Brandt shone his flashlight over him. “He’s been stabbed.”
Brandt ripped off his own shirt. Balling it up, he pressed it to the old man’s wound. “Hold this! I’m going to see if I can bring our jeep round.”
Dalilah pressed the balled-up shirt into Jacob’s side as Brandt ran off to find the jeep. Smoke burned her throat and eyes, a fire still crackling in one of the engines.
The dog whimpered beside her, wriggling closer to Jacob. Emotion squeezed through Dalilah’s chest, and her attention went to the mauled body lying a few feet from her.
Amal Ghaffar. The one-armed enemy of the Al Arif clan, dead in the moonlight, a hooked and bejewelled dagger covered with blood at his side. Killed by a dog. It seemed fitting somehow, she wasn’t sure why. But however this bastard had died, a battle of decades was finally over. An era of true peace was finally possible for the Al Arif family. And it had ended in the Valley of Ghosts.
Bile rose in her throat, and she looked away.
The dog stayed with her, whimpering softly. Tears pooled and ran down her cheeks.
Two days later
Brandt and Dalilah had been in Gaborone, the Botswana capital, for over forty-eight hours now. They’d driven Jacob in Skorokoro to the nearest town, where Brandt had accessed a phone and secured a chopper. Jacob had been airlifted with them and Jock to the Princess Marina Hospital, where he’d gone straight into surgery. Luckily, he was going to survive.
When Jacob had been able to speak after the operation, he’d told Brandt he’d seen signs of the ambush as they entered the gorge, and he’d said nothing—he’d wanted Amal to die, and he’d figured Amal was going to kill him and the dog anyway. Jacob preferred going by ambush, he’d told Brandt.
They’d also learned from him that all the staff back at the Zimbabwe lodge had been systematically slaughtered, including Jacob’s wife. He had no remaining family.
Brandt invited the old tracker to come stay on his farm, where the old man could heal and be with Jock for as long as he wanted. Brandt was indebted to Jacob—he’d kept the blood off both his and Dalilah’s hands. He couldn’t begin to say what this meant to him.
After contacting Omair, Brandt had also spent a full day with the Botswana police and military. The Botswana army had rounded up Amal’s remaining four horsemen and had been in contact with Interpol and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. A most-wanted terrorist had been killed. The hunt for Amal Ghaffar, son of the infamous Aban Ghaffar—aka the Moor—was finally over.
While Dalilah had shopped for clothes and rested in a suite at Gaborone’s top hotel, Brandt had printed the photographs he’d shot of Dalilah. His favorite image of the bunch he’d had enlarged. It was now wrapped and ready to go up on his bedroom wall. He’d then deleted the files from the camera, packaged it up with the wallet and mailed it to the driver’s-license address in Germany, along with a substantial check to cover any other expenses incurred for their losses. Omair could reimburse him later.
Meanwhile, a pilot colleague of Brandt’s was on standby with a chopper at Madikwe Safari Lodge about thirty klicks outside Gaborone. Brandt had left Jock at the lodge with the pilot. When Jacob was ready to leave hospital, he’d have both Jacob and the dog flown up to his place together. Money was no object—Omair had wired a small fortune into Brandt’s account, and he had no qualms accepting it. He’d paid his debt to the sheik. He’d done the job. And he was going to need a new plane.
The hard part—telling Omair about his feelings for Dalilah—was yet to come.
Brandt pulled up outside the hotel, a low, functional-looking building with a nice pool outside. Gaborone was a small town by city standards, and this was what passed as the top hotel.
Nerves washed through him as he gathered a bouquet of flowers off the passenger seat. He still hadn’t slept and he felt a little rough around the edges, but he’d bought flowers and was dressed in new khaki shorts and a fresh white shirt. He’d shaved and had his hair cut. Brandt rubbed his smooth jaw now as he strode across the baking-hot parking lot, feeling naked without his usual stubble.
He hadn’t seen Dalilah since she’d had her arm reset at the hospital, and nerves bit deeper as he entered the hotel lobby. He felt like a teen on