First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “Are you such a coward that you would do this to your own people?”

  “I don’t want to be killed.”

  “You will write all of this down.”

  “No, I’d have to go with you.”

  Her eyes darkened. She started to signal the guard.

  “I’m not sure of the place names! But I’d recognize them and I could identify the men for you. So there would be no mistake!”

  That stopped her. “We would need the helicopter,” she said slowly, working it out.

  “I promise you, Birdsong can fix it.”

  “But the Security forces will be looking for it, of course. They would shoot us down.”

  “Not if we camouflaged it.”

  “How?”

  “With paint.”

  “There is paint here?”

  “Yes, in our cell.”

  “We could do it. …” While she came to a decision, I shut up. Hell, I held my breath. “Yes. … You will fly with us back to the north. The others hold Birdsong here as a hostage to your honor—if you have any.”

  “Of course I do!”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  When I told him, Birdsong wasn’t happy about it. Not about Faisal doing the flying. Nor about painting over his chopper’s Petramin colors, which were an overall midnight-ice blue with orange striping. Very snappy. He was even more unhappy about using a water-based paint that had mostly gone over to gummy glue. Especially using pink water-based paint.

  “You think this is going to be inconspicuous?” He whispered to me an hour later, still angry, as we went about the job. Birdsong took another swipe with his rag, leaving a smear of pink with streaks of dark blue underneath. In the hot sun, the gluey coat dried almost before he ended the stroke. We were using rags because there had been paint in the cell but no brushes. He was whispering because the guard on our work detail, which included two of the terrorist band and us, was giving orders in broken English punctuated with clouds of Arabic and Farsi, and we couldn’t tell how much more English he might understand.

  “I didn’t say that,” I hissed back at him. “Just that it won’t look like the same helicopter we took off in.”

  “Sure, man. And do you know how many 101 Mixmasters there are in Saudi Arabia? Three counting this one. All flown by Petramin. Ten seconds after we take off, the Saudi police are going to be telling each other, ‘Look for the pink one.’ ”

  “Shhh! And it’s only pink up close. You know how camouflage colors work. Get this out in the desert, against the sand, in the bright sunlight, and it will look more ... .beige.”

  “Pink—hey, watch it!” He was shouting at one of the work party, a boy about thirteen, who was dribbling paint into the intake screens over the engine cowling. “No, stop! Hey, tell him if he clogs them up the engine will flame out. Tell him just to leave them blue.”

  I waved at the head guard and pointed. “La el-loun! La!” [No color! No!]

  “No?” he asked.

  “No. Muharrick neffath. El-mirwaha ’atlana.” [It’s a jet engine. The airvent will jam.]

  “Ahh.” He nodded pleasantly and cuffed the boy for his stupidity.

  “Color its feet, please?” The guard pointed down at the landing skids, half-buried in the sand.

  “No, better not.”

  “Ahh, not. And wings?”

  “Wings?” I asked.

  “Jinah?” He pointed up at the clusters of rotor blades.

  “La! No, no.”

  “Hookay.” More smiles. He went about the plane, telling the others exactly how he wanted it painted, reinforcing his orders by banging on the fuselage with the muzzle of his gun.

  I turned sideways to Birdsong and spoke out of the corner of my mouth. “Did you get the fuses back aboard?”

  “Sure,” he whispered. “Made it look like they had been jarred from their brackets and spilled out when I pulled the access. Faisal thinks I am a mechanical genius. … Now, what is your plan?”

  “Fly back to Riyadh for bigger Petramin fish.”

  “Do you know any?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then what point ... ?”

  “The idea is to get us separated from this crowd of disciplined and heavily armed crazies. Then we work it out from there.”

  “Are you going to get us killed?”

  “Maybe. But it beats getting our brains summarily blown out when Princess Zahedi discovers that Petramin conforms to Travel Order 6263.”

  “Hunh!”

  The head guard came around and smiled again. “No talk.”

