I dug out my laptop. I went online, found a travel website and booked myself on three flights tomorrow: Ouarzazate to Paris, Paris to Boston, Boston to Buffalo, arriving at 9.45 p.m. local time. The cost of this last-minute ticket was absurd: $1,700 in economy. But it was also just money. I needed to finally call time on this madness and return home.
After paying for the ticket with my credit card I sent an urgent email to Morton:
I hope you have your BlackBerry in hand, as I know you are due to meet me at Buffalo airport tonight at 9 p.m. I am still in Morocco, so don’t bother. I will explain all when I see you at the office in two days. I fly tomorrow and arrive late. And yes, I have a story or two to tell.
I hit the ‘send’ button, then set the little alarm clock for four-fifteen a.m. It had been, on every level, a vast, difficult day – and I had to remind myself that this time last night I was having a short sleep in a Casablanca hotel. The narrative of one’s life can become so skewed in such a short space of time.
Now, in a less frantic, more reflective moment – and after that interesting dinner with the German man of God – I saw that the ‘essential’ clarification of the last frenzied few days was my decision to abandon ship and head back to the States. I had made a crucial decision. I could now surrender to sleep without hesitation – for just four hours.
When I was jolted awake at 04.15 I forced myself into the shower. I dressed, loaded up my small backpack with everything I had taken out for the night and left the hotel.
Outside it was still moonlit and I had to watch my step on the descent down into the main town. The bus depot was just a minute beyond the city walls and checking my watch I saw I’d arrive there with ten minutes to spare before the bus left town.
When I reached the end of the descending pathway I spied two figures leaning against a wall, smoking. As I came into their field of vision, they tossed away their cigarettes. Suddenly I noticed the two matching baseball caps and realised these were the two guys who’d flirted with me the previous night.
‘Hello there, pretty lady,’ the talkative, arrogant one said. They were now positioned directly in front of me, and a red warning light went off in my brain.
‘You’re up early,’ I said, trying to keep my tone light while simultaneously glancing frantically from side to side, desperate to find a way to squeeze by them. But this was a narrow pathway and they had comprehensively blocked the way forward.
‘We wanted to say goodbye,’ Mr Arrogant said.
‘Goodbye then,’ I replied.
I attempted to dash past the other guy, who was holding a jar of some liquid and a rag. As I made a break for it Mr Arrogant caught me by the arms and pinned them behind me. I tried to scream but his friend had the rag over my nose and mouth within a nanosecond. It was sodden in a liquid that gave off a high chemical aroma. Kicking out with my feet, connecting with nothing, I tried not to inhale its toxic fumes, but he pushed it down on my face with such force, while simultaneously yanking my hair backwards, that I could no longer hold my breath.
When I exhaled the chemicals hit me like a sucker-punch to the head. This is not happening, this is not happening.
And then the world went black.
Nineteen
WHEN THE WORLD came back into focus I wanted to jump back into the darkness again. Because to be conscious meant facing my imminent death.
I was nowhere. I was being bounced up and down. Tossed from side to side. My head felt as if it had been split in two. Nausea was consuming me. But I fought it back, as a rag had been tied tightly around my mouth. To vomit would be to risk suffocation. My hands had been bound to my feet. Movement was impossible.
I had been thrown into the back of an open truck. It was still night, though a small hint of dawn was beginning to cleave the sky. I forced myself upright for a moment and spied nothing but emptiness around me. Then another bump in the terrain slammed me back down against the floor of the truck.
I was being driven into the Sahara. Once they had me at a place far away from any hint of civilisation I knew what they would do with me. I also knew that once they had raped me, they would kill me. And bury my body deep within the desert. Then return to their job on the road gang by sunrise and act as if nothing had happened. When my absence was eventually reported, what trace would there be of me? I saw my backpack out of a corner of my eye. It had been thrown into the truck bed, near a plastic jerrycan which had slid down and was bumping against my face. From the fumes issuing from its cap I could tell that it was filled with spare fuel.
