10. MADEMOISELLE JULIE
Chapter 1
STRANGE RIDER
Captain Gaston Lefevre, the middle-aged Frenchman with greying temples and weary eyes, once again pulls the bottle of cognac across the surface of his writing desk, pours a drinking glass half full, and downs it in two swift draughts. Then he slumps forward, rubs his eyes hard, and shakes his head in powerless, desperate tension. As he has for the past four days, he listens subconsciously every moment, waiting for the office door to open, for the orderly perhaps to enter with a new message.
Then he straightens up and, in a surge of fury, slams his fist onto the table. But he doesn’t even feel the hard wood injure his fist, for the drink has rendered him numb to almost everything.
Except for the deep, dull ache of his daughter being lost.
Captain Lefevre again pulls the radio communication message closer, which he must have read over and over several hundred times in the past few days.
Commander Dini Salam to Lefevre Fort Laval. Your daughter Julie missing from Hotel Europa. Comprehensive investigation initiated. Will be kept constantly informed. Le Clerq, Colonel.
Just that. Nothing more. And every day since, they had merely sent a radio message stating that the search for Julie Lefevre was ongoing.
And here he sat, trapped in this hornet’s nest of a Fort Laval, hundreds of kilometres from Dini Salam, with a paltry garrison of some thirty men. He, a captain in the French Foreign Legion.
But that is what the bottle does to a man. When your superiors deem you drink too much, you are dispatched to a pit like this to command thirty men. In this remote corner of the Sahara, this foremost outpost of French authority in this immeasurable, inhospitable, and perilous wasteland of sand.
Gaston Lefevre rises quickly, walks unsteadily to the window, and stares out across the desert. If only he could do something to search for her, he thinks, while the shimmering heatwaves dancing over the sand dunes cause his eyes to narrow. If only he could have done something. But what can he do from this godforsaken corner of the earth? With thirty men, and while he hasn’t even the faintest notion where his Julie is!
He grips the iron bars in the window, and for a moment, it feels as though he could tear them from the stone walls. In a few days, he and his garrison were due to be relieved here and would have returned to Dini Salam. There he would have met his only daughter, who had flown specially from Algiers to see him. After the death of his wife last year, Julie is all he has left.
The greying captain lets his head droop forward, and he feels the tears burn in his eyes again.
“What have I done to deserve this?” he says with a short gasp, tugging helplessly at the iron bars. Then he swings around, staggers back to his writing desk, sinks onto the chair, and pulls the cognac closer again. Cognac – that is all that offers him solace and courage in this consuming crisis in which he now finds himself.
Yesterday, he had requested leave via radio to lead a search party from Fort Laval. He knew full well it was practically futile, as he hadn’t the faintest idea where his daughter might be, but later it felt as though he would go mad from the waiting, hour after hour, day after day. The uncertainty and fear gnaw at him constantly.
The response to his request was a brief and blunt refusal from the commander of the main garrison in Dini Salam, Col. Paul Le Clerq. It included a strict order. He was under no circumstances to leave Fort Laval.
That is why Gaston Lefevre now yanks the cognac bottle closer again and simply puts it to his mouth, without bothering to use a glass.
“Orderly!” he bellows in a most unbecoming manner, and when the startled orderly pokes his head around
