Blessed Child (3 page)

“Let's go! Hurry,” Jason urged them. For all the talk of delivering these to safety, they wouldn't make it past the front gate if they didn't leave now. Assuming the gate was not already overtaken.

“Dadda . . .” the boy said.

“Go with God, Caleb. His love is better than life.”

“Dadda . . .”

Jason grabbed the boy's arm and tugged him toward the arching entry. Leiah, the woman, was already at the door craning for a view on either side. She spun to them.

“Hurry, hurry!”

“Jason,” the priest said. “What's soft and round and says more than it should?”

Jason spun back. “Wha—?”

“The hem of a tunic.” Father Matthew smiled. “An old Ethiopian riddle about modesty that will make sense to you one day. Remember it.”

They ran from the monastery together, Leiah in the lead, with Jason and the boy following behind. The midday sun blinded Jason for an instant. He released the boy's hand and took the steps more by feel than by sight.

Behind him Father Matthew's voice urged a faltering boy. “Go! Run. Run to the truck and climb in. It will be all right. Remember my riddle, Jason.”

There was no sign of soldiers on this side of the monastery, but the detonations of what Jason assumed to be mortar fire shook the ground behind them. Black smoke boiled into the sky. Father Matthew's burning moat. Oil.

Jason spun to see the boy picking his way down the broad steps on his tiptoes. His round eyes glanced around, petrified. Jason bounded up the steps, grabbed the boy around the waist, and ran for the Jeep.

“Give him to me!” the nurse demanded, her arms outstretched from the back seat. He shoved the boy toward her. She gathered Caleb and set him on the seat beside her. The boy immediately covered his eyes with his hands and buried his head in her lap.

“Get us out of here! Hurry, man!” Leiah said.

“I am. I am! Hold on!”

The engine roared to life with the first turn of the ignition. Jason rammed the shift stick forward and floored the accelerator. The Jeep spun in a circle, raising dust on all sides. He angled the vehicle for the gate and grabbed another gear.

Behind them an explosion shook the courtyard. They were lobbing the explosives to the front! Ahead the gate was closed. The gatekeeper ran out, pointing frantically to Jason's rear. He glanced back and saw the first truck emerging from a cloud of smoke beside the monastery—a Land Rover painted in desert camouflage.

Jason didn't let up on the gas pedal. He had the engine wound out in third gear, screaming for the closed gate.

“Open it! Open the gate!” he screamed, motioning furiously with his hand.

The gatekeeper flew for the latch, like a ghost in his flowing white robes. He shoved the gates open and ran for the monastery, uttering sharp cries barely heard above the thumping explosions behind them.

The Jeep struck one of the gates with a clang and shot out onto the driveway. Jason shoved the gearbox into high gear, veered off the road in his haste, corrected with a jerk of the wheel, and centered the vehicle on the road leading from the valley.

“Stay on the road! Watch the potholes!”

Her warning came too late and their right wheel pounded through a hole the size of a Volkswagen. Jason cleared the seat a good foot before crashing back down. He glanced back to see Leiah's white face. The boy was still buried in her lap, oblivious to the world.

“Watch for the holes!” Leiah yelled.

“I am!”

Behind them a huge explosion ripped through the air, like a thunderclap rumbling across the sky. Jason's heart slammed against the walls of his chest, loud in his ears, spurred by a mixture of terror and euphoria. Machine guns stuttered in long bursts. This was no abstract attack on a village. They were destroying the monastery wholesale, an unspoken taboo, even during an invasion. The monasteries had survived a thousand years precisely because of the reverence they commanded. Slaughter of women and children was far more common in this land than the destruction of a shrine.

They had nearly reached the crest of the first hill when Jason looked back again. What he saw ran through his chest like a spike on the end of a sledgehammer. He caught his breath. The monastery was without ambiguity history, crumbled and smoking, a remnant of its former structure. No soul could possibly have lived through such a pounding. And if one or two did manage to find the sunlight alive, a ring of trucks with mounted machine guns awaited to make certain they did not savor it too long.

