Taking Morgan

by David Rose

  The bomber is wearing white because that is the color worn by Muslim mourners, and that of their funeral shrouds, and he gives off a strong and distinctive odor. Before preparing himself to die, he has doused himself with kafoor, a perfume made from jasmine and camphor, used only for Islamic funerary rites. Beneath his left armpit, he holds the bomb’s trigger with his right hand. It’s another Soviet-era hangover, commonly found in Afghanistan and readily supplied elsewhere: a manual, spring-loaded detonator. If someone asks a bomber to raise his hands, he can pull the pin and trigger the explosion at the same time as he complies.

  The man utters his third syllable, a single letter, or rather, a musical note: “U.”

  This time, scenes from Adam’s own life flash through his mind, and with each image, his will to continue it intensifies. He sees Charlie and Aimee, their bodies tanned and glistening as they emerge from a lake on a family summer vacation; then again wrapped in anoraks, safe in their helmets, on a skiing trip to Vermont. He sees a family row over Aimee’s reluctance to do her school homework, and experiences anew his unexpected pride when her teacher called especially to tell him a poem she has written will be published in a national anthology. And he sees Morgan: that first day in Harvard Square; at their wedding; and in bed, damp and naked in the aftermath of the physical exultation that he suddenly knows with undoubting certainty they must and will regain.

  The bomber’s fourth syllable: “Ak—”

  He gets no further.

  Adam fires three times. The first shot hits the bomber squarely in the middle of the forehead, extinguishing all consciousness and severing in an instant the neural pathways that formerly connected his brain to his hand. The next gets him in the throat, and the third the top of his sternum.

  He falls to the floor. Adam walks over and fires a final bullet into the side of his temple, then unclasps the man’s lifeless fingers from the detonator.

  “Khader,” he says, “as well as a pickaxe, we’re going to need a bomb-disposal expert.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Tuesday, June 26, 2007

  Still trapped in the box in which they dragged her through the tunnel, Morgan feels herself being moved from a vertical to a horizontal position. The ascent of the shaft must be over, which means she is now in Egypt. The wood muffles the sound and the planks of the box admit almost no light, but so far as she can tell, they have ended up somewhere outside. There is very little space between her body and the lid, making any kind of movement difficult. But despite her claustrophobia and fear of total darkness, she knows she must not hyperventilate. The heat is all-enveloping, and her mouth is swaddled once again with the hated duct tape. Her living coffin has been infiltrated by fine sand, presumably from the tunnel, and the consequent irritation of her nasal passages means that suffocation is a real possibility.

  All the way down the stairs from the apartment and into the tunnel, they kept her head pointing downward. The pressure of the blood coursing through her skull was a new source of pain, and she felt herself on the brink of vertigo. But somewhere, through sheer necessity and willpower, she found the strength to fight it off. By the time they reached the top of what, to judge by the box’s steeper angle, was some kind of ladder, she had overcome her panic. She feels a fierce thirst, but the only thing she finds almost overwhelming now is her own repellent stench.

  She can hear the sounds of men greeting each other. Backs are being slapped as Karim greets the comrades who have apparently been waiting for him in Egypt. They seem to be indulging in rounds of mutual congratulation, using words she understands: “mash’Allah,” “al-hamdulillah.” Someone pats the top of her box. She hears the phrase “CIA kufr.” Does that mean there is a second box? She feels herself being lifted onto some kind of platform. After a moment or two, it starts to rumble and vibrate. She’s been loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck. But before its engine grows any louder, she hears another sound she finds more troubling, the whimpering groan of a man in pain. He does not utter any words; presumably his mouth is also taped. But with a sharp pang she recognizes the timbre of his voice: Abdel Nasser. He sounds as if he is lying very close. He must have been carried through the tunnel at the same time.

  The truck starts to move, but they’ve hardly gone any distance before she hears another, much louder noise, the penetrating boom of an explosion. There’s silence for several seconds, and then two other voices, very close by, emit a ragged cheer. Before they put her in the box, she watched Aqil booby-trap the apartment. Does the fact that his bombs have gone off mean she was about to be rescued? And are those who were trying to come to her aid now dead?

