He fooled with the trip computer for a moment, double-checking their odometer reading against their scheduled arrival time. They should hit the check-in station to the minute. A hard jounce rocked the car. If the potholes got much deeper, they’d need alpinist’s climbing gear to get out of the next one.
“What are you talking about, Luke?”
“I’m talking about the Malles Motos. Supposed to call it The Original by Motul.”
“The French engine oil provider?”
“Yeah. Those guys run with no support except for a small trunk of parts. Do their own service, their own camping, their own route planning, and they ride without a support team. Really impressive.” He called out the final turn and he could see the white tents of the check-in point not far ahead.
“That’s where you’ve been these last two nights is hanging out with motorcycle racers?”
“Sure. What did you think I was doing?”
“Being off with someone like one of those Argentine dancers or Liesl or the blonde with the major front-end armature or something?”
“Couldn’t get to Liesl even if I wanted to, not with the way she’s bolted to your side. Besides, are you crazy enough to think I’d be with anyone else when I’ve got you?”
“Apparently, yes, I’m that crazy.”
Zoe rolled up to the time check-in and pulled the time card out of the special dash holder that Christian had tucked it in.
Had she thought that he’d lost interest in her? Was that why she’d almost crashed them early in the course? Not overwhelmed by the driving, but by their…relationship?
He’d admit they’d left fling somewhere back on the road and he hadn’t even noticed. Since Marva had cheated on him and blown up their marriage, he’d only ever had flings. A few of those had lasted as long as month or two, but weren’t involved enough to call them anything more.
For fuck’s sake, how had he ended up in a relationship after seven days?
Luke decided that it was a good thing he wasn’t the one driving.
17
Zoe waited through the five-minute hold at the timing station. All she knew about the next stage from the Road Book was that there was no mention of dunes. In fact, most of today’s Selective Section was technically on roads because the course markers didn’t have the dashed line of off-road. But neither was their route going to be even marginally paved. It was technically marked “track,” which probably meant just as little as it sounded.
Luke was still with her? What did that mean? (Means you’re still together, you goofball.)
Actually, it didn’t. But if he thought so, maybe they still were.
And if they were, the things he’d said about who he was with…were about her?
He liked the way she thought?
The way she made him laugh (even if she’d only ever heard it as a smile)? Except he actually had laughed at her just a moment ago. At her, not with her, but maybe it was a start.
And…sexy? That was the first thing he’d said—as if such a delusion was possible.
With a roar, Kanski’s Toyota leapt out of the holding station beside her.
She checked over the car. She left the tire pressure set to high. On dunes she’d deflate the tires for better traction, but “track” probably meant dirt roads. She dialed the shock absorbers to a stronger response—there’d be no way to dodge the potholes on a track as it was probably more pothole than road. Fuel status was still good—they had to be able to go the entire route on a single tank—no en route refueling allowed. She changed the engine setting from “1,” which meant no turbo and very fuel conservative, used for road driving, to the max responsiveness of “4”—all out power. Oil temperature and pressure were—
Their timer handed them a new time card. She double-checked that it was their car number and it was stamped with the next minute before tucking it carefully in the dash holder—losing a timecard incurred a major penalty.
At thirty seconds, she shoved in the clutch and shifted into first gear.
At fifteen, she slid her little side window closed but no longer felt stifled for air. No longer felt the choking oppression of all her doubts. They were still there, but their chokehold had eased from imminent death to mild strangulation. No prob! She was used to that.
The timekeeper started the ten-second countdown.
“Luke?”
“Yeah?”
Five seconds.
She didn’t know what she wanted to say, but once the racing started, there wouldn’t be a chance for stray thoughts.
Four.
“This woman you’re with?” Unbelievably herself.
Three.
“Uh-huh.”
Two.
“Um… Please don’t give up on her too quickly.”
One.
“If you say so.” Zoe swore that she could hear the laugh in his voice and that encouraged her more than anything.
She punched the gas and popped out the clutch. The Citroën roared to life. Five hundred horsepower launched them from zero to a hundred kph in less than two seconds. First, second, third, fourth—a four-wheel drift through the first corner—and she launched down the track.
What she could have done at Huckfest with a car like this almost hurt her heart. Well, she’d had enough of that.
Luke wanted her.
That was the present and she’d be damned if the past was going to come between them again. It was so hard for her to trust, but if she wasn’t going to trust a Team 6 SEAL lieutenant commander, she’d better get her head fixed.
Third gear, second through a tight corner that Luke had warned her about. Out of the turn: third, fourth, fifth…then the world opened up in front of them.
Zoe hadn’t been ready for it.
At Huckfest there was a starting dune. Jumpers started from its wide flat top to take advantage of the sharp downslope to build speed. Opposite, there was a high dune to climb, then a single jump over the backside. A momentary sensation of flying, with a view over successive dunes and the Pacific Ocean, then the hard slam like one burst of a sexual release as you came back to earth.
On the race from Dakar, Senegal, to Saint-Louis, they’d been entirely on the beach. The Atlantic had rarely been more than a few car lengths away and their highest altitude might have been the moment she’d made that jump to pass Luke and Christian.
