A Sulta's Ransom

by White, Loreth Anne

  He slowed his horse.

  Na’jif was one of three cities within possible radius of the wireless transmitting device he’d found planted in Dr. Sterling’s computer. And he’d discovered camel prints outside the perimeter fence that led in this direction. His quarry had headed to Na’jif, he was certain of it. And now something was going down.

  A cadre of soldiers began to gallop toward him on camels, dust churning behind them. His pulse quickened. He didn’t speak the language and he hadn’t brought a translator. He couldn’t afford to be arrested now. It would take forever to get through the red tape.

  He did have the requisite travel papers, authorized by the sultan himself. But he also had a satellite phone. Any phone was illegal. And he carried a concealed firearm. That, too, was against the law. His travel documents made that clear. He’d have to ditch those, use his knife when it came down to the kill.

  The soldiers were coming straight for him.

  He dismounted quickly, dropped to his knees and buried his phone and gun. He took the reins and pressed innocently forward to meet the soldiers on foot, knowing he would appear less of a threat that way.

  His employer in Manhattan would not be able to contact him now. But that didn’t matter. He never spoke to anyone until his job was complete. Manhattan could wait.

  Twenty minutes later, he was corralled outside the city walls with other travelers, under the guard of nervous young soldiers. Their coordination was patchy. Something major was going down, and he could sense the troops weren’t all on the same page. Some of the men looked afraid, others excited.

  He managed to find one who could speak some English and he asked why he was being held. The soldier told him it was a precaution. There was a rumor blowing through the land that a man who claimed to be the true king had returned to take back the throne. Civil war would break out if the sultan’s army did not find and apprehend the imposter within the next few hours. All travelers in and out of the city were being stopped.

  “Are you sure he is an imposter?” he asked.

  The young soldier looked wary. He glanced over his shoulder to see who else might be listening. “It is the sultan’s word that he is.” The soldier explained that villagers under duress had told the militia that the “imposter” had ridden into Na’jif with a fair-skinned woman on Thursday morning. The woman had not been wearing a regulation chador, and they were thought to be hiding somewhere in the walled city.

  “Take me to your commander, at once,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I can help you find this man.” And the woman.

  19:20 Charlie, Na’jif plateau, Friday, October 3

  For five hours they’d raced in a straight line toward the purple foothills of the Asir—two camels, robes flying—over the undulating ripples of sand as far as the eye could see.

  The sun burned down hot on their backs as it curved in its arc toward the Red Sea, but not once did they slow their brutal pace.

  The sound of the camels’ hooves on sand thudded through his veins, and Rafiq’s heart began to pound with the ancient blood of his warrior ancestors. Each mile over the desert stripped back another layer, another barrier of the past fifteen years; each hour under the unrelenting Arabian sun exposed the raw and fierce Bedouin pride that burned deep inside.

  And the strong woman keeping pace at his side fed his energy, his strength, his purpose, his spirit. Feeling her racing alongside him fired his blood, his desire to fight, to reclaim his country. Paige Sterling was a woman who could handle this terrain—a woman who could handle him.

  She was a woman worthy of a king.

  Shock rippled through him at the thought, and he quashed it instantly. He had to focus on getting her out of Hamn, not keeping her for himself.

  Why would she want a life with him, anyway? She was his polar opposite. They lived in different worlds. How could he even entertain the idea?

  And his road ahead was going to be hard and bloody. He might not survive. He had no business thinking about trying to build a future with her, with anyone. Not until he’d liberated his country.

  Besides, she thought him a coward.

  Perhaps he was.

  He slowed his camel to a stop as the sun sank below the horizon in a fiery orange ball, throwing shadows behind every little ridge of sand. They’d reached the steep western escarpment and the jagged ridges of the Asir loomed above them.

  Paige brought her camel to a stop next to his. She was breathing hard and her kohl-rimmed eyes were bright, fierce with the energy of their flight, a mirror of his own passions. It lit something in him just to look at her. God, she really was beautiful. And at this very minute he wanted her, more than anything.

