Smith looked up. "Are you prepared to execute my orders, Remo?"
"I guess so."
"Are you prepared to terminate this woman if the order is given?"
"No," Remo admitted.
"Why not?"
"Because I think I'm in love with her," Remo said miserably, slowly withdrawing a long length of yellow silk from his pocket. He brought it up to his nose and began to sniff it, his eyes growing avid and sick all at once.
Chapter 17
The customs inspector zipped open the shoulder bag with a fierce rip of his arm.
"Any contraband?" he demanded, not looking up.
"No," said Kimberly Baynes, holding her chin in one hand, as if in thought. It was the best way to keep her broken-necked head vertical.
"Alcohol? This is a Moslem country. No alcohol is allowed to enter."
"I'm not carrying any alcohol."
"Drugs?"
"No."
"Pornography?"
"Of course not."
The inspector pulled out a fistful of yellow silk scarves. He looked up, his dark sloe eyes questioning.
"So many. Why so many?" he demanded.
"It's an American custom."
"Explain."
"When we have hostages, it's customary to tie a yellow ribbon around a tree. These are my yellow ribbons."
The inspector considered this explanation. Wordlessly he stuffed the yellow tendrils of silk back into the bag and without zipping it closed returned it to Kimberly Baynes.
"Entry allowed," he said gruffly. "Three months. You must not work in that time and you cannot take more money from our country than you brought with you."
He stamped her passport with a pounding jerk of his rubber stamp, saying, "You are hereby permitted to enter Hamidi Arabia. Next!"
The bazaars in the Hamidi Arabian capital of Nehmad teemed with humanity. Arab men in flowing white thobes and headdresses tied with plaited ropelike agals moved like the lords of the desert. The women, mostly in black abayuhs that masked them from head to toe, gave silently before them, their eyes evasive and mysterious.
And joking and laughing U.S. servicemen and women moved through the spectral Arabs in twos and threes for protection, buying fruit from the stalls and sipping soft drinks to fend off dehydration.
Still carrying her bag, Kimberly returned their smiles and winks as they passed. Suggestions that she join them for a Coke were politely declined.
She wanted nothing from any of them. The person she needed to fill the Caldron with blood would show herself. Kali had promised her this. And Kali never lied.
Specialist Carla Shatter still couldn't believe she was in Hamidi Arabia.
Only a few weeks ago she had been a paralegal in Hingham, Massachusetts. Her Army Reserve status was good for nearly five thousand dollars per year in supplemental income-this in return for the weekend training sessions and a month each summer at Fort Devens.
When the call-up came, she had been scared. But her unit was not a combat unit. Their job was military justice, and the very fact that she had suddenly found herself stationed in Hamidi Arabia told her that the United States government had expected to be running war-crimes tribunals.
And since the U.S. Army didn't try war criminals until there had been a war, she had existed in a state of low-level apprehension, certain hostilities were about to break out.
Today her concern was the terrorist threat. U.S. service personnel had been warned that every time they entered the capital they were at risk to pro-Iraiti terrorist attack.
She walked through the bazaar with her eyes open. Despite the brutal heat, her sleeves were rolled down and her regulation blouse was buttoned up to the top button in deference to the sensitive Hamidi mores. She had been told to watch out for the Mutawain-the Hamidi religious police, who could insist upon her deportation for offenses ranging from holding hands with a man in public to brazenly displaying her seductive ankles.
Carla thought it was all a bunch of crap, but at least she didn't have to wear one of those medieval abayahs. They looked hot.
Few U.S. civilians prowled the bazaars these days, so Carla was surprised to see a blond woman in a flowing yellow chiffon dress walking through the dirty street like a Fifth Avenue mirage.
Carla walked up to her, smiling. An American woman to talk to. This was better than a letter from home.
The blond was quick to smile. Carla liked her smile. Of course she was from America, the blond said.
"Oh, where?" Carla asked, barely containing her glee.
"Denver."
"I'm from Massachusetts!" Carla burbled, thinking: Any port in a sandstorm.