They are going to rape me and strangle me. Then they’ll use the gas to burn my body and bury its charred remains deep in the drifting sand.
I began to scream. I screamed through the gag. I screamed like a lunatic. I screamed in the desperate absurd hope that someone would hear me. I screamed with rage and fury and disbelief. I screamed with hatred. I screamed with terror.
I tugged at the ropes that were binding me. My hands had been so fiercely tied to my feet, the knot pulled so tight, that there was absolutely no way of loosening it, certainly not undoing it without a knife. I pulled and yanked and desperately tried to get my fingers – gone numb owing to the pressure on my wrists – to deal with the knot. But it was impossible. Every time I tried the ropes seemed to apply more pressure, increasing the numbness, making me wonder if the lack of circulation would . . .
This is not happening . . . this is not happening.
But this was definitely happening. With the sky beginning to lighten, I was pretty certain it was going to happen very soon. That would be their logic: fuck and strangle her before sun-up. Cremate the body, bury the remains, be back on the road with the new day dawning, and . . .
I struggled and struggled and struggled. My muffled screams turned into hysterical crying as I began to realise that there was no way out of this. I am going to die. Before that happens I am going to suffer the worst sort of degradation imaginable, followed by a monstrous death by strangulation. There was nothing I could do to stop them.
The truck began to slow down before coming to a halt. The motor was cut. I heard both front doors being opened and slammed shut. Footsteps. Then a voice.
‘Sleep well, pretty lady?’
He climbed into the back of the truck and began to stroke my hair. When I started struggling he slapped me hard across the left ear, a ferocious pain coupled with a profound echo effect. I screamed in agony, and was rewarded this time with a fist to my cheekbone. I blacked out for a moment. When I came to again, it felt as if my cheekbone had been fractured. The little shit was now brandishing a knife in front of my eyes and yanking my hair at the same time.
‘You fight me again I will cut you,’ he hissed. ‘Cut off your tits, maybe gouge your eyes. You want that, cunt?’
I shook my head many times, fear making me whimper. Now his fury turned into a broad frightening smile.
‘You fight me, you will get hurt. You no fight me, everything will be very nice. Understand?’
To emphasise that last word he yanked back hard on my hair. I whimpered again, nodding several times.
‘Good girl,’ he said, stroking my cheek. Then he shouted something in Arabic and his accomplice came over, a knife in hand.
‘My friend is about to cut off the ropes, remove the gag,’ the little shit said. ‘You going to struggle?’
I shook my head many times.
‘Good girl.’
More shouts back and forth in Arabic as the cords were cut, the gag pulled down from my mouth. Immediately the restoration of blood flow to my hands made me shudder. A hard clip across the ear was the punishment for that involuntary movement.
‘I fucking told you – no movement.’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I whispered.
‘Tell me you want this,’ he whispered.
I tensed and was hit again, crying out.
‘Tell me you want this,’ he repeated.
‘I want this.’
‘You move, you get cut.’
<
br /> He threw my untied hands behind me and, with his accomplice helping him, cut the remaining rope off my ankles, then proceeded to lift my buttocks up and unzip my pants, pulling them down with my panties at the same time. As he did so my free right hand darted around the immediate vicinity, trying to find something I could use as a weapon. I knew I only had seconds but nothing came to hand. Until my fingers connected with the jerrycan. I managed to get my fingers around its cap when I felt my legs being spread wide and I looked up and saw the little shit above me, his pants pulled down, his penis erect.
‘You going to fight me?’ he asked as he climbed on top of me.
I shook my head, seeing out of the corner of my eye his goon standing on the ground, folding up his knife, lighting a cigarette with a Zippo he kept clicking open and shut, clearly frightened but also waiting his turn. With my right hand still on the cap of the jerrycan I reached over with my left and touched my assailant’s arm, actually stroking it in a come-on way. A huge smile lit up his face.
‘You want me, yes?’
