The tracks dwindled, then disappeared. I stood on the backbone of the mountain, gazing at the pillar of fire on the horizon, alone.
11
My vibrating telephone woke me from a sound sleep. As soon as I opened my eyes I knew that something was seriously amiss.
It was David Wong on the line. He said, “Do you see what we see?”
I did indeed. Ibn Awad’s camp had come to life. Lights burned, men bustled about, trucks and motorcycles moved through the darkness, headlights blazed. All of this was happening in dumb show and in Tinkertoy scale because I was a couple of miles away from and a thousand feet above the scene. One of the scale-model trucks was a tanker. It pulled up beside the parked airplane. Men leaped out and ran hoses to the plane’s fuel tank. There wasn’t enough light to use my binoculars. What I saw with the naked eye were silhouettes—men darting through the beams of headlights or briefly framed in light from within as they lifted the flap of a tent.
David was closer to this scene than I was. I said, “Who are these guys?”
“Reinforcements, maybe. Everybody here is asleep except me. Any sign of the others where you are?”
“No.”
David went on whispering into my ear. I was disoriented and despite the excitement of the moment, still half asleep. Because my mind was so thoroughly elsewhere, his words did not immediately register, but one of his phrases rattled around in some part of my head even though I had not really heard it on the conscious level.
“What did you just say?” I asked.
David said, “‘Somebody just went into Ibn Awad’s tent carrying the Saker falcon.’”
This brought me fully awake. If they had the falcon they must have the Christophers, either dead or alive. And if they had the Christophers they must have the Amphora Scroll. This realization touched off an emotion that was new to me—rage: uncontrollable, overwhelming physical rage that seized control of my mind and body as though some Stone Age Horace had leaped out of his cave and into my skin. My brain—in the state I was in I could hardly call it my intelligence—began to race. About two hours of darkness remained. That gave me just enough time to get off this mountain, cross the open ground below, penetrate the enemy camp, and kill someone. Anyone.
I did not even say good-bye to David. Before I knew it I was halfway down the mountain. Likely I wouldn’t have remembered even this much of the descent but I stumbled over a punctuation mark—another dead fedayee. His throat had been cut, too. I paused to take his AK-47 ammunition and pluck two eggshellsmooth Russian hand grenades from his shirt. They were sticky with the blood from the gash in his throat. Down below, assault rifles were being fired. The shooters were not aiming at me but into the air. Apparently they had something to celebrate. Another bad sign.
Nearer to camp, scouts on motorcycles buzzed around like insects. I passed among them as if invisible. I was in the dark, looking into a lighted world. The enemy were in the light, looking into the dark. It was almost dawn. I had to strike before the sun came up and made us all equal in terms of eyesight. The tanker truck’s crew were winding their hoses onto drums. I crept closer. Ground crew swarmed around the plane, inspecting surfaces, checking whatever such people check, peering into engines. A man approached from the camp. He limped slightly. Light fell momentarily on his face. I recognized him—it was Captain Khaldun, Kalash el Khatar’s pilot who had flown me in and out of Cairo in Kalash’s Learjet. I contemplated this funny coincidence without surprise. What was one more example of betrayal? Captain Khaldun walked around the airplane, clipboard in hand, and carried out his own inspection. One side of the fuselage was awash in the headlights of a rank of parked trucks, apparently as an aid to the refueling. The other side lay in darkness that seemed all the deeper by contrast. I was standing upright about a hundred feet from the plane. Captain Khaldun, still the humorless singleminded fellow who had dropped me off near Jef Jef el Kébir, was so absorbed in what he was doing that he did not see me. I waited until he disappeared around the tail of the plane, then walked without concealment to the wing, jumped lightly into the air like an eighteen-year-old going in for a lay-up, and without pulling the pins, tossed the grenades I had taken from the dead man into the jet engine. If all this seems recklessly showy, I should explain that I was not so spacey that I forgot my tradecraft altogether. When it comes to penetration operations the key to success is not subtlety and maneuver but brazening it out. A skulker is more likely to be nailed than a lunatic who behaves as though he is in no danger, has no fear. As soon as I stepped into the light, I broke into a run and headed straight for Ibn Awad’s tent. Before any of the many guards could shoot me, I was inside.
