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But he turned and glanced at her. “You’re awake. Good.” He scrutinized her with narrowed eyes.
She moved forward. Maybe all hope wasn’t lost yet. She stumbled to the closest man and sank onto her knees in front of him, turned his head, blanched at the fixed, empty stare, the dark lashes clumped with blood. The driver of the other Hummer. She recognized him before her gaze fell to his ring finger, which had been hacked off.
Tariq’s voice was tight as he spoke. “They’re all dead. I already checked.”
She drew her hands back. The sun was cooking her, the sand burning everywhere she touched it. A wave of dizziness assailed her. She was going to be sick, or faint or have a nervous breakdown. Surely all of those responses would have been appropriate under the circumstances.
“Have you called for help?” she asked weakly. Maybe he had walked around and found a spot where his phone worked.
“There’s no signal this far out. And they took the satellite phones from the cars. Took everything that could be sold at the nearest market. Get out of the sun.”
She stumbled back to the car to see if she could find some water, glanced through the window and gagged at the sight. One of the armed guards sprawled across the backseat, bathed in blood. Lots of it. She pushed away and lurched toward Tariq, fixing her eyes on the sand at her feet, not wanting to see any more dead.
He glanced at her when she stopped next to him. “You should drink.”
She couldn’t form the words to respond. Hardship on a business trip before had meant that the projector didn’t work. What had happened here was beyond all comprehension. She couldn’t begin to process and make sense of it.
She ran a hand over her body, scarcely able to believe that she had survived whole. Her brown skirt was speckled with dark stains, her top had been torn. She had bought the suit specifically for this trip because the skirt was longer than usual, the outfit suitably modest. She reached to her blouse, and found it stiff with dried blood. Not her blood; nothing hurt when she moved.
A faint sound in the distance startled her, and she launched herself against Tariq’s solid chest, thinking another attack imminent. Then she realized it was only the wind. She stepped back, embarrassed, away from the steadying hand he held out.
“Do you think they’ll return?” Her voice was shaky from nerves.
The look he gave her was an understanding one. “I don’t see why they would, but we better get out of here, anyway.” He walked around and pulled out a bottle of Evian from the back. He even twisted off the cap for her, before coming back and handing it over. “We’re lucky this rolled under the driver’s seat.”
“Thank you.” She drank sparingly, then tried to give the bottle back, but he wouldn’t take it.
Instead, he reached out and cradled her cheek in his hand, lifted her chin and rubbed something from her jaw with his thumb. Dry blood, most likely. The moment dragged out, and she stood still, surprised by the gesture, even a little breathless.
“You’ll be fine. Go sit behind the car, in the shade,” he said gruffly when he finally spoke.
His simple touch of comfort helped to ease her shock and fear. After a moment he let his hand drop, but she was reluctant to move away. She felt better near him, as if his strength somehow extended beyond his body.
He said nothing, but went back to work on the engine, wiggling a wire with one long finger until he got it into the position he’d been apparently aiming for. “This should work.” He went around, reached through the driver’s side window and turned the key. The motor came to life.
The sweetest sound she had ever heard. Her eyes nearly teared up with relief.
He shut it off almost immediately.
“You should sit and rest.” He pointed to the small patch of shade the car provided.
She looked at him, then to the car, noticing that he had already cleared out the back—no bodies there. Nor anything else. Their briefcases were missing. Hers had held her laptop, cell phone, all her money, her passport and her plane tickets. She sank to the sand. It was marginally cooler in the shade.
Tariq walked back to the front and slammed the hood, which had to be hot enough to fry eggs and sausage.
“Why did they do this to us?” she asked.
He gave her question some thought, although she was sure he must have considered it himself while he’d worked on the motor. “Could be we were at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Who were they?” She tried to rub dried blood off her hands.
He shrugged, the movement filled with tension. “Gun trade has been a profitable business in this part of the desert for the last couple of decades. Sex trade’s fading, but as long as there’s still some money in it, it won’t be completely abandoned. Drugs are always a possibility.”
Outrage unfurled inside Sara and nudged her out of her shell-shocked state. If they knew this, how could MMPOIL have brought them here? “So this happens all the time?”
“Not in the last four years, since the country stabilized,” he said darkly.
All she could think of was that they should have waited for the chopper to be fixed. She tried to make sense of the events of the past hour as Tariq took off two shot-up tires and replaced one with the spare, the other with an unharmed one from the other Hummer, refusing her offer of help. Then he got a short-handled shovel from the back and began digging in the sand a few yards from the vehicle.
She watched the shimmering horizon, petrified that the attackers would return. Only when the sound of digging stopped did she look back at Tariq. He seemed to be swaying. The heat of the sun was powerful.
“Are you okay?” She got up and walked to him, holding out the half-empty water bottle.
