Page 81

CHAPTER 42

SEVEN DAYS. SEVEN days and seven nights I’d been stuck in this sorry piece of desert. I know I always said I liked hot places, but now I was rethinking that. At that moment, I’d have sold my soul for a bat blood slushee.

I was annoyed because I was baking in my own skin. Annoyed because my boots were filled with sand and I had blisters. But mostly annoyed because if I didn’t get to where I needed to be quickly, I’d die in this horrid bit of wasteland. My luck in the cave may have brought me a brief reprieve, but I was beginning to weaken again.

By late afternoon, my mind started to play tricks on me. Non-existent water shimmered on the horizon, and I’d seen Black at least four times. I couldn’t complain about those visions, but when I reached out to touch him, he flittered further away, always out of reach. Bleeping hallucinations. And now there were camels. Camels and people. I shook my head, trying to clear it.

Then they came closer, and rather than disappearing like I expected, they solidified. Either I’d lost my marbles totally, or they were real. I’d never been happier to see a pair of gun-toting Arabs in my life.

“ Hal anti bikhair ?” one of them called, his accent harsh from years of living in this inhospitable environment.

Was I okay? No, of course I wasn’t okay. I tried to roll my eyes, but they wouldn’t cooperate. “ La. Ana ‘atshaan. ” No. I’m thirsty.

Their white robes identified them as Bedouin. They stared at this strange, dark-haired girl shuffling along in the middle of the desert, carrying half a bottle of blood and the remains of a parachute, like she’d dropped out of space. Which I suppose I almost had.

I’d pretty much collapsed by the time they reached me, but one of them crouched and held a canteen of water to my lips.

Thank you, karma .

I sipped slowly, resisting the temptation to gulp the water down. Black’s voice in my head warned me of the danger of hyponatraemia, the low concentration of sodium in my blood, and I didn’t want the sickness or seizures that could bring. A little strength flowed into my limbs, and I sat up on my knees.

“ Man anti? ” one of the men asked.

I wasn’t about to tell them my name; not until I knew who they were. I shook my head and stayed quiet.

He tried a couple more times, but when I didn’t answer, he gave up. Huffing under his breath, he motioned for me to get up on a camel. It knelt so I could climb onto its woven saddle. Then we set off, to where I didn’t know, but the situation was a definite improvement on the state of things an hour ago.

Although they carried guns, that didn’t worry me. Every kid worth his salt in these parts had an assault rifle of some sort, but they didn’t tend to shoot random passers-by. In fact, the Bedouin were mostly peaceful and also bound by ancient customs to offer hospitality to anyone who requested it, even if they didn’t like them all that much.

So wherever we were going, I’d get food, and with food would come strength.

As it happened, Lady Luck stayed with me, hitching a lift on the camel. Although I don’t suppose her bottom was as raw as mine when I finally slid off the flipping thing. I liked riding horses. Camels, not so much.

We’d arrived in a tented village in the shade of a cliff, neat and tidy with a small oasis off to the side. The oasis I’d been looking for since I shot out of the plane over a week ago.

Thank goodness .

A few of the villagers came out to stare at me, children hiding behind their mothers and men staring me up and down. Then there was a commotion, and the small crowd parted as a man strode forward through their midst.

“Emerson?” the man asked, sounding a little surprised to see me. I couldn’t think why.

“Hi, Salah. It’s been a while, so I thought I’d drop in.”

I’d first met Salah a decade ago when Black brought me to Jordan for my first bout of desert survival training. He’d been young, maybe twelve, when I found him slumped under a scrubby acacia tree, freshly bitten by a puff adder.

Being the good Girl Scout I was, I fished the vial of anti-venom out of my backpack and administered it before the symptoms got too bad. His father, and of course Salah himself, never forgot. We’d kept in touch over the years, and I stopped in to see him when I was in the area. Although usually my visits were slightly better organised.

“Emerson,” he said again, reaching me and shaking my right hand with both of his. “How have you been? You look so thin.” He turned to the waiting women and shouted in Arabic for them to prepare a feast.

“I’ve not had such a good time lately. Black died.” Might as well get that out there.