  His submachine gun was strapped casually over his shoulder, the barrel level and pointing toward us. I could see that he had somehow managed to pack the muzzle tightly with clay or sand. The other guards’ weapons were twenty yards away, leaning against the building. ...What a temptation!

  Looking him straight in the eye, I said, “Feeh atal.” [There’s something wrong. ] I reached slowly but smoothly for the barrel of his gun.

  “Ish? Gif!” [What? Stop!] The man started to pull back on the weapon and I tipped the muzzle up so he could see. “Ahh!” he exclaimed. “Shukren jezeelen!” [Thank you very much!] His face, which had clouded up, was all smiles again. I began to think Birdsong and I might have a chance.

  Four hours later, when the aircraft was properly painted a smeary pink with faint blue stripes, we were ready to go. Then Sybil had a big fight with her lieutenant, Scar Face, who was hearing about our plan for the first time. Their fight worked to my advantage, because his opposition forced her to argue for the idea, which closed her mind to any rational assessment of the risks. They screamed Farsi at each other in the main avenue between the houses of Abaila while the rest of their force looked the other way and toed the dirt.

  Finally, at midafternoon, Sybil herded Faisal and me into the helicopter. She was holding an Uzi in a rigid, angry grip. It would have been a perfect time to hit her except for the dozen people standing around with their own machine guns. It took fifteen seconds to find out that Faisal was a worse pilot than Birdsong had described. He flunked the start-up sequence three times and on the last try even Sybil was telling him which switches to pull. The engine roared to life just once and then the plane bucked three feet into the air, stalled, and dropped with a bang.

  “Out! Out!” Sybil screamed, pointing her gun more at Faisal than at me. We all climbed out of the cabin.

  “You stay here, you worthless Wahabi weasel!” She pointed the gun at Birdsong and at Scar Face. “Get in! Get in!”

  We all quickly climbed back aboard. Birdsong settled into the pilot’s right-side seat, Scar Face on the left. Sybil and I in the back. The same relative positions as yesterday. Except that Scar Face, caught by surprise, did not have a weapon, at least showing, although there could be a pistol holstered under his fatigue blouse. And Sybil, instead of her sawed-off scatter gun, had the big, two-handed, awkward Uzi. Better and better.

  Birdsong wound up the engine and we lifted off fast with a head-snapping bounce. That was the time to hit them. In one motion, my right hand went out to pin the barrel of the machine gun while I rolled my hips toward Sybil, bringing my left leg up and over, cocking my knee to clear the backs of the front seats, arching my foot, and then releasing all that muscle tension and kinetic motion into a point on her forehead. Her head struck the rear bulkhead with a thunk that could be heard above the rotors. Continuing my body twist, I flipped over almost onto my stomach, catching myself and pushing up with my left hand against the seat cushions. Bracing a foot somewhere on Sybil’s neck and shoulder, I dove forward over the back of Scar Face’s seat, drawing in my right fist and then pistoning it, with my whole moving weight behind it, into his quickly turning face. His body recoiled into the control stick and the instrument panel.

  By this time, Birdsong had the helicopter about thirty feet in the air and moving forward. He had instinctively pulled back on the stick when I erupted in the cabin, and that motion saved us from nosing in when
Scar Face’s body pushed the stick forward.

  “Fly!” I screamed at Birdsong.

  My hands scrambled across the front of Scar Face’s fatigues trying to haul him off the controls and also to kill him. The blow had just barely stunned him; he was blindly fighting me and working his hands under his blouse to get that holstered pistol. I would have climbed into the front with him, except my belt buckle had caught against the seat’s back frame. I was stretched across the length of the cabin and could feel Sybil stirring down near my feet.

  Sensei Kan had always warned us about head shots. The face is full of small bones and teeth, he’d say; they cost your opponent nothing in losing them except pain, but these sharp little bones damage your hands when you strike against them. The skull, fragile as a porcelain vase, is still well protected by cushioning layers of muscle, cartilage, and hair. Also, a blow to the head is too variable: The same force that will kill one man may not even distract another. Better to go for the body structure, the joints, and the nerves, Kan would say.