  Where does Karim plan to take her? He has said nothing, but she can guess. For him, Egypt, with its American-aided dictatorship, will be only a little less hostile than Gaza. But the distance to any of its land borders is vast. They must be hoping to get her to the Sinai coast, to one of the channels that lead to the Red Sea, the Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba. If they can load her onto a boat at some lonely desert cove, they will be able to take her to one of several destinations from which her chances of reemergence do not look so promising. Abu Mustafa said that Karim’s new allies are Yemenis, so Yemen is the obvious choice. But Sudan is also possible, or even Somalia.

  She feels hyperalert, her senses heightened by the fear and adrenaline. As the vehicle gathers speed, she reaches for the gift conferred by Abu Mustafa in the moments before he was shot: a pocket knife, which he left tucked inside the waistband of her filthy sweatpants. But now is not the time to use it. In any case, her movements are so constricted, she cannot begin to try to cut through her bonds. In time, she prays, that may change.

  While one of Khader’s men takes steps to ensure that the suicide bomber’s device is fully disarmed, another attacks the trapdoor over the shaft with a pickaxe. They have brought more lights, making the dingy basement bright. Adam can see where the bomber hid: a small room to one side of the main underground basement. It contains circuit-breakers and cleaning equipment, not so very different to the hallway closet under his parents’ Oxford stairs, where Aimee keeps her new scooter. He feels shaky from the ebbing of the adrenaline flood that saved all their lives, and a little nauseous. But there is no time to pause.

  “Are you okay?” asks Khader.

  “Yes. I’m fine.”

  “No one has ever done this before, habibi. Saved my life twice. Whoever it was that taught you to shoot, they did their job well.”

  At last the top of the shaft is fully revealed, a dark, narrow rift hewn from the sandy bedrock, partially lined with planks and sheets of chipboard. Adam peers down and directs the beam of his flashlight. It looks at least sixty feet deep, and the only way to descend is by a homemade wooden ladder, its rough horizontal spars lashed and nailed to rickety uprights. Every fifteen feet or so there’s a ledge, where one section of the ladder ends and another begins. The air is dusty. Evidently the sand has recently been disturbed, but it doesn’t look as if the tunnel gets much traffic.

  Adam starts to descend, grasping the rungs firmly. But he’s only gone down two steps when Khader reaches down and grasps his wrist.

  “Stop,” he says. “We shouldn’t do this.”

  “But you promised we could go as far as Egyptian Rafah.”

  “Not this way. Maybe they have booby-trapped this tunnel, too. Or they may have left someone waiting for us at the far end. We should go another way.”

  Adam climbs back out and they leave the basement, returning to the lobby. Adam winces as he catches sight of the remains of someone caught by the blast’s full force being carried on a stretcher down the last few stairs. According to Islamic tradition, his funeral must be held later this same day. But his face has gone; Adam hopes that Hamas militiamen wear dog tags, or he will not be easy to identify.

  “We will go to the tunnel where you were waiting when this all began,” Khader says. “There the operator knows he must cooperate with us and pay us taxes, or his business will close. I have a man on the
other side. I will call him and tell him to meet us.”

  They walk outside into the brightening daylight and approach the familiar shack. Inside, a short, unshaven man with red-rimmed eyes stands by the winch. Its winding drum is fixed directly above the round, black shaft, which is both wider and apparently deeper than the hole in the basement. Evidently alarmed by the events of the morning, he’s sucking hard on a cigarette. He must have been in bed when the bomb went off, and has come out to check on the state of his source of income.

  Khader speaks to him in Arabic. The man starts a diesel generator to one side of the shaft, and a row of lights inside it flicks on, illuminating what looks like professional wooden shoring. The man uses a hook to fix a wide, padded harness into a steel eyelet attached to the end of the cable, and hands it to Adam, indicating he should slide it under his buttocks. Adam stands at the lip, feels the cable take his weight, then swings into the middle of the gaping hole and descends, rather more rapidly than he expected. By the time he reaches the sandy floor, the mouth of the shaft is a mere coin of light, a hundred feet above his head. The tunnel, with sealed electric lamps every fifteen feet, lies ahead. The harness is hoisted skyward, then swiftly returns. This time, it contains Khader.

