Noble Hearts (Wild Hearts Romance Book 3) (23 page)

The commander nodded toward our rifles, and we retrieved them with grateful smiles, immediately slinging them to our shoulders while one man kept his AK-47 casually pointed our way. I approved of the caution, and probably would have insisted on the same had the tables been reversed.

Then Kayla and I gathered our charges, including our lucky rhino, and headed east again, waving as we went.

Kayla turned solemn eyes on me just before the soldiers disappeared behind the trees. “A rhino’s luck is in its horn,” she said. Our little rhino, of course, had none—yet.

“That’s a curious belief then,” I pointed out, “considering how many rhinos die because of their horns.”

“Only if you’re looking at it from the side of the rhino.”

There was such a sadness shrouding Kayla that I almost gave in to the sharp desire to wrap myself around her and offer myself as protection and comfort against a world where luck had all to do with which side of the gene pool you happened to be on.

A deep, menacing growl grew around us. Not from any beast but from a pack of helicopters racing in just to our north. We shrank from the outburst of
rat-a-tat
fire from automatic assault rifles.

An explosion rocked its way through the trees, its concussion booming in our ears.

A second explosion followed, and then a third. The outpost had been found.

“Weapons stores,” I said.

“And petrol,” Kayla added.

Another round of automatic fire staccatoed, and the faint screams of men pierced the rain. Pressing Gus’s collar into Kayla’s stunned hand, I sped back the way we came. I was, I recalled, a doctor first.

In the right conditions, sound could carry a long way. It was nearly a mile to the outpost across terrain filled with deadfall, peat and mud, and water sheeting over the ground from the mountain elevations above. It took a good eight minutes to reach the outpost, and by the time I got there the helicopters had already winged off south in search of other prey.

The devastation was complete. Flames engulfed two blackened jeeps and the charred tarps that had no doubt covered stockpiles were already being beat into the mud by the persistent rain. Satellite and short-range communications equipment lay mangled in their cases.

I found 15 men altogether—our 12 captors and another three who’d been left behind to guard the camp. Our 12 had made it back to their posts in time to die honorable yet ultimately futile deaths. My stomach churned—not over the wounds and gore, because in my profession I’d already become inured to the sight and smell of mangled men, but because of the humanity lost in such a short, single flick of time.

Finding the remote outpost, though, had been a timely stroke of luck for the soldiers on the other side of the winning guns. Luck was, as Kayla had noted so eloquently, a matter of perspective.

You either were the rhino…

…or you weren’t.

Mark’s blasted look coupled with how quickly he returned told me all I needed to know. How had we degenerated into this so quickly? Ushindi was young and strong.

“We had such hope 10 years ago,” I told Mark as I held him close that night under another makeshift shelter being pelted by the rain. “Our nation would be different. No fighting or corruption. Just prosperity and peace.”

“What people don’t want that? What nation forms for any other reason? But war and power run hot in our blood. The world we have was built as much on war as on cooperation. Hell, America tore itself apart, fought in a gruesome world war, then swore a policy of isolationism it could never hope to honor before bloodying itself all over again.”

“Not all people want war. Not me. Not my father. Not the tribes of my mother. My aspirations were modest—grow coffee and provide a living for my workers and me. I didn’t even want to be something more than what my father was. Only to be as happy and successful as him. Content like he was even before Ushindi sprang up around us, offering a glimmer of a future even more comfortable than the life we’d known till then.”

“Yet your father was here only because the French and Belgians moved in and conquered your mother’s people. Once the Europeans were driven from America, they licked their wounds here in Africa, preying again on an indigenous population armed with nothing more than spears and blow darts.”

I shook my head. This was something I’d been thinking about. “When the history books are rewritten, they won’t say it was men and their civil war that drove Ushindi down. They’ll say it was the mosquito that conquered us.”

Mark moved in my arms, intrigued. The conversation about a dying Ushindi was a painful one for me, but it was doing what I intended—keeping Mark from dwelling too much on what he’d seen at the outpost earlier. Beside us, Gus whined in his sleep.

“Not through the
Subs
virus itself, but through its threat. By cutting us off, by keeping the world’s attention—the UN’s attention—on a global threat. Who would care about a tiny nation of less than a million people when faced with an epidemic that could kill a hundred times as many? The mosquito robbed us of allies at a time when we were making our last bid for a true democracy, not some platitude pasted into the name of our country to con ourselves and the world into believing we’re something we’re not, like the Republic of the Congo or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By the time the rest of the world realizes what’s happening here in Ushindi, we’ll be only a footnote in those history books—another failed country in a region so few care about, so few know about.”

