At the Merest Glance: a military paranormal romance (Shadowforce: Psi Book 3)

by M. L. Buchman

  “Bet you’d look good in some of those getups,” he whispered down to Katie.

  “As if. Do they even make clothes for short people here?” Her head was below the heights of most people’s shoulders, so he kissed the top of it.

  One of the men, making a far more discreet show of flexing his sore legs than Anton was, offered him a smile and said something in a quick language.

  “I thought they spoke French here,” Michelle said close by his elbow. Her gangly five-ten didn’t stand out here at all.

  “Doesn’t help. I don’t speak French.” Michelle had tried to teach him when they were kids, but it just seemed to bounce off his ears without ever reaching his memory.

  “I am sorry,” the man apologized in French-accented English. “Your face. I assumed you spoke Wolof.”

  “Wolof?” Maybe this was where his family had been enslaved from if a local identified him as that familiar looking.

  “Senegal is a land of many voices. Mouths?” the man continued.

  “Tongues.”

  “Tongues, yes. Thank you. Wolof is the common tongues. Many, especially here in the city, speak French. It is our language of business. Many, many, we now learn English like me.”

  “You’re doing really well,” Michelle thought to say. She might be sharp-tongued, especially to him, but she was a decent person. Which was always a bit of surprise when she did something to remind him of that.

  “I am learning.” The man smiled an acknowledgement. Neither self-deprecating nor boasting, it was a simple statement.

  Then he, Michelle, and Katie began chattering away in French, and he looked greatly relieved. In fact, he looked very much as if he’d like to take Katie home despite Anton standing right here. Michelle had a ring on her finger but Katie didn’t have that kind of defense yet.

  Yet?

  Someone should smack him with a two-by-four—hard.

  At the terminal, they were soon through security and had their luggage.

  However, the short transit from the airport to the rental car lot disabused him of any idea that this was somehow normal. In the Army, he’d done his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he wasn’t ready for the abrupt change that happened outside these airport doors.

  In Southwest Asia, he’d flown into shitty secure airfields and deployed into the sprawl of shitty secure American base housing. He flew Black Hawks with far more holes than they were designed with. But he’d never before landed at a developing world civilian airport.

  The newness of the airport lasted across the width of a frontage driveway, a twenty-car-deep parking lot, and a perimeter road. A meter beyond the far shoulder lay arid desert. The sun was so bright that it hurt through his sunglasses. It was only an hour past dawn and the heat was almost as blinding—he was sweating standing still. The air smelled of nothing but dust.

  And they were instantly surrounded by guys on the hustle.

  “Carry your bag?”

  “Need a taxi?”

  “From America? I’m Number One guide. Show you special places.”

  “I have special car, take you to city. Anywhere you go.”

  He pulled Katie close as their two Delta operators slipped quietly to the fore. With Hannah and Ricardo clearing the path, they were soon in their Ford Expedition SUV. It was weird to have exactly the same car in another country. Almost the same, the steering wheel had shifted from right to left and Hannah and Jesse had switched sides, but everything else was the same.

  In minutes they were racing along the broad multi-lane highway to the west.

  “Hey, this isn’t so bad.”

  “Tomas,” Katie raised her hand, palm down until her knuckles hit the roof, “the tall guy on the transport, said that the heat, dust, and humidity are early this year. They usually don’t start for another month. Luckily, today is a mild day.”

  “This is mild? I’m screwed.” Anton sighed. Born in North Carolina and now living in Texas, he should thrive on the heat. He didn’t. He actually liked the few times he’d been in cooler places.

  “You’re screwed then,” Katie agreed amiably.

  Anton rolled his eyes at her and she offered one those trickling laughs. “Looked like that guy Tomas was hitting on you.”

  Michelle chimed in from the back seat, “Two marriage offers between the plane and the terminal and another one to live to together in sin. You’re going to have to put a ring on her finger just to protect her in this place.”

  Anton could feel the blood drain from face.

  Katie did her best to keep a straight face.

  “Oh God. I did it again,” Michelle groaned from the back seat.

  Anton was studying the back of Jesse’s head with great intensity.

  It was just too much, and Katie lost it.

  Everything that had been building up inside her: the uncertainty of how she was going to survive the year, her annexation by this team, whatever was going on between her and Anton that was somehow perfectly captured in Anton’s half-panicked and deeply unsettled expression…

  All of it just exploded forth.

  The laughter started big and it just grew. She wrapped both hands around Anton’s big biceps, leaned her forehead against his shoulder, and still couldn’t find a way to get it under control.

  There were other, uncertain laughs here and there drawn out by hers, but her own never slowed, like it was a spooked deer.

  When it collapsed into breathless pain around her ribs and a dose of hiccups, Anton reached around to thump her on the back—which was ridiculously funny all over again.

  She was about half-recovered when Anton rumbled out a deep, “What was that about?” Now he’d shifted to half-consoling and deeply confused. Hard to blame him.

  Katie almost lost it again, but the last of the hiccups and the lack of air saved her. “I—”

  Nope. Not enough air. She tried again.

  “I just…pictured the last forty-eight hours of my life. Then thought about the next forty-eight.”