  “Which way do we go now?” she asked.

  He didn’t have a clue which way to go with her, how to handle the complexities of what he was feeling at the moment. He just knew he had to get her to safety. That was the first step.

  “That way.” He pointed up into the darkening crevices. “We need to go through that narrow pass between those two mountains. It leads to a route down to the Saudi-Yemeni border on the other side. We’ll travel until dark, then we can rest and water the camels.”

  She squinted up at the peaks. “Is that the way you came through?”

  “Yes. Hamnian airspace is completely closed. I was dropped off by chopper on the Saudi side, where I had a guide waiting with a camel. It’s the shortest route through the Asir.”

  He nudged his camel forward carefully picking a route through rocks of sharp flint. “Stones are loose, so watch your footing.”

  And they began their climb in silence.

  They slowly worked their way up the steep, winding path as the sky turned indigo and the air began to cool. Paige could smell pine. Her camel made soft snorting noises, and a pot clanked gently against a tin mug strapped to one of her saddlebags.

  The path flattened out along a narrow ridge crowded with twisted juniper trees. It was getting dark and difficult to see, only the stars and a rising sickle moon lighting the way. Rafiq halted his beast on the ridge ahead of her, motioned for her to stop.

  They’d climbed incredibly high already. The land of Hamn seemed to stretch out from the foothills below them, an expanse of sand, and rolling dunes all the way to the Red Sea.

  He took out a pair of night vision binoculars and scanned the plateau they’d just spent the better part of the day traversing.

  She saw him tense.

  Paige squinted, trying to see what he’d seen, but it was too dark. She edged her camel closer to his. “What is it?”

  He handed her the binoculars. The move, the trust, surprised her. He was treating her as an equal, a partner. She took the scopes from him, put them to her eyes, adjusted the vision.

  “I…can’t really see anything, other than maybe a bit of a windstorm brewing.”

  “That’s no windstorm. Those are soldiers.”

  “Following us? Already?”

  “The goddamn army.”

  Her stomach tightened. She lowered the binoculars. “You think it’s the Land Command?”

  “No. That’d be the sultan’s armed forces. Horses. Armored vehicles. Munitions.”

  Her eyes met his. They glinted in the dim light. “He knows. About you.”

  He nodded.

  The pace of her heart quickened. “I told you, Rafiq. It’s too late to run. You have to fight. The war has started.”

  “I am not running,” he snapped. “I will be back.”

  She said nothing. She could see now that the man was caught between a rock and one hell of a hard place. She had no idea why he’d left his country in the first place, but she could also see now how vital it was to get that antidote made.

  He took the scopes from her, lifted them to his eyes, peered into the dusk. A cool wind was beginning to rush down the mountain, displacing the hot desert air, beginning to whip the ends of their robes.

  “They’re still several hours out. If they know we headed tow
ard the Asir, they’ll be heading for the pass. It’s the most logical route into Saudi Arabia. And they’ll likely have reinforcements grouping along the Saudi side of the mountains.

  “So we’re trapped?”

  He spun in his saddle, secured the scopes, nudged his camel around and urged it onto a barely visible path that snaked along the ridge. “We go south, this way. They’ll expect us to head east, over that pass. They’ll follow it to the end looking for our tracks. It’ll buy us time.”

  Her camel automatically followed his. Paige was nervous riding in the dark, especially on such a narrow steep trail.

  “We’ll find somewhere to lay low tonight,” he called back to her, “until the cadre has passed. Then before dawn, we’ll backtrack behind them, up to another path that will take us through the peaks to the south, closer to Yemen. Yaah,” he said softly, urging his camel to move faster along the treacherous ridge, using the cover of the juniper forest to hide their progress.