There Ibn Awad sat on a rug, dressed like a pilgrim in roughspun garments, eating his curds and whey. Behind him on a perch sat the snow-white Saker falcon along with half a dozen peregrines. Ibn Awad looked up and squinted—his eyesight had always been dim—and actually said, “You!” In Arabic, of course.
The two bodyguards who stood behind him had made the mistake of slinging their assault rifles around their necks instead of holding them at the ready. While they struggled to unlimber their weapons I shot them both dead with the Kalashnikov. This made a lot of noise inside the tent. The gunfire startled the falcons—out of the corner of my eye I saw wings flapping—but escaped the notice of the people outside because they themselves were still firing merrily into the air.
Before my ears stopped ringing, Ibn Awad was scrabbling on hands and knees toward the back of the tent, bony backside in the air, uttering choking sounds. Naturally I thought that I had shot him by mistake. I was wrong. It was not Ibn Awad I had shot but two of his falcons, which had been knocked off their perches by stray rounds from the full magazine I had fired at the bodyguards. Ibn Awad was now gazing tearfully at the broken bodies of his pets. He paid no attention whatever to the two men who had just laid down their lives for him.
I said, “Old man, turn around and look at me, please.”
Ibn Awad heard me, but his mind was on more important things. He was grieving for his birds, holding one in each of his outstretched hands so that I might see their bloodstained plumage, behold their lolling heads and opaque yellow eyes that glittered no more, and understand exactly what I had done.
I said, “The owners of the Saker falcon. Where are they?”
Ibn Awad shrugged. His indifference was so obvious that it practically gave off an odor. Clearly he did not fear me. He knew perfectly well that I had every reason in the world not to shoot him and probably he also believed, oh so wrongly, that I was the fully rational person he used to know and trust.
I said, “What orders have you given about my cousins?”
He shrugged again. This infuriated me. I became the raving caveman again. I seized Ibn Awad, threw him over my shoulder, and dashed out the back of the tent into the darkness. Probably the old man had never before in his life been touched by infidel hands, let alone treated like a rolled-up rug being carried off by a thief. He offered no resistance; he could not have done so even if he wished; his starved bony body felt as if it had no strength in it at all. Fortunately for me, Ibn Awad was an ascetic. Years of eating only enough food to keep himself alive had reduced his weight to what felt like around ninety pounds, so I was able to move quite swiftly through the night. Each time one of my feet hit the ground Ibn Awad uttered a sound, half grunt, half moan, as if every shock came as a total surprise.
After I had run flat-out for about a quarter of a mile (who knows where I got such energy?) I came upon a good-sized altarstyle rock and dumped Ibn Awad on top of it. There was no one behind us. I could scarcely believe this, but it appeared to be true. The folks who were supposed to guard Ibn Awad had been so busy readying his airplane for escape that they had not noticed what had gone on in his tent. They were in for a surprise when they went inside and found the martyrs and the falcons lying about, but no madman.
12
The sun came up at last. At the exact moment that the first thread of
dawn appeared in the eastern sky Ibn Awad fell to all fours atop his flat rock, wheezing and keening and gesturing in fervent prayer. I am not usually moved by demonstrations of religious feeling, but I was oddly touched by his behavior. For a fleeting instant I was almost fond of him again, as I had been in the past before my orders changed. It’s amazing how touching the enemy softens the heart. For months I had been demonizing Ibn Awad from afar. Now I was close enough to hear him gasp for enough breath to talk to Allah; I had not brought along his oxygen tank and his emphysema was clearly all too real. He smelled faintly of cloves; I wondered why. His hands, moving in the gestures prescribed for Muslim prayer, were so brown that the falcon blood on them was barely visible. It must have troubled him to pray without washing himself first, but I suppose that unwashed hands were permitted to the devout in the extreme circumstances in which he now found himself. His gesticulating figure, perched on top of that rock, must have been clearly visible from the camp, but no one seemed to notice. This was not surprising. Most of the people in the camp were praying, too.