Here, the track led to the Argentine oceanside south of Mar del Plata. It was a strip of dirt atop a cliff. To her right was arid brush—far denser than Senegal’s, though that wasn’t saying much. To her left was a five-story cliff down to the Atlantic. Senegal was in her past, all the way there across the ocean. She’d do her best to leave her doubts over there.
And if she didn’t pay attention, she might well end up there—as a floating wreck.
The track wove back and forth atop the cliff, sometimes mere feet from the drop-off to the beach. Each hummock that she jumped had to include a dose of faith that while she was in the air, the road and cliff wouldn’t veer out from under her.
“Two exclamations in half a klick,” Luke called out.
Fourth, third, second. She slowed perhaps more than she needed to, but she didn’t have a feel for how cautious the course designers were. Three exclamations might be all the way to first gear.
Two exclamations was the sharp turn she’d feared, but it wasn’t that sharp.
Zoe accelerated as she swept through the corner—
Then slammed on the brakes and the car jerked to a halt and died as she’d forgotten to drive in the clutch.
She looked out her side window at the face of a boulder larger than the delivery truck she’d almost hit earlier. Its rough face was so close that she could make out individual grains in the towering chunk of sandstone. In the sudden silence, a seagull began laughing off her feathered ass at them.
“Okay, now we know what a two is,” Luke said calmly.
“Yeah,” Zoe swallowed against a dry throat. She pulled back on the tall handbrake t
hat stuck up from the middle of the console—the size of a baseball bat, there was no way to miss grabbing it in an emergency. She hit the Engine Start button on her steering wheel while holding the brake.
Giving it gas, she released the brake and was once more racing up the track, but no faster than her heart, which was still trying to throttle her. Ten minutes into her first Selective Section and she’d almost knocked them out of the race. What else was she going to run into over the next fourteen days that would try to kill her?
Other than a Pakistani arms dealer?
Luke hung on. The car danced and jerked like a living thing.
Its awesome suspension smoothed out all except the very worst of the road’s surface, but Zoe’s control was shaking them hard.
She changed gears every few seconds: sometimes more frequently, but rarely longer. He now understood the characteristic sound of the videos he’d watched of previous Dakars.
Roar, roar, roar, ROAR! with the increasing pitch of increasing gears. Bwaa, bwaa, bwaa of downshifts. Then roaring up again.
She downshifted into turns and accelerated hard on the straightaways, even when they were only a hundred meters long.
Each tiny change of the steering wheel twisted the highly reactive car. Cleaner landings off jumps, smoother slides around dirt corners, counter-steering against acceleration torque—Zoe’s hands were in constant motion.
It was a challenge to watch the Road Book and not her.
He remembered that he’d once thought of her as blurred because of the way energy seemed to constantly vibrate off her. Here, in Christian’s world rally car, she finally made sense. No Tweety Bird energy spent to distract or tease. Zoe was one hundred percent about milking the most out of the car over specific terrain.
She displayed a fearlessness. She took blind corners on faith. No exclamation marks warning of danger? She accelerated into corners—sliding through them in dramatic four-wheel drifts. Blind jump in the middle of a straightaway—she might slow for the angle of the jump, but not because she couldn’t see what lay on the other side.
Then they descended a narrow notch through the cliff and down to the beach.
That was where Zoe shone. Fourth, fifth, sixth gear—wide open at over two hundred kph, a hundred and twenty miles per hour, she flew along. If there was one thing she understood, it was sand.
He didn’t recognize what was happening at first. The motorcycles had all started before the cars and were long gone. Their single tracks had been obliterated by the thirty cars ahead of them, leaving their own sliding twin tracks.
But the air, which had been so clear, began misting up. The midday sun blurred by dust, then by sand thrown in the air. Sand thrown by what?
By…
Zoe was overtaking Kanski. A seasoned Dakar Rally driver, who had left the timing area two minutes ahead of them, and she was overtaking him. There wasn’t a chance that their car was more capable than Kanski’s, which meant that it was Zoe’s driving.
As she came even with Kanski and began the battle to pass, Luke could feel his body heating up again.
The memory of just the two of them racing along the Senegalese beach. Of the way she’d felt as he took her against the side of the Renault. The second time she’d been true to her word, giving herself to him as much in joy as the first time had been in fear. She’d bared more than just her body—he’d never felt so connected to a woman than right after she’d first beat on him and then, when all was done, wept on him.
She hadn’t done either one again, but it had given him insight into the woman. That there was a woman in there, not just a body for him to enjoy. Had he always been that shallow? Women were for… But Zoe wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like she had some pre-ordained purpose. She hurt and ached and felt joy and had a dark past that she confronted with towering strength. Were all woman like that? More complex than he’d ever bothered to think about?
Maybe he could ask Nikita.
He checked the odometer again, glanced at the Road Book, then began to smile.
“Zoe,” he called to her over their helmet intercom.
“Uh-huh,” she tried again to get by Kanski, but he wasn’t having any of it on the narrow beach. It was high tide, and there just wasn’t that much room to play with between the cliff face and waves.
