Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.
A/N: All good assassins – particularly those who can kill with a paperclip – are bound to be more schooled than the usual person in the details of human anatomy.
Sand, Sun, and Sotol
Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple. –Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (original)
"Yeah," Lizzie said, her voice carrying easily over the moaning of the ever-increasing wind outside, "prickly-pear musta been designed by a psychotic ten year-old. Who else'd think to take a fruit what tastes somethin' like bubblegum and watermelon an' stick it inside thorns? Kinda like how my dad always claimed that pineapple was designed by a mother-in-law – all bristly an fulla stickers on the outside, but once ya get past that skin, all sweetness and caged sunlight." She chuckled a little, "Hafta say that Grammie Harris never appreciated the comparison none."
Tony echoed her laugh. "I can see why. Still, though," he managed to slice open another of the smallish fruits, "I hafta say it isn't too bad; better than I would've thought just from looking at it." He was starting to get good at opening the fruits – he actually managed to skin it without gouging himself on the thorns for a change.
Ziva shrugged a little. "It is okay, I suppose, but I still prefer mango. How long, do you think, will the wind continue like this?" She was getting impatient with the situation. Had she been on her own, she could have easily hiked out of the valley and managed to find someway back to civilization – she'd noticed that no place in the US was all that isolated; walk far enough in any one direction and she was bound to hit a road or a line of power-poles or something similar that would lead her to a town. But she wasn't on her own – she had not only her injured partner to worry about, but a civilian, too. It didn't matter that Cambry seemed to be at ease in their surroundings, she can't have had near the level of survival training that Ziva had undergone.
Elizabeth cast a long look over her shoulder at where the carcass of her plane, braced in place with numerous rocks hauled in from outside, blocked most of the cave entrance. The gaps between stones and the twisted metal were dark; the sun had set about an hour earlier. "No way to say for sure, not without a linkup to a weather station, but I will say I ain't never seen it blow like this for more than a few hours at a stretch. Gusts have gotta be gettin' close on to ninety, ninety-five or so. I'm thinkin' that once it calms down some, we might wanna see about headin' for the highway. Be a damn sight easier on us all if we trek it at night than if we were to wait for daylight."
Tony slurped down the last bit of juicy prickly-pear fruit he'd been munching. He felt pretty good, for a change. Sure, he still ached, and his knee gave him a screaming tantrum almost every time he shifted his position, but that damn song had finally stopped looping and his mind was back to being firmly tethered within his skull. And with the fruit's help, he didn't even feel thirsty any more. Unfortunately, the pile of rubble blocking the cave entrance wasn't at all airtight and so there was a thick haze of combined smoke and dust hovering in the air that made his throat tickle in a way he'd long since come to hate. On the other hand, though, we did all manage to not only survive the crash, but none of us are even hurt all that bad.
Ziva moved her eyes from the pile of whatnot blocking most of the cave entrance to the pilot. "Are you certain that is wise? Surely, light is of more use to us than lower temperatures."
Liz shook her head, "Naw. I don't know 'bout you, but I got – to borrow Hok'ee's words – 'scary-good' night-vision; I can read a newspaper by starlight. 'Sides, I still got my Maglite, an' I don't think it'd be that great of an idea for the łigaii hastiin here ta be out in the full light of day – the sun don't seem to like him much." (1)
The teasingly insulting tone used on the unfamiliar phrase had Tony narrowing his eyes at Lizzie. "What did you just call me?"
"Nothing bad, Áłtsé Hashké, just 'white man', and not even one of the derogatory phrases," Elizabeth replied.
"Is that not a case of the pan – no," Ziva interrupted herself, "I know this one – the…the pot calling the kettle black?"
"Not really," Cambry replied. "Just 'cause Mom's Irish won out don't mean I'm full-white, chica. My dad was a quarter Navajo."
Tony let out a little huff of amusement, more at Lizzie's pale complexion – she was whiter than he was – than at Ziva's determination to get an idiom right. "So," he said, "that would've made your great-grandpa full Navajo?"
