Maze Master

by Kathleen O'Neal Gear

  It was probably all nonsense, of course, but he’d been telling himself that for years to no avail. His own uncertainty was the adventure. If it turned out to be true, well, it would change the world.

  Anna blinked suddenly and sucked in a breath. After she’d composed herself, she said, “Martin, talk to me. What are you thinking?”

  “About you.”

  “Any specifics?”

  “If you told me anything meaningful about yourself, it would be a good start.”

  “What do you want to know? I was born in Florida, near the—”

  “I don’t think so. I’m a specialist in languages, remember? I think you grew up somewhere in the Rocky Mountain West.”

  Anna turned to give him an incredulous look. “Miami is swimming with different languages. Don’t you think that might have had an influence?”

  “If you’d grown up in Miami’s linguistic stew, you be clipping your Es and swallowing Rs. I don’t hear it.”

  High overheard, the building roar of a jet split the night. As quickly, it passed and began to fade.

  Anna tilted her head back, eyes hardening as she scanned the contrail that gleamed in the starlight.

  Martin followed her gaze. “What’s wrong?”

  “That’s an A-10 Thunderbolt. The situation is deteriorating.”

  “It’s just a plane, Anna.”

  She subtly shook her head. “The Thunderbolt was built to attack tanks, Martin.”

  “What makes you think it wasn’t just innocently flying over, heading back to U.S. bases in Germany or Italy?”

  She said nothing for several moments. “I hope you’re right, but I want you to listen to me. If something goes really wrong, like war breaks out, we’re totally on our own. There’s no help coming.”

  He paused to digest that interesting tidbit. “What makes you think war is going to break out? Aren’t Egypt and America allies?”

  Given the quirk to her lips, he’d amused her. “We were. Before LucentB. But now? All bets are off.”

  He tossed another chunk of wood on the flames. “The plague is in Europe, not here. There’s no reason for a war with Egypt. Though it would be just my luck. We’re close to completing the quest of a lifetime.”

  “Well, hopefully, we’ll be gone before it breaks out. If my source is correct, the village that’s supposed to be near the cave is less than one day’s ride. We should be there tomorrow night. If we can find the cave, we’ll be back in America three days later.”

  “Who is this source, Anna? How do you know him?”

  Anna ran her long-fingered hands up and down her lower legs, forming her khaki pants to her shapely shins. Her eyes turned wistful, as if recalling painful memories. “He’s an old friend, a classmate. He works for Israeli intelligence now, but he used to be a heck of a great mountain climber.”

  “Mountain climber?” He rubbed the back of his neck, aware of the pungent tang that rose from his unwashed armpit. Their water supply was too limited for even sponge baths. Smart people didn’t get extravagant with water in the Sahara. “What does he do in Israeli intelligence?”

  “He’s a … a scholar of ancient documents.”

  He had the feeling she was lying, but he said, “See, I don’t get why intelligence agencies need scholars of ancient documents. Wouldn’t they be more concerned—”

  “Well, think about it. The last thing the Israelis need is some imam wandering out of the desert waving a long-forgotten prophetic scroll that will upset the entire balance of power in the Middle East. Our allies are already having enough problems with new caliphates springing up by the day.”

  “How do you know this guy? Where did you meet him?”

  “We went to college together.”

  “Which college?”

  “I told you. California State University in Bakersfield.”

  Martin wondered if any of this was true. Like her birthplace, he doubted she’d attended college in California. He knew something about university cultures. Depending upon where a student was educated, he or she picked up regional mannerisms, ways of speaking, attitudes toward the world. Anna didn’t have that West Coast university “flare.” Instead, her serious demeanor suggested Ivy League training. “How would a girl from Montana get to California?”

  “Florida,” she corrected with a knowing smile. “I wanted to get as far from home as possible. Across the country seemed about right.”

  “Bakersfield, huh? San Joaquin Valley. I’ve been there.”

  “Good for you.” Anna used a piece of wood to prod the fire, sending wreaths of sparks into the desert darkness.

  “Why were you so eager to get away from your family? Mother-daughter issues?”

