Chapter 1

January 1974

Egypt-Libya border

The blades of the search-and-rescue helicopter thwacked the salty air above the Mediterranean coast, creating a staccato rhythm. The choppy engine was whirring loud enough to drown out thoughts. Hot wind gusted into Temple’s eyes as he leaned out from the open cabin, squinting at the steep, sparsely vegetated cliff marking the border between the two countries.

Trucks, vans, and cars, bound for Alexandria, idled along Halfaya Pass. Inspecting the vehicles, Libyan soldiers swarmed their side of the border and paid no attention to the American chopper hovering one thousand feet above.

“Aren’t they supposed to ask us for identification?” Temple hollered into the mouthpiece, swatting at his billowing shirt.

His headset sputtered. “No one cares as long as we stay in Egyptian airspace,” said the pilot. “They’ve gotten used to us.” The operation to find the two abducted teenagers had been in effect for months.

Temple grimaced and withdrew his head into the cabin, not looking forward to the conversation he was expecting to have with the teens’ families when he landed. As a U.S. senator, he’d known the political situation was unstable. Dammit, he’d warned the families, told them to get out. He’d alerted them enemies were hiding amid the chaos, waiting for a chance to exact revenge. They’d stayed in the country, anyway. Men with the power to stop the criminals were indifferent to the potential for trouble and refused to act. No one—not a single soul—had been willing to sacrifice profit or safety to battle evil. Two young people paid the price for the stubborn stupidity of their guardians. Innocent blood was shed because of the greed and cowardly apathy of those who should’ve known better.

Gaddafi—the Libyan dictator—denied responsibility for the kidnapping of the former ambassador’s sixteen-year-old daughter and her friend. But his government refused to let American personnel conduct a search within the country’s borders. Instead, they presented to the U.S. government several mercenaries involved in the crime, claiming to have apprehended them after an exhaustive hunt. The criminals insisted the hostages escaped, the boy having killed one of the guards.

Since then, there was one phone call from the boy, suggesting they were on their way to the Egyptian city of Alexandria. In the weeks after, the United States military kept reconnaissance flights going along Halfaya Pass, the closest border crossing to the city, and intelligence sources in the Middle East were alerted to look out for the kids, but no one spotted them. Chances were they were dead. It was time to call off the search. Senator Temple—as a friend of the families—was asked to fly to Egypt and persuade them to quietly accept reality.

Before he could say anything, he ran into the girl’s twin brother. Apparently, it was the twins’ seventeenth birthday that day. The silent desperation in the boy’s eyes compelled Temple into volunteering to join this flight. Not to mention the splinter of guilt in his own heart at the knowledge he, too, played an inadvertent role in the tragedy. The pilot was surprised, to say the least. He never expected to have a U.S. senator for his partner even if the cargo they were trying to retrieve included the child of a diplomat.

This would be the last such flight, Temple promised himself. Enough time and money were wasted on this futile operation. The kids were surely dead. After all, there were many ways for a young person to die in the North African country… the unforgiving Sahara Desert, its animals, the warlords who ruled the villages, and very often, the brutal government. All anyone could do now was pray their deaths had been painless.

“Senator.” The pilot’s shout interrupted Temple’s train of morbid thoughts. “I think that’s Lilah.”

“What?” Temple grabbed the military-issue binoculars by his side. One hand clenched around the doorframe, he leaned out to check. The sandy wind whipped around him and pulled taut the safety line securing him to the chopper. Blinking away the grit, Temple peered through the lenses.

Gaddafi’s border patrol was still detaining all vehicles on the hilly pass. Soldiers separated men from women, holding all of them away from the caravan. There were quite a few camels and donkeys, the owners gripping their leashes as the patrol conducted the inspection. “Where?” Temple asked.

“Not with the crowd, sir. Check the port side. Look for yellow clothes. She’s dressed local.”

There. A figure ran between boulders, her robes flying behind. The girl was a couple of hundred feet from the group under inspection, concealing herself behind the limestone formations. She looked up at the chopper before plastering herself to the side of a rock.

The brief glimpse was enough. The young girl in the photograph… a picture taken at some school dance… Oh, my God! It’s her. Lilah. “What about the boy?” Temple asked urgently. “There were two kids.”

“Could be with the caravan. Let me—” The pilot stopped to curse. “We have a problem, Senator.”

“I see it.” One of the Libyan soldiers had detached himself from his team to follow Lilah. If she got caught, there was little a single search-and-rescue chopper could do to help. Temple grabbed the rifle from the other seat. “Hold position and inform the ground team.”

