Sora shook the emotional baggage from her mind, fumble for the key on her lap and slotted t into the ignition. She turned the switch to ON and leaned forward to the computer console. One beep sounded, signalling once the hard disk had booted. She slid the keyboard toward her, and typed “Ali Baba” on the blank screen.

The screen flashed white, then black, then lit up blue with a white border.

Hello Sora Kang.

She typed Hello Vixen, and punched enter.

The scree responded, System Check in Progress, and a series of numbers flashed with accompanying beeps, signifying all functions were in order. Finally, the words system check complete, begin ignition sequence appeared.

Sora sat back and punched one key, Enter. The computer did all the work. A secondary screen provided her all the report on fuel mix. It was too rich, a higher octane than the plane was used to. Only two of the four petrol tanks were full. Did she want to cancel the ignition and cap the tanks? The computer asked. Yes or No. No. Enter. The computer said impartially, Fuel mix will decrease engine performance by .003 percent. Not critical. Enter flight plan now.

Sora’s fingers hovered over the QWERTY keyboard. The only destination she could think of was her bed at home. She tried to moisten her dry lips. Home was twelve hours away. She didn’t have it in her to push her body that far.

There was a bed on the Vixen, a wonderful fantasy bed, sheeted with designer silk. She could crawl back there, strip the bed and collapse on it. Sleep off her exhaustion. There was water in the storage tanks. She could strip down, clean up and try this later. And not fail at it when she had her wits back. Her strength back.

Sighing deeply because that was a solution she could live with, Sora let her fingers rest on the home keys then types Close systems, park head. Enter.

The screen flashed, invaid code, retry, abort, fail.

Sora muttered a curse, and again type Park head.

Are you sure?

“Listen, you stupid computer,” Sora growled cranky, “Don’t get smart with me.”

She typed no and went through her shut-down sequence again. It should have worked. It didn’t. She was too tired to work her way through a system glitch. The quickest way to shut down the computer was to turn the key, but that would subvert her lockouts. The plane would automatically go to manual ignition.

She went back to the beginning one more time, and hit the same snag. Reading the snotty Are you sure? question, Sora wanted to smash her fist through the blue screen.

She almost assed out when a long arm reach past the back of her seat and one finger punched the n key. Then those lean tanned fingers pushed her aside and typed Forty Thieves, then pushed Enter, and the Vixen shut down.

“Very clever.” A forceful hand clamped down Sora’s right hand before she could snatch her key from the ignition. Sora’s heart dropped all the way down to her proverbial socks.

“Very predictable, yes, but very clever.”

Leeteuk Park slid the key into a pocket of his fatigues, removed her passport, wallet and papers from the console and dropped them into another pocket.

“Get up. Let’s go”

He pulled her hard in the direction he meant for her to go. Sora only half manage to get her feet under her before he had dragged her out of the cockpit.

Speechless, stunned because he’d appeared out of nowhere and had been waiting to come stumbling into the trap he’d baited so carefully, she couldn’t figure out if she wanted to kiss him or kill him. She made up her mind it was the later when he shove her toward the rear exit, his hand hard and fast on her upper arm.

Trying to jerk free she voiced a complaint. “I don’t need your assistance!” Even though her legs nearly collapsed underneath her.

At the closed door, Leeteuk hit his fist on the rosewood panel twice. Immediately the outer lock rotated and the hydraulic door slid sideways. A set of metal stairs stood in place and a whole platoon of soldiers waited to take her prisoner.

Trying once again to wrench her arm out of his grip, Sora said through clenched teeth. “You got what you wanted. Let me go!”

Leeteuk yanked her off balance on the last step, dragging her against him. “Go ahead, provoked me!”

Sora couldn’t muster a curse to hurt him anywhere near vile enough. She had a vision of cool Sora Kang dissolving in a screaming, horribly, childish tantrum on a Saudi tarmac. That image prevented her from making a complete fool of herself.

She found her stiff upper lip as she was dragged to a jeep and tossed inside with the sheik, who crammed his too-big body next to hers. Some flunky drove without lights through clustered buildings half sunk underground. They stopped at one of the bunkers. The outer entry she was pulled through was pitch-dark. Steel door swung shut behind them, and they were inside a room, the lights blindly bright.