  I would have, Sensei, I really would have, if human bodies sitting in a confined space offered any better—more structural—targets. So here I was, caught on my stomach between two half-stunned terrorists who still had their guns.

  The other thing Kan had always said was: When you run out of options in the middle of a fight, don’t stop moving.

  And my internal battle computer said that, based on elapsed time alone, Sybil needed to be hit again. I slid down off the seat back, twisted to face her, and let fly with a one-two-three-four-five series of straight punches to the base of her throat. I then snatched the Uzi from her loose fingers and whirled to see what Scar Face was doing.

  He was crouching behind the seat cushion, exposing just the top of his head, two eyes, and the muzzle of the biggest pistol I had ever seen. Clearly he was afraid: The whites of his eyes showed all around as he tracked my movements. His gun jerked right and left trying to get a bead on me without hitting Sybil. I pulled the Uzi’s trigger and unloaded a full clip through the back of his seat. The roar drowned out all the noise of rotor wash and engine. The inside of the windshield fogged up with star cracks and blood.

  Chapter 6

  Billy Birdsong: Dolabella

  I was braced for the impact when the big terrorist’s body—what was left of it—threw the cyclic forward for the second time. With my right hand, I took a squishy grip on the tatters of his uniform and dragged him off it. The pieces slumped on the floor.

  One glance across the left-side instrument panel showed what Corbin’s swarm of bullets had done. Most of the engine readouts were shot up, but the turbine sounded steady—for now. The electronic navigation gear was gone, but the digital compass on my side still worked—or seemed to. The radio had evaporated. So had nonessentials like the switches for landing and running lights, the gauges for altimeter, airspeed, and fuel pressure. The important stuff, circuits for the controls and the hydraulics, was on my side, so at least we were still flying upright.

  I did not know that baby lawyers could fight with their hands. Nor that Corbin was going to start the minute we lifted off. But once he was launched, I tried to help with a few gyrations that would keep the two terrorists off balance.

  My big worry had been the crowd on the landing pad behind us. The bucking of the ship, while Corbin was flying around in the back seat, was going to be noticed on the ground. It would look exactly like the trouble it was. Those people had weapons—and would be firing them into our engine. What a bullet or two does to a high-revving turbine looks like an explosion in a knife factory. Therefore at the first lull in the fighting, while Corbin was trying to climb into the front seat, I cracked on the power and got us a stretch of sand and a big hunk of altitude.

  After Corbin had wasted the man with the woman Zahedi’s burp gun, I just took a compass heading for Riyadh and held the ship at 5,000 feet and what sounded like eighty-five percent power.

  “You about done?” I asked after a minute.

  “Yeah …”

  “What about the woman?”

  “Her breathing is hitching pretty badly. I think I cracked her sternum.”

  “She going to live?”

  “For now.”

  “What about you?”

  “Bruises. Can you fly us out of here?”

  “Well …” I gave the proposition serious thought. “Jabrin is one hundred and seventy-five miles northwest of us. Northeast, at about the same distance, is ’Arada. At least two hours’ flying either direction. We can land anywhere, once, if we have to. But after that, we will never get off again without instruments. Now, the engine sounds all right, but with a turbine you have to watch your gas temps and I got nothing to watch with. The flight manual says not to fly with two or more instruments showing faulty readings.” I pointed to what was left of the panel. “And my contract says I can refuse to fly this ship on the grounds of airworthiness. But, unless you want to circle back to the oasis and try to explain this …”

  “No thanks.”

  “Thought not. So … can we fly? We have to.”

  “I wonder what kind of reception we’ll get from the Saudi Security Police?” Corbin mused.

  “They will welcome us as heroes, of course.”

  “Hmmm.”

  ”Why not? We foiled a kidnapping of American citizens, by agents of a foreign power operating inside the Kingdom. The Saudis are so paranoid they will shit their jellabas when they find out about it.”

