Firebird

by Michael Asher

  Ross considered it silently. He didn’t seem the least surprised at what I’d said, and I had the feeling he’d heard it before. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but what was Ibram’s involvement?’

  ‘Ibram was shot dead in a teashop in the Khan al-Khalili a week ago,’ I told him, ‘and I found out that six months back he and Sid’Ahmad as-Sanusi were searching for something in the Bahr Bela Ma. The project was called Operation Firebird: a guy called Monod told us they were looking for the Benben Stone.’

  Ross gasped. ‘The ghoul is behind this,’ he said, ‘it has to be. Within four years it’s managed to get control of some of the most powerful people in society, and got them looking for something it needs for its own purposes, just like it did before. It needs the Benben Stone.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I said, ‘several people have already been killed for the sake of that Stone, including Ibram and very nearly me and Daisy too. And that’s not all, amnir. One of the thugs who tried to bump me and Daisy had a Sekhmet tattoo on his wrist and I saw another on the CIA man Jan Van Helsing. What’s more, Ibram left a picture of Sekhmet in his effects, with the words of the hymn to Ra written under it:

  ‘Let the Eye of Ra descend

  That it may slay the evil conspirators.’

  Ross swallowed hard. ‘It’s happening again,’ he said. He removed his glasses once more and let his eyes go out of focus. I could see his shoulders rise and fall rhythmically in the firelight as he took in deep breaths. There was another long silence, then he opened his eyes wide and replaced his glasses.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘our ghoul has reactivated the Eye of Ra society. It’s regained control of MJ—12. The fact that it’s fed twice in two days shows it’s planning something very soon.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘and whatever it is depends on the thing that lies buried in the Bahr Bela Ma. We’ve got to find it before the Eye of Ra does.’

  Ross looked troubled. ‘I’m not sure, Sammy,’ he said, ‘I’ve had visions of the Sea Without Water in the Shining recently. Visions warning me off. I’ve got a hunch something bad is waiting for us there.’

  ‘Amnir, we must go,’ I said, ‘the key to Firebird lies out there.’

  ‘But the Sea Without Water is a big place,’ Mansur said. ‘Where do we start looking?’

  ‘I can answer that,’ I said, bringing out the two halves of Ibram’s map from my bundle of things. I held them up in the glow of the flames. The wavering light caught them and for a minute the hills and wadis almost seemed to crawl off the parchment. ‘A lot of people have died for these bits of rag,’ I said.

  ‘What are they?’ Ross asked.

  ‘They’re Doctor Adam Ibram’s last will and testament,’ I said, ‘pieces of a map showing the exact position of the Benben Stone.’

  39

  It was long after dawn when I awoke, and I probably would have slept on if the camels hadn’t started grumbling and screeching in my ear. I blinked to remind myself where I was, and saw Daisy wrapped up in a thick Hawazim quilt on the other end of the rug, staring at me blearily. We were under a makeshift awning of goat’s hair the tribesmen had slung between the palms. Outside, in ace of clubs shaped dapples of light and shade where last night’s fire had been, ten camels were being saddled and loaded amid roaring, spitting, and excited human shouts. The tribesmen were trim figures, barechested and barefooted, who moved around the herd like dancers and squabbled as they loaded. They seemed to take a pleasure in argument, and when two men disagreed, half a dozen others would sidle over and join in. They made ‘Ow! Ow!’ sounds to encourage the camels to sit still long enough to be saddled, but there was an occasional ‘Curse your father, you son-of-a-bitch!’ as one of the beasts rose up like a behemoth, throwing off his baggage and vomiting bile.

  The camels were beautiful looking creatures, I thought — sleek and lean with the off white colour the Hawazim called aghbash, and with the wedge shaped heads and small pricked up ears the tribesmen prized. Each one bore the Hawazim lizard brand on its rear right rump, with modifications for each family or owner. Among them I noticed my own she-camel Umm ar-Rusasa, and Daisy’s old female of the previous night, waiting patiently for our attention. A moment later Ross came bustling towards us dangling two decorated headropes from his arm. ‘Get up you city people!’ he bawled. ‘This is the desert not the town! We have to get moving if we’re going to reach the Bahr Bela Ma!’