Instead of responding, he went back to digging again.
“I can help,” she said.
“Go back to the car.”
The arm of his dark blue shirt was soaking wet, she realized for the first time. Blood trickled down the back of his hand onto the shovel. And she remembered now that he’d been shot when he’d come to save her. How could she have forgotten that? She could barely think with all this death and destruction around them.
“You’re bleeding.” She handed him the water, trying to examine his arm.
“It’s fine,” he said through gritted teeth, but stopped for a second to take a few measured gulps.
“I’ll dig. You could bring over the bodies.” Now that the grave was taking shape, she’d finally figured out what he was trying to do.
She reached for the shovel, and at first he pulled away. But then he let her have it with a faint nod of appreciation, and started across the sand.
She could have been digging in talcum powder, she soon discovered. The sand flowed where it pleased, slowing her progress. She tried not to look at the dead as Tariq dragged them over one by one, but saw enough to register that they were all men who’d come with them. Her breath left her, her chest tightening painfully when she saw Jeff.
Jeff was dead. Jaw clenched tight, Sara kept digging.
It had been years since they’d been lovers, and God knew, they hadn’t been the best of friends lately. But they had history. She had been ready to have him out of her life for good, but not this way. She’d been hoping to scrape together enough money to buy him out. She felt the first tear roll down her face, quickly followed by an army of others that evaporated in the heat before they could reach her chin.
Tariq was by her side, taking the shovel from her. “Go back to the shade.”
Seven bodies lay in a neat row. She knelt next to Jeff and untucked her shirt to wipe his face with the clean part, straightened his tie and jacket, smoothed down his blondish hair.
She barely recognized her own voice, it sounded so hollow when she spoke. “Where are the rest?” She’d seen more men than this die in the fierce battle.
“The smugglers took their own. Cleaning up evidence.” He tossed the shovel aside and dragged the bodies into the shallow, wide grave, one after the other.
She helped as best she could, pushing sand over the fallen with her bare hands while Tariq used the shovel. At the end, he said a few words in Arabic, and she added a simple prayer, said a teary goodbye to Jeff. When she was done, she followed Tariq back to the car.
He picked up the driver’s kaffiyeh, then went to the other Hummer and brought a suit coat from there, laying them on the grave. “It’s an old Bedu custom, to pass on the clothes of the dead to some poor wanderer.”
“They were Bedouin?” She couldn’t consolidate the sharp business suits with her idea of desert nomads.
“We are all Bedu,” he said as they got into the car.
She tried to picture him in a goat-hair tent. It didn’t work. That West Coast accent threw her off.
“We can tell the families where they are,” she said as he put the vehicle into motion, feeling guilty for being alive. “The bodies can be found again, right? The other Hummer will be here.”
He drove in silence for a few moments before he responded. “My people are at rest. We believe that we come from the desert, so we go back to the desert when we die. No marked graves. The sand is sufficient.”
It did seem fitting. The vast desert in itself was a breathtaking monument. She was sure, however, that Jeff’s parents would want his body to be returned to the States. Guilt pushed deeper into her core. It didn’t seem fair that all these people had died and she was alive. Not that she didn’t feel grateful. She did. Then felt guilty about the quiet appreciation that she was still here to draw hot air into her lungs.
“How about the GPS?” Both Hummers were well equipped. “Don’t those things have panic buttons or locators or whatever?”
“The other one was shot to bits. This one I had hope for ….” He gestured at the display, at the small hole in the middle, then shook his head, his masculine lips pressed in a flat line.
From his expression she figured the damage was bad enough to render the unit unusable.
“Where are we going?” she asked after a while. “What’s closer, Tihrin or the well we were heading for?”
“Wouldn’t make it to either. A bullet nicked the oil pan. We have a slow leak.”
She looked at the profusion of holes in the door next to her and the dashboard before her. Everyone had been trying to take cover behind the vehicles, which had taken the brunt of the attack. That Tariq had been able to salvage one of them was a miracle.
“Without oil to lubricate the engine, it’ll overheat and stop. If we’re lucky, we’ll make it as far as the oasis,” he said. “We need more water. And we should get out of the open as fast as possible.”
She pictured palm trees nodding in the wind, green grass and a glistening blue pool where some underground stream surfaced in the sand. She would have given anything to be able to wash off the blood.
“Can we get in touch with the sheik somehow? He could send people to get us out of here.” She pictured robed men racing over the sand on beautiful horses, their swords drawn, the sheik at the very front. They would be brave and fierce, whisking her to safety.
She blinked that image away. Okay, so reality would most likely be a group of the sheik’s armed guards, sent in the chopper—when someone fixed it. Either way, she would be deliriously happy to see anyone who came to the rescue.