He bowed his head. “I’m so sorry. He was a good man. So you’re on your own?”

“Yes, just me. I need to ask you for a favour. Well, two actually. Firstly, can I borrow your phone? And secondly, I need to get back home.”

“The second I can help with, but the satellite phone that you bought for me is not working. It will no longer turn on. Kaput, is that what you say?”

Great. Just great. Nate must be doing his nut, and I was desperate to know what happened to Logan and Jed. Did they get out okay? Escape would have been tough enough under normal circumstances, and with the state of Jed’s leg, the situation had been even more messed up than usual.

And what if my team thought I was still in Syria? They’d try to come in after me, which would be not only dangerous but also completely pointless now I was hundreds of miles away.

But what could I do? Nothing right now but rest. I needed to save my strength for the journey home.

One of the women returned with a pot of sweet, spicy Bedouin tea, which she poured into tiny glass cups. Over that, and then a dinner of bread and well-salted goat stew, I worked out a plan to get home with Salah.

“I will send men to the town tomorrow to organise things.”

“I need a boat to get across the Gulf.”

“You want to go to Egypt?”

“Yes, to Dahab.” The town lay west of Jordan and about sixty kilometres down the coast. It would be a long trip.

Salah nodded slowly. “For you, I will arrange it. Do you want to leave with the men?”

I shook my head. “No, I can’t afford to spend time in town. I don’t have any paperwork, and I’m not sure who might be looking for me. I’ll need them to call a friend with a message, though.”

“Very well. They will prepare the transport, and you can leave when it is ready.”

As night fell, Salah provided me with blankets and a tent, and I got my first full night of sleep in almost a fortnight.

I woke feeling vaguely optimistic, but the morning brought bad news. Two of the Bedouin rode into the camp just after dawn to let us know there was a sandstorm approaching. Everyone scuttled around, tying things down and moving the animals to shelter as best we could. Within minutes, the winds arrived, kicking up sand everywhere and reducing visibility to zero. The storm was a nasty one, lasting through the day and part of the night. All we could do was shelter in the caves at the base of the cliff while the winds raged overhead and wait for it to blow itself out.

The next morning, the sky was calm again, blue without a puff of cloud, but the storm left behind a layer of sand and dust that covered everything. As promised, Salah sent a couple of his tribe out on camels to the nearest town to organise my transport while the rest of us set about clearing up the mess. I’d given them Nate’s phone number and a short message: Valkyrie lives to ride again . Nate would understand what that meant and call off the troops.

At sunset, the riders returned. “The boat is arranged for the night after next,” the older one said. “It was the soonest the captain agreed to go.”

“Did you get through to my friend?”

He shifted from foot to foot and looked at his feet. “We lost the paper.”

For pity’s sake, they had one job. Well, two, but neither of them was particularly difficult. Still, I couldn’t do much about it now. I’d just have to hope Nate had his sensible head on.

The next day passed interminably slowly. As a guest and also a woman, I wasn’t allowed to do much to help, although Salah did take me out into the desert to show me his new falcon. I wished there was some way to hurry things along, but unfortunately, life didn’t work that way out here. The name of the game was insha’Allah , which meant “if Allah wills it,” more commonly translated as “things will happen when they happen, if they happen at all.”

So I had to wait.

The night in the desert dragged on forever. As the temperature dropped, I huddled under the extra blanket Salah found for me, grateful for the double layer of warmth. A group of kids woke me up at daybreak, and I spent the day sitting in the shade while they crowded around, asking questions about everything from England to elephants. Once they realised I didn’t bite, they couldn’t resist the novelty of a stranger. Then after another meal of delicious, if unidentifiable, food, the time came to leave. I had another camel trip to endure.

We set off as the sun dropped. Salah rode beside me until we reached the outskirts of the town, and then we said our goodbyes.

“Thanks for everything. I’ll send you a new phone as soon as I get home. Same drill as last time, yeah?”

He nodded and grinned at me, displaying his lack of dental hygiene. “Next time, don’t leave it so long before you come back.”