“I care.” Mark’s protest sounded sincere, but I knew better.

“Do you really? Or do you only care about the people you’ve met here? Is it Ushindi you care about…or me?”

His face fell. I had caught him out. To his credit, he gave sincere thought to my question. That quality of self-examination, of putting aside his ego in favor of truth, was, I think, what I respected most about him.

“I think, through you, I could have learned to love Ushindi as much as you. But you’re right. For all the time you’ve known me, I’ve only been running away from Ushindi, not fighting to protect it. Not like…”

“Like you’ve fought to protect
us
,” I finished for him.

“One privileged white man’s step at a time.”

That self-effacing honesty was, I think, what I respected second most about him.

Out of pure respect I kissed him, long and deep, with plenty of respectful tongue. Conversation was only one way to divert a man from thinking too deeply and from memories that would no doubt surface as nightmares. In our tiny shelter, however, crowded together with a snoring Rottweiler and a sleepy gorilla, we could divert ourselves only so far.

Then again, two intelligent people with clever hands and tongues could devise a number of very satisfactory ways to divert ourselves, even given such limitations.

Four days ago, the pass we found ourselves in now at mid-morning had seemed both so distant and so much nearer than the four-day trek it had taken to get here. Now the mountain peaks rose to either side of us, their tips cloud-wrapped. The rain had eased, and we hoped for a few hours reprieve from its relentless downpour.

Mark whistled. “Thank god we don’t have to scale
those
. The oxygen’s thin enough here as it is. How far up do you think we are?”

“That’s Margherita.” I nodded to the peak north of us. “It’s a little over 5000 meters. I’d say we’re at three or three-and-a-half thousand.”

He had to convert meters to feet in his head to make sense of the scale, but once he had he seemed duly impressed. “We’re up 10 or 11 thousand feet, then.” He looked back the way we’d come, but the low clouds that had settled into the hollows of the mountain path hid the way from us and gave us no sense of scale to judge either distance or elevation by.

The rhino and okapi took the opportunity to grab a snack of giant lobelia leaves while we rested a moment at the head of the pass. Trees were thinned here and the pass itself primordial, covered in giant groundsel, with every twig and shrub dripping in thick, heavy moss. Old Man’s Beard, I’d heard it called. It wasn’t going to be an easy trek across, but I was grateful seeing it, because now I knew where we were.

“About four kilometers straight across, and then it’s pretty much downhill from there, right into Uganda.” My legs were definitely looking forward to using their downhill muscles, and while I was more used to mountain living than Mark was, breathing oxygen-rich air again was a pleasure I looked forward to.

Breaking out some snacks, I shared the commander’s trail mix with Mark and handed a small box of raisins to Jengo and a large dog biscuit to Gus. We were munching down when the clouds lifted a few dozen meters revealing, just ahead of us and downwind, a trio of striped butts and long chestnut necks that took my breath away.

“Okapi.” I murmured the word as my brain struggled to fill in the possibilities of what I was seeing. “Okapi!” I whispered as loudly as I dared, nudging Mark in the ribs, only remembering his wound when he winced away.

My hand automatically closed over Gus’s collar. Giving it a quick jerk, I threw a preemptive “Quiet!” his way, not wanting him to scare them away by barking or chasing after them. He looked confused until he caught sight of them, when he began to growl so deep in his throat I felt it more than heard it.

Two of the okapi raised their heads. Had I tipped them off? They had incredibly big and sensitive ears. Most likely, though, our scent had drifted out to them, the molecules wafting slowly downwind in the thin, damp air.

Beside us, Nyota stiffened mid-chew, staring their way.

I stood rooted, memorizing every last detail of my lovely orphan.

Gus tugged against my hand. “Take him, please,” I begged Mark, who obliged immediately, kneeling beside the big Rottweiler to keep him calm.

Nyota trembled, watching the trio in the distance. Her tail twitched, the bottle-brush end of it flicking in the rhino’s face. Tamu stared at her best friend. I doubted she could see the herd in the distance clearly enough to recognize them for what they were. Certainly she couldn’t smell them since we were upwind. So she was caught trying to make sense of her friend’s sudden preoccupation.