  “This is one of the biggest and newest tunnels,” Khader says as he arrives. “If the Israelis maintain their blockade, tunnels like this will be the only way to keep Gaza going.”

  “This wouldn’t be a great time for the Israelis to launch an airstrike, I guess.”

  “No, habibi. It wouldn’t. Let’s hope not this morning.”

  They walk quickly, barely needing to stoop. The air is dusty, but there are fans to ensure it circulates. At this greater depth, the orange rock must be stronger; for most of the way, there’s no shoring. Several hundred feet in, they hear a party of people coming the other way. The tunnel makes a bend, and they come into view. There are three men. One is pushing a shiny Yamaha motorcycle with its price label still attached, while the other two are struggling to manage a live, full-grown nanny goat. Khader greets them, and they move on.

  Finally they reach the far end: another coin of light, another disappearing cable.

  “We push this button,” Khader says, pointing. “It gives them the signal we are here, and then they will winch us to the top.”

  Time passes. It must be at least an hour since they left the Egyptian side of Rafah. Inside her dark, fetid coffin, Morgan finds it impossible to judge. The sun must be rising higher in the sky, for the heat is becoming intolerable. Feeling new pools of sweat behind her neck and beneath the small of her back, she summons a mental map of the Sinai. The eastern side is surely too well developed for a clandestine handover, for the coast is punctuated by resorts, scuba centers, and marine national parks. They must be heading southwest, toward the Gulf of Suez, an arid, sparsely populated region inhabited mainly by Bedouin. But where along that shore? Most of the way down, there’s a paved coastal road, a big risk for the kidnappers. Then comes a flash of insight, and Morgan guesses where she’s headed.

  From an another era of her existence, an unbidden memory materializes, an intelligence report that she studied a few weeks before she left for Israel. The work not of the CIA but its sister organization based at the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency, it suggested that militants in Egypt had been forging links with extremist organizations further east. It pointed out that north of the town of El Tor, the main road leaves the coast and swings miles inland. In a cove near the empty headland of Abu Suwayrah, the DIA report went on, assets of the Agency’s Egyptian liaison service had noticed a fishing dhow making landfall—although so far as they could ascertain, it never did any fishing. Other sources had suggested that a dhow of this type was being used by AQAP, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. An accompanying, highly classified memo to the National Security Council suggested this might be part of a weapons supply line, and recommended that steps be taken to develop these leads—perhaps by a US Marine intelligence unit that was about to be deployed in the general area. Maybe this AQAP cell are Karim’s Yemenis.

  As she bakes in her constricted wooden oven, Morgan considers her mental map again. From Rafah to El Tor must be well over five hundred kilometers. Though most of the road is paved, it’s certainly no highway; a winding, narrow blacktop across the Sinai mountains, and then, if the cove mentioned in the report really is the place where they’re headed, a final off-road section to the coast, at least another fifteen miles. The journey is bound to take at least nine hours, but as yet the day’s heat has hardly begun. The conclusion is inescapable. If they don’t stop soon to give her and Abdel Nasser some air and water and free them from their coffins, by the time they reach the dhow, they’ll likely both be dead. She focuses on her breathing, trying to stem the rising tide of fear.

  Khader’s man is waiting in the shack at the top of the shaft in Egyptian Rafah: Hamas’s local contact. He looks disheveled, as if he hasn’t had time to orient himself since an abrupt, too-early awakening. As Khader moves to talk to him, Adam takes in his surroundings. They’re in a neighborhood of low, poorly constructed buildings, connected by sandy alleys; here the Egyptian side doesn’t look very different from the Gazan one. From where they’re standing, the Wall is invisible. Khader and his man confer in Arabic for several minutes. Finally Khader touches his arm and comes back to Adam. His face wears a look of defeat.