Liz nodded. "Yep. He was a Windtalker in World War Two." She smiled somewhat ruefully at her befreckled arms. "I got the no-sunburn thing from that side of the family, but I still don't tan none, just break out in freckles. I keep hopin' what with enough exposure, maybe the freckles'll all merge into one big one, but it ain't happened yet."
"So you are half-Irish?" Ziva asked.
Lizzie shook her head, "No, not really. I'm pretty much an all-American mutt. Had ta do a report on my family history back in high school. Found out that aside from the Navajo, there's equal bits of Irish, Welsh, German, French, and Greek in the tree. Also found out that nobody knows where our last name surfaced – just showed up in Montana at the close of the 1890s with Jared Cambry, who'd come down outta Canada."
Their conversation drifted organically through family history and lineage, lit briefly on the weather several times – rather like a skeptical bumblebee when faced with an unfamiliar bloom – before dancing across travel, language, and food. Eventually, right around midnight, the three survivors managed to find themselves in a good-natured argument on whose job was more dangerous, the pilot's or the federal agents, based solely on the type and number of injuries sustained. They hadn't quite gotten to the point of comparing scars – and with no alcohol available, that possibility was less than likely – when Tony noticed something. Actually, it wasn't noticing something, so much as realizing that something was missing.
"Hey, do you hear that?" he said.
"What?" Ziva asked, interrupting Liz's tale of six broken ribs and a dislocated thumb.
Lizzie grinned brightly, the firelight glinting off her teeth. "The wind's died down. Can pro'ly leave the cave and not get sandblasted now." She sprang to her feet and went to the pile of rubble. Peering through a gap in the 'wall' she and Ziva had erected earlier that evening, she waited patiently for her eyesight to adjust.
Lit by a sky filled with more stars than seemed possible and a just-past-half-full moon, Elizabeth saw that the desert had already smoothed over what damage the crashing airplane had done to the landscape. The rough edges of the gouge bisecting the small valley had worn away making it look like nothing more than yet another runoff ditch for the heavy rains seen during monsoon season. The 'X' she'd laid out that morning was partially drifted over by blown sand and partially obscured by a couple of uprooted sage plants. She checked her watch and found that it was just past ten-thirty.
Had Elizabeth been alone, she knew she could have made it to Highway 54 in about three hours or so, and caught a ride down to El Paso and been enjoying her cousin's wife's machaca burritas smothered in asadero by the time said cousin had to get up for work at four. But she wasn't on her own – she had a fellow desert-rat and Áłtsé Hashké to worry about, and neither of them were in the best of shape. (2)
"What's the verdict?" Tony asked, startling Liz out of her thoughts.
The pilot turned around and grinned, "Winds are down, pro'ly to around thirty or so. Still not what y'all would consider calm, but calm enough for now. I figure we can head out in a coupla hours or so."
"Why not leave now?" this time, the question came from Ziva.
Liz's perpetual grin landed on the Mossad officer. "Because, amiga, I don't wanna carry Áłtsé Hashké, an' I doubt you do, either. 'Sides, I'm sure he'd rather have the braggin' rights ta havin' walked out himself, yeah?"
Tony looked from Liz to his injured knee – which was sporting a disturbing pallet of dark blues and purples and had swollen to twice the size of its twin – and back. Unlike Ziva's and Liz's thoughts from earlier, he knew he didn't have a chance in hell on hiking out by himself. "Not that I'm disagreeing here, but just how do you plan on that?"
"By followin' Mom's favorite sayin' about duct tape – 'There is no problem too big or too small that cannot be solved by the proper application of an appropriate amount of either duct tape or high explosive.'" Liz waggled her eyebrows at her companions. "An' since I ain't in the habit of keepin' boomy things on my person, it'll have ta be duct tape."
"You carry duct tape with you?" Tony choked back the urge to laugh; this small revelation, though amusing, was not surprising in the least.
Lizzie nodded decisively, "Damn skippy I do."
Though Ziva was well-acquainted with the myriad uses of the dull silvery tape, she wasn't precisely sure what Elizabeth was getting at. "How will tape help us?"