I nodded. Another big smile from him. The head of his penis was rubbing against me, trying to gain entrance but defeated by the absolute dryness within.
‘Open wider,’ he ordered, and he spat into his hand before rubbing it against the lips of my vagina and forcing his way in. I felt as if I was being ripped apart; an agony beyond agony. He began to thrust wildly within me, his eyes now snapped shut. My left hand tightened around his arm, and I deliberately began to match his thrusts with my own as a way of letting him think I was into it. Meanwhile, my right fingers were manically unscrewing the cap of the jerrycan. As I could hear his moans rising, and his penis beginning to stiffen even further as ejaculation approached, the cap finally loosened enough for a small trickle of fuel to spill out. That’s when I reached up with my free hand and stroked his face. He opened his eyes and I dug my nails directly into them, digging down, blood spurting forth, his screams deafening. I let go with the jerrycan, drenching him with the fuel. He jumped back, falling to the ground with his face in his hands, blood now pouring from his eye sockets. In a nanosecond I jumped off the truck, grabbed the Zippo from the hand of his startled accomplice, set it aflame and tossed it directly at my rapist. All this took maybe three seconds. There was a huge conflagrating whoosh. The lighter ignited the gas. The little shit burst into flames.
His cries of agony were mirrored by a scream from his accomplice, for whom I was now gunning with my claws. But as I sideswiped his cheeks, he caught me with a punch to the face and I fell to my knees. He kicked me with full force in the head.
And the world went black again.
Twenty
THE HEAT BROUGHT me back to life. Then it threatened to finish the job and kill me.
As I came back into murky consciousness the pain was ferocious. My head was battered, my cheekbone fractured, my lips split; there was a reverberating echo in one ear and the throbbing in my skull was unbearable.
I’d collapsed face down in the sand. I knew this because when my eyes finally opened sand cascaded into them, making me jump upright and then nearly fall over again as the pain hit. I held my head for several moments, eyes tight shut, as I became aware of the boiler-room heat. And the fact that I had no pants on. The entire exposed lower half of my body felt as if it was charred.
I tried to stand up but failed. I sank to my knees, but the sand was so fiery that it forced me somehow to become vertical. That’s when I doubled over. Because that’s when I saw him – or what was left of him. Still on his knees. Charred all over. Most of his features burnt beyond recognition, but his face still partially intact.
I turned away. I was sick, the vomit disgorging from me with a ferocity and a vehemence that had me collapsing again. Until the scorching sand forced me up onto my feet again.
It all came flooding back now. Every appalling detail from the moment they’d grabbed me. Everything they had done. Everything I had done – evidence of which was right there in front of me. And the punch in the face and the kick to the head that had blacked out my world. Blacked out everything until now.
The vomiting left me with a voracious thirst and I was already severely parched from all the time unconscious under that pitiless sun. How long had I been left here? Instinctively I glanced at my wrist, thinking they must have snatched my watch. But my father’s Rolex was still there. So too were my engagement and wedding rings. The watch told me it was 8.23 a.m., the hands on the dial blurring before me – my vision felt as if it had been knocked out of kilter with that final boot to the head. The intensity of the sun blanched the landscape. As I tried a step forward my foot felt something soft. I stared down, almost crumbling again. The blurriness in my vision was alarming. But I could discern tan pants in front of me. My tan pants and underwear, stripped off me by the little shit before he forced his way inside me. Before I set him ablaze.
It took considerable effort to reach down and pick up these discarded garments. Trying to put them on was torture. When I finally got the underwear and the pants back on, and also located the pair of sandals pulled off my feet, I noticed the tyre track right by me. A tyre track which continued forward for a few feet before turning into a circle and then . . .
He’d driven off. After kicking me in the head the punk had clearly jumped into the truck and driven off into the dawn. Leaving his accomplice on fire and his victim unconscious in the sand, exposed to the monstrous elements that would kill her in a manner that might have made strangulation preferable. Because as I looked up from the encircling tyre track what I saw was . . .
