Wild Storm Read Free

when all the passengers were gone.
    “He was seated in 2B,” Peggy told him. “Why don’t you check the manifest?”
    The captain returned to his cockpit and scanned down the list of the passengers.
    The man from seat 2B was named Derrick Storm.
     

CHAPTER 2
    WEST OF LUXOR, Egypt
    F
    lat and featureless, hot and barren, the expanse of the Sahara Desert that stretched for some three thousand miles west of the Nile River was a great place to hide. But only if you were a grain of sand.
    Everything else stuck out. And so Katie Comely had no problem distinguishing the dust cloud rising several miles in the distance.
    She trained the viewfinder of her Zeiss Conquest HD binoculars on the front of the plume and saw the glinting of windshields. There were vehicles, at least four of them, traveling along in a lopsided V formation, closing in at between forty and fifty miles an hour.
    It was not, in any way, a covert approach. But the men that Katie worried about were not the type to bother with subtlety.
    Bandits. Again. They were always a problem in the desert, but even more so since the revolution of 2011 and the April 6 uprising. It was all the authorities could do to keep order in the towns and cities. The outlying areas had become as lawless as they had been in the days that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. In the two months since Katie had been on the dig, the expedition had been raided three times by outlaws who had helped themselves to everything they could carry. One or two of the items were later recovered by Egyptian authorities. The rest disappeared, sold on the black market for a fraction of what they were actually worth.
    The expedition had hired a security force—really, just two aging locals with even older weapons and without the heart to use them—but it had been outnumbered and outgunned all three times. The force had since been doubled in number to four. She hoped that would be enough.
    Katie adjusted the binoculars, trying to get a better view. She was twenty-nine, only a few months removed from defending her dissertation. Her PhD sheepskin still had a new-car smell to it. The University of Kansas had instructed her on how to pry open the secrets of antiquity. It had not taught her how to deal with armed thieves.
    She adjusted the hijab on her head. The garment served at least two purposes. It shielded her fair face from the sun. But it also made her at least slightly less conspicuous. In her native Kansas, her yellow hair and blue eyes made her just another corn-fed local girl on the cheerleading squad. Out here, amid all these swarthy, dark-haired Arabs, they made her something of a freak.
    If only she could have found a way to hide her gender. While Egypt was more progressive than many other Muslim nations when it came to its attitudes toward women, Katie still felt men leering at her everywhere she went.
    She lowered the glasses, feeling her brow crease. “Do you want to take a look?” she asked the man next to her.
    Professor Stanford Raynes—“Stan” to the guys back at the Faculty Club at Princeton—was tall and lean, with a pointy chin and a few too many years on him to harbor the crush on Katie that he did.
    “I’m sure it’s fine,” he said.
    Katie tolerated the crush, even encouraged it, partly because it was so benign—he never laid a finger on her, never acted inappropriately around her—and partly because he could make or break her career. A world-famous Egyptologist, he had doctorates in both archaeology and geology. He had revolutionized the field by using seismograms to locate many heretofore hidden sites, finding lost pyramids that generations of Indiana Jones wannabes had only heard rumors about. He was also the source of her funding for this, her first dig as a true professional in one of the most hypercompetitive fields in all of academia.
    “I’m worried,” she said. “Aren’t you worried?”
    “Just some youngsters racing cars in the desert, I’m sure. And if