Alone with Moore in her arms, Day let out a mournful cry before breaking down and crying until she couldn’t cry anymore.
Outside, the sandstorm whipped around the house as the sun dipped below the horizon, plunging the Gobi Desert into darkness. Three days later, when they failed to arrive in Ulaanbaatar, the expedition leader notified the local authorities, who began a search for the missing grad students. After a week, the search was called off and their parents notified that they had gone missing. The police told them that they had likely met foul play at the hands of bandits who sometime plagued the roads heading to Ulaanbaatar.
The truth was far worse, and if they had known, the police would have moved heaven and earth to prevent the coming storm.
4
Ryan Mitchell unlocked the door and stepped inside his new apartment. The smell of freshly painted walls still filled the air. Dropping his old military knapsack on the floor of his dimly lit place, he searched along the wall for the light switch. He turned it on and saw the familiar sight of organized mayhem. Jennifer March and Mitchell had moved in together barely a month ago, but with both of their hectic schedules, they still hadn’t found the time to unpack. No sooner had they signed the lease than Jen was offered a job teaching in Tokyo for a few weeks. Cardboard boxes filled the living room and the bedroom. Mitchell had placed the furniture, albeit in a very haphazard manner. It was all still waiting a woman’s touch to tell him where to place things — correctly.
It hadn’t been an overly stressful day, with his injured body still needing daily visits with the physiotherapist to strengthen the damaged tissue and muscles. Mitchell and Jackson had been assigned to teach anti-terrorist drills to a cadre of military police from Kosovo who, after a month of intensive training at Polaris, would then go back home and teach their own people. Earlier in the day, Mitchell and Jackson had put the police through a difficult range exercise using a mock-up of a passenger jet. The exercise had gone so well that they had decided to move onto the live-fire portion of their training where Gordon Cardinal and Sam were waiting to take over the training. Mitchell was thankful that there were no major activities on the training schedule for him tomorrow. He was looking forward to taking a rare day off to do some laundry and catch up on his emails with Jen and his parents.
He headed straight for the kitchen, opened the near empty fridge, and grabbed himself an ice-cold beer. Mitchell opened it and savored the flavor. He didn’t drink very much, but with a day off coming his way, he welcomed the chance to shoot back a couple of beers and then have a lazy morning. He checked his watch and saw it was already close to ten at night. The time difference between New York and Tokyo was thirteen hours ahead, so come eleven o’clock it would be lunchtime in Tokyo and their agreed-upon time when they could chat over the net.
Taking his beer with him, Mitchell went and had a long hot shower before drying himself off and crawling into a set of loose-fitting flannel pajama bottoms and an old army T-shirt with large ragged holes under the armpits. It was comfortable, but something he would never dare wear when Jen was around. Sitting down behind his laptop, Mitchell booted it up and then rummaged through the emails he had received from his friends and family while whittling away the time until he could see Jen’s face once again. As it grew closer to eleven, Mitchell could feel himself growing anxious. He couldn’t wait to see with his own eyes the woman he had fallen hard for. People who first met them thought they made a bit of an odd couple. Mitchell was a former soldier who had grown up on a farm in Minnesota, while Jen was an African-American professor of history who came from Charlotte, North Carolina, but there was no denying their deep attraction to one another.
On time, Mitchell smiled when he saw Jen’s beautiful face fill the computer screen. Her warm brown eyes sparkled, telling Mitchell that she was just as excited to see him as he was her. Ever since taking a job with the UN, Jen had been on the go. Flying over to Tokyo, Jen was helping to teach a course on the history of peacekeeping at the United Nations University Institute for Sustainability and Peace. She had been there a couple of weeks and wasn’t due to come home for another few days.
“Hey there,” said Jen, still warmly smiling on the screen.
“Hey there yourself,” Mitchell said, taking a swig of beer. “You look wonderful. Japan must appeal to you.”
“Hardly, it’s been crazy-hectic busy ever since I arrived here, trust me, I look like hell by the end of the day,” said Jen as she nibbled at her lunch of sushi and rice.
“I doubt that,” said Mitchell with a wink.
“Well, you haven’t lost your charm. How’s it going back home?” she asked, hoping to get some good news about his job. Even though Mitchell didn’t say it, she knew that he was chafing at being placed on the active reserve list and couldn’t wait to be declared fit for operations by General O’Reilly.
“It’s not too bad. My team is working with some really keen folks from Kosovo, but it’s not the same thing as real field work.”
“How was your visit to the doc?” asked Jen, trying to see how Mitchell’s recent visit to the team’s psychiatrist had gone. Without his approval, Mitchell could never return to active duty.
“Fine, I guess,” said Mitchell, taking another swig of his beer. “He asked me a lot of questions about what happened in Colombia and how I felt about things, especially about a hostage being shot while under my care and my time undercover. And before you say anything, I was totally honest with him, just like you said I had to be. Trust me, I didn’t hold anything back.”
“That’s good, the sooner you’re back to your regular job the better,” Jen said with a smile. “You’re way too moody when you’re not able to go out into the field with your friends.”
“I’m not moody.”
“Please, Ryan, I know you better than you know yourself. I know it’s dangerous work, but it’s what you live for. If you hadn’t been so good, I doubt Mother and I would be around,” said Jen, remembering when they first met in the Philippines after a team of mercenaries had taken her hostage. “Anyway, it sounds like you’re doing okay without me.”
“Not really, I’d honestly prefer if you were at home with me, if you know what I mean,” said Mitchell lecherously. “Enough about me, how is the course going?”
Jen shook her head at Mitchell, then spent the next fifteen minutes filling him in with all that had happened since she had arrived in Tokyo and that she and couple of other women from the university were venturing out to try their hand singing karaoke at a local bar tonight.
Mitchell feigned being upset. He couldn’t stand karaoke, but would have given a month’s pay just to spend one evening in Tokyo with Jen.
Jen smiled at Mitchell’s pouting lip. She leaned forward toward her computer screen and blew him a kiss.
Mitchell, like a schoolboy in love, blew back the kiss.
An irritating buzzing noise on his desk made Mitchell look down at his cell phone. There was a text message for him from Polaris’ deputy leader, Luis Ortiz, a former Miami police commissioner, who had been overseeing the training of the Kosovar police. Mitchell saw that General O’Reilly wanted to see him in his office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.
“So much for laundry day,” mumbled Mitchell to himself.
“What was that?” said Jen, not getting what Mitchell was going on about.
“Oh nothing,” said Mitchell, placing his phone down. “It would appear that I have been summoned to the general’s office for nine tomorrow morning.”
“That has to be a good thing,” Jen said optimistically.