Chapter Forty
Nomad
Nomad looked through his safari-quality zoom lens. “Camels.”
“Of course, there are.”
“Three men are riding. They have two camels with what looks like camping gear. And a sixth camel is set up for riding. That’s probably for Simone.”
“Can you see their faces?” Red asked. “If you can get their photos, we could just go bully the phone away from Simone, and it could be an easy day.”
“The only easy day was yesterday.”
“That’s for SEALs. That’s not me,” Red said dryly. “My days are spent chatting over tea. They’re all easy.”
Nomad turned to catch her eye and gave her a shake of the head. “We both know that’s not true. Also, with this wind blowing sand around, they’ve wrapped shemaghs around their faces. I’m going to have to pull them off to get the images.”
“Yeah, the wind is picking up, and I’m getting sandblasted. So what do we do?”
“Here’s one way this could play out: one guy will dismount. He’s going to get the camel to lay down so Simone can climb on. We’ve already figured out that the phones are in her backpack. You’re going to get the backpack from her.”
“I’m going to get the backpack worth forty million euros from that woman. Sure. Piece of cake.”
“You are. You’re going to sit on the garbage bag and slide onto the scene. We have surprise on our side. They won’t know what’s going on. They’re not ready for this.”
“Weapons?” Red asked. “If so, we’re just going to have to track them on foot until they set up their camp for the night.”
Nomad spent some time assessing that possibility. “No weapons are out. My experience is they carry knives and AKs, but this area is empty of anyone and anything. There’s nothing they need to defend against. They’re not ready for combat.”
“Are you sure?” Red asked.
“They look bored.”
“All right. So I slide down to Simone.”
“After the camel starts to go down, and everyone has their attention on the process, I’ll go in from the east side. All I have to do is get their photos, and then we’re out of there.”
Red blinked at him. “You know that makes no sense.”
“Doesn’t matter. We have a mission to complete. Use your trash bag as a weapon. I know you know this, but I feel compelled to say it out loud. If someone gets control of the bag and puts it over your head, don’t try to move their hands and fight your way free. Preserve what air you have while you puncture a hole so you can breathe.”
She held her eyes wide.
“I’m calling them by their shirt colors. Brown, Blue, Green. If you hear me call out a color, you know whom I’m looking at.”
“But not Red.”
He kissed her nose. “There are no Reds out here, just a Cassie.”
She breathed in and held it.
Nomad waited for her to exhale. “Good?” he asked.
“We’re about to find out.”
He patted her thigh and made his way to the position he’d chosen for himself, where the men would have to look straight into the glare of the sun to see him.
The eastern dune was shorter than the others, which worked for his plan. Nomad was on his plastic bag, ready to go, when Simone started her sidestep over the dune.
That Simone was walking up and down each hill in sand that came up to her ankles meant that he and Red had the opportunity to get out in front of her by using their thick black garbage bags as sleds at a distance that kept them out of her line of sight. It not only cut their time, it saved their energy. Simone had to be exhausted. She was moving from west to east, with her head hanging, watching her steps.
Red was lying on the northern dune.
The six camels and three men were in the basin below.
Nomad was counting on Simone being worn out because, no matter the front Red put up, Red hadn’t fully recovered from her bout of typhoid.
Laying at the top of his dune, camouflaged in his Sahara-sand-colored tactical wear, he watched the scene unfold.
As Simone approached, Blue called out the commands to get his camel to lie down. As soon as the camel’s front knees touched the sand, Nomad slid down the slope, aiming straight for the man wearing a green T-shirt who had twisted away from the glare of the sun. Nomad grasped Green’s ankle and jerked him from his camel. Green yelled out as he slid over the top, stopping his call abruptly when he saw the size of Nomad hovering over him. Grabbing at the man’s robes, Nomad pulled Green far enough off the ground that his strike would do the most damage. Nomad chambered his fist and then let the punch fly to the full extent of his arm so the physics of the strike to the man’s jaw would whip his head fast enough to put him out.
Though Nomad’s knuckles slid along the man’s beard, diminishing the impact slightly, the man was unconscious when Nomad released Green’s robes. Doubling into a crouch, Nomad moved under the belly of Green’s anxious camel.
