The Navigator

The guide cleared his throat and turned back to the mixture of about two dozen Turks and assorted foreigners clustered around him.

“At one time, the harem housed more than a thousand concubines, slaves, sultan’s wives, and the sultan’s mother. The harem was like a small city, with more than four hundred rooms. On your left are the quarters of the Black Eunuchs and the chief eunuch, who guarded the harem. Other doors lead to the quarters of the imperial treasurer and the chamberlain. You can go through that door and inspect the apartments of the eunuchs,” he said.

The guide gave the same speech in Turkish, and then led the way into the guards’ dormitory like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Austin held Carina back until they were alone in the courtyard. His blue-green eyes scanned the doors, searching for a possible escape route. He tried one door handle. The door was unlocked. He was hoping they could lose their pursuers in the vast labyrinth of apartments and courtyards.

“Kurt,” Carina said.

The Carriage Gate door had opened. Buck stepped into the courtyard with his hard-faced friends and signaled to his men to spread out. They moved three abreast toward their prey.

The guide and the tour group poured out of the eunuchs’ living quarters into the courtyard, creating a human barrier of camera-toting tourists. Austin and Carina merged with the group as it went through a door that stood in a vestibule at the far end of the courtyard.

Austin glanced over his shoulder. Buck and his men were shouldering their way through the crowd.

“What should we do?” Carina whispered.

“Enjoy the tour for now, and when I say run, run.”

“Run where?”

“Still working on that,” Austin said.

Carina muttered in Italian. Austin didn’t need a translator to tell him she was cursing. He saw her anger as a good sign that she hadn’t given in to despair.

The guide led the way through a square-domed chamber. Stopping every few minutes to deliver a speech in Turkish and in English, the guide pointed out where the concubines lived, where the children of the harem went to school, and where the food for the vast complex was prepared.

Austin glanced longingly at the doors and corridors that offered possible escape routes. There was no way he and Carina could break away from the crowd. With each stop, Buck and his friends drew closer.

Austin put himself in the shoes of the pursuers. The three men would move in and separate him from the crowd. Two men would finish him off with their knives. The third would grab Carina.

Buck and his thugs were all former special ops men. Their training would have included knife fighting and assassination. A hand clamped over his mouth to prevent him from calling out. A quick thrust of a blade between his ribs. By the time bystanders realized murder had been done, Austin would be breathing his last. Buck and company would slip away in the confusion that would follow.

If he was going to make a move, he’d better do it soon.

The tour group stepped into a large carpeted room. The walls were decorated in seventeenth-century blue- and-white tile. A wide sofa covered in gold brocade sat on a platform under a gilded canopy supported on four columns. The walls were decorated in a combination of baroque and rococo style. Light filtered through the stained-glass windows in the upper section of the domed room.

The guide said they were in the throne room, or royal saloon. At one end of the chamber was another platform where the concubines, wives, and the sultan’s mother sat during affairs of state or to enjoy music and dancing.

The crowd began to break up, removing the human buffer Austin and Carina had been using to fend off Buck and his gang. As the group dissipated, Austin faced the three men with only a few tourists in between them.

Now or never.

Austin whispered to Carina to play along. He took her by the hand and sidled up to the guide.

“Would it be possible for us to leave the tour?” Austin said. “My wife is not feeling well. She’s pregnant.”

The guide took in Carina’s slim profile. “Pregnant?”

“Yes,” Carina said with a demure smile. “Only a few months.”

Carina spread her fingers across her flat abdomen. The guide blushed and hurriedly pointed to a doorway. “You can go out that way.”

They thanked him and headed for the exit.

“Wait!” the guide said. He lifted his walkie-talkie to his lips. “I’ll call the guard to escort you.”

He spoke into the hand radio. The guard would arrive in a few minutes. He told them to stay with the group in the meantime.

Buck had seen Austin talking to the guide. When the guide spoke into his radio, he assumed that Austin had called for help.

“Let’s do it,” he said to his men.

Austin was guiding Carina from one part of the room to the other, trying to put space between them and their pursuers. He was learning that hide-and-seek wasn’t made to be played in the open.

The three men closed in. Buck was close enough so that Austin could see the murderous gleam in his eye. Buck reached under his jacket.

A burly security guard entered the royal saloon, and the tour guide pointed out Austin and Carina. Austin played his ace card.

Pointing an accusing finger at Buck and the two other men, he roared at the top of his lungs. “PKK! PKK!”

The PKK was short-hand for Partiya Kerkeren Kerdistan, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization that wants to set up an independent Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey. The PKK had been staging a violent campaign against the Turkish government since 1978, attacking government property and tourist areas and, in the process, killing thousands.

The guard’s amiable expression vanished, and he fumbled for the revolver in its belt holster. In Turkey, shouting PKK was the equivalent of throwing gasoline onto an open fire. The guard had finally got his gun out.

The guard saw the knife in Buck’s hands. Holding the revolver with two hands, he shouted in Turkish. Buck turned and saw the muzzle pointed at his chest. The knife clattered to the floor, and he raised his hands in the air.

One of Buck’s men was aiming a pistol at the guard. Austin threw a battering ram shoulder block into the man’s midsection, and the gun went flying. They crashed to the floor, and Austin drew his arm back and nailed the man with a short punch to the jaw.

The throne room had emptied out. The tour guide had ducked into a doorway and was calling for reinforcements on his radio.

Buck slipped his hand under his jacket and came out with a gun. It was a fatal mistake. The middle-aged guard was a Turkish army veteran. Although he was thick around the middle, he remembered the discipline that had been drilled into him. Austin got to his feet, yelled “PKK” again, and pointed at Buck.

The guard turned, calmly aimed at Buck’s torso, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet caught Buck square in the chest and sent him crashing onto the sultan’s divan.

Austin scrambled to his feet, grabbed Carina, who had been frozen in place, and guided her toward the exit door. They flew along a corridor, made a blind turn, and retraced their steps to a small room that had a door in the corner. The door led out onto a terrace that was drenched with sunlight.

Standing on the terrace were the two men who had chased them through the abandoned village. Austin stepped in front of Carina to protect her. As the men started toward Austin and Carina, the harem door burst open and Buck’s men stepped out into the open with guns in hand. They blinked in the bright sunlight and didn’t see the Turks reach under their jackets for guns, which had silencers attached. The guns coughed simultaneously. Buck’s men crumpled to the deck.

While one Turk kept his gun trained on the door, the other took Austin’s arm.

“Come,” he said. “It’s okay. We’re friends.” He gave Austin a friendly pat on the back and winked at Carina.

The other man took up the rear. He was talking on a cell phone and frequently glanced over his shoulder to