by Tom Hron
“Godalmighty, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt so good, and I hadn’t realized that I’d wasted so much of my life as a professional crybaby. Meeting you was the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time and has reminded me of my heritage and purpose in life.”
“It looks a lot more like I almost got you killed,” Harry answered tersely, as he peered at the bruises on Joe’s back and arms. “What happened to you back there? When I talked to Max, I was half convinced you were dead.”
“They torpedoed my house and blew it to smithereens with a smart missile of some sort, probably from a drone. They want you and me dead.”
“That much I know, but I haven’t figured out why.” Harry then lowered his eyes, because the terror was still there. “Maybe it has something to do with the plane I lost.”
“I think it’s a lot bigger than that, probably so big we can’t even imagine,” Joe insisted. “Otherwise, why would they see me, of all damn people, as a threat? They’re worried that you told me something, maybe even accidentally, and now they’re unwilling to take the chance that I might say something to somebody else.”
Yes, that’s probably true, thought Harry as he raised his eyes again, except that was where everything came to a screeching halt. Shawki and he had hypothesized until they’d made complete idiots out of themselves just a couple of nights back and what good had it done them? It was just as he’d said at the time … the answers lay halfway around the world. “We won’t know until we get back home,” he said with a sigh, “but first we have to catch Abu Muhammad.”
They saw Shawki come back and park his car, and by his broad smile both knew that he had gotten the letter they had been waiting for. He walked over and handed it to Harry, almost as if he’d somehow divined the latitude and longitude they needed. With those, they could play the waiting game—with those, they could succeed. Dreading what the letter might say or not say,
Harry walked off by himself. No matter what was in it, he’d be opening old wounds. Seeing that he wanted to be alone, Shawki and Joe walked down the beach with the dogs. Harry tore open the letter and read what it said:
Dear Harry,
Your letter has upset me so much I can hardly write. How could you leave me with so many questions and such heartache? You write this succinct message that your life has suddenly been ruined, then ask me to help you commit suicide. Furthermore, I know no matter what I do you will go anyhow and I’ll never see you again.
The senator has found this as incredible as I have, and it’s only with the greatest reluctance that we’re giving you the camp’s location. It’s at 30 degrees, 21 minutes, 15 seconds North and 48 degrees, 17 minutes, 44 seconds East.
Please don’t do this and come home. I’m sure we can somehow fix whatever is wrong at the Justice Department.
Catherine
He refolded the letter and shoved it into his shirt pocket, then walked after Shawki and Joe. What in hell had he expected her to write? He hadn’t been fair when he’d written, and so there hadn’t been any way for her to see the dilemma he faced, and the danger, for that matter. At least she had been kind enough to give him the coordinates, and with those he had a chance at returning, though, of course, not in the way she would have wished.
That afternoon they sailed with a favorable wind blowing them into the Persian Gulf and up its weather side toward Kuwait. Shawki’s dhow plowed the sea as if it were alive, upstairs and downstairs, beating and breathing through the ocean swells. Staying aft, Shawki and his crewmen manned the wheelhouse, winching and trimming the lateen. They were finally on their way.
Harry went forward with Joe and both watched the black and white dolphins surf the bow waves and the ever-present gulls ride the wind blowing off the sail. For an hour they stood side-by-side, letting their silence extenuate what they intended to do and what they would face in the coming days. Soon they would sneak ashore in a country they had never seen and begin a manhunt for someone they could only identify from a photograph in an old Newsweek they had brought along. It was as if there was a hidden covenant between them.
“Have you ever done anything like this,” Joe asked, “hunted men and killed them?”
Harry shook his head. “Not at all like this. I won a dogfight in Iraq’s southern no-fly zone once, but that’s a lot like playing a computer game. You’re blowing someone out of the sky from twenty miles away, so it’s all very germ free.” He then leaned forward and rested his elbows on the prow’s railing. “But I’ve sailed before. Shawki and I took some courses together at Scripps in San Diego, oceanography, diving, stuff like that, and we often sailed on weekends.”
