Chapter 22: Two Minutes

The second hunt where Rubina was the quarry was a much more interesting one from Ramzy El-Najjar's point of view, and infinitely more galling from hers. After she had calmed down somewhat, he had spent some hours analysing her first hunt with her and showing her not only how she was caught, but when she had been in the most danger of being caught. He told her firmly that she must make her own plans for evading the hunters and not simply use one of the the ones he had used as examples.

"I can visit hunt ground again?" she asked, in the first statement she had volunteered since the day of the first hunt.

"What do you mean? You will be hunted again in about four or five weeks."

"No. Must visit with no hunt. Planning, always look first, my husband tell me," she explained.

"Oh. Well it's never been done, but I will ask the Emir, may he live for ever, for permission."

Ramzy El-Najjar felt his interview to pass on her request to the young Emir was instructive; it told him a great deal about the young man's way of thinking. It showed him to be a true sportsman, at least in the matter of the hunt.

"Yes," he said, "It is a reasonable request and she can be a much better quarry if she knows the lie of the land. She must not be allowed to escape. Fit her with a GPS tracker and let her go for as long as she wants, all day if she wants. Then collect her with a helicopter. Point out that if she does not cooperate in being collected, or if she ditches the tracker, then she will not be allowed to hunt again. I want to give her a fair chance, but she has to play fair with us. I very much admire her spirit and would send her back to Italy if I could, but it would only make all the other stolen women resentful. I let Davina go back to England to retire and there was much unrest in the harem from some of the others. I ended up having to have one of them strangled to calm them down. If she can win her freedom in the hunt that would solve it all."

So it came about that Rubina was released into the hunting chase alone and unaccompanied for six hours to gather her own ideas about where and how she would avoid the hunt. Ramzy El-Najjar kept his promise to her that he would not use the tracking device to follow her, but would use it only to find her after her day in the chase. At the end of that time she was collected from the compound, where she was already sitting quietly on the grass beside the meeting point and walked to the helicopter quite passively.

Back at Ramzy El-Najjar's harem she was her usual spitfire self, but he had behaved exactly as he had promised and nobody had raped her since the hunt. The relentless physical training continued, as Rubina had a distinctly Italian tendency to put on weight.

The day of what turned out to be Rubina's last hunt dawned bright and clear, as did almost any day in Kobekistan when there wasn't a sandstorm. The hunt would move off at eleven, so she was duly dressed in her camouflage suit and released at the meeting point at ten. Almost before the helicopter left the ground she was off the path and over the ford and running between the woods and the first of the low hills. After ten minutes and a good mile and a half from the meet she suddenly turned right into the woods and made the best time she could to the edge of the stream, not bothering about the obvious trail she was leaving. When she reached the water she plunged in to the stream and turned downstream for a few hundred yards, leaving the water to go into the woods on the opposite side. Skirting the water she went back upstream for half a mile on that bank, almost reaching the swamp before taking to the water again moving upstream as fast as she could.

When she came opposite the entrance to the cave tunnel through the hills she ran straight up the bank and into the cave, passing half way through it. Then she turned and retraced her steps back to the river as closely as possible on the same line she had taken moving out to the cave. Re-entering the water she moved on upstream to the mouth of the river, where it flowed out of the artificial lake.

Just as she got there she heard the gun go for the hunt to move off. She had got much further than she expected to by this time, but she did not slacken her efforts. Swimming as fast as she could she crossed the small lake, disturbing the few imported exotic ducks which lived on it, and swam through the white water at the bottom of the waterfall and pulled herself on to the rocks behind it. Now she proposed to sit out the hunt hidden from sight by the waterfall and hidden from the dogs' noses by the fact that she had done the last half mile through the flowing stream where no spoor existed for them to follow.

She reviewed her efforts at elusiveness so far and tried to assess what the hunters would do. The dogs would easily track her to the first entry into the river. Then they would cast up and down on both banks until another scent was picked up and would, she hoped, waste a good three quarters of an hour following the decoy path on the south bank of the river. Eventually they would find the next exit and then follow it up to the cave. Most of them would belt round the end of the hills to pick her up at the far end of the cave, and find no scent. Then one of the men would work his way through the cave and there would be cursing when she was neither in it nor to be scented at the far end. One or other of them would realise that she had gone in and out of the river at the same point and the decoy trail would again be checked, as would the banks of the river on both sides. When there was no other trail, she hoped they would assume that she had used the swamp to leave the river and would spend some time trying to find a trail leaving the swamp. By then, she hoped, they would have run out of time.