“Mohammed, what did you do? What are you doing?” Brown demanded.
Blue had his camel halfway through the front back, front back shifts of getting to the ground where he could dismount. Neither up nor down, Blue was twisting his head, looking at his comrades and then at Simone, ankle-deep in the sand, as she moved slowly down the slope.
Green’s camel didn’t like Nomad underneath her and pressed sideways into her herd mate, trapping Brown’s leg.
Brown leaned over to press the camel away. And when Nomad saw Brown's leg shift downward, signaling that he was off balance, Nomad wrapped his hand around the guy’s ankle and jerked hard.
The guy landed between the two camels, clinging with one hand to the saddle cloth, jaw slack with astonishment.
The call of warning from Blue signaled that Red was sledding down the dune toward Simone.
Brown reached up and pawed at the blankets, and Nomad knew he was looking for his weapon. Nomad didn’t have the angle for a jaw strike. He wrenched the guy around as he squatted to tuck Brown into the crook of his arm. With his free hand, he clasped his wrist and tightened the pressure on the man’s artery. At the same time, he pushed into his heels and stood. The man dangled a foot off the ground, kicking and flailing. But that didn’t last long.
Nomad dropped the unconscious man to the ground.
With a hand wrapped into the belly strap of each of the camels to keep them as cover, Nomad walked forward.
Two down, one to go.
But that one had a knife to Red’s throat, looking around wildly, trying to figure out what was happening.
Simone had decided she was out of there and had turned around. Using hands and feet, she was scrambling up the dune.
Blue focused on Simone, beseeching her in Arabic to come back.
He was clearly the youngest. And he was lowest in rank, or he would not have been tasked with getting the woman saddled up.
Red called in Arabic, “Friend, may God’s blessing be upon you. Why are you treating me with violence?”
“Are you … Who are you? You are not the woman we are to meet.”
“Two women. You were told two women, were you not? Do you think I would let my niece travel alone in the desert with men who are not her kin?”
“You are her auntie?”
“Of course. You know this. Take your blade from my neck. This is inhospitable.”
She was pitch-perfect. Nomad would have believed her. A mix of incredulity, kindness, and offense. But he also saw that she was twisting the black plastic garbage bag into a rope, getting ready.
The knife hadn’t moved.
“Then why is she running?” The man’s voice was pitched an octave higher, and he seemed wild-eyed and desperate that he was suddenly here in a situation he didn’t understand, and his comrades had disappeared.
“Would you not run if a stranger took out their knife and held it to your aunt’s throat? What else is she to do—a woman?”
Green was moaning. And that made Blue shift toward the sound.
That was all Red needed.
Wrapping the man’s wrist in her bag rope, she was able to get control of it while giving herself space from the blade. She used the hard edge of her sole to scrape the length of the man’s shin, hitting all the pain points. Lifting her knee to chest, she stomped his toes, unprotected in his leather sandals. That would have been a better move on a hard surface, but it still had to hurt.
Nomad was at her side, relieving Blue of the knife.
Once Red saw the weapon had been cleared, she reached between the man’s legs, grabbed what Nomad had to assume was the man’s scrotal sack, and twisted her hand as she pulled her elbow back like she was starting a lawn mower.
In sympathy with the man who must be seeing his life flash in front of his eyes, Nomad winced, drawing one knee over the other as he bent protectively. “Shit, Cassie.”
“He had a knife to my throat, Nicholi .”
“Fair.”
The man was on all fours, vomiting into the sand.
Catching Nomad’s eye, Red asked, “Did you get their pictures?”
“Not yet. Doing it now.” Nomad moved from one man to the next, snapping photos—front, left and right. And took their fingerprints for good measure. “I think I’m done walking up and down these dunes,” he said. “Let’s ride the camels. And, so these guys can’t catch up once they’ve recovered, we’ll take all of them with us.”
“Catch up to Simone, get her pack, get back to the ATV, fill up with gas—”
“And let the camels go,” Nomad finished. “Someone will find them.”
“Now that sounds like a winning strategy.” Red looked over at Green as he started to rouse. Brown was still out cold. “Is he still alive?”