"Well, it ain't gonna do it on its lonesome, but just like how it ain't pizza without the cheese, the plan can't work without the tape," Liz explained as she turned back to the pile of rubble blocking the exit. She climbed into the remains of the airplane and rummaged through the deep pocket on the back of the pilot's chair. "I figure with this," she held up a thick spool of duct tape (bright pink duct tape, no less), "an' a stick of ocotillo an' that knife of yours, we just might have enough shit lyin' around here ta make it work."
By the time Elizabeth's watch read two in the morning, not only had a plan been made, but nearly all preparations had been completed.
While Liz went out searching for a suitable length of ocotillo, Ziva'd been busy stripping the cloth and stuffing from the airplane seats and dulling her knife by cutting through the thin aluminum of its battered hull. When Lizzie got back with a very thorny length of dried, spindly cactus, all the rest of the pieces were gathered together.
After learning that he had his own knife with him, Liz set Tony to stripping the thorns off of the inordinately hard length of ocotillo – the stick itself was about two inches thick at the base, narrowing to about an inch thick at the end; its lower third was perfectly straight, but it wavered back and forth somewhat for a further three feet before making a graceful bend/swoop. Though it was about three feet too tall, and that bend/swoop part was almost comically long, the toughness of the dried-out cactus was enough to convince Tony that it would do as a temporary crutch.
While he worked on the thorns, Lizzie and Ziva managed to come up with an odd sort of contraption by combining Ziva's knowledge of anatomy and the innumerable times Liz had wound up injured. Long, narrow strips of the aluminum were beaten relatively flat with the help of a couple of rocks and taped into place perpendicular to smaller strips of the gray fabric from the airplane seats. Knowing that duct tape doesn't get along all that well with fabric on its own, Liz used one of the thicker thorns off of an unburned mesquite branch as an awl to sew the tape and fabric together; for thread, she took a length of the bright pink tape and tore it in half lengthwise before folding it, sticky-to-sticky, also lengthwise.
After the thorns were disposed of off of the ocotillo branch, Ziva helped Tony to his feet. Using his partner to balance, he held the branch to one side and Liz used his knife to mark where it needed trimmed down. Using the left-over length from the 'swoop' to brace that portion of the stick, Liz then wrapped the entire thing in a layer of tape. The 'swoop' at the top also got a thick layer of the foam rubber padding out of the seats from the airplane.
The color may not have been to his liking – at all, to be truthful – but damn if the DIY knee brace and crutch didn't work. Tony still had to use one or the other of the girls to help keep his balance, but he was up and vertical. Yeah, it hurt, but nowhere near the level it would've without the extra support.
The trio left the cave behind at two-thirty in the morning, after Liz took the time to rearrange her 'X' of stones into an arrow pointing east. Ziva carried Liz's flashlight while keeping pace with Tony. DiNozzo kept his left hand on her shoulder for balance and his eyes on the patch of ground directly in front of him – the absolute last thing he needed was to drop the crutch or his good leg down a prairie dog burrow. Elizabeth kept ahead of them by a good ten to fifteen feet, just to make sure the flashlight wouldn't inadvertently ruin her night-vision.
It was slow going, but they managed to make it out of the valley in about an hour.
Light pink stained the eastern horizon when Liz called time for a break. Scavenged prickly-pears slaked thirst easily enough, but didn't do much to stifle the growing hunger all three were feeling. However, for the last forty minutes or so, before the approaching daylight had begun to interfere, they'd been able to see headlights in the distance.
After nearly getting his head bit off for asking if that was the highway they were aiming for, Tony kept his mouth shut. Now that there was a little more light available, he could see that Elizabeth was frowning. Not just a regular frown, but a jaw-clenching, forehead-wrinkling, nearly-a-scowl kind of frown. As he watched, he saw her yawn four times, without opening her mouth, and was on the verge of asking if there was something they needed to worry about when she answered it before he could even take a moment to form the words.
"I think I'd kill for a cup of coffee right now."