Sora shielded her eyes with her free hand. Leeteuk gasped at what the lights revealed.

Several soldiers had told him what a light-brown eyed urchin at the checkpoint look like. The crew that found her wandering in the desert had also debriefed him. Hearing about her effective disguise was nothing compared to seeing it.

Not in a million chances would he have guessed that the creature before him was a beautiful woman.

Filthy, she was dirtier than a mud logger on the most remote oil field. Leeteuk spun her to face him and yanked her plain kuffiyah off her head. If she’d cut that hair or ruined it, he was going to kill her. Roughly he unwound the close binding of black cotton turbaned round her head.

“Ow!” Sora pushed his hands away, lurching back. She got a glimpse of the unchecked anger in his face. That made her wince more than having her hair pulled.

“Get in there,” Leeteuk said through gritted teeth, “You are going to wash and scrub and scour this… this…”

Words failed Sheik Leeteuk Park Haji Haaris. In neither his language nor hers could he come up with a description foul enough to convey to her exactly what she looked like.

Sora jumped the second his hands shot out from his side. She wasn’t quick enough to dodge the oncoming blow. But he didn’t strike. Instead, his fist dug into her grime-covered clothes. She was jerked sideways and roughly shoved ahead of him through a door into another room.

Leeteuk hit a wall switch. An overhead light flooded the cubicle with harsh bright light. Sora found herself in a sterile, white tiled bathroom. It was plain and simple –shower, toilet and wall-hung sink – and nowhere near big enough to contain a man in a rage and her, too.

Above the sink, screwed to the wall, was a mirror fir for little more than a shaving and putting a part in hair. Flicking her eyes towards it, Sora glimed a horrible apparition nest to the handsome Sheik Leeteuk.

He reach past the wraith, yanked the plastic shower curtain aside, twisted the knobs and a stream of water shot from the shower head.

“Get in there!”

Thinking she was going to be thrown in, anyway, Sora did exactly what he said and stepped inside the stream of water, clothes and all. There was an orange bar of soap on the sink, Leeteuk grabbed it and shoved it into Sora’s hands.

“Scrub!”

A pair of pale brown eyes in a coal miner’s face blinked at him. He couldn’t begin to read her expression. She turned the bar over her hands, rubbing it between blackened palms. A gray lather was formed, but the grease on her skin only blackened the bar. The dirt wasn’t affected at all.

Too angry to risk putting his thoughts into words, Leeteuk march out of the bathroom, slamming every door he passed forcefully shut behind him.

He stood in the middle of his quarters and ran his fingers through his hair, looking around him like a crazy man. There wasn’t enough soap in the world to get her clean. He stalked to the supply room four buildings down and ordered a sergeant out of bed, made him open the storage and issue him detergent, mechanic’s cream, vegetable grease, pumice soap, everything and anything that could be used to cut through dirt. He carried a heavy carton in his hands when he walked back into the semi-underground housing.

Inside the shower stall, she had made little progress, through the bar soap and whittled to almost nothing. Sora sat on the floor of the stall, stripped to tunic and cotton trousers, scrubbing a foot that was the color of a hot roofer’s tar-soaked mop. She was white around her knees where the trousers rolled back to dingy cuffs, smeary gray to the prominent anklebone and tar-black below.

“It won’t come off,” she said lamentably.

The sound of horror in her voice tore something loose inside Leeteuk’s chest. He flipped the lid down on the toilet, dropped the cartoon onto it and knelt on the wet floor beside her. He shut off the water and grabbed a towel.

Sora took her cloth frfom him, patting it on her hands, on her feet, blotting her face. In the strong light, her face and neck were a funny ocher-brown. Nutmeg, Leeteuk finally defined it in his mind, the color of the light crude spilling on the ground.

Without a word spoken, Leeteuk twisted te top off the waterless cleaner, picked up her right foot and laved a handful of the substance onto it.

