The colonel spit out something in Egyptian that made Hanif’s fist jerk and almost tore Jaci’s hair out by the roots. When tears poured down her contorted face, Deke snarled at his friend.

  “Throw down the damned radio!”

  Kahil’s primary means of communicating with his troops slammed onto mud baked to concrete hardness. Hanif shoved Jaci two steps ahead of him.

  His boot heel came down on the radio. She didn’t hear it smash above the engine’s earsplitting drone, but she saw the muscle jump in the side of Deke’s jaw when Hanif pushed her toward the chopper.

  They took another step. And another. Deke’s eyes never left her face. She could read their message despite the whirling sand and her blinding tears of pain.

  Go with him.

  Don’t do anything stupid.

  I’ll find you.

  She wanted to believe him. Had to believe him. She signaled her understanding as her scrabbling, clutching fingers closed around the scarab. It was fake. She knew it was fake. Yet she clutched the beetle so tightly that its single antenna gouged deep into her palm. Unbidden, her mind sent a frantic prayer winging into the night.

  Listen up, Ma’at. If you’re anywhere in the vicinity, this would be a great time to kick some butt.

  She couldn’t move her head, could hardly breathe, but from the corner of one eye she saw the crewman leaning out of the hatch. Frowning, the airman beckoned to his would-be passengers. He still couldn’t see the gun at Jaci’s back. He must have begun to suspect something was wrong, though, as he jumped down onto the skid and started across the hard-packed flats.

  Jaci felt rather than saw Hanif half turn toward the man. The gun barrel moved with him, its tip vicious as it scraped along her rib. For a mere second, it cleared her side and poked at the folds of her robe.

  She didn’t stop to think, didn’t weigh the odds. She knew she had less than a heartbeat to act. Sobbing with fear and utter desperation, she angled the scarab’s head through her middle and third finger and closed her fist around the hard malachite of its body. Knuckles clenched, she swung with everything in her.

  Her fist connected with a thud. Liquid spurted over Jaci’s head and face.

  Howling like a wounded animal, Hanif reacted instinctively. His submachine gun spit fire and cordite. The acrid stink burned Jaci’s nostrils. Bullets ripped through the folds of her robe as he released his brutal grip on her hair and slapped his free hand to his
face.

  His violent gyrations threw her sideways. She sensed rather than saw Deke throw himself at her attacker. Shoved clear of the two men, she hit the ground with a jarring thud. Her legs tangled in her long skirt as she fought to roll out of the way of the men who suddenly crashed down beside her. Hanif fired off several long, lethal bursts, but Deke managed to keep the barrel pointed at the star-studded sky. Then Kahil delivered a soccer kick that splintered the bones in the guard’s arm. His weapon spun off into the darkness. His screams of pain ricocheted through the night.

  Only after Deke pushed to his feet and helped Jaci up did she see the blood gushing through the fingers Hanif had splayed over his right eye. A half inch or so of her fake beetle, she saw with a sickening lurch in her belly, protruded between his fingers. Her frantic swing had thrust the gold antenna deep into the man’s eyeball.

  After that, things seemed to happen at the speed of light.

  Relieved at their close escape but appalled by the damage she’d inflicted on another human being, Jaci barely heard Kahil shout something to the chopper’s crew chief.

  He rushed to the cockpit, gesturing wildly to explain what had happened to the pilot and copilot while Fahranna knelt beside Hanif to assess his condition. Even with Deke holding the man down, he screamed and writhed too violently for Fahranna to help him until Kahil retrieved her medical bag from the Land Rover. With swift efficiency, she broke a capsule of some kind of painkiller—morphine, Jaci guessed—and jabbed the needle right through Hanif’s pants into his thigh. It must have been a powerful dose. Within seconds, the guard’s screams dwindled to moans and Fahranna was able to pry his hand away from his face.

  “I can’t do anything for him here,” she announced after a quick and very grim examination. “We have to fly him to a hospital. Get him aboard.”

  While Hanif was being carried to the chopper, Sheik Yousef and a half dozen of his men came thundering across the desert with their weapons at the ready. Kahil gave them a swift explanation of the gunfire before joining his wife, Deke and Jaci in the chopper’s hold. As soon as the colonel had strapped himself in, the crew chief handed him a headset. Moments later, the aircraft lifted off.

  Hot air whipped in through the open hatch. Jaci was wedged between Deke and Fahranna, strapped tight in a web seat, but she got a good view of Jawal when the chopper tipped into a steep bank. For an instant or two, the oasis was right below her. The palms fringing the water looked like feather dusters, surrounded as far as she could see by undulating mounds of silvery sand. And there, in the distance, the darker silhouettes of the mud-brick dwellings, their windows lit with the flickering glow of lamplight.

  When the helicopter pulled out of its steep turn, she put Jawal out of sight and out of mind. From that point on, regret for the awful injury she’d inflicted on Hanif warred with a growing, gnawing worry over Susan Grimes.

  Jaci’s breath snagged at the sight of her friend hooked up to a stomach-clenching array of monitors and drip bags. The retired schoolteacher looked terrifyingly like an Egyptian mummy. Bandages swathed her entire head, with only small openings for her eyes, nose and mouth. But when Jaci gently took her hand and murmured her name, Susan’s lashes fluttered up.

  It took several seconds for recognition to dawn. When it did, her fingers spasmed. She attempted to speak, but all she could manage was a low, hoarse croak.

  “Don’t try to talk,” Jaci whispered, her throat tight. “Just rest. I’m here. So is Deke. We’ll stay with you.”

  She spoke from her heart, not really thinking. Only belatedly did she remember that Deke had completed his assigned task. He’d verified that she wasn’t part of the antigovernment conspiracy. He’d also helped neutralize the threat. Kahil could wring the names of the other conspirators out of Hanif. No need for him to hang around any longer.

