part0024

Nightmares of suffocating and smothering quickly faded. In their place, rays of early morning sunlight beamed down through the cinnamon hazed skies.

She was half buried in the sand. To her surprise, Caine’s taut, muscular arm was wrapped around her.

She lay still for a moment, enjoying his touch. She remembered now, the sandstorm had terrified her like nothing before ever had. She didn’t know why. She was a surfer and had once come face to face with a bull shark in the Pacific Ocean. She’d been caught in rips, pounded by crashing waves. Neither had scared her as much as the sandstorm had.

Caine had come to her rescue, held her secure through the worst of the storm. He had stayed with her for hours, taking the brunt of the wind against his back.

She thought about reaching out and kissing him, to say thanks, and to show him how she felt. Caine wasn’t like other men she’d encountered. She desired to explore him, discover exactly how deep he went .

Rolling on her back, she turned and looked at his strong, handsome face, now sporting a thick beard.

He opened his eyes, waking. Those beautiful emerald irises of his seemed to peer deep into her very soul. When he saw her staring back, he smiled. “It’s over now. Are you okay?”

She didn’t think. She just leaned forward and kissed him, hard.

She kept her mouth planted on his, exploring the saltiness of his lips.

Then she realized that he wasn’t kissing back.

“I’m so sorry!” Consumed with shame, she pulled away and sat up and turned her back on him.

“Don’t be,” he said kindly.

“I thought… I thought you felt the same?”

“I do,” he said, placing a hand on her back. “It’s just… ”

She turned to face him, not ready to believe what should have been obvious from the onset. “You have a girlfriend?”

Caine shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

Kimberley stood, arms folded, and walked from him. She was crying and hadn’t realized it. Before anyone noticed, she wiped her tears.

“Can we…” She choked on her words, feeling like she was fifteen again kissing her first boy. Every person she had dated or kissed since university had pursued her. There had never been doubt about whether a guy was interested in her or not. But with Caine, he wasn’t like other men. She was chasing him. “Can we pretend this never happened?”

He walked over to her. “I’m in a complicated relationship. It would be unfair to lead you on, and pretend that I am not.”

She nodded and looked away before she was teary again. “I’m sorry.”

Desperate to change the subject, Kimberley looked around. Safiya was checking on the camels. Kimberley counted four, all of them grunting and complaining, but otherwise unharmed. She cringed, wondering if Safiya had witnessed her embarrassing rejection.

“I’ve made coffee,” Safiya explained as she approached, acting as if nothing had happened. “And there are dates and bread for breakfast. I’m going to pray, then we should be on our way.”

Caine nodded. “Thanks Safiya. I don’t know what we would do without you.”

She smiled, took her rug and climbed the nearest dune.

Kimberley couldn’t shake her embarrassment. Now Thomas Caine knew how she felt about him, and how weak she was. She wanted to run and never talk to him again, until she realized that was the reaction of a fifteen-year-old girl. She wasn’t a child anymore. She had to deal with this like an adult.

She noticed what might be uncertainty edging into Caine’s expression. He touched the back of his neck. He gazed at the tops of the dunes encircling them.

“What’s up?” she asked, glad that they had something else to talk about.

“I don’t know,” he said. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Just a feeling. Something’s not right.”

“You get these feelings a lot?”

“What happened the last time you got one?”

“My friend and I were ambushed. She was killed.”

Kimberley nodded. She found her binoculars in her pack and looked to Caine. “We should take a look then.”

Caine unwrapped his assault rifle from its protective goat-hair cloth, then checked it to ensure it still worked. The mechanism was clean and sand free.

He hefted the weapon over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

They climbed the same dune Safiya was praying on, but kept their distance so as not to disturb her. The dune was about two-hundred meters high. The climb was hard work. The sand kept collapsing around their feet, making their progress feel like two steps forward and one back. When they reached the top, they felt the beginnings of another hot and debilitating day in a roasting desert.

Thousands upon thousands of sand dunes stretched before them, rippling towards the horizon in every direction. The contrast this early in the day between the shadows and the light was stark. She knew the haze in the distance was caused by suspended sand particles left over from the storm. Ripples of wispy clouds decorated the skies, and slivers of bright blue were starting to pierce the fading orange tint. In all her travels, she had never seen anything as beautiful or as scary as the Rub’ al Khali.

His binoculars raised, Caine scanned the horizon while she looked north. She saw a tiny sliver of light, as bright as a fallen star. She blinked. Something was reflecting back the sunlight.

“Look over there,” she said, pointing.

Caine followed her direction, and looked through the binoculars. He lowered them and grinned. “Take a look yourself.”

Kimberley raised her own binoculars. Within a few seconds, she found the anomaly. The tail of an aircraft, perhaps five or six kilometers distant, jutted from the crest of a dune. “It’s the plane! The sandstorm must have exposed it during the night.”

“My thoughts exactly. Good eye, Kimberley.”

When Safiya had completed her prayers, they regrouped. Normally they would set up camp and sleep during the day, but Caine and Safiya both wanted to push on. The plane could disappear again. Better to reach it now than wait until night and lose it forever.

They set off on their camels. The heat became stifling and draining. Kimberley drank her water faster than she should. Caine kept looking behind him, like he was worried they were being followed. If he saw anyone, he didn't mention it to her. Kimberley didn’t notice anyone following them either.

After half an hour, they reached the dune crest before the one ahead with the half-buried wreckage. Caine looked down though his binoculars again .

“That’s it. The tail number matches the plane I’m looking for. Well done, both of you.”

“Let’s check the wreckage,” Safiya said quickly, “then we can set up camp while we search it.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Kimberley added, feeling confident again. The lingering memory of her early morning embarrassment was beginning to fade.

They started down the sand dune.

From nowhere, a bright arc of yellow light streaked across the sky.

A split second later, the aircraft exploded.

Kimberly felt a tremor rumble through the sand. A fireball of searing red and orange erupted from the wreckage, disintegrating it utterly. Nothing was left except a burning, blackened hull and a trail of dark smoke spewing up into the sky.

Caine leapt off his camel, and peered up at the skies.

“What happened?” Kimberley asked as she took a deep breath. Her newfound confidence evaporated in an instant.

“Drone!” Caine exclaimed. “It fired a missile at the plane. Split up, because we could be next.”