Sora shivered a little, watching his hands move, massaging the white cream all over her foot, between her toes, up her ankle. He added more and rubbed more the white stuff turned gray, dissolving. The white towel in her hands looked like something used to clean a crankcase.

“You’re mad about the plane,” she said.

“Do not speak to me.”

“It’s my plane. Now it’s ugly.”

“I’m not going to discussed it.”

“Did you fly it?”

Leeteuk shot a quelling look.

“You did, didn’t you? You got your hacker baby brother to break into my program, didn’t you?” Sora jerked forward, squishing water from her clothes, and dug her fingers into the can of cleaner. She worked on her hands. He scrubbed her ankle and the bottom of her leg. Every pore seemed embedded wth dirt. Every crease filled.

“Why won’t you discuss it?” Sora demanded as she wiped her hands on the towel and repeated the process. He started on her left foot.

Not until the third treatment with the waterless cleaner did the gunk begin to loosen. Leeteuk held her left foot in his hand and started at it. The arch was never going to come clean. The goo between her toes belonged on a Cairo guttersnipe.

“I have never been so filthy in my life,” Sora said. She didn’t like the way his eyes shot daggers at her.

He opened another can of cleaner and pulled her forward, bringing a handful of white cream up to her face. Talking and seeing wasn’t going to be allowed. She shut and closed her eyes. His fingers worked and worked. Lathered and wiped, creamed her up again and again and again.

He tore her collarless shirt halfway off her shoulders and he started rubbing of the stuff into her neck, up , around her ears. Sora peeked open greasy eyes and didn’t know she looked like a racoon. At least she wasn’t sunburned, except on her eyelids.

“I’m hungry.”

Leeteuk sat back on his heels, dropping his hands from her neck and glared at her. “You’re hungry?”

“And tired. And I don’t want you to be mad at me.”

He tossed the blackened towel at her. “Wipe off your face and neck and don’t forget your ears, inside them.”

She stood and left, slamming the door.

Wearily, Sora hoisted herself up from the floor of the shower. She looked inside the box, found a soap powder and three gritty bars of soap. She stripped off her sodden clothes, turned the water back on, adjusted the temperature and begun to scrub, determined to get herself lean.

Adjacent to the bathroom was a small closet. There, Sora found extra towels and a robe. He skin was pretty funny looking, but she’d had all scrubbing she could stand. She couldn’t work the dine-tooth comb in the medicine cabinet through her hair, so she wound it in a towel and ted the belt of the robe secure at her waist.

Nothing from her disguise could be salvage. She bundled the ruined clothes and towel into the trash and padded into the next room.

It was a very small apartment. What passed for living space was a postage stamp in size. It held a vinyl couch and a table with two chrome chairs. There wasn’t room for anything else. A partition split off the minuscule kitchen and sitting room from the single bedroom, which contained a single bed and lone chest of drawers.

Leeteuk occupied the wedge of the kitchen, overwhelming the space rattling a frying pan over a gas burner. Eggshells were strewn about the dinky countertop next to a stainless-steel sink. He did not look up at her. He lifted a pan from the flame and slid the cooked contents onto two plates, dropped a fork onto each and picked them up.

“Sit, eat.” He reached around her to put both her plates on the table.

The food smelled very good, of green peppers and onions. There was sausage cut up into the eggs, as well, and tomatoes. Sora wanted to tell him how good the food smelled. Mouth-watering, she sat down in silence and waited for him. He came with a carton of milk and two glasses.

“Eat,” he said more forcefully when he’d sat down.

There was a good possibility that Sora wasn’t going to be able to swallow a single bite, no matter how hungry she was.

He ate five or six bites then tore a hunk off a flat loaf of bread. Studying her gray face, he wondered if his sisters-in-law and their mothers could do anything to salvage her beautiful skin. He doubted it.

Sora forced herself to swallow everything she put in . She drank half her milk and thanked him when he topped up the glass. His silence was killing her.

“Can I tell you something, please?”

“You have nothing to say to me that I will listen to.”

“Okay, fine.”Sora compressed , hurting over his coldness. But she wasn’t going to keep still and quiet, like some little kid being punished. He was going to hear her questions and she was going to have answers, one way or another.