“I’ve shut my mind to all the men I’ve killed.” Joe’s face then fell into angst. “Thousands of Vietcong would overrun our positions in Nam and to save ourselves we’d have to counterattack with the Cobras. Fire, blood, guts, it was all great stuff if you liked death.”
Joe has something on his mind, Harry thought. Men never talked about death unless they saw it coming their way again. He searched for the right thing to say.
“Shawki and I talked about you a lot, and we really believed you could help us.”
“When we get there…” Joe began slowly, “I’d like to scout ahead, spend a little time sneaking around, and I thought it would be safer if I went alone. You know, when I make myself invisible to my enemies. My grandfathers taught me all the secrets of my ancestors’.” Soft-eyed, he glanced at Harry.
Invisible? Though it sounded absolutely silly, Joe’s suggestion made a lot of sense, thought Harry, since they didn’t have a set plan, simple or otherwise. Joe could probably sneak up and touch someone and they’d never know he was there. Wars were always won on careful intelligence, and it made a lot of sense that they would send him and the dogs out first.
They went aft, told Shawki about their idea, then walked forward again. The afternoon smothered them with its spermy heat and left them wringing with perspiration, and they balanced on the bowsprit to cool off. Along the way, oil derricks towered like oversized waterbirds. They sailed on and on, working their assigned watches. Shawki’s crewmen couldn’t take their eyes off Joe, who wore a headband around his raven hair and sporadically broke out in his native chants. Even the dogs watched him with gyroscopic eyes. He’s just going a little primitive and getting ready for the warpath, Harry told himself.
Changing compass courses willy-nilly, Shawki tacked most of the time, mixing with the small craft, the oil tankers, and the commercial shippers along the Saudi Arabia side of the Gulf. When Harry asked him about it, he answered that he wanted to keep Iran from guessing their objective, and it wouldn’t if they fell off toward Kuwait on their last reach. The mullahs had small navies now, he explained, and they patrolled the coastline. “Iran even has submarines and sometimes it threatens to blockade the Strait of Hormuz.” He then dismissively waved his hand. “The fools don’t realize their whole navy would get sunk completely by the Fifth Fleet if they so much as tried. Anyway, we must make sure no one gets suspicious.”
The Fifth Fleet. An idea started forming in Harry’s mind. What if?… Then he forgot about it because it was way too early.
They sailed past Saudi Arabia and almost all of Kuwait, then behind an island lying below Iraq’s border. For a while they searched for a secluded bay and finally dropped anchor in a long estuary. Shawki explained that they were in the middle of a large marshland off the Shatt-al-Arab delta and at nightfall they would sail for the river itself. His crewmen would drop them off near Abadan in the middle of the night and then sail into the Persian Gulf to wait for a signal to pick them up. Earlier, Harry had suggested they use hand transceivers with aviation frequencies that Iran wouldn’t be monitoring, at least not along the seacoast. They set about getting their equipment ready for their manhunt.
After dark they navigated with GPS, sonar, and radar across the delta and up the Shatt-al-Arab river, using all the tugboats and tankers along the way as cover. This is the world’s busiest oil term
inus, Shawki explained, so there is little chance the Iranians will notice us. Regardless, his sober eyes didn’t look as confidence as his words in the wheelhouse’s red light. Harry watched the red, green, and yellow displays on the GPS flip and flash and the radar’s blips getting a lot closer. Something was going wrong.
“Harry, get the rafts overboard and load Joe and the dogs in one and you get in the other. We must launch on the other side of the tanker ahead, immediately.”
Running, Harry pulled on the night-glasses that Shawki had borrowed from the royal armory. Russian made but first-class nevertheless, they had lithium batteries for freezing weather, shared aperture filters for aviation use, and automatic brightness controls. The dhow instantly turned grayish-green. Joe saw him coming and together they threw the rubber rafts over the side, hauled them close on short bow lines, and threw their equipment down. Joe vaulted into one and Harry lowered the dogs to him, then Shawki ran up and Harry and he jumped into the second raft and cut themselves loose. Shawki’s crewmen quickly motored the dhow away, leading whoever was chasing them in the opposite direction.