Just before midnight, I crawled into the bed of a pickup truck and hid myself under a pile of blankets and some animal feed. At each checkpoint, the driver explained he was returning to his family after a trip to Petra and paid over the requisite bribes while I stayed silent in the back.

My muscles stiffened and my back ached as we bumped over the desert for a couple of hours. Finally, the truck stopped at a desolate section of coastline, and I smelled the sea air. I stood and stretched as the driver proudly pointed out the boat waiting for me down below.

I couldn’t hold back my groan.

Because when I said down below, I meant down below. The boat was anchored at the bottom of a cliff that had to be almost a hundred feet of sheer drop.

I turned back to the driver. “Isn’t there a way to drive round?”

He just shrugged. “Salah said you are good climber. This was best place to land boat.”

“Can’t it move a little?”

“No, you climb.” He backed towards the truck, key at the ready.

Thanks, Salah. It wasn’t like I loved my fingernails anyway.

I worked out the kinks in my back and tied the small bag containing my camera and other bits around my waist. I’d wrapped it in plastic and tape to keep it dry.

Then I started down.

It was a horrible descent, and I say that as someone who loves climbing. The cliff had plenty of handholds, but many of them gave way when I touched them, and I needed to be super careful not to cause a landslide that would take me with it to the bottom.

I somehow reached the beach safely, thanking Black, once again, for all those painful hours he made me spend scaling rocks with him, then clambered into the tiny boat. More of a dinghy, really, with a single outboard motor and a hard bench seat. Not particularly quick. Thankfully, the blue waters of the Gulf of Aqaba were calm that night, and with only a light breeze, we made the crossing in less than four hours, arriving just before sunrise.

Well, sort of.

We stopped a good distance offshore, and the boat driver wasn’t keen to get any closer.

“No passport. You get out now,” he told me.

Oh, for goodness’ sake. I tried explaining to the guy that the police would still be tucked up in bed at that time, but he kept shaking his head. Eventually I gave up, stripped down to my underwear, and dove off the side of the boat. I’d endured a week with no water. Now I had plenty of it.

My shredded hands stung as the salt hit them, but I gritted my teeth and set off. A mile of swimming brought me to the small spit of land that guarded the mouth of the lagoon in Dahab. I hauled myself onto the beach, skirted in disgust around a pile of discarded cigarette butts, and started off on the short trek back to civilisation.

A twenty-minute walk brought me to Dahab City, which wasn’t a city by any stretch of the imagination. It didn’t even have a Starbucks. Most of the buildings were high-end hotels and apartments set right next to the Red Sea. Keeping to the shoreline, I skipped the first two hotels before making my way up the private beach of the third: the Black Diamond. A red brick path wound its way through tropical gardens. Even in this arid climate, lush grass abounded, surrounded by fragrant trees and colourful bougainvillea. When I reached a white, two-storey villa with a traditional domed roof, I hopped over the low wall surrounding it and knocked on the door.

A minute later, the lock clicked and a sleepy-looking guy in his late fifties glowered at me. He rubbed his eyes, no doubt hoping that if he did it hard enough, I’d disappear and he could go back to bed.

“Morning, Bob.”

“Emmy, it’s not even five o’clock, and you’re standing on my doorstep in…is that your underwear? Actually, you know what? I’m not surprised.”

Bob was Captain Bob Stewart, a former Navy captain I’d trained with during my early years with Black. When Bob left the service, declaring he’d had enough of cold and wet, he managed to put up with two months-worth of DIY and decorating in the Virginia home he’d shared with his wife before declaring himself bored. While he may have had enough of cold, wet was too big a part of his life, so he and Sondra upped sticks and moved to hot. Hot being Dahab, where they ran the Black Diamond Hotel and dive centre.

How did I know this? Well, firstly because Black and I were friends with them, and secondly because when they announced their plans, we’d invested in the business. Hence it being badged as the seventh hotel in our Black Diamond chain.

“Nothing ever surprises you, Bob. Can I have the keys to my villa, please? Oh, and I need to borrow your phone.”

Silently, Bob reached into his pocket and held out his mobile, then he disappeared back inside, rolling his eyes.