[b]South of Port Fuad, Egypt - The Suez Canal[/b]

"They aren't going to take me seriously anymore." Leyla fretted as another mine rolled off the layer and hit the water with a roaring splash. The [i]ENS Aksum[/i] was making good time, the the sea hissing and foaming behind them. Every few minutes, the crewmen released a mine from one of the tilted rail minelaying machines on the back of the frigate. They left a trail of bobbing steel spheres in the canal, turning the trade lane into a warzone.

Elias chuckled. "They said this is an important mission. I don't know what else you expect." He hadn't taken her concerns seriously. Sometimes, she felt as if he didn't take her seriously either. They had worked together since Armenia, and he knew what she could do. Still, it was the looks he gave her. The patronizing grin. He had always been good at those, but she noticed it more now, and she always wondered if he had become more patronizing after the Sultan.

They had joined the Walinzi in their youth, and they had been sent to Armenia shortly afterward. Ever since then, they had been partners. Elias was slightly older than her, though his strong-jawed youthful face and well-groomed head of hair made it hard to tell. Ever since Armenia, they had been partnered together like the agency equivalent of siblings. 

In her mind, the Sultan had changed everything. She had killed him in bed, his body mingled with hers. She could s till smell his musky unwashed scent. He had been old, and the process of slipping into paranoia had aged him even further. When she first met him, working undercover in his employ in order to get close enough to assassinate him, she had saw him as the enemy. The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Suleiman III. He had murdered thousands in a megalomaniacal plan to keep an Empire that he had neither earned nor deserved. Armenia, Syria, Egypt, the Caucus, they were all bled by the bullets he had ordered. She had saw firsthand what his men could do, in Armenia and then in Istanbul itself where the people seethed under martial law. She had hated him when she met him, and during those first few days in his palace, she had been numb.

He wasn't the monster she had expected. The evil dictator she had been taught to hate was a frightened old man. His people had abandoned him, and his generals were plotting against him. He babbled about it on and on, refusing to shave or bathe out of fear that he would be assassinated in his own palace. The Turkish generals were planning to take control, he would say. His own advisers were planning his demise. It sounded insane, the ramblings of a paranoid man, but in the back of her mind Leyla had been aware that there was truth there. Suleiman had become damaged goods. If she hadn't taken him out, someone else would have.

In the miserable shell of his own fear, isolating himself from everything that had ever brought him peace of mind for fear of his life, the Sultan had wrote his own demise. So alone, so broken and abandoned, the sleepless Sultan had given in to her touch like an infant to their mother. It had been so easy that it had stunned her. In his fear of what lurked behind the shadows in the world he had known all his life, he had blinded himself to new threats. She became his last tenuous connection to humanity. At first, it had been revolting, but as she continued to warm his bed she began to pity him. Pity, and then guilt.

Leyla watched as she became the only thing he had, the only thing he cared about. He talked to her as if she was his daughter rather than his lover. One night, she had heard him crying in his sleep, begging forgiveness from his father. In this, she realized what his defeat meant. He had lost the Empire of his forefathers, that they had build centuries ago. He had failed them and lost everything. Everything but her.

He loved her. She knew it. She was the only thing that made him a person. She was his forgiveness. And she killed him with the pills.

His heart gave way with her on top of him, and when he looked in her eyes he must have understood. Leyla could not put on an act in that moment - she had become dead to the world, and he saw it. She could remember the look in his eyes. That would stay with her until the end. He had died truly alone.

Leyla had only ever told Elias this much of the story, and he had worried she had fallen in love with the man she had targeted for death. She had worried the same thing for a while, but it had not taken her long to realize that love wasn't what she had felt. In him she had seen the thing everybody feared the most. To be hated by the world, to have failed everything that meant anything to you. She had pitied him so deeply that it had seemed like a form of love. It had still just been, however, pity. 

He had died truly alone.

She shivered at the thought of it. Another mine went in. Another splash.

"There they are!" a man shouted, breaking her trance. A whoop, shared by sailors and Walinzi alike, leapt up across the ship. 