To all appearances his absence had not been noted. Men in robes were busy striking the camp and loading it onto trucks. One after the other the tents collapsed until only two were left—Ibn Awad’s big tent where the dead fedayeen and falcons awaited discovery, and another smaller one. It was not difficult to guess what was hidden inside the second tent. It could only be the Christophers. I pictured them bound and gagged, all four of them—Tarik, too if he still lived—sitting in a row, awaiting whatever fate their captors had in mind for them. Whatever that fate was, it probably did not in the mind of their captors involve salvation, for they were unbelievers and if they died they would die like dogs with no hope of heaven. Ibn Awad finished his prayers and sank onto his haunches. He stared serenely at me, turning blue for lack of breath, no hint of fear or ill feeling in his eyes. I thought I still knew him well enough to read his mind. He seemed to be waiting for someone to come and kill me. As far as he was concerned it was all in the hands of God. Everything was, including me as the bizarre nemesis who kept showing up in his life and ruining all his plans. He was Job, I was Satan, wandering about the Earth and administering tests of his love for the Almighty who had given him so many reasons to love him—oil wells, a mission to destroy evil on Earth, even a resurrection of a kind after the assassination failed and Claus Bücher healed his wounds. You could feel his submission to the divine will. He knew his present situation was nothing but a test, that he was being teased by the Author of the Universe who would never let him come to real harm, that in the end he would kill the enemies of the faith on Earth as he was born to do, and enter paradise.
Suddenly his eyes lit up and shifted and I whirled, weapon at the ready, expecting to see his thugs behind me. What I saw instead— you’ve guessed it—was Kevin, rising up out of the dust with a tremendous minstrel smile splitting his face, which was smeared with camouflage grease. I was in no way surprised. Kevin gazed at Ibn Awad, who gazed back at him with unruffled serenity, as though a jolly commando from Ohio was exactly what he, too, had been expecting to see.
Kevin said, “We watched your run for the roses just now. Nice fireman’s carry, Horace.”
We? I looked beyond him and sure enough, there were his men lounging on the sand. Evidently they had been there all the time. But why? What had they been waiting for? What was the point of sneaking up on an objective under cover of darkness if you were going to wait until daylight to attack it? I asked no questions. There was no point in that, either.
Urbane as ever, Kevin said, “I don’t know why you thought you needed us, Horace.” He waved a hand at the pillar of fire, the pall of smoke to the north, then indicated the captive on the rock. “You’re a one-man action movie.”
He was standing upright now as if all need for concealment had vanished and he had nothing to fear from the swarm of armed desperadoes who were buzzing around the camp. He was carrying Ibn Awad’s oxygen tank. Gently, even tenderly, he adjusted the mask over the old man’s nose and mouth, then turned the valve. Ibn Awad inhaled convulsively for a full minute, then began to breath normally again. Kevin patted him on the arm.
The air stirred. A quarter of a mile away Ibn Awad’s tent inhaled the breeze then blew it out and hung slack. Still no one had gone inside to check on Ibn Awad. Suddenly something clicked, the pieces came together, and it dawned on me that there was a reason for this. Ibn Awad didn’t have anything to fear. He had been a captive. The men I had killed had been his captors, not his bodyguards—Kevin’s men, not his. The old schizo had been gazing on me so benignly because he thought I had rescued him.
I said, “Kevin, what exactly are you up to?”
“Fulfilling my mission,” he said.
“I see. Do you have my cousins in your custody?”
“Not exactly. But they’re alive and well and I have no interest in them. Others do.”
“Others? What others?”
He nodded toward the camp. “Those fellows over there. They’re Turkmen and I think they’re going to expect to be paid a ransom.”
“A ransom?”
“I’m afraid so. And compensation for their two friends whose throats Tarik cut before we got to him and saved him from Turkoman revenge, which is not, I assure you, a pretty sight.”