  Yet he reinforced her reckless promise with a nod. “We’ll stay as long as you need us,” he confirmed gruffly.

  The hand Jaci was holding spasmed again. With an effort that was painful to observe, Susan Grimes croaked out three whispered words.

  “Someone…pushed…me.”

  Gentle, tenderhearted Jaci felt a flash of white-hot fire in her veins. The wrath of a vengeful goddess fueled a fury like none she’d ever known. If it wasn’t Hanif who’d shoved Susan in front of an oncoming taxi to lure Ma’at’s messenger away from her protectors, it had to be one of his coconspirators.

  Jaci damned every one of them with the depths of her soul.

  Chapter 12

  Jaci spent most of the next forty-eight hours at the hospital. The sight of pale-colored scrubs and beeping monitors became as familiar to her as the scent of antiseptic. Despite Deke’s concern for her safety and Fahranna’s assurance that she would personally attend to Mrs. Grimes, Jaci refused to leave Susan’s side until the schoolteacher was taken off the critical list and moved out of the critical care unit.

  The confession Kahil extracted from Hanif registered only on the periphery of her consciousness. Ditto the colonel’s frustration at Hanif’s stubborn refusal to name his coconspirators. She didn’t really focus on anything but Susan’s valiant struggle until Deke walked into the hospital room two days after their return from the oasis.

  “I contacted our operations center last night,” he informed Jaci and a still woozy Susan. “We’ve set up a special aircraft to fly you both back to the States.”

  Instant and very palpable relief spread across the older woman’s face. “They’ve been good to me here,” she murmured through her bandages. “So good. But I want to go home.”

  “I know.” Carefully, Deke stroked the paper-thin skin above her bandaged wrist. “My associate set everything up. She’s piloting the aircraft, in fact. She used to fly medevac missions in and out of Iraq, so you’ll be in good hands.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Watching his gentle touch, listening to his deep, calm voice, Jaci knew her knight in shining armor was back up on his charger.

  He might never follow up on the husky promise he’d made out there at the oasis, just before Hanif showed on the scene. And she knew in her heart that they lived in different planes. Yet at that moment what she felt for him went deeper than anything she’d ever imagined, much less experienced.

  Just as well, she realized a few moments later, because this might be all she’d ever have of him. She saw it in his eyes as he caught her gaze across Susan’s bed and jerked his chin toward the door.

  “The pilot who’s on this aircraft,” he said when they’d gained the hallway. “Her name’s Victoria Talbot, code name Rebel. She’s acted as my backup on this op.”

  Jaci’s stomach sank. Her instincts had been right. He was handing her off.

  “I asked Rebel to fly you out,” Deke said, confirming her suspicions. “You and Mrs. Grimes. Once she gets you both home, she’ll stay with you until Kahil drags enough names from Hanif to take down the entire nest of ‘true believers.’”

  “I take it you’re going to assist with the inquisition?” she said slowly.

  “Yeah, I am.” His jaw hardened. “I’m not partial to the idea that one or more of them might decide to follow you back to the States.”

  She wasn’t partial to the idea, either.

  “When do Susan and I leave?”

  “Rebel just radioed. The evac plane is on final approach to Cairo International as we speak.”

  That quick! After these long, sleepless hours at the hospital, events suddenly seemed to be taking giant leaps forward.

  “Do I have time to say goodbye to Kahil and Fahranna?”

  “Fahranna’s on her way to the hospital. She’ll help prepare Susan for transport. Kahil you’ll have to call. He’s working the few leads Hanif gave up before he went into surgery.”

  Jaci wanted to feel sorry for the guard. She really did. She’d never inflicted grievous bodily harm on anyone before. Or minor bodily harm, for that matter.

  Then again, she’d
never had a gun barrel jammed against her ribs. Or sat at the bedside of a friend who’d been pushed in front of a careening taxi. Those experiences seriously impacted her sympathy factor.

  “One more thing,” Deke said. “No, two. First, Kahil talked to his friend at the Cairo Museum. They’re going to put out the word that additional testing has verified that the scarab you found is a fake crafted in the late-nineteenth century. A clever one, but still a fake. That should take the radicals’ focus off you.”

  “But…”

  The protest formed, hot and swift. After so many centuries, it seemed a shame to deny the goddess her due. More than a shame. Almost a sacrilege. Indignant on Ma’at’s behalf, Jaci had to voice a protest.

  “Declaring the scarab a fake will rob Egypt of a precious piece of her heritage. I’m surprised a venerable institution like the Cairo Museum is willing to go along with the lie.”

  “The museum relies heavily on government grants and funding,” Deke replied with a shrug. “They’ll play ball…at least until Kahil rounds up the rest of the players in this crazy game.”

  Jaci couldn’t shake the dogged need to have Ma’at’s symbol given the respect it deserved.

  “Then will the museum validate the scarab as authentic?”

  “I suppose. That’s not my top priority. I’m more concerned with making sure you’re safe. Which brings me to the second item on my list.”

  When Deke framed her face with his palms and leaned down to cover her lips with his, Jaci banished all thoughts of scarabs and goddesses.

  Her response was purely instinctual. Rising up, she hooked her arms around his neck and gave herself up to the feel of his mouth on hers. It washed through her, gentle waves that alternated with rushing heat. She could have lost herself in insidious pleasure. Would have, if the ping of elevator doors and the assured clip of approaching footsteps hadn’t penetrated the haze.

  “Much as I hate to interrupt,” Fahranna said, amusement threading her voice, “I need to know the specifics of the equipment aboard the plane that will transport Jaci and her friend back to the States.”