“He probably doesn’t know the area. Not like you do.”
A silver lining, if only a shred of one. “You’re right. So we have an advantage there.”
“We sure don’t have one in firepower.” He held up his pistol. A nice weapon, but not much use at a distance. “Are you a good shot?”
“Won some shooting contests when I was in high school.” She held up her rifle, showing him the brass plaque on the stock proclaiming her Wind River County Champion Marksman, Junior Women’s Division. The whole idea of shooting competitions seemed ridiculous and trivial in light of the situation they were in. Fun and games in the face of life and death.
He nodded, as if it was exactly what he was hoping for. “Okay. Then you can cover me.” He handed her his horse’s reins.
His words jolted her like a slap. “Cover you? Where are you going?”
“That first shot, it wasn’t meant for us.”
“Who was it meant for?”
“Whoever is up on that ridge.” He pointed across a rough area of the canyon floor to a ridge of rock. “See him?”
She shielded her eyes with her hand.
“To the right. You can see something white, a sleeve.” Lightly touching her cheek, he tilted her face in the correct direction.
She tried not to think about the feel of his touch and focus on spotting what he was trying to show her. Sure enough, some sort of white cloth was flapping in the wind. “I see it. You think it’s a person?”
“I think it’s a body.”
“You saw him get shot?”
“Not exactly. I didn’t realize he was there. Not until after the shot was fired and he suddenly wasn’t.”
“And you plan to climb up there?”
“We can’t leave him.”
“Do you know who it is?”
He shook his head. “Let’s hope not.” Holding his weapon at the ready, he stepped forward.
“Wait.” She grabbed his shoulder. “If this is a sniper…”
He looked back. His eyes fixed on hers. “That’s why I’m relying on you. Can you cover me?”
Her insides shook so badly that she didn’t even know if she could manage to get her finger to the trigger. The dossier she’d studied on his background had mentioned military service, as with the other COIN leaders. But even though she’d grown up around guns and knew the terrain, she was no soldier. At the sound of that first gunshot, adrenaline had hollowed out her stomach and turned the rest of her into a quivering mess.
He leaned toward her, closer than a man had been in a long while, and tapped on the award plaque on her rifle stock. “You’ll be fine.”
She nodded, even though she wasn’t so sure. She squinted up at the ridge and the wisp of white fabric flapping in the wind like a flag of surrender.
“Wait.” She stepped to her mare’s side and rummaged through the saddlebags with her free hand. Her fingers touched the pair of binoculars she had used to find the sheik. She pulled them out and handed them to him. “You should be able to see the area better from up there, maybe spot our shooter.”
“Good thinking.”
She shouldn’t feel so warm at his praise, but she couldn’t deny the flicker in her chest. A flicker that for a moment eclipsed the shaking. She stood up a little straighter. “Please be careful, Sheik Efraim.”
“Just Efraim. Please.”
“Efraim. Be careful.”
He nodded. Pistol in front of him, he started climbing up through the eroded and crumbling rock.
She shouldered the rifle and scanned the area through the scope. She’d ridden out here to bring him back to the Wind River Ranch, and that’s what she’d do. If there was one thing her daddy taught her, it was to do what needed to be done.
A lesson that had served her well so far.
The crunch and scrape of his footsteps faded into the wind. She forced herself to breathe, stay steady and alert. Next to her, Efraim’s horse tossed his head. Her mare, Sasha, pawed the ground.
“Callie,” Efraim called, his voice rasping, as if his throat was filled with sand.
She lowered the rifle slightly and glanced up.
His dark head peeked over the edge of the cliff, bent over the body they’d seen from below. “I need your help.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Can you find a way to get the horses up here?”
She tried to picture the canyon in her mind’s eye. If she wound south, the slope was more gentle. The horses should be able to handle it. “I think so.”
“I’ll cover you as best I can. Hurry.”
Tucking her rifle back in its scabbard, she grasped the reins and started trudging in a wide arc that sloped up to the canyon’s edge. Whoever Efraim found up on that cliff must be hurt, not dead. And knowing that gave her a little more hope that all this would turn out okay.
The trek seemed to take forever. But except for a few slips and scrambles of steel shoes on hard rock, the horses plugged along. She turned the last corner, the point that should bring her to the level where Efraim crouched by the body. A rock face loomed in front of her.
She let out a heavy breath.
It wasn’t high, only about ten feet of jumbled rock rising to a wider cap formation on top called a hoodoo. But small or not, the barrier was squarely between her and Efraim.
She could climb the side and skirt around the saddle-horn-shaped hoodoo with a little effort, but the horses couldn’t.
She glanced around, her gaze landing on a scraggle of half-dead sagebrush. Sasha was trained to ground tie with the best of them. She wasn’t so confident about the horse from the Wind River Ranch. Without a sturdy halter and lead, she couldn’t tie the animal very securely, but maybe it would be enough.
She looped the horse’s reins around the woody base of the sage. She dropped Sasha’s reins free next to it. “Whoa.” As long as something didn’t happen, they should be fine.
Turning back to the rocky face, she spied Efraim staring down at her. He cupped his hand around his mouth. “Do you have something plastic? A bag? Something like that?”
Her mind raced, trying to decipher the reason behind the request. She turned back to her horse. She kept a number of things with her when riding out on the ranch or the BLM, but plastic bags weren’t among them. She returned to Sasha and grabbed the saddlebags from the saddle. Pausing, she grabbed the rain slicker she’d tied on the saddle’s skirt and carried all back to the swell of rock and started climbing.
Loose sand and stones skittered under her feet. She slipped twice, trying to catch herself with hands weighed down with saddlebags and slicker. A rock face about three feet high formed the final hurdle. But from here she could clearly see Efraim and the white fabric they’d spotted from the canyon floor.
It wasn’t a shirt, as she’d previously thought, but a traditional head cloth designed to protect the wearer from the harsh sun.
The kind of sun that beat down on the island of Nadar.
A chill fanned over Callie’s skin despite the June heat. She focused on Efraim. “One of your people?”
Efraim looked up, dark eyes glistening. Rusty red smeared his cheekbone where he’d swiped at his eyes with a bloody hand. “It’s Fahad.”
NUMBNESS