“These Turkomen are with you?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Kevin said. “Let’s say we’re working together. It’s our policy to work with the locals. That’s primarily what our fellows were doing in Turkmenistan, finding locals to work with. They cleaned out the camp and took Ibn Awad prisoner. I think they’ll want payment for the two Turkmen you zapped.”
“What sort of ransom did you pay them?”
“They get everything but the airplane and Ibn Awad,” Kevin said. “That’s why they’re so happy, firing into the air and so forth.”
Ecstatic might have been a better word, judging by the amount of ammunition that was still being fired into the wild blue yonder.
I said, “Frankly, Kevin, I’m at sixes and sevens. If your Turkmen friends get everything but Ibn Awad, who gets Ibn Awad?”
Kevin’s smile turned apologetic. “We do.”
“‘We’ is not you and me, I gather.”
He shook his head.
“Then you and who?”
“I’m not allowed to say. But the old fellow will have a good home.”
My gorge was rising. It was late in the day for games. The beast I had been the night before was awakening again and I was mightily tempted just to shoot Ibn Awad and put an end to his story. However, I had other people to think about and I knew that I’d be dead myself before I took my finger off the trigger if I actually did what my reptile brain was now instructing me to do.
Nevertheless I pressed the muzzle of my Kalashnikov against Ibn Awad’s heart. In the most pleasant tone of voice I could muster, I said, “I noticed that Captain Khaldun has joined the party.”
Kevin seemed surprised. “You’ve met?”
“Is Captain Khaldun on loan from Kalash el Khatar?”
“Gosh, what a lot of little details you know, Horace. The answer is yes. Ibn Awad’s pilot wasn’t deemed reliable as a getaway driver.”
“Is this another example of working with the locals, or do you and Kalash go back farther than that?”
Kevin had stopped looking me straight in the eyes and was now smiling upward as though waiting for advice he knew could never come. He sighed audibly.
“Look,” he said. “The objectives of this operation were to destroy Ibn Awad’s bombs and eliminate him as a threat to mankind. Thanks mainly to you and your pals, these things have been accomplished. What difference does it make what the auspices are or who gets Ibn Awad?”
“So you’re going to give me the credit and take Ibn Awad as your share?”
Kevin said, “Something like that. Horace, will you please stop poking your weapon into the prisoner’s body?”
“You want him alive.”
“Of course I do. What good is he to anyone dead?”
“What good is he alive? What are you going to do with him? All questions about him have been answered. There’d be no point in hooking him up to a battery and making him talk because he’d just thank Allah for the agony.”
“Nothing like that is going to happen. Now please, Horace, it’s time for all of us to get out of here. I can’t believe the Uzbek army isn’t here already.”
“If interrogation isn’t part of the plan,” I said, “what is? Are you going to sell him to Kalash, or what?”
Kevin ignored these impassioned questions. His eyes were fixed on Ibn Awad, who could not have been more serene or more disinterested in his own situation if he had just taken a whole bottle of Valium.
Kevin said, “He really is insane, isn’t he?”
“Either that or he’s achieved union with the ineffable and God and his angels really do talk to him,” I replied. “In either case, sweet and harmless as he seems, I’m not prepared to turn him loose on the world again unless I know the details. To whom are you planning to deliver him?”
Actually I had no intention of turning the old man loose no matter what Kevin said. He had too much money, too much hatred for the Great Satan, too much faith in the idea that life on Earth was transitory and without value except as an opportunity to wipe out false religions. However, I was beginning to see a pattern. This whole thing had started with Kalash. Was it now ending with Kalash?
The muzzle of my gun was still pressed against Ibn Awad’s chest. Kevin was beginning to look positively unfriendly. He said, “You know, they always warned us about getting mixed up with formers.”
“Getting mixed up with what?”
“Former operatives. Old Boys. People like you. Now I know why. You geezers are dangerous.”
I got out my telephone and speed-dialed Kalash’s number. If he was as closely involved in this as I suspected, he would be waiting for a call.
The Old Boys Page 38