  “No. I had an overprotective older brother named Jonathan. He met every boy who ever asked me for a date at the front door and threatened him.”

  “Jeez. You didn’t have many dates, did you?”

  “Very few. If I hadn’t fled to California I’m sure I would have never had sex.”

  Martin laughed. “Thank God you escaped.”

  Anna leaned back on the sand, propping herself on her elbows so she could glance into her pack, then up at the sky. Then she sat forward again and stared at the flames. What’s in her pack that she had to look at?

  “What about you, Martin? Older brothers? Sisters?”

  “Nope. I’m the only child of a single mother. It was just Mom and me growing up.”

  “Really?” Anna’s delicate brows slanted down over her pointed nose. “I wouldn’t have guessed that. You don’t seem…”

  “What? Like a mama’s boy?” Martin smiled. “Well, it wasn’t easy for either of us. My father died when I was three. God, that was 2009. The country was in the midst of a financial meltdown. My mother lost her job. We had a hard time for a while. Fortunately, I had two great-uncles who took turns being my father. Both Vietnam vets, by the way. Great guys.” He would be eternally grateful for having them in his life. Especially in his teen years, when he’d gotten a little out of hand and they’d dragged him aside to explain the way the world worked. Tough love, it was called.

  “Can I ask how your father died?”

  “He was a runner. He was running down the side of road one day when a car swerved and hit him. Killed him instantly. The driver was a sixteen-year-old kid who happened to be texting his girlfriend and didn’t notice he was about to run off the road.”

  Anna blinked and looked away. “What a tragedy. Your poor mother. Did she ever remarry?”

  “Yes, but not until I turned twenty-one and graduated from college. He’s a nice guy. I like him.”

  Something about the softness of her expression touched him. But it also worried him. He was fairly certain that everything she’d told him about herself was a lie. Which meant she had much to hide. Much she feared. Did he dare let himself get close to her?

  “Okay,” Martin said. “Enough personal stuff. Time for business. Let’s talk about tomorrow. Where are we going? What’s the name of the modern village? It’s time you told me.”

  Anna scanned the wadi, as though she expected to see pursuers at any instant. “The ancient village that was once called Batatab was renamed about one thousand years ago. It’s now called Bir Bashan, and it sits on a rim of Black Canyon at the edge of this dune field. When I was here four years ago, I didn’t know that Bir Bashan was built on the ruins of Batatab.” Her gaze grew distant. “But he must have. The name meant something to him.”

  Martin tilted his head skeptically. “Who is ‘he’?”

  She glanced at her pack again. “Let’s roll out our sleeping bags. We have a busy day tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know how you can sleep after the things we heard on the news today. Doesn’t it bother you that the plague may have escaped quarantine in France? And what about the huge explosion in northern China? The reporter said it could have been—”

  “That’s speculation. No one knows the details of the Chinese event yet. It was probably a big munitions
factory going up in flames. I was far more bothered by the graph that showed ammunition sales in America going through the roof.”

  “Yeah, that disturbed me, too. But what if the plague really has escaped quarantine—”

  “There’s nothing you or I can do about it.” She rolled out her sleeping bag beneath the overhang. “So we may as well get a good night’s rest.”

  Firelight illuminated her stony eyes as she stretched out across the bag to watch him.

  “I’m just going to think about what’s happening in Europe for a while.”

  “Okay, but don’t be long. Tomorrow’s going to be a hard day.”

  Long after she’d fallen asleep, Martin found himself staring out at the starlit dunes, wondering what was happening in Europe, and wondering if she’d told him the truth about anything.

  CHAPTER 7

  SEPTEMBER 23. NUBIAN DESERT, SUDAN. TWO HUNDRED KILOMETERS FROM THE EGYPTIAN BORDER.

  The whole damn world is coming apart.

  The green image in Captain Micah Hazor’s night vision goggles flickered as the filters kicked in to protect the delicate intensifiers from the explosion of white light in the valley below. Stones, scrubby grasses, and thin-branched desert bushes shot black shadows against the steep hillside he and his team were climbing.