They found a Pizza Sheikh whose English sign was repeated in Arabic, and swapped stories while the ice-choked Cokes kept coming and the blazing Arabian sun descended to the superheated desert sand.
Carla learned that Kimberly was twenty-two, a reporter with the Denver Post, and had a "crick" in her neck from sitting too close to the air conditioner on the flight over. Carla thought the way her head kept lolling to the left was more than a crick, but let it pass.
Kimberly asked a lot of boring questions about Carla's job, her unit, the distance to the neutral zone, and other reporter-type questions. When she could get a word in edgewise, Carla asked about home-now broadly defined as the continental U.S.-and hung on every answer.
Strange how fascinating it all was, after so many months stuck in the sand.
Finally Carla stood up, saying, "Listen, this has been great, but I gotta get on the bus back to the base."
"Is that where you're stationed?" Kimberly Baynes asked.
"Yeah, and it's a three mile-ride. If I miss my bus, I gotta walk. No, thank you," she laughed.
"I'll escort you to the bus," Kimberly offered.
"Fine by me."
They walked through the cooling dusk. Sand blew in the air. Sand always blew in the Hamidi Arabian air. The sun was sinking, a breathtaking ball of smoldering fire.
And somewhere between the Pizza Sheikh and the dusty street corner where a khaki bus waited, Kimberly offered Carla Shaner her yellow silk scarf.
"Oh, no. I couldn't take that," Carla protested, laughing. But Kimberly refused to take no for an answer. She even insisted on tying it around Carla's neck for her.
"Over here," Kimberly said, gently pulling her into an alley. "There's more light over here."
Actually, Carla found, there was less light in the alley. That was where it got cloudy. Then fuzzy. Then dark. Very dark.
When Carla Shaner's uniform left the alley, she was no longer wearing it. She lay in the dark alley with her moist purplish tongue collecting windblown sand the way an ice cream cone collects jimmies.
The yellow scarf encircled her throat, tied in an intricate knot that the Royal Hamidi Police were later forced to cut with a knife in frustration.
Kimberly Baynes caught the last bus to the base. More than one serviceman's eyes bugged out at the sight of her generous, button-straining bust. She sat with her arms modestly folded over her chest. One hand covered her name tag.
The Star in the Center of the Flower of the East Military Base lay three miles north of the Hamidi Arabian capital city of Nehmad. For nearly a year it had been under a joint Hamidi Arabian/U.S. command. For all that time it had remained in a state of high alert.
In theory, this was a symbol of U.S./Arabian cooperation. In practice, it meant no one was in charge.
So every twelve hours, the command structure was rotated. The U.S. general would grumblingly vacate his office and Prince General Sulyman Bazzaz of the Royal Hamidi Armed Forces and his aides would take up residence. The official language of the base became Arabic and the guards were changed at the main gate.
Which, at sundown, meant that a quartet of Hamidi Arabian sergeants huddled in the guardshack playing backgammon and chewing sweet dates.
When they heard the approaching bus from the capital, one poked his blue-bereted head out and saw that it was the American b
us. He waved it through without checking. He was not afraid of infiltrators or terrorists. Not with the mighty American Army there to protect him, praise Allah.
Thus did Kimberly Baynes penetrate the Star in the Center of the Flower of the East Military Base.
Hours later, she left in a wide Humvee-the jeep's wide-bodied descendent which she had commandeered from a swaggering Hamidi corporal by putting her ample chest under his nose and strangling him with a length of yellow silk used as a ligature as he contemplated her bursting buttons.
Kimberly was stopped at the gate as she drove up to it.
"What is your business?" the sergeant in charge of the gate asked her in his native tongue.
"I don't speak Arabic," Kimberly said patiently, bathing the sergeant in the sweet radiance of her American smile. And while the sergeant went into the guardshack to get the Sergeant in Charge of Speaking English, Kimberly gunned the Humvee and sent it running along the undulating dips and rises of the benighted Hamidi Arabian desert. No one followed.