Tony's memory flashed back to the half-full pot of coffee he'd spotted in the hangar two days earlier. Has it really only been two days? Feels like it's been weeks. However, knowing that only insanity or a really big caffeine addiction would lead someone to drinking coffee when it was a hundred-plus degrees out managed to put the pieces together. I bet she's got a bitch of a headache right now. He resolved to try to stay on her good side. Besides, he was used to dealing with a caffeine-addict. The only difference here was that while Gibbs could fire him, Liz could simply leave them behind if she got pissed-off enough.
The break, though necessary, had the unfortunate side-effect of making Tony's leg stiffen up. He refused to complain, however. Not until there was something resembling A/C surrounding him and a hot shower with a solid meal in his immediate future. As the three of them continued their agonizingly slow pace across the desert, weaving around prickly-pear and ocotillo cactus, mesquite trees, yucca plants, sagebrush, and patches of surprisingly thick grass, the sun peaked over the mountains far to the east and began its trek across a cloudless blue sky.
The wind had died down to a light breeze that kept the air from feeling stale and swiftly dried sweat, making the morning feel far cooler than the previous two had been.
Almost imperceptibly, the line in the distance that marked US54 marched closer and closer.
At a quarter past eight, an unusual sound caught the attention of first Tony, then Liz and Ziva.
As one, they turned and faced north.
Bit by bit, the noise became clearer and clearer.
Liz saw it first and grimaced – her pulse rate sped up and old, old memories flashed through her mind. She stooped and swept up a dusty beige rock that was slightly larger than her fist.
Tony caught sight of it next, and he squinted slightly, half-convinced he was hallucinating. He realized he wasn't when Ziva said something in Hebrew that he was pretty sure wasn't nice.
"Isn't that…?" he muttered.
"I believe so," Ziva replied.
"But…" By now, the distant speck had tripled in size and the noise was easily identifiable, though still somewhat distant. "How the hell…?"
The quiet exchange of words went unheard by Liz. All she could see was another instance of that fucking thing that had given her her very first scar. It really wasn't her fault she'd never grown to like the damn things – she'd only been five, after all.
Still puzzling over the creature rapidly approaching them, Tony glanced over at the pilot. He saw the white-knuckle grip she had on the rock and smirked a little. So much for her being fearless. "Suppose there's one way to tell for sure," he said.
"And how is that?" Ziva asked.
Tony raised his hand to his mouth and let out a piercing whistle. The dog put on a fresh burst of speed.
When he all but skidded to a halt in a self-made cloud of dust at Ziva's feet, there left no room for doubt in either of their minds. Ziva smiled at the wriggling mass of wagging tail and puppy-like yips coming from the big dog. Tony shook his head a little, smiling more at the thought that this meant that Probie was out there somewhere, most likely alongside Gibbs, and looking for them than at the antics of the German shepherd.
"You know that dog?" Liz managed to break through the heart-stopping panic.
Tony nodded, "Yeah, he belongs to our partner."
The corner of Liz's right eye twitched as she eyed the dog. "Keep it away from me."
DiNozzo nodded, noticing how she didn't let go of the rock at all, and had to wonder just why she was so freaked-out about a dog. He refocused his gaze to looking back the way Jethro had come, hoping to see a Jeep or a couple of four-wheelers – Hell, I'd even take horses at this point! – in the distance.
He was disappointed and it showed on his face. "So now what do we do?" he asked no one in particular.
Lizzie didn't hesitate in answering, "We keep on goin' like we been doin' all mornin'. We should make it to the highway by ten or eleven. You just keep that fuckin' mutt away from me."
A/N2: This story's rapidly coming to a close – from my notes, I expect two more chapters.
1. łigaii hastiin - white man (Navajo – literal translation)
2. Machaca burritas are a type of dried-beef burrito-style dish and asadero is a smooth white cheese that lacks the sharpness of Swiss or provolone but isn't as stringy when melted as mozzarella – both these food items are common to the Chihuahua area of Mexico (even spilling over in abundance from Juárez into the El Paso area). I highly recommend them.
Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.