Darkness at Dawn (24 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn
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All would be carefully shaved clean. No beards, no mustaches, no facial hair at all. All would have manicures.
Next door was the wardrobe. Each man would be issued an outfit, carefully chosen by a brother sensitive to the cause who worked at Harrods in London. Rich businessman, dowdy professor, casual student—they would all be represented. Every single style carefully chosen to be nondescript and nonthreatening.
Most of the men would be issued glasses with clear lenses. Men in glasses looked less threatening. Each man would have an accessory of his trade—from an expensive Gucci leather briefcase to a student’s casual backpack.
Each man had some form of identity—driver’s license, credit cards made out in his name, company ID, university ID, US passport. All would survive a superficial examination.
Mazari withdrew to his quarters on deck and went over his material once more. Weather forecasts, epidemiological studies, virological reports, blood analyses . . . he had about four kilos of paper, and he patiently went through it one more time.
This was going to be one of the greatest medical experiments in the history of the world, over and above being the greatest blow ever inflicted against America. Every detail needed to be perfect.
He studied through the night, the powerful engines thrumming away under his feet and carrying the ship eastward, until Mazari saw the faintest lightening of the sky ahead of him. He closed his computer and stood up, stretching. He was sometimes so immersed in his work he lost all knowledge of the world outside his head.
That was dangerous now. He had to be alert, alive to his surroundings. He was going to do something that had never been done before, and he was going to strike a blow to the enemy so devastating it would take generations to recover, if the enemy ever did.
He went down the ladder and along the corridor to the rooms where his brave martyrs were being transformed into the enemy. He opened the door and looked, pleased. “Ah, my brothers.” He walked around, hands behind his back. “You have all done remarkably well.”
And they had. The barbers had done perfect work. Every single man had a different haircut, perfectly suited to his look and the style of his clothing.
Mazari had given orders that all the clothes be expensive, even the casual student outfits, and that all the haircuts be attractive. It made a huge difference. Each brave
shaheed
who came on board had the heart of a lion, but his body betrayed a lifetime of privations. There was nothing he could do about their teeth, there was no time, but he could coat their bodies with the sheen of Western prosperity.
It was the one thing guaranteed to stick out in Manhattan. When he was going over the plan with his financial backers, they had resisted the cost of the expensive clothing for men who, after all, would die a gruesome death soon after. But Mazari had insisted, and he knew he was right.
The martyrs were to blend into the crowd of a great festive occasion. The crowd of hundreds of thousands weren’t trained to notice anything out of the ordinary. But their senses would alert them to the man who smelled bad, whose hair was long, dirty and greasy, whose fingernails were black, whose clothes were cheap, all-synthetic—there would be subtle warning bells ringing.
His men now would fit in perfectly. Tomorrow they would receive instructions in Western body language.
But for now, there was another operation to see to. He went quickly back up onto the deck and leaned against the railing, pulling in his breath, breathing in the sea air.
He had been born in Lahore and had never even seen the ocean until he was twelve years old. It had astonished him—the limitless blue ripples edging out to as far as the world went, the briny smell, so unlike the smells of the city, the sense of unfettered boundaries.
His life had been the life of a student, made up of books and then, later, laboratories. Cold, sterile environments. An environment of the mind.
This was the physical world, made for a life ruled by God. Not the Americans’ world, a world of conquering infidels, with outsized appetites for everything—food, sex, money. If it had suited them and they could do it, Mazari had no doubt the Americans would have sucked up the oceans to feed their appetites. They were already destroying the land.
He was doing God’s earth an act of mercy, ridding the world of as many Americans as science would allow.
He pulled in another deep breath, the slight smell of civilization that had underlain the air in the Mediterranean gone. They had passed the Azores an hour ago and were now on the open sea.
A light line on the horizon gradually grew lighter. Day would soon be upon them, and they had to hide from the Americans’ prying eyes in the sky.
The engines suddenly shut down.
A low horn sounded, and like a well-oiled machine, the crew emerged from below the decks and began a practiced routine. Something they’d done every morning for six days and undone every evening for six nights.
It was a fascinating sight. Mazari stayed on deck to watch it.
Four crew members, two on each side of the back of the ship, disengaged a mechanism and a huge blue cylinder emerged from the planking of the deck. With the push of another button, the huge cylinder began to turn, unfurling an enormous blue canvas tarp.
As the cylinder kept turning, the agile crew pulled it over the entire ship, from stern to bow, and just like that, the ship became completely invisible to military satellites overhead during the day.
For the rest of the trip, the
Star of Orion
would travel by night and cover itself by day.
It was effectively lost to the world.
T
WELVE
 