She drove north. Toward the border and occupied Kuran.
And in the back of her racing mind, a small hollow voice said: Well done, my chosen vessel. Well done.
"Thank you."
But next time, remember to kill your victims more slowly. For it is not the dead that I truly love, but the dying.
Chapter 18
Maddas Hinsein, President of the Republic of Irait, field marshal of the Iraiti Armed Forces, and self-styled Scimitar of the Arabs, entered the simple conference room dressed in an olive-green general's uniform and black beret like a sullen bull moose walking upright.
His Revolting Command Council jumped to their feet, their arms stiffening at their sides, their eyes identical dark pools of fear.
"Sit," said President Hinsein, and his Revolting Command Council slammed their rumps into the hard wooden chairs with coccyx-threatening force.
Under his bristly mustache, President Hinsein smiled.
Under their identically brushy mustaches, his Revolutionary Command Council smiled, showing flashing white teeth and bringing fear wrinkles to their eyes.
After ascertaining there were no poisoned tacks on his chair, the President sat, saying, "Give me your status reports."
"The Americans are too afraid to attack, Precious Leader," said the defense minister, praying that the Americans would not bomb until after the meeting was over. He did not mind being bombed. He just did not want to be in the same room with Maddas Hinsein when the B-52's roared overhead. There were worse things than bombs.
"And the cowardly Hamidi Arabians?" he asked of his information minister. His voice was subdued. Grave without being worried.
The information minister smiled a sick little smile as he spoke.
"Cowering behind the trembling American defensive line," said the information minister, who knew full well that elite Hamidi Arabian forces were dug in at forward positions less than a mile below the Kuran-Hamidi Arabian neutral zone, along with units of French, British, Spanish, Greek, and Tahitian troops. It was rumored the Italians had taken a wrong turn in Egypt but would be on station no later than the turn of the century.
He dared not tell the President that this was no longer a case of the U.S. supporting the soft, weak Hamidis, but virtually the entire world now encircling their beleaguered country.
"Excellent," said the President. "It is time to gather intelligence for the day."
And each man felt his heart leap into his throat like a frisky salmon as the President of Irait reached for the dreaded black device and aimed around the table, clicking the button.
Even though it was only a TV remote-control unit, such was their fear of the Scimitar of the Arabs that they each flinched by turns. Maddas Hinsein smiled appreciatively at each flinch. He had been the palace torturer to the previous President, whom he tortured into abdicating.
When the remote unit triggered the big-screen TV at the far end of the room, under the twelfth-century fresco of the Arab hero Nebuchadnezzar riding a chariot, they turned their heads as one to behold the soul-freezing CNN logo, their only source of hard intelligence-and the one thing that could get them all hanged as traitors should the President choose to believe the wrong reports.
More than one hand stole under the table to manually choke off an imminent liquid accident.
A woman newscaster appeared on the screen. Though her words were in English, Arabic subtitles reflected her report.
"The United Nations joint command today reported that the array of forces now numbering units from virtually every standing army of the world, less Italy, are only three months away from hammering out a workable command structure."
"Lies," President Hinsein smiled. "Flimsy propaganda."
"Lies. Yes, lies. Transparent fabrications." The murmurs of agreement rippled around the long table. Laughter came easily.
"In Washington, Reverend Juniper Jackman, perennial presidential candidate and shadow senator to the District of Columbia, announced that he would go to Abominadad and attempt to win the release of BCN news anchor Don Cooder, now in his fourth day of captivity."
"Tender the Reverend Jackman an invitation to visit Abominadad," the President told his information minister.
"Yes, Precious Leader. Shall I have him detained?"
"No," muttered President Hinsein. "He is an ass-kisser. I do not arrest those who understand where to place their lips."
"Of course."
And every man in the room made a mental note of their President's pronouncement. If there was one good thing about Maddas Hinsein, it was that he spoke his mind exactly.
The report continued.