“Hold her!” Mark meant the little okapi, of course. Instead, I wrapped Jengo’s arms around the rhino’s neck, holding his wrists and leaning into them, capturing both the
watoto
in a single embrace. Tears welled in my eyes. I let them fall.

“What are you doing?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question exactly, but Mark knew the answer well enough.

I answered anyway. “Breaking our hearts.”

Nyota raised a tentative foreleg and took a step toward the trio, who looked to be on their guard now, unsure what threat we might be.

She took a high step forward, then another, and another. Six steps out and she bleated. The okapi closest stamped its feet, a signal of alarm. They held their ground, though, as Nyota gained courage and, tail twitching nervously, sprinted their way.

She looked so tiny, so young, so fragile. That she was old enough to be weaned and on her own—under the protection of more experienced okapis, of course—I had no doubt or I would never have let her go.

Tamu still wasn’t prepared to as she lunged against me, straining to be free, to follow wherever her best friend led.

“Not yet,” I told her, knowing I wouldn’t be able to hold her back if she truly wanted to go. “Your turn will come.” The words didn’t help. Not the rhino or me. I doubted there was any promise or assurance that could.

A dozen meters from the nearest okapi, Nyota paused, unsure of her welcome. They were not animals that lived in large herds. It was highly possible she might not be accepted. I held my breath along with her. This wasn’t how I meant for her to go, so suddenly, and with others I didn’t even know, in the mountains so far from home.

But we had no home. Not any longer. Not any of us, save for Mark who was so far from his. We were all taking a chance. And my brave little Nyota was taking a chance now at a life wild and free where none of us could follow.

“Is this what you want?” Mark asked, his quiet voice loud in the silence.

“No. But it isn’t
my
choice to make, is it?”

The okapi nearest Nyota stretched its neck forward. An invitation or a challenge? With sudden decisiveness, Nyota paced up to them, enduring a gauntlet of inquisitive, sniffing noses as she took a place beside them. Only one of the beasts protested—a graying cow who lashed out with her front hooves then kicked impotently behind her as she sprang away, her protest registered but overturned by clear majority rule.

The other two shuffled around her, each nearly twice her height, and I lost sight of my baby. Then whatever impulse had guided them here urged them away. As one, they wheeled for the cliff rising to the northeast and disappeared into the jungle taking Nyota with them.

Gone.

I tried to comprehend it.

Tried to understand how everything in my life could be disappearing just as fast and just as finally. Mother. Father. Home. Workers. Friends. Mementos. Memories. And now my
mtoto
, my child—for how could I feel any differently about any baby I’d loved and nursed and raised?

My life was disappearing piece by piece.

Overwhelmed by the grief, I collapsed in the wet, narrow pass and wept.

But I was not alone. Those I still had left wouldn’t let me be alone. Tiny arms. Strong arms. A sharp, cold nose. A warm, wide one. They all crowded me with comfort, with need.

Blindly I reached out, returning that comfort, returning that need, until I felt strong enough to look up again and face whatever other challenges fate had in store.

Picking up what pieces of my shattered heart were left, I rose and walked east, through the pass and over the ground where Nyota had already led. Mark’s arm across my shoulders and Jengo’s hand gripped in mine bolstered me. Stalwart Gus pacing ahead strengthened me.

It was Tamu’s forlorn bleats from behind as she called for a friend that didn’t come that kept threatening to undo me.

The dipping of the ground in its gradual slide toward the Ugandan border should have been a cause for celebration. Instead, Mark acknowledged it with only a deep, satisfied sigh and a simple declaration. “We’re coming for you, Uganda.”

I tried desperately to find even a glimmer of joy in my heart to share with Mark, but I came up empty. “When is it just too much?” I asked.

He smoothed a lank of unbrushed hair from my forehead. “Not until you’re dead. Before then, anything is still possible.”

I wondered if he believed that.

We were an hour down the far side of the pass when the little rhino stopped in her tracks, refusing to move forward. “Come along,
mtoto
,” I cajoled, and even Jengo got into the spirit, pushing on the rhino’s rump. Mark handed me a cracker from his pack, and I dangled it temptingly in front of her. She stretched her neck toward it, her eyes locked on the seductive prize, but her feet were even more firmly locked in place.

“Maybe if we—”

Mark never got to finish his thought.

The flash of a dazzled butt and a familiar chuff and whistle filled my heart as Nyota paced toward us in that rollicking gait of hers, looking pleased with herself and even more pleased at finding us.