  They were all running on fumes. Micah turned, sweat pouring down his oxygen-starved body. The hoarse gasps coming from his men seemed loud. Instinctively they kept glancing back at the valley they’d just evacuated. Light, like popping strobes, illuminated the distant buildings.

  Flipping his goggles up on his helmet, Micah watched the explosions that seemed to consume the small oasis. A series of white flashes dimmed into a yellow ball of fire, and rising flames silhouetted the mud-and-stone houses, steel prefab buildings, and the mosque.

  Micah didn’t need to glance at his watch. Sergeant Luke Ranken had set his charges to go off at 0200 hours. The buried cache of surface-to-air missiles, Semtex, mortar rounds, and bulk explosives had been too good to pass up. Especially since the Mufa Jihad, as they called themselves, had buried the cache within meters of the town’s fuel storage tanks.

  Around the base of the fireball, sparkles of smaller explosions, like a high-dollar fireworks display, twinkled and flashed.

  “Yahoooo,” Marcus Beter attempted to crow between heaving breaths. The fact that the wisecracking private didn’t break out in maniacal laughter was symptomatic of his total fatigue, or the burden of the dead body he and Corporal Gembane bore on the makeshift carry-pole between them. Or maybe it was the awareness that the missions were coming too close. Some initiated even before the last one was finished. Like this mission, they were being thrown together at the last minute.

  Two months ago Micah’s spec ops extraction group had consisted of twenty men. After tonight, four of them remained alive: Micah, Beter, Ranken, and Gembane.

  We got lucky, Micah thought as the hollow booms finally reached them. Warheads, mortar rounds, and tank shells cooked off or detonated from concussion.

  At the head of the line, Sergeant Ranken was looking back, his blacked-out face creased by a weary grin, his helmet brim casting a shadow across his eyes. The woman hanging on to his arm wore filthy civilian clothes. Her hair hung in brown tangles. She’d been pretty once. Maybe she would be again someday, but Micah suspected—given what she’d just been through—her nightmares were only beginning.

  Her name was Yvette Duclair, twenty-eight, a French national working for the Associated Press, a woman who thought she could get “the inside scoop.” She’d gotten it all right, having been taken at gunpoint from her hotel room by the Mufa Jihad. Her image had been broadcast around the world, showing her on her knees before her captors, with a leash around her neck. Other images depicted her naked, short-chained to a filthy cement floor, masked fighters pointing machetes at her groveling body.

  When Micah and Private Sully Hanson had shot their way into the four-room compound where she’d been held on the outskirts of the El Jauf training camp, they’d found more of a whimpering animal in her cell than a woman, though she’d begun to respond as they struggled to dress her and evacuate the building.

  They’d just made it out the compound gate when a bullet caught Hanson full in the face.

  Now his corpse rode the carry-pole borne by Beter and Gembane.

  Billows of fire from the blast were fewer now, smaller, as darkness began to reclaim its fight for the night.

  Micah flipped his night vision goggles down. “All right, soldiers. Let’s beat feet. We got a ride waiting on the other side of this ridge.”

  “Roger that,” Colonel Joseph Logan’s voice spoke in Micah’s earphone. “We’re reading no less than twenty-three hostiles hard on your butt, Captain. And that detonation of their arms depot is probably going to supply them with a whole new sense of motivation.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Micah watched his small command stumble forward up the goat trail, their booted feet slipping on the loose rock as they climbed.

  Most of Europe was quarantined because of a weird-ass plague, and the American military was crawling all over northern Africa for reasons he couldn’t quite grasp.

  From his position, he watched Yvette Duclair as she clung to Ranken’s muscular arm, her weary feet twisting and turning on the rocky trail. She tottered forward on the verge of collapse.

  Micah stumbled along behind them. At the moment, he’d trade the whole stinking world for a good night’s sleep. They’d been up for nearly two days straight since their insertion into Sudan. Most of that had been humping hard to get into, and now out of, the El Jauf area.