  I rolled out of my quilt and shook hands with the amnir. ‘Where’re the rest?’ I asked, gesturing to the camels.

  ‘Fifty is too large a party to cross the open sands,’ Ross said, ‘too dangerous.’ He frowned at me. ‘A chopper came over just after first light, Sammy. Oh, they didn’t see us. We were well hidden under the palms and anyway we had our camouflage nets up. But you can bet they’ll be back, and I don’t relish the idea of being shot up by a helicopter gunship in the middle of nowhere. Seven men will ride with us. The rest of the qom will remain here until we return.’ He shook hands with Daisy and handed us each a headrope. ‘You know Hawazim ways,’ he told me, ‘no passengers. If Daisy comes with us she’ll have to learn to rope and saddle her own camel! Come on, it’s already late!’

  He was right. The chill of dawn had long gone and you could feel the heat in the air, and smell the scents of desert earth unscrambling as the sunlight warmed the surface. There was a slight blow from the south that carried spice with it, and made the palm fronds crackle. Al-Bahrayn was a forest of tangled palms darkening the desert in two directions, while to the north, behind the clumps of camels, I glimpsed the bluer than blue gleam of open water. To the south lay the vista of the desert, a sheet of amber sand and purple stone blazing in the morning sun. I led Daisy to where our camels were knee hobbled close together, and showed her how to tie the loop of cord across the camel’s head. The Ghosts of the Desert disdained the nose rings, nose pegs and chokers used by other tribes. Some Hawazim camels I’d seen were so well trained they’d respond simply to taps with a camel stick, and could be ridden without a headrope at all. When we’d roped the animals we went to fetch our double horned saddles crude wooden frames padded with palm fibre the Hawazim called hawayyi. Other tribes had more flashy saddles, but like everything the Hawazim had these were more practical, and far more comfortable for the camel.

  I showed Daisy how to fit hers, tying the girth rope under the animal’s belly. ‘The Hawazim rule is that every rider saddles his own camel,’ I said, ‘that way if anything goes wrong and the rider is thrown, he has no one to blame but himself.’ When the saddles were in place we loaded the heavy drippers, one on each side, and slung the woven saddlebags and topped the saddle with quilts and blankets ready for riding. Not long after, ‘Ali arrived with a huge bowl of frothing camel’s milk.

  ‘It’s God’s gift in the desert,’ he told Daisy, ‘it is our food and drink.’

  By Hawazim custom only men could milk the camels, and it was strictly forbidden to drink the milk without first offering it to someone else. I knew tribesmen who’d been herding camels alone, and who’d had to go several days without drinking until someone else came along. I told Daisy to squat down as she drank: it was considered bad manners to drink camel’s milk standing up. She drank deeply and when she passed the bowl to me she had an oval of froth around her mouth and nose.

  ‘Mm,’ she said, ‘it tastes kind of savoury!’

  ‘That’s the desert sedges,’ Ali said, ‘they give it spice, you know — like pepper.’

  I drank and handed the bowl back to ‘Ali. The hubbub diminished and I looked up to see that Ross was making his way to the front of the kneeling column of camels. The tribesmen were silent now, standing up straight, cradling their rifles, looking at the amnir expectantly. He stood on a small hillock of sand and raised both hands in front of him, palms facing inwards. The tribesmen made the same gesture, and Daisy and I followed suit. ‘Al-Fatihr Ross shouted, and we mumbled the first verse of the Quran. Suddenly the amnir vaulted into the saddle, and the tribesmen scram
bled to do the same. The camels stood, their complex hinge joints uncrimping as they bellowed and howled. I reached to hold Daisy’s headrope but she snatched it away.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘The only way to learn is to do it myself!’

  She stepped lightly on to the camel’s back and had to cling on as the animal lurched jerkily to its feet. I laughed, then leapt on to Rusasa’s back. By the time she came up on her feet, Ross had half turned his mount towards the company. He raised his camel stick. ‘Let the Divine Spirit be your agent!’ he cried, then he reined his mount towards the northwest.