“You won’t get that fellow with an AK-47,” warned the pilot, twisting around in his seat. “Not the right weapon to use against a moving target from a chopper. And they’ll shoot back.”

Plus, the U.S. government would have a hell of a time explaining why the senior senator from New Jersey shot a member of the Libyan armed forces. “I’m not trying to kill him,” Temple said. “All we need to do is distract the border patrol for a couple of minutes. We’ll buy the girl some time to hide. Get us out of here the second I fire.”

His fingers trembled when he took aim. Temple’s stint in the army between world wars never involved active combat. The helicopter shuddered. With a gasp, he tumbled back into the seat. Sweat trickled down his neck, a sour stench saturating the muggy air inside the cabin.

When Temple scrambled to recheck the terrain, Lilah was not where she’d been, but her yellow robes made her easy to spot even behind the rocks at the far border of an open space. The soldier in pursuit sprinted across the clearing toward Lilah. Temple swore and again took aim.

Before he could press the trigger, red-orange fire mushroomed on the ground. A blast reverberated its way up to the chopper. The soldier’s body disintegrated, ripped into pieces and scattered across the terrain. Temple’s mouth fell open. Sounds struggled to escape.

The headset sputtered again. “Minefield,” said the pilot, voice terse. “Lucky girl.”

Lucky? Lilah was retracing her steps, keeping herself hidden by the boulders, out of sight of the officers running to the scene. There was no hesitation in her gait. Temple watched, his heart thundering. What the devil had just happened? Did the man accidentally walk to his death, or was he led to the landmines? How could she have known there were explosives buried in the clearing? Why would the young lady even be aware of the existence of such dirty weapons?

The girl was born to a diplomat, raised in an intellectual environment. Sweet and loving and bright from what her twin brother said but stubborn as a mule according to the rest of her family. Lilah had never been exposed to the rougher elements of society, much less to violent death. Yet she didn’t pause in shock at the grisly end to the soldier hunting her.

The border patrol gathered at the edge of the open space, their attention on the remains of their comrade. No one ventured close. Behind their backs, Lilah rejoined the convoy and climbed into a pickup truck, her movements quick and sure.

“The Libyans claim we’re encroaching their airspace,” said the pilot. “They’re trying to stop us from us seeing any more than we already have.”

Probably, but it didn’t matter. There was nothing more Temple could do at the moment. Lilah was back with the convoy. On her way to safety, hopefully. “Land us before they shoot,” ordered Temple.

The pilot set the chopper down on the Egyptian side, a few feet from the exit point where the families of the kidnapped teenagers waited. Temple jogged out from under the blades to join them. Craggy rocks blocked their view of the events behind the border gate, but vans and cars packed with traders and their wares were inching past. It appeared the loss of a soldier in the mine explosion shifted the border patrol’s focus, and the weary travelers were finally allowed to leave. The pickup truck Lilah climbed into lagged at the tail end of the caravan and was still waiting to make it through.

“Did you see Harry?” asked one of the men, voice eager.

“Only Lilah,” Temple admitted to Harry’s father. “We didn’t have a chance—” Another chopper appeared in the cloudless sky with no insignia to suggest American or Egyptian military. It didn’t look Libyan, either. “Who the hell—”

A boulder exploded on the pass, raining large, sharp pieces of rock all around them. Fire shot into the sky, and flames engulfed the vehicles. The ground shook with a loud boom. “Bomb,” someone shouted.

Screaming men and women stampeded, carrying crying children. A short, plump figure covered entirely in a black burka emerged from the blaze, screeching nonstop. Temple tried to leap out of the way, but she careened straight into him and knocked him to his knees. Still shrieking, the woman continued to run. Repeated explosions drowned out the roar of the chopper overhead. The air reeked of molten metal and burning plastic.

Temple spotted Lilah behind the gate. Even with the monstrous flames, there was still room for her to run to safety. “Hurry,” he tried to yell, his throat closing in panic. But she pivoted as though preparing to return to the Libyan side.

“Harry,” bellowed the boy’s father.

Bodies—human and animal—rushed past, impeding Temple’s vision, and he had to strain to see. On top of a twenty-foot drop partly obscured by the blaze and the grimy air, there was a dark form. Harry Sheppard, the second kid.

“Lilah!” Harry screamed. Behind the boy, Libyan soldiers scaled the rocks, cornering him on the cliff that marked the border with Egypt.

Lilah looked up at the sound of her name. Flames engulfed the gate in front of her. Temple clambered to his feet, his attention on the girl trapped on the Libyan side by the burning gate. Wind slammed into the rocks; flames spiraled to the sky. Lilah disappeared from Temple’s view.