  “I think they already know,” Corbin said. When I kept quiet, thinking about that, he went on. “Well, work it out. The Ayatollah’s Boy Army is already entrenched in Kuwait and operating freely in the Neutral Zone. The Saudis don’t dare attack directly or the rolling wave comes right on into the Kingdom. Right across their oil fields ... The other option is to hit the Shi’ites economically. Sybil’s plan.”

  “Kind of farfetched. … What does she say about it?”

  There was a pause from the back seat. “I don’t think she can talk.”

  “Well, then …”

  “Faisal wasn’t one of them,” Corbin said suddenly. “He was a Wahabi and son of a sheikh. And he couldn’t fly worth a damn, as you said. And that’s the only thing Sybil wanted from him. So he must have been some kind of Security Police plant, to keep tabs on the group certainly—possibly to help them.”

  “Sounds reasonable, I guess. … But what does that mean for us? I mean, do we really want to surrender at Jabrin? The government might just fly our asses back out to those people. We could fly to ’Arada, which is over the border in the Emirates. Would they be in on the plot?”

  “No, but they’d count the bodies in here and then hold us until the proper Saudi authorities can sort the matter out. Can you make it all the way to the Petramin Compound in Riyadh?”

  “You mean, without being spotted? In a bright pink helicopter? Dripping blood out of a smashed-up nose bubble?”

  “The Saudi Air Force isn’t that thick in the sky.”

  “But those people back at Abaila certainly have radios to warn them with.”

  “Right. … What about ditching short of some town and walking in?”

  “All right,” I said. “My instruments include a compass and a wristwatch. I have no accurate topo maps of this area. And, anyway, all they would show is rolling dunes. So, you tell me when you think we are ‘short of’ some place, then we find out how far we have to walk.”

  “Ouch!”

  “Exactly.”

  “I guess, then, we fly to Jabrin and trust our luck with that famous Arab hospitality,” Corbin said. “And there’s just a chance that, seeing we’ve gotten free, they won’t have the balls to send us back. They might just play us straight and sacrifice the whole group at Abaila.”

  “Think so?”

  “Nah!”

  But that is exactly what the Security Police did. When we brought the Mixmaster shuddering and groaning into a sideways landing at the Jabrin airstrip, the first people to reach the
craft were uniformed police. So they may have had some kind of tipoff. But they came with their sidearms holstered—until they saw the busted plexiglass and bloody tatters hanging off the nose of our bird. Then they all pulled their guns and sank down on one knee to get steady aim.

  We climbed out with our hands up. Corbin talked to the nearest man and the man’s pistol for three minutes in that halting, grade-school Arabic he used. I wondered if his phrasebook had words like “terrorist” and “submachine gun.” I was left watching their hands and faces. When I saw both relax, I started to bring my hands down. From there, things happened fast.

  Corbin led them back across the runway toward the hangers, walking quickly. He was using the command stride he would perfect later, during the war: hands always in motion, pointing, gesturing, emphasizing, and always in beat with the tempo his feet set. He had a way of looking at the man on his right and talking to the one on his left, wrapping them all in the scope of his thoughts. I do not understand how, but he still held the burp gun that had killed the big terrorist— and the Security men let him carry it.

  An ambulance, a converted Cadillac with a truck body welded onto the back and all painted white with red crescents, rolled past us, out to the shot-up helicopter to take Sybil off. I would not see her for another three weeks and then under much different circumstances.

  There were a few shaky moments when we were brought to the colonel in charge of the post. From something Corbin said in that strangled Arabic, the colonel must have assumed I was one of the terrorists. They separated us, leveled their sidearms at me, and brought out the handcuffs.

  Jay talked fast then, pausing only to find the right words. The policemen hesitated and looked at their colonel. He finally said two words and I was released.

  Inside of half an hour, the entire force was being mustered. They were breaking out riot guns and grenades, warming up helicopters and light airplanes. I took Corbin aside and asked what was going on.

  “We’re going back.”