"In other news today, the citizens of La Plomo, Missouri, today held a rally in support of U.S. hostages in Irait and occupied Kuran, tying yellow ribbons around every tree in the tiny farm community, struggling to return to normalcy after last spring's catastrophic poison-gas-storage accident."
His chin cupped in his strong hands, his elbows on the table, Maddas Hinsein narrowed his liquid brown eyes at the words.
This warning signal went unnoticed because all eyes were on the TV screen and the flickering images of U.S. farmers busily tying yellow ribbons around a huge oak tree.
They were shouting at the top of their lungs.
"Mad Ass Mad Ass Mad Ass."
"See?" Maddas Hinsein crowed. "Even the American farmers support me. They despise their criminal government for denying them the right to sell their grain to the proud but hungry Iraiti people. It is just like Vietnam was. A bottomless pit of sand."
No one dared contradict the President. They knew, whereas their leader did not, that Americans had learned a bitter lesson in Vietnam and would go to any length to avoid repeating the experience. Including pulverizing storied Abominadad.
Then the camera panned to an obvious caricature of Maddas Hinsein hanging from a noose. A boy in a green-and-brown-checkered shirt brushed the straw-stuffed effigy with a lighted torch. Licking flames crawled up its legs. In moments the effigy was blazing.
The cry "Mad Ass Mad Ass Mad Ass" swelled.
And every sweaty face along both sides of the conference table jerked back to take in their President's reaction.
Maddas Hinsein leapt to his feet, hands gripping the table edge, ready for anything. A few more attempted to choke off bladder releases by crossing their legs.
"Why do they call my name so strangely?" Hinsein demanded. "Do they not know how to pronounce my name, which is revered by all Islam and feared by the infidels who dwell beyond Dar al-Harb?"
No one answered at first. Then, seeing the growing darkening of their leader's face, everyone attempted to answer at once.
Maddas Hinsein brought order to the room by whipping out his sidearm and waving the muzzle at every face. Hands that had been under the table surfaced. The trickle of running water came. No one wanted to be mistaken for an assassin with a concealed pistol-the chief reason that the Revolting Command Council met around a large square table with almo
st no top other than a thin border around the edge.
Silence clamped down like an aural eclipse. The weapon stopped pointing at the information minister, who wore a military-style uniform and about a gallon of sweat where his face should be.
"You. Tell me."
"They are making fun of your name, Scimitar of Islam," he said in a shaking voice.
"Maddas is my name."
"In English, 'mad' means something else."
Maddas Hinsein's meaty face gathered in puzzlement.
"What?"
"It means 'angry.' "
"And the other word?" Maddas asked slowly.
"This word, O Precious Leader, has the same sound as the backside of a man."
Maddas Hinsein blinked his deadly emotionless eyes.
"Angry Ass?" he said in English.
The information minister swallowed. "Yes," he admitted.
"Me?" he said, pointing at his chest with his own gun. Everyone silently beseeched Allah for the gun to discharge and preserve Irait from this madman. It did not.
"Yes," the information minister repeated.
Maddas Hinsein threw his head to one side, thinking. His eyes crinkled. His mouth gave a meaty little pucker.
"I have heard this English word," President Hinsein said slowly. "Somewhere. But it did not mean 'angry.' "
The gun whipped back toward the information minister. "It means 'crazy'!" he snarled.
The Revolting Command Council gasped as one.
"Both!" the information minister bleated. "It means both!"
"You lie! How can a word mean two things?"
"The American are like this! Two-faced! Is it not so?" the information minister asked of the room.
The Revolting Command Council was silent. No one knew the safe answer, so no one spoke.
And getting no response, the President turned his pistol toward a perspiring general. "Answer this. Does 'mad' mean 'angry' or 'crazy'?"
" 'Crazy,' " the general said quickly, hoping he would not be shot dead in the face.
He was not.
The President said, "Thank you." Then he shot the information minister in the face. The man's head snapped back with such force that it carried him and his hardwood chair backward.
The information minister's body jerked and quivered like a convict in an electric chair that had fallen over.
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