  He looked at her quizzically, but Hannah got the joke and offered a short snap of laughter as she slalomed through a cluster of battered orange and yellow taxis.

  “Yeah, really? Right?” Katie asked her.

  “Yeah, really,” Hannah answered without any hint of laughter.

  And that sobered Katie up hard.

  No one else seemed to get the joke, so she tried to explain it.

  “Two nights ago, I was taking a wildlife photographer to look at badgers. Since then, I’ve aided and abetted you all breaking into Skewjack. Using psi powers, psi, mind you, we’re now tracking someone that you conjecture could be an international terrorist, to Senegal—on a completely different continent! So two nights from now am I going to be married and in love ever-after with an American ex-soldier most of a foot taller than I am? It’s just a little much.”

  The men all laughed appreciatively, even Michelle.

  Hannah’s shrug said that wasn’t a bad description of exactly what had happened to her. In a careful glance toward the back seat, Katie saw that Isobel wasn’t laughing either. Almost as if she would be surprised if that weren’t the case.

  The important task isn’t to interpret the trail’s intent. The important task is to follow it in the moment and see where it leads.

  Katie decided that she was definitely in over her head.

  Chapter 14

  Dakar had to be the craziest place Anton had ever been.

  Unable to think about the idea of being married to a woman like Katie, because c’mon, stuff like that didn’t happen to guys like him, he needed a distraction.

  He concentrated instead on what was happening outside the window.

  The highway raced across the landscape.

  Now through desert dotted with crazy fat, white trees.

  “Baobabs, like in The Little Prince,” Michelle said dreamily.

  Katie echoed with a happy sigh.

  Great! Now his girlfriend, if that’s what Katie had become without him
quite noticing, was bonding with his pain-in-the-ass stepsister. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for the two of them to get along.

  That soon gave way to a city…with no people. Three- and four-story concrete-block apartment buildings. A mall. A couple of hotels. A massive sports stadium. Kilometer after kilometer of shops. A whole damned city that existed only along the highway with no people. Just one to two blocks behind all the new concrete was the land of red desert and baobab trees among the thorny acacia bushes.

  There was the occasional bicycle, and twice a family walking along, but mostly it was a great void of ghost-city. And all of it, from the desert to the newest building, was covered in a patina of red dust. It was like a massive alien abduction had removed all the people and the dust was reclaiming the world.

  After fifteen or twenty kilometers of this, it…snapped.

  One moment he was watching the emptiness of an unoccupied city of colossal scale. The next they were in the hovel sprawl that he’d come to expect around the edges of urban centers, even American ones. In the space of a few minutes they plunged from ghost-city, through hovel-land, into central Dakar. If paint jobs, almost entirely in soft pastels, indicated that a building was finished, it seemed as if a third of the city was new construction. The gray of raw concrete-block rose at every turn.

  And the city teemed with life despite the early hour. While they waited to clear the congestion at a roundabout, someone came up to his window and tried to sell him a new cellphone cover. She had a hundred or more dangling from strings in all sorts of designs and sizes. At the same time, Jesse was being offered a shining pair of Nikes, except the swoosh had been sewn on upside down.

  Some of the sellers were independent. Others appeared to be outward extensions of the tiny shops that lined either side of the road.

  Through the window, he bought some surprisingly good coffees. A hundred meters on, he purchased crunchy French-style baguettes spread with Nutella for probably too many CFA notes, but he was okay with that as he just assumed he’d be paying the Westerner’s price.

  “Where do we even start?” Katie asked as if he’d have a clue.

  “You’re the hot, sexy tracker. You tell us.”

  Katie looked at him strangely.

  “What?” Anton mumbled around a mouthful of baguette.

  “I’ll buy the hot because this is at least a thousand degrees hotter than Cornwall. But…” She could feel it prickling her skin it was so intense.

  “Damn, Katie. Any man doesn’t think you’re sexy is an idiot.”

  That would be every man in her past. She looked down at herself. Boots, rugged shorts, and a denim work shirt that had seen too many seasons. Who was he trying to kid?

  “Seriously, woman.” Anton reinforced his judgement strongly enough that she almost believed that he believed what he was saying. But she knew better than to…

  Path to nowhere. She did her best to chop off that line of thought.

  A trail begins.

  Where did this trail begin?

  It started at sea.

  Then—

  “Cables come ashore. Let’s follow the shoreline.”

  “Jesse,” Hannah called out to her husband.

  “On it,” he had a tablet computer in his lap and was soon looking at a map.

  No one questioned or doubted. Even when she was being the sole guide of a group, she’d always be questioned about whether or not she knew where she was going or how could she be sure this was the right way. Leading trainings for Tom’s school, people would doubt that the “lass with charming British accent”, as Tom always insisted on calling her, had a clue. It was a surprise to have the members of Shadow Force not even hesitate.

  Jesse described the map for everyone else, “Dakar is like a big triangular peninsula. This highway is the primary connection to the city from the rest of the country. Take the next exit, then head left until you run into the ocean.”

  “Oh God,” Anton groaned. “I’m going to be so lost. There’s water in every direction again.”