Harry was slow spoken. “Will they catch them?…”
There was an unusually long silence.
Shawki was rarely non-responsive, and it quickly became clear to Harry that they had committed themselves with no way of turning back. Courage was often a matter of jumping in, sinking or swimming, and doing or dying. Searching the Iranian shore, he saw there were trees along the river and he signaled to make for them.
“It’s a date plantation,” whispered Shawki, finally finding his voice. “I think there are several along here, and they are always good places to hide.”
Pulling on their oars, they rowed ashore, disassembled the rafts, and hid them in a drainage culvert choked with thistle. Joe disappeared, then came back and led them to an oil refinery, where they hid themselves in abandoned salvage along one side. Crouching inside a wrecked tank, they waited. At first light, they would kill the spiders and scorpions and crawl farther in, then sleep until it got dark again. There was no wind and the air smelled of rust and crude oil, and there was no sound except for the peeps of mice, although the roar of the refinery filled the background, making their tank something of a drum. They dreaded the day to come, for they’d bake like rats in an oven. Finally, they fell asleep, but into one where they woke in fits and starts throughout the day.
At six in the evening the sun fell behind the refinery, its smokestacks and cracking towers billowing white mists only a quarter-mile away. Once again, Joe left on a reconnaissance with the dogs slinking ahead of him like ghosts. Harry and Shawki waited with their eyes almost wild with boredom, then worry whenever the refinery belched an unusual sound. Suddenly, Joe was standing beside them again, scaring them half out of their wits.
“It looks like swamps and cropland all the way with good places to hide, and what I like best is a pipeline where we can make good time. It don’t seem like nobody’s around at night.”
The waiting was over and now the dangerous time was about to begin, thought Harry. He asked Joe if they could reach the terrorist camp by morning.
“The GPS says it’s a little over ten miles by the way a crow flies,” Joe answered evenly, “so we should get within a mile or two at worst.” Then his voice took on a more austere tone. “But when we get closer we’ll have to make sure they don’t have a picket line set up. It wouldn’t be so good if we run into a sentry.”
Harry smiled, since it was clear Joe was now in his element.
They left the salvage yard in single file with Cochise and Geronimo leading the way along a multiplex pipeline running north on a flat stretch. Dim-lit by the moon, the night lay thin and hot, like the long pipes had somehow held onto the afternoon’s hot sun, and where in the darkness the line looked almost like quicksilver. Harry watched his two friends space themselves defensively, and he fell behind them by a few paces and brought up the rear. Now and then, the dogs would find a snake and flip it into the weeds alongside the narrow track they were following. The nighttime crept by with the crickets and the hunting jackals calling in the distance. At three in the morning, Joe stopped and disappeared once again. Harry and Shawki waited for him under an olive tree. An hour later he rejoined them.
“I found it,” he whispered. “The camp’s on a hillside where the land breaks up a bit, but we’re going to pay hell figuring out how to catch Muhammad. It looks big enough to hold a hundred men.”
“Is there any place to hide?” murmured Shawki from below the olive branches.
“A perfect place. There’s an oil well about a half-mile away with some junk sitting around. We’ll hole up there until we can figure out what to do.”
Harry walked back to the pipeline even before he was aware of where he was going and before considering the perils ahead. He had done the same thing with the Aurora. There was an old proverb that said was hope was the last to die.
They set off for the oil well, following Joe and the dogs over grassland scattered with sinkholes and shadowy bushes the size of elephants. After an hour, they saw the fort-like terrorist compound sitting almost like a Parthenon on the slope ahead, since that was almost how large it looked. Harry felt his heart sink, for even in the dark he could tell it was impenetrable. All three crawled into the brush near the wellhead and watched the copper sky of the morning lighten the horizon.