  They moved like that for another hour, the air growing cooler, the breeze fragrant with the scent of juniper trees. He stopped suddenly in front of her. “Over there, around that ridge, see?”

  A strange dark bulk rose out and over the rocks and blotted the faint milky stars that spattered the sky.

  “What is it?” she asked coming up alongside him.

  “Ruins of a Crusader castle. Probably eleventh century.”

  A strange sense of timelessness filled Paige as she studied the dark hulking shape of the castle ruins on the ridge. She and Rafiq were treading on ground that had been traversed by people hundreds and hundreds of years ago. The sense of spiritual awe was so powerful that it brought tears to her eyes.

  Rafiq leaned over, brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Hey, you okay?”

  She nodded in silence, wanting to lean into him, to feel him next to her, to share the sensation she couldn’t begin to articulate.

  “What is it?” he whispered in Arabic.

  She drew in a deep breath. “It’s…just the idea that knights and Moors traveled this very path so many hundreds of years ago, under those same stars, using the same mode of transport as we are.” She smiled softly and looked into his eyes. “It kind of makes me feel insignificant in the scope of it all. It makes you question what you really want from your own little slice of life on earth.”

  He remained silent for a while, with just the soft rush of wind in juniper leaves and the snorts of their camels in the night air.

  “What do you want, Paige?” He finally asked, his voice quiet, serious.

  She bit her lip. She wasn’t sure anymore. She was on a cusp—her old life destroyed, the future an unknown landscape, both frightening and exciting. “All I know is…that I just don’t want to do it all alone anymore,” she whispered softly.

  He studied her in the dark. But he said nothing.

  He turned his camel suddenly and headed up the path, sending small rocks clattering far down into the canyon.

  Something slipped in her stomach, and she felt incredibly alone. She watched Rafiq moving ahead of her like an ancient Moorish warrior. And she realized it was him she wanted. It was a ridiculous notion. And once she got back to civilization, she’d realize it was a heat-of-the-moment thing.

  Besides, he was a sultan. He had a war to fight, a country to reclaim, princesses to marry.

  Who did she think she was, anyway? A man like him didn’t lack for women. A man like him chose women for political purpose. He used them to build alliances with neighboring countries.

  Besides, she really knew very little about him—such as why he deserted Hamn in the first place.

  They neared the stone walls, the shape of the crumbling turrets taking form against the pale moonlight, the sheer size of the place becoming evident.

  He brought his camel to a stop. “We can hole up in the castle grounds tonight and water the animals.”

  And defend themselves from the bastions if necessary. But that notion hung unspoken between them.

  Paige dismounted, led her camel through an ancient arch, feeling as if she were crossing through a portal from one world to another, feeling as if she was no longer Dr. Paige Sterling, but just a woman in time. She stopped for a moment to gather herself, allowing Rafiq to go ahead before following him into the castle courtyard where the air was still and eerie. Grass grew thick around an old well. She let her camel go and he made straight for it, began nosing at it with happy snuffling sounds. She smiled in spite of herself. The horror of the pathogen and a world on the brink of war seemed a million miles and as many light years away.

  Rafiq sat up near a turret and punched Sauvage’s number into his satellite phone as he watched Paige in the courtyard below him. She’d taken off her chador and her hair gleamed almost silver in the moonlight. He watched as she lit a fat tallow candle and placed it in a stone alcove. She was now laying out a blanket.

  “Zayed?” The voice startled him back. He glanced quickly through the narrow slit in the wall, making sure the desert plains far below were still empty. The sand in this region was pale and it reflected the light of the moon. Any army would stick out a mile away. They’d be safe here for a while. “C’est moi. What’s the news?”

  “Still nothing. No sign the Cabal has been alerted.”

  “So you think it was a technical glitch?”

  “I don’t know. December thinks it’s unlikely. Perhaps someone found the device—a Nexus employee like Sterling, unaware of Cabal motives, or even its existence. It may take a while for the news to filter up. The bombs could still blow.”

