Page 15

Ian slapped at a biting fly and tucked his camo-mosquito netting a little more tightly against the ground.

Hard to believe he could prefer sitting on a broiling Khartoum rooftop to anyplace in the world, but sitting in sweltering African bush with no breeze, among the snakes and biting, crawling critters, was actually worse.

At least he had the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten Piper to leave Khartoum before she ran so afoul of the locals that one of them killed her. She was probably stateside by now, eating American fast food and sitting in her air-conditioned home watching pre-season football games. Lucky bitch.

Aww, who was he kidding? He was glad she was safe. He’d worried about her the whole time she was in Khartoum. That town was no place for a lady.

Doing his best to block out the physical misery of this surveillance op, he wiped sweat off the rubber cups of his binoculars for the hundredth time and put them back against his face. The house that came into focus looked wildly misplaced in the middle of the African bush.

The white, two-story, clapboard structure with broad verandas and a bright metal roof could not be more out of place in this sub-Saharan clime. It looked like a Dutch colonial homestead that had blown in on a wahdi , a great Saharan sandstorm, and been dropped in this little clearing by accident.

What the hell it was doing out here in the middle of nowhere was anybody’s guess. Maybe a leftover of the colonial period when these lands were ruled by Europeans.

The temperature had long-since blown past 120 degrees when a cloud of dust rising from the bush obscured the house’s driveway and roused him to full alertness. A visitor, maybe? Strangely, though, no vehicle pulled into view in the cleared area around the house.

He waited a couple of minutes, but nothing. And no cloud of dust announced that a car had turned around and gone back the other direction.

What the hell? He scanned the edges of the clearing carefully. Nada. Intrigued, he reached for his heating-seeking scope and took a look.

Bingo. Warm blobs at eleven o’clock. Human-sized. Two of them. Both squatting, appearing to hunker down to wait for something or someone. He settled in to wait out this new quarry. What were they up to?

He didn’t have long to wait to find out.

In about ten minutes, activity erupted at the rear of the house.

The back door opened and a man stepped outside into Ian’s range of vision.

He carried a cooler-sized container of some kind.

It looked made of Styrofoam. The man opened the back of a Land Rover and stowed the cooler in the back.

Over the next few minutes, the same guy carried out two more coolers. On his way back inside the third time, he paused on the back porch and made a quick cell phone call. More importantly, he turned so Ian could see his face.

Quickly, Ian snapped pictures of the man. Middle-eastern in coloring and features. Late thirties in age, maybe. Neat. Well- groomed. Was this the Palestinian scientist he’d been tracking? The guy had the look of a scholar about him.

The man started the Land Rover. Windows rolled up. So it was air-conditioned. What was in those coolers that he was so concerned about keeping cool?

The target made another trip inside and came back out.

Ian stared, shocked. That was a kid with him.

A little girl. No more than seven or eight years old if he had to guess.

She was fucking carrying a doll. The man led her to the passenger side of the vehicle and helped her in.

Ian photographed the whole thing, but simmering anger smoldered in his gut.

It was pretty shitty of a terrorist to use a child as a cover.

Yet again, the man disappeared into the building.

Ian started as activity at the front of the house caught his attention. The blobs from the other side of the house had stepped out of the bush and now approached the front porch. They were both carrying what looked like big gasoline containers. What the hell?

Perhaps two minutes passed.

The terrorist exited the back of the house and climbed into the Land Rover.

Shit. He was going to have to hoof it back to his Jeep to be in time to pick up the guy’s Land Rover when it hit the main road.

He would have to follow the guy at a distance because of the dust trails out here on the unpaved roads, but he was no amateur.

No way in hell was he losing this bastard now that he finally had contact with the Palestinian.

Ian stood up, careful to keep brush between him and the driveway. He shouldered his backpack and took a step into the bush when yet another movement captured his attention.

Something—someone—was creeping onto the back stoop. Stealthily. And there was something familiar about the silhouette?—

Nonononononono. Curses erupted in his skull as he swung the binoculars up to his face.