  For the first hour the oasis remained behind us, a dark blot of ink on the desert’s page until it finally dissolved into the background, leaving us adrift in boundless space. In a motorcar the desert is always the Other — the great Out There, to be feared and subdued by technology. When you’re on a camel or on foot though, you meet it on its own terms, you abandon yourself to it. That’s why Islam — ‘submission’ — is the perfect desert religion. Like Daisy had said, there seemed nothing to get a fix on, but that didn’t worry me. I saw a desert different from hers — not an empty wilderness but a map of places where events had happened in the past. Few of them were marked by cairns like the Javelin Cast, yet I knew them because they’d been inscribed on my memory as a youth. Unlike townsmen the desert nomads’ thoughts were always connected with places, so that their desert was a vast mnemonic system that played a sort of silent music to them as the landscape unrolled.

  There was an imperturbability about Ross that was reassuring. He led the column from the front, never looking at the map but simply following his instincts, occasionally extending his camel stick left or right to indicate a slight shift in direction. We didn’t move in a tight squad like military troopers, but loosely in knots and pairs, spread out but always within sight of the guide. The camels, well fed on the agul grass that grew at al-Bahrayn, stepped out valiantly, squaring their massive chests and raising their heads proudly. The crunch of their feet on the gravel made a stirring rhythm, and the tribesman sang along with it in their age old hida, or camel marching songs. The verse passed from one rider to another down the column, punctuated by the voices of the entire party roaring back the chorus. The chorus itself was a set piece, but the verses were made up spontaneously by the singers who vied with each other for the cleverest rhymes. If anyone botched the rhyme there were hoots of derision from the mounted men. Daisy and myself were each the subjects of different verses, I noticed, and they weren’t entirely flattering.

  Slowly the sun rose to its zenith, growing tighter and more hotheaded as it climbed, reducing our shadows to squiggles beneath the camels’ bellies and making us wrap up in our headcloths. The heat lifted back from the surface, basting our bodies from head to foot. That was where the Hawazim clothing came in — it was loose enough to allow a layer of cool air to circulate around the body, insulating it against the heat. As we had started late we didn’t stop to drink until midday and then it was only one gourd of water each. Water discipline was tight on a march like this and a rider never touched his own water. At the halt only one dripper would be breached between five people and then, no matter how thirsty you might be, it was considered polite to refuse until the pourer insisted. After drinking we ate a handful of dates each and walked for a while to give the camels a rest, leading them by the headropes or merely driving them gently from behind. The ground was red hot at this time of day and even the Hawazim, who’d been walking barefoot all their lives, had to put on their thick soled sandals. The surface heat made no impression at all on the camels, though. I roped Daisy’s camel to Rusasa and we walked behind them chewing dates, glad of the chance to stretch our legs. The motion of their great haunches was almost hypnotic from behind.

  ‘So,’ I said at last, ‘what happened to the well-heeled father and the yachts?’

  ‘That was all part of my cover,’ she said. ‘There was a girl called Daisy Brooke — the one in the photograph —but she was involved in a serious car crash not long after that photo was taken. She went into a coma with irreversible brain damage, and they asked her father — who is a senator and an ex-general — to lend me her identity. David Brooke’s a patriot just like I said — he’d been through Korea and Nam, but when Daisy was kayoed it nearly killed him — I think he’d always had her earmarked for some big role in the CIA or FBI. Senator Brooke is one of the good guys I told you about — concerned about the nexus between M J —12 and the military industrial complex. I mean, imagine getting superior weapons via alien technology and selling them to the highest bidder!’

  ‘Not a happy thought when you see some of the people around these days.’

  ‘Exactly. Area 51 was bad enough. I got in there posing as a technician, and believe me there’s some folk there you wouldn’t want to meet at night down a dark alley. They were getting on to me and I had to beat a very hasty retreat. The president’s office had to give me a new identity, and when the docs told David that Daisy would be a vegetable on a drip for the rest of her life, he agreed to let me “become” her. I met him a few times — he’s a real sweetie, and every bit as straight as I told you. He said the real Daisy would have been proud, and I guess he felt her life had served some patriotic purpose after all. It was almost like she’d been resurrected.’