  His wink and smile belied his tone, and actually made Katie feel even better. He reminded her of their brief time together in Cornwall. The fun moments in among the bewildering changes. His easy humor had been a constant thread throughout.

  He’d also brought an incredible adventure her way. She’d only ever been to Europe and the US. Now she was on a brand-new continent. While she’d have preferred a nice cup of tea, she’d grown accustomed to Tom’s penchant for bitter coffee as well. The Senegalese coffee was much lighter and it perfectly cut the heavy chocolate of the Nutella baguette.

  As Hannah took them off the highway and jounced onto a rough, narrow street, she let the motion bounce her knee against Anton’s once more. Despite the heat, she liked the feeling of connection. Not some weird psychic whatever, just the feeling of her knee brushing against his.

  He looked at her questioningly.

  A man who learned? That was a miracle in itself. “Just let me know when you go lookabout, okay?”

  He nodded carefully.

  Despite the heat, she kept the window down and breathed in the city. It was probably an ill-advised choice. The sky was thick with humidity and hazy with dust. It quickly formed a gritty layer on their skin as it stuck to the sunscreen that everyone had slathered on before leaving the airport.

  The dust would be good for tracking across a very short period of time, but it would then quickly mask the very trail sign that it had captured. Tom had talked about how such things cut both ways.

  Dakar had a thousand smells. A woman and a small boy were squatting by a small propane tank with a burner built into the top. From the large wok on the burner, she could smell the roasting peanuts. When the boy spotted her, he scrambled over and offered her several plastic bags of peanuts the size of a banger sausage. She pointed at three.

  “Cinq mille,” he informed her stoutly.

  “Une mille,” she held up one finger. A thousand CFA was a little over one British pound. She didn’t know what a fair price was, but she knew his first offer would be far too high.

  He held up three fingers, she offered two. He took it and skipped back to his mother, who waved happily. Apparently she’d just been taken by the young entrepreneur, but didn’t care.

  She handed the peanuts around and went back to watching the city. The car jounced along the rough street only a little faster than a walk. Some sections of the road were paved, but small dunes of red sand, thick with plastic garbage and small chunks of concrete made for a rough ride.

  A mango seller flourished mangos on a stout stick. She also had a big knife for peeling the fruit. The thick sweetness filled the air…until they rolled past a cow who raised its tail to deliver a massive flop of oozing brown that almost came in her window as Hannah squeezed the car past.

  The people were impossibly clean and beautiful amidst all of the dust and debris. A laughing group of teenage schoolgirls sauntered by in their blue-skirt and white-blouse uniforms, well aware that they were the most beautiful females ever to walk on two legs.

  Little children were everywhere and didn’t seem to be attached to any one adult.

  “Are they safe?”

  It was Hannah who answered. “The society is very community-centric. A child doesn’t just have parents, it has a hundred aunties watching out for it wherever it goes. If a child gets in trouble or needs a reprimand, someone will always be there. I did a three-week, cross-cultural training mission here early in my career.”

  Knowing the children were safe didn’t make their carefree explorations any less surprising.

  The traffic was thick and jostling. There were scooters and motorcycles weaving through the traffic. A three-wheeled bicycle with a large wooden delivery box on the back rolled effortlessly through the confusion. It stopped at a tiny store no bigger than her room back in Mousehole. She could only laugh when he lifted an armful of baguettes out of the box like so much kindling, and carried it into the store. A baker’s delivery
van.

  She wasn’t paying any mind as the big port, busy with a dozens of ships slipped by.

  “Goree Island.” Hannah pointed at an island beyond the harbor’s mouth.

  Michelle leaned forward and rested a hand on Anton’s shoulder. “Pa said that’s where your ancestors…” she cleared her throat. “Where your side of the family came through. Most likely from somewhere inland, but that’s the last place they’d have touched the continent. It was the biggest slave trading spot in all of Africa.”

  “Huh. Okay, that’s officially weird.”

  Katie looked out at the island and felt herself cringe inside. Her family wasn’t nouveau riche. They were old English money, cotton merchant money that had driven the wool merchants almost to extinction. Cotton money meant their ships had traveled a triangle from England to Africa to pick up slaves, delivered them to America, then carried cotton bales back to England to feed the big British mills.

  Her family was all legitimate now, or as legitimate as the super-wealthy ever were, but not through any choice of their own. Instead they had seen the pending abolition of slavery and had shifted their business model before its end had bankrupted them, as it had so many others. Her parents and grandparents had boasted of it as a symbol of the family’s savviness.

  What was she doing here?

  What was she doing with Anton?

  There was a strong possibility that her family’s ships had delivered his ancestors into slavery.

  Everything that had felt so light just moments ago disappeared beneath a shroud of wind-blown red dust.

  Chapter 15

  Anton didn’t notice the change in Katie at first. He was simply glad that she’d rolled up her window to block out all the dust that had been getting on his nerves…though Hannah’s was still down.

  By the time they’d prowled this far along the twisting harbor streets and finally reached this faster stretch, the midmorning heat and humidity was making their dawn arrival feel like a Siberian memory. The sun thundered down on their rental so hard that the AC had crapped out and just left them to roast.