God damn it. What was Piper doing here? His attention swung back to the Land Rover’s dust retreating all too quickly down the driveway. He had to go. Now.

She disappeared into the house while he debated with himself. His job was to track the Scientist. But she needed back-up in the worst way. Two men had just snuck in the front door!

Cover her six? Chase the terrorist? No choice in the matter. He had to do his job. He spun for the bush and his vehicle.

But then he heard some sort of scuffle inside the house. He spun back around reflexively. Damn it all.

The front door opened and two Caucasian men came outside. They moved quickly, but not in alarm.

Fuck. Had they jumped Piper? Taken her out? Was that a fight he’d heard? Was she injured or dead inside the house?

He swore violently. He had to leave her behind!

But then something else caught his attention. A tendril of smoke curled out the front door before the men shut it behind them. They chatted casually as they jogged down the front steps and headed for the driveway. They weren’t concerned about her, that was for damned sure.

The Palestinian was getting away.

Piper was inside that house.

And if he wasn’t mistaken, those two men had just set the house on fire.

Fuck. Fucking fuck, fuck.

No good choice. Let a fellow American operative burn to death. Do his duty. Heart versus head.

The Special Forces code of ‘Leave no man behind,’ imprinted on his soul in blood, sweat, and tears, burned like acid. The McCloud creed, ‘We take care of our own,’ added its chorus to the urgency screaming in his head.

Swearing in a steady stream, he turned for the house and Piper. She had better be dead, because he was going to kill her for making him let the Palestinian get away .

He paused long enough to test the front door knob for heat—cool to the touch.

Safe to go in. A small vestibule greeted him, smelling of bleach and antiseptics.

A staircase disappeared upstairs to his left.

He stepped into the room on his right and saw the source of the smoke.

A pile of bedframes and thin mattresses were haphazardly stacked in a bonfire in the middle of the room and flames rose from the pile almost to the ceiling, which was already turning black.

Whoever had set this fire should have opened the windows to provide additional oxygen to the blaze. But far be it from him to tell an arsonist how to do his work.

He ran down the central hall to the back of the house and found an empty kitchen. Ian backtracked, checking the other rooms on the first floor quickly. Where in the hell was Piper?

He returned all the way to the front door. The fire was starting to crackle and pop as the wooden bedframes caught fire. That blaze was going to get hot fast. And then this old, dry, wood frame house was going to go up all at once.

He raced upstairs, calling Piper’s name. The carpet in the room over the bonfire was smoking and threatening to burst into flames. He went room to room but saw no sign of her. Where was she?

Had those bastards knocked her out and stowed her body somewhere? He checked the closets and behind the desultory furniture, anywhere she could be lying unconscious, about to be roasted alive.

The last door in the back of the upper floor revealed the only fully furnished bedroom.

Refrigerator-esque cold skittered across his skin in the dim space.

A double bed took up one wall, and a low cot covered with a lavender comforter sat in the far corner underneath what must be an industrial strength air-conditioner.

Even now, the thing was humming away, blasting the room with chilly air.

Good luck against the inferno to come. All across the top of the unit, small blue bottles stood in a neat row.

He picked one up to have a look. The label was written in some Arabesque language he did not read.

He snapped a quick photo of it on his cell phone before tossing it in a pocket on his utility vest.

He threw open the closet door and peered in just long enough to rule it out as Piper’s hiding place.

Unfamiliar and altogether unpleasant, panic started to claw at his gut.

He tore back downstairs. The ceiling of the living room was on fire now, along with the curtains and exterior wall. Heat roared toward him, and the fire was getting loud.

He bolted past it one more time to the back of the house. He would’ve seen her go out the back door from his vantage point, and she definitely hadn’t gone out the front door. She had to be in here, somewhere.

Where. Was. She?

He skidded to a frustrated stop in the kitchen. The first door he threw open was a pantry. The second door revealed a staircase, however. Basement.

Casting a worried glance over his shoulder at the fire quickly consuming the front of the house, he raced down the steps into the dark.

He narrowly avoided hitting his head and was forced to slow down. “Piper! Are you down here?”

“Ian? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Saving your?—“