Jason saw the destruction in a glance. But he forgot it almost immediately in favor of another sight that nearly drove him from the road. It was the sight of a lone truck barreling down the road behind them.

Leiah must have seen the look on his face, because she spun to face the valley. Machine-gun fire cut through the air, a small popping sound, like popcorn in a microwave.

“Move it! They're catching us!” she screamed.

Something snapped in Jason's mind. The euphoria of their escape was smothered by horror. They were being pursued.

“Faster! Drive faster!”

“Shut up! I'm driving as fast as I can! Just shut up and let me drive!”

They crested the hill and roared into the next valley. For a few seconds, maybe ten, they were alone with the growling of their own engine. And then the larger Land Rover broke over the hill and screamed after them.

Jason felt panic wash over his spine. They were going to die. He knew that with dread certainty. His life would end this day.

2

T
HE
J
EEP MANAGED TO MAINTAIN
its half-mile lead only with its engine screaming bloody murder. With the white dust billowing behind them, keeping sight of the Land Rover was nearly impossible. But every time they crested a hill, they could clearly see the vehicle's relentless pursuit.

“You can't make this bucket of bolts move any faster?” Leiah demanded.

“It's not exactly a Porsche, is it?”

Jason could nearly feel her glare on the back of his head. She was a hard one; it took a strong woman to survive in this land. But right now it wasn't the land that threatened their lives; it was an armed truck barreling down on them. He was beginning to regret bringing her. At least she was keeping the kid quiet. Caleb still cowered beside her, his head buried on her knees, silent.

“Do you think they've gained?” he asked.

“All I see is dust. How do you expect me to know if they've gained?”

“I asked if you
thought
they had gained.”

She looked back for a moment, then announced her verdict. “They've gained.”

“Are you sure?” Jason asked with alarm.

“You asked for my thoughts. I think they've gained.”

“Well, that's not good. How do you know?”

“They're closer.”

They came to the crest of a hill and Jason looked back quickly. The cloud of dust from the Land Rover was still a fair ways off, but it certainly wasn't falling farther behind.

He spun back to face the road and corrected the Jeep's straying course.

“Keep your eyes on the road. We don't need
you
killing us,” Leiah said.

He ignored her for the moment.

For another half-hour they kept their distance, and Jason began to recover from the raw panic of their flight. They had a good hour haul to Adwa, the first town in this parched mountainscape. If they made Adwa, they would have a chance.

They were in canyon lands at five thousand feet. With any luck the cool mountain air would extend the engine's performance. Heaven knew the Jeep wasn't made for this. On all sides rugged mountains rose and fell to deep ravines browned by a dry year. Sandstone cliffs ran jagged lines across the horizon on either side. It was like driving through parts of North Dakota on steroids, Jason had often thought. Seventy miles to the east, the salt-encrusted Denakil Desert fell to the earth's lowest point, nearly 500 feet below sea level. Seventy miles to the west, Mount Ras Dashen rose to over 15,000 feet. It was a land of extremes.

And now the landscape seemed to have rubbed off on the guerrillas behind them.

The boy uttered a small cry of surprise, and Jason twisted to see that he'd finally lifted his head and was gaping at the steep escarpment to their left.

Leiah spoke a few reassuring words in rough Amharic.
“Ishee, ishee
.
”

Caleb turned his attention to the Jeep itself, staring in stunned silence at the vehicle that whisked him away from his only reality. The boy likely hadn't seen a vehicle, much less taken a ride in one.

Back there at the monastery Caleb's only father had just been killed; Jason was sure of it.

“Make sure he doesn't fall out,” Jason said.

“You just keep your eyes on the road. Let me worry about the boy.”

He turned and met her gaze. Her eyes flashed a blue brighter than the clear sky, and Jason held back a retort. Like the priest and the child, she, too, was an enigma.

The Jeep suddenly coughed once. A chill ran down Jason's spine. He pressed the accelerator, but it was already flat on the floorboards. The gas meter bounced in the green at the halfway mark.

“We're pushing it too hard,” Leiah said.

Jason didn't answer. If they were, they had a problem: they were still a good twenty miles out of any civilization. Maybe it had been an isolated . . .