  ‘But surely there must have been people who knew the real Daisy Brooke? I mean, weren’t you afraid you might run into them?’

  ‘Yeah, but the real Daisy was kept on life support in a high security hospital with my name on her records, and it was all kept hush hush. There was the chance that M J —12 might get their feelers in, but we had to risk it. If ever I met anyone who’d known Daisy I gave out that I’d suffered serious memory loss as a result of the accident, and had had plastic surgery. I was also steered clear of relatives and people who’d been close to her.’

  ‘So there were no horses, servants and parties?’ I said.

  Daisy laughed. ‘You were cutting very close to the bone when you asked me about that,’ she said. ‘Actually, I’m an orphan like you. I never had a mother or a father. I was brought up in an institution by Catholic sisters, who are not my favourite people. They thought they were justified using any kind of punishment. There was one of them — Sister Agnes — who got off thrashing little girls with a stick, stark naked. They used to lock us up alone in cupboards or dank cellars if we complained. When you get treated like that it either turns you scatty, or it makes you hard and determined to survive. I suppose you know all about that, Sammy?’

  ‘Sure. Different details, same deal. But then I got my break aged ten. The Old Man took me under his wing. That’s why my loyalty will always be to the tribe.’

  ‘I had to wait longer, but I got my chance too. One day — I was sixteen — I was called into the principal’s office to meet this woman. She said that she’d had good reports about my classwork, and noted that I always took A’s. This lady — she wasn’t old, maybe middle aged and kinda beautiful — took me out to lunch and told me she’d been looking for somebody like me. At first I thought it was a trick — you know, I’d heard stories about con artists and white slavers who sold girls into prostitution or got them hooked on drugs. I was very wary, but the woman — her name was Laura — came to see me almost every week and we got to know each other. She was always kind and generous, and she started taking me to Los Angeles for weekend trips. There was never any sign of funny business, so I gradually relaxed and got to trust her. She said she was sure I had the qualities she was looking for, but she never told me why or what qualities they were. Sometimes we went to a lab and she gave me tests.’

  ‘What kind of tests?’

  ‘You know — like personality tests, physiology, reaction time, that kind of a deal. After a while I sort of clicked I’d somehow “passed” the tests, and they got me out of the orphanage and I moved in with Laura. It was like a five star hotel after that place, and Laura became what she called my “mentor”. I wanted to know what it was all about
, of course, and she asked if I’d be willing to use my talents to serve the country. I said yes, as long as it was really serving the country and not some big honcho on the make. You know what she did?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She took me to the White House and introduced me to the president! Can you imagine it? Me, a seventeen year old girl with a spotty face, only a few months out of an orphanage! The president said something like not only the USA but the entire future of Western society rested on my shoulders. It was just a pep talk, of course, but I was sold on it after that. I soon realized that, apart from my talents, they needed someone who had no attachments, so if anything happened I could be written off. I didn’t resent that, though: I’d been brought up close to the realities of life.’

  ‘Are there any more like you?’

  ‘If there are I don’t know about them. I was trained specially in languages, sent on courses in Israel, taught modern combat techniques, underwater stuff, close quarter battle — the full works. All that was while I was still a student at Berkeley. They pulled strings to get me into the FBI, but the training at Quantico was like eating candy after what I’d gone through. No wonder I finished top of my class. Poor bastards — I had the jump on all of them!’

  We walked in silence for a few moments, listening to the click of the camels’ feet on the pebbles, hearing the sough of the desert wind and taking in the scents of flint and chalk. ‘So it was all an act then?’ I said.

  Daisy looked at me, pouting her full lips as if she was comforting a child. She knew what I was talking about. ‘No,’ she said, ‘that thing in your flat...look Sammy, I was trained to stay aloof, to avoid getting mixed up with people, all right. Sometimes you just can’t help it — things just sort of take over...’