She waited until he finished his food, then tried again.

This morning, yesterday morning, whichever, a bus from Kuwait stopped at Al Auda. This old man had all kinds of money with him. Bundles of it. He begun to wave it around trying to sell it, I think. No one would take it. Not even the soldiers. They all threw it away.”

“Kuwaiti currency?” Leeteuk asked soberly.

“Has the whole economy crashed? Kuwait is one of the riches country in the world,” Sora asked, shocked.

“Kuwait is an occupied teretory. Worthless Iraqi money replaces the Kuwait dinar. My home is being systematically and plundered.”

Sora stared for a long time at him fierce expression. Deep lines ravaged his features, lines that hadn’t been there the first time she’s seen him. It wasn’t only her foolish actions that had left their impact on his face. His troubles ran much deeper.

“How can Iraq do that? What will you do?”

“It is not your concern what we Arabs will do.”

Sora dropped her gaze to her empty plate. Was his hostility to her based on the fact that she was non-Arab? She sense something. He certainly had a dim view of American. Or maybe just her. Unable to short that through, she shook her head simply. She wanted to comfort him, but didn’t know how or even where to begin. What could you tell someone whose country had been crushed? What words she thought of seemed hopelessly inadequate.

“Have you had any word from your father?” she asked. “Do you know if he is all right?”

“No. There has been no word. The last report only verified that he was seen at the airport by others on the morning of the invasion. A friend reported that a very tell dark-haired American was with him. Your father dark-haired?”

“Yes.” Sora nodded. “Is that all? Did your friend know anything else? Were they all right?”

Leeteuk took a deep breath and release it slowly. He wouldn’t be the one to tell her that his contact saw bullets take down her father. “That information is now a week old. There has been nothing more.”

“It’s not very reassuring.” Sora admitted.

The silence lengthened between them, but it was no longer fraught with the tension that had existed prior to their meal together.

Sora gathered the plates, glasses and debris from the meat and washed the dished, dried and put them away. Leeteuk sat in stony silence staring at a wall embellished by one framed picture of the prophet. When she was done, drying her hands on the cup towel, he said. “Go to bed, Sora Kang.”

She had the glimpse of the bed. This was not Anaiza. She asked cautiously, “Where do you sleep?”

He steepled his hands before his face and looked at her harshly. “That is not your concern.”

Sora tossed the dish towel to the countertop.

“Fine, it’s not my concern. Nothing is my concern. You won’t discuss it. What does concern me, Sheik Leeteuk? Will you discuss what happens to me personally? Am I under arrest? Are you sending me to jail?”

Leeteuk drew a deliberately deep breath before rising to his feet. He would like to soften his expression for her, even draw her inside his arms and give her the comfort she was signalling that she so desperately needed. He could not. Firth because he would not take such blatant advantage of her emotional turmoil. Second, because he could no longer trust himself if he came within one inch of her. For the time being, it was better that he remain aloof and remote and her tender feeling were the only thing endangered.

“If it is within my power, I will return you to Anaiza,” Leeteuk answered. “Here I can make no guarantee of your safety. The Republican Guards is massed on the border, poised to take control of the Saud oil fields south of Kuwait. There is nothing on this world that can stop them. Hussein’s formidable army will mow through this desert like locust devouring wheat. And you, my foolish girl, are standing on the first target they will attack, this military base. Now, do you understand?”

Sora’s bit her lower lip and shook her head. “No, I don’t.”

Leeteuk closed the distance between them, grasped her shoulders and shook her. “What terms do you understand? Do you know what red alert is? Can you comprehend that this base is now a closed fortress, sitting in the path of the biggest army in my world has ever seen? Hussein wants the oil fields and he’s going to have them by whatever means necessary.

“Yes, I can understand that,” Sora shouted back at him. But it is not my fault, I didn’t start a war.” You’ve been treating me as if I am your enemy, and I am not.”

“I’m yelling at you because you stupidity had landed you where no women belongs! It isn’t safe! I don’t need the worry of keeping watch over some reckless, blundering woman. I’ve got the lives and welfare of thousands of my people to look out after, and you keep preventing me from doing the job I must do.”