The engine coughed again, and Jason felt a chill run through his bones. He stomped on the accelerator. The road had leveled off, offering no descents to ease the strain on the motor.

“This ain't good,” Jason said.

“No, it's not.”

“We have to get off the main road. They're going to catch us if we slow.”

“Yes, they are.”

“There's a road that heads east a couple miles—”

“The trail to Biset? Are you crazy? There's no way you can take a vehicle through those canyons.”

“You have a better idea?” he snarled. “You obviously seem to know your way around, so why don't you lay it on me? At least we have a chance of fooling them.”

“Yes, of course. And we could drive off a cliff as well. That would throw a surprise their way. At least on the road we have a chance of staying on all fours. Maybe the engine's just adjusting.”

As if to respond, the Jeep lurched once before regaining its full speed.

“That feel like an adjustment to you? I may not be as well informed about the arts of survival as you, but I have learned a thing or two about Jeeps in my two years here. That was more like a death rattle than a midcourse tune-up.”

“And in the three years I've lived in this country, I've learned a few things as well. One is that this trail to Biset you suggest we take was made for camels, not Jeeps. It's impassable.”

She had a point.

The car suddenly jerked three times in succession. He snatched a quick look to the rear and saw that Leiah had turned as well. The Land Rover had gained. The boy stared at him round-eyed.

That was it. Jason gripped the wheel tight. The turn off was not much more than a break in the rock to their right, around the next bend.

“Hold on. Just hold on tight.”

“You'll kill us,” Leiah said.

“Hold the boy.”

He was counting on the dust to obscure their exit; the more he churned up the better. They were doing forty miles per hour by the speedometer when the sandstone to their right gaped. Jason jerked the wheel without easing off the accelerator. The Jeep bounced over a shallow ditch and snorted into what looked like a sandy river bottom.

Rocks the size of coconuts populated the wash. A thin trail snaked through the center. Leiah's camel trail. Jason swung the wheel from side to side in an attempt to dodge the rocks, but there were too many. The front left wheel slammed into a large rock, sending the Jeep rearing up at an odd angle. Jason's knees smashed into the steering wheel and he winced. He caught a brief glimpse of Leiah, suspended behind him. They crashed to the ground and shot forward. How Leiah managed to stay in the Jeep was beyond Jason. Then again, if anyone could, it would be someone with her determination. And she did it holding the boy.

“Hold on!”

The engine was faltering badly now. They lurched over the sand, avoiding the rocks and peeling around an embankment that rose to their left. Here the path was still wide enough to allow the Jeep's passage, but Jason knew that Leiah was right: the path narrowed to a goat trail within two miles.

But he had no intention of going two miles. Or even one mile. If he could get the Jeep into one of the canyons gaping to their right and shut it down out of sight, they might escape detection.

He angled the vehicle for the second canyon and glanced back. No sign of the Land Rover yet. “Keep down.”

“You're going to kill us.”

“Just keep your pretty head down!”

They entered the canyon without being seen—that much Jason was sure of—and the relief that washed over his neck felt sweeter than any he could remember. He nursed the sputtering vehicle along the canyon floor. Sheer cliffs rose on either side thirty yards each way. And then directly ahead as well. It was a box canyon—not his first choice, but with any luck he had already saved their skins.

He drove the Jeep into the canyon's long shadows and pulled behind several round boulders at the end. He turned off the ignition and let the engine die.

Jason pulled himself up by the roll bar and peered back toward the opening, three hundred yards off. Nothing. A low wind moaned through the canyon, but it was the pounding of his own heart that filled his ears. He held his breath and strained for the rumble of an engine.

Still nothing.

Jason blew out a lungful of air and looked down at the pair in the rear seat. His right hand rested on the roll bar, shaking badly.

“You hear anything?”

The nurse looked at him without responding. It was the first time he saw her without an impending threat looming over them. Her complexion was dark, but clearly European. Her nose was sharp and her eyes very blue. But he saw something else now, on her neck, at the fray of her navy tunic. Her skin at the base of her throat was badly scarred. Burn scars that disappeared beneath her wrap.