On a road that ran alongside the canal, a caravan of armored trucks had joined them. They had landed in Suez, where the Red Sea meets the canal, and they had been tracing the canal every since, securing villages from the mosaic of factions that controlled the fractured Egyptian nation. For days, the ENS Aksum had not seen any signs of them. Leyla had felt the doubt that whispered across the ship; the caravan had been lost, its personnel slain by the a gang or tribe that had more power than had been expected. The orders remained the same none the less. Radio silence. The appearance of the trucks had disproved their worst fears and set their minds at ease.

There were dings in the armor of those vehicles - evidence of the fighting they had expected. Bent fenders and dented doors were almost the norm, among the older German vehicles with their rounded lights and smoothed features as well as the sharper, more compact Chinese equivalents. Old or new, combat still found a way to wear on both. With dusty scraped paint and dirt-smeared windshields, they trucked on. Ragged soldiers, their uniforms in disarray, were huddled in the back of each vehicle. Several held on to more unconventional perches, most likely left-overs from transports lost or abandoned somewhere in the Egyptian sands behind them. There were men clinging to jutting fenders or hanging off the sides with their hands clasped around the metal frames that rose up from the truck bed. One man held on from the back, one leg balanced on a hitch while the other held onto the butt of his rifle. Dust kicked up around him, and the ratted dreads that were his hair wriggled out from his head like snakes trying to flee. It reminded Leyla of Armenia in a way. Men and boys alike going to a war that they looked likely to win just by arriving. Who could stand in their way, after all? But it was easy to forget that confidence doesn't bring about victory, blood does. Most of these men would die. It was a sad realization that had hit her over and over again during the darkest days of the Armenian conflict. Here, it was an even darker thought. These men were not foreigners, after all. These men were theirs. 

She put that thought to the back of her mind. The sound of mines against the water, the sight of a dozen trucks burning through the sun-soaked Egyptian sands under the shadow of a three thousand ton steel monster sheering through the open canal. If victory didn't feel like this, what did?

"It reminds me of Armenia." Elias shouted above the waves, as if he had read her thoughts. "It's better out here than in the office. More action."

Leyla nodded. "I don't get it though. Why only one ship?" 

"They want the rest of the navy guarding the Mandeb. It's no use trying to stop them here. Most of the Spanish ships can out-range us."

"What else can the navy do?" Leyla inquired. "If they can out shoot us, they can do it in Mandeb."

Elias shrugged. "I guess they figure they will focus on invading the coast for a while. Long enough to keep cargo coming in from China at least."

"You don't know?" Leyla asked. "I thought they told you."

"I'm not Debir. I don't have that type of clearance." he stared out toward the trucks, watching them blankly as they passed beneath the sparse shade of palm trees along the razor-straight bank.

The last time she had seen Amare Debir, it had been on the coast of Trebizond fighting off little goats. 

"I wonder where he is." Leyla blurted. 

"Still in Armenia." Elias answered. "That's all I know."

Sometimes she missed those days. She had been a child back then, in retrospect. Leyla had entered the Walinzi at seventeen. They had been looking for young people, hoping that special training at such a malleable age would be more effective than it was on the veteran soldiers that they usually trained. Several years later, she was deployed into the rough backwater patch of the ailing Turkish Empire that called itself the independent Armenian state. It was the first time in her life that she had left Ethiopia, and even amongst her fellow agents she had felt exiled. Out of her element, in a way. The Armenians had seemed like a desperate people, clinging to a world that had been turned upside down by revolution and war, and they had no place for foreigners of the dark continent. The small Walinzi office had been her world for that time, and Amare Debir had been their father. During the darkest days of that war, when the future had seemed uncertain, Amare had seemed so calm that it had comforted her. Even after the embassy bombing, he hadn't seemed too affected. 

"We're coming up on Port Fuad." the ships captain shouted down to them. Leyla and Elias both looked to the front of the ship, almost instinctively. She knew the Spanish were nearby. She could almost smell them. Her insides fluttered at the thought. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the captain leering uncertainly at the trucks.

"You'll have your extraction." Elias shouted back. "Just get us closer to the mouth."