  “Well we can do with a small reprieve.” He hesitated.

  “It may take us a day longer than anticipated to get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “The sultan has mobilized his army. We have troops tracking us. We can no longer cross the Saudi border. We need pickup on the Yemeni side.”

  “What? The sultan is involved?”

  Rafiq sucked in his breath. He had to tell him. It was going to come out one way or another. “This has nothing to do with the Cabal. He wants me.”

  “Zayed—”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. There was no simple way to say this. “I am the true king of Hamn.”

  Dead silence stretched through space.

  Sauvage laughed, breaking the silence. “You been chewing the qat, eh?”

  Rafiq said nothing.

  “This is true? You’re telling me the sultan of Hamn is…your half brother?”

  “I am Rafiq bin Zafir bin Omar al-Qaadr, the rightful heir to the Hamnian monarchy. According to the constitution, if I return—”

  “Merde!” he hissed. “How does the sultan know you are there?”

  “Someone recognized me.” Rafiq hesitated. “The entire nation has been waiting for me. The rebels have been amassing arms.”

  Sauvage swore again, softly, but no less violently. “This is not a minor problem, non? You have started a rebellion. A civil war.”

  Rafiq watched Paige drawing water out of the old well for the camels, the sight of her strangely soothing to his mind.

  She was the only thing real and tangible thing in his world right at this moment—a muse with a conscience. One that was guiding him right now, keeping his focus on what was important.

  “It will not be a problem,” he said calmly. “My mission remains the same. Always has.” It was a lie. Nothing was the same. But then again, it was. The circle had come together. “I’ll let you know when we get near the Yemeni border.”

  “We won’t be able to send air support into Yemen. We have no arrangement with the government.”

  “We will have to exit by sea, across from Djibouti. Can you get a boat into the Gulf of Aden for us? An old fishing vessel, maybe? We won’t attract attention that way.”

  “That can be arranged. We can have the chopper pick Sterling up from the boat, and we can have a jet on standby in Djibouti to fly her into São Diogo, ASAP.”

  Rafiq signed off, walk
ed out along the crumbling parapet and stared over the land. His land. A strange exhilaration blew over him with the night breeze.

  He heard Paige coming along the parapet, the clink of her bells and bracelets incredibly feminine. She came up behind him, touched his shoulder so gently that he caught his breath, and with it, her scent. Warmth and power rushed through his veins.

  “Rafiq, look at me.”

  He turned slowly. Moonlight shimmered in her silver eyes. She moved closer and his gut tightened, his body braced. He felt hot.

  “What’s the news?”

  “No attack. Not yet. They may not even be aware the device is related.”

  “Thank God,” she whispered. She stood beside him, her arm brushing his, and stared out over his desert. He could almost feel her mind reaching into space, thinking; she never stopped thinking. What was she thinking now?

  She lifted her face to his suddenly. “Let me go, Rafiq. Alone.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me the way, give me a camel and supplies, and let me try and make it over the mountains on my own. You stay here. Help your people.”

  Shock rippled through him. “You won’t make it alive. Not alone.”

  “I might. And if I don’t, at least I’ll die trying. The loss of my life won’t be the end of the world, Rafiq.”

  It’ll be the end of mine. She’d just made him see it, right this minute—clear as moonlight over white desert.

  “If I don’t make it, your techs have my pass codes, they know how to access my system, my research. Dr. Meyer is the best there is. He can use—”

  “No!” He gripped her by the shoulders. “I cannot let you go alone. Meyer will work faster with your help, your guidance.”

  “There’s an entire army after us, Rafiq. What chance do either of us have of getting over the border? It’s not me they want. It’s you. They don’t know anything about the pathogen or the antidote. This is your battle. Let me go and fight mine. I’ll have a better chance of getting out if the army isn’t after me.”

  He hated the fact her argument made sense. But he didn’t want to let her go for reasons that went deeper than any logic.