Nothing.
Nothing but sand.
It stretched to infinity. Burnt beige in colour. Lunar-like, with craters and fossilised dunes. A boundless, evaporated void on the far side of the moon.
And nothing hinting at human life in any direction.
Nothing but the tyre track. When that punk raced off in the truck he took with him everything that gave me an identity and a means of contacting the outside world. My passport, my credit cards, what cash I had left, my plane reservation, my laptop. He also took the few spare clothes I had, including a hat to shield my head. I was alone in the Sahara with nothing. No water. No protection from the fireball above. No papers indicating who I was.
I glanced back at the blackened corpse of my attacker. This would be my fate. I would not last more than a few hours out here. I would fall over somewhere, succumbing to sunstroke, dehydration, raging thirst. I would slowly die. If I was ever found – and that was unlikely, given that they had brought me to a place few dared to venture – my body would be so burnt by the sun that . . .
No, no, don’t think that. You can’t think that. You must somehow try to find help. Or a water hole. Or . . .
I scanned all corners of the horizon again. Nothing. Not even a speck in the distance of any outpost of civilisation. Nothing but the tyre tracks.
The punk did a U-turn and headed back. Just follow his tyre tracks and you will eventually . . .
Die. For you are miles and miles away from anything resembling life.
I stared down at the tracks. I started following them, my gait hesitant, unstable. My head was throbbing, my vision obscured, my need for water desperate. I could feel the sun smouldering the top of my head.
But I forced myself to walk, to let the tracks be my guide. I had no choice. To stand still was to accept death.
My sense of balance began to leave me. I must have been walking a good quarter of an hour, each step a small agony, my mouth desiccated with dried vomit, my saliva in increasingly short supply, the back of my throat beginning to tighten. Is this how death by thirst begins? The oesophagus slowly contracting due to the lack of hydration, eventually strangling you?
My death.
I felt myself beginning to stumble.
My death.
Who would notice my passing? Who would care that I was no longer walking the planet? Would Paul – were he still alive – feel some sort of guilt? And beyond him, wh
o? A few friends and work colleagues might mourn my absence. Otherwise . . . my forty years on this planet wiped clean. My footprint on life as insubstantial and impermanent as the marks that my sandals were now making in this Saharan sand.
I stumbled, collapsing onto one knee. The sand singed it but I didn’t have the strength to lift myself up. I wanted to ask for some sort of celestial help; for God to save me. But how could I call out to an Almighty whose existence I still doubted? How could I cry out: Don’t forsake me . . . show me a way out of this wilderness, this hell.
My other knee sank into the sand. I tried to swallow. I shut my eyes. My head felt near to implosion. This was it. Endgame. The final moments of my sorry little life. Throwing my head back I reopened my eyes and looked straight up at that fiery object that was about to kill me.
Thy kingdom come.
The sun burnt right into me.
Thy will be done.
I pitched forward. Gone from this world.
No white light greeted me. No heavenly way station. No cognisance of anything. Just blackness. I remained there until . . .
Until I felt a hand touching me. And whispering in a language foreign to me. The whispering became louder, as if the voice was now right up against my ear.
‘Salaam, salaam . . . es-hy, es-hy . . .’
I opened one eye. My vision was clouded, indistinct.
‘Es-hy . . . es-hy.’
I tried to open my mouth but it was seared closed. I had no energy, no will to do anything, let alone to respond to the hand shoving my shoulder, her little voice louder:
‘Salaam, salaam . . . es-hy, es-hy . . .’
Her little voice.
What I could discern from my one befogged eye was a small figure, in a robe, her face obscured by a flowing headscarf that covered everything but her eyes and mouth. From the sound of the voice emitting those words, and the lack of force behind the hand trying to rouse me, there was a young girl crouched beside me.
Was she some intermediary figure sent to guide me to the afterlife?
The Heat of Betrayal Page 23