  “I am sorry, habibi. We have reached the end of the line.”

  “What did he say?”

  “It wasn’t the explosion which woke him. He lives just over there, less than two hundred meters away. At about four o’clock, he heard the sound of a truck engine. He got up to look; it was a white Mitsubishi pickup. It had Egyptian tags, and it stopped just outside his house and waited; The driver stayed inside all the time, so my man kept watch; the situation was not normal. Then, just before the bomb, he saw a group of men loading two boxes onto the truck flatbed. He heard the driver talking to the men who brought the boxes, and he thinks he had a Yemeni accent. Then the bomb went off, and the truck drove away.” Khader clasps Adam’s hand. “We cannot stay here. The Egyptian mukhabarat almost certainly know we are here already. I am sure Morgan is on that truck, but we cannot try to follow it.”

  “Surely we can do something! Khader, men have died to get us this far. There must be someone we can turn to, something we can do!”

  “Habibi. If I truly thought there was anything, we would. But what? To the Egyptians, I am the enemy. If they find me here, they will put me in jail. If you try to talk to them, they will see you have no entry visa. They will arrest you first, and ask questions later. But at least we have some information. We know when she crossed, and the vehicle they are using. And we have a photo of the truck. Can’t you tell your American friends? Can you call the embassy in Tel Aviv?”

  “Not them.” Adam stops, thinking for a moment. “But there is someone else. Before we go back through the tunnel, let me make a phone call.”

  “As long as you are quick. But use my phone. To the people who monitor such things, a Palestinian number will be much less conspicuous than your American cell phone.” Khader hands his handset over.

  Did Rob mean all that stuff he said in Oxford? Could he really deliver on it? There’s only one way to find out. Adam’s made sure he’s memorized Rob’s number. The ringtone tells him he’s still in England; he must have extended his trip. Rob picks up after the third ring, his voice thick with sleep. In Oxford, or London, or wherever else he is, it’s only four in the morning.

  “Ashfield.”

  “Rob, it’s me, Adam.”

  “Shit. Adam. I’m sorry. I was in a deep sleep.”

  “There’s no need to apologize. But what you told me—that I was to holler if I needed help—well, I do. I’m in Rafah, Egypt, just across the border from Gaza. I followed Morgan through the tunnels, but I was too late. They’ve loaded her onto a truck. We don’t know for sure where they’re taking her, but the driver may be a Yemeni, and Yem
en may be their ultimate destination. The vehicle is probably a white Mitsubishi pickup.”

  “Roger that,” Robert says. “A white Mitsubishi pickup. You know when they left?”

  “It’s hard to be sure, but it would have been before five, local time. Before a big explosion on the other side of the wall—that was the bomb the kidnappers left in the apartment where they’d been holding her. Someone must have picked that up with a seismograph. It made the fucking ground shake. And it killed a lot of people.”

  “Okay. Roger that as well. I’m going to do what I can. I’m going to be passing this on to what I hope are the right people. This isn’t the time for a catch-up, but … are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. At least, I am in one piece.”

  “And Morgan? Do you think she’s still alive?”

  “I think she is. She has to be.”

  “Call me again in four hours. By the way, those kids are great. Just like their mom and dad. You must be so proud of them. I’m still in Oxford, by the way. At your mom and dad’s house. Out.”

  “Thanks, Rob.” Adam feels himself slipping into Rob’s military dialect. “Over and out.” He manages a wry smile, a moment’s response to his situation’s perilous absurdity.

  Until now, Morgan’s ride has been smooth, but now she feels the flatbed jolting as the truck hits stones and passes over ruts. They must have turned off the road. Ten minutes more and the vehicle stops. The driver cuts the engine. She hears the cab doors open, and footsteps on the ground. Someone is climbing up onto the flatbed, making a metallic clang. The clasp of her box makes a rattle and at last the lid is flung open. The hot morning air floods in, together with the brilliant sky. She’s being pulled out by her bound wrists. As blood returns to her lower limbs, her calves start to cramp.