Stung, Sora tilted her chin, showing injured pride. “Well, you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I’ll stay out of your way.”

“It is too damned late for that!” His growl was so fierce it made the hair of her neck stand up. “You don’t understand, do you?” he said.

“Understand what?”

“Do you have any idea of the hell you just put me through for the last twenty-four hours?”

“You’ve been through? Why you arrogant, conceited oaf, I’m the one who’s been suffering, wandering in your stupid desert, trying to get here. Just so I could take my plane to Kuwait, pick-up my father and godfather and get the hell back home! You could have helped me, but no, you acted like a desert bandit and threw me inside your own private harem!”

“Forget it!” Leeteuk’s voice dropped several octaves into a low feral, growl. “You will never understand anything. You would have died in the desert. I diverted ten patrols from their necessary duties to search the desert for you. Can you understand that? It wasn’t an accident those soldiers found you stumbling over your own feet! And you’d better thank God they did. A few more hours and you would have collapsed and been food for scorpions.”

The bald truth in his words made Sora shudder. She could think of nothing to say for her defense that would diminish his righteous temper. She folded her arms across her chest defensively and met the burning anger in his eyes.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh?” Leeteuk reared back, astonished. “You’re sorry? Do you think that by saying that you make up for the agony of discovering you missing last night? The torture I’ve been through this whole day? Hot knowing whether you were alive or dead or in some horrible trouble? Does that make everything all right again? Is that what works at home when you get in over your head? Do you bat your beautiful eyes and hang your head prettily and everything is like it was before? All is forgiven?”

Sora shook her head. “No. I had no idea… that you would… that I’d … Look, I am sorry. My running away was a stupid thing to do/. I will admit that, now. I didn’t know that when I started out.” She finished on a lame note.

“I didn’t do this to hurt you,” she went on. “I did think it would be better if we didn’t see each other again. I really thought I could just make it here quickly, get into the Vixen and leave. I know my father is alive. He’s hurt, but he’s okay. If I can just get to Kuwait, to the airport there, to out hangar, I can get my father out before something terrible happens to him. And my godfather too.”

Leeteuk stared hard at her stubborn, determined, beautiful face. It didn’t matter that her intentions were pure. She was a woman and she was more vulnerable than she realized. Now would he admit truly distraught her disappearance had made him feel. He’d torn a strip off Ali that wasn’t likely to ever grow back figuratively.

“I have only one question to that, Sora Kang.”

“What?” she asked, hoping he could see her reasons and understood her motivations?

“Suppose something horrible has happened to your father. Do you think he’d actually want you there with him?”

Sora thought back to the last words she’d heard her father shout at her over the radios. She flashed a look at Leeteuk’s intense and beautiful eyes. Did she have to answer that? He knew the answer.

“No, he wouldn’t.”

Some of the tension in Leeteuk eased. “Thank you for an honest answer.”

Sora’s mouth dried up. Yes, she’d given him honesty, but she saw immediately that he took more from it than she had intended. It reinforced his self-proclaimed right to act as her protector.

“Well. Don’t get it into your head,” Sora said. “I don’t let my father tell me what to do any more than I let my brothers treat me like a doormat. I have to do what I think is best. I’m not a coward. Maybe some women would take a back seat in the face of trouble, but I don’t.”

“Then you leave me no choice but to remove such decisions from your hands completely. You will remain inside these quarters until I can safely return you to Anaiza.”

Sora glared at him. “Why don’t you be honest and call a spade a spade. I’m under arrest, right?”

“You may consider it any damn think you like.”

“You self-righteous son of a !” Sora stifled the urge to strike him. Instead, she her bare heel ad fled to the stark, plain bedroom.

Defeated, Leeteuk let her go. He’d put the truth badly. Diplomacy wasn’t his long suit; defense was. The Saudi military, the whole world, waited to discern the next move of Hussein.

Leeteuk’s greatest fear was the Republican Guard. No military personnel could leave the base. For the moment, Leeteuk was as trapped as Sora.