  Duclair had managed all right as they crossed the flat agricultural fields down in the valley, but she’d played out quickly, and now was staggering uncontrollably.

  Should have fixed a separate litter for her. Now’s a good time to think of it.

  But that was the problem. As good as Micah and his team were, they’d lost the edge. Been pushed too hard, for too long. All of the teams were that way. He and what was left of his people hadn’t been rotated out of theater for more than two years.

  He hadn’t been home in almost three.

  “Mama? You still got a house in Atlanta? Or is that only a dog-tired soldier’s hallucination?”

  Stop it. You’re talking to yourself.

  Ahead of him, Yvette tripped over an angular rock sticking out of the trail. She almost pulled Sergeant Ranken down with her.

  “Miss Duclair, you all right?” Ranken asked as he tried to help her up.

  “I just…” The woman panted. “Just. Can’t go any further.”

  “Here,” Micah told her, kneeling down. Gembane and Beter stumbled up behind him, the heavy weight of Sully Hanson’s body swaying from the pole.

  Mindful of the trauma she’d been through, he patiently explained, “Miss Duclair, I’m going to lift you up. Do you understand? You’re safe. We’re the good guys. When I pick you up, I’m carrying you to safety. Do you understand?”

  She blinked in the darkness, her face glowing green in the night vision goggles. She couldn’t seem to focus her eyes. “Yes, please, please just get me out of here!”

  “We’re going to do that, ma’am.” Micah took a deep breath, lifted her, and slung her over his shoulder, saying, “Okay, you worthless pukes, let’s make time.”

  With the first steps he knew he was in trouble. She couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds, but his anaerobic muscles screamed at him.

  Gotta do it. He sucked his lungs full of air. When you’re at the end of your rope tie a knot and hang on.

  Reaching down into what he called his “deep core,” he willed himself up the slope, one leaden step at a time, placing his feet as carefully as he could.

  The woman over his shoulder broke into hollow sobs, whispering, “Please, Captain Hazor, I want to go home. I want to go home.”

  “I’m going to make sure that happens, ma’am. Just hold on.”

  I
n the distance another detonation boomed into the night.

  The narrow trail grew steeper as Micah fought for breath and tried to ignore the ache in his calves, thighs, and back.

  Got to make that narrow gap in the ridge. Then it’s down the other side.

  “Captain?” Beter’s hoarse voice barely carried over the grinding of loose stone under his feet.

  “What, soldier?” Micah managed through an exhale. Where the hell was the top of this damn trail, anyway?

  “Gotta rest, sir,” Beter wheezed.

  “Negative,” Micah managed. “Bad guys closing.”

  “But we almost … dropped Hanson,” Gembane croaked.

  Micah blinked against his own weary dizziness. Duclair’s weight felt like solid lead. Her swaying limbs kept throwing Micah off balance. “Three … beautiful … words…” Micah’s throat had gone dry, his lungs working like bellows. “Forward … operating … base.”

  “FOB, FOB, FOB,” Beter began chanting under his breath as he scrambled up the exposed bedrock.

  Ranken gasped, “Gonna get … to sleep … at FOB.”

  “Sleep for days,” Micah assured them, desperately hoping that single promise would get them across the divide. Hell, they could drag Yvette Duclair down the other side to the waiting chopper if they had to.

  He winced at the thought of doing the same to Sully Hanson’s body, but their old comrade’s head had been turned to pulp. He wouldn’t feel a thing. The hard part was that Sully’d been a solid guy. The kind who had his shit wired tight. The kind who shouldn’t have taken a bullet through his face to blast out the base of his brain.

  It feels like the End of the World, I swear to God.

  But he’d worry about it after they made the FOB and found the luxurious cots that waited in the dark interior of some camo-draped tent. He might even manage to fumble his combat gear off before he collapsed into the sack.

  “FOB, FOB,” Beter’s voice continued to chant over the breathless weeping of the journalist.

  It might have been an eternity, or maybe less than ten minutes before Ranken puffed out the news: “Here’s the top, Cap’n. Hand her over to me. I can schlep her down the hill.”