The look on Tariq’s face redefined grim. “In case this wasn’t a random attack, we need to figure out whom we can trust, before we do anything. But yes, there is a satellite phone at the oasis.”
She let herself relax a little. “I’m sure you can trust the sheik and the people at your company. And the authorities.”
She didn’t want to sit around in a desert full of murderers any longer than was absolutely necessary. The people they’d buried were an effective reminder just how dangerous the place was.
“We buried only seven,” she realized belatedly. “There were ten of us. Who’s missing?” She’d tried as much as she could not to look at the bodies as they’d buried the men.
“They took Husam. Perhaps he was injured at the end and could no longer fight. I didn’t see him.”
“And they tried to take me. Why?”
“Husam’s father is a wealthy man. They might have recognized the son. Could be they wanted you for themselves, or to sell at Yanadar or to ransom you to your foreign family.” Tariq’s face was getting darker and darker as he spoke.
Her chest tightened at the prospects he was enumerating. Yanadar? Did that have something to do with the sex trade he’d mentioned? She rubbed her arm where she’d been grabbed, and found her skin still tender. “But then why didn’t they take me? At the end?” She fingered the bump on the back of her head. She certainly couldn’t have defended herself.
“They thought you were dead.” He paused a beat. “Sorry about that.”
For a moment she didn’t understand. Then the hard object that had hit her made sense all of a sudden. He’d been the only person near enough to hurt her. He’d still had his gun back then. “You hit me?”
“I couldn’t be sure if you could pull off playing dead. I had no bullets left. They were closing in.”
He’d knocked her out, then draped his bleeding body over her and pretended the bandits had shot both of them. There’d certainly been enough blood to be convincing.
“I still don’t see what they would want with me. If they were going for ransom, why not grab Jeff, too? The sex slave thing …” She shook her head. “Seems too far-fetched, frankly.”
“Don’t count on it.” He dug into his pocket, then held her rings out on his open palm. He could afford to take his attention off the road now. They were going over flat terrain, and it wasn’t as if he would cross the center line and veer into oncoming traffic.
“Thanks … for saving these,” she said, although her jewelry was pretty low on her list of priorities at the moment. She noticed suddenly that his watch was already on his wrist. He must be attached to it, she decided.
“If they saw anything valuable on either of us, they would have taken it. And if they had to grab us and move us around, they might have realized we weren’t dead. Or they would have …” He fell silent and looked back at the so-called road.
Would have what? She was about to ask when she thought of the driver with his finger missing. She nodded, grateful that Tariq had had the presence of mind to think of everything.
“Husam was at your meeting this morning?” he asked. “The more I think about it, the less I believe this could have been a random attack. They might have known he was coming, and lain in wait for him.”
“What about the two men in the other car?”
He thought for a second. “Minor managers. And nobody tried to take them. They were shot in cold blood.”
“An assassination? Maybe they were the true target.”
“But then why take Husam? I think that’s the real clue,” Tariq said.
She tended to agree with him. “When the others went up to the helipad, he stayed behind to make a call. He sounded … I don’t know. I didn’t understand anything he was saying. But he sounded angry and stressed. Maybe he told whoever he was talking to that he was headed for the desert. Maybe he was betrayed?” She didn’t much care for Husam, but she hated to think of anyone in the hands of ruthless bandits. God knew what they would do to him.
“Possible,” Tariq said, tight-lipped. “Did he know at that time that you’d be taking the cars instead of the chopper? You were still heading for the roof when we met.”
“I was told as soon as I got up there that the helicopter needed repairs. Someone could have called him already. Maybe that’s why he never went up.”
“Was there anything strange about your leaving? Do you remember him talking to anyone else in the hallway? Have you noticed anyone watching him?”
“No, but at the meeting …” She hesitated, not wanting to sound like a complete idiot.
“At the meeting?” Tariq’s gaze was sharp as he studied her face.
“He was looking at me. A lot.”
His expression softened, a corner of his mouth turning up. “For that, you must forgive us.”
Meaning what? That he thought Husam liked the way she looked, and maybe he shared that feeling? Husam’s interest left her cold, but the possibility that Tariq would be attracted to her sent heat skittering through her. There had to be another explanation to his words. She wasn’t about to ask.
She remembered another detail. “We were supposed to visit the well this morning. When we were delayed, Husam recommended that we not go until tomorrow. Jeff wouldn’t hear of it. Maybe Husam had a premonition.”
Tariq tapped his long fingers on the steering wheel as he considered that. “Why was Husam with you, but none of the others you met with?”
“The site supervisor was expecting us. We were supposed to take the chopper without escort. Husam decided only midmeeting that he would come along.”
They drove in silence for a while, until Tariq leaned forward and narrowed his eyes, gesturing toward the horizon. “The oasis. We are almost there.”