THE PALACE CHILONGO, NHALA
 
SOMETIME during the night, the huge space in the middle of the enormous bed shrank.
Lucy found herself lying on a very hard, very warm surface. Very hard, very warm, very
hairy
surface. She came awake in a sudden panicked rush, turned her head and met amused dark brown eyes.
“Good morning.” His morning voice was a little hoarse. One big hand was on her shoulder. If she was going to bolt out of bed, she’d have to knock his hand off.
“Good morning.” Her own voice was a little hoarse, too. But she was wide, wide awake.
The entire front of her body was plastered against him, from her head resting on his hard shoulder to her toes brushing against his hairy shins.
He felt absolutely delicious.
Heat pulsed through her in a blinding flash, and it wasn’t menopause. A heat so intense her skin tingled with it. She had very fair skin and she just knew she was blushing. She might as well have had a red bulb on her forehead flashing.
Turned-on woman.
“Did you sleep well?” Though he kept his voice low, it was so deep it reverberated through her diaphragm, like the bass lines of overly loud disco music. She could feel the vibrations.
Everything about him was amazing. She’d slept with a few men in her life, though sleeping was a misnomer. She’d had sex with a few men, and had tried to avoid sleeping through the night with them.
She was familiar with the male body, with how it differed from the female body. Men smelled different, for one. They had more body hair. Their hands and feet were usually bigger. But, in the main, the differences weren’t all that enormous, except for that penis-vagina-breasts thing.
They had four limbs, one head. Slept. Ate. The differences had always seemed less important than the similarities.
Mike seemed like . . . like another species. Maybe a species that had evolved on a heavy-gravity world, because though he was lean, his muscles were incredibly thick, with no give in them at all. And he smelled wonderful, too. Not that gamy smell of the wild he’d had when they’d yanked him out of the field, but a musky scent ripe with pheromones, absolutely designed to lure women to their doom.
The bits of him that she could see—such as his huge, dark sinewy hand on her shoulder, the strong jawline covered in early morning beard—the feel of an enormous body exerting a heavy gravity against her, the smell of a healthy male animal . . . it was almost too much.
She had to think to come back into herself. And remember that he’d asked a question.
“I slept very well, thank you.”
It was the polite response, but to her amazement, it was true. Lucy was a light sleeper and rarely slept an entire night through.
Last night she had slept like a rock, an intense, deep sleep she hadn’t experienced in years.
He was watching her carefully, so carefully she was afraid he could read her mind. She couldn’t think of the last time someone had been so close to her, so close his breath moved a few strands of hair, so close she could follow the exact line of demarcation of his heavy beard, see the slight striations of yellow in his pupils. His eyes moved, watching hers, and that sense of him being a heavy planet with gravity increased, pulling her to him.
“I’m glad,” he said softly. “You needed it.”
What was he talking about?
As when a planet pulls a moon, the distance between them grew smaller, not as if he were lowering his head to hers but as if some universal force stronger than they were was at play, rolling her over onto her back.
His mouth settled on hers and there was an explosion of feeling inside her. Her heart gave a startled leap in her chest, and she could almost feel an electrical crackle as their mouths met.
It was too much, for both of them. Startled, he lifted his mouth and looked at her narrow-eyed, as if something had happened that he wasn’t sure he liked.
But he was willing to try it again.
This time his mouth stayed on hers, opened. Helplessly, she opened to him, too, and that same electrical charge ran through her at the touch of his tongue against hers. They both drew in shaky breaths and she breathed him in.
The Nhalans believed that some people—mothers and their children, lifelong lovers, close friends—have bits of their souls embedded in each other, so that over time you become a little bit your loved one. She felt this strongly, right now, as if parts of him were flowing into her, as if she were breathing in Mike,
It wasn’t just
his
body that was strong and tough—hers became strong and tough, too. Some of his fearlessness and courage flowed into her.
She wanted more. More of that heat and strength.
She arched up against him, lifting her head from the pillow, but that wasn’t necessary to get closer to him because he was pressing down on her. His whole body had shifted and now he was on top of her, his heavy weight pushing her down into the plush mattress. It felt so incredibly natural that her body automatically accommodated him, her arms and legs opening to receive him, her hips forming a cradle for him.
All his muscles were so tense it also felt natural that his penis pushed against her, hot and hard, in slow, rhythmic pulses, like the tides of the sea. Her arms were around that impossibly broad back, but couldn’t meet. Her fingers traced the ridged muscles along his spine and singled out thick scar tissue, two big round puckered scars and one long one along his side, her palms slowly making their way down the long planes of his back to rest on the small of his back, riding the movements of his hips.
She could feel everything he was feeling. Except of course, she didn’t have a penis.
But she had something better, a blossoming of red hot heat in her groin, exactly where he was rocking against her, pulses of feeling so intense she thought her heart would knock its way out of her chest.
“Someone’s knocking,” Mike murmured and she opened her eyes. His face was changed almost beyond recognition. Arousal suffused it with blood, making it even darker. His lips were red, swollen and wet from her mouth.
“My heart,” she answered. “I think it’s going to blow.”
“Okay. Makes sense.” His eyes narrowed, face tightening. He had started to lower his head again, when both of them heard a distinct knocking at the door.
“Should I tell him to go away?” Mike asked. “After all, we’re engaged.”
And that was when her head caught up with her body. Clearly it had gone on a spin around the Palace while she’d been making out with Mike like a high schooler in her boyfriend’s backseat.
“No, no.” Lucy pushed at Mike’s shoulders, and with a sigh he rolled over. She caught her dressing gown on the way to the door, the thick silk rippling behind her as she all but ran across the large room.
Outside was a Palace servant, an elderly man with deeply engraved wrinkles in his nut brown face, smiling widely at her, holding a huge wooden tray.
“
Blessings upon you this morning, Father
.” Lucy greeted him in Nhalan, and his mouth fell open, showing a nearly toothless mouth. He almost dropped the tray in his surprise.
“You speak the Dragon Language, my child? How is this possible?”
“I lived in your beautiful country when I was young, Father. My parents came to study your beautiful language.”
She swallowed
. “They died here.”

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