Richard Castle: Wild Storm

But in that moment, Captain Estes was only thinking of one man, a man who had already slipped away.

“I never even got his name,” he said to the flight attendant 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.

WEST OF LUXOR, Egypt

Flat 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 not, that’s why we’ve got those gentlemen,” he said, gesturing toward the four men with guns.

The vehicles were still closing in, now roughly a mile away, driving in a straight line toward the dig site with a determination that, to Katie, seemed to signify malignant intent.

“They’re probably just merchants trying to sell us something,” the professor suggested. “Fruit or vegetables or trinkets. Anyhow, I’m going into the tent to get some water, and I suggest you do the same. I keep telling you, it’s very easy to get dehydrated out here.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just…I can’t lose Khufu.”

The professor disappeared. Katie, however, continued walking in the direction of the dust cloud, toward the tented staging area where the valuables they brought up from under the sand were being carefully wrapped and readied for transport. There were crates of varying sizes, some small enough for a few tiny figurines, others carrying huge slabs of carved granite that weighed a thousand pounds or more.

Among the artifacts she had personally discovered was a life-sized bust of Khufu. One of the early pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty, a god-man who ruled Egypt some 4,500 years ago, he was generally accepted as being the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid of Giza. Little else was known about him. If verified, the pink granite statue would be just the second known depiction of the ancient king.

It would also be the kind of find that would propel Dr. Comely into the first rank of young archaeologists. Perhaps it would even lead to a rare tenure-track professorship at a leading research university. But only if she could get it back to the lab.

The dust cloud now appeared to be at least three stories high, and the vehicles — they were pickup trucks, with men riding in their flatbeds — were just a few hundred yards away.

Close enough that Katie could see their guns without the aid of her binoculars.

“Professor!” she shouted. “It’s them. They’re back.”

Raynes reappeared from his tent.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Just look!”

He grabbed the binoculars from her outstretched hand, focused them, then swore.

“Okay, okay. Let’s…let’s not panic here,” he said.

Then — in a voice that sounded a lot like panic — he began shouting in excited Arabic at the sleepy-eyed guards. Katie only spoke a few words of the language, enough to be polite on the street and ask where the restroom was. She had been meaning to improve her skills. She was lost as soon as a conversation started.

The moment the professor’s instructions to the guards were issued, one of the young assailants rapidly closing in pointed his AK-47 in the air and gleefully squeezed the trigger. A rapid burst of ten or twenty rounds flew into the atmosphere. Katie counted at least six other men with guns in the raiding party.

To Katie’s dismay, the four guards did not return fire. They took one look at what was coming and, as if in practiced unison, reached the simultaneous conclusion that they were not being paid enough to do anything about it. They turned and ran.

Katie felt a shout escaping from her lungs. The professor was also berating them in Arabic. His admonishment bounced off the guards’ backs as they fled.

The bandits were now on them. They were mostly young, barely out of their teens, their dark beards still scraggly. The leader — or the man who appeared to be the leader — was older, perhaps in his late thirties or early forties, with strands of white in his beard.

They pulled to a stop near the staging area and hopped off the pickup trucks with the apparent intention of helping themselves to whatever was there. The professor rushed at them — courageously, foolishly, and completely unarmed — and did not stop even as several gun muzzles were trained on him. Katie rushed behind him, yelling at him to stop. He was unbowed.