When it was bright enough to glass the terrorist camp across from them, they began their long watch, or as Joe put it, “reconnoitering the enemy.” Protected by barbed-wire and several guards, the compound held at least seventy-five or more men, way too many for any kind of frontal assault. Most were young, teenage Saudis, Syrians, and Jordanians, announced Shawki. Boys with machine guns and Russian plastic, all playing with bombs the way other kids played with basketballs. Mindless and dangerous, where killing was only a game to them.
Harry felt his stomach turn. Nonetheless, then his disgust became an inspiration. “Shawki, you brought some plastic of your own, didn’t you?” he asked.
Shawki answered that he had, although his variety was British PE.
“Notice anything unusual about the place?” continued Harry. “Why aren’t there any cars and trucks?”
Well, it’s not that unusual, said Shawki. The whole idea of the camp was to train everyone to be good little Jihadists, and automobiles were a big distraction for kids that age.
“Do you both see the oil well just above the camp,” Harry asked next, “the one with the storage tank almost the size of a house?”
Staring back, Shawki and Joe answered that they did.
“See how the road runs up and stops a little short of the main gate?” A jab of his arm showed the exact location. “That’s where Muhammad will park his car when he comes. What do you suppose would happen if we blow up that tank just after he gets inside the compound?”
The answer flashed in their eyes. There would be instant panic and chaos, and the whole hillside would turn into a rolling inferno headed right for the camp.
They split up that night knowing the hazardous odds and not without a little argument. Each thought the other was taking too much risk and therefore believed that he should be the one to wait for Muhammad, steal his car, or blow up the storage tank on the hill. However, soon common sense prevailed among them. Shawki would hide at the end of the road, since he could best pretend to be one of the terrorists when all hell broke loose. Joe and the dogs would wait in ambush for Muhammad because that’s what they did best. Harry would take out the tank, since he could run the fastest. It wasn’t the greatest plan in the world, and they would have to play it by ear once it got started, but it had one thing going for it—surprise, big surprise.
Harry took his time circling the camp with his charge of PE, since no one knew how long they would have to wait for Muhammad to show up. One day or two days, he had lots of time. Armed with an Uzi, several clips of ammunition, and a radio, he had enough food and water to last several days.
; After reaching the tank and its connecting oil well, he explored the entire installation, then planted his bomb on the downhill side with a two-minute detonator. Now all he needed was luck, diversion, and lots of trust in human nature.
At ten o’clock on the third morning he saw a long black Mercedes driving toward the compound, raising the dust as it glided over the road like a coach-built limo. His senses sharpened to a primitive edge. The car swung around at the end of the road and stopped fifty feet from where Shawki lay hidden. Four men got out, though one stayed by the driver’s side and fished for a cigarette. The excitement of the camp quickly changed to a triumphant chant of Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad. Next, all the terrorists gathered in the compound’s yard as a thick, bearded man in white robes walked toward them.
Harry tripped the detonator.
The two minutes had nearly passed before the guards spotted him sprinting diagonally away from where Shawki and Joe were hiding. All at once, the explosion blew the tank apart and spilled its oil in a river of fire pouring downhill toward the compound. Five minutes, ten minutes, it was just a matter of time before the whole place went up in flames.
Slowing a little, Harry watched the pandemonium unfold with all the terrorists starting after him. Muhammad stopped them, just as he had thought. His imaginary ear could hear Muhammad screaming at the top of his lungs: Get the shovels, dig a ditch and divert the fire. Get the explosives and ammunition out of here. Hurry, damn you, hurry! You over there, pick a couple of good men and get the infidel who did this. Kill him. Kill him a thousand times! Meanwhile, of course, he was sidling toward his Mercedes and wondering if he had enough time to get the hell out of there. If terrorist leaders were anything, they were pragmatic, leastwise if they wanted to live to a ripe old age. It was what Harry was hoping, anyway.
He saw Shawki pop up from his hiding place, run over to the driver while the man’s attention was directed toward the rolling inferno and ensuing chaos and send him after Muhammad. The instant the man’s back was turned Shawki jumped into the Mercedes and tore off, leaving Muhammad and his bodyguards stranded. Now the question was would they fall into Joes trap? Only time would tell.
