Chapter 1
The ragged tops of tall palms rustled quietly in a furnacelike breeze and the sky pressed down over the Moorish city of Na’Jar with a thick harmattan haze—fine particles of Sahara sand lifted by West African trades to choke the air with a dense, red fog.
Slowly, Nikki Hunt dismounted from her camel.
The old medina at the base of a four-lane boulevard that swept up the hill toward the palace was eerily deserted. Yet she could sense eyes watching her from dark windows cleaved into baked clay walls. A dog barked somewhere, and Nikki caught the blur of a black-garbed woman grabbing a child’s hand and darting like a ghost into an alley.
Her mouth went dry.
Tensions in this ancient city were volatile after a brutal coup two months earlier had seized the life of the revered old king. And just two days ago there’d been a suicide bombing right outside the palace walls, someone trying to assassinate the new king who had yet to be officially sworn in. That’s what the Berber tribesmen in the barren Rahm Hills had told Nikki when she’d inadvertently drifted across the border and into the desert kingdom of Al Na’Jar. The Rahm Berbers said it wasn’t safe for a woman to travel in the country alone. Not now. Not ever.
Nikki knew that.
North Africa was a hostile place for a female without the protection of a man. It was why she was now dressed as a Tuareg nomad with a heavy indigo-black turban wound around her head, hiding all but her eyes, which were masked by reflective sunglasses. Her bright white robe was cinched tightly at her waist with a leather belt. A tasseled camel whip and jambiya—an angrily curved dagger—hung from her hip.
Under her robe she hid the .45-caliber pistol she’d taken from the body of a rebel solider in Mauritania.
The skin on Nikki’s hands and wrists had grown dark from months under the desert sun, and with her blue-green eyes hidden by shades, she’d so far managed to pass unharmed, unquestioned. Any feminine gestures Nikki might not have been able to mask were not terribly far removed from the feminine grace inherent in some Saharan men, especially those from the northern Mali region and parts of Algeria.
Nikki had watched them carefully, studying their economy of movement in blistering heat. She’d mastered riding a camel. And step by torturous step—not thinking beyond putting one cracked and sandaled foot in front of the other—she’d managed to shepherd her ragged band of ailing war orphans across the arid northwestern Sahara. But after drinking stale water from a wadi, her children had fallen ill.
And then Nikki had gotten lost, drifting so far north that she’d unknowingly entered the small and unsettled Kingdom of Al Na’Jar.
The Rahm Berbers had briefed Nikki about the coup and told her about the new king. His Royal Highness Sheik Zakir Al Arif was descended from a proud and ancient line of fierce Moorish-Bedouin warriors who had ruled this kingdom for hundreds of years. They referred to their new monarch as the “Dark One” or the “Dark King” because they knew so little about him. He’d apparently been living in France before his father’s assassination. The Berbers also told Nikki that after the suicide attack the new king had moved quickly to shut down his borders as he tried to determine who were his allies or enemies.
Which meant Nikki was now trapped in Al Na’Jar.
The only way out of this simmering kingdom was now through the seat of government—that walled fortress with its gleaming domes and minarets up on the hill at the end of the deserted boulevard.
If Nikki could get a decree from the Dark King granting her safe passage across Al Na’Jar to the Atlantic, she could save her orphans. From the coast she’d try to board a boat to Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands where the Mercy Missions relief organization had a base.
But her first priority was medicine—antibiotics and liquids that would balance electrolytes. Without it, some of her kids could die. Within days.
Nikki’s stomach fisted with tension as she tethered her camel to an old stall in the abandoned marketplace. All around her the thick, silent stone walls were pocked from mortar fire. Cartridges still glinted gold on cobblestones—evidence of the violent battle between the Sheik’s Army and the mysterious insurgents who’d mounted the coup.
Gaze flicking left to right, Nikki began to walk slowly up the ominously deserted boulevard that led to the walled castle. She held her arms out at her sides in a gesture of peace, and to show she was unarmed.
Heat quivered from the bleached tarmac and the tattered leaves of the tall palms flanking the boulevard crackled in the hot wind.
She crested a slight rise and suddenly saw why the road was empty. A massive coil of razor wire had been hauled across the boulevard. Behind it lurked a blockade of Bradley and Abrams tanks, shimmering like a deadly mirage under the pitiless noonday heat. Nikki swallowed.