“Really put the pressure on him. Distract him until he’s only paying attention to you.”
“Why?” But she was already accelerating hard on his passenger side.
“But don’t try to actually pass him.”
“Say what?”
Kanski came up close to the cliff edge to block her and she slid down toward the waves.
“In about six more seconds, there’s a right turn that will take us back up the cliff. Distract him so much that he misses the turn.”
In answer, Zoe dropped down a gear and thumped on the gas. A rooster tail of sand shot out the back of the Citroën as she weaved side to side behind Kanski like a maniac, mere inches off his bumper. In the lower gear, there was no doubt that Kanski would hear the Citroën engine’s roar like the wrath of the gods on his tail.
He could feel Kanski and his co-driver glancing at each other and thinking, No way! Or perhaps, What the hell?
Three.
Two.
Zoe had gotten so close to the water that she had two wheels in the backwash of the waves and Kanski was right down there with her, to block. The Citroën’s windshield was blasted nearly blind with sand and water despite the wipers being on high.
But Luke sat on the dry side of the car and kept watching ahead for the turn.
There.
“Now! Hard right!”
Zoe sliced from left to right, so close to Kanski’s bumper she could have flattened a taco between them. She shot blind across the beach on his word.
Then the wiper managed to clear the windshield and she corrected a few degrees as she punched for more power.
Luke glanced back.
Kanski was in an arcing four-wheel slide as he tried to recover.
“Too little, too late, dude,” Luke called out with a whoop.
They sliced into the narrow cleft in the cliffs three car-lengths ahead of Kanski.
“And that’s how we do it in Maine!” Luke shouted rearward before he faced forward and scrolled the Road Book for the next set of instructions.
“Ma-ine?” Zoe managed on a bounce as they jumped clear of the arroyo and landed once more on a clifftop track.
“Ay-uh,” Luke confirmed happily.
“Too little, too late, dude is what they say in Maine?”
“Sure…” Except it wasn’t.
“It sounds like you’re from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”
“What’s wrong with that? I like that movie.”
Zoe actually spared him a glance during her latest drifting turn.
“What?”
“I’m just trying not to admit that I like it to. Most people think it makes me weird.”
“Idiots. It was…”
And they both shouted, “Excellent!” together which left them both laughing.
“Well, I’m not going to start calling you dude. You’re a girl-type person.”
“So, what are you going to call me?”
They passed a lone tree. Luke twisted around and began counting seconds. Kanski was five or six seconds back now. Most excellent.
“A lovely, smart, sexy woman who drives like a god and enjoys goofy movies? Damn, I don’t know, Zoe. Dudette doesn’t seem to cover it.”
“That’s goddess to you. I drive like a goddess!”
The track slashed down toward a stream a dozen meters across. There was nothing to indicate how deep it might be.
Zoe drove through it at speed, blasting water aside, and actually shifted up another gear as she climbed out the far side.
Goddess Zoe? She wasn’t going to get any argument from him.
18
“Eight hundred and twenty-three kilometers,” Luke an
nounced as they rolled into the bivouac.
And Zoe could feel every single one of them tramping through her body like a centipede army bent on her destruction. Only a hundred and fifty klicks had been on a Selective Section, because Stage One was the easy one—six hundred something had been timing challenges on roads. This was the easy one? Someone shoot her now, please.
She and Luke hadn’t talked much through the rest of the drive beyond what was needed for the racing itself. But it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, she hoped. They’d simply focused on the task at hand like the good soldiers they were.
On a couple of the longer straightaways, they talked over the import of Drake’s news about what had happened in Pakistan. While it was chilling, it didn’t shed any more light on what was happening at The Dakar. That conclusion had also cast its own pall over further conversation.
After the emotional drain of the start and the first Road Section followed by the pounding exhilaration of the Selective Section, the long Road Section to the end of Stage One became a timing challenge that ultimately consumed all of their lagging energy, despite drinking water and eating a couple of energy gels. Maybe the gels had energy, but she certainly didn’t.
The bivouac had been set up by the assistance vehicles that had hurried ahead—doing their own timed rally race, but only on Road Sections. There existed no Selective Section for the assistance crews.
Santa Rosa de la Pampa might be a city of a hundred thousand, but they weren’t in it. Instead, the bivouac was on a tabletop-flat farmer’s field far enough out of town to make the tall city buildings no more than a heat shimmer in the distance.
The area was a fenced-off rectangle covering many acres—a one-night-only pop-up city of nearly two thousand people: five hundred competitors, an equal number (at least) of assistance personnel, the same again in media, officials, vendors, caterers and… It was a wild scene, not counting the fans who’d come out from the city.
Then she eased around a corner looking for her lane—tall banners with car numbers flew to indicate where to go—and almost plowed into a dance troupe. A great number of women were moving in two circling lines, one facing each way. Attire ranged from jeans with loose white blouses (the kind that looked silly on flat-chested women but fantastic on the Argentines) to elegant rawhide skirts and vests topped with (what she assumed were traditional) flat-topped, flat-brimmed Old West hats. They all looked like they were having such fun.
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